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Scratches on CDs don't affect the audio. They can make the audio skip because part of it is unreadable, but if that happened you would get an error while ripping the track. So a flaw on the CD would not affect a rip.

Well, except that most decent rippers these days use paranoia or something similar, using algorithms to interpolate the corrupt stuff. The interpolation is going to sound good but it's almost certainly not going to be the same bit-for-bit. And bit-for-bit is what matters.

Yeah, this irks the heck out of me. The FAQ also solicits outside developers to "hack away" and help get it ready...but with Xiph's continuing silence on the project and a lack of documentation, nobody but Xiph can really contribute anything...

All is not lost, though - Dan Miller has actually been actively working on specifications for the Theora codec and such, and there has been a LITTLE work that's shown up in CVS since the Alpha 2 release. Just nothing real recent.

It sounds as though all that's REALLY left to reach Beta (at which point the API should be standardized and 'outsiders' will be able to effectively use Ogg Theora) is agreement on a couple of aspects of the container format, if Xiph ever gets around to finishing that. You can see the details of what's left HERE. That page is guessing "August" for the beta. Hey, they've still got 10 days, they MIGHT make it...

A couple of other points:

• MPlayer, in traditional 'play everything' fashion, now has current working support for the current Theora CVS version in its own CVS - files encoded with the example_encoder program included in the Theora CVS sources play back fine on the code in MPlayer's CVS
• In my experience, Ogg Theora looks really promising - the quality (to my eye, anyway) looks at least as good as mpeg4. It seems to become 'blurry' rather than 'blocky' at lower bitrates, which in my opinion doesn't look as bad. The example encoder is completely unoptimized, so it's very slow, but it does work.
• There is now also apparently a windows-compatible example playback program included in Theora CVS called 'splayer'. You'll need a package called 'portaudio' to run it.

• Record and encode MP3s from any source (internal radio tuner or line-in). [I have been told that recording to OGG is a possible future firmware update.]

The Karma is very cool, and reading about it made my day. It's showing that Vorbis is gaining support. I guess this is another portable Vorbis player to add to the list.

I have to correct myself a bit here. The Ogg Vorbis toolkit was originally licensed under the GPL, from what I remember, and they later shifted to a BSD-style license, which move was not begrudgingly accepted by RMS and the rest of the Free Software Foundation. They actively encouraged the move, IIRC, as Ogg Vorbis is a technologically superior format unencumbered by patents, unlike the dominant MP3 format, for which a legal codec would be impossible for Free Software (LAME and Bladeenc are legally a gray area, and that isn't a good thing). Think GIF vs. PNG. RMS and the FSF have always understood that software patents pose an even greater threat to the cause of Free Software than proprietary software does. The GPL is designed to protect against software from going proprietary, but is of no help at all when dealing with patents (for which there can be no effective legal defense, short of having your own cross-licensable patent pool or having software patents abolished totally, which the FSF and the LPF are actively working to do).

Care to give a link that shows that RMS and the Free Software Foundation did not fully endorse Xiph's decision to move the licensing from GPL to BSD-style? Another link I've found, again RMS's own words, shows more pragmatism than anything. For reference, here's the original link from which i got the first RMS quote.

You are right of course that yes, rare are the cases where another license would serve the cause of Free Software better than the GPL would, but these cases are not unknown. For another example, someone else points out that the FSF actually discourages people from GPLing components at the core of the X Window System. The FSF as a whole and even Stallman in particular are not as inflexible and unpragmatic as many here seem to think.

Ahem. The FSF actually recommended that the Ogg Vorbis toolkit remain under a BSD license, rather than insisting that it go GPL. This was all done, apparently, with Richard M. Stallman's blessing! Yes folks, RMS actually encouraged the Xiphophorous people to use the BSD license rather than the GPL! The story here.

In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use."

No, the FSF does not recommend exclusive use of the GPL at all times. They can encourage use of other more permissive free licenses if they believe that it will aid the cause of Free Software.

