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Ogg Vorbis And Xiphophorus
mental666 writes: "Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free general purpose compressed audio format for high
quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This
places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and
TwinVQ), and PAC. It sounds great; I've tried it and while the file size is slightly larger than mp3, the quality is there. There's also an xmms plugin in the cvs module. For details check out The Xiph Web site."
The c't magazine recently conducted two studies with blind tests and found that the vast majority of testers could not even hear the difference between CD audio and MP3 audio.
A format that produces larger files than MP3 doesn't really sound attractive to me.
Yes, we have RA, .mp3, and a few others that I can't think off of the top of my head, but even a free/openly lisensed implememtation won't fly at this point unless it sounds better than mp3. As others have pointed out, mp3 is the high card, the player to beat, and free alone won't cut it here.
Will it be used? Probably. Will it be the big thing mp3 is? Odds are not.
David
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
So standards that incorporate privately-held IP can function to get a big system (as cellular needs) accepted. Maybe they are not appropriate in all situations, but they can be useful.
The mechanism that you described has a name -- corruption.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Would you have the government act alone to devise a cellular standard? Or perhaps there should be a popular vote? Or perhaps government should stay out of it completely, and we should allow Microsoft to "invent" it?
Goverment should support an independent standards body that oversees the standardization process and ensures that no secret and patent-encumbered standards are acceped.
It worked just fine for the Internet.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Oh phoo, just give me Ogg ;)
Only a bit- disk space issues. I have only two 2.1g IBM SCSI hard drives, each of which is partitioned in thirds. I've managed to fit a Linux install into one of the thirds. I wasn't aware I could even _get_ a BeOS for PowerMac anymore, short of going out and buying it. To make matters worse I'm running a G3 upgrade on it :)
Then, reading the inventor's interview, I was blown away by how good his attitude was. He GPLs: I GPL. He _specifically_ and eloquently objects to the notion of 'security features'. He's clearly coming from an audiophile sort of place- I'd given up hope of finding that in compressed digital music at _all_- I currently like mp3s because they distort pretty smoothly and unaggressively, the attempt to deliver 'bright clear spectacular highs' will inevitably produce horrid distortions and breakup, just as it does in hardware and analog audio, only much worse. Now here's somebody with an actual clue concerning himself with issues that mean a great deal to me! Wow. I kinda like that.
My take on the matter as an active and increasingly prolific net musician is this: I'm happily using mp3 128bit from BladeEnc, partly because I dislike the notion that I have to shell out big bucks to Xing or somebody (no laughing in the back there! I hear Xing is actually pretty unmusical, 'flashy' sonically) just in order to produce my work- also I know mp3 is well established, and again it degrades kind of euphonically compared to some stuff I've heard.
CD audio is _already_ severely severely compromised. It is. I can't get over how people get into these arguments over what sounds better or worse and miss how degraded CD sound already is... I would say with my recent work, it is about the same degradation in quality going to 44.1/16 as it is going to 128k BladeEnc. I'm not fooling- this is due to my use of a customised 48/20 ADAT with custom coupling caps throughout the analog board, combined with the removing of all the (wave soldered!) anal hiss control caps which are only there to change the op-amp noise levels from -104db to -73252346 db for crazed silence freaks ;) oh, and it feeds a custom analog board through custom cabling into the computer's A/D converters through more custom cabling. (To hear all this working, listen to songs off "anima", which uses the whole setup- expect the beginnings of a techno album soon. The album "Hard Vacuum", which is pure Noise, is actually even harder on an encoder, recorded direct to 44.1/16 and I kept the masters...)
Which is to say, I _know_ mp3 is quite flawed. I can mix and master to make this as unintrusive as possible, but it's still on a level with very good cassette tape (say, Nakamichi Dragon decks) at its best. That can be quite listenable. It can also be useful- when you start dealing with very high transparency equipment like I use, the performances have to be at a higher level, and it's easy to fake yourself out by mixing so that the slightest mistakes become obvious. If you record pretty dry it can be very unforgiving, though real punchy and involving- there's no room for error at all. I do this and then mix to 44.1/16 and then mp3 and by the time that's done, it's much harder to find flaws because the transparency just isn't there anymore :)
However, I will still be among the first to go with Nanny Ogg (gotta love the pterry references! Didn't even clue to this right away) and will even do special high-resolution mixes tailored to stress the new format to the limit- given two things.
