The Best Quality Minimum size codec is here. AAC (mp4).

MPEG4 standard is the forthcoming thing for Audio and Video. For audio it is variation of AAC(Advanced audio codec). Apple iTunes already sells .m4a which is nothing just another implementation of MPEG-4 AAC.

This codec helps saving space with small handheld devices/mobile phones. A normal 4 minute song might just take little over than 1MB with very-very good quality, and no much apparent lose in quality, unless you are an audiophile you will love it.

Below are the different versions of AAC.

• AAC -> Normal AAC, all iTunes store files in this format.
• SBR-AAC(Spectral band replication) or AAC+ or HE-AAC -> good sound quality even at 45kbps
• PS-SBR-AAC(Parametric Stereo w/ SBR) or eAAC+ or HE-AACv2 -> smallest size, good at as low as 28kbps.(effectively only 700kb for a 4 min song.)

I have been using this codec for all songs to be copied on phone for quite some time, finally penning it down here.
you will need two utilities.

Download and install this utility foobar.
http://filehippo.com/download_foobar2000/ - 2.53Mb

Download Nero Codec
http://www.nero.com/ena/downloads-nerodigital-nero-aac-codec.php - 1.7 Mb
That’s a mpeg-4 audio implementation by Nero, a deutsch company.
Unzip this to folder C:\Program Files\Foobar2000


1. (Optional) – performance thing only.
Go to foobar2000 program directory and delete neroAacEnc.exe and rename neroAacEnc_SSE.exe to neroAacEnc.exe. Normally all the PC have SSE instruction, unless you have some old 486 or 386 which nowadays nobody keeps :). this will enhance the speed of encoding a file


2. Open foobar, Drop the media file onto foobar, it will start playing immediately.
Stop the file if you don’t want to listen at the moment.
Select convert to same folder in context menu of file.

(click on image to view image full size)



3. Select mp4 in next window.



4. Click on ellipses button in after selecting mp4 from dropdown.
Below screen will come up.



Keep the target quality as “VBR” but change the quality to 33 kbps (this will encode file to e-AAC with Parametric Stereo).
Press “OK”.

5. Select ok in next window this message will pop up, say yes.




6. Foobar will ask to locate the neroAacEnc.exe so you can browse the place where you have unzipped it.



I have unzipped my codec to Nero_e-AAC and will select from there.

And you are done;) foobar will save your compressed media file in the same folder where original file resides.

You can try various other bitrate to suit your needs. But normally selecting a VBR 48kbps is good for listening on computer and Mobile.(the output mp4 will be in HE-AAC) But want more compression with very less loss to quality, choose VBR 28 or VBR 33 which will give use HE-AACv2(Parametric Stereo).


Just one thing more here if you want to play these files, they won’t work out of the box in windows media player. But Foobar itself, and Winamp, along with media player classic can easily play such files.

cheers/ Anurag

Intel Quad Core Processor, do we need it...?

Intel has started shipping its Quad Core processors for the Desktops, And Recently I came across an Advertisement from Intel saying Quad Core PC's start from Rs 25990/- Price Range. But My Idea is :

Do we really need it....?

For all the requirement for ppl at home, is just a decent Machine which can perform all the task of Word Processor, email, Browsing, and all those similar things.
See the spec for the Intel's newest Desktop Processor, here, And see that the Processor Consumes 95W power Which is much more than many of the existing processors.
I am not against Technology, But the idea to market the term Quad core CPU for Consumer Market like home is all crap. For Enterprises Intel can plan moves as they want it, But Its bad to even think of a quad core processor based Machine for home use.
Unnecessary wastage of electricity with effective additional output that's what are intel newer CPU's are.

Call Filter : Block unwanted calls

Pushed marketing has become such a huge business for various companies that they take it as for granted to disturb customer over his mobile every now and then. And Bangalore is one the cities where you can find to its utmost limit.
I had issues with vodafone (back in october) as they told me that DND will be active not before than 45 days time, so i decided to figure other way, and it is this.

All symbian Mobile phone users can install a free application 'Call Filter' and block numbers from which they don't want to receive calls. download here

here is some description from the site.

