Programmers Will Debut Free MP3 Alternative

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to an article on CNET.com, a group of programmers at iCast have created a free alternative to MP3, named Vorbis. According to the article, they're planning on showing a beta of Vorbis "at next week's MP3.com summit in San Diego," that it will be released without IP restrictions, and that it will provide equal or better quality than MP3. Gotta love free software!"

Comments

Re:But can it get a foothold?

[MicroBerto]

This is a major problem. What I would do for myself is to have an mp3->ogg converter for the current collection, and then use ogg from then on. However, if the public doesn't accept it (maybe they won't like the name Ogg Vorbis!), then it could be an uphill battle.

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto

The skinny yo.

[jon_c]

As someone else mentioned this has OggVorbis has already been "new"
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/ 04/11/118219.shtml

Since then I have taken the time to actually check it out; compile the winamp plug-in, compile the encoder, browse through the mailing list archives

First off the code strikes me as very clean and well written, It looks like the guy knows what he's doing. Second he sounds like he knows what he's doing, he talks to people about the idiosyncrasies of audio compression, DSP etc... so I defiantly give the author props.

As for "how good is it". Well the skinny is that it's a little bigger then mp3, and a little lower quality, also encoding a 5 minute song a PII 500 took around 1/2 an hour. However REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked. This doesn't suck. And it's not even 1.0.

The author expects the low bitrate compression to surpass mp3, it's just a matter of time to get things finished.

Right now it looks like 90% of all the min-projects are done, they just finalized the bit stream format, xmms/winamp plugs only miss streaming support. And the command line project is nearing completion. Next I'm sure they will attempt to optimize it, and tweak the audio quality.

Somewhere in the mailing list I noticed the author was talking about how he kept the specifics of the quantization process open. Meaning it could be changed very easily, which in turn means that the compression could be very precisely tuned, that should be much more useful then simply picking bitrate/hz/stereo.

OggVorbis has the smell and feel of a next generation audio codec, It's open source, free and not owned by patents. I can't wait..

-Jon

Re:The skinny yo.

[peter]

The important thing to realize here is that anything they downloaded would not be compressed with their profile. All they could use the format for would be to compress stuff they had gotten through non-lossy methods (e.g. from a CD). If stuff they do hear was lost when it was compressed before they downloaded, it won't come back if they decompress and then recompress according to their "profile".

If computers improve their number crunching a lot faster than the internet grows in bandwidth, then maybe we will see sites where audiophiles can have music compressed for them personally on demand, according to their profile. Otherwise, if internet bandwidth grows a lot, we might start seeing losslessly compressed (e.g. gzip), or totally uncompressed, audio data (e.g. PCM) being sent.
#define X(x,y) x##y

Re:The skinny yo.

[peter]

Wow, that is a really interesting perspective! I bet you'd love to have a variable-bitrate format where you could turn up the bandwidth around the critical important moments, like that guitar note.

I got the impression that you are used to setting the controls a certain way, and leaving them for the whole track. With computers, it should be fairly easy to have an eq profile for a song, so the settings could change whenever you want. It could all be set, similar to a midi sequencer I think, so you wouldn't need to manually move sliders while encoding or any monkey business like that.

All this could make things very interesting: people who rip CDs would produce crap compared to official mastered compressed music distributed with a groups permission... This is good.
#define X(x,y) x##y

Re:The skinny yo.

[nutty]

However REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked. This doesn't suck. And it's not even 1.0.

Hmm, yes. But Windows has gotten all the way to 98 and it _still_ sucks. ;-p

As for ogg's success, i can't emphasize this enough:
Look what happened to mp4...nothing!

Whatever you introduce, unless it's bigger better faster smaller cheaper easier AND cooler, then it won't do. It takes a lot to change standards...this is one case where you can serioulsy learn from history...
exibit a) png

/nutt

Re:The skinny yo.

[sjames]

The problem is that objective evidence is going to be hard to come by. Already we see a lot of people posting here on Slashdot saying "Hey! The quality sounds fine to me!" when subjective statements like this are just absurd. Unless you are doing blind A/B listening tests with decent equipment across a wide variety of music (Classical, Rock, Jazz, Electronic, Opera, etc), along with electronic measurement tests, you simply won't be able to tell which is better (unless one is just far inferior to the other).

That is only true to a degree. MP3 routinely fails blind A/B listening tests vs. CDaudio, and yet it's everywhere.

Mostly, audio compression is being used in the context of simple listening for enjoyment by non-audiophiles. In that context, 'sounds fine to me!' is all that's required.

Audiophiles will never find any sort of lossy compression acceptable anyway unless it is tuned exactly to what THEY PERSONALLY don't hear anyway. Such a 'compression profile' would not be likely to transfer well from one audiophile to another unless it lost very little (and compressed very little).

Re:The skinny yo.

[illumin8]

You're correct. The reason why MP3 is so much better than Microsoft Windows Media codec and most of the other codecs out there is that it is the only one that has had subjective listening studies done on it. Fraunhofer isn't charging money for nothing. They've actually brought in hundreds of volunteers off the streets to do the subjective listening tests and actually prove that the codec works properly.

Re:The skinny yo.

[Wah]

Audiophiles will never find any sort of lossy compression acceptable anyway unless it is tuned exactly to what THEY PERSONALLY don't hear anyway.

Given an OS audio spec, this is a possibility. How far can you push the compression algorithm and still use the same codec? (if I've got my vocab correct)

I guess these would be considered "tuning forks", eh? :)
--

Re:The skinny yo.

[Signa1 l1]

'scuse me, but I have now patented the term 'karma whore' (#3990984-0090903a) and, being the rightful and sole owner of the term, hereby order you to cease and desist all use of the term 'karma whore' until such time as you have obtained a valid per-use license. Terms are available at my website:

http://www.karmawhore.com/singal11/isa/faggot/

Stay tuned for news and information about my other patent-pending slashdot term 'bitchslap'!

Re:The skinny yo.

[Chris Johnson]

"Somewhere in the mailing list I noticed the author was talking about how he kept the specifics of the quantization process open. Meaning it could be changed very easily, which in turn means that the compression could be very precisely tuned, that should be much more useful then simply picking bitrate/hz/stereo.

Now this is what interests me. Usually when I am participating in discussions on this kind of stuff, it is as a musician, but underlying that is more than ten years of extremely hardcore audio geekness- I would feel pretty confident in saying that w.r.t sound engineering hardware I am as good as Monty is with this compression programming. (I realise that sounds like a big claim- it is. I make no such claim about programming or software :) )

From that viewpoint, I have to say that the idea of being able to 'very precisely tune' the compression is wildly exciting, just wildly exciting. Does everybody fully understand where that leads? It gets away from the computer geek core skills, but you know there are geeks whose core skills it leads _towards_. What you are talking about is effectively a form of MASTERING. Let me take a minute and give a little background on what this could be like...

First, mastering. Once music gets mixed down to a final two tracks (or more, if you're doing funky surround stuff, but mostly it's two tracks), what you have isn't the final media. You have a 30 ips openreel two-track tape, maybe, or you might have a 48k/20bit digital master if you're smart, or possibly just a 16 bit 44.1K DAT or something if you're not. If you have a CD you've basically done the mastering yourself- and that's not necessarily good, because you might suck at it and the idea is to do it really really well, possibly at huge expense and possibly not.

Mastering engineers always desperately want some form of much-higher-quality media to work from- if you are making a CD they would prefer 20 or 24 bit output. If you're making a record, you could use that or the traditional two-track open reel tape which generally exceeds vinyl playback quality levels by a wide margin. In some cases a mastering engineer making a CD might want analog open-reel tape instead of _any_ form of digital: the idea is that he knows waaaay better than most musicians how to do the transfer, and may have lots of sophisticated equipment to extract every bit of detail and color off that tape and make it jump out of the CD sounding totally lifelike. Mastering engineers are the ones who will get mad at you if you go around normalising all the levels on your digital master for 'em- the mastering engineer tears his hair in angst at such a situation because he or she knows exactly what damage the algorithm is doing to the sound, and that it can't be undone once done. In analog the mastering engineer handled compressing the sound and imperceptibly summing the bass frequencies of each channel to utilize all of the LP's ability to put across music. In all-digital, for instance the example of mastering a 48K 24 bit mix to CD, the mastering engineer will be keeping untouched versions of the files and experimenting with various EQ algorithms, different multiband compressions, all to try to FORCE the resulting lower quality version to sound BETTER than the supplied master tape. That's really the name of the game- making it sound as good as, isn't enough. And that's where you get into really expensive equipment and total voodoo engineering and guys paid on the scale of computer professionals whose names are recognized by lots of studio engineers and almost nowhere else. Ever heard of Bob Ludwig, Wilma Cozart, Bob Clearmountain?

Now. To bring this neatly into context with Ogg Vorbis, imagine getting access to a Vorbis 'compression settings box' that took up the whole screen crammed with little settings and adjustments. Stuff like 'masking threshold curve for left channel's frequency', or whatever goodies are there- the stuff that apparently none of the MP3 encoder writers think is the user's business. Almost everyone in the world would take a look at that and run screaming. Almost all computer geeks would look really confused and wonder, what is the point, isn't there just one right setting? Almost all serious mastering engineers would take one look and cry YEAAAAHHHH GIMME MORE O' THAAAAT! ...and they'd be off and running, and you wouldn't believe what they'd be capable of. _Every_ _single_ _song_ would be tailored to the optimum compression details for THAT SONG, not some mythical standard...

From what I've seen, encoder programmers seem to think the idea is to match test tones as accurately as possible- and that is not going to be good enough, going into the future with digital compressed media. It took reading that comment about 'very precisely tuned' to realize just what's happening with all this. Look, if you told a big recording studio or an 'audiophile' act like Pink Floyd that they had to have their music mastered in just one particular way, but that's OK it's 'optimal', they would KILL AND EAT you *g* the fact is, recording projects vary so widely in both recording quality and SOUND that it's totally, totally impossible to 'master' to mp3 or anything else using a preset algorithm no matter how clever. Compare the sound of Rush (heavy on pushing the edges of the frequency range, dynamic, over-clear) with the sound of Tangerine Dream (really deep ambiences, liquid sound _necessary) with the sound of AC/DC (punchy as hell but it's gotta hit you in the stomach, no shrieky grating edges allowed and no show-offy super low bass) and you can see the problem. All compression must trade off _some_ qualities. But how can one arrangement cover all those bases? That's like mastering all their tapes through the same EQ and compression settings- disastrous.

I always think of a particular guitar note when I think of mastering- it's on Alanis Morrisette's "Jagged Little Pill" CD, I think on the song 'You Learn'. There's a brief instantaneous moment where an acoustic-sounding guitar, quite in the background, 'snaps' a tiny highpitched note on the high E and instantly mutes it again. Sounds like a set of light electric strings on an acoustic. This one short note cuts through the whole mix with stunning airiness, like a tiny instantaneous holograph of the note popping out. It's magical, impossibly delicate and clean- and that's what mastering can do for a song. That Alanis album is brilliantly mastered by Chris Bellman at Grundman Mastering- without him, that moment would NOT BE there. It might not have even felt that way on the original tape! The guy reached out and found the essence of the sound and caused the CD to cast exactly the right sonic spell to reveal it.