- tools that run on a PowerMac, or which can be easily built in MPW, which I'd be willing to struggle with for the cause- I'm _no_ C programmer. I'm a drummer
;) (well, and bassist and guitar player etc etc etc) - somewhere to PUT the damned music. I have 177.1 megs of _compressed_ music on the Web at mp3.com, _all_ freely downloadable. That is orders of magnitude beyond what I can get for my own website, which I'm quite happy with for what it is, but it charges $1 a meg, roughly, and I'm paying $45 a month all things considered.
I like to think I am the poster child for audiophile geeknessI _like_ hearing about this stuff. I hope this works out. I hope this sees Slashdot again and somebody comes up with a Mac version of the programs, no matter how klugey, so I can work with the format and see what I can get out of it.
Count me in- just so happens that the contract with mp3.com is NONEXCLUSIVE rights to my recordings. If anyone sets up an Ogg Music site, I can right now throw five albums of original material on it, producing custom mixes (which I needed to do anyway for a private 'audiophile CD' project I was working on) and at least some material (Extended Play, Hard Vacuum, and anima) of very demanding audiophile quality to show off the format. All I need is the web space and the software...
(*g* dare I say it, wouldn't it be cool if I was some kinda bigshot on mp3.com by the time this happens? I'd _loooove_ to be on some sort of Successful MP3.com Musician soapbox when I start saying these things like 'use GPLed codecs' and 'no secure format bullshit' and 'there's this format called Ogg' ;) Therefore, I would be thrilled if people went and downloaded music from http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ which is all free as in beer and speech (meaning, if you want a sample from it I'll actually let you sample individual instruments off my master tapes with my total blessing and cooperation, instead of being a dick and forbidding it), and which is fine music and great for showing off stereos and much of it makes for a nifty Bass Test, especially "Koala" which has huge warm fretless bass and a nearly subsonic string pedal tone to freak people out with... end parenthesis)
Sounds good. I wonder how long it'll take for the RIAA to file a lawsuit and get an injunction banning its distribution?
Shame on you, Tounge-Twister and the Slashdot crew.
At least five, possibly six, avid Slashdot readers already knew about Ogg Vorbis. Who cares that there were countless other readers who actually saw this as new news--I being among the countless others--those five, possibly six, were far more important.
Also, at least four readers found this story to be completely irrelevant. I mean, Good Lord, you're writing about open technology and technological innovation! How dare you put stories about open-source technolog innovation on a technology news site! I for one found it very informative and relevant, but, my God, you so inconsiderately posted something that four or five folks found totally irrelevant.
Don't think that my optimism or enthusiasm for the content of this post fool you--I'm shocked, appalled, and dismayed that you failed to realize that the whole of the universe revolves around five, possibly six, individuals with nothing better to do than sit at their computer, surfing the Web instead of innovating.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Players are one thing. There are plenty of GPL'd playerrs.
Encoders are another matter entirely. Thanks to one particularly gluttonous company by the name of Fraunhoefer (did I spell that right?) you cannot make any encoder without paying them truly obscene amounts of money.
LAME is NOT an encoder, and for a very good reason. It would have to pay these royalties to Fraunhoefer if it were. It gets by because it's a patch to the ISO reference code.
Frankly, this is a major problem with ISO. It shouldn't be accepting patent-encumbered stuff as standards. If it's to be an international standard, it shouldn't be something that can be controlled by any one entity, as MP3 is due to our scumbag racketeer friends. Something really ought to be done about that. The whole point of ISO is that these standards are supposed to be open, when corporations would love to make them anything but.
Thanks for the props.
/. days after it first breaks, whether on Advogato or one of the other free software news sites.
