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Ogg Vorbis - The Free Alternative To MP3
Christopher Montgomery:
Vorbis is a hybrid time/frequency transform coder like mp3, but the similarity really ends there; it's more similar to TwinVQ in some ways (many shared mechanisms, albeit used somewhat differently).
Like mp3 (and virtually every other useful transform coder), we first look for strong changes and natural breaks in the input audio, and can use this information to break up the incoming audio into different sized blocks. When you lose information in the frequency domain, the resulting noise spreads throughout the time domain. A very strong spike in time will get smoothed out by frequency quantization, so the larger the block, the more audible it is. You want to isolate these strong, sharp events in smaller blocks.
Past this point, the similarities with mp3 end. Vorbis can do a time-domain pre-encoding using wavelets to further reduce spreading of time events and non-tone data. The current libvorbis doesn't have the code to do this yet, but the hooks are there for when we do finish this code (this feature will be post 1.0. Wavelets are still something novel that no one else is using in serious production yet, and we need to do more real R&D before it's ready).
Vorbis takes the time data directly to the frequency domain with an MDCT, where mp3 first subbands the data. The polyphase pseudo-QMF filter that mp3 uses for subbanding is not completely orthogonal; no matter how good the implementation, there will always be some aliasing. For this reason, Vorbis dispenses with subbanding altogether and just uses a large MDCT.
Vorbis then computes line-by-line masking curves for local peaks, long-distance simultaneous tone masking, simultaneous noise masking and temporal masking. These curves are use to separate inaudible tones from audible tones, and then choose a frequency domain amplitude curve that represents the 'base energy' of that audio frame. The base energy curve (I call it a floor) is subtracted from the MDCT data (like a whitening filter), which produces 'frequency residue'. The floor is converted to an LSP (line spectral pair) representation and then it and the MDCT residue are vector quantized into the final output codewords by a cascade of custom VQ codebooks that are packed along in the header of the bitstream. The result is one vorbis audio packet.
The audio packet is them embedded into an Ogg bitstream page and the page (when full of packets) is shipped out in the stream.
The decode side does the reverse, but without all the masking analysis. We extract the string of packets from the Ogg bitstream, and for each packet unpack the floor and residue, take the dot product and then do an inverse MDCT to recover the time-audio frame. Each frame is lapped and added to the previous frames and we get the original audio out.
Very simple, see? :-) To be fair, the masking analysis is the only real black magic. What I'm doing is almost entirely based on the masking curve data published in the late 50's by Robert Ehmer.
One thing the current release of Vorbis does not have is channel coupling (like mid-side stereo, although we'll be doing it differently). Beta 1 and beta 2 actually include multiple totally separate channels. The fact that we equal and better mp3's quality missing this huge piece is exciting. Mid/side stereo in mp3 drops the final bitrate of a stereo stream by 30-50kbps. To get a real comparison of Vorbis vs. mp3, compare mono streams or force the mp3 encoder not to use joint/intensity stereo (eg, -m m in LAME 3.84). Vorbis at 56kbps mono beats mp3 at 80kbps. At equal bitrate there's no comparison at all.
Slashdot:For those just tuning in, what's the project all about, and how did it get started?
The Vorbis codec is a lossy audio compression codec similar to mp3, but we're shooting for better performance (lower bitrates for a given level of quality) as well as keeping it totally Free as in Beer and Speech. I started work on Vorbis a week or two after Fraunhofer sent out 'cease and desist' letters to several free mp3 encoder projects in the fall of '98. At that point, it was clear the worst case was happening; the squeeze was on by commercial entities to not only dominate the legal distribution of music, but the underlying technology as well. A 'free license' to owned technology means nothing (and that's why Real and Windows Media are also worthless as infrastructure to us).
Fraunhofer (and MPEG in general) and the RIAA are also a bit too friendly behind the scenes, if not entirely in bed together. If you really believe SDMI is about protecting the artists, well, I have some wonderful Oklahoma beachfront property for sale at prices that are a steal, but you'd better act fast!
It's ironic that at the same time mp3 has been an agent to open up music distribution, it's becoming a tool for commercial interests to reclaim control. If online music is to fulfill its potential, an oligarchy can't be allowed to control its distribution or the technology behind it. The Internet would not have reached critical mass if it was a product of Microsoft or AOL or Oracle... It wouldn't ever have happened. Corporate control of every facet of online music will just strangle it in the cradle. The inventors of the Internet 'gave it away,' and that's been a great thing for business. However, the important lesson here is that the foundations were set in stone and wrought from iron before any company had self-interested influence. TCP/IP (brought to you by research laboratories) is elegant and farsighted; it's taken thirty years for it to begin wearing thin. E-mail is similarly brought to you from academia. HTML, on the other hand, (as ultimately brought to you by Netscape and Microsoft) makes good engineers weep and gnash their teeth.
We need to have unbreakable free music foundations in place before letting the commercial interests have their way with the infrastructure. I wouldn't rely on any infrastructure they build themselves.
Ogg and Vorbis are trying to continue the principles for which we in the open world see mp3 standing.
Slashdot: What are you working on right now?
Vorbis second beta. General quality improvements, additional bitrate modes in the encoder (96-350kbps stereo, mono modes), bugfixes, etc. After beta 2 (look for on Tuesday at about the time LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose opens), we have low bitrate modes to finish, channel coupling (joint stereo and joint surround) and constant bitrate modes (Vorbis by default is VBR).
Others in the project are working on tools... Mike Smith, Kenneth Arnold and others are knee deep in utils, Jack and Chad of Icecast are adding Ogg streaming to Icecast, Ralph Giles and Rob Kaye are working on stream mixing, metadata streams (Ralph is also hacking on MNG over Ogg). Kim, Tori and Emily at iCast are writing documentation...
The project has also outgrown our group. There are now Vorbis news sites (like govorbis.com and vorbiszone.com), an all-vorbis music label (vorbisonic.com) and other vorbis related sites poppin up. angrycoffee.com is working on Vorbis tutorials for beginners.
Within the core team, we need to get more people who are up on signal processing aspects like in the community around LAME.
Slashdot: Is this your full-time thing?
Yes. Ogg and Vorbis development are sponsored by iCast and they're also deploying it internally. In addition to paying salaries, they're pitching it to the industry and providing legal assistance.
Slashdot: Xiphophorus is a collection of people, projects and tools. What's going on with the collective?
Vorbis is a 'serious' project now, so we're expensing the massive espresso consumption ;-) The few of us who are now getting paid to do this can afford to be extremely intense about it. Other contributors still come and go. Right now, we're all pretty much focused on Ogg Vorbis; I have to apologize to all the cdparanoia users out there. I'll be working on it again in the future, but right now I only have so many cycles.
Ogg and Vorbis are currently getting more outside attention than we can really gracefully handle (well, handle and still get work done at the rate we're used to, which was still always slower than we want ;-) Apparently someone on some list claimed 'Vorbis was dead' because we hadn't updated the Web site in a month. Ha! If we were 'dead' we'd have plenty of time to write HTML :-) And answer mail. Anyone who sent me personally mail in the past month and a half, I'll answer it eventually, I promise...
Slashdot: Are you out to replace mp3 as the sound format of choice? If not, why not, and if so, what are the challenges?
We're out to keep things Free (capital F intentional). If MPEG turned around and made the mp3 spec and patents public domain, we'd definitely declare victory (and then continue coding to improve Vorbis). But we all know that isn't going to happen. More likely, if Fraunhofer decides we're a threat, they'll just delay licensing (remember kids: free licenses to binaries aren't worth jack) until the competition dies down. Then they'll squeeze again.
Honestly, I don't think we're going to 100% replace mp3 (people still use RAR for Christ's sake). I lay better than even odds on us eclipsing mp3 in the next year if the licensing picture stays the same. We also intend to have 80-96 kbps stereo streams that sound better than mp3 128 by that point, so people (and businesses) won't exactly have to give anything up to save money. Also expect hardware support soon, possibly by end of year if things go smoothly.
Slashdot: You talk a lot on your Web site about Open software. Which came first, the desire to deliver multimedia, or the drive to develop it openly?
My real hacking skills germinated at the MIT Lab for Computer Science. I'd coded practically all my life before getting to MIT, but I'd always been the best coder I knew, so I hadn't really learned much. When I got to MIT, I didn't feel stupid but it drove home that I had a lot of catching up to do. Most of my mentors were from the previous generation (all open source people) but a few of the very hardcore people were younger than me, too.
