I find myself often looking for things with 5.1 sound, but thats kinda hard atm, because there is no real indication how many channels an anime has. And assuming by codec (ac3, aac) is at least half of the time wrong.
atm I'm using the desciptionfield to add the # of channels, but thats not a very nice way of doing it and so far I think I'm the only one doing that
there could be 3 states for this entry:
- mono (1ch)
- stereo (2ch)
- 5.1 (6ch)
mono could be left out, but imho this would be a nice addition.
for stereo no icon is needed imho.
Last edited by Der Idiot on Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Mmm... IMO we only want to know when a file is multichannel. Because a good encode can have mono and an awesome sound and a bad one even while being stereo can have an awful sound.
I made some time ago an icon for audio that wasn't used at AniDB. I added now the multi-channel text and I think can be used as a true/false value for files.
I don't think Dolby Surround logo is really needed. It's unlikely that whoever adds the files even knows if it's Dolby Surround/Pro Logic/Pro Logic II, as those all are matrix-mixes on stereo track. Also, even if the original was a surround mix, transcoding might have destroyed it (no, transcoding doesn't automatically destroy surround mix, but there is no guarantee that the surround mix survived whatever transcoding was done).
So, 1/0, 2/0, and 5.1 are the useful ones. I don't think there are many 6.1 or 7.1 tracks around really.
In addition to knowing that something is 5.1, it would be interesting to know if it's DD or DTS. If it isn't, most people who watch the eps using home theatre system will have to downmix to stereo and thus it's no better than a good 2/0 surround mix [depending on decoder doing downmix - might be Pro Logic]. Yes, there's experimental realtime AC3 encoding option in an ac3filter test version, but that only helps if it won't crash on you. And even in such case, the track suffered two transcodings.
I contest whether it's useful information. I'd prefer to have mono/stereo/surround. You can keep adding channels forever, it's still just 'surround sound' though.
although some ppl might be fanatic enough about audio to be ready to die for a real 7.1 version, so maybe that level of detail would have some use to some ppl after all :P