MP3ing that track almost certainly obliterates that moment and makes the little 'plink!' into a tinny clonk, ruining it. But if it was possible for the mastering engineer to also master the MP3- I guarantee that things would be very different. If I was doing it I would key off that sound and weight the 'masking' or whatever so that you had the deep pulse and a big emphasis on the airiness- the highs would be stealing lots of data for themselves. The thing is, simply going 'Oh OK' and coding in a radio button for 'more air' is unacceptable- if I had to master that track to MP3, I'd need to keep going back and adjusting the curves of the masking and all that until that instant and other important moments jumped out of the resulting mp3 JUST EXACTLY like it did on the original recording- or *gasp* BETTER! It's not at all a question of finding 'the masking thresholds of the human ear' and coding in those. Mastering engineers need total control over all those details at an amazingly low level, even though they are NOT programmers and wouldn't know memory management or b-trees if one bit them on the ass. Mastering engineers know better than the programmers how to set the 'equaliser dials' for the compression- because that is their JOB, to know that.

So _on_ behalf of all the other mastering engineers who don't read slashdot and aren't rubbing elbows with programmers as great and brilliant as Monty, let me just say- "Give us the controls!" We can't do your job, don't try to do ours! Every project has vastly different needs, and sometimes the needs are quite unusual! I could easily see, for instance, a song in which you masked 3-5K (normally the presence area!) very heavily and threw lots of data at the extreme highs which might normally be masked! I can even name a song that calls for that off the top of my head- "Hot Sun", from Adrian Belew's album "The Lone Rhino". Lots of Bowie's "Low" album would demand a _very_ different compression than most material because it is meant to sound claustrophobic, sometimes quite artificial and grating, and sometimes totally Enoed out lack of highs. I could keep on giving examples for ages- the point is, pleeeeease give us arbitrary control over these things and stop trying to perfect them for consumers all the time. There needs to be a way for mastering engineers to practice their craft on compressed media. If you make that possible, then we will start getting music from talented mastering engineers that really pushes the technology to the limit- and the difference will not be subtle, it will be a massive blast of very individualised sounds, letting different bands _really_ get their own distinct sound, and everybody will be able to appreciate that while still being able to use the 'consumer' version of the encoder (with all the scary parameters covered up and set to nice 'optimal' values) to rip metallica CDs *g*

If you can't force Ogg Vorbis to be the mainstream format with the help of mastering engineers, maybe could you make an MP3 encoder with a similar level of adjustment over its parameters? This needs to happen.

If I understand things correctly, MP3 encoding can be free (or partly?) but it's been hard for the free encoder coders to catch up with the totally patented and proprietary Freihofer stuff. And so you have Xing which gets tinny and artifact-y, and Blade which is said to be dull and lacking in extended highs, and LAME which some people claim is 'perfect' because it comes between the other two in personality.

When will people understand that these are all settings on the EQ dial? Mastering engineers do not need a single black box with the 'ideal' settings locked in painstakingly. Mastering engineers need KNOBS.

Give us KNOBS! :)

Re:The skinny yo.

[Reality Master 101]

As for "how good is it". Well the skinny is that it's a little bigger then mp3, and a little lower quality, also encoding a 5 minute song a PII 500 took around 1/2 an hour. However REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked. This doesn't suck. And it's not even 1.0.

I don't think this is comparable to Gnome, etc. When you're doing a UI, it's really a pretty mechanical process. You pretty much know where to go, it's just a matter of spending enough time.

Music compression is different. It's very much more art than science. I recall an article on Slashdot a few weeks ago that described the process the guy who developed MP3 went through to perfect it. There was an enormous amount of tuning and tweaking that went into it before it reached the stage it was at now. It simply is not the case that any 2-bit hacker can whip up an audio compression algorithm given enough time.

Now, it sounds like the people working on this new CODEC may be smart people who know what they're doing. However, it is not a given that this will ever reach the quality of MP3. On the other hand, since it's open source, it may fall into the hands of people who can do something with it, so there is hope.

The problem is that objective evidence is going to be hard to come by. Already we see a lot of people posting here on Slashdot saying "Hey! The quality sounds fine to me!" when subjective statements like this are just absurd. Unless you are doing blind A/B listening tests with decent equipment across a wide variety of music (Classical, Rock, Jazz, Electronic, Opera, etc), along with electronic measurement tests, you simply won't be able to tell which is better (unless one is just far inferior to the other).

I wish them success, but I also think people need to keep in mind the difficulty of the task.

--

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[Gogl]

Sheesh, I don't get why so many people whine and complain about bitrates and CD quality and digital sound and all sorts of mumbo jumbo when, in general, musically, these people lack the ear for it to make a difference!

Think about it - the large majority of MP3s traded are either a) popular crap (and in my opinion, no matter how many bits you got going Backstreet Boys is going to suck), or b) weird old stuff (which is probably stolen from tape, record, or TV as it is, making the quality kind of doubtable).

Personally, I listen to jazz/swing, classical, and other weird stuff. But, with the occasional exception of napster, you don't find those MP3s on the net. Search for Benny Goodman and you'll be more likely to find Britney Spears. It's pretty bad. So, given the music (if it can be called that) being traded, and the people trading it, I think that relative quality of a couple of this and that isn't important at all.

That being said, this new format does look pretty cool. But people have to stop being so anal retentive about little numbers and bitrates when they aren't even going to be able to tell the difference themselves....

(Disclaimer - I'm not trying to say people are stupid. A lot of them are, but not everybody. I'm not insulting the average /.er - I'm insulting the average pimple-faced, lazy AOL user who uses the letter 'z' more then the letter 'e'. And they think they're cool because they spout technical jargon about bitrates and stuff when they're trading 'N sync or some other new crap and they don't know a frickin thing about music, them or the groups they listen to. On that note, I've been thinking of writing a computer program that pumps out "Boy band" music. It's actually really simple - pick an easy key (concert B flat anyone?), set it in with a I-IV-V chord progression, make it be a set baseline, a drummer that just subdivides and OCCASIONALLY throw in some 2 against 3, then make up a boring and repetitive melody that fits to the chords, then swap the melody between whiny crappy guitars and vocalists. As for the lyrics, just take all the current boy group songs, stick em together and put it through Bable. The trickiest part would be getting the lyrics and the melody to match, syllable and pronunciation wise. But all in all, not that hard - and the fact that a computer program COULD be written to pump out the crap that's making millions in todays society is what proves to me that it really isn't music. So anyway, if you ARE a fan of Backstreet boys or something, I hope I've thoroughly offended you. Read whatever I happen to post next, I'm sure we'll be good friends :).

Re:Slashdot is repeating itself

[Eil]

Look at the editor's post there, tough guy. This story pointed out that the software was going to be officially demoed at the MP3.com summit, whatever that is. This is important, because they're basically voluntarily bringing themselves to public attention whereas before they were quietly working in the background to reveal something worthwhile in the near future. Troll elsewhere.

The Tori Test

[Eil]

I dunno, I'm not the biggest audiophile in the world, but I can tell the difference with MP3. The "pure" notes sound less pure and some noises such as certain electric guitar chords get distorted.

In cases like this where someone says "oh, you can't even hear any difference," I like to bring up the Tori Test. Put on a really good pair of headphones. Play a Tori Amos song. Almost any will do. Now rip that and encode it in MP3 in the highest bitrate and frequency possible and play it back. The notes she sings are so pure that MP3 mangles them badly and the result is not pleasureable to listen to.

And I think I'd have to agree with you on the Backend Friends bit. The only artists I listen to anymore are Tori, Weird Al, and Underworld. Quite a variety of genres there but I own every CD of them that I can get my hands on. I wouldn't have found Underworld if it weren't for MP3, so that THAT RIAA!

Re:The Tori Test

[Eil]

hrm. correction.
"Take THAT RIAA!"

I know what extension they should use

[Dwonis]

It's called "Vorbis", so they should use the extension ".vbs"
--------
"I already have all the latest software."

Re:Linux crash? Nope .. [OT]

[FooRat]

Hmm .. well I think its a bit silly then, *of course* you can crash Linux when you're root, I'm sure theres hundreds of ways (just dump anything random onto /dev/mem for example). Why is that a big enough deal to be boldly pronounced in someone's sig? Now if someone had found a way to crash Linux as a user (other than a fork bomb) then that might be worth proclaiming ...

Re:Algorithm != Implementation

[Zebbers]

And since we're talking about music compression software, shouldn't it be "algorythm" anyhow?
No. algorhythm maybe.

Re:Filesize is King

[FigWig]

Here's a bit of technical info on the whole psychoacoustical audio compression thing:
click here

I didn't see any attributions so I'm not sure where the concepts originated from.

Re:File extension

[Zagadka]

The naming sounds like a tribute to Terry Pratchett. Vorbis and Nanny Ogg are characters in his Discworld series.

Actually, if you look at the Xiphophorus names and logos page, you'll see that they explicitly state:

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_.

"Ogg" actually comes from Netrek. I think that's pretty cool, since I used to play Netrek. They've actually got a couple of things with "Ogg" in the name. There's Ogg Vorbis, and Ogg Squish. I think they should make something called "Ogg Base". (okay, lame Netrek joke)

Incidently, that page also has an explanation of their logo. That's Thor apparently, not Jesus or a picture of RMS from back when he was Mr. Universe...

All well and good, but....

[ZoneGray]

This is a very good thing, but note that it is not "free of IP restrictions." GPL and LGPL both make restrictions on redistribution, and rely on copyright laws to enforce those resatrictions. To be sure, the restrictions are intended to advance a generally admirable agenda, but the only way to truly release something without any IP restrictions is to release it into the public domain.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but lately I've been thinking that it's preferable to renounce one's claims to intellectual property altogether. The restrictions in the GPL and LGPL do not seem to advance the use of free software, they simply thwart commercial use of it. But commercial use is part of freedom, too.

Re:All well and good, but....

[xiphmont]

This is a very good thing, but note that it is not "free of IP restrictions." GPL and LGPL both make restrictions on redistribution, and rely on copyright laws to enforce those resatrictions. To be sure, the restrictions are intended to advance a generally admirable agenda, but the only way to truly release something without any IP restrictions is to release it into the public domain.

You need to distinguish between the spec and the software we wrote that implements the spec. The spec is free of IP restrictions. Go use it. For anything. Make your own software and never look back.

Our software implementation is LGPL (for the libs) and GPL (for the utils). That's just *our* Ogg software.

Monty

Re:All well and good, but....

[ZoneGray]

Well that is indeed very cool.

Of course, this won't gain true acceptance until..

[ivarneli]

...Napster starts searching for .ogg files too.

Re:Doomed...