Does it support Ogg Vorbis, like these other players do?

Xiph.org isn't only developing Ogg Vorbis, but also Ogg Theora. It's still in alpha stages though. The technology used in Theora is based on the vp3 codec which is covered by patents, but Xiph.org has negotiated an "irrevocable free license to the vp3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public".

Xiph.org is also developing the experimental wavelet-based "Tarkin" codec. As I understand it, it's more written from "scratch", much like Ogg Vorbis, but is even further ahead in the future than Ogg Theora, which they are focusing on right now.

I'm not going to be using any digitial music service until they offer my a lossless version

MP3 is a data reduction method that loses some fidelity. So are WMA, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis. Downsampling from a 32-bit 192 kHz studio master to a 16-bit 44.1 kHz CD is also a data reduction method that loses some fidelity. So is amplifying the signal above 0 dBFS and intentionally clipping it. The term "CD quality" has been abused.

of the song.

If you just want a lossless version of the song, buy sheet music. You get all the notes, all the rhythms, all the lyrics, losslessly encoded in Western Common Practice Notation.

The proper term for what you're trying to say is "a version of the recording with equivalent fidelity to a well-mastered CD." Tests confirm that Ogg Vorbis is transparent to trained ears at 192 kbps. If you're worried about fitting more recordings on a portable player, the Vorbis specification includes a (not yet implemented) "bitrate peeling" feature that allows transcoding from a hi-fi file to a lo-fi file by operating entirely in the transform domain, which incurs less noise than decoding, re-modeling, and re-encoding.

You're wrong. And so are some of the others, actually. The synchronization software (ie, the program on the computer that you would use to manage your music on your Neuros) is called Positron, and is officially released at 1.0 for Linux. It hasn't (as far as I know) been ported to OSX, but that shouldn't be too hard.

The firmware for making the Neurosetta firmware capable of playing Oggs is still in beta (prone to skipping at >200k encoding and takes up a bunch of battery life, but supposedly otherwise fine).

You're wrong. And so are some of the others, actually. The synchronization software (ie, the program on the computer that you would use to manage your music on your Neuros) is called Positron, and is officially released at 1.0 for Linux. It hasn't (as far as I know) been ported to OSX, but that shouldn't be too hard.

The firmware for making the Neurosetta firmware capable of playing Oggs is still in beta (prone to skipping at >200k encoding and takes up a bunch of battery life, but supposedly otherwise fine).

While that's possible, they haven't come up with a working implementation yet.

Here is a supposed "working implementation"... but it's an April Fool's joke, and only reduces size to 0.

While it's truly POSSIBLE with Ogg, the way the files are organized right now is not conducive to peeling. There's talk on the boards of a tool that would reorganize the data frames and make it much easier, but most want to see the codec tuned as well as MP3 has been.

Something like this may be coming. Check out http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware for a list of hardware that can play Vorbis now, and also hardware that will be able to do so. There are currently 2 CD-R players in the "Coming soon" list. The Freemax has an external battery pack, will cost about $150, but will be sold in Korea.

Theres now an integer only decoder library for Vorbis called Tremor (see here).

Strangely they describe it as a codec, even though it's apparently only a 'dec'.

I think they're supported via donations and merchandise. I must say I'm tempted...

Since the Mozilla Foundation is applying for 501(c)(3) status, contributions are not yet tax deductible.

Under the Internal Revenue Code, donations that come in after the organization has applied for 501(c)3 tax exempt status, but prior to that status being granted, are tax deductible assuming the 501(c)3 status is finally granted. That is, the tax exempt status is applied retroactively to the time of application.

Not that the Mozilla Foundation is guaranteed to receive IRS approval, but it is quite likely. The xiph.org foundation received 501(c)3 tax exempt status and the Mozilla Foundation seems quite similar to me (vis-a-vis the factors that matter to IRS approval.) Often times, pointing out another similar organization that has recently received 501(c)3 approval is persuasive to the Service.