» CallFilter Description

Call Filter is a utility application realised under the concept "Simple Yet Efficient" for your Symbian devices. It allows you to hang-up any incoming calls from contacts selected as a filter rule in main application screen. Gives you a very convenient and quick access to block/unblock some phone number at runtime. The logs screen maintains a list of rejected calls and allows placing a quick call or an sms to the rejected phone number. So this is what we call "Simple Yet Efficient".

- Blocks unwanted calls
- Allows block/unblock calls on the go ..
- Maintains a log of rejected calls .. and allows to send an sms or make a call to the rejected caller immidiately !
- The best of all .... its Freeware

cheers,
Anurag

Fed up of web Advertisements! Block them all.

Really fed up of Advertisements, go to any forums, or news site and you will find whole lot of ads, even the Yahoo mail has an irritating flash ads all the time coming, and similar is the case with Hotmail and aol. Google itself has adsense service and other sites like Zedo, yahoo and doubleclick do provide web advertising services.... which actually pay the owner of site too... I don't say that its bad that site owners are getting money, But many a times it becomes irritating to read the real stuff. I have seen sites which had over 13 ads on a single page. Moreover these ads can eat up bandwidth who have limited broadband bandwidth connection( ie 1GB per month etc.)

Mozilla Firefox provides with a very good solution for it. Adblock plugin which can be downloaded here can block a whole lot of ad service pulled ads. After installation it shows up in bottom-right corner in firefox. Though initially there are no settings and you have to build your own filters over time, But here is the filter file that has been updated as I browse over Internet. right click the bottom right corner adblock icon and open preferences, and then adblock options -> import filter upload the filter file and you are done.

Disclaimer: this will block the google adsense and you won't see them, if you like them, you can remove that from preferences :).

Finally your eyes are spared from seeing all the crappy ads.

Getting email confirmations

Here is an Interesting thing that I found with Mozilla Thunderbird.
The actual email interfaces as initially developed(RFC and all) allows a mail to get a confirmation as soon it is read by its receiver, back to the sender. But this facility is available in corporate business mail accounts only. The mail sent from free email services like yahoo and gmail don't ask the receiver for any "read confirmations" neither they can reply a "read confirmation" for the mail these free accounts receive.

But here is the thing, I figured a catch to this and here it is. Gmail allows an easy SMTP interface to access and send mails thru its email clients like Thunderbird. so what I do is I just configure Mozilla Thunderbird to receive and sent emails thru my gmail account. Thunderbird has the capability to ask for read confirmation for all the mails sent thru it, and this does the work. so I actually request read confirmation for all my mails, but point to be noted is that "read confirmation receipts" can only be received for mails sent to corporate mail ID's and not to free accounts like yahoo and gmail itself as these don't allow any read confirmations.
Still It solves my purpose, The important mails I send are directly to corporate ppl and I am able to track that , at no extra cost what More I can expect from the free email service. Google Rocks!, It provides complete services to users and finds a complete different channel to get revenue(the ads we see in the sidebar.) Pretty decent enough.
Also Microsoft too offers Windows Live mail client (download here) which can be used to access hotmail(and gmail too) accounts on PC. Effect of competition. Still proprietary so no other email client may use it.


Disclaimer: This is totally receiver's domain dependent, though it has worked for me, but can't say it would work for all domains. If it doesn't work with any domain,Let me knw I will post it here.

Optimization \:)/

Optimization seems to be the keyword for many of the things in the industry, Google asks question and then makes you optimize from n² to nlogn and finally logn. whatever…(lookout for there qns they are really cool though)

I do like things to be optimized, even my life. getting things done with minimum chaos which doesn’t happen normally, Nevertheless, here I am putting some of techniques ,optimizing my 1.4Ghz Computer(yeah it sounds slow, but its actually a fast AMD64 with superb performance).

The first optimizations I normally do just after installing windows is to disable the Animation while minimize and Maximizing windows actually you can see that in the following image, only the checked items I keep on, rest all options I just uncheck for performance.
access this as below —> right click on my computer —> properties —>advanced—>performance settings—>(1st tab itself)
here




I find people going for the costliest hardware they can afford, even when they may not need it. I like optimizing the stuff I already have and using it to max.