[C.Lee]

>well have the other formats competed with MP3, like windows media and
>the vqf thing or whatever. Heck, I can't even remember the names of
>the other formats, that is how dominant the MP3 format has become.
>This new format will just be another Beta vs. VHS thing, I'm sure of
>it.
>The only thing that will blow the MP3 away is something which has
>vastly better compression and comparable sound quality. Anything else
>is doomed to obsolesence.

I take it you weren't around for the ARC vs PKZIP wars eh? Here's a clue. The ARC/PKZIP war had more to do with the BBS politics of the time than anything else. The pro-ARC crowd basically drove people into the PKZIP camp. The same thing is going to happen with the mp3 format. Count on it.

RMS logo

[xiphmont]

Incidently, that page also has an explanation of their logo. That's Thor apparently, not Jesus or a picture of RMS from back when he was Mr. Universe...

I love it! People have said before that the logo 'looked like Jesus spanking a snake with a sparkler" (*so* much detail gets lost in the tiny logo), but no one had ever thought it was RMS. I can live with that particular misidentification :-)

Monty

Re:Jack the Ogg pimp

[jon_c]

...As Jon trys to figure out why his foot tasts like leathor.....

I should have read the article

I apologize...

(note: this is the author people, moderate his ass up!!!)

Re:Just some points for comparison

[DeepThaw]

Whoops, sorry, was looking at the MPEG-1 compression. Don't know how that ended up there in my notes.

What about hardware players?

[makohund]

That would be my concern... will hardware players (Rio, Nomad, DVD&CD players that read MP3 off of CDR, etc) easily be upgraded to be able to read this?

I'd hate to have to encode my collection twice... to accomodate older hardware players. Or wait until some support this to buy any.

I was just about ready to get an in-dash CD player that reads MP3 off CDR/RW as well as audio CDs. Now what?

----- For the curious, I've seen two players like that. One by Kenwood (expensive), one by Aiwa (a bit better, pricewise).

Re:AGH!

[Signa1 l1]

-1 troll time to email malda to get some moderator bitchslapped, eh?

Re:Yes!(Here goes my Karma, again)

[Delphinios]

Heh.
Nope. not enough.

1. a) its spelled "LINUX"
2. b) its "i wonder how that would run on a Beowulf cluster
3. its Natilie Portman, naked and petrified
4. its GPL'ed Open Sourced.

Seriously though, If you are going to criticise "sheep" mentality or gripe about how the use of certian buzzwords are used, do it right, don't use a combination of slashdot troll posts and 2600 (no offense you 2600'ers out there ;-} ) propaganda to make yourself sound like a total moron.

Haiku

[575]

Best compression rate:
Poet reduces music
To simple haiku

Re:Haiku

[mortonda]

Can someone make a slashbox that picks up this guy's posts? :P

Re:What is wrong with the Lame MP3 Encoder

[jmv]

Yes, LAME is free from all copyright. However, the real problem with Frauenhoffer is patents. They claim that EVERY mp3 encoder infringes their patent. I don't know for sure the state of the patent issue with LAME, but for sure Frauenhoffer will try to cause them as much trouble as possible.

Re:Lossy compression always equals loss in quality

[Eil]

Offtopic, but at the radio station I used to work at, a computer held all the commercials and announcements for insertion between the piped-in programs from a satellite dish. And if I recall correctly, everything was stored at 24-bit, 96kHz. Uncompressed. I couldn't find any option to change the default, but then they didn't allow me to play with the software because the computer ran the whole studio and if that got fucked up, dead air was broadcast until the engineer could drive 6 hours downstate to fix the problem. :P

Re:This will fail

[gyc]

that was because vqf was a proprietary format, plus the fact that their encoder took forever to encode anything. I'm personally glad to see other open digital music formats out there so people don't always get the impression that MP3 == digital music.

Re:The bad thing about this...

[edhall]

I agree; any marketing droid will tell you "Ogg" is a horrible name. Of course, they'd have told you the exact same thing about "Yahoo!"...

-Ed

Re:You are SO wrong!

[Ricdude]

Screw the piracy. The RIAA is worried about an independent distribution network becoming accessible to the "common man". My lord, what would the world of music distribution be like if just anyone could drop a few easily downloadable and playable files on a publicly accessible file server, and allow anyone to listen to them. No more insane distribution channels, "independent" radio promotion to launder the kickback money. They realize that their foundation is based on being able to control the distribution network. Pretty shaky foundation these days, eh?

File extension

[rana]

Why use .ogg as the file extension. Why not an extension based on "Vorbis": .VBS

Oh wait, that one's already taken, it means "Virus Building Script".

Re:File extension

[MikeTheYak]

The naming sounds like a tribute to Terry Pratchett. Vorbis and Nanny Ogg are characters in his Discworld series.

- Mike

sorry about the bone headed question but...

[mpost4]

How is the file size compaired to the file size of MP3?

Re:sorry about the bone headed question but...

[brank]

From the Vorbis page, it is roughly on par at 128-160 kbps range, but with the encoder not really finished and the bugs still being shaken out for 1.0, it's really to early to tell.

Just download this file and compare the same file encoded with Vorbis to an MP3 and find out for yourself if you want numbers. Remember to test with a varity of files; every codec has strengths and weaknesses, though these should be basically similar.

Re:sorry about the bone headed question but...

[Spirilis]

Welp, I just downloaded the CVS code and tried it:
-rw-r--r-- 1 spirilis users 5905638 Jun 16 20:27 KMFDM_-_Leid_und_Elend.mp3
-rw-r--r-- 1 spirilis users 6371928 Jun 16 20:52 leidundelend.ogg

The bitrate is variable, and according to XMMS, flutters around 128-140 Kbit/sec for that particular song. The playback (on a P233MMX) takes 99% of my CPU time, but at least does realtime. The code's horribly unoptimized I imagine, and after Xiphophorus handle other issues like audio quality and stuff, I bet they'll optimize it out the ass so it'll be more practical. Converting it from MP3 to Ogg did create a slight reduction of quality, but I kinda expected that.

Re:What's the point?

[Mattsson]

A non commercial open standard can't "fail" since there is no minimum amount of users needed to be profitable.
No profit is needed and thus even one user is a success. :-)

And even if half the people who now compress their audio in mp3 format start using vorbis, you probably wont know the difference since the most popular mp3players are capable, or soon will be, of playing vorbis files.

Just my 2c.

Doomed...

[NatePWIII]

Ok, I hate to compare this to domain names but I will. This compression standard will be similar to a .cc domain. I mean nobody wants anything other than a .com simply because it is the standard now, it had a foothold. The same holds true for the MP3 standard. It has gained serious nameshare as well as tonnes of exposure. I mean how well have the other formats competed with MP3, like windows media and the vqf thing or whatever. Heck, I can't even remember the names of the other formats, that is how dominant the MP3 format has become. This new format will just be another Beta vs. VHS thing, I'm sure of it.

The only thing that will blow the MP3 away is something which has vastly better compression and comparable sound quality. Anything else is doomed to obsolesence.


Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com

Re:Doomed...

[Mr. Pinchy]

I'm not sure I agree with you, about OggVorbis' chances, or that Network Solutions is going to be the VHS of registrars, effectively squeezing all others out. One reason for both: PRICE.

If you have a company, and you are faced with paying some percentage of income (don't know the specifics) or other large amount of money to FHG to use MP3, or use a freely available one that provides similar quality/filesize, saving your company (a made up) $10,000 a year, it's a no brainer. All that needs to happen is for the major media players (Winamp, etc.) to include support. Considering it costs them $0 to add it, that doesn't seem far fetched.

Similarly, what advantage does Network Solutions provide that any of the thousands of competetive registrars? That they own your domain name and can revoke it for any reason? (See here). Sure they've got a head start, but that hardly makes them "VHS" to the other registrars' "Beta." Are you telling me that unless I register my domain with NS, it won't work for the majority of users? Not at all. You seem to misunderstand how the name registration system works. It doesn't much matter which one you use, if you pay more for less at Network Solutions, that's your perogative too.

...I know its a cheap shot but I couldn't resist. And I did it to make a point.

Better luck next time, cheap shooter! I hope I get to compete against you in the marketplace. Pay your money to FHG, I'll use mine for advertising. We'll see who wins. Never forget, a competitive marketplace is brutal, and it is sometimes only thousands of dollars that separate success from ruin...

Re:Doomed...

[crisco]

Either I didn't make my point clear enough, or you didn't get it or you didn't read my post in the context of the one I replied to.

But since it isn't clear, I'll make it so. See, I disagree with NatePWII, who I was replying to, about the viability of another audio compression format. And since Nate's sig mentioned domains at $15 a year, I assumed he was one of the OpenSRS registrars. So I decided that the best way to make my point was to parrot his post, replacing the subject at hand (OggVorbis chances of making it against mp3) with the whole domain registration issue. As a matter of fact, I think I do know how the domain registration system works, having registered domains under both NSI and various OpenSRS registrars. In fact, I've followed the whole evolution of alternate registrars and seem to recall serious comments similar to my parody. And look how they have been wrong. As the existence of Nate's business and the reality of $15/year domains shows, significant competition to a monopoly can arise.

Sure, there are technical details to be worked out, just as there were with opening the domain database to multiple registrars. And there is the issue of momentum in the business world. NSI will continue doing business becuase they are perceived as being trusted and because so many domains are already registered there. Mp3 will continue to be a popular format because of the momentum built up of the applications and hardware that support it. But an open, well engineered format like OggVorbis will be successful in its own right.

Oh, and the cheap shot was in taking Nate's words and twisting them around.

Re:Doomed...

[kz45]

I think the only way that it could compete with the Mp3 standard, is if its compression rate was at least double, such as 24:1.

Re:Doomed...

[Tardigrade]

Check out this you urban myth spreader :). Equivalently priced Betamax products were comparable to their VHS counterparts.

Visit this place for a look at Video 2000 and the other formats which lost out to VHS.

Re:Doomed...

[crisco]

Ok, I hate to compare this to domain registrars but I will. This compression standard will be similar to the Open SRS registrars or the alternative registrars that ICANN has aproved. I mean nobody wants to use anyone else besides Network Solutions simply because they are the standard now, they have a foothold in the market. The same holds true for the MP3 standard. It has gained serious nameshare as well as tonnes of exposure. I mean how well have the other registrars competed with NSI, like register.com and the dotster thing or whatever. Heck, I can't even remember the names of the other registrars, that is how dominant NSI has become. These new registrars will just be another Beta vs. VHS thing, I'm sure of it.

The only thing that will blow NSI away is something which has vastly price and comparable service. Anything else is doomed to obsolesence.

...I know its a cheap shot but I couldn't resist. And I did it to make a point.

Re:Doomed...

[gwalla]

This new format will just be another Beta vs. VHS thing, I'm sure of it.
The only thing that will blow the MP3 away is something which has vastly better compression and comparable sound quality. Anything else is doomed to obsolesence.

Even that's not a guarantee. Remember, Beta was actually a superior format to VHS. It was just cheaper.

Fortunately, Vorbis is already cheaper: no royalties required for implementation, and a free-as-in-beer-AND-speech reference implementation.