Note also that AOL's transactions with Mozilla are unlikely to be categorized as an "excess benefit transaction," as one person commented. Excess benefit transactions are problems with self-dealing--e.g., if a 501(c)3 pays someone who is a disqualified person (impermissibly connected to organizational decisionmakers) too much for the services rendered, then the excess benefit penalties kicks in.

Some are, some aren't. My favorite one is, and I send 'em a check every month, because open formats (with open source reference implementations) are even more important than open source itself.

There is a good deal of hardware support for Vorbis, including a Vorbis player for your car (PhatAudio). See the VorbisHardware wiki for more details.

http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware

I did end-to-end tests on my PC comparing MP3 and Ogg files, and I found out that Ogg files were smaller, and of higher quality, than MP3 files that were equivalently-encoded from the same WAV file.

An Ogg Vorbis file encoded at 64kbps sounds exactly like an MP3 encoded at 128kpbs. Now thats a good point, considering the space restrictions on portable (memory and card based) devices.

If you want to test the sound quality for yourself, heres a page where you can listen to ogg vorbis compared to mp3pro, mp3, wma, and others, all of them compressed at 64kbps. Click here to start comparing.

positron

This is the home of positron, the synchronization manager for the Neuros Audio Computer. This software is primarily intended to support Linux, but will probably be portable to other POSIX systems such as OS X and the BSDs. Currently there are USB protocol issues with OS X, so please don't try it there yet.

The above was taken from a link in the above story. Now, the problem I have is that I own three of these, Acorn Electrons. Can I simultaneously use an Electron and Positron, or am I going to end up annihilating something?

TIA LOL Me too!!!! etc.

We've been collecting what freely-redistributable clips we can find at media.xiph.org. There's not much there, but it's still worth a look. Particularly interesting for your case are some public domain HD test clips made available by TU München LDV. Of course, they're quite short given the size of uncompressed HD frames.

Please let us know if you find anything else, that's exactly what the collection is for.

In general, the suggestions of contacting copyright holders for permission is the best one. There are various collections of test clips and movies online, but they're generally either small and without audio, or already compressed. Plus, the more content we get under free licenses, the better the world will be. :-)

The Internet Archive does have a collection of movies with contact information, so that might be an easy place to start.

Good luck!

Nah, odds are you're just going to take your FLAC and then transcode it to MP3 or perhaps AAC if your an iPod owner or Ogg if your one of those wierdos who uses it

Ermmm what? FLAC is part of Ogg. Are you talking about Vorbis?

Did they switch for legal reasons? No.
Did they switch for technical reasons? No.
Did they switch for political reasons? No.

So why did they switch? Obviously, Phish just happen to be fans of the logo.

FLAC is lossless, which means it is CD quality. Literally. It will be a bit-for-bit perfect representation of what you'd get on the CD. As part of the tradeoff, you get larger filesizes. FLAC will typically give 2:1 compression, compared to the 10:1 you're likely to achieve with MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, so your files will be around 5 times larger.

Also, Ogg is a container format, not a compression method. Ogg Vorbis is their flagship lossy audio compression scheme. Note, however, that FLAC is migrating to Ogg, so in future, FLAC files will come with a .ogg extension.

Ogg Vorbis

This means many dial-up users can't get a complete file. It would be a very useful feature to add.

I agree with motown that Ogg Vorbis and Speex are worth a look. Ogg Vorbis is good at 48k mono, but is surprisingly bad at 32k.

An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense
...
Ogg is a larger multimedia project that does not only concern compression; Squish became the name of one of the Ogg codecs. For that reason, we usually just refer to it as Ogg when there's no Netrek context nearby. The Ogg project has nothing to do with the common surname 'Ogg'. Nor is it named after 'Nanny Ogg' from the Terry Pratchett book _Wyrd Sisters_.
...
Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.

