Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
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...
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
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
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...
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
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
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.
-----
"I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html
Arun
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.