Ogg Vorbis Changes (Just About) Everything

The good people of Ogg Vorbis have a new beta release out (number 4) for which they claim better compression, nicer sound, fewer bugs and more protein than the last. While that's nice enough, that's not the only news on the Vorbis front: probably more important in the long run is that the guys behind Vorbis have formed a non-profit called Xiph.org to replace the S-class corporation they've been developing as for a while, Xiphophorous. Emmett of BinaryFreedom had a cool chat with Vorbis developers Christopher Montgomery and Jack Moffit about the new release,foundation, encoding, and hardware capable of playing back the Vorbis format -- well worth reading. Plus, you can download the new beta (and some sample tunes), too. Oh, yes, and there's the little matter of moving from the GPL ^[?] to BSD license ^[?] , with what they say is RMS' blessing. You will have to read to find out why, though;)

Comments

Yeah

[j0nkatz]

bone-0-rama r00ls!

If you were given $5 to buy a share of LNUX

Open Source music compression

[Ananova]

Although I think open source licences have advantages in many cases - for example, apache, KDE and Gnome are all good candidates for an open source licence, I'm not sure that open source is necessarily appropriate for a music compression alogrithm.

At the essence of music lies intellectual property. Intellectual property underpins music. Without it, there would be no Eminem, no N-Sync and no Limp Biskit. These bands rely on ownership of intellectual property for their income, and hence for their inception (without the protection IP affords, there would be no money from seeling records).

An open-source approach threatens to undermine this. We are seeing more and more the danger that MP3s present to musicians' livelihoods - they threaten to make paying for music obsolete.

Now as an 'owned' algorithm, MP3 can easily be protected, and indeed we are seeing the advent of watermarking to protect music.

With something whose very existence opposes intellectual property, however, the result will be 'free' music, since open source will not protect intellectual property.

This, in the end, is bad news. I hope people will realize this, and put the longterm good of the record industry ahead of short-term 'free' music from the likes of an unprotected compression system such as oggvorbis.
--

Re:Open Source music compression

[Bug2000]

You know what it will end up with ? That will have some impact on the music quality. Big producers will not make as much money as they used to and they will stop producing Spice Girls and Britney Spears. What a loss! More people will start making music for the sake of it and will live on concerts. I'm being intentionally provocative here but it may be one of the side effects if big corporates cannot control the spread of MP3's. But, let's be reealistic, that will not happen.

Re:Open Source music compression

[sqlrob]

Without it, there would be no Eminem, no N-Sync and no Limp Biskit.

And this is bad exactly how?

Re:Open Source music compression

[hardburn]

Most bands don't make money on their actual sales. They get it from concerts and merchandise (t-shirts, hats, etc.). There is no substitue for seeing a live performance. If anything, free (speech and beer) music will generate a bigger fan base, thus brining more people to their concerts and buying t-shirts.

Also, as another post pointed out, what would be so wrong if there was "no Eminem, no N-Sync and no Limp Biskit"?

------

Re:Open Source music compression

[bluecalix]

(disclaimer: I spent 6 years in the music industry) Do some reading and don't just buy the BS coming from the major labels. Most bands, including many that you hear on the radio, don't make any money from record sales. None. They make money on touring and selling merchandise. Granted the bands you mentioned probably make loads of money from record sales, but consider this: Limp Bizkit support free trading of their music as mp3s, and because of the record industry's 'indentured servant' attitude towards artists, N'SYNC pay both their current and former record labels on their record sales, so they probably don't make that much from them either. Good musicians will always be able to make a living and a career out of performing music because people will always want to see live music, and the hardcore fans will always want to bring a piece of that home, as a T-Shirt or whatever. The really important thing about a free music algorithm is in music production. If the Secure Music Stream thing (or whatever it is called) comes to be in Windows then all of your music components will need a key to play music. And of course who do you think you have to license that key from? The multi-national Digital Music Key consortium. And do you think it will be free? Is the DVD algorithm free? (no)The effect of this could be that the independant musician cannot make music that can play on anyones equiptment. And then we're back to needing record labels. Their 'revenue stream' is assured And if you were being sarcastic, then I'm sorry I rambled on, but people really do believe what you are saying.

Re:Open Source music compression

[KjetilK]

Eh, I might misunderstand you, but the algorithm itself is in the public domain (where it belongs). It's the software the developers write that are BSD licensed. If commercial entities don't like the license, they can write their own software from scratch.

Re:Open Source music compression

[pohl]

The author was pulling your leg.

Re:Open Source music compression

[SubtleNuance]

there would be no Eminem, no N-Sync and no Limp Biskit.*

And this is a bad thing? ;)

We are seeing more and more the danger that MP3s present to musicians' livelihoods

Just so people understand: Digital Music Distribution only threaten the lively hood of the RIAA. Music (and the Arts) thrived before IP law. The Arts will thrive long after people stop trying to impose artificial constraints on culture/thought/speech (IP law). Please read this article by Courtney Love. Members of the band Garbage are caught up in a legal fight with RIAA thugs. What was the name of that black singer who went bankrupt a couple years ago - she had sold millions and millions of records - and was penniless? The RIAA is messing with public perception - digital music distribution threatens them (and they are obsolete but are _BUYING_ laws to protect their pocket book schemes) and not artists.*

*These people are essentially *not* artists - they are products. This is what the RIAA is interested in; not Art. _BUT_ unfortunately i cannot tell *other* people what to listen too - just as I cannot convince 95% of the worlds sheeple how to vote, or why it is they think they like these 'artists' (because the public is horribly connected to The Media Machine(TM) which purpose is to end individual thought and replace it with a 'shared' group experience which centers on the Consumer Values(TM) - I believe 95% of people are incapable of making decisions based on objective opinions because they are caught up in a massive experiment in Population Control (no I don't mean there is a dark force controlling it all - but the 'marketing' machine evolves to serve those who intend to serve themselves - which is why the system is becoming effective - its goals are to homogenize thought to match product offerings.. and its working.) Hows that for paranoid? ;)

Re:Open Source music compression

[Glytch]

I don't know, those of us without CD burners might find MP3s just a *tad* more convenient than ISOs, don't you think?

Re:Open Source music compression

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Would reverse-engineering the key to make free music play be illegal under the DMCA? It does contain an exception that one can circumvent with the permission of the copyright holder. So if I release music legally, and Windows won't play it because I can't sign it, and I find a way to circumvent the system to access MY content, which I as the copyright holder authorize, is that illegal according to the law or likely to be illegal in Judge Kaplan's opinion?

Here is an interesting thing for the DVD crowd to do. Write a CSS ENcoder. (Yes I know DVD players play unencrypted discs...). Release content encoded with CSS and with an Open Content license. Have people use DeCSS to decrypt it. As the copyright holder, authorize them to do so. Then if anyone sues saying DeCSS is a cirumvention device, say that it is with the authorization of the copyright holder, and blow a hole in the DMCA'a reasoning with its own exemption.

That could make a great test case.

Re:Open Source music compression

[jovlinger]

I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you suggesting that an opensourced algorithm would somehow change the licence of the data?

That's like claiming that gcc can only produce binaries that are GPLed, because gcc is GPLed. This is patently false.

It seems to me the licence of the codec is completely immaterial.

Re:Open Source music compression

[stikves]

Well DCMA says anything that "could" be used as a cirumvention device is illegal.

It does not say that anything that "is developed as a" cirumvention device is illegal.

Re:Open Source music compression

[aionix]

Toni Braxton... and the group TLC around the same time. I'd like to hear their take on the issue.

Re:Open Source music compression

[alinn33139]

I guess the ultimate question might be; What should a musicians "livelihood" be ? Does a Eminem/Limp Biskit need millions of dollars to live?Do they need Bently's and nights at the Playboy Mansion? The greatest D.J's in the world right now don't seem to have the same problems with music shareing. Because they earn their livelihoods by performing for their fans. In other words they earn it. Why not share/advertise your product with Mp3's and then we consume your product/performance live and in person. Yes this might eliminate all the middle people feeding on $16 and $25 C.D's. File sharing is going to differenciate performance and work of art. You can not compress the brush strokes of a great artist. You can not compress the experience of a live performance. Performance pay what a concept.Perhaps talent will prevail and lottery/luck will subside. Any cd I purchase will be shared with my friends.

what does the logo mean?

[Ankou]

Is it just me or is that Jesus hitting a snake with an ax? What the heck does the logo mean?

Well at any rate, I have used the betas of the past from Ogg Vorbis and they work quite well. Keep up the good work guys.

"I am sorry, I switched to a new ISP becuase you guys dont offer Yahoo like AOL does!" - annonymous customer

Re:what does the logo mean?

[aidoneus]

Read the page... You can find the details here. Or http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html for the goat weary. Basically, the story is below:

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.

Hope that helps.

Re:what does the logo mean?

[judd]

If you're indo-european, your conception of gods is likely to include "big guy with long hair and big beard".

Apparently one factor in the conversion of Scandinavian pagans to Christianity was the similarity of the cross symbol to the Thor's hammer symbol. Not to mention the "resurrected dead guy nailed to a tree" meme (Jesus=Odin) or the "slain good god" meme (Baldur) or the "world ends to be replaced by something better" meme (Ragnarok=Apocalypse).

Re:what does the logo mean?

[macshit]

It means that Jesus supports Ogg Vorbis. Duh.

* The snake is Bill Gates; Jesus is hitting him because, well, it's just fun to hit Bill Gates with a stick.

Re:Welcome Ogg...you're a little late

[MartinG]

Firstly, thats not even a very good troll.

Secondly, the reason you don't see many improvements in digital sound compression (you said yourself we've had the same mp3 format for years) is because of the absurd number and generality of patents issued in this area. This is precicely what ogg is trying to avoid and they have done a brilliant job.

Have you tried ogg? Have you compared the filesize and output quality with that of mp3? Try it - I dare you.

RMS quote

[Per Abrahamsen]

In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use."

This is actually not surprising, he had a similar reasoning for making the gzip compression code available on a BSD-like license.

It will probably be too much to hope for, that some of the "RMS will only accept GPL" people will take note.

Re:RMS quote

[streetlawyer]

It will probably be too much to hope for, that some of the "RMS will only accept GPL" people will take note.

Indeed it will, given that he has played this game of bait-and-switch before, when he started trying to deprecate LGPL. For Stallman, any other form of licence is just a tactical compromise on the way to finagling everyone into using his beloved GPL. He wants to try to promote Ogg to become the de facto standard, and then start including features in it with GPL code, so that anyone who wants to stay up with the development path has to join his merry band of intellectual property guerrillas. Of course, when Microsoft do this, it's called "embrace and extend", but Open Source's favourite sweaty hippie would never do anything so bad, would he?

Re:RMS quote

[0xdeadbeef]

They're not guerrillas, they're "freedom fighters".