The names come from the Terry Pratchett Discworld books. Vorbis was a corrupt religious ruler hell-bent on world domination in Small Gods and Nanny Ogg is a funny, old, hard-liquor drinking, foul-mouthed witch featured in many of the books.

I don't think the Theora specification will be available any time soon. The Vorbis specification is not yet published. There is just a reference implementation.

A spec for theora the main feature on the todo list for the first beta release. Dan Miller, one of the architects of the VP3 codec, is writing it.

The vorbis spec has been available since the 1.0 release.

Do try to keep up.

This is what the cdparanoia faq has to say about ripping...

I can play audio CDs perfectly; why is reading the CD into a file so difficult and prone to errors? It's just the same thing.

Unfortunately, it isn't that easy. The audio CD is not a random access format. It can only be played from some starting point in sequence until it is done, like a vinyl LP. Unlike a data CD, there are no synchronization or positioning headers in the audio data (a CD, audio or data, uses 2352 byte sectors. In a data CD, 304 bytes of each sector is used for header, sync and error correction. An audio CD uses all 2352 bytes for data). The audio CD *does* have a continuous fragmented subchannel, but this is only good for seeking +/-1 second (or 75 sectors or ~176kB) of the desired area, as per the SCSI spec.

When the CD is being played as audio, it is not only moving at 1x, the drive is keeping the media data rate (the spin speed) exactly locked to playback speed. Pick up a portable CD player while it's playing and rotate it 90 degrees. Chances are it will skip; you disturbed this delicate balance. In addition, a player is never distracted from what it's doing... it has nothing else taking up its time. Now add a non-realtime, (relatively) high-latency, multitasking kernel into the mess; it's like picking up the player and constantly shaking it.

CDROM drives generally assume that any sort of DAE will be linear and throw a readahead buffer at the task. However, the OS is reading the data as broken up, seperated read requests. The drive is doing readahead buffering and attempting to store additional data as it comes in off media while it waits for the OS to get around to reading previous blocks. Seeing as how, at 36x, data is coming in at 6.2MB/second, and each read is only 13 sectors or ~30k (due to DMA restrictions), one has to get off 208 read requests a second, minimum without any interruption, to avoid skipping. A single swap to disc or flush of filesystem cache by the OS will generally result in loss of streaming, assuming the drive is working flawlessly. Oh, and virtually no PC on earth has that kind of I/O throughput; a Sun Enterprise server might, but a PC does not. Most don't come within a factor of five, assuming perfect realtime behavior.

To keep piling on the difficulties, faster drives are often prone to vibration and alignment problems; some are total fiascos. They lose streaming *constantly* even without being interrupted. Philips determined 15 years ago that the CD could only be spun up to 50-60x until the physical CD (made of polycarbonate) would deform from centripetal force badly enough to become unreadable. Today's players are pushing physics to the limit. Few do so terribly reliably.

Note that CD 'playback speed' is an excellent example of advertisers making numbers lie for them. A 36x cdrom is generally not spinning at 36x a normal drive's speed. As a 1x drive is adjusting velocity depending on the access's distance from the hub, a 36x drive is probably using a constant angular velocity across the whole surface such that it gets 36x max at the edge. Thus it's actually spinning slower, assuming the '36x' isn't a complete lie, as it is on some drives.

Because audio discs have no headers in the data to assist in picking up where things got lost, most drives will just guess.

This doesn't even *begin* to get into stupid firmware bugs. Even Plextors have occasionally had DAE bugs (although in every case, Plextor has fixed the bug *and* replaced/repaired drives for free). Cheaper drives are often complete basket cases.

Rant Update (for those in the know):

Several folks, through personal mail and on Usenet, have pointed out that audio discs do place absolute positioning information for (at least) nine out of every ten sectors into the Q subchannel, and that my original stateme

And I'm not entirely sure that LAME is illegal in the US, but it wouldn't surprise me, and it's enough to make me use Vorbis, even if it means re-encoding when I get a portable player. (There will be portable Vorbis players soon, though.)