I've been a musician all my life too, albeit not a very good one (I feel a bit like Soliari in Amadeus) and Ogg was born in '93 when I bought a 1 Gig hard drive and a sound card and thought 'this is unlimited space! I can put music on this! And do things with it!'. I quickly found out that a Gig wasn't unlimited by a long shot, not even in '93 (I filled it with mail eventually), so I started muddling with compression. Greg Hudson made an offhand remark about there not being any good, free, music compression libs at the time, and Squish was born. I got a letter from a lawyer a few months later politely informing me that 'Squish' was a registered trademark and if I didn't change the name of my software, I could forget ever owning anything in the Western World ever again. Mike Whitson renamed the codec 'OggSquish'. The Ogg project was born. Oh, and we plan to release an updated Squish codec again sometime in the next year.
does anyone actually think that with the current popularity of MP3s that anything else will take over? unti something much better comes along, MP3 will, IMHO, be the standard.
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
You have to wonder, even if it's technologically superior, is there any shot of it beating out .mp3 as the standard for digital music? I just don't think it has much of a chance. MP3 is just too embedded into society. It's going to take another leap forward in technology to dethrone it - not just some nice enhancements.
--
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
OK, the Motion Picture Experts Group, a non-commercial cooperation of engineers specialising in the field of audio and video compression spend a decade scribbling away and coming up with audio layer one, tweaking it to audio layer two (.mp2) and again tweaking it to audio leyer three (.mp3). If they are experts, why didn't they come up with the same algorithms as these smart eggs, or should that be smart oggs? (possible reason - movie audio differs dynamically from music audio, so the different techniques exploit these differences?) FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I remember hearing all this praise a couple of years ago about VQF files -- all the quality of MP3 files, in much less space. (Or something like that.) Without mainstream support, VQF files quietly went unnoticed. Microsoft now promotes its Windows Media codecs, which deliver very good performance in a very compact file, but suffer from the obvious platform dependence issues. Where does Vorbis stand in all of this? Right now, it looks like just another good idea that will be defeated by good marketing.
For more information, click here.
Does he carry?
I would expect slashdot to provide URL to informations readily available on the web, it is common pratice today. More information is available from http://www.vorbis.com/
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Vorbis sounds awesome!! The one thing I am most interested in, though, is the ability to have a hardware player, similar to the Genica or Pine models, and my trusty Apex DVD player. People aren't using mp3 just on their computers anymore-- it's moving into "real life", and I suspect the format will have a hard time unless there is real, tangible, non-vapor hardware available.
When we get the first wavelet-enabled version, I would love to see Ars Technica (or somebody else) do an independent technical review of the audio quality vs. mp3 (and maybe vqf, aac, windows media, and whatever else there is...)
The last test I did with my ears, vs LAME 3.84, LAME was easily (subjective) better. I encode everything at 160 stereo, and Ogg just didn't sound as good at the maximum bitrate available.
The LAME team takes extra care in analyzing the output and comparing it the FhG encoder and the previous version of LAME (just in case something broke). How does the Ogg team compare results? Is it with listening tests?
-mark
Fraunhofer (and MPEG in general) and the RIAA are also a bit too friendly behind the scenes, if not entirely in bed together.
There's been no real reason to think that MP3 will be "controlled" by the dark forces of the RIAA. MP3 is VHS, Ogg is Beta (a bit better - but is it worth the switch?), and the only way that it is going to catch on is through scaring people away from MP3. The RIAA is the best bogeyman to come along, so it's no surprise that they're used; and Fraunhofer - well, Germans always scare people, don't they?
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
oh, this is all fine and dandy news on a technical front, but what will this file format come to be known as? How will real people in the real world deal with such a cumbersome name?
.vog files? .vo files? will we say V.O.G. or vog or V.O. or voh? .orb? .vorb? maybe we can all wait for the 5th rev, and call them vo5 files! (refers to a brand of shampoo here in the US)
will they be
The word 'emmpeethree' has a certain flow, a rythym that satisfies. I think it is an important element to the continued success of the mp3 format. The histroy of the mp3 format shows the success is due to being in the right place at the right time, but now that we have an easy, universally understood 'name' to use in mp3, Vog Orbis has its work cut out for it. There'll have to be a catchy abbreviation or truncation before this will move forward.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Who are the likely manufacturers for hardware oggvorbis decoders? I'm thinking of buying an MP3 player, but if this is going to come off soon I'll wait. The existing MP3 players all seem to require either USB or Windows (or both), and I'm definitely sold on the idea of open solid-state music...
Keep up the good work, congratulations on finding someone to fund it!
--
W.A.S.T.E.
I would agree that a new format isn't likely to change many people over unless it's a fairly significant advance, or unless distributers like mp3.com, etc start pushing it while Napster et al shut down. Neither of which are likely to happen. Perhaps the only ways a new standard would be able to gain a foothold would be if it offered significantly better compression (which is, I think, quite difficult at this point, unless it becomes much more lossy) or if it took less time to encode.
As for open standards, I don't think anyone can take mp3's away from people at this point. It's too widespread (who doesn't have an encoder these days) and there are enough companies backing it for their own good.
credo quia absurdum
What is being done to help with syncing issues? As multi-media gets more widespread, its going to be very useful to have the sound playback systems independent from the graphics but with a losely controled sync signals. One feature that seems to be missing is to be able to say "play the audio frame 3433 to start in exactly 2.1 seconds". Fixed bitrates make that easy but VBR gets to be a real mess unless there is extra info in the audio data.
Remember, Fraunhofer owns the MP3 patents. They can set any licensing terms. They could, for example, do what RSA did with theyr crypto systems, licensing only one controlled implementation for general use, and go after anyone disseminating unlicensed encoders/decoders.
(Sure, you'll be able to find them on the Net, but if RedHat can't legally put them on their CDs, they're in the same twilight zone as arcade ROMs.)
As there is a single point of control for MP3, the RIAA could easily pay Fraunhofer a few billion (or even buy them outright through a front company), and get open MP3 pulled, forcing everybody to upgrade to encrypted SDMI formats.
Owning the patents for a technology you wish to bury can be very powerful. When Macrovision developed the copy protection mechanism embedded in all DVD players, they also created and patented a device for removing the protection. This enables them to sue anyone attempting to sell such a device or distribute the details of constructing one. (Not that it eliminates said information, but it drives it sufficiently underground to keep the ordinary people from seeing it.)
Once Fraunhofer start getting heavy with MP3 licensing, the penguinhead army will adopt Vorbis in a flash, and hopefully so will Windows-using music fans. Then the battle lines shift to hardware players.
is NOT to replace mp3. With the current widespread use of mp3's, I think new codecs stand very little chance of replacing mp3 quickly and completely. The smart way to go about it, is to slowly shift your codec into the market. In this case, I would try to get Ogg-support in WinAmp and the like, and facilitate Ogg-trading on napster and it's peers. If people can transparantly mix their mp3's and oggs, you will get to a point where people are saying:
"Hey, this piece of music is available in both mp3 and ogg format, but oggs are a lot smaller, so I think I'll download that one."
I was wondering if anyone knew if players like Winamp and XMMS support Ogg Vorbis. And if so, what can I use to make .ogg files.
:wq
Also, maybe off-topic in the current state of development, but it would be nice to have ID3-like tags allowing for longer titles than how it is now.
VQF is superior in many ways to mp3, even the encoder will let you encode live streams on the fly (with a fast cpu). Sound quality is much better and files are 30% smaller. How many vqf files have you come across?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Has anyone wrapped this code in a QuickTime or WM codec so that we can easily do A/B comparisons with the existing codecs like QDesign & WM Audio?
