Profile names are ambiguous

[Alex Mauer]

Binary package hint: gnome-media

Now that there are AAC and MP3 profiles in gnome-media, the names have become ambiguous.

There are 2 lossy "CD Quality" codecs specifically named, and one that doesn't say what the actual codec is.

Since this is actually important (some media players can only play some subset of the codecs) I suggest renaming them:

CD Quality, FLAC (lossless)
CD Quality, AAC
CD Quality, Ogg Vorbis
CD Quality, MPEG1 layer 3
Voice, PCM/Wave (lossless)
Voice, Speex

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

This is in feisty, of course

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. What do you think it's not clear enough? What changes do you want to do exactly? What locale do you use?

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

Well, they're currently as follows:

CD Quality, AAC
CD Quality, Lossless
CD Quality, Lossy
CD Quality, MP3
Voice, Lossless
Voice, Lossy

So I have 4 codecs that might I know are lossy, but I don't know what two of those codecs actually are (so I have no idea if they will work on my portable media player, for example).

I also have two lossless codecs; given that there are dozens of lossless formats and probably around 5 common ones, the distinction "CD Quality" and "Voice" is not very helpful here.

I suggest changing the codec names as described in the initial bug report. It would also be helpful to somehow indicate what "CD quality" and "voice" mean, but I have no suggestions on how best to handle that. I use locale en_US.UTF8 or 'C' depending on which machine I'm using.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I've forwared your request upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413379

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

upstream bug comment

"Would that help if we would have a secondary description for advanced technical
details?

CD Quality, Lossless | FLAC
CD Quality, Lossy | Ogg Vorbis 160 kbit/s
CD Quality, MP3 | MP3 CBR 128kbit/s
...

What do you think?"

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

responded upstream.

[Oliver Joos (oliver-joos)]

I would prefer one descriptive name per profile with codec name and specs in brackets. Even novices cannot ignore the codec because of compatibility with their playback devices. Mentioning codec names twice is against the DRY principle (don't repeat yourself). It opens the possibility of inconsistency for all those >280 languages!

Furthermore these profiles set cornerstones for zillions of megabytes, so they should be chosen carefully. After what I've read and compared myself, CD Quality needs at least 160kbit/s MP3, whereas with OGG 128kbit/s would be enough, IMHO.

So my preference would be something like:
 Lossless (WAV uncompressed)
 Lossless (FLAC compressed)
 High-end (MP3 VBR Q=6)
 High-end (QGG VBR Q=0.5)
 CD Quality (MP3 160kbit/s)
 CD Quality (OGG 128kbit/s)
 Normal (MP3 128kbit/s)
 Voice only (SPEEX VBR)

Nice to see changes ahead here. This will make apps like sound-juicer more usable out-of-the-box.