I sent an email to Roblimo immediately after posting the interview. I have no idea what's going on inside Slashdot these days, but from the outside, it looks pretty fucked. A typical story makes it to
Incidentally, I generally check Slashdot, Lwn, and Kuro5hin at least once a day, and post links when appropriate.
ObOnTopic: I tried the CVS Vorbis encoder two weeks ago on a set of files, including some music that MP3 did a relatively poor job on, and was very impressed by the overall quality at 128kbps (64kbps/channel). I'm looking forward to the release of the new psychoacoustic model, as that promises to make Vorbis dramatically better than MP3 for comparable bitrates.
That said, a great many people either can't hear the difference or don't care. How else can you explain the fact that so many people use BladeEnc or one of the barely-modified ISO coders when LAME is so much better?
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
["The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost." -- Bennet Cerf]
:)
I'm surprised that you are so manaical about your analog equipment, but are basically satisfied with BladeEnc. To me, BladeEnc at 128k distorts the music enough to detract from my listening enjoyment, and I can even hear the artifacts at 256k.
If you're going to be doing MP3 encoding at 128kbps, use LAME. LAME is without a doubt the best free MP3 coder in existence. The differences between LAME and BladeEnc at 128kbps are striking, and it's pretty close to Fraunhofer's quality.
I can hear distortion in 128kbps MP3's generated by LAME (and Fraunhofer, too, for that matter), but only if I listen. It's perfectly adequate for everyday listening. So I usually encode at 160kbps, at which point I cannot hear the difference. 160kbps also gets past the >16kHz cutoff of 128kbps MP3. (and here you are bitching about the loss of sound quality from the CD's 44.1kHz sampling rate!)
Based on listening to the CVS version a couple of weeks ago, I fully expect that the production version of Vorbis at 128k will be indistinguishable from CD's, perhaps with a few minor exceptions of difficult-to-compress passages.
And to address the main point of your posting, by all means get out there and push for Vorbis to be supported in all the cool places where MP3 is now. There are no compelling reasons not to, except for inertia. And the reasons to are, to me anyway, compelling. It simply sounds better, and it's totally free. If people are going to go around buying gold-plated speaker cables, you'd think being given a significantly better codec would be even more effective
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I did some listening tests with the CVS version about two weeks ago, and compared it carefully against LAME and Fraunhofer's coder, respectively the best free and proprietary MP3 coders out there.
I listened to some regular music, plus the samples at the LAME website designed to stress MP3 coders to the max.
Basically, Vorbis blew the pants off MP3, with one exception - there are occasional artifacts audible in only one channel (Vorbis, at present, simply encodes each channel separately). Since these artifacts are way off center in the stereo field, they are particularly annoying. Monty claims that these artifacts are fixed in the new psychoacoustic module, and you know what? I believe him.
Keep in mind also that today's MP3 coders have years of tuning and tweaking behind them (Fraunhofer's coder of a few years ago did not sound that great, actually pretty far behind where LAME is now).
I encourage people not to just accept information that's spoon-fed them. It only takes a few hours to set up a simple listening test. Check out the code from CVS, put on your 'phones, and put it through its paces.
Advogato carried the interview with Monty a full week ago. I sent mail to roblimo, with whom I had been in correspondence. What's happened to Slashdot's speed lately?
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Hi,
;)
Is there any allowance for metainfo in your bitstream specs? The webpage didn't indicate it to me but I might not have been looking hard enough.. IIRC Icecast/Shoutcast file metainfo (artist, titles, genre, etc) on streams is kludgey and unreliable, where it exists. Is this involved in the bitstream or is it meta/wrapping around the bitstream?
Easier to fix this and get it right while the standards are still in flux (then again, this is OSS, aren't the standards always flexible?
Your Working Boy,
but MPEG, while being "open" isn't really free...check this out they won't even tell you what the licensing terms are...Though I suggest reading the Office Faq, There /is/ a need for a FREE standard..as opposed to a "OPEN" one...
..is it we need another format for audio? Is it so certain desperately boring people can claim "early adopter" status?