If its within one of these common replay systems it will be a lot easier to drive adoption.
as for me, i plan on investigating it more as soon as i get home today. it sounds (of course) great, we'll see how it
still, just like mp3, it won't be a replacement for CDs.. i haven't downloaded an mp3 in months, actually. i can't play them in my car, and why would i want to? CDs sound better. sure, there's the hassle of switching CDs, but really, with a nice sized disc-changer, that's just a once-a-month switch.
at one time i had 13gigs of mp3s available on my machine. that was over a year ago. right now i have none.
it's useful, but only for songs you don't really care about, you have an urge to hear them, download it, listen to it, and you're done. maybe check out a new album. but songs you care about, ones you want in a collection (i hope i'm speaking for more than myself here), are worth having on CD.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Yeah... vqf got screwed because the standard was closed. It made small files, but the encoder was slow and sucked big-time, and for years, there was no way to skip around in the track. Even now, fast-forward is implemented (apparently) by muting the sound and playing the track as fast as the CPU can handle, and rewinding is done by muting the sound, starting at the beginning of the track, and applying the fast-forward algorithm until you reach the point you want to rewind to. This sort of horrible support will be avoided by Vorbis simply because it will be open. People couldn't write their own stuff to work with vqf, and so the format went to hell in a handbasket. Even if Vorbis doesn't catch on, you can *at least* be assured that you will always have a player you can port to your new OS.
It may not go mainstream, but it will not be defeated like vqf was.
And if we get hardware players, you can bet I'll be moving all my music to vorbis!
So make a WMP codec. And for that codec, and all of the plugins readily available, make very very good installation instructions, or better yet, automatic installation procedures, so that even the shy-est users can do it.
I've got my horse, Bessie. She gets me where I wanna go just fine, why would I wanna buy one of them new-fangled autocarriages?
However, the important lesson here is that the foundations were set in stone and wrought from iron before any company had self-interested influence. TCP/IP (brought to you by research laboratories) is elegant and farsighted; it's taken thirty years for it to begin wearing thin. E-mail is similarly brought to you from academia. HTML, on the other hand, (as ultimately brought to you by Netscape and Microsoft) makes good engineers weep and gnash their teeth.
So, what about Delphi - designed and maintained by a single company for purely commercial interests? It has an elegent design which accepts new features as required, and has been updated over the years to fit new ideas without sacrificing backwards compatability or elegence.
And then there's C++ - a similar language that, whilst undoubtedly powerful, is maintained by a standards body which means that updating the langauge is a task with a duration measured in years.
Not all things under corporate control turn out poorly. HTML is not a good example.
That's fine, but this is _free_ and open source.
Furthermore, if this new format prooves to have better quality for lower bitrates then there is an additional incentive to use it. Even if it didn't people don't really have a loyalty to Codecs. People talk about MP3's because that's the only tech out there right now that provides the quality for the space constraints. It could be WAV, or AIFF, or RealAudio for all they care. Since they don't have to buy new hardware to support new codecs it doesn't matter to them.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I went out and bought a minidisc player for about $200. It is a dream since discs are only $1.50 a piece and hold as much as a CD. It supports digital recording and is smaller than almost all mp3 players except maybe that mp3 player in a pen from sony. Anyway, it will save you on flash costs and on long trips, having ALL of your music instead of 32 megs worth is a real plus. Only downside that I have found, realtime recording, but you only record once so it hasn't been a hassle. Check out minidisc.org if you are interested. Some players even support text transfer from the computer ect, and it saves so much on media costs.
Look at TwinVQ and AAQ, as well as other formats that have appeared since mp3. pretty much all of them were marqinally better than Mp3. but mp3 kept its corner on the market.
mp3 is gonna be like VHS or NTSC television in the united states. Its gonna take years to get people to switch. even if the alternative is miles ahead of it in terms of quality and features. The people in the know will use it but not the general public, even if all existing players could play it somehow.
There's already an MP4 in existence, as far as I remember it's more of a MIDI on steriods type of file format. It contains a description of how the sound source is meant to sound along with the notes.
This is probably a good place to start looking.
The similarities are remarkable. A more-advanced better compression takes on an established older, poorer one.
:)
My prediction: OV will be used but will not be mainstream, much like BZ2... and music available in OV will also be available in MP3 (that's not really a suprise, is it?
"You can represent this entire problem as a 3x2 matrix"
Anyone have any insight as to the expected CPU usage (relative to mp3)? Even if the format has a smaller file size relative to mp3, decoding the stream will suck if it uses two times as many CPU cycles.
Why can't they exist together? As long as you've got a player I don't see why you should bother converting your MP3's.
but at the same time, i think the music industry serves a purpose. they give me songs from bands i like in a convenient package.
now, mp3 is nice and all, but that infrastructure is just going to be replaced by another commercial one. bands are not just going to start recording their songs at home and sending them out over the net by themselves. no one could be heard over the din of horribly crappy bands that would pollute the net in that situation.
not only that, but most bands can't afford it.
i agree that the attitude the record industry is taking is ridiculous and fascist, but they do serve a purpose, and simply need to be reminded of their place.
in the mean time, working on better sounding formats is always a Good Thing(tm).
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
What's so bad about RAR?
:)
I always thought its compression was superior to almost all alternatives except Quantum (paq) which takes an eternity and a couple of others that are even slower.
It's definately better than zip and gzip.... right?
I havn't had to look into compression too much since I moved up from my 68 meg harddrive back in the day
~Chris
The main reason Beta died (except for use in the video industry) was that it was proprietary. Sony wouldn't let anyone else make a Beta machine. JVC allowed (for a fee, of course) anyone to make a VHS machine. Ya, Sony did finally allow licensees, but by that time it was too late.
So, you might want to re-write that statment:
MP3 is Beta, Ogg is VHS.
The biggest difference is that Beta and VHS came out around the same time and fought it out from the start. MP3 is already established, so it might be hard for Ogg to de-throne it.
One thing the current release of Vorbis does not have is channel coupling (like mid-side stereo, although we'll be doing it differently). Beta 1 and beta 2 actually include multiple totally separate channels. The fact that we equal and better mp3's quality missing this huge piece is exciting.
This makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over.
For those who don't get it yet, please read the writing on the wall: The old king of web music, mp3, isn't dead yet but he's dying. The new king is born, and his name is Ogg.
The old king is dying of complications from a disease brought on by misuse of intellectual property.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
mp3 doesn't sound nearly as good as CD, and probably Ogg Vorbis won't either. they're good enough for listening to a song that i don't like enough to buy (ie, i only like the one song by the band), or checking out a new CD that i'm unsure whether i like or not, etc. etc.
but for serious listening there isn't a format that can replace my CDs yet. (yet.) thus, hardware mp3 players have always seemed rather useless to me. (why would i want to listen to an mp3 in a place where, obviously, i could have a CD player?) now the hybrids that can play CDs containing both are convenient, though i will more than likely, not put any mp3-CDs in...
minidisc is cute, but, that's a whole other thread...
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
For those who are curious, yes, it does appear that this usage of "ogg" was lifted from the netrek lexicon: http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html
Gnutella seems like a good alternative to Napster. However, I don't think it's Free, despite the name.(I just looked at a Gnutella website, they mentioned joining development teams, but I believe they're developing clients only)
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer networking server, but there is no central server (unlike Napster). Instead, individuals set up their own Gnutella server, and so the users are responsible (so MPEG can't sue the company if music piracy occurs with Gnutella).
Although some people think that this will increase piracy, any sort of file-sharing tool increases piracy somewhat. That's because pirated software/music represents a percentage of the files that users want to share, and file-sharing tools increase the amount of files that users can share. (Of course, with free software and music, piracy becomes obsolete. So if you use free software (like if you start from Debian or QLinux), then you can't really pirate software, or be accused of it easily.)
I think that the best solution would be a large, Internet-coordinated development effort to create a Gnutella-like server and client, that are Free Software. This would probably be the best solution to the problems with Napster, plus it would offer a powerful file-sharing solution for GNU/Linux users. (This suggestion is not to make piracy easier, but to make free software/music sharing simpler. While the Internet is very good for many purposes, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks offer some advantages.)
--
daedalus587
--- BPT Suits are for suits.
How about MP5? Or is that a machine gun?
..gonna flip when he finds out that this name is similar to his?
When death looks you in the eye, smile. Someone needs to cheer him up.
Blank CDRs are going for about $0.50 / disk. Using ogg or mp3 format, they hold roughly 10 CDs worth of music on one disk
:P obviously. but i thought it needed to be said... some people don't realize, but if you listen... at least, i can't help but hear the difference. mp3s soudn awful to me.
