From: update@david.weekly.org Subject: Audio Update! To: update@david.weekly.org m a y 8 , 1 9 9 9 ----------------------------- Update #3 ----------------------------- -----<< MP3 BOOK >> Looks like I've been signed with Prima Publishing to write a book on MP3s and the new wave of digital audio distribution. I'm excited! More information about the book will become available bit by bit. (No pun intended.) The eventual web site for the book will be @ TheMP3Book.com. -----<< CODEC COMPARISONS >> Over 17,000 people have seen the audio report so far! I'll be continuing work on the codec comparisons once I receive software from various companies to perform my second round tests. I found the shareware AAC encoders to be absolutely awful. Stay away from them. They will not give AAC a fair chance. VQF encodings seem to be of better-than MP3 quality but take about 10x longer to compress. The QDesign Music Codec 2, which is used in QuickTime 4, took the longest of all to compress and produced some of the poorest results. Before I publish that, I'm waiting for an engineer from QDesign to respond to my findings. Incidentally, I have less than $15 in my bank account right now and am kind of hungry: if any of you would be so kind as to send cookies, cash, or even just friendly letters, the gods would smile kindly upon you and I'd give you a mention in the report. =) -----<< WRITINGS >> I wrote a short article exclusively for the website on why I think that XML is doomed to failure, despite its hype: http://david.weekly.org/writings/xml.shtml -----<< NEWS >> Don't forget that my "news" page is pretty frequently updated. I will try to keep these emails to around 1-2 per month so as not to clog your inboxes. More frequent updates are at: http://david.weekly.org/news.shtml