Here.

Sorry.

As far as your computer is concerned, a Neuros is just an external USB 1 hard disk, following the USB Mass Storage standard. You can copy any sort of file, music or otherwise, onto the Neuros. However, only files that are listed in a special database stored on the Neuros will be playable. This is where positron is needed. It will both physically copy files and update the Neuros database so those files are playable.

Check out what xiph.org have to say about this:

Please do not run out and purchase this device immediately, assuming that Vorbis playback will be supported by Neuros. The firmware we write for them (codenamed 'NeuRosetta') will be documented in its creation, and we'll have a site up to document the progress. When that site says it's 'safe' to buy the unit, then it's safe.

positron

I've only laid hands on one copy-protected CD, the VNV Nation "Genesis" single, and cdparanoia made a perfect copy of it, as if it had never been copy-protected at all.

Not to mention the logo which looks like a naked richard stallman hacking at a snake with an axe.

The name origins are explained here.

For the love of $Deity, it's Ogg !! Not OGG, Ogg! Capital O, small g, small g!

Your parent post was wrong to say "most" games, but there's still a numerous amount that use OGG, and the number continues to grow.

This is great, well done to all the xiph guys. Remember to show your support by tax-deductibly donating.

Ogg Tarkin is Xiph's experiment on 3d wavelets.

Hmm... looks like this archive has been delinked from Xiph's mailing list archives page, but it's still alive and kicking.

Or VP3, since anyone who has Sorenson has VP3.

Especially because VP3 is free software now.

Will it play Oggs? They released the Integer only version of the codec months ago.

If I can't play half my music, I don't care how big the harddrive might be.

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

Will it play Oggs? They released the Integer only version of the codec months ago.

If I can't play half my music, I don't care how big the harddrive might be.

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

That might be so, but it is developing momentum. Take a look at this list of games that use ogg, for example.

take a look at people who embed audio in other projects - in-game music, for example. free code and specs availability and patent-freeness is making ogg a de-facto standard in that scene pretty rapidly.

okay, so AAC has k-rad standards bodies bowing down in its direction five times a day. what's a license gonna cost me, and who guarantees some patent holder won't just decide to up and change that tomorrow? with ogg, you know what you're in for.

if you've encoded all your CDs as MP3 at 192kbps or better, then clearly you care about sound quality at least a little, or you'd've gone for 128k or less. in that case, you're not gonna reencode as anything - you're gonna re-rip from the CDs and encode the CDDA in whatever new format tickles your fancy. (which is, of course, what you were talking about. most people use "reencode" to mean translating from one lossy format to another, not to mean redoing all their work. semantic quibble.) and if you're considering that sort of effort, then you should definitely give a damn about ogg - its sound quality per file size is quite competitive.

the one thing people still need to worry about is portable players. too often they just play the crummy (encumbered, non-free) formats; me, i'm not wasting my money on a toy that won't play the format i've settled on for my music collection, and i'm not re-ripping all my discs now that i've finally got the quality settings down pat the way i like them. if your iWhatever won't play my ogg, i won't buy it, i'll just have to dig the CD out of storage and play it on my discman. as for that "neuros" thingy, now - that looks like it might become something.

The only reason I hold any hope of Apple adding Ogg support to iPod is that it's free (as in both). There's 32MB of EPROM (or Flash?) on every iPod specifically intended for firmware updates. Plenty of room for AAC, Ogg, and the next dozen codecs to come.

It's not on their website, but via emailed, I was informed the OGG code was being worked on and would be available for the II and the ia.

Having my NEX II conveniently disassembled right now, it looks like it's using a TI TMS320VC5416 (C54xx series) 16-Bit 144-pin Fixed-Point DSP with Boundary Scan.

A quick Ogg search shows that someone was working on porting the Tremor code to the TI C54s last year. Interesting stuff.

BTW, I'm been using Mozilla v1.3+ (currently running a 1.4b build) and the site hasn't been giving me any problems.