;P
but this isn't all good, it's a question of quantity vs. quality
MP3 players which double as CD Players are the perfect solution -- you can burn your own music collection onto CDs and listen to them anywhere. As the original poster correctly points out, we need ogg support on these hardware mp3 players! Fortunately, most are flashable, so upgrading to new, better formats (such as ogg) shouldn't be a problem.
the whole hardware-mp3-player hype is mind boggling to me. i mean, i understand it, as a fad and gadgetry thing, but.. you're basically making a downgrade in your audio system when you go from a CD player to a straight-up mp3 player. the hybrids are the obvious, good, middle-ground.. as long as the price difference is reasonable.
the hardware fad is so bizarre though,.. there was never this kind of reaction over MOD or S3M
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Vorbis was an inquisitor who believed he would be the next profit of the Great God Mighty Horns Om. Nanny Ogg is the matriarchal nymphomaniac of the Ramtop town of Bad Ass. I just can't imagine them ever having a kid!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
So what if Fraunhofer decides to get pissy about ownership? MP3s will still exist, and so will the players. Fraunhofer would dig its own grave if it decided to make all the old mp3s incompatible with the new players. People would still use the old software, and just keep trading, and then Fraunhofer would have its own little fiasco of a proprietry format on its hand's, that no one would use. Its pretty much useless, mp3 is here to stay. As for Vobb, and all those other silly named software codecs, good luck, really. But its not likely all those napster-scour-gnutella-freenet users are going to switch just because another megacorporation is threatening a software format.
Maybe Franhofer realized all of this, and is not going to do anything, all the better.
Remember, its just software, and files, and so on.
Fred
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - H.L. Mencken
what would make you resist getting a player that uses a new format (which will of course still support MP3)
.mp3 and .ogg is not tangible in any sense and therefore isn't relevent.
"Mom, can I get an OGG player?"
"We just bought you an MP3 player, Billy. Absolutely not."
Seriously though, why spend more dough if the one you have isn't broken? I'm tickled at this story but I'm not feeling too optimistic for some grand overnight switch to a new format. As for your analogy about CDs replacing tapes, uh-uh. Tapes can get eaten, quality goes downhill quick. CDs are much more stable in a physical sense. The difference between
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
CDex is a cdripper for windows that's GPLed. It comes with Vorbis support in its 1.30 beta2 version. Very nice program I use it when I'm in windows and don't want to reboot to use cdparanoia. It also includes LAME 3.84 as it's default encoder. Currently it's the only program that i've found that makes encoding Vorbis .ogg files easy. CDex Homepage, and Source Forge.
I've been looking at a lot of the posts, and most seem to be wringing their hands over whether or not this will end up outgrowing mp3, complete with obligatory references to the VHS/Beta cliche. The most important thing that can be done to ensure that Ogg Vorbis catches on and eventually dominates is to establish transparent support with the major playback software giants. Getting the codecs prepackaged with pieces like WinAmp and the rest of the herd will ensure that kids will be able to play what they download, and if the quality difference is important to them, they'll eventually make the switch, as it were. Of course, this strategy cannot be executed in a vacuum with the expectation of success. The word needs to be put out through the major mp3 distribution channels that Ogg Vorbis is available, that music in that format is available, and that using that format isn't going to be a hassle at all, as long as you have the latest version of your player of choice. Thoughts?
Can this be done with minimal, or *no* loss of quality? IOW, can ogg represent the exact same DCT parameters, block sizes, etc, as mp3 does? Because it would just be that bit of icing on the cake if I would wave my wand and have all my mp3's magically become oggs.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Pirates! Thieves! Anarchists, the lot of you! These Vorbis project people should be locked up for creating tools for copyright violation! Anyone with a .ogg file on their hard drive is guilty of conspiracy to defraud musicians!
If so, then why does this web site still use GIFs?
I guess there's a difference between advocating freedom and just reporting on it. Hats off to Slashdot for having the journalistic integrity to stand back and not take sides on the issues.
May I ask how the Ogg Vorbis team feels about their chance of getting sued for writing software that possibly allows easier pirating of copyrighted music?
Yeah, the world sux, but I am not the one making up the laws.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Doesn't this remind anyone of PNG vs. GIF? How many of us use GIF still? Why? I would guess that the majority of tools are still GIF producers. The success of this format will depend on what tools save and produce Vorbis! I'm not talking Linux tools, either, but mainstream Windoze, since that's still where the majority of content is generated -- not by me ... by others ;-)
I think the interviewee has a very good point. This is what we do know:
1. We know the RIAA wants people to move from MP3 to SDMI.
2. People won't do it voluntarily.
3. Fraunhofer wants to retain control of their patents and wants to make money on their MP3 patents.
Here's a worst-case scenario:
1. RIAA acquires Fraunhofer's MP3 patents.
2. RIAA enforces said patents, either revoking licenses or raising the price to an extreme level, thus stopping further support for MP3 in terms of players and rippers.
3. Software dries up. People are forced to migrate to new SDMI standard.
Thanks guys for putting in the effort to make this Free alternative.
I just tried out OGG by encoding an MP3 file from my Moby CD (Porcelain). MP3 was sized at 5.64mb @ 192kb/s and the OGG file was a nice 3.64mb. I saved 2mb there! Encoding from MP3 to OGG took about 2min on my Athlon Thunderbird 700 @ 950 For arguments sake lets say that encoding to OGG saves 2mb per file then I will save about 300mb! (150 files x2)
As for sound quality I noticed no difference between 192kb/s from the MP3 format to the 119kb/s from the OGG format.
I feel that we have a winner here and it will just be a little longer before that OGG will be dominant over MP3 if not its equal. I just hope they get the support they need.
OT: I did find a small and annoying bug in the plugin player. When you are playing an OGG file and try to peruse the playlist it will always bring you back to the song that is playing. You'll have to stop the track to cycle through the other songs, no biggie though.
Just in case you are wondering where the downloads are, http://www.vorbis.com/download.html
When death looks you in the eye, smile. Someone needs to cheer him up.
I think there's a project called FreeNet, at http://freenet.sourceforge.net
Excellent point. I hope the developers focus on reducing file size and increasing compression. Since mp3 and this new alternative are both lossy compression methods, people are willing to accept that and won't care too much about quality better than current mp3 quality. what they will care about is the file size, especially when talking about transferring stuff over the internet. knowing that i can get a similar (not necessarily better) quality in a smaller file size would make me more willing to adopt this new format.
also, make sure that incomplete files remain playable like mp3. it sucks to download 95% of something and have it cut off and not be able to listen to any of it. also good in terms of previewing what you're downloading.
... isn't just that it's already roughly as good as MP3 on quality and better on compression, but that it can continue to be developed freely until it's much, much better in the future.
Much has been made of the fact that it's free of the MP3 patent problems, but it gains in another way as well: freedom from the inertia and politics of standards committees, and freedom to depart from a single key idea or solution (MP3 is inherently a straightjacket). This pretty much guarantees that its development will proceed at a much faster pace than multi-corporate commercial developments in the same area, as long as its main proponents don't abandon it for a few years.
With that proviso, it seems to me that these inherent advantages put it in a very strong position similar to that of open-source operating systems versus their closed counterparts.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Just because most of the stuff on Napster is poorly encoded doesn't mean mp3's can't be CD quality. Go to www.r3mix.net and look under the quality section.
I personally use ExactAudioCopy and LAME to encode my OOP CDs and no matter how hard I try, I can't tell mp3 apart from the original.
While it sounds like Mr. Montgomery has a great grasp of the technical aspects of his effort, I'd have liked the interviewer to ask some questions about the project's strategy for getting the eventual product adopted at large. The scenario that comes to my mind is the GIF format. Unisys started enforcing its patents to this technology in 1994, requiring developers to pay a fee to use the GIF format [redundant usage I know, but it seems to read better]. There was widespread grumbling and talk of revolt, but here we are, six years later, still using it while its anointed successor, PNG, languishes. The reason is all of the legacy code out there that must be accomodated. MP3 has gained such a foothold that any tool is going to have to support it. That being the case, the 'good enough' mindset takes over, and it becomes much harder to displace a technology that's already doing an adequate job. If there's a battle-plan to get VQL adopted, I'd like to hear what it is. I might even help :-)
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
can't wait
Got shack?
ShackCentral Network
Worlds best gaming network!!!
...wasn't there an article on Tomorrow's World on telly about 10 years ago that demonstrated wavelet compression?
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Could've sworn it's been around for a while... heck, I was even thinking of doing the obvious things and coding up the algorithm myself at one stage!