That wouldn't be worth the effort of switching over. The reason is that there are currently no completely open formats - bits of them always require some sort of licensing or other snags like that. These types of things contribute to the likelyhood of a format being unreadable in 70 years. MP3 is sufficiently open that I don't see a problem with playing those, but there are still some sort of licensing fees involved to do stuff commercially with it, and something else involved with encoding them. It presents legal hurdles at the very least.
This format seems to have aspirations of being better quality than MP3, perhaps placing it up with formats like VQF for which encoders/decoders tend to only exist in binary form. It's good to have this because if people go looking for an alternative, one would prefer that the alternative be at least as portable, right?
I think you left out MP3 from your list of successful formats...
'Stream control' is a red herring. If you can
listen to it, you can record it. There are sound
drivers for Windows and for Linux that let you
save the output stream to disk, so you can make
perfect digital recordings of anything coming
from RealPlayer and other 'secure' players.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yes, it sounds better.
...vs. this format's 128 kbps limit...
Sigh. Per channel. 128 kbps per channel.
--
Ian Peters
Anyone else find the title of that article alittle bit like vogon poetry?
Hmmm, I'm afraid you are off-track here. Encoding bitrate, usually in kilobits per second, actually describes how many bits you need to encode a second of audio. Therefore, it does indicate the amount of compression that you are achieving (over the original sample bitrate). For example, CD-quality uncompressed audio is 44.1Khz 16 bit stereo sampling, therefore approximately 1411 kilobits per second. If the encoding outputs a stream with a bitrate of 128 kilobits per second, you've achieved a compression ratio of a bit more than 10 to 1.
"Words have meaning, and names have power." -- Lorien
I just wanted to say that you guys have the coolest logo ever!
As near as I can tell, it's Jesus spanking a snake with a lit sparkler. Ogg, the symbolism!!
Then the least they could do is get to work on some of their own algorithms to distribute patent free, rather than request that other companies not charge them royalties for using their research...
According to a comment on Advogato from the author,
this can run from 16 to 128k PER CHANNEL -
in other words, 32 to 256k stereo.
Remember, a 128k MP3 stream is actually two 64k channels.
--Kevin
=-=-=-=-=-=
"Just take another hit 'cause you don't give a f*ck-
You're a junkie and you're proud!"
As I see it, the "free" (as beer) feature doesn't offer enough advantage to sell it in the marketplace of ideas, however, I don't read that they meant to go head-to-head against MP3. They simply felt proud of the job they'd done in that arena.
Regrettably, while Ogg Vorbis was specifically designed to do well at low bandwidth, they haven't implemented that code yet. The modem is going to be with us for a long time, and a streaming solution that let you listen as you surf could have fair appeal. It would also have some real commercial potential.
Overall, it's a testbed, and I applaud the notion, though I do not know if other similar initiatives exist. Years ago, I was grumbling that no one supported wavelet and freq/time domain components simultaneously in the same audio file, and last I checked, the major formats still don't. Vorbis at least supports this, though (again) they haven't implemented it.
Still... I can help but think their project name was just the first audible output from pre-alpha code (Who knows what the input was?)
__________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
The bulk of the responses seem to fall into three categories:
(A) "We have mp3 - why do we need Ogg?"
(B) "Mp3 is too entrenched for any competitor to
ever succeed."
(C) "Ogg is not as good as mp3, or requires
higher bandwidth."
Bah! Don't you people *think*?!?
The mp3 format is not going to get better. Vorbis is being actively developed. Just because it may not be better than mp3 at this moment (And I make no such claims here - check the advogato interview for more info, or better yet download the software and play with it.) does not mean that it will not become so in the forseeable future.
Beta never caught on because (A) it was very expensive and (B) Sony had the licensing locked up tight. If Sony had been *giving away* VCR's the home movie industry might have developed differently.
So what does Vorbis have going for it?
FREE
FREE and powerful
FREE and powerful and open source.
What attracted you to linux in the first place?
This is a major boon to anyone who wants to legally stream audio but can't afford to pay for an mp3 encoder. If all you want to do is listen to music on your computer, then maybe you don't care what format it is. Do consider this: A free encoder will allow a whole lot more people to provide content online. Heck, with this, any band that wanted to and could afford a bit of bandwidth could put up their own songs online w/o suffering through mp3.com or running the legal risk of using an mp3 encoder w/o paying for it.