--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom

Re:RMS quote

[rullskidor]

Well either you use the BSD lisence and allow these kinds of tactics or you better have to use another lisence!

And you've just said no matter what lisence he picks he's just evil and GPL communist/terrorist ????? That does not compute. Why not just be glad you've got an option now and shut up! If you don't want any body to see you code just go ahead, if you want to share you can do that and if you only use 100% gpl software use the old release try to walk around the BSD lisence.

Re:RMS quote

[jd]

Sadly, I suspect you're right. More people enjoy fighting than getting on with their lives. (One of the big reasons wars are popular around election times.)

On the bright side, though, natural selection would seem to dictate that considerate people are more likely to survive, making the current fad of personal abuse a temporary phenomina, unlikely to survive.

(Actually, on a side-note, RMS' comments are to do with natural selection of software. Survival of the fittest is a real phenomina, but requires the additional question of "fittest for what?". In this case, Ogg Vorbis is a very strong contender in sound, but the GPL would not make it a strong contender in those places sound is most significant.)

Re:RMS quote

[Parity]

While I agree with you about rms' fanaticism, this little troll of yours can be refuted with the simple observation that OV is an open standard and anyone can make a closed source implementation, whether or not they use the GPLed code. Your scenario is simply impossible.

(Also as other answers noted, FSF does not control OV nor Xiph).

--Parity

GPL --BSD

[wowbagger]

I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good.

On the other hand, as a professional embedded software developer, I have a need that Vorbis would be just perfect for. Under a BSD license, I would have no problems with using it (due to constraints beyond my control, the code would have to be linked against some decidedly CLOSED SOURCE code, thus chucking the GPL out the window). However, I was perfectly willing to go to my managers and have them negotiate a license with Xiph to allow use to use the Vorbis code under a closed-source license and pay them money for the privilege (while maintaining the normal license as GPL). That will be a great deal harder to justify now....

Re:GPL --BSD

[Ded Bob]

Why not release back code that is within in your control, with your employer's permission, from the goodness of your heart? Many companies have done this. The companies not doing so will have to do more to keep up with Vorbis while you will not.

Re:GPL --BSD

[wowbagger]

That's what I'd do, but not as many people are as ethical as I try to be.

Re:GPL --BSD

[f5426]

> the code would have to be linked against some decidedly CLOSED SOURCE code, thus chucking the GPL out the window

Of course, vorbis was LGPL, not GPL. So this point was voided at start. You can link a LGPL library with whatever you want. Only modifications made to the library have to be published. But you also have to let users relink, which is quite hard on an embedded system... :-)

> That will be a great deal harder to justify now....

Not really. You can argue that keeping improvment on the library closed will make maintenance and merge with future version more and more difficult, and that you will basically fork the codebase. Explain them that, if you give your improvment back, you'll get the benefits of *all* the improvments made to the library.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:GPL --BSD

[alprazolam]

tell your bosses its free development. you give them some code, they build around it (if its good).

Re:GPL --BSD

[DeeKayWon]

I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good.

Let them. I'll just keep using Oggenc or LAME for encoding and I'll play them using Xiph's Winamp plugin and XMMS, which has the Vorbis plugin now in the main source tree.

They can embrace and extend all they want, but the free stuff will still be there.

Re:GPL --BSD

[MadAhab]

Re-read the comment you replied to; it's not a matter of ethics. With the BSD-style license, a commercial developer who decides to fork has barred themselves from enjoying future developments in the public code, unless they want to go to the trouble of maintaining a fork.

For an embedded device, this _could_ cause problems anyway, but it's only likely to do so if it _should_; someone creates a hardware ogg player with it's own encoder and subtly different format. They can use the stuff everyone else encodes, but stuff encoded with their software can't play on other people's players. But suppose that development of the main codebase continues; it's not too hard for the developers to make improvements that cut out the forked version, while playing nice with the manufacturers of Ogg player 2, who are contributing code back.

This kind of code fu keeps microsoft in the black, but it can also keep code in the open.

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

Re:GPL --BSD

[hokie93]

It usually boils down to an economic not a philosphical or ethical question. If you fork a new release with proprietary extensions then every time a new release comes out, you have to merge your changes back in. Surrendering your changes and getting them integrated back in does potentially allow your competitors to catch-up but it also saves you resource/money in the long run.

Re:GPL --BSD

[kennyj449]

"I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good." Personally, I doubt this would happen - much. If they break compatibility, they have a seperate format. An incompatible format. Any changed made to Vorbis that they would want to use would necessitate a painstaking update to their own format, which may or may not break compatibility with the original broken format. It can become a complicated mess. Otherwise, a company that breaks compatibility would be on its own. In short, it pays to send a number of significant changes back to Vorbis unless they maintain full compatibility and can be easily re-ported. If a company is willing to go through this amount of trouble to make their own format, let them - they may as well be another Microsoft or RealNetworks, and they probably won't be able to generate sufficient steam on their own. OTOH, I'm all for proprietary (or free, whatever the case may be) extensions that count as "bells & whistles," the little incentives for using one program over another but that still allow you to switch back and forth or use platforms where a given program doesn't exist. Creativity, innovation, and diversity of ideas in software development is something that should be valued, cherished, and encouraged above all else. I don't want to prove Jim Allchin right, but part of the whole reason for OSS is to keep "new blood" thriving. BSD helps to stimulate that more than GPL because of its allowances of proprietary use. In this case, it's a good thing. It isn't always, sometimes we're better off with GPL - it depends more on the individual case. However, in cases where there is incentive to keep all the core stuff open, and maintain full compatibility, even when the license doesn't require it, such as there is here, we may as well be using BSD.

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[MartinG]

Actually, this is probably one time where we might not have too much work to do. Companies generally try to be as efficient as they can be and reduce costs where possible. If they have a choice to make between paying for mp3 (licencing the patented tech) , or using ogg with no payment at all, its obvious which they will use. (some ppl call this "greed" but I'm sure they are completely bonkers)

The only rational thing to do is to use Ogg Vorbis exclusively

The rational thing to do is to let the markeyt decide. With ogg being BSD licenced, the choice they will make is clear in my mind.

RMS's comments

[Stormie]

If you can get to the heavily slashdotted interview on binaryfreedom.com, you'll see RMS's comments on the license change.

Anyway, if and when you announce a different license for the Vorbis code, feel free to mention that I agree with the decision, as long as you make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source", and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a "Linux operating system".

Why do I get the feeling that if you asked RMS's opinion on slaughtering the innocent for the glory of Satan, and bathing in their warmly splashing blood, he'd reply I'm all for it, as long as you make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source", and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a "Linux operating system".

But seriously though.. the reason the Xiph folks gave for their license switch is that they want Ogg Vorbis to be "a basic building block of the internet for multimedia", and hence chose to go BSD: minimise the restrictions on the source, maximise the chance that it will be widely adopted. Fair call - you gotta look at what you're trying to achieve, and ask yourself if every man and his dog stick my code into a proprietary app, does that help my cause or hurt it? In this case, I think it's quite clear that it would help Ogg Vorbis if, to pick and example at random, Microsoft stuck a closed-source .OGG replay codec into Windows.

Re:RMS's comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like the BSD IP stack.

Now it's time for Linus to say something about "it isn't what we want" and adopt an alternate, inferior, implementation.

Re:RMS's comments

[Zapman]

Actually, RMS has used many arguments for several pieces of software for LGPL'ing or BSD'ing code. The main one tends to be if there are other implementations that provide similar/identical functionality. If you are creating something totally new and innovative, he'd argue for a GPL so that ONLY free software could gain by it.

In this case, that implementation is MP3. However, your argument of Microsoft using a closed source ogg codec is a dangerous one. 'Embrace and Extend"

Re:RMS's comments

[DJerman]

I think it's quite clear that it would help Ogg Vorbis if, to pick and example at random, Microsoft stuck a closed-source .OGG replay codec into Windows.

Except that if you use a non-Microsoft encoder, their codec will only play back a flattened monaural version of the sound :-). That way it's "supported".

Re:RMS's comments

[f5426]

> However, your argument of Microsoft using a closed source ogg codec is a dangerous one. 'Embrace and Extend"

Microsoft could do this with mp3 in a blink of the eye (and for a few hundred of millions of $). At least, with ogg, everyone have to compete on the same ground.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:RMS's comments

[thallgren]

Indeed, RMS is an insightful man. He once again proves he's the King of Open Source. Without him, Linux wouldn't have been where it is today.

Regards, Tommy :^)

HOWTO-Pronounce

[whanau]

Maybe I should get down to writing that HOWTO-Pronounce for linuxdoc.org

linux (lin - ix) ogg vorbis (ogg vo-rr-biss)

Re:HOWTO-Pronounce

[agallagh42]

Actually, if you listen to Linus saying Linux, it almost sounds like lee-nooks. So there ;-)

Re:HOWTO-Pronounce

[Glytch]

That because he *is* pronouncing it as "Lee-nooks", just like he pronounces his name as "Lee-nus".

And this is just a pet peeve of mine that's somewhat related, I'm not really replying to agallagh42. Just where does "Lin-ix" come from? Linus pronounces it as above, and therefore "Lye-nucks" makes more sense to someone who grew up pronouncing Linus as "Lye-nus".

In summary, I'll pronounce it "Lye-nucks", and all you "Lin-ix" nazis can bite me.

Re:HOWTO-Pronounce

[Mr. Piccolo]

I think he pronounces "Lee-nooks" as "Lih-nooks" if you listen really close.

So, IT DOESN'T MATTER how you pronounce Linux!

Re:HOWTO-Pronounce

[stikves]

Don't tell this to the guys at Leenucs.com!

Re:HOWTO-Pronounce

[agallagh42]

I think as long as you spell it right, it really doesn't matter how you pronounce it. Based on several recent posts, I'm going to start pronouncing it "Zig".

This is exciting

[qpt]

I'm glad that digital music is finally ready to buck the opression that has been mp3.

While Ogg Vorbis may have a slightly sillier name, it's free (as in pizza, beer, speech, and everything else!) Ogg is a small, but important, part of assuring that we never lose the right and ability to do as we please with the content we purchase.

It will be a difficult battle to gain hardware support for portable Ogg Vorbis players, but I companies such as Diamond have already expressed an interest. Suffice to say, I have faith in the community to produce a digital music format that can compete with mp3 on every level.

However, we must avoid depriving artists of their livelihood. Even though the format is free, we must be willing to pay for the content. I will not weep if the record executive becomes a thing of the past, but the artist must be recompensed for his work.

This is a concept we understand all too little in the open source community, and Ogg Vorbis has the very real potential to destroy pop music as we know it. It can only be with careful and grave consideration that we move forward.