---
Zardoz has spoken!

Re:There were those who said this couldn't be done

[wanderingstar]

They weren't entirely wrong, they were just weren't thinking long-term enough. According to the FAQ, the Ogg project is currently in its 7th year; it's reasonable to assume that (7 years of audio-geeks developing a codec as their primary hobby == months of full-time Ph.D. research).

won't make a dent in current mp3 market

[ArchieBunker]

This won't make a dent in the billions of mp3s floating around out there. Now to address the issues:

1. Plenty of open source encoders/decoders/rippers
2. No royalties on above mp3 software
3. MP4 is in the works, VQF is already superior to mp3 but I don't see it used anywhere
4. See number 1
5. What difference does that make when EVERY cd made has two channels? Unless you want to rip the audio tracks from DVD's

Re:won't make a dent in current mp3 market

[coldguy]

Vendors LOVE royalty-free open standards.

Ahem. While software houses and the like may love the royalty-free open standards, because it's basically a free thing to add to their product, the rest of the people who hate MP3 will hate Ogg Vorbis just as much.

Fraunhoffer will hate the format because it competes with their MP3 stuff. The RIAA will hate it for the same reasons they hate MP3. (Do realize that with the RIAA comes all the major music houses, Sony, BMG, etc.) If it's better sound quality, maybe they'll even hate it more. Hey, if they go on from audio to video, the MPAA will hate them, too! We won't see even a vauge glimmer of support from these guys for a format that doesn't include psychotically draconian measures for copy protection. Of course, even Joe Q. Random is annoyed by stuff like that, so it'll probably take several years before they can find something they can accept and everyone else can accept. (Think they can push something like that through? Look at the late and decidedly unlamented DIVX... That's the kind of scheme they all really want..)

The upside is that even if all these big money people despise the format, they really can't do anything about it (as far as the format itself goes), since it's not encumbered by patent or reverse engineering issues.

Re:won't make a dent in current mp3 market

[Billy Donahue]

> 2. Royalties are still needed if you
> want to stream, read the Vorbis FAQ.

I did and it's not there...
Streamed Ogg is totally free...

Re:won't make a dent in current mp3 market

[mikpos]

Well the OP was talking about why *he* would want to use it; he wasn't necessarily saying that it would take over the world.

BTW why do you assume that the only thing MP3s are useful for is ripping CDs? Sure, that probably makes up the majority of its use, but there are a lot of people who use it for other things. You only have to go as far as mp3.com to see that.

Re:won't make a dent in current mp3 market

[MadAhab]

And they really can't stop it.. all they can do is pressure Real, Nullsoft, Microsoft et al not to release codec plugins for this.. which they could do, but if enough people start using it anyway, then the game is pretty much over and the new dawn will rise... I for one will happily stream in this format exclusively if it can be done... and it's openness makes it a simple programming job to add support for things that are actually desparately needed for commercialization of streaming audio on the web - namely, support for advertisements.

Real has not stepped up to this plate for years (they're just barely getting to seamless pre-stream ads), Microsoft assumes that giving away the streaming server for free means they don't need to do this, and meanwhile it's the only practical way to support a large-scale streaming service (for profit or just to break even).

Let the streams begin...

Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

Re:Still Interesting even if it's not news

[Bruce Perens]

User acceptance of audio formats is driven by one thing: publisher use of audio formats. Given that a plug-in is available on the net and easy to install, the user will download it the first time he has to play a file in the new format.

In this case, a lot of publishers don't want to pay the Frauenhoffer Institute royalties, and this new format is a way to get out of that. Nor do software developers want to pay license fees.

If we want to push it, the best way is to start writing applications for it, and to start producing audio programs in it ourselves. The Free Software community is an effective engine for driving early acceptance.

Thanks

Bruce

What is the file extension?

[kindbud]

Is it .VBS?

Re:What is the file extension?

[xiphmont]

Go to the website... We *do* have a FAQ.

The extention is .ogg

Monty

Re:My issue: Rio

[F0rlorn]

Yeah. And cassette tapes also had control of the market a bit ago.

Re:the trouble with png

[Belltower]

Couldn't Slashdot provide .PNGs instead of .GIFs based on a user preference? That's a suggestion for Rob & co. anyway...

Beta Test

[Tipitaka]

Does that mean we will have Geeks in Space in Vorbis soon?

Sorensen+QT

[Pope]

Don't forget that with QuickTime 4, you set a preference for what speed your net connection is: within one stub file, you can reference many different quality/size movies that link from that stub file. If the stub movie is set up to do so, it will link you to the size/quality movie that most matches your plug in settings auto-magically. That's pretty slick.

Pope

Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

It's already done, sort of

[badgerz]

I live in pittsburgh, and on the local news today, they had a story about this very project on location at the cmu robotics lab. they showed the prototype, and sure enough, on the large solar panel, there was a big black round radio shack logo, i dont see how this is efficient solar panel space management, but regardless, it was there.

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[divec]

320 Tbit/s? Given today's technology, no.

Doesn't have to be compressed real-time. Copy a tiny snippet of uncompressed PCM repeatedly.

Relevance of sound compression as bandwidth grows

[shandrew]

Will mp3 or other sound compression methods be relevant at all three or five years from now? You can get about 2:1 lossless compression on typical CD-quality music, vs about 12:1 with mp3. Six times the file size takes up six times the bandwidth.

In three to five years, that sort of bandwidth should be commonplace, correct?

Hmm...

[Kysh]

But will it have as good compression? :>

-Kysh

Re:Hmm...

[p4r4d0x]

The mp3 compression method is so ancient that it's extremely easy to beat it in terms of compression while still retaining quality...


__

Re:Yes!

[joepeg]

This sounds like it has a lot of potential.

According to the previous slashdot article on this, the size of an ogg is "slightly" larger than an mp3. I would hope this is due to better quality yeilding larger files having to retain more detail.

I have not worked with compression very extensively (in the least hehe) so if, for example, mp3 opened its compression algorithm, how could a programming community such as ours better it? I say mp3 because we are all oh-so-very-familiar with it. This of course can then be applied to the ogg development. I am focussing on things such as better quality, smaller file generation, quicker compression, etc.

Music files are a waste of Internet Bandwidth

[Com2Kid]

I am sick and tired of hearing about MP3s and the whole entire situtation with them being pirated left and right. For crying out loud, what asshole let the comman civilion idiot onto the Internet to begin with? The constent pirating and trading of MP3's is nothing more then just one more example that the common everyday citizen of the world cannot handle the responsability that is required to be on the Internet and participate in an educational and scholorly enviroment.

For crying out loud, then a company comes along and creates an open source MP3 alternative, crap, this really shows how "on the ball" the open source movement is, considering that the basic algorithims for MP3's where devised in the late 80's, it looks like the open source movement is a mere 11 years behind in technology.

Sheesh, I cannot belive that the computer using community would stoop so low as to follow popular trends in standard non-tech culture.

First people argue about the legality of MP3s

Oh, its big bussiness, who cares?

Try taking a few actual CD's from a music store and see *WHO* cares, (besides the cops that is).

So what if its a big bussiness, it's not the money that is the problem, but rather the morality of theft itself. Theft is theft is theft, and unless you are starving to death, it is wrong, period.)

Then people begin to argue about the evil bands and how they are deserting their listeners.

Hell folks, anybody who listens to the crap that is called modern music (either rock or cRAP, take your pick, both are garbage, and that goes for r&b too) deserves whatever they get. I myself would have them all executed for stupidity.

While this is going on, people are arguing over how they have the "freedom" to bog up university Internet connections with napster downloads.

For crying out loud folks, WHAT IN THE HOLY HELL gives *YOU* the right to interupt some LEGITIMENT students *WORK* so that you can ILLEGALY download some piece of crap song that describes a sinnfull way to get some measure of enjoyment out of your pathetic and worthless life?

Then this company goes ahead and plans to release a opensource MP3 alternative, just so that when the recording industry has a slight chance of getting things under control, all hell can break loose again.

And people wonder why I have lost faith in the human race.

Re:Music files are a waste of Internet Bandwidth

[Metrol]

And people wonder why I have lost faith in the human race.

Have you considered joining? Hmmm, on second thought let's not rush through that application.

The great thing about this...

[bconway]

is that it'll revolutionize the electronic music scene, but at the same time be almost completely unnoticable. Think about it, how hard is it to make a plugin for it for XMMS or take a rockin' encoder like GOGO and adjust the algorithm? Yet at the same time, it'll strive for the freedom that many of us seek in software these days. Keep up the great work, guys.

Re:The great thing about this...

[Russ Steffen]

Actually, the plugin for XMMS os already part of source, as well as a plugin for WinAMP.

mp3tovorbis and VBR ?

[smurfi]

[mp3tovorbis]

Does the converter understand variable-bitrate MP3s?

Come to think of it, is Vorbis itself able to encode in variable bitrate? You do need a rather good psychoacoustic model for this to work, but my current experience with LAME has been superb -- you basically get 200+-kbps quality with half the file size.

Re:mp3tovorbis and VBR ?

[kcarnold]

That depends on whether or not mpg123 does (and I have had mixed results with this).

AFAIK, Vorbis in its present state is variable bitrate. You may want to ask Monty on the specifics, but from what I have seen, the encoding modes for Vorbis are numbered 0-6, and each has an approximate bitrate, but the bitrate can vary. Is this due to the accuracy of the quantitization? Or is the psychoacoustic model actually dynamic wrt output? Monty?

What I'd really like to see is the ability for the encoder to scan the entire input file (if possible) and tune the encoding tables etc. This could provide for a small file at really good quality without too much extra work.

Kenneth

see this:

[LocalYokel]

http://slashdot.org/articles/00/ 04/11/118219.shtml

--

Using OV for original music.

[eGabriel]

I distribute all of the files for my personal musical project on a website. I am certain I am going to lose traffic now that I have changed to a format no one can play, but it is the same story as open source... you have to take a hit at first, or no one will come around.

It's the right thing to do, I think.
I hope other musicians will do the same.

http://www.fabco5.com

Time to start

[Stalemate]

Modifying my car mp3 player to also support .ogg files.

Cool!!




--

Yes!

[DustyHodges]

Finally! We do need to have many more things open sourced, and what better than every geeks baby, the MP3! Hopefully people will start to realize that open source projects are the only way to go...

The only downside I can see is that this may bring even more fire from the RIAA. One of the arguements I have seen many times here is that MP3s are lossy, and thus aren't close to being the same quality as the original... Let's hope these things aren't high enough quality to blow that out of the water, or we'll be seeing a whole lot of heat being drawn on it...

Then again, maybe that's what we need to bring Open Source to the conciousness of the general public...
-Dusty Hodges

Re:Yes!

[MicroBerto]

The only downside I can see is that this may bring even more fire from the RIAA. One of the arguements I have seen many times here is that MP3s are lossy, and thus aren't close to being the same quality as the original... Let's hope these things aren't high enough quality to blow that out of the water, or we'll be seeing a whole lot of heat being drawn on it...