I don't think mp3 is as entrenched as some of you seem to believe. How many of you have both a Realaudio player and a separate mp3 player on your computer? What would it take to get you to download another? How about if it were just an XMMS plugin?
Does anybody really sweat a free download?
zeke
Five minutes at 128kb/s = 38400kb. An MP3 representation might be around 3200kb for 5 minutes. This is a compression ratio of 1:12. What they're saying is the compression ratio isn't as good as MP3.
I can sometimes hear the MP3 artefacts so I would not mind a larger format.
We've got to crack the nut of organizations who want to retain intimate and complete control over content delivery
Why? Why shouldn't companies have rights to control their content? If you were producting something of value, you probably wouldn't like it if I were to steal/hijack/pirate it.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
The average person doesn't care about his/her rights
Unsupportable statement. Just becuase the average person doesn't care about the lunatic fringle's holy war(s) against the MPAA and RIAA doesn't mean that they don't care about their rights.
And we either have to kiss our rights goodbye or have no content.
What rights are you talking about? The "rights" people are using to pirate music and videos?
Also, I have as much a right to break CSS (and not get sued for it) as they do to implement it, or even more.
Well, aparently the courts disagree with you, and its their opinion that counts, not yours.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Yeah, I think we should give them total control
Good, glad we see eye to eye
They should make you buy one DVD that can only be listened to during the day at home, one for at night at home, and one for in the car.
Companies should have the right to place whatever license they want on their product. No one is putting a gun to your head and focing you to buy the product.
So a company (or a bunch of companies) can spend their time and money developing a spec, such as DVD, but they don't have the right to place licenses on it in your world?
Basically we should let them require you to sell yourself into slavery to them in order to access their wonderful content
Like everything in the world, you have a choice. There is a cost to the content (both in money and rights you may give up). You perform a simple equation in your head... do I value the content enough to give up the required money and combination of rights? If so, you pay, otherwise, you don't use the content. How hard is that to understand?????
It works really well, and has its own built in negative feedback mechanism, as if the cost of the content is too high (in either rights or $$$$), no one will view the content.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Maybe I missed it, but where is the document describing theory behind this technique? I learned about mp3 last year on a graduate course, I know about DCT and wavelets and acoustics so I'd really like to look what his model is like.
Yes it does matter. The difference is that we finally have a truly free and open standard for digitally compressed audio. The difference is that we finally have a choice, should Fraunhofer come tumbling down on us with more of their patent hassles.
It's almost like Linux. At some point a few years ago, we thought the world would end, and everyone would be using Windows. Somewhere, an open-source kernel was maturing and emerging to be a tour de force. Microsoft thought it didn't matter, becaus e they had 90% of the market, and all the other Unices were dying in their own little corner. But Linux provided a choice for us. Ogg will be similar in many aspects. It will continue to improve, unlike mp3, and there will be no commercial entities withholding us with watermarks and encryption.
- BladeEnc: BladeEnc I have found produces the very worst audio, even worse than Xing. I can make out artifacts on every type of music, even at bitrates up to 256kbps. The highs get all slushy, and you can usually hear strange electronic noises when listening through a good pair of headphones. Avoid BladeEnc.
- Xing Encoder: Xing is very common, and yet it is horrible. I can tell if an mp3 was made with Xing right away upon hearing it. Generally Xing has the same sort of problems as BladeEnc, but not quite as pronounced. I must say it is 2 or 3 times faster than the other codecs, but it is definately 4 or 5 times worse. Stay away.
- LAME: When I first tried LAME under Linux, I thought it was just as good as the modern Fraunhofer codec found in products such as MP3 Producer. But, after using it for a while and ABing it against the same music made with the more modern Fraunhofer codecs, I have found that it is not quite perfect. But the quality is acceptable, and if the bitrate is reasonably high (192-256kbps), I have no problems listening to MP3s encoded with LAME. For pop music, it is even listenable at 128 kbps.