- qpt

wrong download link

[krozdrol]

the vorbis site gives the wrong link for the download page. the correct link is http://www.vorbis.com/download.html.

i've been using ogg vorbis since last year, and it just rocks. give it a try and see for yourself.

t.

Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[TellarHK]

I would love to eliminate all the MP3's on my system, as a way to encourage friends to use the Vorbis format. I currently have several gigs of MP3 files sitting on my hard drive, and occasionally give copies of the entire archive to friends so we can all listen to the same playlists while writing or hanging out.

However, reading this article pointed out one comment that I really wish I hadn't seen. They say it isn't necessary to convert existing MP3's into Vorbis files. I'd -really- like them to come out with a semi-official program to batch convert, and this remark makes me feel like it's less likely now. Is there such a thing available, something I could get and use to do an unattended conversion? I looked a while ago, but after a few days of not finding anything that didn't do it one-file-at-a-time, gave up. If someone comes out with a file like that, it'd be a great way for people to get others into using Vorbis instead of MP3. Force your friends to upgrade. :)

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Ilmari]

Just write a script that reads the ID3 tag of the mp3, decodes it (using sox, mpeg123 or whatever) and pipes it to oggenc with the appropriate parameters. Shouldn't be hard (I might just do that my self this week).

© 2000 Ilmari. All ritghts reserved, all wrongs reversed

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[anacron]

Batch conversion? Do this:

Open winamp. Hit shift-L and select your top-level MP3 directory. This should load all the MP3s on your system. Hit Ctl-P, select output plug ins, and select "Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in". Click 'configure' and select the directory where you want all your wavs to go. Go back to the main window and click 'play' and wait. Wait some more. And make sure you have lots of HD space.

Then open the Ogg encoder of your choice, and do the same thing, but in reverse.

Alternatively, you could just set up winamp as described above, and then create a batch file which does something like:

<pseudocode>
for all files in a directory {
call winamp %i where %i is the current file
call oggEncoder with appropraite options and pass it .wav file
}
<\pseudocode>

This would be maybe 15-20 lines of code in Java. The question is can the current incarnations of the Ogg encode handle command line params to do encoding?

anacron

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Rob Wilderspin]

If quality is of any importance to you then you don't want to convert from MP3 to Vorbis, as they're both lossy with their compression and you're very likely to start losing important data going from one to the other. It's the same with any lossy formats, any data type.

You'd be better off keeping the MP3s you have and just doing new ones with Vorbis, unless you really do have enough time to re-rip them.

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Stormie]

I'd -really- like them to come out with a semi-official program to batch convert, and this remark makes me feel like it's less likely now.

No, you would not like that. MP3, obviously, is lossy compression, and so is Vorbis. Differently lossy, and less offensively lossy, if the Vorbis coders have achieved their goals, but still lossy. If you take degraded files (i.e. your MP3 collection), and convert them to Vorbis, you will degrade them further. You don't want that, do you?

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[hardburn]

Have you ever heard of a shell script?

In any case, I'm warry of anything that tries to convert from one lossy compression to another. Thats just begging for quality loss.

------

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[TheTick21]

recompressing your MP3s would lead to less quality as both MP3s and Vorbis are both lossy

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Sloppy]

If you convert MP3 to Vorbis, you'll get the worst of both worlds, in terms of lossiness/artifacting. You'de be a lot better off if you re-ripped your CDs and oggenc from that.

---

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Madoc]

Unlike almost everyone else who responded with the same obvious info (you'll lose quality), I'll actually provide you with something to help: Files to batch convert mp3 to ogg using vorbize (originally written by Kenneth C. Arnold). These require minor modifications to use oggenc instead of Kenneth's Vorbize, but the basics are there.

----------

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[SCHecklerX]

Just write a script that takes the mp3's and converts them back into .wav .au, whatever (one at a time, obviously, unless you have huge amounts of storage space not available to the common man!), and then re-encode in Ogg-Vorbis.

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[grappler]

What needs to happen if this is to be absorbed into the mainstream is that napster, winamp and similiar programs need to add support for ogg files in their next version.

Then, Joe User searches for some song and downloads it. It ends up in "My Music" and he never even sees the ".ogg" extension because windows hides it by default. It's got a little lightning icon because it's been associated with winamp and he can play it just like any other file.

Eventually, people trading songs would make the association, "oh, these new ogg things work just like mp3s but (hopefully) are smaller)". At that point, if Fraunhoffer tried anything funny, people would laugh at them and use ogg.

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[cananian]

Dude, this is *unix*. You can convert *any* file-at-a-time command-line utility to a batch converter. How about:

for f in `find . -name "*.mp3"`; do
convert $f `basename $f .mp3`.ogg
done

(This is a wild hack, and it's for bash. Is Vorbis' extension really .ogg? I have no clue.)

If you're stuck on windows, you can still download the Cygwin tools and have a reasonable operating environment. Putting tools together is what unix is all about, man!

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Faceprint]

Shameless self promo: mp32ogg. Handy perl script I wrote, point it at your music dir, and let it go to town.

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[3.1415926535]

You should add a disclaimer at the beginning of the script that says "WARNING: If you're using this to convert your MP3 collection, YOU ARE A MORON!".

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[3.1415926535]

Er, I don't think "convert" has support for Ogg Vorbis (yet), so you'll have to do some more nasty work than that (that's what shell scripts are for).

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Enahs]

Well, if you start with good-quality MP3s (not that 96kbps MusicMatch garbage you'll find on Napster) you'll notice no audible difference between the MP3s and the files converted to Ogg Vorbis. I've done it, and incredibly, it still sounds great. :-)

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Enahs]

If lame catches up with libvorbis, you could use it to convert mp3s in one fell swoop.

For the people who prefer command line (and bash):

for i in *.mp3
do
mpg123 -w blah.wav $i
oggenc blah.wav
mv blah.ogg $i.ogg
rm $i #if you want to remove the original mp3
done

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Enahs]

for f in `find . -name "*.mp3"` ; do
mpg123 -w `basename $f .mp3`.wav $f
oggenc `basename $f .mp3`.wav
done

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[sheldon]

That's a good point. Let's say you did go from WAV->MP3->WAV->OGG... I'll bet you'd have an interesting result with some extra special distortion and phase problems.

Definately better to just leave the MP3 files alone, or reencode from the originals. You definately won't gain anything going from MP3->OGG and it'll just be a waste of time.

Re:Unattended MP3 to Vorbis Conversion?

[Chops]

Slipshod as it is, the following worked quite well for me back in the beta3 days; it assumes all the mp3s have filenames of the form "Artist - Title.mp3". If you want to nuke your mp3s as you go, remove the # from the obvious place (after making sure it works.) It needs mpg123 and vorbis-tools. Change "-b 128" to encode at a different bitrate.

#!/bin/bash
RANDOM=$$$(date)
TEMP=/tmp/mp32ogg-tmp.$RAND
while [ "$1" != "" ]; do
NAME=`echo $1 | sed s/.mp3//`
mpg123 -t -n 1 "$NAME.mp3" >& $TEMP
STATS=`grep kbit/s $TEMP`
ARTIST=`echo $NAME | sed "s/ - .*//"`
TITLE=`echo $NAME | sed "s/.* - //"`
rm -f $TEMP
mpg123 -s -r 44100 --stereo "$NAME.mp3" | \
oggenc -r -o "$NAME.ogg" -b 128 -c \
"Encoded from mp3 ($STATS)" -t "$TITLE" -a \
"$ARTIST" - #&& rm -f "$NAME.mp3"
shift
done

Hack the seds to taste if your mp3s are systematically named; if they aren't, root around in $TEMP for tags or use this (which discards title & artist):

#!/bin/bash
RANDOM=$$$(date)
TEMP=/tmp/mp32ogg-tmp.$RAND
while [ "$1" != "" ]; do
NAME=`echo $1 | sed s/.mp3//`
mpg123 -t -n 1 "$NAME.mp3" >& $TEMP
STATS=`grep kbit/s $TEMP`
rm -f $TEMP
mpg123 -s -r 44100 --stereo "$NAME.mp3" | \
oggenc -r -o "$NAME.ogg" -b 128 -c \
"Encoded from mp3 ($STATS)" - #&& rm -f \
"$NAME.mp3"
shift
done

I haven't checked that it still works in beta 4. Caveat emptor, don't blame me if it hoses your partition table, etc. etc.

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[anacron]

The point of all of this is that Fraunhauffer (sp?) will begin charging licensing fees for ANYONE who has an MP3 encoder/decoder built in. By making a similar/equal open source, free, extensible standard, music will remain free.

Yes, you can still keep all your MP3s around. But expect to start paying more (you do pay for all the software on your machine, right?) for both encoders and decoders.

Also, because one person owns the MP3 standard, they can make changes to it at will and discontinue licensing older versions. If Fraunhauffer ever gets in bed with the recording industry, find a nice soft spot to hide and don't come out untill the lawyers' dust settles.

The openness of this standard is the differientiator, and it's the only one that should ever exist. All other qualities, file size, sound quality, compression rates, etc. should remain the same.

Re:Welcome Ogg...you're a little late

[Morzzzol]

If you want near CD-quality on the MP3-codec, you need at least a bitrate of 192 kbits/sec... If you want CD-quality on the MP3-codec, you need at least a bitrate of 256 kbits/sec... Those rates are much smaller on Vorbis, 128 kbits/sec already gives near CD-quality, and 160 kbits/sec and up will give CD-quality in almost all cases... If you think MP3 @ 128 kbits/sec is CD-quality you're near deaf.

Re:Welcome Ogg...you're a little late

[Anonymous Coward]

All I know is that if you try to download ftp.gnu.org as a single tarball, the first thing that happens is all of a sudden you're downloading two multi-hundred megabyte ogg vorbis sound captures of Richard fucking Stallman saying some sort of shit. It's a remarkable deterrent to just going to the root directory of the server and trying to download the whole site as a single .tar file.

What a tragedy...

[sjbe]

Gee, no Eminem or boy bands. What a tragic loss that would be. Can the economy survive if we can't buy their manufactured tunes? Wouldn't art die if we can't buy millions of comoditized songs from no talent hacks who don't even write their own material, control their own act, or be something besides a walking T&A show?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Don't feed the trolls...

Re:What a tragedy...

[MadAhab]

Didja ever notice that in years when the music industry is firmly "in control" via their hacks, the music stinks, and when the music is good, when a band is great, or when a new musical style or movement breaks out, it's inevitably from people outside the industry who do it for their own reasons, and who would (and usually do) become well known without any help from the industry whatsoever?

So if the music industry died, who would notice? Excepting maybe 12yo girls and gay men who find bland pop music from teenagers titillating, and a few of the industry's coke dealers, no one would mind at all.

For the 10 guys who make their living writing songs for other people, I'm sure they can find work compiling and composing soundtracks.