Hey, how can we help it if the open source movement perfects the standard to the point of absolute quality?! All the power to us :)

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto

Re:Yes!

[C.Lee]

>The only downside I can see is that this may bring even more fire from
>the RIAA. One of the arguements I have seen many times here is that
>MP3s are lossy, and thus aren't close to being the same quality as the
>original... Let's hope these things aren't high enough quality to blow that out of the water, or we'll be seeing a whole lot of heat being drawn on it...
What the hell can the RIAA do? This will be a format that's truely in the "Public Domain", meaning anyone can use it to record any sort of audio information,not just music. It's use will most likely be similar to recording things in the *.wav and other sound formats.

This just in.....

[tweder]

...Although Slashdot touts itself as being "News for Nerds" this isn't news. On April 11th it was news, but now it's just noise.

MP3 Players....

[GandalfGreyhame]

The thing is, I (and a good number of other people basing on the number of units available) have invested in MP3 Players. The little portable ones. And even at 80 Kbps encoding it sounds fine to me.

Did I mention I'm a professional musician? I do know when stuff has been nuked one way or another.

"CD" quality? Not.

[DeepThaw]

It'll only get 128kbps, which may be good for the masses, but it's nowhere near the 320kbps you can get with MP3.

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[AntiNorm]

Huh? The interesting part is the algorithm, not the file format. It would take all of five seconds (literally) to get it to do 320kbit/s or 320Mbit/s or 320Tbit/s.

As you said, huh?

The compression ratios that would be required to obtain 320 Tbit/s would require a very well written compression algorithm (which would probably need to be quite lossy to obtain anything even approaching the Tbit/s spectrum), not to mention a file that lends itself very well to compression. True, raw waveform data compresses well, but I'm talking about much much much tighter compression than that. In other words, it would have to have all kinds of digital noise removal performed first. The white noise would have to be changed to 00000000s. This alone would complicate the encoding process by an exponential amount.

One more thing...given the speed of the internal data busses of modern PCs (IDE busses can do several Gbps IIRC), Tbit/s wouldn't be possible anyway unless you had some cutting-edge, really expensive equipment. And forget streaming it...streaming a 320 Tbit/s file? Assuming that your equipment's internal structure could handle that speed, that would require 320 * 1024 = 327680 nodes of gigabit ethernet. Not within any reasonable price range. 320 kbit/s? Sure.
320 Mbit/s? Possibly.
320 Tbit/s? Given today's technology, no. That doesn't mean, however, that it won't be achievable one day.


=================================

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[drinkypoo]

My question is, will VBRE be part of the official specification? And next, will someone make an inexpensive hardware device that plays both this new format, and MP3? The lp3 from lp3music is a parallel port device that plays mp3s in hardware; You can use it as easily on an 8088 as on a Pentium Pro. I've been planning to make an inexpensive and SMALL car player based on the lp3, but now am I going to have to worry about supporting this format, too?

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[gordyf]

This is 128kbps per channel, not altogether, which means that it really goes up to 256kbps.

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[mikpos]

Huh? The interesting part is the algorithm, not the file format. It would take all of five seconds (literally) to get it to do 320kbit/s or 320Mbit/s or 320Tbit/s. IINM, the reason it doesn't do high bitrates right now is because the authors have only written one implementation of the algorithm, and it was designed for low bitrates. Though it's been a couple months since I last read this story on /., so I can't remember everything properly.

Anyway, the file format doesn't really matter, since it's not released yet anyway.

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[MicroBerto]

No, it runs quite well at 160kbps right now, and is taking great strides for the lower and higher bitrates. Check out the web page and try em out.

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto

Re:"CD" quality? Not.

[Pope]

CD quality was never the goal of MP3: 10:1 compression of a digital source was.
Personally, i can't stand the goofballs who post 256 and higher MP3's on USENET. It doesn't significantly change the quality enough to merit the bigger files.

Simply having another music sound encoder that's open source will not solve the higher problem of the massive copyright violations that MP3 brought about.

Having said that, I will say that I do post and download lots of MP3s on a weekly basis, I just don't try to justify it with weak excuses and "reasons." I do it simply because I can. If I didn't have DSL, I wouldn't bother. Hell, I had ADSL for almost a year before I even thought of looking for them on USENET. I mean, isn't that where all the pr0n is? :)

Pope

Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!

I dunno,

[smacks]

mp3 is free, i mean just as free as porn. that's why there is http://www.phatmax.net
----

Re:This will fail

[camadas]

God how wrong can one be. Wan't complete pirate albuns ? Don't look for mp3 and dig trough banners, warez and quotas. Have a look for vqf groups and see for yourself.

Re:"vorbis"

[Black Parrot]

> Every time I hear the name of this thing, I'm reminded of Deacon (?) Vorbis from Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods". Does anyone know if there is a connection?

As soon as I heard the delightful name I headed for google, and the only hits I turned up pertained either to the CODEC or to Pratchett. Pratchett also features an Ogg family, though unfortunately no Ogg Vorbis per se.

--

Does this really address the issue?

[antidigerati]

Are we forgetting what the biggest issue with MP3s is? It isn't the issues with Frauhauser. It isn't whether they are 'open-source' or not.

The issue is that they are being used to download copyright music. The RIAA doesn't give a rat's ass whether the name is MP3 or VORBiS... so what's the point?

Am i missing something fundamental here??

mp3 music
flowing sweetly through my ears
aural orgasm


antidigerati

How do we know it is patent-free?

[booch]

I respect the work of the developers, but I don't see anything on the web site backing up the claim that the format is completely free of patents. Have they done a patent search?

Other than that, it looks great.

See for yourself

[brank]

This is a CVS snapshot of the Vorbis source.

There's also a page here about Vorbis and one about Ogg in general.

Educate the users

[lucidvein]

Start with your friends and family. Turn people on to free and open formats. Use it yourself and spread the word.

One of the catches of proprietary technology is that a lot of people don't know any better. It works: they use it. If we can offer them an alternative that has close to the same capabilities and explain the reasoning behind switching, that's a good thing.

Enter Worf stage left

[Snaller]

So i guess, if someone asks, it would be the place to quote Worf from DS9's Trials and Tribbelations:

"It's a LONG story and we don't talk to outsiders about it"

--

BladeEnc will support Vorbis OGG

[Tord]

Just wanted to add in that future versions of BladeEnc will support OGG as well as MP3.

Support will be handled by simply including their LGPL:ed library so there will be no quality difference. From the same version, MP3 support will be optional during compile time, giving us an OGG-only version of BladeEnc that might be used in all countries and a OGG & MP3 version that may only be used in patent free countries or if you have a special contract with Fraunhofer.

Of course, there will probably not be any particular advantage in using BladeEnc for OGG compression compared to other tools that will appear, but by doing this I hope to be able to leverage some of BladeEnc's popularity onto this new, free format and at the same time give Fraunhofer/Thomson a kick in the ass.

Tord Jansson
BladeEnc Developer

This is nothing new...

[MoOsEb0y]

you posted this already on slashdot back in april... http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/11/118219.shtml ... don't you guys ever check whether somethings been posted?

Algorithm != Implementation

[Sly Mongoose]

It may not be possible to implement an algorithm in a practical matter using today's hardware. But that does not make the algorithm erroneous. And since we're talking about music compression software, shouldn't it be "algorythm" anyhow? :)

Great! but doomed to failure

[Bilestoad]

The only users will be open source enthusiasts. There has already been too much investment in software and hardware for this to overtake MP3, at least in the consumer space. I'm sorry to have to say it but I think that's the truth.
MP3 got commercial and successful and after that anything else is an also-ran. If you like, it's the difference between Amiga and IBM, or VHS and Beta - the one with the marketing won, and technical merit just doesn't matter.

Re:AGH!

[Signal 10]

Come on, the page was updated on May 11, 2000! that's practically yesterday! Slashdot can't of already had a post on it...

PNG conversions are happening

[KlomDark]

A fortune 500 company I work for is in the process of converting all their images to .PNG to avoid licencing fees. They clued in and realized that there's no point in paying royalties when a better, free alternative exists.

I've built my medieval web game, Raid on the Forest of Horrors, using nothing but PNG images. Click below to try it out. Too bad I can't draw better! :)

Lossy compression always equals loss in quality

[Mr Z]

Uhm, if you compress a CD-quality source with a lossy compression format, by definition the copy is not as good as the original. Period.

The more conversions a signal passes through, the lower the quality. The only way a 512K MP3 might even have a hope of sounding better than CD quality is if you encode from a source which is better than CD quality, such as a 24-bit 96kHz/channel digitizer working from the original masters. Not very many people have such a source -- they're ripping from CD.

Now that doesn't mean that lossy compression is bad. As long as what's lost isn't missed, you're ok. And that's the point of having different formats. MP3 is better at choosing what to lose than MP2 is -- it has higher quality at the same bitrate -- just as Vorbis is purportedly better than MP3.

--Joe
--

Re:AGH!

[_Bean_]

they're planning on showing a beta of Vorbis at next week's MP3.com summit in San Diego

There's the news part. It also creates greater awarness about Ogg Vorbis which is probably a "good thing" (TM)

I did read the FAQ mam!

[Snaller]

I can't believe it's a not a frequently asked question.....Why the heck did they choose that odd name!? (And what does it mean? :)

--

Re:But can it get a foothold?

[treke]

This seems like it could be a problem. .vob == video in the case of the video files on DVD disks.
treke

Link to the logo explanation:

[Byteme]

HERE

the trouble with png

[zeck]

Png is a fine idea, but as with many things the standard it's designed to replace is too firmly rooted. Even Slashdot, a site famous for its support of open standards, is still using gifs.

Re:the trouble with png

[Mike Hicks]

Of course, part of the reason Slashdot still uses gifs is because the corresponding pngs do not display correctly in many browsers (including Netscape..)
--
Ski-U-Mah!
Stop the MPAA

Re:the trouble with png

[mikpos]

In terms of stand-alone graphics (e.g. not embedded in an HTML document), I see .png *far* more frequently than .gif. It still lags behind .jpg in terms of popularity quite a bit, and is almost non-existent when it comes to photographs (which makes sense since, IIRC, JFIF was created specifically for compressing photographs).

You have to give it a little time, though. PNG is most definitely not declining in popularity. It's a little slow, but it seems to be gaining in popularity at a steady rate, which is very important.

Re:the trouble with png

[Rhys Dyfrgi]

Interesting that I'm using netscape and I render PNG fine... ah, ImageMagick...
---

Re:"vorbis"

[Pope Slackman]

From http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html :

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.

--KMM


=-=-=

YES!

[Byteme]

Read about it here .

