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I have never had difficulty with cdparanoia. Just change to a directory, place the CD in the drive and # cdparanoia -B. You get a set of .wav files which are easily dealt with {for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done}. Note that you will have to download and compile lame yourself {from a server in a country where maths patents are unenforcible}.

Back in the days of 2.4 kernels, you had to muck about with SCSI emulation, /etc/modules and append statements in lilo.conf; but all that finally changed with the advent of 2.6.

For some discs, you might need a drive of 12X or slower speed. This is because older, slower drives seem not to read all TOCs as soon as the disc is inserted; so are immune to "protection" methods involving bogus TOC entries.

I once bought a copy-protected "CD" {Macrovision / Cactus CDS 200} just for the h4x0r challenge, and was so disappointed when it came through without problems that I have not even bothered to listen to it.

http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware

There is a wiki page on exactly this topic. I encourage you to track it and comment if you make such a purchase.

http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware

Incidentally, Vorbis seems well suited to mobile replay, especially with bitrate peeling, you can have files stored on your harddrive at very high bitrates, and reduce them to lower bitrates very radpidly while downloading them to your device.

I have personally commented on this page. I own a Samsung Yepp YP-t7z. The vorbis playback is not perfect. I seem to be able to exhaust the processortime on the box with high bandwidth vorbis files (around 180kbps or higher). However, this hasn't bothered me, I just encode around 150kbps average. I would recommend the device cautiously. The user interface is not sleek or elegant, but usable and satisfactory. It is a 1 gig flash-based player.

Apparently the IOPS line of players have the best OGG Vorbis support, and generally seem to be good devices.

The iRiver vorbis support historically has been inferior, with various issues plaguing the devices.

No codec should have to implement an equalizer - the same equalizer should be tacked on to the output of whichever decoder is being used, by the audio player.

As the other posts state, XMMS is not well maintained. The equalizer in beep-media-player works fine with Ogg Vorbis files on my Linux box.

As for hype, do some listening tests of your own, if you really want to know. To save time, you could try the Ogg Vorbis dare to compare listening tests. At the end of the day, use what sounds best to you - anyone else will have at least some natural bias.

I bought the same player a few days ago and while i'm enjoying it, some of my ogg files can cause the player to freeze.
There's a bit of a discussion of the problem over at the Xiph wiki: http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Talk:PortablePlayer s#Samsung.27s_Yepp_Ogg_Vorbis_support Have you had any of same problems?

The iAudio's have great sound quality but don't have gapless playback even in ogg format. And that really gets on my tits.

"Copy protected" CDs can be defeated using a combination of a slow drive {24 speed or less; the slowness isn't the critical thing, but it seems that a feature was silently incorporated into more modern drives to make them artificially incompatible with some discs} and CDParanoia. I bought a CDS200-protected CD once, for the hacker challenge factor more than the music; and was disappointed to find that it ripped first time.

Let's not get wrapped up in false restrictions for Linux by overlooking opportunities for improvement.

How will chip developers ever build for Linux rather than simply for Microsoft or Apple if Linux kernel developers can't imagine improvements for the Linux OS? Would you rather lead or follow? Here's how:

Rather than simply fixing the OS for 64 bit processors, or multiple processors, why not build a better OS for everyone?

Remember when they put the math coprocessor onto the same chip as the CPU? If most people listen to sounds and watch video, then why not service the decoding of open source sound formats at the kernal or coprocessor level? Why not have the Linux OS support kernel level software or coprocesser decoding of open source video files? If the Linux kernel could make use of music and video coprocessors on the same chip as the CPU don't you think other operating systems would soon follow?

Once the decoding software is written in kernel software, it is a simple matter to burn it to hardware. If Linux would actually accept generic music and video coprocessor standards into the OS (whether or not those coprocessors are present on the chip) then companies like Intel and AMD could make chips with those extra fast coprocessors for Linux or any other OS.

If Linux developers can not even imagine incorporating a standard open source sound or video driver into the OS then what work will be left to do if people choose to continue to buy a 64 bit processor for the next 20 years? Will the kernel developers simply be out of a job, or are they going to actually improve anything at all?

Computer users just expect the sound and video to play on their computers. Kernel developers are part of the problem when they fail to address the clear needs of the user. You know something is wrong when even chip makers are more open minded than kernel developers. Yes, there certainly is a problem with open source developers these days.

This is why I say we still have a long way to go now kiddies.

First step: Accept a GNU signal encoding software standard such as Ogg Vorbis 1.0.