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

Pop music as we know it

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Ogg Vorbis has the very real potential to destroy pop music as we know it.

One can always hope...

It can't destroy pop music, there has always been and will always be popular music, but the "as we know it" part with mega stars, huge ad campaigns, and bands invented by the marketing departments of record companies, might ultimately be in danger.

awwww

[warez_d00d]

your comment had it all: good syntax, nicely formatted, slashdot-friendly buzzwords ... and then it didn't even turn out to be a troll?!?!

surely something is wrong here!

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[OpCode42]

Good point. As a casual Mp3 user (just personal use officer!) i was unaware of the licensing issues around Mp3. I see the point of vorbis now.

I imagine that many other mp3 users out there are completely unaware of the licensing issue. Lets hops Vorbis succeeds!

-----

Performance?

[MwtrV]

Using slightly different compression methods, how does OGG performance compare to MP3? Systems being as fast as they are, nowadays, this isn't that *big* of an issue, but it is nonetheless with older systems in mind and those with heavy load.

For those who say OGG is late, consider the factors in it not being so pushed for. There was never a huge consumer demand for an MP3 alternative. People own gigs and gigs of MP3s... telling them to convert because of a patent that will affect them when they purchase a commercial product by a few dollars doesn't mean much to them, as they commonly use only XMMS/Winamp and Napster/Gnapster. Companies looking to market commercial digital music players and/or software, on the other hand, plagued with the prospect of paying the MP3 patent owner money for each product they sell, must be more interested. But, again, it is very dependent on the consumer since they would have to convert the MP3 to OGG without help from any software supplied by the commercial company supplying the product -- but software supplied from a non-commercial entity, such as Ogg Vorbis creators, could be downloaded.... Packaged, though? I don't think it could be packaged with the product, regardless of it being "free" or not, because it would be included as part of a commercial product. The best a company could do would be an automatic download (of course with yes/no prompt and license agreement) of the extension from Vorbis to their uploading software.

Re:Performance?

[otis wildflower]

However, take note: interfacing with a portable player involves transferring the data via some client application. Who's to say that the client can't automagically convert the file to .ogg for the device, regardless of whether the source file is .wav, .pcm, .mp3, .wma, etc?

The sooner .ogg support is available, the better.. Even if it requires some transition hijinx to start.

Your Working Boy,
- Otis (LICQ: 85110864)

Re:Performance?

[MwtrV]

That's what I was writing about.

What I should have stated (sorry, too early haze) is the conversion utility would have to be an open source, free software product, a seperate download. So the client does convert the file to .ogg, but with the help of the freely available program. Ogg is native to the client itself.

Biggest hurdle: The Napster situation. I don't see it changing anytime soon to allow the .OGG extension. But, Napster might not be around to change anytime soon ;)

Re:Performance?

[tjwhaynes]

Using slightly different compression methods, how does OGG performance compare to MP3? Systems being as fast as they are, nowadays, this isn't that *big* of an issue, but it is nonetheless with older systems in mind and those with heavy load.

In my experience, an Ogg Vorbis file compressed with variable bit rate centred on 160kb with minimum 128 and maximum 192 is the same size or smaller than a 128 kb MP3 file compressed from the same source CD. The quality of the encoding is excellent - I'm extremely impressed with the fidelity and sound of the Ogg Vorbis output, and I've now standardized on the Ogg Vorbis encoder for all my on-disk music.

Currently the encoder I'm using (the beta3 release under CDex on my WinNT box and under Grip on my Linux box) encodes at about 1xCD data rate on a 400MHz PII machine. Thats not as fast as some of the MP3 Encoders - the x86 assembler ones can acheive around 2.5x on the same machine. But it is early days for the Vorbis encoder - I expect it to get a lot faster once the 1.0 release is out.

For those who say OGG is late, consider the factors in it not being so pushed for. There was never a huge consumer demand for an MP3 alternative. People own gigs and gigs of MP3s... telling them to convert because of a patent that will affect them when they purchase a commercial product by a few dollars doesn't mean much to them, as they commonly use only XMMS/Winamp and Napster/Gnapster.

I don't see a lot of people immediately switching all of their collection to Ogg Vorbis. However, all the important players support Vorbis codecs now and therefore it is a snap to start adding .ogg files into the collection. I am slowly replacing my remaining .mp3s with .ogg versions as I get time and anything new is automatically encoded as .ogg.

Companies looking to market commercial digital music players and/or software, on the other hand, plagued with the prospect of paying the MP3 patent owner money for each product they sell, must be more interested. But, again, it is very dependent on the consumer since they would have to convert the MP3 to OGG without help from any software supplied by the commercial company supplying the product -- but software supplied from a non-commercial entity, such as Ogg Vorbis creators, could be downloaded.... Packaged, though? I don't think it could be packaged with the product, regardless of it being "free" or not, because it would be included as part of a commercial product. The best a company could do would be an automatic download (of course with yes/no prompt and license agreement) of the extension from Vorbis to their uploading software.

Ah - but here the use of a BSD license is important. Because the Commercial packages can compile the Vorbis support into their own systems and not be forced to distribute the source code, modified or otherwise, they have no real reason to neglect this format - they can add it for free and add yet another feature to those marketing tick-lists. Like I said, conversion from MP3 to OGG is probably a non-starter but once this format starts to attract the attention it deserves, I would expect it to become fairly popular fairly quickly.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Be careful !

[f5426]

binary freedom is a trap ! What we really want is source freedom !
</joke>

Cheers,

--fred

Coding from cassette (my Ask /. :-) )

[KjetilK]

I have a few old-style cassettes that I want to encode with Vorbis, anybody have any ideas how this can be done most easily?

I've tried to do it on my parent's old win95 computer, but since the encoder wants (wanted at least) stereo 44kHz files and since the disk is rather small, it's not feasible to play them and make WAV files (I've tried). It would be preferable to encode it directly into Vorbis.

Any ideas?

Re:Coding from cassette (my Ask /. :-) )

[dufke]

Well, if the encoder is faster than realtime (it is on my box), synced encoding should work. Somebody just needs to write the code. You could detect silence to break the tape up into separate tracks.

dufke
-

Walk, do not run, to your nearest HipZip.

[bmetz]

Iomega has a $50 rebate going on right now. Outpost.com has the Hipzip for a (pretty darn low price) $259. With Ogg Vorbis support coming soon and full official linux support right now, it's a pretty brainless purchase as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, $209 might sound like a lot, but the media for the HipZip is CHEAP. A 40 meg disk for it is $8; a 32 meg card for a Rio is like $80.

Re:Walk, do not run, to your nearest HipZip.

[alecto]

Keep in mind that Iomega has never significantly reduced the prices of its media as capacities became bigger. A 100 MB Zip is still between $15 and $20 most places; a 1GB Jaz disk is $100, even when a sub-$1 CD-RW can hold 6 times the data on a Zip and nearly 2/3 the capacity of a Jaz (and with packet writing, the disadvantages are minimal).

This follows the pattern they've established from the 10MB Bernoulli Box forward--keep the media prices high to force users into newer devices for realistic media prices.

Re:Walk, do not run, to your nearest HipZip.

[sfid]

BTW, $209 might sound like a lot, but the media for the HipZip is CHEAP. A 40 meg disk for it is $8; a 32 meg card for a Rio is like $80.

Yeah, real cheap compared to Minidisc media. Why on earth didn't MD take off as a data storage media? They're about $2 for 140mb.

Re:Walk, do not run, to your nearest HipZip.

[LetterJ]

8cm CD-R is only $0.85 for 185 MB/21 min audio. I love them; they fit in a pocket and hold enough MP3's/OGG's to be useful. Most CD-ROM drives, tray CD players and portable CD players as well as a few 8cm CD and MP3 specific portables play them as well. That is part of why MD didn't take off. You can only play it in the one specific device you have to pay through the nose for.

LetterJ
Head Geek

Re:Walk, do not run, to your nearest HipZip.

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'm sorry, but 40meg for $8 isn't cheap.

Question

[athlon02]

I've been making a ton of oggs from ripped audio tracks from my own CD collection, currently taking 678MB on my D: partition.

I kept wondering about perhaps another format that was smaller or some way I could compress the oggs a little bit, but still be able to put them on a CD and not have to decompress them every time I wanted to hear one.

So does anyone know how much better compression it offers now? If I could get rid of another 50MB by slightly smaller ogg files (about ~0.3MB/ogg) that would be great! As long as sonique will still play them...

How much faster is the encoding?

[rendler]

About a week ago I brought a burner and then thought I'd go on a ripping spree, and normally I thought of using ogg as the default format. I was using grip/cdparanoia to do the ripping and oggenc for encoding with beta 3 of the vorbis-tools package from debian, I let the thing go and when I came back 3 hours later it was still encoding the 7th track, mind you I only have a 166. I think it's the VBR that was making it so terribly slow, anyways I had to stop it and was forced to use lame which was usually just 1-2 tracks behind the audio ripping.

Ogg Vorbis, a user's report

[OlympicSponsor]

Last time OV was mentioned on /. (the last beta, presumably) I download the same encoder and xmms plugin for playback. I encoded a couple of CDs and tried it out. Here's what I found:

First, the sample encoder is MUCH easier to use than what I've already been using (GRip). I don't know if that's because my current method is so terrible or because the new one is so great.

Second, the resulting files were about 10% smaller. Others may say "so what, hard drives are cheap", but:

1) I only have 4.5 GB and don't have the extra cash to buy larger.

2) Larger hard drives make a 10% savings even MORE worthwhile. Consider: If I saved 10% of a 4 GB drive, that's 40 MB--room for maybe 10 additional songs or about one CD. But if I saved 10% of a 400 GB drive, that's an extra 4 GB--enough for 100 CD's.

Third, the sound quality was "equivalent". That is, I couldn't tell the difference, BUT I'm not an expert and my sound equipment is FAR from top of the line (just some computer speakers plugged into an AWE32).
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot

Re:Ogg Vorbis, a user's report

[Fjord]

It's actually better than that. 10% of 4GB is 400MB. 10% of 400GB is 40GB. In the first case, you can have an extra CD. I agree that a 10% savings is nothing to sneeze at.

Re:Ogg Vorbis, a user's report

[grappler]

As file size is a direct function of bitrate, there should be no surprises at the size of the encoded file. Perhaps you might notice that you can use lower bitrates before you start noticing a drop in quality.

Re:Ogg Vorbis, a user's report

[OmegaDan]

(I'm on the developers list doing development for an independant company) Theres a tool written by one of the developers called "rehuff" that will further compress your ogg files by about 5 - 10% (losslessly) by optimizing the huffman tables.