- Modern Fraunhofer (MP3 Producer, etc): This is definately the best encoding algorythms. Fraunhofer has perfected their psychoacoustic encoder over the years, taking advantage of their extended knowledge of the codec. 50% of all music sounds find at 128kbps, 95% at 192kbps, at 256kbps, it is impossible for me to hear the difference between the mp3 and cd, even with the most demanding recordings.
I have found that many open-source zealots will try out BladeEnc, being free, and after encoding a few songs make the blanket statement that all MP3s sound like crap. This is simply not true. Please try listening to some properly encoded mp3s before you make rash generalizations.Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
Something else that occurred to me on this point is that those of us who are members of the IEEE and other standards-establishing organizations should be lobbying for all future official standards to be free of patents. That includes things like Firewire, etc. It might have a chilling effect on submissions for standards for awhile, but the current system of "submit it as a standard then ambush everyone with patent demands after the fact" would be defeated.
Right...
The fatalist attitude of so many on Slashdot amazes me sometimes. Here we are, a community numbering in the six figures (maybe even seven by now), and we sit here and go, "Too bad it won't make a difference." Hundreds of thousands of users could make a huge difference, if we just agreed to do something together! Heck, just going and looking at the web sites in most stories on Slashdot is enough to bring mortal servers to their knees!
We don't have to overwhelm MP3 to make Vorbis work - we just have to create a niche market. Especially if clever programmers write converters (tricky without compunding artifacts), Vorbis can stand on its own.
If we're serious about supporting Open Source, then we should support it right down the line - no patent-encumbered formats like MP3 and GIF. If we all live by that, then new standards like Vorbis and PNG will win in the end.
Right...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So when _IS_ a "modern" MPEG 4 audio codec ever going to come out? From what I read, MP3 is basically limited by a whole bunch of legacy cruft...that the technology for much better exists, but there is simply no implementation yet. So somebody write one already!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The issue isn't that the company doesn't have control over their own content, it's that they prevent other companies' content from being available because they have a monopoly on the interface.
Imagine this: some company (rhymes with "Noel") writes new networking software that's initially compatible with TCP/IP, but is so successful on its own that they later remove support for TCP from the product. They kill off all competitors by restrictive liscencing since they have 95% of the market. Since nearly everyone accesses the 'net through them, other companies pay tons of money to advertise on their network. They can also become market leader in any market they want by advertising their product and preventing others from advertising competing products on their network. If done subtley enough, they can also silence opposing opinions (let a few of the slightly-negative things through so people think you're "objective", but filter the really bad stuff out). Open source is no longer viable... in order to write applications for the new network, an organization has to sign a contract that prevents disclosure of source code.
The above scenario is a big stretch (and pretty cynical, especially for me), but I suspect that it's what the "dot com" and media CEOs secretly dream about at night. Fortunately, the government is wary of losing its control and would try to stop something like this at all costs.
--
One thing that everyone seems to be missing, is that Vorbis supports bitrates of 16kbps-128kbps per channel! Since it uses better algorithms than MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3), it has the potential to sound much better. It's not done yet, and the development team is still making changes to it that will affect the quality. I'm going to wait and see how it works, but it sounds like it will be excellent when it gets done.
It's terrific to finally see an open, IP-free audio codec with (seemingly) great sound and compression efficiency.
One of the things most often complained about at Slashdot is the lack of Quicktime players for Linux, and more specifically, lack of a player capable of playing movies compressed with Quicktime 4's Sorenson codec. Many sites, especially those of the movie industry, have adopted Sorenson because it has genuine advantages over industry-standard MPEG video: Sorenson produces significantly better video quality at the bitrates preferred on the Internet today. While Sorenson and Microsoft's proprietary offerings are gaining ground, the use of free video standards like MPEG is becoming more and more scarce.
The only feasible way of reversing this trend is to come up with a superior video codec and distribute it freely. Until now, many people have argued that developing a good media codec involves such high-end mathematics that developing one under traditional Open Source development model is not possible.
It is high time that someone proved them wrong.