I think BSD may have already done something just like this at: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/

Do your research, please.

http://www.ipodlinux.org/FAQ#Is_there_an_OGG_playe r.3F
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/

cdrecord:

cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,2,0 -toc
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a37 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
cdrecord: Warning: Running on Linux-2.6.7-gentoo-r11
cdrecord: There are unsettled issues with Linux-2.5 and newer.
cdrecord: If you have unexpected problems, please try Linux-2.4 or Solaris.
scsidev: 'ATAPI:0,2,0'
devname: 'ATAPI'
scsibus: 0 target: 2 lun: 0
Warning: Using ATA Packet interface.
Warning: The related Linux kernel interface code seems to be unmaintained.
Warning: There is absolutely NO DMA, operations thus are slow.
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
cdrecord: Cannot do inquiry for CD/DVD-Recorder.
cdrecord: Input/output error. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: fatal error
CDB: 00 00 00 00 00 00
cmd finished after 0.000s timeout 40s

cdparanoia:

cdparanoia -vsQ
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

Checking /dev/cdrom for cdrom...
Testing /dev/cdrom for cooked ioctl() interface
CDROM sensed: ATAPI compatible JLMS XJ-HD166S

004: Unable to read table of contents header

Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive?

cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

004: Unable to read table of contents header

Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive?

cdrecord:

cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,2,0 -toc
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a37 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
cdrecord: Warning: Running on Linux-2.6.7-gentoo-r11
cdrecord: There are unsettled issues with Linux-2.5 and newer.
cdrecord: If you have unexpected problems, please try Linux-2.4 or Solaris.
scsidev: 'ATAPI:0,2,0'
devname: 'ATAPI'
scsibus: 0 target: 2 lun: 0
Warning: Using ATA Packet interface.
Warning: The related Linux kernel interface code seems to be unmaintained.
Warning: There is absolutely NO DMA, operations thus are slow.
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
cdrecord: Cannot do inquiry for CD/DVD-Recorder.
cdrecord: Input/output error. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: fatal error
CDB: 00 00 00 00 00 00
cmd finished after 0.000s timeout 40s

cdparanoia:

cdparanoia -vsQ
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

Checking /dev/cdrom for cdrom...
Testing /dev/cdrom for cooked ioctl() interface
CDROM sensed: ATAPI compatible JLMS XJ-HD166S

004: Unable to read table of contents header

Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive?

cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus

Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

004: Unable to read table of contents header

Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive?

I tried to play low bitrate Ogg Vorbis files on my iFP-790. The results are quite interesting. It seems that it uses the Tremor decoder http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/ and the bitrate is computed by its ov_bitrate function. This function can be fooled in two ways with specially crafted files. The first way is to change granule position of pages to make the decoder think that the total time of the song is shorter and the bitrate is higher than the lower limit. The second way is to append a file with broken headers, which causes the decoder to think that sum of logical bitstreams lengths is bigger than it actualy is (the decoder puts -1 to the starting offset of the second stream). Interested readers should read the Ogg Vorbis specification and Tremor source code to find the details.

It seems that the player just compares the computed bitrate with the limits and refuses to play the file if it is out of the range. Fooling the ov_bitrate function does not work however, because the player computes the total time of the song from the bitrate and the size of the file (it could use the same routine that the ov_bitrate function uses, but apparently it doesn't) and it plays only for that time, so better compressed files are not fully played. Appending some garbage to the file increases the play time, which confirms that the player uses the physical size of the file to compute the play time.

There is one reason not to play some Ogg Vorbis files. Some of them use big window sizes (the size of a chunk of music processed in one step) which requires more memory to decode. It is not directly related to the bitrate, the Ogg Vorbis encoder (from xiph.org) uses bigger windows only in very low quality settings (-q -1 or something like that). I do not know why the player checks the bitrate and not just the window sizes. Used window sizes are stored in the headers and it is not more difficult to check them than to compute the bitrate.

I suppose the firmware could be easily hacked to enhance the limits, but apparently noone has descrambled the firmware to the iFP players.

Ogg Integer only decoder was called Tremor. It is available under the BSD license from here: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/

I think the iRiver H300 series also supports Ogg.

So no need to bung an expensive new CPU in the iPod, and no need to spend money building an Integer only decoder :)

Thanks

Jan

Well, I was really speaking to your claim about iPod not being able to support Ogg Vorbis due to the floating-point issue, not how well some hacker shoved Linux onto an iPod to play Ogg Vorbis files. (Which contradicts your own assertion that the iPod cannot support Ogg.) And, really though - using a hobbiest's hacked-up iPod as an example of why Apple's hypothetical support of Ogg Vorbis hypothetically sucks, what with Apple's paid engineers and extensive testing, is kinda specious, dontcha think? The Linux iPod is just a bad implementation. I'm sure if these players can support Ogg Vorbis, Apple's engineering wizards can make iPod support it, too.