Re:Welcome Ogg...you're a little late

[MwtrV]

Well, it wasn't really the fault of the open source mozilla organization. The code Netscape left them to, the 5.x branch, was completely different then 4.x, and was vastly incomplete and shit from the get-go. You can rant and rave about how they had plenty of time to "fix it", but mabye it was so radical and the purposed development goals/architecture so set in stone it got in the way of the end product coming in a timely fashion. Mozilla tries to be many different things -- even a programming tool, to a certain extent. And that's kind of my take on it. Mabye they should have started work with the 4.x branch and gone from there. I partially agree with you; Mozilla stands behind its strengths ("open source", "standards compliant") while the users won't stand behind it because it's such a pain in the ass to use. I'm tired of hearing about code optimization that won't come for another year or so -- I want it now.

As far as the 4.x branch, I'm sure people would disagree with it being a starting point for a new Netscape, stating entirely new frame work was needed, but it certainly feels more proven.

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[cyber-vandal]

Perhaps, but until something like the Diamond Rio can play them then it won't be as mainstream as MP3. Give it time though. Linux wasn't built in a day.

Re:www.oggisdead.com

[Tet]

Great - lets all sit back and watch as Ogg Vorbis is co-opted by M$ into their media players - they rot-13 the id info (or whatever - switch a bit somewhere) and Ogg Vorbitron(TM)(R) enters magical in-compatible la-la land.

Remember we're only talking about the sample implementation here. MS were always able to write their own incompatible version anyway. The file format is still, and always will be owned by the Xiphophorous project. Presumably, they control use of the name Ogg Vorbis, too.

Mediaplayer does this...

[mplex]

Mediaplayer automatically converts my mp3's to 64kbps (I'm very impressed with wma) for transferring to my ipaq. The only downside is that it doesnt cache the conversion so its twofold whenever you want to do a transfer. Also on the mediaplayer front, I heard the wm8 beta does all its recordings at 64kbps instead of 96 with no appreciable quality loss. Once mediaplayer is peoples default audio software for buring cd's, creating video and the like, I have a feeling its going to become extremly popular. Now I know what the replies are going to be, wma at 64kbps sucks, I encode all my mp3's at 256kbps. I really don't care to play the audiophile, I just want twice the music on my portable device. Besides, I still can't tell the difference. Lets see Ogg get that kind of quality from so little...

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[swb]

Sorry to sound bitter and cynical. I just cant see it taking off with MP3 already established, and with people already having forked out their cash for portable mp3 players.

The portable player market is pretty big, but the home player market isn't. I just bought an Apex 703 DVD/CD/MP3 player this weekend, and my choices for MP3 players were pretty small -- it was either Apex or none at all, at least in a sane price range.

The licensing costs of the Fraunhoffer patents are pretty high for a free software group that doesn't have a revenue stream, but at the same time I'm left wondering if the "computer media" world doesn't stay behind MP3 and instead splinters into a half-dozen other formats if we might not have that preference vacuum filled with a CSS-style protected media format. The advantage that MP3 seems to have is that it's an "open" format -- you can copy it, edit it, change it and so on without a lot of RIAA nonsense.

Other systems may encompass this openness as well, but without the "average user" market acceptance that MP3 has they really go nowhere. I'd like to see MP3 get even wider acceptance by hardware makers, which can only happen through market acceptance.

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[hardburn]

Allow me to go off on a wierd story that, yes, does in fact relate to this:

Durring the cold war, the USSR had way better rockets then their western couterparts. They were more expensive, but better built and able to carry more. This is why the US laged way behind the USSR early on.

Then something strange happend. The USSR started slowing down their space program and pretty much came to a halt (more or less) after the American moon landing. They still had a few succsesses, like Mir, but their space program was taking up too much money, and certianly didn't help with their final collapse.

On the other hand, America still had rockets that couldn't take as much, but they were cheeper. More importantly, it forced NASA to miniturize components. This ment they had problems keeping up in the short term, but were better off in the long term.

So how does this relate? KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID. Even if you have the capablity to do it, that doesn't mean you should waste it. It's that sort of philosphy that drove the Solviet/Russian space program to have so many problems in the long run, and thus were beaten by their western counterparts.

------

Re:Welcome Ogg...you're a little late

[Bob Abooey]

The biggest problem I have with Oog Vorbis, other than the massive disk thrashing that happens due to the fact that they still use a double buffered Kleinheimer algorithim, (Sure it's very efficient with regards to lines of code, but the Schmidt-Hefelman routines are much faster and don't write to any temp files), is the total lack of music available in the vorbis format.

When I want to blatently and willfully steal copyrighted material I go right for Napster and mp3's. There is no song out there that I can't find, and find quickly. I really don't see much gain for me by taking my stolen music and converting it to the vorbis format when I burn it onto a CD for my listeneing pleasure. So if they want to gain any popularity, they better make if easy for me to take money from the Recording Industry by having all my favorite songs easily available for free.

Yours
Bob


Yours,

temporary chat mirror

[millette]

The Binary Freedom database seem to have trouble handling yours truly load, so here's the complimentary mirror, brought to you by Waglo Labs.

Extra context; RMS wasn't just being a screwball

[xiphmont]

Actually, that sentence was out of a longer letter that was an RMS reply to Jack. There was some cut-and-thrust debate going on, and RMS's quote was a sensible reply to an earlier assertion made by Jack. The whole "Linux operating system" thing didn't just come out of the blue, the interview just ended up with it edited in a somewhat unfortunate sounding way for RMS ;-)

Monty
xiph.org

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[opal]

Its not an Old Arab Proverb, its an excerpt from Hadith...

Re:what does the NAME mean!? (Please, rename it!)

[namespan]

The logo is sort of obscure, but the snake/sine wave thing is fairly obvious, and everybody likes to see powerful mythic figures hitting things with hammers.

But what in the WORLD were they thinking with the name? Ogg Vorbis? Nowhere near the "catchiness"
of saying mp3. Not to mention that any format must have a great three-letter acronym to catch on. I think "xiph" is a great name for the format, and XPH would make a catchy TLA.

Please guys, change the name, or adopt such a TLA. The name "Ogg Vorbis" just sounds way too plan-9-from-outer-space geeky.


--

See: I was right!

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Indeed it will,

Yep, sticking to facts has never bothered the fanatical anti-RMS club. They invent them as they go. You give some examples below:

> when he started trying to deprecate LGPL.

The LGPL is exactly as "deprecated" as it always have been. From the start, it was intended for libraries that competed directly with proprietary solutions.

> For Stallman, any other form of licence is just a tactical compromise

*All* licenses for *all* intelligent people are tectical compromises for reaching specific goals. For RMS, the ultimate goal is to make alle software free, and GPL, LGPL, and the zlib licenses are merely instruments toward that goal. Only morons thinks trhe licenses are goals in themselves.

> He wants to try to promote Ogg to become the de acto standard,
> and then start including features in it with GPL code,

That would be impressive, given that it isn't a FSF project.

> Of course when Microsoft do this, it's called "embrace and extend",
> but Open Source's favourite sweaty hippie would never do anything so bad, would he?

Unlike Microsoft, RMS never has changed a license for a piece of software he has released to something more restrictive. However, that is a mere fact, not something as important as your speculation and name calling.

Compare RMS to GPL = utter nonsense

[rknop]

For Stallman, any other form of licence is just a tactical compromise on the way to finagling everyone into using his beloved GPL. He wants to try to promote Ogg to become the de facto standard, and then start including features in it with GPL code, so that anyone who wants to stay up with the development path has to join his merry band of intellectual property guerrillas. Of course, when Microsoft do this, it's called "embrace and extend", but Open Source's favourite sweaty hippie would never do anything so bad, wold he?

Look, that makes no sense. Just sit back and think about it. Microsoft "embrace and extend" = create incompatable versions so that everybody is locked into using Microsoft products/standards, and so that Microsoft gets sole control over something which was once out there for all to use. GPL "embrace and extend" = forever make it impossible for any one self-interest to use something to their own ends without leaveing it out in the open for anybody else to use.

How is this comparable? One is inherently selfish. The other is inherently protective. They're opposite.

Sure, criticize the restrictiveness of the GPL. That's fine. But that restrictiveness is of a *very* different nature than the restrictiveness of proprietary licenses such as what comes out of Microsoft, and it's just a stupid troll to try to compare the two.

Regarding the "IP guerrilla" nature of RMS and the GPL: sure, weakening IP is their goal. On the other hand, their way of going about it is entirely fair, and calling them a guerrilla isn't. They aren't going in there and insisting that proprietary software be made illegal, or that proprietary software must be opened up. They are *suggesting* that you might want to choose not to use it. What the GPL does is insure that that which *starts* open, *stays* open. What's so awful about that? It sounds like a damn good idea to me. If you're going to defend propreitary software, bear in mind that almost nobody who produces such software would ever let anybody else use their code without all sorts of restrictive licensing terms dictated by *them*. These restrictive licensing terms will tend to be must less protective of "general use" than the GPL is.

-Rob

Re:Compare RMS to GPL = utter nonsense

[kan]

>How is this comparable? One is inherently selfish. The >other is inherently protective. They're opposite. _Forced_ freedom is not freedom at all - it is labor camp regime. And using embrace-and-extend tactics to force people into that "protective" camp is no better than what Microsoft is doing.

Re:Compare RMS to GPL = utter nonsense

[McKing]

What are you talking about? Nowhere in the GPL are you forced to do anything you don't want to do. By using the software and/or modifying it, you agree to the terms of the deal. If you don't agree to these terms, find another program that has similar functionality or write your own damn software! You don't *have* to use any GPL'ed code at all! Use windows, use BSD, whatever.

The GPL can be summed up thus (legalspeak filtered out):
1. You can use this program however you want. Even sell a copy of it on a CD. You can't take credit for it, though. It still belongs to the author(s).

2. *If* you choose to use this program and modify it, share your modifications with everyone else.

3. Make sure that everyone you give/sell this program to has these same rights that I (the author(s) of this program) gave you.

4. Make sure that I (the author(s)), are credited for originally writing this software.

5. Make sure that when you give/sell a copy of this software to someone, you also attach this license so that they know what their rights are.

There. Plain and simple, right??

Re:Compare RMS to GPL = utter nonsense

[MrCreosote]

Actually, I don't believe GPL actually says what you state in point 2. The core of the GPL is what you state in point 3.

You only have to share the source code for your modifications with anyone using your modified code. If you are the only person using your modified code, you are not under any obligation (except, perhaps, enlightened self interest) to share those modifications with anyone else.

What? RMS gets it?!!

[Mr. Piccolo]

RMS agreeing to someone's decision to license free software under the BSD license? That's like... Microsoft deciding to release Windows XP under GPL!!!

Well, actually he sounds amazing rational when he explains that it's a good thing to release Vorbis under the BSD license so that anybody, even corporations, can use the technology. And I agree 100%. I think the BSD license is the best license if you want to establish a new industry standard.