Marko Karppinen
...but as higher capacity drives become ever more affordable, and high speed connections more common, higher-bitrate codecs will become more popular. Most people can't tell much of a difference between MP3 audio and a CD on generally poor quality PC soundcards and speakers (it is there however). But as more and more PCs are becoming part of high-end audio/theater systems with DVD drives and nice home speaker systems, if you really want to use them as a music jukebox as I'm sure many here already do, it would be very nice to have a higher quality (higher bitrate) codec. So basically, it doesn't just depend on the sucess of DVD-Audio and SACD (Sony Audio CD) which has already been released, and sounds phenomenal, but also on the constant developments in storage technology and PC performance.
Spyky
'Oh, nothing'll topple MP3 - it's got too much mindshare!' 'I don't see the point - wasn't MPEG open?"
... places where it's really important to minimize bandwidth usage without the inconvenience or licensing fees for proprietary CODECs/APIs.
A good, free CODEC really IS vital for free/open online multimedia. Remember that the uses for compressed/streaming audio go beyond Shoutcast stations or packing a million songs on your harddrive. Vorbis will end up in free versions of online music collaboration software, I'm sure, as well as conferencing, telephony perhaps
Look at something like Rocket Network's online studios. Sounds cool, huh? But who would pay for the technology license to develop and deploy a free (in both senses) Rocket Network server? Nobody, I'm guessing. You can get a 'free' online studio now - as in beer - but what if you wanted to make that your business? Lotsa money, no control of the technology.
For these systems to develop in the free/open software community, we need control of all segments of the technology. Think of this in terms of GIF vs. PNG, with a lower practical barrier since the entire world of online mutlimedia is still emerging and CODECs are inherently pluggable in multimedia apps.
Or maybe my head's up my butt.
The test encoder uses a variable bit rate with a minimum rate of 128 kb/s and and a maximum of 160 kb/s. The author probably did not appreciate that.
The vorbis library supports a wide range of encoding options, includeing constant bit rate. The fully featured command line front end to the library is not finished yet.
I guess no one actually read the FAQ.
The current implementation is for the purpose of getting it all working. Optimization to follow.
Some apply logic and crawl before they attempt to run.
See the FAQ
-Peter
I'm taking time to answer a few questions as it seems a number of vocal folks have started posting without looking at the Vorbis web pages first. Practically every question and musing here is addressed there...
First off, I wasn't ready for this. Vorbis is not at release, although I hope that will be soon. I'm not releasing before it's ready.... and it isn't quite ready. Most of the fun stuff has been going on on a CVS branch; the mainline is only a functional, stable, dull, unimpressive version for starting application work. That way when Vorbis *is* released, all the Sonique, XMMS, Winamp, kmpg and Freeamp folks will have to do is recompile.
Second, the name 'Xiphophorus'; the organization is a democracy and I was outvoted. I personally like to emphasize 'xiph.org'. I rather Like 'Ogg' and 'Vorbis' though. Oh, and it's not Jesus spanking a snake. It's Thor, Mjollnir and Jörmungandr. I have a page about the names/logos; go read it.
Lastly, distributing hacked up encoders right now is fine, but keep in mind, that as soon as the new psychoacoustic engine is merged into the CVS main branch the bitstream format will change. The change is minor, but it will break existsing streams. That will happen this week, so you don't need to contain your enthusiasm too long :-)
Monty
xiph.org
The name of the format is 'Ogg'. Just 'Ogg'. It has less unique characters than 'mp3' and can be pronounced in one syllable. Where I come from, that counts as pretty easy. Try it.
- "Fish"
- "Cat"
- "Ogg"
Vorbis is the name of a CODEC that Ogg uses. Just like 'Sorensen' is one of 'Quicktime's' video codecs. 'Ogg' is much easier than 'Quicktime' too.But wait! There's More!
Monty xiph.org
I think that the current CVS mainline is as good as MP3.
(emphasis his)...Now I don't know enough about audio encryption (or rather, I don't know anything at all), but it sounds to me like the author himself thinks that the format is currently only on even ground with MP3. With the disadvantage that MP3 is everywhere already.