It's very possible to support Ogg on portables; I know this because I own one that does (Rio Karma). That wonderful floating-point issue has been solved now for at over two years, when Xiph released Tremor, the integer-based Ogg decoder.

Here is a Perl script to batch convert flac to mp3 including preservation of id3v2 tags. As to why use WMA, well if you have a WMA player which doesn't support mp3.....

Check out http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers for a wiki page on portable digital audio players that play Ogg Vorbis files.

Here, They are out there, but it is a limited subset. Anyone have a the Enox player? I am looking for a new player that uses a regular battery. I have an old Rio that works well but 96mb is a bit limited.

Actually there are many portable players that support Ogg Vorbis. Most notably: players from iRiver, the Neuros, and the Rio Karma.

Full List

Ogg is free, (supported by xmms), patentless and offers better compression (or what ever you call it) than mp3.

Ogg is free, (supported by xmms), patentless and offers better compression (or what ever you call it) than mp3.

Ob: Of course none of these things are ipods...

here you go

JPEG 2000 has one feature that might make it better in "archival" purposes - there is a lossless mode which still achieves higher compression ratios than PNG.

Yes, lossless JPEG 2000 is a reasonable option. I'm not sure any lossy video codec counts as 'archival' storage. Might as well just put published DVDs in a preservation vault. The wide release of movies of movies on DVD has done more for the preservation of movies themselves than anything else in history.

Still, for a digital archive of the film masters, until the patent issues with JPEG 2000 are resolved, I'd just put MNG and FLAC in an Ogg file.

And if you can spare the space, a directory with a wav file and a stack of uncompressed TIFF images is even better. Compression formats are complicated to reverse engineer.

There is Rhythmbox and Totem Movie Player and both have important plug-ins/codecs missing for playing MPEGs or MP3s and there's no other MP3 player.

This seems like a bad thing at first blush, but it's a good thing that Ubuntu is not distributing software that some users can't redistribute (notably, users in countries burdened with software patents, like US users).

It's a real hassle to not be able to double-click on a file and have it do the right thing immediately, but there is a good reason for not including MP3 software: (for those who aren't aware of this) MP3 is patent-encumbered. In some countries all implementations of MP3 are covered by patents held by the Fraunhofer corporation and patent licenses are acquired through Thomson. If you want to merely share a verbatim copy of a GPL'd MP3 player with your friend (again, in some countries), you need a license.

This restriction makes the software non-free for some users, despite the license. This is why free software proponents endorse the use of unencumbered protocols and file formats to do the same job. Ogg Vorbis is a fine replacement and most reviews I've read say that the Vorbis codec sounds better than MP3, or can sound just as bad but with a smaller file size. Have a friend set up a blind test for you and figure out what you like.

There are restrictions on various other kinds of formats too, and there are unencumbered replacements for most of them.

It could happen. Newer iPods have two processors, and probably have enough horsepower to decode Vorbis. The biggest problem is that Vorbis is a more complicated codec than MP3, so a decompressor will not only be bigger but also need more resources (RAM, CPU time, etc.).

Vorbis gives you better quality for the same number of bits, or a smaller file for similar quality. Partly this is because it's just newer technology and does some stuff better, but it's also because it's a little more complicated. While MP3 uses standard reference tables for encoding and decoding, a Vorbis encoder computes an ideal reference table for the particular song being encoded and then saves that reference table as part of the Ogg file. This means that a Vorbis decoder needs to read the reference file and save it in RAM.

Also, MP3 has been around a while, and lots of people have worked to write code that is small and fast for low-CPU-power devices. Vorbis is much newer. The original, "reference" decoder makes use of floating-point maths, which is fine for a desktop workstation but not so good for a low-CPU-power device. The Vorbis guys did write an integer-math-only decoder, Tremor, which presumably is what devices like the iRiver iHP-40 use. But the Tremor decoder could probably use a few man-years of optimisation work to speed it up, make it smaller, etc.

The iPod Linux guys do have Vorbis decoding working on a Linux iPod; the problem is that it's not full-speed yet. It should be possible to optimise Tremor and get it working on iPod but I don't know when it will happen.

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/

Good compression, supported in recent Helix Player, VLC, Mplayer, open source, non-patented and made by good people. I've seen both Redhat and the CC licence website distribute video in Ogg Theora.