Re:Yes!(Here goes my Karma, again)

[DgtlGhost]

Now all we need to do is getting it to run under LYNUX, on a CLUSTER, w/ MS. PORTMAN's approval, then we got real OPEN SOURCE, GEEK Paradise!
Did I work in enough buzz-words to be cool?
For gods sakes, Yes, open soursing is great, but, like an open source soft drink, it isn't always useful! Couldn't you make an inteligent statement about the artical instead of playing up to the uneducated moderators who will bump you up for saying something Informative, while I'll be lambasted for being off topic, even though neither of us said a damned thing about the artical.
Sorry, I can't freely give up my Automatic 1, and I'm NOT posting AC

Filesize is King

[ewhac]

"Didn't you cover this in last month's lecture, sir?"

Slashdot has covered Ogg Vorbis before. Informed posters commented that .OGG files consume approximately 20% more space than equal quality .MP3 files.

I'm sorry, but that's not going to cut it. Some streaming MP3 channels don't broadcast any slower than 56K bps (and 40K bps is about the lowest bit rate I'm willing to tolerate (go DJ Lithium!)). If Ogg requires 20% more data to sound the same, that means a 56K channel has to either sound worse, or go to 67K, which puts them beyond modem users.

I don't have the background to know if the 20% premium is fundamental to the algorithm, or an artifact of it being the first generation of the compressor (i.e. refinements are possible). But I don't think it's going to win many converts until they can sound as good and be within 5% of MP3's data size.

They have a long row to hoe. I wish them all the best.

Schwab

Re:Filesize is King

[drix]

First, the software is pre 1.0.. to quote another poster on this same thread, "REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked." I couldn't have said it better myself. It's not fair to judge this guy's work based on something he hasn't technically even finished yet.

Second, and this is why you should be damn impressed, one man created this entire algorithm himself. That, my friends, is a really, really hard thing to do. Fraunhoffer had a think-tank stocked with well trained engineers for them to come out with MP3 the algorithm, to say nothing of making the crucial leap that a lot of sound sort of "cancels out" in our head and may therefore be ommitted - that doesn't even strike me as in the same field as computer science. For this guy to even come close to rivalling those achievements, alone... well, ever hear of the Small Pond syndrome? It just reminds you that there are people out there that are a lot, lot smarter than you :) Read his technical discussions available on the sight regarding wavelets, DSP, etc. and you should be suitably impressed... I was.

I have a feeling this algorithm will get better, but a 20% premium is still a small price to pay for insurance that some lawyer won't come knocking on your door, ever, demanding royalties.

--

Re:Filesize is King

[mikpos]

Hmm, I've heard the opposite (.ogg sounds better than .mp3 at the same bitrate). Since the algorithms differ so greatly, it would be all but imposible to judge the sound quality objectively. Most important to me, though, (note that I haven't actually tried Vorbis, so I'm going on rumour) is that it gets rid of that MP3 high-frequency problem, which would be nice for listening to music with high-hats (e.g. 95% of all music).

Re:Filesize is King

[Tack]

to say nothing of making the crucial leap that a lot of sound sort of "cancels out" in our head and may therefore be ommitted - that doesn't even strike me as in the same field as computer science.

I think you're describing a Fourier anaylsis, which wasn't actually discovered by Fraunhoffer, but rather used by them.

Re:Filesize is King

[drix]

I am referring to perceptual noise shaping, the concept which drives MP3. Basically it makes decisions on what to omit based on whether or not we can hear it - e.g. if two sounds play at the same time, we can hear the louder one, but not the softer one; the softer one is removed. AFAIK Fraunhoffer pioneered this technology, which, as I said, doesn't have much to do with CS in any way. That a single man could come up with Vorbis, which does much of the same, is impressive.

--

Re:Filesize is King

[Stu Charlton]

There are always people smarter than you, but it takes a lot of brains in and of itself to be 'the first'.

Fraunhoffer's work was almost a decade-long effort producing a revolutionary music format. They were the innovators. It would be expected that a second such stab would take a LOT less time, because the idea is now out in the mainstream...

Not the real SIGSEGV

[EvilGwyn]

signal-ell-one

Re:Not the real SIGSEGV

[Signa1 l1]

>signal-ell-one I'm impressed, figured that out all by yourself didja? Sheesh, your mommy must be proud!

Re:"vorbis"

[titus-g]

wonder how many companies there are out there named from Pratchett's works, mine is, although it's not imediately obvious. . .

Though then again Vorbis would be a strange choice, unless this codec makes listening to the music akin to having your toinails ripped out.

Maybe. But it'll be *ways* too late.

[GeekDork]

By the time Vorbis "hits the streets", it'll spread faster than wildfire, much too slow for those sluggish bigass folks wanting it to disappear (you know who I'm talking about, aren't ya?). And it looks like it's going to get out soon enough.

Paranoids of the world, unite!

Re:Slashdot is repeating itself

[Cool Man]

yeah fuck off whore, we do not want your ilk here

Natalie has spoken!

Oh, you need to read the hidden seekrit FAQ! ;-)

[xiphmont]

Yeah, that one isn't on the FAQ.

People keep asking, so I'll just post it. From the name page:

The Ogg project began with a few-weekend-attempt at a simple audio compression package as part of a larger project in 1993. At the time, the software was called 'Squish'. The project and the general problem of music compression became a personal fascination, and Squish took on a life of its own far beyond the proportions of the original digital music studio project of which it was to be part.

A few months after the first Squish webpage, I received a polite but firm letter informing me that Squish is a registered trademark (for a mail transport system). Mike Whitson, a contributor to the cause in the early days, suggested the name 'OggSquish' as a replacement.

An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. From the definition:

3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."

(see the rest of the definition for the original Netrek usage.)

At the time Ogg was starting out, most personal computers were i386s and the i486 was new. I remember thinking about the algorithms I was considering, "Woah, that's heavyweight. People are going to need a 486 to run that..." While the software ogged the music, there wasn't much processor left for anything else.

These days, 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_.

The 'Thor-and-the-Snake' logo is drawn somewhat from Norse mythology; the real symbolism is the sine-curve shape of the snake. Thor is hefting Mjollnir about to compress the periodic signal Jörmungandr... See, it all makes sense.

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.

Monty

MP3 made from 24-bit 96kHz source better than CD?

[Mr Z]

Maybe, or maybe not. It really depends on the bit-rate of the MP3, and the particular perceptual coder used.

You know, not all MP3 coders are made equal. My fiancee has some MP3s that I can't listen to at all because certain pitches have a particular Morse Code-like quality about how they come in and out due to how the perceptual coder thinks I'll hear the music. Sometimes throwing more bits at the problem doesn't solve those issues.

--

Doomed, just like Linux ;-)

[xiphmont]

Unfortunately I don't get to talk about the industry secrets that don't belong to me.

But anyway, I've been doomed for about six years now. Check back again in a year to see if I'm still doomed :-)

Monty

What about vqf?

[gad_zuki!]

This format sounds a lot crappier than the commecial yet free vqf format.

Re:Yes!(Here goes my Karma, again)

[DustyHodges]

But, in this case, it is useful. According to the article, it is potentially higher quality, while, at the same time stripping the royalties away, making it a truly free format for people to be able to use, rather than a format which must give $5 to a group of german scientists every time they want to give away their free MP3 encoder. There. Enough article for you? -Dusty Hodges

Re:But can it get a foothold?

[mikpos]

Oops, that was my fault (though I blame it on my brain). Without even thinking, I shortened Vorbis to .vob. The group making Vorbis is called Ogg, and I believe the actual extension is .ogg.

Re:Still Interesting even if it's not news

[mcrandello]

...and to start producing audio programs in it ourselves.

This is key. Since you have some weight around here you may want to mention this to Jeff and Rob before they do the next "Geeks In Space"...

Re:Slashdot is repeating itself

[TheGreek]

I think I might just find my news somewhere else that ALWAYS brings news and fresh info on open source products.

Freshmeat.

Re:iCast and Xiphophorus?

[xiphmont]

iCast is sponsoring Ogg development in addition to lending legal and promotional resources (not to mention industry push to get it adopted). They've been great guys and have generally 'gotten it' about Open Source and the Ogg project. They embrace the penguin...

(Is the image of hugging a penguin as disturbing to you as it is to me? :-)

Monty

keep'n up with the skinny, yo.

[Wah]

also, and very important, IMHO.

Moffitt, who is overseeing the project, is himself the creator of the open-source Icecast, a streaming MP3 technology similar to Nullsoft's Shoutcast, now owned by America Online. He came to iCast last year when the company acquired Net radio firm Green Witch.

Icecast mixed with a nice audio format, nearly built in, will make for outstanding internet "radio" stations. This is mostly how I listen to MP3. Streaming. There are thousands of stations. All sorts of genres. 24/7/365 No commercials. It's awesome. With this, it will be possible to set up a truly free radio network. When wireless IP becomes common, the real radio better watch out.

And as a quick aside (I deal with radio stations and their web efforts on a daily basis) the radio industry is clueless about what is right around the corner. They are coming around, but now corporate inertia has brought them to a near complete stop. Case in point...This is the webside for AMFMi, the internet arm of AMFM (Yes, I'm serious, they just recently did a "reorg"), the largest radio holding company in the nation. Here is a quick rundown on their "terrestrial" efforts.

Lots of what they call "market potential" around this area, no?
--

Re:keep'n up with the skinny, yo.

[jon_c]

Moffitt, who is overseeing the project, is himself the creator of the open-source Icecast, a streaming MP3 technology similar to Nullsoft's Shoutcast, now owned by America Online. He came to iCast last year when the company acquired Net radio firm Green Witch.

Well from the copyrights at the top of the code I've looked at, a chap by the name of Monty has done all the work.

I think Moffit is working on implementing OggVorbis into icecast, but I seriously doubt he's "overseeing the project", as in leading it.

-Jon

Re:What's the point?

[ronfar]

I don't really have to answer this, it has already been answered:

http://www.xiph.org/about.html

Good troll attempt, though.

Insightful?

TeX version numbering system

[divec]

TeX has a numbering system a bit like you just described: it's currently at 3.14159 (IIRC) and every time a new version comes out they stick the next digit of pi on the end.

It's an update.

[CardiacArrest]

Some people seem to be complaining that this story was posted 2 or 3 times before. This is an update, it's news because it's finally ready (1.0) There's now XMMS, WinAMP, and Sonique plugins and the compression is better than mp3 at the 128 Kbps range that seems like the standard (although some PC sites say Microsoft's new codec sounds better at 64Kbps, but I'm skeptical-I don't get income from MS banners). I think I'll actually get the plugin now, but this will be much more useful if there's conversion both from .mp3 to .ogg and vice versa.

you've had weird experiences

[raistlinne]

Hi, I've found the quality of vorbis (cvs from about 2-3 weeks ago) to be on par with mp3s, and the sizes seem to differ in only the last 3-4 digits of the byte count. As for time, I found that on an Athlon 600 that I could encode a song in just slightly more time than it takes to play it. I.e. I can start encoding and start xmms playing it and it's about a minute before it starts to skip, assuming that I'm not doing anything else.

I don't know why you are having the experiences that you are, but you paint the ogg vorbis format a lot darker than I've found it to be.

Re:Still Interesting even if it's not news

[Bruce Perens]

Yes, I will. But it helps if you do, too. Let the community speak!