Also, if you're a business (Rock band, whatever) and use MP3 files on your web site, you'd damn well better have a legal MP3 encoder when Frauhauf comes knocking. You wouldn't have to worry about THAT kind of legal exposure either, using this file format.
Now all we need is a high quality highly compressable unencumbered video format...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is as pointless an argmuent as, "why develop linux. Windows already has 90% of the market share, it's reasonably good(it's useable), so why bother with Linux?" Some would say, "it's better!" But that's not the real point. The point is that Linux is FREE and OPEN. This is the true power and purpose behind Vorbis as well.
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"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
scheme to add to the piles and piles of "to be discarded". So it sounds good and compresses nearly as well as MPEG. Wasn't the whole point of MPEG that it too is an open standard? And frankly, looking at the current state of affairs it would seem that MPEG has already won the necessary mindshare to BE the defacto standard. Looks like a steep uphill battle..
There is an encoder available in the CVS checkout from the xiph.org site. However, it is extremely simplistic. I have already added to this encoder the ability to accept command line options via getopt(). My modifications seem reasonably stable and I will be releasing the modified encoder to Freshmeat probably within the day. Really this makes it much easier to encode things (the supplied encoder is stdin -> stdout). I plan on doing the same thing with the decoder so that it can play to the sound card, etc., like mpg123. I will link to my modified source as soon as I get it online.
The xmms plugin: in the cvs directory xmms, just type 'make' (after configuring and making the rest of the package from the main directory). Then copy the resulting lib*.so file to your XMMS Input plugins directory (/usr/lib/xmms/Input/ for global, ~/.xmms/plugins/Input ??? for local.)
http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html
Arun
I believe the bitrate of an mp3 file is the 'final' bitrate, after compressing both channels. This new format seems to explicitly support 128kbps per channel, meaning both formats can deliver exactly the same format. It does make you wonder if this means the new format doesn't exploit inter-channel dependencies the way mp3 does, though, if they mention bitrates per channel...
With 256Kbps MP3 shines, but with a lower rates you may hear the compression artifacts, it doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen. it appears that at 256Kbps artifacts disappear. If you want to have a fairly high and consistent quality, even 192Kbps may not suffice, unless you use something better than MP3. AAC is better but some heavily patented that I don't see any AAC-based freeware coming in a near future. There is some interesting info on www.mp3-tech.org
and MP3 is currently under HEAVY attack from the RIIA, in various forms, the Napster attack being the latest.
Yes, you can always capture the audio output, but that isn't considered the threat that capturing the digital stream is.
And I'll agree that you can capture the digital stream, as well, by hook or by crook. But it's a bit harder, and at the moment isn't mainstream. Heck, at the worst grab the RealAudio ipchains proxy and hack it to put the stream capture code there.
If surreptitious stream capture techniques were to rise to the general consciousness, I'm sure the RIAA (and MPAA, where relevant) would be after them.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
AFAIK, the only "standards" to have taken off are Real Audio, Windows Media Player, and Quicktime, all of which have proprietary codecs. But isn't the real issue that they also are able to enforce end-to-end stream control?
This is what prevents one from capturing a stream and saving it. Use an open codec, and the codec can be replaced/subverted to capture the stream, and then everyone in the world will immediately pirate the precious content.
IMHO, a free codec won't help. We've got to crack the nut of organizations who want to retain intimate and complete control over content delivery.
It's not really a software problem, it's a greed and political problem.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
having read the blurb about this audio format, it states, [paraphrased] that "the file size is slightly larger than mp3 but the quality is there". is the quality _better_ than that of an mp3? if it is the same, then it would seem to me that mp3 still comes out on top, supporting variable bitrates of up to at least 256kbps vs. this format's 128kbps limit, with a smaller file size. i don't know anything about the format as i have no experience with it, but i felt it was worth mentioning. can anyone give some insight as to the advantage of this format? thanx!
-rich henning -linux 2.2.x
and it can capture 100.0% of usual 44.1/16 audio as well as compressed lossy audio.
and I believe the enc/dec programs are free.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."