In any case, I guess this is a case where the freedom of the technology to "infect" everybody takes precedence over the freedom of the code itself.

I guess this shows how much RMS dislikes the LGPL ;-)

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[Sloppy]

I just cant see it taking off with MP3 already established, and with people already having forked out their cash for portable mp3 players.

But also, there's a lot of people who haven't forked out cash for hardware MP3 players, because both the Fraunhofer patent problem and the Vorbis announcement were in the public eye before hardware MP3 players started shipping. If Fraunhofer had kept the sub underwater just another year or two, MP3 would have won decisively. Instead, concientious people held back and waited, and now there's going to be a battle.

---

Blech!

[MoOsEb0y]

I just downloaded and encoded some tracks with beta 4, and I hate to say this, but the quality of ogg has _DROPPED_ since beta 2. (If you don't believe me, go out and actually BUY a copy of alanis morissette - jagged little pill and encode track 8... don't do a freaking mp3 recode!)
-Moose

You might be getting bitten by different defaults

[xiphmont]

In beta 2, oggenc's default encoding mode was 160kbps. In beta 4, the default is 128kbps. There *is* an audible difference, even with the improvements to 128kbps since earlier betas.

Monty
xiph.org

All this talk....

[Calamere]

about RIAA and Watermarked Music and new algorithms doesn't mean jack to kids. They are going to get their free music whichever way it's easiest to do. Period. End of story. When Napster starts chargeing, they'll move to the next thing, be it Freenet or Ogg or what have you, as long as it doesn't take much to figure out how to do it. The less brain power it takes to figure out, the more likely the masses will take to it. So the trick is to make Ogg extremely simple to use. And it looks like they're on their way.

OpenNap will trade .ogg

[xiphmont]

Napster pledged support early on but doesn;t seem to have gotten around to it.

OpenNap, however, does support Ogg. Just use a client (AudioGnome or a recent Gnapster) that supports .ogg, and OpenNap servers will happily take them. And, yes, I've used it so it does work, not just heresay ;-)

Monty
xiph.org

MS has no mindshare among music players...

[DeeKayWon]

Really, now. Very few people use Windows Media player for playing and recording music. Even AOL probably couldn't successfully embrace and extend Vorbis by including an incompatible Vorbis decoder in Winamp, because people could just use the official Winamp Vorbis Plugin. There'd be little incentive to pay for an incompatible encoder, since there will be free encoders out there. Heck, the people working on LAME say that Vorbis will eventually become the default encoding used by LAME, and we all know how good of an MP3 encoder it is. Sonique already has Vorbis support, and Sonic Foundry has added support to its products.

The free Vorbis will always be there. The availability of free encoders plus the standard plugin architecture of music players these days would make embracing and extending a real tough thing to do.

Re:MS has no mindshare among music players...

[sheldon]

I'm confused. What point are you trying to make?

Most music players already support WMA, at least Winamp, Sonique that you mention definately do.

Re:MS has no mindshare among music players...

[DeeKayWon]

Simple. The only way Microsoft can try to embrace and extend Vorbis is by creating the tainted version and offering support for it - and not "free" Vorbis - in Windows Media Player. That won't do anything, since hardly anyone uses Windows Media Player for listening to music. The most important bases, those being Winamp and Sonique, are already covered by plugins for untainted Vorbis.

Re:MS has no mindshare among music players...

[sheldon]

Windows Media Player is pretty much tied in terms of marketshare against Real Player. Trying to make the claim that hardly anyone uses it is misleading.

Without real stats, one has to make them up. I would imagine out of one billion computer users this is the breakup of marketshare for audio encoding formats:

900,000,000 use MP3
99,999,990 use WMA
10 use Ogg-Vorbis

I don't see what purpose it would serve Microsoft to taint Ogg when it has no marketshare, and it's an inferior format to the WMA they already ship.

Ogg Vorbis 100% free?

[TheSync]

Has there truly been a patent search to make sure that Ogg Vorbis does not infringe on existing patents?

For example, I just did a quick patent search for "MDCT" and "audio" and came up with 175 hits. There are plenty of patents out there covering all kinds of audio encoding mechanisms including MDCT (or whatever transform you happen to be fond of). While the transforms themselves usually are not patented, mechanisms of their practical use are.

Re:Ogg Vorbis 100% free?

[ChadN]

The Ogg Vorbis people have done THOROUGH research to insure that Ogg Vorbis does not infringe on any credible patent claims. Not to say that it won't stop a lawsuit, but the specifics of encoding/decoding ARE different from the MP3 patents, for example.

Re:Ogg Vorbis 100% free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I'm certain the very concept of audio itself has been patented. You're no one in the tech industry until you've been sued by patent squatters.

Re:Ogg Vorbis 100% free?

[Chris Johnson]

If they do a thorough patent search it makes them liable for triple damages in the event they do get sued...

"He who writes the code picks the license....

[namespan]

and anyone else is just a whiner."

[attributed to Linus Torvalds in an earlier /. discussion, so it must be true...]

--

Re:who cares...

[Phillip2]

"Legions of mindless gnudroids"

What pitiful flamebait. Perhaps you meant, lots of individuals who value his contribution to the free software and the debate that this has produced.

Phil

Re:who cares...

[Nater]

who the fuck cares what RMS thinks anyways?

Legions of mindless gnudroids, that cannot think themselves and mostly hang around slashdot and kuro5hin. That's who

And some smaller number of intelligent people who understand that RMS is just a man with an opinion, a plan, and some measure of success. He is a man who doesn't ask anyone to do anything they don't want to, who will personally respond to any question from any person, and who knows himself better than most people can ever hope to know themselves. It is unlikely that any one person can change his mind and this, I think, is the sticking point for most of the anti-RMS crowd. What people don't seem to understand is that he's not stubborn at all. Rather, the reason his mind is so difficult to change is because his opinions are so firmly grounded in years - decades even - of careful reasoning.

You don't have to agree with every word that comes out of his mouth (or his RJ-45 jack). I don't. But don't go lambasting those who do agree with him just because there are so many who do it without thinking. My guess is that you are one of those who lambaste without thinking.

"Large enough"

[Per Abrahamsen]

> 2) Larger hard drives make a 10% savings even
> MORE worthwhile. Consider: If I saved 10% of a
> 4 GB drive, that's 40 MB--room for maybe 10
> additional songs or about one CD. But if I
> saved 10% of a 400 GB drive, that's an extra 4
> GB--enough for 100 CD's.

At some point, the saving stop mattering, because the harddisk is simply "large enough". For example, any harddisk you can buy today is "large enough" to hold all the text documents I have written, ever, including school reports, emails, Usenet postings, and auxilary files. I could gzip them to make them take say 50Mb instead of 100Mb, but it hardly matters.

The 400 GB harddisk is "large enough" to hold all the music non-collecters care about in mp3 format, so an additional 10% saving isn't that important. What is important is the size of their movie collection, 400 GB might hold 100 mpeg2 (DVD) movies, going to mpeg4 (Div-X :-) would be important.

Now let is talk 400 TB harddisk, and we can start talking either cinema quality video, or new forms for entertainment (imagine a 3d engine, which instead of artificial models and texture used film taken from real locations, with all as many detail as you can afford).

Re:what does the NAME mean!? (Please, rename it!)

[namespan]

Nanny Ogg
Deacon Vorbis

It's all Terry Pratchett.

Great. It's Terry Practchet geeky. A step up from Ed Wood, but still....

--

RMS as "King of Open Source"?

[BlaisePascal]

I think RMS would be flattered by your sentiment, but would probably take exception to the title of King of Open Source.

Re:RMS as "King of Open Source"?

[jbailey999]

I think the preferred term is "Saint iGNUcious"...

http://www.stallman.org/saint.html

Re:RMS as "King of Open Source"?

[thallgren]

I think I'll have to stop posting sarcastic jokes on Slashdot.

Regards, Tommy

The name isn't helping any

[TobyWong]

Amen brother.

I don't understand why anyone would choose a name like that for a technology that depends on market acceptance...

It's like naming your kid "ZxykliaBou De Amafenxsezerly" and hoping they get elected to senate when they get older. You really aren't helping them any with that name.

Re:The name isn't helping any

[TobyWong]

HAHAHAHA ok you made my afternoon =)

Looks cool, but still rough

[Adam Wiggins]

The format looks cool, but it's still rough. I've been offering both MP3 and Vorbis from my download page for a while, and the few people that do try out the Vorbis version have complaints like:

- Can't get it to work with winamp
- Can't download it on Macintosh due to screwey MIME types
- My own complaint: the file is signifigantly larger than the matching MP3, yet the sound quality is noticably worse.

I'll check out this new beta. I'd say don't throw out notlame or your mp3 players just yet, but hopefully it will be up to par with MP3s (and maybe better!) very soon.

Oh, a point in its favor: getting the plugin for playing the files running on xmms was a breeze.

Re:Looks cool, but still rough

[jbailey999]

Ummm, our office admin got the winamp plugin running. She's pretty bright, but not exactly technical.

If you still need an XMMS plugin, upgrade to a newer version, it's built in now.

Re:See: I was right!

[Phillip Birmingham]

Has there been an instance where RMS revoked an LGPL or BSD license to replace it with the GPL, or did you actually not intend to tell us something we don't already know?

Re:See: I was right!

[civilizedINTENSITY]

More restrictive in that its design is more effective at promoting freedom. I can live with that. :-)

It's a valid point of view...

[TobyWong]

I don't agree with the parent post but it hardly merits a moderation of "troll". Just because it goes against The Holy Church of Slashdots commandment #4 which states

Slashdot 3:16 "The lord God sayeth 'all things must be free (as in beer) and even if they aren't they should be. Oh yeah and please mod anyone who thinks otherwise -1 troll"

Anyhow back on topic, that is certainly a valid assertion if you agree with current definitions of intellectual property. Once you chage "who really owns what and for how long" like the RIAA and MPAA are currently trying to do, then all the rules change. Think about this, just because IP exists as we know it, does that mean it's the correct way? or the best way?

Re:NHS?

[Thomas Miconi]

The NHS is not a socialised health care, it's a socialised life expectancy reducer :o)

Universal, socialised health care is rare, except in France (and in Scandinavia, of course). It seems to work well, provided you're ready to fund it decently - and the UK government is not.

The worst thing is, the average Brit wouldn't mind so much about paying a little more taxes and getting a reasonable cancer survival rate in return - but you know, ideology...

Thomas Miconi

Yes now the quality is great!

[Adam Bertil]

I have tested Ogg Vorbis before it became beta.
And i found some samples that sounded bad even with beta3(using default encoding parameters) mind fraunhoffer,lame or bladeenc could not encode them right.
But now with Ogg Vorbis beta4 those files sounds as the orginal and are smaller than mp3(lame 128kbps).
Great work Monty and the rest of the crew!
Time to rip my cd collection.