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
These chips aren't upgradable, at least in any meaningful way. Some commercial players are based on DSP chips, but generally the power consumption is high, so they don't tend to run from batteries. The empeg is a good example, though I believe it uses a strongarm chip instead of a dedicated DSP. The creative nomad jukebox (still vapor) is another example, where they only get 3-4 hours from high capacity NiMH batteries.
There are an aweful lot of hardware players running from batteries that use these existing chips that only decode MP3. Perhaps the download software could convert vorbis to mp3 during the download? Of course, if a nice low-power vorbis decoder chip existed, maybe one could make a player that only used vorbis (longer play time) and convert mp3 to vorbis during the download. The use may end up using vorbis and not even know it.
Well, to avoid making a truely shameless plug (only a bit shameless?), I'll avoid posting a link.... if you really want to see it, follow the link to my site above in the user info. The player is still more or less vapor, but maybe in a couple weeks circuit boards will actually be available.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
VQF is also superior to MP3 (which is, frankly, the worst lossy sound format currently out there), some of which went into the making of MP4. It has free (as in beer) encoders and decoders for Windows (and has had, for some time).
Up against opponents like this, Ogg Vorbis is going to have to pull some amazing rabbits out of the hat, if it's going to be seen as a serious alternative.
Now, I'm not saying that's impossible, or even unlikely - the (truly) Free software world has the benefits of strength in numbers, strength in minds, strength in flexibility, and no paymaster to kow-tow to, every five minutes.
What I -am- saying, though, is that Ogg Vorbis isn't going to achieve anything remotely considerable as success if it's chiefly being compared against a dead & decaying standard, that is only staying upright by the sheer will-power of a few million zombie high-priests.
IMHO, Ogg Vorbis has to (at least) match, if not surpass MP4, in EVERY respect, if it's to be a genuine contender in the War of the Formats.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm curious, what is it you feel compelled to defend yourself from?
XsX
- The
.gz format was created because free software couldn't get a Unisys patent license for the LZW algorithm at the core of the .Z format and because Phil Katz's deflation algorithm.
- The
.ogg format was created because free software couldn't get a Fraunhofer patent license for the MPEG layer 3 algorithm at the core of the .mp3 format and because the xiph.org people had a better algorithm.
See the similarities?<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't know about RAR vs. BZ2, but they're both a lot tighter than ZIP.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Video's got vastly more information to it and our eyes are a hell of a lot more picky about things than our ears are. There's at least 10 to 100 times the information (depending on what you're comparing- speech for example has a usable bandwidth of 8kHz (phones...) and NTSC video which is about the lowest actually usable resolution of video takes something like 6MHz.) and many of the techniques that get optimal compression with lowest computed error end up with noticable artifacts.
That's not to say that it's not a worthy goal- it is and people are looking for ways of doing it. It's just that it's a hell of a lot harder than Vorbis ended up being; and Vorbis wasn't that easy either.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Like, now?
-- Only unbalanced people can tip the scales.
I don't know why everybody says it won't take over mp3... It's simply better. Most people I know have been waiting for a better music format for a while now. And most of the mp3 freaks are the geeks, who are going to jump on it the second it comes out. I know I will. :')
It's like comparing magnetic tape to CD. It'll maybe take a little bit for everyone to convert, but it will happen.
So I say: "Bye bye, mp3!"
--------------
--------------
$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
even the best MP3s, and i have made them myself, do not sound as good.
MP3 is lossy compression, this is an expected..er... feature.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
How many video players could play both formats? And how much did it cost to buy one player? IIRC, the choice of VHS / Betamax was fairly exclusive for most consumers: you had one or the other, unless you liked spending money on players for two formats one of which was pretty much guaranteed to be obliterated from the market by the other within a short space of time.
How many formats can Winamp handle? How difficult is it to get Winamp to handle even more formats? How much does it cost to get hold of Winamp? Different story, isn't it?
Vorbis isn't going to have the problem that users of mp3 aren't going to be able to play Vorbis streams, so mindshare won't be determined on the basis of ruthless winner-takes-all competition.
mp3.com still has links you can click on to get mp3 players and encoders. When the site started, not everybody could play mp3 format files - but all it takes is one short download, or grabbing the software of a magazine coverdisk. The fact that most people now have mp3 players needn't discourage anybody setting up a new music site (or managing an old one) from moving over to Vorbis and placing links for Vorbis players and encoders. More music, better quality, lower bandwidth? Ta very much...
"Knowledge is the continuation of ignorance by other means"
Wow, somebody actually noticed the Devo references. :) Sharp!
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Sausage King of Chicago
Vote Nader
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
People with guns in their house are 43 times more likely to be shot in their own home than people without a gun in their house. You're better off without the gun.
For a large amount of people thats not true, CT did a nice blind test (I know I know, a blind test in high end audio testing... whats the world coming to, everyone knows subjective tests only count if you know what you are listening to ay?). There were only very few songs in which a majority of the people could distuingish 256Kb/s from the original... and this is just a transparancy test, not a quality one. In blind quality testing even lower bitrates would be enough.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Similar things were said about the GIF format before Unisys started sending out all of the letters about "Your website owes us $5,000 in licensing..."
Frauhopper (sp?) has, as alluded to in the article, already started exercising some of that muscle. The price of freedom is truly eternal vigilance...
~Hammy
Actually, no, your MPEG doesnt rule. Its not even her, its some mexican.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
I was thinking that hardware support was key also - and I was wondering since the eMpeg (car mp3 player) had the source availiable, has anyone tried adding Ogg support to it yet?
---> Kendall
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Its fairly simple, actually. We're working up toward next month's article in Wired. Think of it as the pre-game show.
:)
As for trolling, this site is owned by VA. Therefore, I will without hesitation pee upon it.
Knowing what I know, you'd be drinking extra fluids too, just for the sake of it.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
The best interview I've read here in a long time! Truly brought up some wonderfull issues.
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
...Xiphophorus does mean, wins a prezel.
My guess is you don't know.
Why do you use words when you don't know what they are about?
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Hundreds of mp3's, new format... Ogg will need a [good!] encoder to tranform mp3's into oggs [and vice versa for quite a while, in order to alieviate 'hey Bob, you got that new [artist X] song?' "Yeah, but only in ogg"...]
If they deliver what they prmoise and make a decent converter, I'll bite
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Binary is dead. Given the current buzzwordiness of XML, we need a human readable XML based audio format like so.
<beep>
<frequency>50hz</frequency>
</beep>
<guitar>
<style>bass</style>
<note>high C</note>
</guitar>
...
One can apply the same statement conversely. An imperfectly encoded piece of music is listenable, but a badly encoded viedo isn't really worth watching. It's all rather relative and subjective. It all depends on the level of imperfections- some people have a higher level of tolerance than others. The point I was trying to make (Which you completely missed, btw...) was that our eyes will pick out imperfections out of an image quicker than your ears will pick out imperfections in an audio stream. (Did you know that for all the "quality" of a CD or DAT, it's still very imperfect (the sound is composed of linear approximations that are performed at 44 and 48kHz respectively)? Most people will not pick out the imperfections in encoding in those media, but they can notice artifacts in an MPEG2 stream from a DVD if they're using a PC monitor or HDTV monitor to view them.)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I converted a couple of my MP3's to OGG format to test it out.
.ogg files was about 1 meg (20%) smaller than the .mp3 .ogg files use a variable bitrate) .mp3 takes about 4-5% of my CPU time, whereas Winamp playing an .ogg takes about 25-30% of my CPU time. This is a big (and painful) jump for me, especially when I'm compiling.
The Results:
1) The
2) I couldn't tell the difference in sound quality (although I did notice that the
3) On my 266 NT box at work, Winamp playing an
I wonder if this number will improve as they progress through the beta stages...
Sadly, for most systems people use (whether it's a walkman, car stereo, or home stereo) you're not going to hear the differences- because the equipment is sufficiently imprecise enough to NOT accurately reproduce the distortions produced by the encoding, hence the "essentially perceptually lossless" claims for MP3, TwinVQ, and Vorbis- you're just not going to hear that much in the way of differences when it's encoded right. And that's just the equipment- not everyone can hear the differences when it's played on equipment that can reproduce the sounds as they're encoded.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
About a month ago, I went to hear a talk from one of folks at iCast, formally of icecast. The guy informed me that they are in fact working on an open-source video format. It is not based on mpeg4. I came away impressed with their committment to open source and their dedication to freeing users from the potential bonds of the mp3 format.