Thanks

Bruce

Re:The bad thing about this...

[webword]

The really sad thing is that this is more true than you might think. We've seen time and again that superior technology doesn't automatically "win" in the marketplace. Savvy marketing and sales are critically important business functions. People might think that .oog is stupid, or they might not. The point is that that stinking file extension really is important.

FEAR OOG!

(1) OOG, The Object Orientation Game

(2) Welkom bij Tennisvereniging Oog In Al

(3) Oog TV (Has a cool interface. Check it out!)

(4) Out of Game (OOG)

(5) OOG Radio!

(6) Yes kids, Oog in Oog (Hmm...does "oog" mean "eye" in Dutch.)

(7) Oh baby!Even more oog in oog

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com (Usability Vortal)

Standard?

[cmat]

Vorbis == Standard? No. It's a specification, and a damn cool one, being open source and all, but remember that acceptance turns a spec into a standard. ;)

So get the damn thing out and let's start using it! :)

Chris

mp3 and orbis

[porky_pig_jr]

note that Orbis' highest rate is variable 128Kbps. This is probably ok for casual listening (w/portable player), but not adequate for high-quality compression. so far it appears that only format which is better than MP3 is AAC (sort of next generation of MP3, but not quite MP4). Liquid Audio is based on AAC, it does produce better results than MP3, but it is less popular format since free encoders like LAME (ok, ok, LAME is sort of a 'gray area') are not available (though you can easily find a cracked Liquid Audio Demo). Everything else is frankly a fluff. VQF may work better with certain tracks, something else may work ok with something else, but MP3 exhibits the consistent quality among the wide range of music (just read the latest issue of Hi-Fi News and Records Review, its conclusion is that MP3 gives the most consistent results, they didn't compare it against AAC though). Meanwhile LAME makes a tremendous progress, in fact they are adopting some of the AAC techniques. It is probably the most advanced MP3 encoder yet. Orbis? I wish them luck but reserve the right to remain sceptical till I have a good beta-quality encoder I can give a try.

iCast and Xiphophorus?

[Spirilis]

I know Ogg Vorbis is developed by Xiphophorus, but what is iCast? Is that a company sponsoring Xiph or something?

Incorrect. Max bitrate is not limited

[xiphmont]

Nope. Read the website again.

Not only does it say "128kbps per channel" (which is 256kbps stereo), that's just the intended usage range. Many of the developers who have been with us more than a few months remember Vorbis' original encoding mode of roughly 500kbps :-)

Monty

Alot's happened since then

[xiphmont]

If you're not keeping up, please don't quote obsolete facts as current truth.

The Slashdot posting in April was prealpha code. Substantial development and tuning has happened since then; not only is average Ogg filesize now *smaller* than mp3, the audio quality is much improved. We're now four days from 1.0 beta. Go get it and see for yourself if you don't believe me.

Monty

Re:Alot's happened since then

[ewhac]

I stand corrected; thank you. That is excellent news.

Schwab

YAGH!

[jpowers]

He's so pissed you'd think Katz had posted this story....

-jpowers

But can it get a foothold?

[cbuskirk]

Will any of these free "better than MP3" music formats be able to compete with MP3? I don't want to rip my whole collection over again and I don't want to lose a generation with some transfer program. IMHO The only way a new music format would have a chace is if a large player started not just to use it but to depend on it. There are far better alternives on the high end of audio. And if you arn't on the high end you are everybody else, and everybody else, seems to be quite content with MP3. I would love something better but I need somethign to motivate me to switch

Re:But can it get a foothold?

[kcarnold]

> What I would do for myself is to have an mp3->ogg converter for the current collection, and then use ogg from then on.

cvs -z9 update -d
cd vorbis-tools # by me
make install
mp3tovorbis [mp3] [Vorbis output file]

Happy? I also wrote vorbize and ogg123. Have fun.

Re:But can it get a foothold?

[mikpos]

Most people (I assume) are using players like Sonique to play their music. With someone like me, who has music of many different formats of music, if you were to ask me at any given time if the music that was playing was MP3, MP2, XM, IT, MOD, S3M, or (in the future) this Vorbis deal, unless I recognised the song, I probably couldn't tell you (without looking). Sonique plays them all just fine.

Once people learn that .vob == music in the same way .mp3 == music, all they'll have to keep in their pretty little heads is that if they double-click it, sounds come from their speakers.

But...

[Cannonball]

Is the compression still as lossy as MP3? If it's not as bad, and the file sizes are still reasonable, this could be great. So where do I sign for the betatest?

Winamp plug-ins

[bunnys_wonder]

Winamp has already made a step forward to supporting new formats with its plugins, and I think a lot more to come is in the future

Slashdot is repeating itself

[x-empt]

Lately Slashdot has had quite a few stories run for a second time on the main page, is this going to become a trend? If so, I think I might just find my news somewhere else that ALWAYS brings news and fresh info on open source products.

I did like the story about the Minivend merger, I was looking for a good opensource application for e-commerce at the time so I didn't have to code my own in PHP4.
Free Porn! or Laugh

This will fail

[bdigit]

Everything that trys to compete with mp3 always fails , remember that vqf shit, how long did that last? 2 or 3 days...

Monty's a sharp guy.

[Booker]

I just read Monty's rebuttal of the "Ethics of Free Software" article, which was previously on Slashdot. I gotta say, I was impressed. Nice to see that the smart programmers are also able to express themselves in careful, intelligent, thoughtful ways outside the programming realm.

---

Why I should use Vorbis!

[MicroBerto]

1. Open source
2. No royalties ever owed to jerks
3. Already comparable to mp3 and once finalized will be better quality and compression
4. LGPL
5. It will support more than 2 channels (if it doesn't yet)
6. Already have audio player plugins for it, they're getting better.
7. With a name like Ogg Vorbis, its GOT to be good!
8. Their logo is awesome

and finally..

9. The extention is going to be .ogg !!! How cool is that?! I'm there!

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto

Re:Why I should use Vorbis!

[xod]

Such a bizarre file extension, which is so unrelated to the name vorbis will cause no end of confusion in the millions of people at which this is aimed. I guarantee a significant number of files will get named with .vor.

More disturbing is the fact that the top bitrate is 128. 128 sounds like crap, so I hope this standard is significantly better than mp3.

Very cool

[YIAAL]

I'm pretty happy with MP3, except that there are real differences in the encoders and the standard doesn't address that fully; only decoding. (Yes, this matters). This seems to address that. Plus, it's just cool.

Re:Why is Microsoft streaming audio tinny sounding

[YIAAL]

Uh, because it's microsoft? Seriously, I've noticed the same thing: it never sounds as good. At a guess, phase distortions are introduced during encoding or decoding, but I've never gotten into the guts of the thing. I just avoid it.

The sweet bliss of new standards...

[DranoK]

The coolest thing about this isn't about the free as in beer format, but the fact that it's an open format. I think more and more compression/encryption/etc in the future is going to abide by these open formats, as png has led the way (and hopefully this will continue the cause).

My first thought, of course, was that no new standard could compete with mp3. Then I realized it wouldn't really have to. Let's look at gif vs png, for example. Average Joe User coasts through webpages, never ever knowing if the pretty images he sees are gifs or pngs. He doesn't need to; all he cares about is that the pictures are there. Netscape and IE are the ones that had to do the work of getting png support for their browsers else worry about being slammed as "incomplete". The same will happen with any new open standard, I think.

Winamp, for instance, isn't going to stop playing mp3's. But I bet a future version of winamp will support the new format as well. This is the power of open standards.

Format types are a pain in the ass when they are closed. No company wants to buy liscencing rights to add support for a format, and will only do so if the format is so huge that their product won't sell without it. This stalls development of free software (if you're not going to be paid for it in the end IMHO the less likely you are to shell out thousands of bucks for a liscence) as well as a stagnation in standards. If all standards were proprietary, creating a new one would be hard to get out since companies would rather only impliment those standards that are set in stone. They likely won't purchase a liscence to a new commercial standard before it's been proven, and it won't be proven until it's liscenced. Without open standards stagnation would prevail.

For one last example look at the competition between OpenGL and GLIDE. GLIDE was too proprietory, and after a few years of fame slowly slipped away into the night. The industry is realizing this now, and is embracing open standards.

If only they'd realize the same logic applies to Open Source as well...

DranoK
Having honestly nothing better to do today than read old Slashdot stories ;)



That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.

Just some points for comparison

[DeepThaw]

Standard CD audio is 384kbps.(1:1 Compression)
MiniDisc compression is 292kbps.(literature says 4:1 compression, but those numbers don't seem right)
MP3 tops out at 320kbps.(I'm assuming the 10:1 compression is for 128kbps)

File format?

[Eponymous, Showered]

I looked around the website and found little about the file format for .ogg (I suppose I could have downloaded the source...)

Will it support some sort of metadata about the audio, preferrably in a dynamic, flexible style like id3v2?

I'm both excited and nervous about Vorbis. Excited to see a quality format available without any encumbrances and nervous because I'm not sure what I'll do about my nearly-complete 350ish CD mp3 collection and about the software I'm helping write at RIMPS which is a streaming web-based mp3 jukebox.

Re:Doh...

[jpowers]

Yeah, but now you can actually use it.

-jpowers

Re:Speaking of MP3...

[linuxonceleron]

Even though its a flash animation, its funny, but I don't think that promoting piracy to the general public as a benefit of your services is good marketing, the obviously know that the /. crowd is generally anti-IP-law though, since they had the balls to do that.

And widespread distribution ...

[timothy]

Bruce Perens wrote:

"User acceptance of audio formats is driven by one thing: publisher use of audio formats. Given that a plug-in is available on the net and easy to install, the user will download it the first time he has to play a file in the new format."

Well, given the nature of this software, I'd like to see encoders and players exploiting it in every Linux distribution, soon, right next to the scads of MP3 / "multimedia" (whatever that means) players :)

In fact, the possibility of improved encoders / players (whether in bitrate, audio quality at the same bitrate, or licensing terms) has stopped me from purchasing a stand-alone MP3 player like the Rio, which otherwise look like a great way to timeshift radio programs. I doubt we'll see a "Vorbis Rio" though ... then again, why not?

"In this case, a lot of publishers don't want to pay the Frauenhoffer Institute royalties, and this new format is a way to get out of that. Nor do software developers want to pay license fees."

I hope this will swing the pendulum in favor of unencumbered formats, and recognition that it's dangerous to rely on a single, proprietary one, on the part of these groups. Otherwise content, as you hint, will be slim.

timothy

check this out...

[fluxrad]

here's the deal. you compare it to domain names, i'll compare it to fledgling bands.

perhaps...in the next year or so...Vorbis won't get big. I, too, doubt that there's any real serious benefit to using a .ogg file right now ;-)

However, if/when the RIAA really starts making the $#!+ hit the fan...then we'll see it get used. I think the very thing that major record companies want to see (i.e. everyone stops using mp3's) could come to pass if the conditions are right. which they could be in the next year or three.