The origin of the Ogg

[tjwhaynes]

Nanny Ogg
Deacon Vorbis

It's all Terry Pratchett.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzztttt. Wrong!
Pedant alert: The Ogg in Ogg Vorbis is taken from the move in Netrek - to Ogg an opponent. The full definition is here but to summarize the Netrek definition: "to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying strategic positions". Quite appropriate really.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Thats absolutely why I haven't "forked out the cash" yet.

Re:what does the NAME mean!? (Please, rename it!)

[Airline_Sickness_Bag]

It's not as bad as "microsoft", which sounds like someone who needs Viagra and PVC piping. -me

BSDL is ideal for sample implementations

[The Deep Blue Funk]

If you want to provide a sample implementation of something, then BSDL is good because just about anyone else can use the code as a basis for their own implementation. GPL/LGPL is good if you want your implementation to be the only implementation. So, if you're trying to promote a standard rather than an implementation, go with BSDL (the 2-clause variety, that is) or some other X-style license.

This is a perfect example of someone choosing a license based on what their goals are for the code, rather than religious beliefs or whatever. IMO all of the BSDL vs. GPL debates are pretty pointless, since most of the time the participants are arguing that one or the other license is ideal for all open source software. I say, it all comes down to what your goals are for the code you're writing; pick whichever license is most appropriate, rather than mindlessly advocating using one over the other for everything. This goes for proprietary software too.

Catching on

[Rader]

I'm sure that as long as the popular players support OGG, then it always has a chance to catch on, and continue the cycle.

All it would take though is for WinAmp to not support it, to crush its chances.

Rader

Re:Catching on

[stikves]

WinAmp already includes .OGG plugin in its standard distribution.

Re:what does the NAME mean!? (Please, rename it!)

[Ryandav]

Interesting thing: sometimes, we who make the technology, make the rules.

Yeah, it's not "marketing-friendly", but sometimes that just means we drive a little change in the world a little more to our view of things. People come around eventually to whatever level is required to participate in the next "big thing". Influx into common american usage patterns by outside linguistic groups isn't exactly something new...

isn't that cool?

lockup on seek?

[ywwg]

Has anyone else had trouble with seeking with the new vorbis xmms plugin? I've only tried the rpm so far, but when I drag the position cursor xmms locks up. This doesn't happen with mp3s, so it must be a problem with the vorbis plugin. Has anyone else found this?

Keep them poor

[wavydavy]

For the sake of our ears, we should keep musicians poor. Everyone knows that bands go downhill with too much success.

Multichannel?

[grappler]

Does anybody know about support for multichannel (specifically 5.1) audio streams? I've got a surround setup and some surround recordings on DVDs, and it would be just swell if I could encode those...

Re:80 minutes CD-R's!

[athlon02]

Ok, obviously I left an important couple of details... oops! I am planning to use a 700MB CD and I have more tracks to rip & encode too though... and well 22MB is not enough for about 10+ tracks more.

So when is xmms + ogg not going to suck?

[luge]

I've got a large ogg library (about 2.5K songs) but playing it with xmms is painful- many times, I can't get all the way through one album without crashing. And as one friend put it "sure, they are accepting patches... or they would be, if they didn't think that their code was already perfect."
Are there decent GUI-driven alternatives out there for ogg + mp3?

Re:So when is xmms + ogg not going to suck?

[xiphmont]

Every Ogg + XMMS crash bug we know about is fixed... in XMMS CVS. Because there have been no major releases of XMMS recently, most people are still downloading and using buggy 'official' XMMS packages. Thus, folks are unwittingly reporting bugs that have been fixed for weeks or months. A number of the crash bugs were in the Ogg plugin, but a number have also been in XMMS itself, which Ogg simply had the bad luck to tickle. Upgrading the plugin alone can't save you.

So, first grab and build XMMS from XMMS CVS. It actually builds cleanly with minimum fuss. At that point, if you get a crash playing Ogg, the XMMS developers and we would very much like to hear about it.

Monty
xiph.org

Re:So when is xmms + ogg not going to suck?

[luge]

Ok, great... this still leaves the obvious question: "if what is in CVS is substantially better than the released packages, why aren't you doing a new release?" I know in my projects, that's the gold standard: when there are serious bugs, and the serious bugs are fixed, there is a release. Are there plans for a release any time soon? I really prefer my toys to be package-managed and not built from (difficult to remove cleanly) scratch.
~luge
BTW, I don't mean to knock either the XMMS or ogg folks- obviously, the work both of those teams have done is above and beyond what 99% of us could do. It would still be nice to have a release less than 3 months old, though...

Re:So when is xmms + ogg not going to suck?

[patrikr]

You're barking up the wrong tree... Monty is responsible for Ogg, not XMMS.

--

Re:So when is xmms + ogg not going to suck?

[luge]

I knew that; sorry if it wasn't clear. I guess I just kvetched in his direction since he has clearly been working with the XMMS people to solve these problem, and so I thought that he might have some clue of their release schedule. Guess not :\

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[Lemmy Caution]

The rational thing to do is to let the markeyt decide. With ogg being BSD licenced, the choice they will make is clear in my mind.

This makes no sense. "The market" is just an abstraction about people's individual choices. You don't "let" the market do anything, you make your choices based on the constraints you find yourself in (how much money you have, your sense of urgency and need to decide quickly, your ethics and morals, and the total impression - most of it irrational - created by the good or service), and if that choice is available to others as information and data, you become part of "the market."

Treating the "market" as a ding an sich is up there with saying that "evolution will decide who lives and dies," another persistant tautology. Not to mention the fact that using Ogg Vorbis or the mp3 algorithm are both, for all practical purposes if not legal ones, free, and so the metaphor of the market isn't even completely apt.

Performance

[rossarian]

Well, they weren't kidding when they said the've been optimizing. Playing .oggs via xmms this morning took up about 15% of my cpu time. I upgraded to the new plugin and now I haven't seen cpu usage go above 0.9% for the same songs. Top seemed to be taking up more, for reference.

I don't know if it's an xmms thing or an ogg thing, but it sure is nice.

What distro are you using?

[tuffy]

I've run xmms+ogg under RedHat 6.2 and RedHat 7.0 with no problems whatsoever - even over lots and lots of oggs. Maybe the problem is I can't find a source for xmms-vorbis and it's linked against a lot of libraries. A recompile of either xmms or the ogg plugin might help considerably.

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[roady]

I recall that mp3 actually became a standard (as in everybody uses it, not as in MPEG consortium) near 1995-1996 when warez groups started distributing brand new albums in MP3 format.

Just wait until some some music warez groups are convinced to switch to org and it will become the standard (this worked with RAR archives and DivX :-)).

The only thing is that warez groups don't care about patents, licensing or anything, so they might not see the interest to move to ogg.

Lossy vs. lossless compression

[cougio]

With the bandwidth and hard drive space rising, I feel that by the time Ogg is finished, it will be obsolete. Wouldn't concentrating on a lossless compression format such as FLAC be more worthwhile?

I don't want near-CD quality: I want CD quality!

Re:Lossy vs. lossless compression

[Datafage]

SWEET! When will there be a nice graphical automated encoder?

-----------------------

Re:Lossy vs. lossless compression

[SLi]

It all depends on how you define "lossy" and "lossless". Not even CD quality is as good as the original, and that's because it limits samples to 16 bits and frequencies to 22kHz (i.e. half the sampling rate). It just comes close enough for us not to be able to notice. If CD gives us the quality we need and a bit more (since practically nobody can distinguish it from the original), what's wrong with saving a few more bytes from the file size and use lossy compression with a high enough bitrate? I'm sure neither you nor anybody else here can hear the 1Hz tone anyway.

Vorbis Webpage (-1 Offtopic)

[mav[LAG]]

Minor quibble about the download page - I found the order of things screwy: libraries should come first, then players and tools, front-ends and whatnot, then player plugins, then language bindings. No doubt there's a good reason for the current order of things but I found it confusing.

Re:I'm not going to post ontopic here

[Lazarus Short]

Dammit, man, why couldn't you have posted this yesterday when I still had moderator points?

Shoeboy, you're my hero. You write well, you're consistenly funny, and I couldn't agree more about the women's feet thing. Are you going to burn off karma by posting more erotica any time soon?

Also, what's your position on painted toenails? Sexy, or is au naturale better?

--

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

The advantage that MP3 seems to have is that it's an "open" format -- you can copy it, edit it, change it and so on without a lot of RIAA nonsense.

I agree about openness, but you can't edit MP3 or Vorbis or any other lossy format well. Just like JPEGs degrade when sent through multiple edit and conversion steps, so will a lossy audio format. It will sound bad. You need to have a lossless version of the content to edit well. Preferably a multi-track original, not after it has been mixed.

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[Kvasir]

As any economist could tell you the market doesn't always do the rational thing, which in this case would seem to be to switch to Ogg Vorbis encoding of audio data. The term mp3 is so well known, largely as a result of the publicity surrounding the Napster v. RIAA case, that everyone understands that it means "illegally copied music spread by evil hackers across the internet" and everybody wants some. Putting MP3 on the box makes everyone pick up on it and think "Hey I can get free music!" You could probably sell a processor by pointing out it was MP3 compatible, heck you might even get away with it on the box of a graphics card.

Ogg Vorbis doesn't have this affect. Whilst it could easily be cheaper (for commercial entreprises) and even, perhaps, a superior encoding format, it will probably not succeed in breaking the market so dominated by mp3. Newbies who have just figured out they can use their PCs to play music will run searches for "Limp Bizkit MP3", not "Beethoven Ogg Vorbis". Just because that is what they have heard of.

What is wrong with quality work?

[TooTallFourThinking]

Hi all!

I am curious about the recent comments about why there is all the hubbub on Ogg Vorbis since bandwidth and computer speeds are increasing. I would like to ask, what is wrong with doing quality work?

I believe amoung the Ogg Vorbis developers many pursuits is to create very efficient code and have that reflected in the size and quality of the bitstreams. I have noticed a similar stream of thought in Perl programmers, who constantly strive to make their code smaller and faster. Goofy bastards. ;-)

But it seems some people don't reflect that view and I am just curious as to why. Maybe I am missing something and if so, would like to know.

Here is my thought. Say it were affordable to have a T1 instead of DSL to host my webserver, and I wanted to stream out audio for everyone. If I had a choice of serving out 20 streams at 56kbits or using a different format (Ogg) which will have a smaller bitstream at 56kbit and serve out 30 streams, I would opt for the smaller format to get more streams. It seems to make more sense to me.

And not to mention is it free. I sometimes forget that.