So says Handgun Control Inc. And you didn't even get the stat right. The lie they put up is that a gun is 22 times more likely to be used against someone you know. The thing they neglect to tell you is that that includes people you have just met before. The other thing they don't tell you is that most home defense is against people you know. Kinda makes sense, doesn't it?
Stop swallowing what the media tells you and actually research things yourself.
--
alSeen@narnia.net
Quick clue session: there is no such thing as a defensive patent! A patent is a patent. The notion of a 'defensive' one is the intellectual property equivalent of passive-aggressive behavior. At the end of the day it's just a patent and has inevitably, unavoidably put the control in one person's hands, or one entity's, along with all the tools for abuse. There is NO such thing as a defensive patent. If people's desire to create and share their OWN INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS is not enough to protect them legally- then we need a revolution of legal expectations, NOT 'defensive patents'. Are we not clear on the fact that the Vorbis people are doing their own work, in public, pointedly avoiding potential legal problems? Just how much credibility do we want to give potential attackers here? I'd rather be ready to scorn the potential attack and wave lots of evidence of prior art, instead. At some point that HAS to be enough. If it's not enough the system is so totally screwed that it's morally and ethically intolerable to cooperate with it in any way at all...
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Ralph is also hacking on MNG over Ogg
Does this mean potential for cartoon "Music Videos" and or other animation with Ogg Vorbis?
If OGG can keep sound and cartoon video synchronized better than Flash (which, at least on Linux, seems prone to getting out of sync), I'm definitely interested. I imagine "content authoring" tools for "Mng over Ogg" would end up more readily available and less expensive than ones for Flash.
Obviously, as someone who's always been jealous of people who have the skills and talents to do animation, I'd LOVE to get some inexpensive, open tools to play with.
Or am I getting my hopes up too quickly and/or misinterpreting this comment?
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Seriously speaking, Vorbis is named after the Pratchett character, but Ogg is not named after Nanny.
Best regards,
January
P.S. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. :-P
So to hell with the 'Dozers, their soundcards won't be producing clean enough recordings to flaunt Vorbis anyways (except for the few mad dozers running kilobuck soundcards, that's different)- if there's anybody capable of doing it, get this stuff deployed on MacOS _pronto_, then do something like make an extension that adds the Vorbis codec to Quicktime. Hell, just whip up a quick and dirty SIOW port for just the CLI tools and have people use that for now- but get it into the hands of the serious professional audio geeks. Heck with the soundcard people! The majority of CONTENT is not generated by CD rippers- I'd say that content was the digital audio, and the ripping is just translating content that already exists. Wouldn't you rather have the artists releasing Vorbis content themselves?
The software also supports MP3 and WMA encoding. Unfortunately, the software is currently Windows only.
My other first post is car post.
I have to assume that anyone listening to MP3 today, is listening at what is to them acceptable quality levels. Because it they thought the quality was unaceptable, they would not be accepting it by listening! Therefore I see the benefit of the new format being one of size.
.OGG (?) file with a bit-rate of 128 is equivilent in audio quality to the 192kbps .MP3s I currently use, then the advantage to me is the 33%-ish reduction in file size. This means I can buy a 40Gb hard drive instead of a 60Gb hard drive. I can get approximately 180 tracks on a CD-R instead of 120. I can download a track via my 56kbps modem in 20 minutes instead of 30, and an album in three hours instead of five. So all else being equal, why would I not choose to encode as .OGG files instead of .MP3? Why wouldn't I D/L .OGG files and take 50% longer to D/L .MP3?
.MP3 files. I need to be able to playback the new format using the same or comparable software to what I currently use. (People using "skinnable" GUI applications will want to continue to do so, as will those who prefer using command-line apps.)
.MP3 files out there, the playback applications simply need to be able to playback both formats interchangeably. It would be nice to have an MP3->OGG conversion utility, particularly one that did not cost in terms of audio quality. But that is not critical to the adoption of the new format.
If a
It is all down to one thing: The software that is available for me to use. I need to be able to encode my new CD's into the new format with the same degree of ease as I currently encode
It would appear that plug-ins for the common players are available, as are encoders for the common platforms. The coded is free, so anyone who wants can include it in their code. So it looks like there is every chance the software will be there when you want it.
As for the Gbytes of 'legacy'
But wait, it gets better! A minimum of one cent per download??? Just how much do they freakin' think I _make_ from the downloads at mp3.com? I don't CHARGE people for those, it's part of the incentive program. As near as I can figure this would be in the thousands of dollars! O_O
Oh, man, you are right, this _is_ scary. Hopefully I can get paid what I'm currently owed while still remaining 'blissfully ignorant' of this situation. To me, the one cent minimum royalty on each download is the CRUSHER- that is an absolute showstopper. Makes me glad I never invested in an encoder beyond BladeEnc (say what you want, if you have the capacity of pre-emphasising the highs you can get a really smooth full sound out of it that's not over-dull).
Who knew? I could see a scenario in which mp3.com itself switches to Vorbis- that is, if it is actually possible to levy an mp3-distributing tax of a penny a download. Oy... this is nuts... looks like I have to teach myself C programming just to be able to compile and build Vorbis binaries for my Mac just to be able to operate as a musician... talk about 'not in the job description'! o_O
I just finished doing a basic 'quality for size' test here where I created a wav of several different music types as well as speech, and ran it though an MP3 encoder (Musicmatch Jukebox 5, several times for different bitrates, and once for VBR) and an OGG encoder (once, using the standard encoder and standard options). If anyone is willing to host the resulting MP3 and OGG files, please email me at neuracnu at inlink dot com.
The 4 minute, 42 second file took a staggering 13+ minutes to encode into OGG format with this AMD K6/2 333MHz machine. MP3 encoding took a mere fraction of that.
The following files were produced:
- 64kbps MP3 (2.15 MB)
- 96kbps MP3 (3.23 MB)
- 128kbps MP3 (4.31 MB)
- 192kbps MP3 (6.46 MB)
- VBR MP3 (5.58 MB)
- VBR OGG (3.92 MB)
As you can see, the OGG file weighs in someplace between 96 and 128 kbps MP3 files. Judging from my cheesy processor load meter, I can see that playing the OGG file uses about twice as many calculations as playing any of the MP3s.
So far, I've found that OGGs are a little smaller than MP3s, take up a lot more clock cycles to play and a WHOLE lot more to encode. But how to they sound?
Well, my ear has been trained to listen for MP3-like audio artifacts, and I didn't hear anything glaring in the music itself. The speech, on the other hand, was another matter. In laymen's terms, high pitched voices (I used "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid soundtrack) sound overly 'hissy' when compared with MP3, and low pitched voice sounds bland and subdued. I was not impressed.
With these kinds of results, I'm not convinced that OGG will be replacing MP3 anytime soon at all.
--
go to www.empeg.com and see what you think. 36 Gb of mp3 files in a unit that fits in your dashboard like a standard stereo, but it runs Linux and it rocks!
I zapped all my CD's onto mine, downloaded a couple of ones and put on some of my own band - it is seriously versatile!
Frog51
In napster, add some code to include
In winamp, add an ogg codec as part of the standard release (I think one already exists as a plugin) and add the file association along with the winamp lightning bold icon. Windows doesn't even show file extensions by default - it'll take some people a while to even know it was there.
mp3 carries no brand loyalty - this could be very easy indeed.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
What are you, high? We here at AmigaRut Industries have been working for friggin' years to bring a hardware MOD player to market! The advantages are obvious -- with such a small file size, you can fit tens of thousands of derivative, unimaginative techno dance tracks on a single CD at a sound quality that approaches a rusty gramophone being played through a walkie-talkie sealed inside of a ziplock bag and submerged in a toilet!
I guess the lack of press coverage for AmigaRut's products is just another lamentable sign of the media conspiracy against forward-thinking Amiga-friendly companies striving to keep the hype alive for the latest, most bleeding-edge 80's technology.
Unfortunately, our MOD player has been delayed because we have been working to incorporate not only S3M files, but also the old Apple II faux-stereo PCM files, complete with a codec that faithfully reproduces the wonderful warm, buzzy sound of the Apple II system speaker.
You're not going to find value like that in any johnny-come-lately MP3 player, bucko!