While that is true (not necessairily for the iPod, I dunno), there are two mitigating factors. One, players are becoming more and more powerful, because there are so many formats that need to be supported now, and because of the perpetual fall of hardware prices. And also, Vorbis decoder chips do exist, see a list here.

Ogg is already popular enough that many handhelds do include it. The round-up of handhelds posted to Slashdot just before Xmas listed a large number of devices with built-in Ogg support. It's not just the geeks that want Ogg (as someone else in the thread suggested) -- Ogg has growing recognition and support in the audiophile community as well. And the recent release of several ogg-on-a-chip decoders can only help.

According to the Xiph Wiki, "[t]here are currently more than 40 different companies offering a total of more than a hundred [hardware] products that support decoding Ogg Vorbis." I'd say that's a sign of an already-popular format. Maybe not mp3-level popular, but popular nonetheless.

Now I admit, I have my doubts whether Sony, in particular, will be foresighted enough to include Ogg support. I suspect it depends on whether or not they want to use "flexibility" and "versatility" as marketing slogans. But if any of their new devices support more than three formats (a pretty big "if", I admit), I'll betcha that Ogg is one.

> What's a swordtail got to do with Ogg Vorbis?

Explanation for those who can't be bother to do their own research: Ogg Vorbis is a sound codec developed as a part of the Ogg Project by the Xiphophorus Foundation. Ogg's logo is a xiphophorus helleri, a small aquarium fish known as the common swordtail. Quisitor Vorbis is a character in "Small Gods" novel by Terry Pratchett which is the last and most important element needed to understand the pun in grandparent post. What's wrong with slashdotters these days? Am I the only one who got this joke? Seriously, am I the only one who is not an illeterate moron? That's really depressing. I'm serious.

> What's a swordtail got to do with Ogg Vorbis?

Explanation for those who can't be bother to do their own research: Ogg Vorbis is a sound codec developed as a part of the Ogg Project by the Xiphophorus Foundation. Ogg's logo is a xiphophorus helleri, a small aquarium fish known as the common swordtail. Quisitor Vorbis is a character in "Small Gods" novel by Terry Pratchett which is the last and most important element needed to understand the pun in grandparent post. What's wrong with slashdotters these days? Am I the only one who got this joke? Seriously, am I the only one who is not an illeterate moron? That's really depressing. I'm serious.

> What's a swordtail got to do with Ogg Vorbis?

Explanation for those who can't be bother to do their own research: Ogg Vorbis is a sound codec developed as a part of the Ogg Project by the Xiphophorus Foundation. Ogg's logo is a xiphophorus helleri, a small aquarium fish known as the common swordtail. Quisitor Vorbis is a character in "Small Gods" novel by Terry Pratchett which is the last and most important element needed to understand the pun in grandparent post. What's wrong with slashdotters these days? Am I the only one who got this joke? Seriously, am I the only one who is not an illeterate moron? That's really depressing. I'm serious.

> What's a swordtail got to do with Ogg Vorbis?

Explanation for those who can't be bother to do their own research: Ogg Vorbis is a sound codec developed as a part of the Ogg Project by the Xiphophorus Foundation. Ogg's logo is a xiphophorus helleri, a small aquarium fish known as the common swordtail. Quisitor Vorbis is a character in "Small Gods" novel by Terry Pratchett which is the last and most important element needed to understand the pun in grandparent post. What's wrong with slashdotters these days? Am I the only one who got this joke? Seriously, am I the only one who is not an illeterate moron? That's really depressing. I'm serious.

Any other resources that Slashdot readers can recommend for those who are interested in the subject of audio compression and representation?

• An older but good technical survey of digital audio compression, including MP3, is Davis Yen Pan, "Digital Audio Compression," Digital Technical Journal (Spring 1993). (PDF)
• Some other technical reference material on MP3 is also available on the Digital Audio Systems website.
  
• A more recent survey of perceptual coding of audio, which covers more recent formats like AAC, is Painter and Spanias, "Perceptual Coding of Digital Audio," Proc. IEEE (April 2000). (PDF)
  
• Ogg Vorbis is documented on the Xiph.org website, but I found the documentation to be lacking when read from a signal processing perspective. Christopher Montgomery provides a better description from that perspective in a Slashdot interview from 2000. I found another good description in this thread in the hydrogenaudio forums--it hyperlinks a good block diagram of the encoding process.
  

While Ogg Vorbis encoders and decoders are still in development for the purposes of tweaking the compression and bugfixing, but for all intents and purposes, the bit stream format has been set in stone back with the 1.0 release quite a while ago.