Re:What is wrong with quality work?

[mongus]

I would like to ask, what is wrong with doing quality work?

I completely agree. In my day... I remember running impressive programs on my 16K Coco 2. You can hardly build "Hello World" in 16K anymore. I have a hard time with the excuse that quality programming doesn't matter anymore because machines are so big and fast now. Grrrrr... bloated software.

20 streams at 56kbits or using a different format (Ogg) which will have a smaller bitstream at 56kbit

If you're streaming at 56Kbps it doesn't matter what the codec is you'll be able to support the same number of streams. What you want is a lower bitrate with the same quality. (probably what you meant)

Re:What is wrong with quality work?

[TooTallFourThinking]

Yes. That is what I meant. It made sense in my head but it didn't come out quite right. Thanks

I agree with you. The Commodore 64 had a flight simulator written on it. A not too shabby feat back in the day. Nowadays it seems software is more bloated then it used to be.

Some companies want to reduce their time to market and get the product out as fast as possible, skimping on efficiency and quality. I understand that. And some companies don't. I respect that. Where will the line between laziness and efficiency be drawn? Maybe those are the perils of writing extreme large pieces of code?

Then again, my code isn't exactly lean either. *laugh*

Re:Vorbis FAQ

[swb]

Well, you only suffer one generation loss when editing an MP3. The audio editor I use converts it to uncompressed audio for the editing process, it only gets saved as an MP3 if you re-export it. It doesn't get decompressed-recompressed each time an edit is run on the file.

I'm not an audio expert, but as far as I'm concerned the generational loss of decent 128k MP3s has been something I haven't noticed. Besides, I'm primarily referring to "consumer" editing, not professional multitrack editing, where I presume other more suitable file formats exist.

Is there any hard data as to the generational degredation of Mp3 streams with subsequent de/compression cycles? I know that early ATRAC versions had this problem, but current ATRAC seems relatively immune within a reasonable number of generations (like fewer than 20).

Re:Is Ogg Vorbiss our Moral duty?

[stikves]

I heard that Rio accepts software updates. So we can "port" ogg player into Rio. Just a thought.

It depends...

[stikves]

(Talking about MP3) Well 128KBit may be CD-Quality, if there are no vocals and only simple insturments are used.

But even 256KBit does not satisfy me when i try to encode Metallica, because of the electroguitar.

MP3 is on a modem box now

[kennyj449]

Many of Creative's modems have "MP3 COMPATIBLE" on the box in the corner... Guess that means that you have to have one of their modems (and one of the mp3 compatible ones at that) in order to download the mp3s "correctly." The only thing more ridiculous than that is that people probably believe it, and would choose it over other modems because they don't claim to have MP3 compatibility. A side note, Creative has a model of the SBLive called the Live! MP3 and now the MP3+5.1, but since these are made with amateur music playback, recording, and manipulation in mind and come with a veritable shiotload of software that does so, I can't gripe as much. Basically, it's just like the other "SBLive Value" clones, whereas the only differentiating factor is the software bundle. I actually won one of those at a drawing at my college, and I'm still trying to decide whether to switch over to it completely or stick with my good ol' Aureal Sq2500. In the meantime, they seem to play nice together, except for DOS emulation in Windows 9x...

Unfortunately quality still subpar...

[sheldon]

First a disclaimer... I have a fairly critical ear and I'm listening using a pair of studio grade Sony MDR-V6 headphones.

I just did a quick compare using "Where it's At" from Beck's Odelay album using MP3, OGG and WMA at 128kbps. To be honest I like using music which contains large amounts of purposeful distortion on the part of the artist because it really screws with these encoders...

OGG is slightly improved over MP3. Although there was considerable distortion in the first couple of passages of the song which really drove me nuts, the distortion throughout the rest of the song was more tolerable.

MP3 as always has this really nasty distortion throughout the song, enough to give me a headache after extended listening(i.e. more than 2 minutes).

WMA still just overall has the best quality of reproduction. It's still a lossy format and there are times of distortion, but overall it just does a much better job of reproducing the music.

Also to mention speed. MP3 encoded the fastest, in around 30 seconds. WMA took 50 seconds. Yet it took nearly 3 minutes to encode the song into OGG format.

Your mileage may vary.

If you can't hear the difference between an MP3 and the CD original, the differences in these formats will not be noticeable to you. In which case the question is do you have the time to wait for OGG to complete your encoding?

Honestly I found the differences between these formats to be quite distinct. I believe I could pinpoint them with 99% accuracy in a double-blind test.

Re:what does the NAME mean!? (Please, rename it!)

[jon_c]

It's all about making a image format with the extension ".TNA"

I've been saying that for a while.. funny enough microsoft now has "Thread Nuertral Apartments", of "TNA"s. for all us COM+ people.

..and who said microsoft didn't makeing anything cool?

-Jon

Streamripper

the major problem with Ogg Vorbis ...

[porky_pig_jr]

is that they are trying to avoid anything which has been patented so far. Meaning some of the best algorithms. Whereas Lame (MP3) or Psytel (AAC) approach is 'screw the patents', and MP+ apparently got the rights for some MP2-related algorithms (from Philips?).

Re:the major problem with Ogg Vorbis ...

[xiphmont]

is that they are trying to avoid anything which has been patented so far.Meaning some of the best algorithms.

Not really. All of the annoyances so far have been trivial. For a patent to be valid, it has to narrow to a specific innovation. Yes, that's been abused alot recently, but the research and commercial organizations we're talking about here (Fraunhofer, Dolby, AT&T, Philips, NTT, etc) don't actually have very abusive patents. it's just the way they're using them; it is nearly impossible to make an unencumbered MP3 derivative. But if you're not doing things the MP3 way (we're not), sidestepping the patent issue isn't that hard.

Monty
xiph.org

VQF

[ArchieBunker]

Ever hear of VQF? Go to www.vqf.com and check it out. The files are 50% smaller than mp3 and sound MUCH better. VQF has been out for years but I have yet to see a single file using it. For listening to my own cds its great.

Re:Comparison of .ogg/.mp3/.wma size + quality

[sheldon]

Interesting, in my comparison Ogg was nowhere near the quality of WMA.

But then I only did 160kbps.

:P

[Chris Johnson]

Fine- YOU write the Mac versions, and while you're at it, see to it that the encoder has:

• ability to set low and high cutoff points
• ability to set slope of said rolloffs
• ability to ditch or moderate the psy model or replace it with ATH suppression
• ability to set that ATH point DYNAMICALLY

I'm not going to get _into_ mass ability to play the resulting file- THAT can be fixed in the long haul! I'm saying that AS A MUSICIAN I _need_ more than just consumergrade lossy audio encoding. Each of my songs reacts differently to encoding, I know what I'm trying to get out of each, and treat it as a mastering situation. How? I use LAME and specify custom settings in detail to lock in a consistent, believable soundstage despite the coarsening of texture from the lossy compression. What if LAME didn't offer those controls? The version I use didn't! It's free software, I was able to _add_ them working from a version that compiled without issues and a drag-and-drop helper app (DropMP3)!

Let's not even get into the way there is _still_ no Mac 'hacks' downloadable. How many months, years has it been? There was some sort of quick-and-dirty hack written at MacHack- where is it? Let's see that. Let's see MPW tools, _anything_, because right now your attitude is very much like saying 'no soup for YOU!'. It's morally indefensible to not get behind Vorbis, but it's not _your_ problem to make that possible, is it?

I am increasingly of the opinion that backing Vorbis is a detour, and what people should _really_ be doing is mounting legal challenges against Thomson's obscene over-reaching regarding the mp3 format. It's not especially relevant that mp3 is established- that could change. What's relevant is that Vorbis is playing a defensive game, and I'm seeing multiple reports that the avoiding of obvious, optimal algorithms that Thomson considers 'theirs' has led to Vorbis sounding less good- which does _not_ please me, way to compete guys :P Given that Vorbis will do this in efforts to not challenge the Thomson claims of intellectual property, just what are you gonna do when Thomson, unopposed, proceeds to make MORE CLAIMS and further eat away at the permissible techniques for encoding audio?

There are people out there who are preferring to go ahead _assuming_ the Thomson claims are unenforceable, ridiculous and obscene, who are simply proceeding to use mp3 _without_ paying tribute, and I don't mean consumers, either. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're better off doing that and getting ready to directly contest Thomson's right to charge content producers and distributors for USE of the format. Ogg Vorbis legitimises what they are doing by playing keep-away with them and conceding every claim to property they make. I'm not okay with conceding these claims they make.

Use the just released encoder, not an old one.

[xiphmont]

> MP3 encoded the fastest, in around 30 seconds.
> WMA took 50 seconds. Yet it took nearly 3
> minutes to encode the song into OGG format.

Umm.. then I don't think you were using beta 4. Since we're comparing against *beta 4* now (and the speed/quality improvements is brings...)
your review doesn't mean that much :-(

If you have problems with beta 4, please send us example samples.

Monty
xiph.org

Squish will be updated in Ogg

[xiphmont]

Squish will reappear.

But there's also been other good lossless compression work done lately in the form of FLAC and Monkey's Audio. Squish will be updated after I've had some time to commisserate with the other projects and steal technology from them-- AHEM! I mean share what we know.

(sorry been reading Microsoft rants)

Monty
xiph.org
Evil Anti-Capitalist Anti-Innovation Anti-American Open Source Pinko Peckerhead Freak

Re:Welcome Ogg...you're a little late

[mvw]

What is the Schmidt-Hefelman (or Heffelman) procedure about? Do you have any reference?

Whatever...

[sheldon]

Whatever...

Track 8 "Where it's at" from the Beck Odelay album.
Machine is a Compaq PIII-550.

C:\usr\test>oggenc test.wav
Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
Encoding "test.ogg" [100.0%] [ 0m00s remaining] /

Done encoding file "test.ogg"

File length: 5m 30.0s
Elapsed time: 2m 45.0s
Rate: 2.0054
Average bitrate: 121.8 kb/s

C:\usr\test>oggenc -v
OggEnc v0.7 (libvorbis beta4)

If you listen to the resulting file you will hear incredible distortion in the first passage. I would call it a reverb effect.

My statements are accurate, your attempt to deflect criticism through ad hominem does not help your argument.

Apologies to Sheldon: He used beta 4

[xiphmont]

We talked via email, this is beta 4, just to make sure every one else sees it (ie, my previous response was wrong).

The low speed is a little surprising, but not as big a deal as the reported artifacts. I'm looking at it.

Monty
xiph.org

Re:what does the NAME mean!? (Please, rename it!)

[Grahf666]

real good non-lossy compression on the pr0n with that format...

Re:See: I was right!

[An Ominous Coward]

Aparently I did tell SOMEONE something they didn't already know, as they marked a valid post as "Troll".