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Technology is not mainstream unless there is some push factor.
Current pull factors ("It's cool!", "It's smaller!", "It sounds better!") wil not make it mainstream.
This is the same as PNG.
The tools to produce ogg files exist now, as do the players. Yes, same as PNG.
The difference is that most GIF's downloaded are from small sites [0]. There are no gallerys of GIF's for download, that are well used.
Most (legal) MP3's are downloaded from large(ish) sites. There are large 'gallerys', that are well used (cf mp3.com).
It is those sites, along with streaming audio content (internet 'radio'), that are made to pay the Fraunhofer group (via patent). They are the ones to benefit from the change. And it's a big benefit. (Files are generally smaller for same quality in Ogg - that saves money too, in terms of bandwidth).
There is a plugin for WinAmp, and Sonique. Apparently the Sonique plugin will be included in next main distribution too. Hopefully next verion of WinAmp too.
[0] Erm, prehaps 'site with a small number of gif's' would be more accurate.
There is no need for defensive patents. There is prior art - the main algorithms were publish over 30 years ago.
That's one helluva prior art.
Besides, when the aim is for free and patent free codec, patents are silly.
It's all patent free, deliberatly so.
Besides, what (exactly) can cause you to _need_ a patent for defensive purposes? A Patent gives a limited monopoly, to allow you to stop others from using your invention. how would they assist in this case?
I recently encoded "Dream Theater - Pull Me Under" as both 128kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
The Vorbis file was a bit larger, but not absurdly so. It's a variable bitrate format, apparently. I couldn't figure out how to disable VBR. I asked for an average bitrate of 128. As it stands, I doubt many people will for i in *.mp3; do ogglame --mp3input $i; done, but it's a workable option. The codec is improving.
The Vorbis file also took much longer to encode, but perhaps that was because I was using the highly-optimized Gogo encoder (ie, almost pure assembly) versus the in-development Ogglame encoder. I also seem to recall that variable bitrate encoding is generally slower.
The quality of the Vorbis file was excellent, as far as I could tell. I used the vorbis XMMS plugin to play it. My laptop's speakers leave something to be desired, but it even sounded a bit richer than the MP3 file.
I intend to use Vorbis in one of my upcoming projects. It's totally free, and it's basically painless to support (the API is very clean).
I'm under 21, so I can't buy the Ogg people a beer, but someone please do!
-John
So, everywhere but in the most popular and widely-used medium for digital image files, PNG is king? Rock on.
what about streaming audio. I think that the problem with mp3s is that we are still dealing with the distribution of music, be it files or cds with files on them. It seems to me that we could put a database of every song every made on the Internet/Web(for newbies) and allow people to play anything from that database without downloading files. This whole idea of playing lossy signals and waiting 10 minutes for each song baffles me. What do you think? Most people think this sounds like a weird idea but I think this will be the only way to make things work when we have these mega-bandwidth wireless devices. Why have storage on them? The idea of paying IBM for micro drives when we have tremendous storage elsewhere baffles my mind.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
really, just take some similliary developed video codec, or mpeg2 if there is none, and combine it with ogg. cant see why it wouldnt work ... any volunteers? :)
You can convert between mp3 and ogg files using LAME, the one which has OGG support, but there will be some quality loss. Formats are not compatible.
First, Beta 2 is not out yet!. It'll be on www.vorbis.org and www.vorbis.com in inch high letters when it is :-) We're still shooting for releasing tomorrow.
Consumers are not going to switch, the industry is. Both small and large industry players are going to try to avoid mp3 because of the licensing. For a small artist, $15,000 is alot of money. For the big companies, a flat percentage/per track fee is a huge chunk of cash. I stand to save my sponsor, iCast, around eight figures next year and they're not even one of the industry 'heavyweights' (yetNow, the Slashdot crowd is not the typical herd of consumer sheep, but we're also a drop in the consumer bucket (we have more weight as techies than marketing segments). Ogg Vorbis will achieve market penetration top down because it saves everyone a ton of money and frees business plans from a large, uncontrollable external influence And if *companies* will use Vorbis to eliminate being yanked around (who says mp3 prices aren't going to go up? Remember, FhG reserves the right to set licensing case-by-case; MusicMatch gave away around 20% of their company for a free encoder license), the Right Thing for individuals is even more clear.
"Ogg Vorbis: Don't sell your Soul (or your equity)"
Actually, this is backwards. Beta died exactly because Sony strangled the format with licensing in order to keep complete control of it. VHS won because of relatively open licensing. First off, you're probably comparing beta 1; there were several analysis bugs that are fixed in CVS and beta 2.Secondly, I mentioned although I did not emphasize, that Ogg Vorbis does not currently have channel coupling. If you're comparing Ogg Vorbis to LAME, you're comparing an essentially 'bundled mono' compression [today] to mid/side stereo in mp3. If you tell lame to compress two mono channels (like *current* Ogg Vorbis is), you'll see that you need to hike LAME up to about 192-225kbps to compare to Vorbis 128kbps in non-mid/side stereo. The fact that Vorbis (l/r stereo) still often beats LAME (m/s stereo) is astounding.
Yeah, it's not fair to say 'we're better than mp3 if you cripple mp3'. The point is that this is the next feature we're implementing and at that point, our bitrate, for a given stereo quality, will drop by about 40% just like in mp3. From Segher, a hardcore mp3 hacker and friend:
(I was being conservative with 30-50kbps) You're right. There's no secret conspiracy. It's all very out in the open. MPEG (FhG especially) is fundamental in developing SDMI, and RIAA-mandated SDMI is an integral part of AAC/MPEG4.Courtney Love and others go off on this particular rant much better than I do, so I'll let it go at that ;-)
Correct, but that is not the case here.MPEG is not non-commercial (why do people thing they are?). It is an industry standards consortium. The aim of the RIAA and MPEG is to *make money* and maintain the necessary control to do so. That does not mean that they will act abusively, however the chances of them doing so are greater without any moderating agent.
Who here remembers the old phone company joke [back when AT&T had a monopoly in the US]: "We don't care; we don't have to. We're the phone company."? Extrapolate and roleplay accordingly. Why do people get up in arms about Echelon controlling/monitoring email when it's perfectly OK for MPEG/RIAA/SDMI to do the same thing?
Also true for now. Vorbis decode is *not* more complex than mp3, I'm simply a better engineer than I am an optimizer. Decode is bound on the iMDCT and iDRFT transforms I wrote (couldn't find any open source for them at the time) and they're not particularly speedy. Segher, Takehiro from GOGO/LAME and others are looking at making my solid but slow code a little less station-wagon-like(BTW, if you're using top to see CPU usage, you're suffering from undersampling inaccuracy. At a minimum, compare mp3 decoders to vorbis decoders using 'time' not 'top' ;-)
IP patents are slowly turning into "watch the USPTO go clinically insane", so there are no guarantees. However, iCAST is footing the bill for an independent patent review of Ogg Vorbis. I'm probably not allowed to make an official statement at this time, but I will say (whether I should or notWe'll have an official statement eventually, but the Wheels of Justice are already grinding much faster than the lawyers involved are used to ;-)
I will also say I've been pleasantly surprised at how technically sharp the lawyers we're working with are.
Can anyone tell a bit more about what metadata can be included in the .ogg files? A link, maybe? It was shortly mentioned that someone was working on it... Or is reading the source the only way right now?
Actually, there is an issue of backwards compatibility. Vorbis decoding currently about 60-70% (or more) of a P166MMX processor, MP3 uses 5-10%. Vorbis makes the entire system unresponsive - it needs a lot more optimization before it becomes usable on older computers.
What is the big deal anyways. As long as I can get an MP3 encoder/decoder for free then I am happy. Hard drive space isn't an issue, and I don't think that an increase in audio quality by a few percent is enough for me to switch from MP3.
Slashdotters are the type of people that would be anti-GIF because it isn't "Free". The funny thing is that Slashdot uses GIF images and not PNG... I wonder why.
What I want to know is, what's the latency to encode a Vorbis stream to a given (say, 56K bits/sec) bitrate?
What I'm getting at is: can this technology be used for telephony?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'd love to see an Altivec-optimized implementation of Vorbis, included in Quicktime.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Better compression takes more CPU. The question is, what's more important?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The window latency is about 50ms. The rest of the encoding latency will be CPU-dependent.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Streaming is nowhere near economical as is. The existing commercial formats take way too big a bite of a would-be streaming company's budget. To make way for small broadcasters, you need Ogg or something like it.