The RIAA and whatever that company was who makes the mp3 codecs get together and say "wait a fucking minute...we're not getting paid here" and they pass all kinds of laws against doing it without one of those two organizations getting paid. There are all kinds of loopholes and wierd scenarios that hadn't been planned out by the U.S. Gov...and people go "wait...you mean if i use this vorbis thing i don't have to pay a cent to anyone??? HELL YEAH!!!" While it may be impractical right now...the internet, the RIAA, and anyone else trying to "bogart" the rights of consumers may just make it practical.

note to the RIAA: you want people to quit using thse illicit and illegal mp3's? be careful what you wish for...you just might get it!!!


FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

Re:check this out...

[Jose]

note to the RIAA: you want people to quit using thse illicit and illegal mp3's? be careful what you wish for...you just might get it!!!

The RIAA is just against mp3s - although that is the main focus right now - they are more against the illegal mass trading of copyrighted material. The MP3 file format itself is in no way illegal, and I couldn't see it becoming illegal. It is the illegal trade of them that they don't like.

That name has to change, though...

[Holgate]

No matter how good the algorithm, no matter how free (beer || speech) the licence, no-one's going to be talking about Xiphophorus's Ogg Vorbis project in the bars and coffeeshops.

em-pee-three. nap-ster. gnu-tella.

The name's the thing.

iCast is helping out on legal

[xiphmont]

You're not the first to 'call' on this issue :-) And you definately should.

The legal review of Ogg and Vorbis patent status is one of the things iCast is helping with. I don't know how much of the patent review will be on the website at 1.0 beta-time. For the most part, I've been keeping my head technical and not tracking the publicity or legal push going on around me at iCast; I know that the lawyers so far are very comfortable with the patent review, but I don't know what documents they've produced so far to prove we're not just bluffing :-)

Of course, results of the legal review will be public knowledge as soon as it's finished. So far, no surprises (I have more patent summaries in my inbox to review right now...)

Monty

Re:Poor Geocities, Tripod, etc...

[Seumas]

Now Geocities, Tripod and all the rest will have to add yet another file type to filter in addition to *.mp3.

---
icq:2057699
seumas.com

My issue: Rio

[CrayDrygu]

Okay, here's my issue. I just bought a Rio 500. Somehow, I doubt it can be updated to support new formats (correct me if I'm wrong). So if, by some miracle, Vorbis replaces MP3, you know what's gonna happen? I'm gonna resave my .ogg files as .wav, and reencode them as .mp3. So...what's the benefit? To me, there is none -- in fact, it's a hassle.

Sure, it might be better. There are people who insists Betamax was better, but VHS got control of the market. Well, guys, MP3 has control of the market...

Still Interesting even if it's not news

[Bruce Perens]

Even though slashdot has covered Ogg Vorbis before, it's still a great project. Most of us whine about bad patents. Somebody with the right background in math and signal processing went and did something about bad patents.

And he says he wants to work on video, too.

Bruce

Re:Still Interesting even if it's not news

[grappler]

I'll add something to that.

A big thing for me is portable players. I love being able to go on a run, or even mountain biking or skiing with a portable mp3 player. They're really the greatest thing to happen to music, IMHO. I don't like to listen by sitting in a room, but while I'm out doing something else.

So here's my promise: When Vorbis is finalized, I will switch to it in a heartbeat IF there is a portable player to play .ogg files. When such a player comes out, I will buy at least one.

Here's hoping one gets made.

--
grappler

Re:Still Interesting even if it's not news

[MicroBerto]

But Bruce -- do you have any good ideas for getting this accepted if it does end up kicking ass? This is also a general question -- there are many things that can be improved but no one likes change. What's the best motivator or idea?

Thanks..

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto

Speaking of MP3...

[bconway]

...has anyone seen the new Speakeasy.net DSL ad that's been floating at the top of Slashdot recently? It's f'ing awesome. Advertising at its best: http://www.speakeasy.net/refer/w/metslash/ That's the funniest thing I've seen all day.

What's the point?

[dead_penguin]

Any new "standard" for distributing compressed audio will have to be pretty phenomenal if it's going to make any headway against mp3. If you consider the sheer volume of mp3s out there (legally or otherwise), it's pretty obvious that mp3 has become an unofficial standard. Slight improvements in quality or compression won't make a difference, especially with the increases in bandwidth and computer power we're seeing every year. Similarly, while the "openness" of the software and algorithms producing the compression are interesting for many of us here on slashdot, average people tend not to care. If you're playing and downloading illegal music files, does it really matter to you if the program you use to play (and possibly create) the files violates some patent somewhere?
These are some reasons why I feel this mp3 alternative, and any other commercial alternatives are doomed to fail.

They could have a portable if ....

[Anonymous Coward]

... they could create a codec for a software downloadable player such as the nomad or lyra.

I have yet to see a nomad, but the lyra keeps its executables as files on the flash card. Anyone know if someone has started hacking this yet? or have any info? cpu type?

"vorbis"

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

Every time I hear the name of this thing, I'm reminded of Deacon (?) Vorbis from Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods". Does anyone know if there is a connection? If not, where the heck did they both come up with that name?
--
Compaq dropping MAILWorks?

.ogg is for ANY Ogg file, be it sound, etc.

[Svartalf]

Ogg is a generic answer to streaming/compressed multimedia. Ogg was developed by Monty and Co. to answer a need and to do Quicktime "right". Currently, they're working on audio compression; soon they plan on working on video codecs as well.

Winamp plugin...

[Svartalf]

From what I understand of what I've read on the dev list, someone's already done an alpha WinAmp plugin for it. This is going to happen.

Why the RIAA is *really* afraid of MP3/Vorbis.

[CodeRx]

The RIAA knows by now that MP3 poses little threat to their bottom line. Despite huge amounts of "pirated" music being distributed across the net, sales have actually increased. The *real* threat is that artists may begin to realize that they don't need the record companies anymore - they can put their music out there on the net and promote it themselves (actually, I bet their fans will do all the work for them if they'll just put it out there!).

One of the arguments that I hear put forth a lot is that the time warners of the music industry provide a "filtering" service - so you don't have to waste your time listening to tons of shitty garage bands to find good music. This is somewhat true, but the big failure of this argument is that they filter the music based on their own priorities, not necessarily the quality of the music. So the music you get to listen to has simply been selected because it is the most profitable of the bunch.

The internet is vicious - even more vicious than all the barking lawyers the RIAA could ever hope to muster. Filing all the lawsuits in the world won't change the fact that the record companies are basically fucked. The artists (their suppliers) hate them. The listeners (their customers) hate them. And the two groups now see a way to work together in a mutually beneficial way. It's time to cut out the middle man.

Re: Open Standard

[Arandir]

You hit the nail on the head. The important thing is not that it's an Open Source program, but that it is an open standard.

Ow. It works, but...

[xiphmont]

Converting from mp3 to Ogg is going to make a pretty nasty file actually. Not only is a bunch of quality going to be gone.... but Ogg is going to spend losts of bits trying to encode mp3's artifacts! :-)

Monty

who would care

[timothy]

The RIAA also doesn't care whether you're listening to music under Linux, FreeBSD, or MULTICS.

The Frauenhofer Institute are the ones who would care whether you are using proprietary algorithims of theirs.

As to whether they're used in violation of copyright, you're right that it's a separate issue. Personally, I'm interested in audio digitization and compression chiefly for timeshifting radio, and the same sort of use that has been widely termed fair use when applied to cassettes (convenience copying, same household, no simultaneous use). MP3 is just a file format -- can be used to hold transcripts of Aunt Millie before she died that you can send to Uncle Walt by email, can be used to hold secret conversations that you eavesdropped on while committing arson. It's just a file format! :)

timothy

The bad thing about this...

[meersan]

This is all well and good, especially since it is GPL'd, but I have to admit my first reaction was a bit negative. Nobody will use an audio format when the file extension is .ogg. 'Ogg'? Come on! It sounds like some sort of caveman grunting. You gotta admit 'mp3' sounds much, much cooler.

Open source is based on cool names. Linux would not have gotten half as far if it were called 'Gruntux'. The people at vorbis have to realize that, due to the overwhelming popularity of the MP3 format, they already have a strike against them. By using the ridiculous '.ogg' extension, they are dooming their project to the Hall of Unsexy Software. Any marketer will tell you the importance of a name. They should have picked .vor or something like that; perhaps somebody will realize this and rename it. -- tongue-in-cheek standard disclaimer applies ;)

You are SO wrong!

[Sadfsdaf]

The entire reason that the RIAA doesn't want MP3's to succeed isn't the widespread piracy, oh NO! The amount of money "lost" is negligible and they may be making more money off mp3's from the same kind of advertising as radio.

The reason they are against MP3's is because once it becomes widespread and people start selling mp3's online, they can circumvent the recording industry and they don't have to recive 5% of the CD sales, if they sold it direct, they can get 95% royalties and the recording industry would get 0, unless they get a foothold on the internet (which is doubtful).

Oftentimes, you hear the RIAA and recording companies talk about how bad MP3's are, but they occasionally don't say ILLEGAL or PIRATED mp3s. Think about it, they have said they kinda accepted audio tape recordings, but don't accept MP3s..

REMEMBER: The RIAA is not the Recording Artists Association of America, they represent the Recording INDUSTRY's best interest, and they'll be SCREWED OVER if MP3's or any other internet medium succeeds.

Jack the Ogg pimp

[xiphmont]

Jack Moffitt is overseeing Ogg's production and implementation within iCast. He's one of those truly rare breed of geek; he not only has a technical whip (and knows how to use it), he enjoys talking to people, drumming up support, evangelizing and remembering all the names at a meeting.

Ogg got written because of me... but Ogg is getting the attention it deserves because of Jack.

Monty

What is wrong with the Lame MP3 Encoder

[jessohyes]

I thought that slashdot did a story a while back on the LAME encoder (Mp3) and it was totally free of all copyright issues with Frauenhoffer. Plus if I remember correctly it was also open source. Why not just stick with MP3 if this is the case or am I missing something. Jess

There were those who said this couldn't be done

[weston]

Somewhere over a year ago, I remember seeing a discussion -- I think on slashdot, even -- where this was proposed. And yet, there were quite a number of people who said that developing such a codec couldn't be done in an open manner. The reasoning was that it took teams of Phd's months of full-time research to do such things.

So what I'm wondering is... why were they wrong?

Re:Oh, you need to read the hidden seekrit FAQ! ;-

[RickHunter]

As a Pratcett fan, I'm kinda curious as to what the story behind the Vorbis bit is...

-RickHunter

128kbps per channel

[SEAL]

And I believe one of the developers posted on /. awhile back, saying that higher bitrates were in the works. I'll be damned if I can find the link though.

SEAL

Cheap Karma

[Andy_R]

Well, if this lot got a (5, informative) and two (4, insightful)s last time, it should be worth a try....

"Here's a link to an interview with the author, with his explanation of why vorbis is better than mp3. http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html

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 moviescompressed 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."

...oh all right then, I'll settle for (score:13, reundant)

- Andy R.