All encoders should be compatible with all decoders (with the exception of some extreme encoders such as the 2Kbps encoder). Vorbis is no longer a moving target (like Theora still is at the moment) and if you make a decoder you can be assured that it will play all Vorbis files from the past (since 1.0 of the format), present, and future.

Xiph.org couldn't have made it any easier for hardware manufacturers, providing the integer codec Tremor (to run on embedded processors) and don't charge royalties for using or modifying a Vorbis codec in a hardware player (almost all other formats are patent-encumbered and charge royalties).

First, I never had to do that for Ogg Vorbis audio streams.

Second, I was not referring to Ogg Vorbis audio-only streams, but streams with both Vorbis audio and Theora video.

Unfortunantly, at this time I am unable to determine whether PeerCast is using a standard stream format for these, because they are labeled OGM everywhere I can find it. With a little bit of Googling, I found OGM Container, which seems to say that this format is a derivitave.

So now I'm confused. Can OGG streams be used to stream both a/v? Then why does PeerCast call Ogg Vorbis streams OGG streams, and Ogg Theora+Vorbis streams OGM streams?

I'm sorry, I just made things more confusing than I wanted to. It looks like the majority of PeerCast users are Windoze idiots who like their Windows Media and Real Players.

I thought the "Windows" only support would be a problem with the Neuros as well, but there's an open source sync manager for Linux (and other POSIX compliant OSs maybe) made by Xiph called Positron. http://www.xiph.org/positron/ I think we'll be waiting years for official Linux support on these PMPs, and life is short unfortunately, especially since USB mass storage on Linux is still rather iffy (for now). At least Neuros has opened up their firmware, hardware (specs), and software. I've been looking to replace my "old school" Neo for a while, and had considered an iPod for a while, but Neuros seems to have decent digital recording built in (even better if you get an external pre-amp/microphone).

I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine.

Have a look at snatch, done by xiph as part of the vorbis project. It's only available in CVS (or subversion now!). You can find it here under trunk/snatch. Worked pretty well when I tried it last, and it has a scheduling GUI front-end.

No, Thor's hammer is taken as part of an Ogg logo.

However, the remedies being upheld is a good thing. This may put a bigger wrench in M$ plans by not only preventing the desktop audio / video market from closing up, but also HDTV and DVDs. M$ has had its eye on all three and the desktop monopoly could have done much more harm if HDTV over IP were to become available only via WMP.

Let's hope this support of the March decision gives open codecs like Vorbis and Dirac a boost all around.

I bet this new scheme yields to cdparanoia just like all the others.

AFAIK, there is no standard mapping for >2 channels in Ogg Vorbis. So yes, there is that problem. I thought that Ogg and/or Vorbis was supposed to have more meta-data (and meta-meta-data?) than other formats. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

As for file size, Vorbis does have a very flexible system for channel coupling, much like joint-stereo in MP3. In the reference encoder it's only used for q >= 6 though. So adding more channels should have a diminishing impact on bitrate requirements, assuming that similar sounds are coming out all/most of the channels.

for me. Once I tried foobar2000 there was no going back.

Features
* Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player
* Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC
* Audio formats supported through official addons: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
* Full Unicode support on Windows NT
* ReplayGain support
* Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
* Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
* Highly customizable playlist display
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)

If you've ever tried writing a plugin for Winamp you'll fall in love with the fb2k SDK, its like heaven compared to the other player. ;-)

Ever play UT2004?

GamesThatUseVorbis

There's a list on the icecast website.

--Dan

How did this get modded up as informative? Is Slashdot giving out mod points to completely clueless noobs now? Ogg Vorbis has had a fixed-point, interger-only decoder for a while now. It's called Tremor, is under the BSD license, and actually takes up slightly less CPU time playing .ogg files on my Zaurus than .mp3 files take to play.

Currently, one of the two main criteria for me in choosing my next music player is Ogg Vorbis support. I have a good number of CDs ripped in Vorbis format (VBR, quality 5), and they sound fantastic. The only thing I still need is the whole stack of them in my backpack or the dashboard of the car.

http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware There are a few that are mass-produced for audio players that include Vorbis playback. Scroll down to the bottom.

Ask and you shall receive.

I think you are fretting with WiFi and copying things. A bit of a non-story - either use CDA / CD-MP3 (I am sure you can buy MP3 player for car).

For added geek value, have a CD/SD/Memstick/pigeon carrier input to an ogg player. Less fuss more music.

Geek value points: avian carrier IP dataram transmission

OGG audio

Stripping the filename from the link to the tarball results in a link to this directory, which contains the libogg tarball that you wanted (as well as zips).
Slightly modifying the link points to this directory, which contains the vorbis stuff.