[TUHS] PAC (Perceptual audio coder)

[Rob Pike]

Ken Thompson and Sean Dorward worked hard on PAC to get it ready for
release. Our plan was to fill up the rest of the Plan 9 release CD with
several hundred meg of PAC audio. I gathered together music from a number
of famous musicians (I won't name drop here but you'd recognize them all),
much of it recorded just for us. We were going to release the source code
for the decoder and, in a compromise for the business people trying to sell
to the broadcasting industry (they eventually succeeded; digital FM
broadcasting is derived from PAC), only 386 binaries for the encoder, at
least for the initial release. At the time the encoder only ran about 1/4
real time on a PC.

Then an AT&T lawyer stepped in at the last minute, was deeply offensive and
rude to us, and shut down the effort for completely stupid and invalid
reasons. I still bristle at the memory. What an asshole.

PAC was so much clearer sounding that MP3. The world would have been a
happier place. If only.

-rob


On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 4:57 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 12:29 PM aksr <aksr at t-com.me> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 06:02:16PM +0200, aksr wrote:
>> > Have anyone tried to get this open-sourced:
>>
>> *Has anyone...
>>
>
> Not that I'm aware of, not that anyone would tell me, though I knew some
> people who used it. My understanding was that the most useful/interesting
> parts got wrapped up into MPEG-4.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
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