Running a company like iCast, you see your margins get shaved to hairs by the likes of Rob Glaser and Bill Gates. But it's not feasible to engineer a new format from scratch and force its adoption on the market. So what do you do?
Find a smart, dedicated believer in an alternative format, and fund his dream project. In the end, you give away the product, but you also liberate yourself from crushing per-stream licensing and expensive, unstable, coercive OS choices. You give away the milk, and in return, you get the cow. If the standard takes off, they will be able to compete against Real, and iCast's investors will be slapping each other's backs over the best investment they ever made. Just keep the smart guys who made it possible, treat them well, and if the format takes over, you can get all the business for outsourced streaming (and very few companies want to do it themselves) since you are, after all, the source of the streaming server software that powers it.
That's why you should pay very close attention to the article and parent comment's mentions of hardware players and industry support. These guys have made a very smart play, one I wish I was in a position to make because I saw it coming.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
when going to CDs... that you won't hear the difference, but if you listen to a pristine vinyl LP on a high quality system and compare it to the CD equivallent, the vinyl LP still sounds better. it's smoother, has a 'warmer' sound to it.
obviously, though, vinyl wears out and the sound quality is never quite as good after the first few play throughs.
you are wrong about CDs containing more than our ears can use... that's like saying a movie contains more than our eyes can use. yes, you may not notice everything about the movie on every viewing, but on subsequent viewings you will notice things you didn't before...etc.
i realize there are also physical limitations to our ears, as there are to our eyes,.. however, once again, people can tell the difference between 60 frames per second and 80. even though your eye cannot distinguish each individual frame, you can tell one is 'smoother' than the other.
if you're not an audiophile, MP3s may be fine for you, maybe you cannot tell the difference.
i can.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
My company recently submitted Macintosh support to the Vorbis project; they're in the CVS tree as of sometime earlier tonight.
I did most of the initial work at MacHack this June, and I finally found the time to clean it up and contribute it to the project.
If you have a CVS client and CodeWarrior Pro 5.3 you can build the Vorbis CODEC shared library, the WAV encoder example, and the raw PCM audio decoder example and use them on the Macintosh. It's not a complete, do-everything QuickTime CODEC, but it's a start.
Many thanks to Christopher Montgomery for giving such a cool gift to the world.
--
Christopher M. Hanson
President
Monty and others have done work on a video codec, but it hasn't been released yet. They want to get Vorbis out the door before re-focusing much effort on that.
--
Ski-U-Mah!
The only way Ogg Vorbis can succeed is to cleraly demonstrate it can do a better job than mp3 at 128Kbps, somethine en par with AAC (like LiquidAudio). Since AAC is heavily patented, and there are no free implementations available (seems like FAAC isn't going anywhere), Ogg may get its chance. As to the fact that mp3 is formally not free either - who gives? It is an open standard. THere are some fairly decent free encoders and a large number of decoders. Period.
can anyone out there in net.land comment on how ogg compares to sony's ATRAC compression, used on MiniDiscs and now in their MemoryStick audio products? I've seen repeatedly that atrac sounds better than an mp3 at the same bitrate, but things like this are pretty hard to quantify... if there are any refs to ogg vs atrac, i'd love to see them. -- kai
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I'm pretty sure I got the "43 times" figure right. Unfortunately I accidentally deleted all my bookmarks, so I can't provide a URL (I bookmarked it for exactly this kind of discussion).
The thing they neglect to tell you is that that includes people you have just met before. The other thing they don't tell you is that most home defense is against people you know
It doesn't matter who uses the gun against whom. When you confront an armed intruder in your house with a gun of your own, somebody is likely to get shot. Chances are, it's going to be you. Not confronting the intruder gives that intruder no reason to shoot you (either deliberately or in panic). If you value your VCR more than your life, then by all means go ahead and buy a gun. Gun owners are at an evolutionary disadvantage, so the problem will solve itself in the end ;)
(also, consider for a moment why even people in high-crime areas in Europe (and most of the rest of the civilized world) get by just fine without weapons for "home defense")
"Music in an egg". Hmmmm. Egg breaking, musical notes coming out of it.
Use an egg as a logo. Explain it isn't an egg, it's an ogg.
Or I'm slightly deranged and everything in this message is gibberish, including this. It's late, I gotta sleep. But first I'm gonna have a snack. Some fried eggs maybe.
This turns out not to be the case. The 43:1 ratio is a myth. If you take out the suicides, accidents, and justifiable homicides, and consider actual murders compared to actual killing in self-defense, the ratio looks more like 4:1. But most gun owners avoid shooting people as much as they can, and 98% of the time defend themselves without killing anyone, so the actual ratio looks more like 1:75 (75 people saved by guns for each one lost). Follow the link for support of the 1:75 claim. See also here.
Dr. Lott has shown that using a gun to defend yourself gives you the best chance to escape an attack unharmed.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Why do I get the feeling that someone's had one deathmatch too many? ;-)
The purpose of minidisc is not to replace cds, but to record audio (not to store computer data) in a convenient format. they're meant to allow easy editing of tracks and easy re-recording (not unlike cassette tapes).
;)
SCMS can be shut off in a pro MD deck, so digital copies can be made for the musician in all of us.
anyway check out minidisc.org for more info.
oops! the main purpose is audio. data storage is a side issue, unless MD2 takes off. my bad!
Nothing is perfect, but ATRAC compression (used in minidisc recording) is now a mature technology compared to its intro in 1996.
;)
I've done live recordings with MD. sounds fine to me!
check out minidisc.org for more info.
This isn't really a troll, it's just sort of silly.
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
i've used LAME, i've used everything, you are just not experienced in the ways of the audiophile. you even admit you haven't done any listening tests, why then do you bother trying to correct me?
i think most people, if they do some listening, will notice the difference. it is quite striking to me.
and to the person below, my MOD/S3M comment was a joke.. duh..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
>> Wavelets are still something novel that no one >> else is using in serious production yet, and >> we need to do more real R&D before it's ready Maybe this is true in Mr. Montgomery's world, but not in video compression. We've been shipping a system with multiplexed video being compressed by wavelet hardware for over a year now... It has definite advantages over our MPEG versions of the same product.
i can't currently and why would i want to install a system that would allow me to?
and no it is not going to be the same quality as a CD player, that's a load of crap. see the other thread on this subject.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
you're just pointing out a situation where you CAN'T get the CDs.. but you would if you could for a decent price, right?
well, if you don't care about quality you might not... anyway, this has nothing to do with the point i was making.
i listen to a lot of music you just can't walk into the random CD store and find, but i know good stores i can go to and find rare CDs, and i make it my business to do so.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
I can understand taking out the suicides, but why the accidents? If you accidentally get shot with your own gun, you're dead. Had you not had that gun, you would still be alive.
The 75:1 ratio is a myth too of course. By presenting it this way you make believe that without guns, those 75 people would have died. Still even it is "only" 4:1, you are putting yourself at risk. This argument is just like the smokers versus non-smokers debate though. In their heart everybody knows smoking is bad for you, yet the addicts don't want to give up their God-given right to put themselves and others at risk.
Look, this is off-topic for the MP3 thread. It's a topic I care about, but we are abusing /. by discussing it here. I'll answer your questions, but if we want to continue this, we need to take it somewhere else.
In the first place, an unknown number of gun cleaning "accidents" are actually suicides, done as a fake accident so that life insurance will pay off despite a no-pay-for-suicide clause. In the second place, people who quote the "43:1" statistic often say you are 43 times more likely to be shot, not to shoot yourself by mistake, so I think it is valid to pull those out. Third and finally, the number of accidents was so few in the Kellerman study that it doesn't really matter if we leave them in or out.
This seems fair to me, since the anti-gun folks are claiming that in the 43:1 case that none of the gun suicides would have committed suicide using some other means than a gun, and none of the murder victims would have been murdered by some other means, and so on.
If you read the link I put to Dr. Lott's article, you will see that actual research has shown that resisting violence with a gun is the safest thing you can do. ("Give the attacker what he wants" is, for a woman, 2.5 times more likely to result in harm. Even for a man, it is 1.4 times more likely to result in harm.)
See you on some other forum if you want to keep this discussion going.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely