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Who'll Be Using Ogg Vorbis Instead Of MP3?
An anonymous reader asks: "Ogg Vorbis is hitting stable and hopefully will release 1.0 soon. But I'm wondering, who is going to use it? MP3 is very popular on the net and beyond, but it's based on patents. Software patents aren't legal in Europe, but are in other parts of the world. Is Ogg Vorbis making a chance to become the next music-standard for the net and beyond. This mainly because there are no patents broken by this standard. Will it be a standard for the world or one for the books?"
Never having bothered to do it before with MP3, I've recently started ripping my CD collection to .ogg files, and the quality is good to my (tin) ears. Someone with an entrepreneurial bent needs to sell a dedicated hardware player that takes CD-Rs, so I can play back 10 hours of books on tape from a single disk. I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?
Actually it's Archos and their website is avaiable at http://www.archos.com
The only place I can't play OGG files is in my car - a PhatNoise PhatBox. The ARM CPU needs optimised decoding libraries, the same ones the EMPEG needs to play OGG. As soon as those are out, I'll switch.
It's really hard to follow this one up with anything but an, "I agree." Perhaps this is a useless post, but to add to the show of hands and answer the question, all the music I rip from CD goes to OGG. MP3's just don't sound as good. There are sounds that you can hear in the CD recording and the OGG encording that you cannot hear in an MP3. Sorry, MP3 fans.
assert(expired(knowledge));
>Ogg is apparently not the best (but who's to
>trust those musically inclined people)... so
>what's the purpose of this article?
The test was _highly_ flawed and that has been
pointed out noumerous times.
In independant double-blind tests, Vorbis has
come out ahead each time, along with AAC and
MPC.
--
GCP
Two years? Uh, Iomega HipZip, asshole.
If only you knew the power of the p0rn side.
</heavy breathing>
Before I ever learned of Fraunhofer techniques for removing "nearby by quiet" sounds, I was kicking around ways to turn sound files (such as WAV's) into MIDI files. To do this one has to select "primary" frequencies and ignore "riff raff".
What I came up with resembles edge detection techniques in computer vision and image processing applications. Typical "edge filters" can remove nearby "noise", similar to what Fraunhofer claims a patent on. There are all kinds of edge-detection and "cleaning" filter "types" in computer vision and image processing. Some have names like "sombrero" due to their shape. The human eye even uses forms of these I hear, and only God can patent the eye.
I don't know which filter curve shape works best with sound (it may be subjective), but I doubt most varieties are patent-able (although the patent office shows chimp-like intelligence at times, so I would not put it past them.) They are simply curve profiles. Can 1D curves be patented? (In vision apps, one often rotates a 1D curve to make a 2D filter.) Then one applies a threshold (a simple number) to remove the lower-scoring candidates. The steps are:
1. Apply a filter curve to the "image"
2. Remove lines or pixels below a given threshold
3. Process the remaining lines or pixels
My main point here is that there are computer-vision and image-processing analogies for removing "nearby noise". Fraunhofer simply RE-discovered the *sound* versions of vision filters the hard way.
Just work with a frequency chart as if it was an image-processing chore, and find the filter curves that give you what you want. The filters are treated like "template libraries" in image applications. A typical application of image filters may be to remove/reduce lens-flare from around star images, for example.
Table-ized A.I.
I discovered this format thanks to /. and I plan to fully convert my library (1600 files) fairly soon. Apart from the space saving implications, it's OPEN SOURCE! Why the heck wouldn't you go OGG? Winamp has a plugin for it (though they don't do Tags yet), XMMS supports it in 1.2.5, and it fits with our "Penguinist" views of free software.
Side note: Finally got a modem working in my Slack 8.0 box! This is my first post under Linux! Yay for me!
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Everyone is forgetting that the Ogg encoders themselves are subject to legal action anytime by the Fraunhoffer guys. Fraunhoffer has said it has yet to be proved if Ogg doesn't infringe on any of their patents. I know they're making their best effort, but maybe, just maybe, Fraunhoffer is waiting for it to become abit popular to sue anyone. I know that's FUD, but they might out some lawyers into it.
I think they both sound like crap next to a live performance or a CD. I can't think why anyone would listen to an mp3/ogg to truely experience the music.
OV may be patent-free, but until I see support for it in the plethora of digital music hardware out there on the market, I'll stick with mp3.
~dlb
If ogg123 can lock up FreeBSD, your box has got some problems.
No, MP3 Pro and Ogg Vorbis are the winners of the new era in digital music compression - one for those who like to pay licensing fees and one for those who don't. MS-whatever is left in the dust.
erm
:(
He's talking about minidisc. Not an Iomega product. A sony product (licensed to several others). Optical rewritable media, ~74 minutes per disc. Format: 384Kbps ATRAC (sony proprietary compression format).
They're not too bad. I'd use mine more but I dropped it and it's functionality is now limited to sitting on the shelf
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I know, that's where I got the idea :) I bet Coke/Pepsi try to screen out people planning to do that, though...
I'm surprised that people can't tell them apart in a blind taste test, but then again there are people who can't tell the difference between diet and regular.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
If you want to help, why not join the discussion and make some suggestions on how to actively promote OGG? You could be part of an important grass-roots movement here.
very simple reason to use ogg:
when developing an application where audio compression is needed (voip, game sound etc) you need to pay to use the mp3 codec. ogg is good for small developers...
already converted every single one of my 600 + mp3s last month.
Incorrectly. It does not support 24 bit transparency mapped PNG, which is the only useful format option that gives quality exceeding GIF.
Due to the lossless compression method, the file sizes are typically 3x larger than an equal dimensioned JPG at equivalent quality setting.
PNG is not a valid alternative to GIF in terms of bandwidth, quality, or multilayering technique for web sites. I've done everything possible to move in the direction of PNG on two of my domains, and eventually went back to GIF for file size. When 24 bit PNG with alpha mapping is properly supported, all that will change.
JH
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
How does the GPL make something unsuitable for commercial use?
My company's business is selling a Linux cross-development environment/distribution to folks doing embedded systems development, and we've got plenty of customers. I doubt we'd be making the money we are if they were "non-commercial".
Wrt. the licensability thing, I don't quite follow that argument, either. Licensing the technology generally includes licensing the patent, and having patent law as an extra means of enforcing the requirement to license strengthens the legal protection of those trying to commercial software, rather than weakens it. Certainly, large-scale enforcement is difficult -- but despite the availability of free, (illegal?) unlicensed applications, the big money is made off of commercial use anyhow, and there enforcability is far stronger.
As a matter of fact, mp3 is a compression scheme for wav format. So it _must_ be converted from wav. Any cd ripper that skips that probably does it as an illusion. For example: rips a 32k buffer, converts to wav while in memory and then to mp3 without saving the entire song as a wav on disk first.
Actually, the mp3 format has nothing to do with wav format. As long as you have an audio stream to compress, you can encode it in mpeg2-layer3.
I used to maintain a Solaris machine with a number of odd sized external disks attached forming a 32gig array that housed all our mp3s on it. Every mp3 was encoded in-house, nothing from napster or what have you. I wrote a handfull of scripts to that pulled all the audio off of a cdrom, dumped them to a shared directory where a farm of Ultra-I and Ultra-II's encoded them to mp3. But that first step entailed ripping to .au because these were Sun machines after all! =P It wasn't until we got an updated ripper that would do wav and a bunch of win folk asking if they could contribute audio that I changed the system to use wav.
What'd we do with all those mp3s? Uh, listen to them. =) They also made a good base of large data when stress/performance testing new hardware!
From what I'm told, the machine is still there, serving away music to those who put music in (the rule I put forth - can't pull from the "archive" unless you've "archived" something to begin with).
And to be a little more on-topic: I've repeated the above process at home earlier this year... with a few minor changes. Replaced the handful of sh/awk/sed scripts with 1 all-purpose, all-powerful, yet rules-with-a-benevolent-hand perl script, and it now finishes up with ogg vorbis instead of mp3.
Why? Because Sonique supports it! I use Sonique because it handles audio streams better (as one song is almost done it starts buffering the next - a must for electronica mix compilations). MXAudio does the continual buffering thing, too, but since I'm stuck with a windows desktop (it's the games, man!), Sonique's what I'm gonna use.
-Ducky
Huh? Shouldn't that be gravity?
Intertia would have made it a cold, dark world, flying off into space till it collided into something...EEEEK!
rmathew.com
Just for the record, the dramatic quality difference between VHS and Beta is a well documented myth (although, the question is a little more complicated than that, as usual). You are right, however that VHS killed Beta primarily because of the recording length issue.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Slashdot is the last place? Dude, pay closer attention. Slashdot is the FIRST place you'd see this.
Slashdot uses GIFs. Geeks in Space uses MP3s. I bet most of the editors run Windows regularly.
This goes for most of the visitors, too. There's a great deal of talking here, and very little being done. Most of the people here are just consumers, who don't make any real difference, and aren't interested in changing to the truly free formats.
I find that few people are actually practicing all that is said about free software and formats. Ask some of your friends and see if this is the case where you are.
Think about it: The licensor can make any conditions they want. So, they can tell you not to critizise them, or their partners, or whoever pays them money. There's nothing you can do about it. We haven't really seen bad license conditions up to now. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
It is if somebody would own all the paper in the world, and you would have to sign a license agreement to publish anything on paper, or even write something on paper. Obviously, you wouldn't have free expression if that was the case.
Now, I emphasize practically, because, obviously, you can still talk, and you can still write on paper. But that's only because it is what audio might not be: it's free as in speech. If the only way you can be heard, is by communicating with audio files, paper is obsolete (which may happen), then the public domain standard is very valuable.
Besides, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the ability to communicate in any medium, when talking about free expression.
Ogg Vorbis is a way to ensure free expression, and a much more important one than free software too.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I once read that people won't switch to better quality if it takes away their freedom, perhaps that's why commercial MP3 competitors are not becoming more mainstream. As for Ogg Vorbis, it is clearly a good alternative to those commercial competitors. The fact that it's free makes a great advantage commercially. On the other hand, there's the install base.
At this moment, (in my country) the video rent shops is trying to shift from VHS tapes to DVD discs, this shift takes a long time. It does remind me of the shift from records to CD's.
Ogg Vorbis becoming a hit is not something to happen overnight. It needs a few other qualities becides being free - it must have better compression and better sound quality (sorry, I'm undereducated here, I don't know whether this is the case). Anyhow, I'm sticking to my posting subject - it's hard to tell the future.
Bizar technology?
To get truely accurate reproduction you'd need to use a very high bitrate (at least 192, probably 256), but I'm don't need perfect reproduction. I use 128 kbps Vorbis to encode all my music, so I can have all my albums on my computer, and have a nice random playlist of 3500 songs -- the quality is easily good enough to listen to while coding, or game playing.
By all means stick with MP3 -- Vorbis will be out there for you when Fraunhofer start getting serious in chasing after unlicensed MP3 encoders.
There's been a lot of nonsense comparing MP3/Vorbis with VHS/Beta. This completely ignores the fact that all the software players which will play MP3s should also be able to play Vorbis files: they play well with each other, and there is absolutely no reason why both should not coexist for a long time to come (just like GIF/PNG, which is a much more valid comparison).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
>As a matter of fact, mp3 is a compression scheme
>for wav format. So it _must_ be converted from
>wav.
This is simply wrong. mp3 compresses PCM audio
data. It being in RIFF WAVE format has nothing
to do with mp3.
--
GCP
That's true. But if you can make (numbers completely made up) a 96 kbit/s Ogg file that sounds as good as a 128 kbit/s mp3 file there will be a real motivation for people to switch formats. It'll be that much faster to trade over the net, and you'll be able to store 1/3 more songs in the same space. That's not quite world peace and an end to hunger, but it's nice. That's the real advantage of a more efficient codec.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The only reason I would think that someone would use Ogg over Mp3 is if it has better performance. That non-infingement crap is just that Crap, if we put a limitation on information the amount of usage it will see will probably decrease. I can see Ogg being used for copywrited material, but that isn't the largest demand on the internet what most people desire is free data which Mp3 provides. The only thing that would make Mp3 obsolete is something that will provide the same way but offers much more.
"Coffee, it's what's for breakfast." - Dante of Angst Tech.
FWIW, this doesn't have to mean that ripping and encoding to Ogg Vorbis is any harder than for MP3. I recently ripped a few hundred tracks to ogg using the following method:
- Insert CD into CD-ROM drive
- Start Konqueror and click on AudioCD Services
- Select all the songs I want to rip in the Ogg Vorbis folder (they look like normal files and selecting them works like you expect)
- Drag the selected files to
/space/music
That's it. Konqueror (using the kio_audiocd ioslave) takes care of ripping the track from CD, encoding it as Ogg Vorbis, and copying it over to my final location.I don't even have a sound card on this box.
I am going to be brutally honest hear, but I think you are incredibly shallow.
I doubt it will go anywhere. The end user could care less if its open-source or not. (*cough* linux? *cough* :P) Its not superior to MP3 (well, it's nothing revolutionary, i should say), so why would everyone automatically switch to a new format? ("everyone" as in NOT just the major part of the slashdot readers that run open-source stuff because its the cool thing to do)
Sure, I use w3juke and the author nicely added ogg support, so it "just works".
Disclaimer#1: I'm the author, so I may have an over inflated opinion of how nice I am.
Disclaimer#2: w3juke plays it's music by feeding a stream into an external program (mpg123, ogg123, vox, or whatever you setup in your conf file for a given MIME type, or file extension), so it was pretty easy to add ogg support.
Disclaimer#3: the tar-ball version is pretty good, but there were some minor changes to make it compile out of the box on Linux that are only in CVS. Likely there will be another tarball soon. for now if you use Linux, check it out of the CVS tree.
Disclaimer#4: the screenshots are old, it look better now :-)
Wow !!! this has got to be the most intelligent reply i've ever seen... Way to go... And then you wonder why society is so fucked up !!!
Something about they haven't gotten around to it. Mind you, now that 1.0 is out(?) the spec should be finalized, if somebody bothers to write it.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
First, the patents on mp3 are not going to effect users of mp3s in the slightest. I mean I dont think that there is currently some sort of halting of any sort of the independant production and distribution of .mp3 files due to patents. So if you have people using the .mp3 files regardless of patents, and distribution and creation lie mainly in the independant realm, well the patents are meaningless.
.mp3, why would joe-user care? We are talking about a very obscure music format, and it's only one step away in obscurity from the mp3 format. That certainly doesn't help at all. Good intentions and perfect execution are great, but good luck getting your solution integrated if an easy to use, fully integrated, perhaps flawed system already is in place. And thats even saying that the Ogg format is better than mp3 which is questionable at best.
Anyways, second, sound quality, unless its far superior to
Last, Ogg Vorbis? Pardon? Just answer one question for me, WHY??? Whoever came up w/ the name for the format of this music should have not expended the energy required to do so... If I asked joe user what he thought of, or had he heard of the Ogg Vorbis format, the response I would expect would probably be "Ogg WhoWho?". Face facts, subjective reasoning aside, it's a horribly stupid name for a format that you intend anyone other than nerds to use.
So you think the end users of GIF files, MP3 files, copyright works, etc. need a license? Define 'need'... Perhaps according to law they 'need' a license, but when the scale of use reaches a certain point, then the law is moot. For small scale stuff licenses are still 'needed' in practice as well as by law. However, once you're in the realm of millions of users then licenses are irrelevant, and you're better off coming up with a different business model.
Ew! You play your music off a 16 bit Sound Blaster? Those things have the WORST transient signals I have ever heard come out of a DAC! All the gold coated cables in the world won't eliminate the hiss from your fans and the snap every time the memory bus is called!
Switch to a nice digital output card (you can get coaxial digital from the old Aureal SQ1500 for $9, or optical digital out of the old SuperQuad 2500 for around $35) and deliver your sound cleanly to the card, and you'll have much, much better results. Since the DAC involved with digital out is the one on your receiver, you don't have ANY transient signals at all...no hiss means clean treble and no ambient rumbling from your bass!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Unless I'm mistaken (which is not improbable) the earlier Fraunhofer codecs basically sucked. They put it on their FTP, and people found the code and started fidling with it. Eventually, it was made to not suck. Fraunhofer then went and made their own. They claim its better, but I don't know of any unbiased test that demonstrates this. I can't distinguish it from gogo or BladEnc myself.
hey, listen to me nice new oggies!
geez.. at least ogg is slightly pronouncable..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
....not unless I can somehow get my Aiwa CDC-MP3 car stereo player to play them.....
Agreed. I did the same thing with "You are so Beautiful" by Joe Cocker and listened on my Sennheiser HD570's connected SbLive! Wow, big big big difference between the mp3 and the ogg! Used the exact same process for both the mp3 and the ogg(CDex, nothing but Win2k running in background, ripped wav then compressed). Big, big difference. It was like CD quality again! I'm hooked, sure I have to go through an extra step(Exact Audio Copy, then use Ogg Drop), but it is well worth it. Maybe all those mp3 ripping/warez groups need to be convinced that ogg is better, they might listen(and then there breaking one less law!).
Ogg Vorbis is going to be like linux to the home user. Few of them will use it, but the mere existance of it will make companies like Microsoft play (relatively) nice.
Ofcourse, at the moment microsoft doesn't play nice yet vis-a-vis linux, but they will have to. Not that I think there will ever be general adoption of linux, but only that just enough people will change over to make microsoft behave.
I'd never use a compression format with such a stupid name.. I don't care HOW good it is, as long as it has a suck ass name, I don't want anything to do with it.
png still isn't used by me primarily because IE has lousy Alpha channel support. If they fix that, I'll use it when IE 6 becomes the 'lowest support point'. Most corporate websites still have to support the 4.x series of browsers -- some companies aim for the 3.x series. Those certainly don't work well with png's at all.
Rod Taylor
I'm gonna be brutally honest here, but if you're gonna get people to use Ogg, you've gotta change the name. From a marketing standpoint, it's abyssmal.
Think about it: you're a teenager, you want to share music with your friends. Which name is going to get you called a nerd and beat up? Which sounds cooler? (In a teen way, not geek way.)
A) "Hey! I got some new tunes! Want some MP3s?"
B) "Hey! I got some new tunes! Want some Ogg Vorbis files?"
Process that, and then wonder why people aren't using the format that is "the choice of nerds everywhere..."
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
One of the problems with PNG's is the size and availability of viewers for the format. If an alternative format is created that's superior, and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available, then it has a chance of being adopted.
I remember first hearing about MP3's as an alternative to WAV files. While the differences are even more vast than those between PNG and GIF, I still maintain that it was the availability of viewers that helped MP3 to become the standard.
We live in a different world than the world that the PNG was introduced to. With more bandwidth, more users on the net, who knows how the PNG would have fared in the modern world with plenty of viewers.
That's for sure. And here's something to back it up: I encoded collection of CDs for a certain artist to 160 kbit/s VBR OGG Vorbis and listen to it regularly in XMMS and WinAMP.
One time, this one song from the mix sounded odd... there was this hissing/clicking noise in the background. I checked my mixer settings and speakers... there was nothing else playing and it wasn't coming from the furnace. I had listened to the song many times before and it never sounded like this.
Then I looked at my playlist and saw the problem. It turned out that I had accidentally misplaced a mis-named(*) mp3 remix I downloaded in the directory and it was being played as part of the regular mix. So there. I didn't know I was listening to anything but OGG, but still, my ears told me that something in the quality was amiss when an mp3 was thrown into the mix. How about that?
Now it was a 128kbit/s mp3 vs 160kbit/s OGG, but still, the difference was very noticeable to me.
(*) I thought it was a re-mix I had never heard before, but it turned out to be just a misnamed version of one of the regular tracks I already bought.
Beta had superior picture quality. I have owned both Beta and VHS and, though I no longer own the Beta, I am painfully aware that it had measurably better performance. The chroma resolution, in both horizontal and vertical, was significantly better than VHS as was the chroma signal to noise ratio. The total number of lines of luminance resolution was slightly higher than VHS. The Beta HiFi audio was more robust and less prone to degradation due to tape wear. I won't waste either of our time by writing an in-depth technical treatise on Beta, but let me assure you that the link you provided was clearly not created by videophiles.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
It seems to me the ideal use for Vorbis is streaming. With mp3 streaming set to become a pay for play deal, free Vorbis streaming seems a good idea.
The popular mp3 players must be able to play the new format (winamp, musicmatch, etc.) and there absolutely must be an automated utility to convert mp3 to ogg vorbis. Then it shouldn't be a problem. Oh, and a good .3 extension would be good too--ovb anyone?
>I don't see this happening. Ogg Vorbis (like MP3)
.ogg files if the consumer demand was there to warrant it.
>doesn't support DRM, which is the new "must-have"
>for music playing. Support will most likely
>remain "unofficial" for a long time.
Neither does mp3 (at least not the version that everyone uses). I think that there are lots of companies that would be willing to support
- Vincit qui patitur.
Somewhat akin to converting your gifs to jpeg, I suppose. =) Both are lossy, the former being lossy in the color depth while the latter is lossy on the image pattern. The result: Yick. But good enough for most people.
Though thinking about it... they both get to their results in similar ways (hence Fraunhofer's suit against Xiph). So I'm curious as to what the audio artifacts left over from such a conversion would be. My guess is... good enough for most people who will be listening to them via 2" computer speakers anyway.
Since I'm at work it's an experiment that I'll just have to wait to listen to in full clarity. =)
-Ducky
The reason VHS won over BETA was not because of length, it was because of content. You could rent a lot more in VHS than BETA - they learned from that mistake. It doesn't matter how good the machine is if there isn't any "software" for it. And the quality is no myth either
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
No, you can't compare the waveforms to the original and declare the closest to be the winner. The goal is to get something that sounds the closest to the original, which is not the same as getting the closest waveform (unless one waveform matches). For example you can can omit frequencies that are masked by other frequencies, or alter the timings of others in complex ways and most people won't hear the difference.
The right test is double blind and to include the sound sample form all codecs plus the original (so you can discard anybody that claims codec X is clearly better then the original, since they aren't listening for reproduction, but for something else, like more bass, or volume or who knows).
MP3's that sound as good as the original will sound bad to dogs, because we made assumptions about the sound processing people do. they may sound even worse to aliens, then again they'll already be pissed we only do two channels (or 5.1) so their 28 ears will be useless (well, most of them...).
5{are so well entrenched, I can only see Oggs becoming a 'geek' technology, used mainly by geeks, such as the ones that read Slashdot. It's too bad, because a patent free technology for music becoming mainstream and standard would be nice.
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
It's sorta obvious, but someone should say it: QUALITY MATTERS. I think that will be the most important determiner. If the quality/size tradeoff is better than MP3, people who matter will have an incentive to switch. The other issue will probably be inclusion of a codec in a very popular player program. This will not happen if "people who matter", i.e. netheads, don't adopt. When this happens, Ogg Vorbis has a shot at hitting the mainstream.
CDex does this!! (http://www.cdex.n3.net/)
Its open source and worked great.
Only for windows so far though...
The newest beta has the newest OGG encoder built in.
Yamaha's *.vqf format is pretty good, but the ripper is slow, but the quality is amazing. I do music production and mp3 has its foot to far in the door to be changed by ogg, imho
It might be free, but please get real. It's definitely not better. In fact, it's a lot fucking worse. That shit just about makes my ears bleed.
Has anyone else been sharing their files in the .ogg format or is it just me? It just seems like very few people are bothering to either convert or re-encode their files into .ogg since MP3 works and lets face it, do most people really care if it's proprietary?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Well, of course - if you chose Pepsi you got a lot more than just that coupon :)
I'm just waiting to be in a blind taste test, so I can spit it out and yell "That's rancid milk!".
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I intend to listen to my collection primarily on a home stereo system - not my PC. For this, I intend to use an above average sound card, an above average amplifier, with above average speakers.
I performed a blind comparison of LAME-encoded MP3s and Ogg Vorbis-encoded music at varying bit rates. The bottom line is at bitrates at or below 192 Kb, I can hear (or sense) compression artifacts. My reason for using Vorbis is that it provides the best bang for the byte. The fact that it is free (speech) is a nice bonus.
Whether Vorbis takes hold in the market in a significant way is a good question. The GIF vs. PNG analogy (mentioned in another thread) seems like a good model. PNG didn't usurp GIF's "market share" overnight, and perhaps never will. This could hold true for Vorbis as well.
On the other hand, we're already seeing new codecs being added to hardware and software, including Windows Media. I think the biggest hurdle that Vorbis will need to overcome is its floating point requirements. Most consumer equipment, as I understand it, is integer-based. If an integer-based Vorbis codec were available, I think it could easily become an option in a number of products.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
The VHS/Beta thing is a totally different issue. Way back then, when buying a video tape player, you had to put out hundreds of dollars to buy a system. It was basically a waste to buy two systems, and it turned out VHS was better marketed and had more movies available.
Contrast this to OGG/MP3. OGG is nothing but a FREE software program. If I want to play an OGG file, I don't have to go out and spend hundreds of dollars for a player (like you had to with Beta). I just download it over the net!
Here is what I see happening. Us geeks that DO care about free code etc will start to encode in OGG. More and more people will start trading in this OGG format, and once you can listen to an MP3 and OGG format "side-by-side", you realize how much better the sound quality is. It may take a while for OGG to catch up, but I know *I* have stopped ripping my CDs into MP3 and now use OGG instead.
What content provider is going to use any format that doesn't have copyright controls on it anymore? MP3 has gone the way of the dodo as far as the labels are concerned. While end users may take it up, it's hard to convince people that they really need to use this instead of MP3. Especially when they have N gigabytes of mp3s on their hard drive.
>Unless ogg uses a conceptually different .mp3->.ogg.
>technique to compress audio it should be
>possible to create a lossless converter for
It does. That is why the transcoding artifacts
are so bad.
Ogg is so different because they needed to avoid
the patents, and hence invent newer and better
stuff.
--
GCP
Magazine covers Napster, Metallica, Dr. Dre and every website in the world have all made the word "mp3" part of everyday language. It's like Microsoft -- People trust it because they've heard of it.
>> Anyway, the point is that that comparison has >> really nothing to do with OGG/MP3. Where .ogg
>> stands to gain is if some of the major media
>> player writers support it. It has no chance of
>> support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft
>> and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox,
>> Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a
>> momentum shift.
I know by the time this gets posted, a dozen others will have mentioned this, but here goes anyways:
Not to be confused with MS support, but a group has developed a plugin that allows MS Media Player to play Vorbis .ogg files. I have not had a chance to test it extensively, but it does work. And it appears it was updated yesterday (5 August).
Took it once, and noticed that one of the cokes was just a tad colder than the other one. Sure enough it turned out to be the Pepsi, that was the cold coke, and therefor the most refreshing one on that warm summers day
BTW it didn't disguise the taste, and as a true "real coke" lover I chose the "other coke"...
The real reason is the same as IBM vs. Apple. Sony wouldn't license the beta format and RCA licensed the VHS format. Therefore more VHS hardware.
...well, they don't!
'course Macs kinda suck, but they're kinda cool too.
I've found a few articles written up that said things like "give 'em 6 months and they'll have a floppy in it" when Apple said that the new Macs will not have a floppy drive. Guess what, they never added a floppy and seem to get along just fine.
I'm no Mac aficionado (I think they cost too much and are too closed) but that's what I know.
I think that what really got MP3 popular was Napster. As there is no Napster for .ogg, I'm not sure that ogg will be popular on the net.
Look PNG. Without good support in standard browser and players (winamp, MS player), it doesn't have a single chance to succeed
Besides, of course, if we get a killer app for this file format. Music creation may be one, because you'll need a free, good quality format to use, or in the embedded world (patent free), for answering machines, digital dictaphones, digital recording machines, "MP3 walkmans".
Nothing but OGG has stepped up to fill the void. Wrong...M$ has stepped up with their WMA format, which it seems they put a lot of research into, and unfortunately it sounds very good. OV must be able to compete with WMA in terms of quality, but that's not nearly as important as usability, because we all know how much M$ is going to push WMA with upcoming versions of Windoze. IMHO, MP3 will be around forever. They're just too popular. Look at 3.5" floppies...20 year old technology, yet it's still found on every computer and still a popular way of changing information. Zip drives were around for awhile...they were proprietary and expensive, but better than floppies. They dominated until a much better system, CDR/CDRW came around...But OV isn't THAT much better than MP3/WMA.
WRONG! NS4.7x can view PNGs. It can't handle PNG transparency.
and IE for Mac won't view png. that leaves the entire mac world and some of the pc world not able to see it,
WRONG! QuickTime can view PNGs and we've already estblish NS 4.7x can view PNGs.
so why bother?
'Tis widly adopted, duh!
With mp3s, it doesn't matter to me if someone else can hear it or not.. I want to listen to it. With png, there's a good chance you're putting it on the web for someone else. The two cannot be compared fairly.
A good number of MP3s are put up for others eg Emusic.com, Napster, Aimster, Gnutella/0.4.
By the way, it is considered grammatically correct to capatalize the pronoun I, especially when it is the first word in a sentence. Also, there is no reason for two .'s; use one or three.
Wow, what a wonderfully over-generalized troll this post is. I salute you, Bing.
Don't forget that Sony was demeanding a liscense fee from the movie companies to use tyhere tapes, and they were going to force the companies making of Beta tapes for consumer sales('blank' tapes) to pay a liscensing feee as well. I would suggets that, ultimatly, its was the liscensing demands that killed beta for the consumer market.
FYI beta is still used in the movie industry.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So far I haven't been able to find an MP3->Ogg converter for Unix/Linux... if there one listed on http://vorbis.org I'm sure Ogg would be a much more widely used format.
I'll probably end up finding an MP3->WAV converter and then using oggenc from there... sigh =\
A couple of months ago I wrote a brief guide of how I got various ogg tools working on my system. In fact, I posted it here, but since it wasn't a troll I got modded down :)
Anyway, for those interested, try:
http://www.reimeika.ca/marco/data_vgai/mp3toogg.tx t
So far I've only converted my mp3 files to ogg, but
I realize this is not the way to go. I'll be getting
a 40Gb drive next week to re-rip my collection to
ogg. In the guide I mention above, however, there is
a link to a song ripped in three different ways (wav -> mp3,
mp3 -> ogg, and wav -> ogg).
Gee, Ogg Vorbis plays on my copy of Winamp fine. I drop in in_vorbis.dll and Winamp support is magically installed. I stayed away from MP3 completely for luddite and later patent reasons until I found out about Ogg. I ripped all my stuff with one of their later betas and it sounds great on my Grado headphones. Close enough to CD that the added convenience makes up for it.
Thanks!
Has anyone used Shorten format, .shn
I heard a lot of show trading has been going on with
the shorten format (etree.org) grateful dead, phish, widespread panic, etc, etc.
Do geeks listen to hippy music? They should!!!
BTW I guess shorten is a higher quality format for music trading.
I'm waiting for a DivX codec that uses Ogg for audio rather than MP3 so we can have 6 channel sound in our DivX based home movies.
Rod Taylor
Or at least not entirely. Two reasons: One, porn is a multimedia product. Sound alone just won't cut it. Two, it's not enough to just get people listening to OGG. We need them encoding in it, and not just porn.
In addition, with the way congress is not-thinking these days, we might end up getting Vorbis banned as a "purely pornographic and immoral medium", or some such crap.
The concept is sound, though. The porn industry certainly has done a lot of pioneering work with multimedia formats. Come to think of it, maybe someone should talk to playboy, see what they think...
I'm the stranger...posting to
an EULA has verry little (or nothing) to do with a patent on software. EULA's are an agreement between you, and the software company who you LICENCED your software from. it tells you what you are alowed to do with it (eg, run one copy) and what you CANNOT do with it (eg, decompile, trade, etc)
EULA's are tough to inforce, howerver (especialy in the us, i dont know about europe)
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
No you wouldn't. MP3 and Ogg are both lossy formats. Converting from one to the other would result in noticeable distortions in the files. Your best bet for quality Oggs is to re-rip from the CDs.
Perhaps this can be considered a naive post, but why use Ogg Vorbis? I understand the ideological reasons behind using something completely free as opposed to patented, but does Ogg offer anything more than that? Where is the superior encoding? Where are the smaller files? This I don't see.
Let's face it. Most of us don't pay for ANYTHING related to MP3s. Napster (now WinMX -- free. Programs to rip MP3s from a CD -- free. Players -- free. Okay, so if we're not paying anything outrageous to do ANYTHING associated with MP3s, why are we so concerned about something that is ideologically free?
The thing that was great about the Napster era was that EVERYONE had it. You could find everything from the most obscure song to the latest Top 40 crap, all in one place and all in one format. All your friends were on Napster, so you could browse hard drives and download the songs you liked from them. This was as good as it got; the high times of music sharing... controversial, but it opened up so many avenues for hearing what really good music was, and instituted a revivial of sorts of older but great classic music.
Now the market has been split among different Napster "clones" -- WinMX, Audiogalaxy, BearShare, Gnutella, Morpheus, etc. Now you have to sign on to at least one of those to find what you want, and it's often low-quality. However, at least you don't have to download 15 different players to get it all.
Standard formats are part of the computer industry, like it or not. (Just try sending a StarOffice file to your coworkers; you'll get the idea quickly enough.) MP3 is the standard for audio, and honestly, 99.99999% of the people using it find nothing wrong with it. We're not paying for anything associated with MP3; the convenience is that everyone else also has it; and the quality is pretty good, especially at 192k or above. I'm sorry, but I just don't see any reason to switch to something more obscure that just puts up one more barrier to me trading great music with my friends. More to the point, I GUARANTEE you that almost every computer user feels the same way.
Right now, my MP3 archive is a bit over 90 CD-Rs. (More then 95% at either 192CBR or Lame VBR 1). I'm willing to slowly switch over to OGG once my 2 listening enviornments support it. That would be on a computer (taken care of), or on my empeg-car. As someone else noted, a decent ARM decoder needs to come out soon.
Being the geek that I am, I had read up and compared .ogg to .mp3
I really liked the variable bitrate. I thought that was supersweet. So I decided to be the coolest geek I know (you're right I don't know many) and take the ogg plunge. After ripping 2 cd's I came to a gripping realization. My rio500 would not play them. So much for that idea. I know that the rio is flashable so I'm thinking someone will come up with a patch or flash rom for playing ogg on it. But until then I'll have to stick with the patent shattering mp3 format
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Thanks for any information you can offer!
Andrew
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
That is correct.... Winamp was located at winamp.lh.net, if I remember correctly.
The ones who don't mind spending their Friday and Saturday night's re-ripping that 50G of music they've got laying around just because OGG sounds like it's going to be the Next Great Thing.
Until I see more hardware support, and better support for the codec in the applications I like to use (not the crap you see on freshmeat that some dweeb whipped up in his parent's basement), I'll stick to mp3, thank you.
~dlb
And jpeg's are more popular than both. PNG's are new, give it time.
Compared to what? Analog broadcast TV is as close as you'll get in your home to perfect, unless you're buying betamax tapes directly from the production houses. It beats the hell out of digital. That's why it takes more bandwidth.
Seriously. People will switch to Ogg Vorbis if MP3 starts costing real bucks.
If RIAA succeeds in cracking down on it, or levying some extra fee, people will choose the cheaper version. Free is a lot cheaper than expensive.
But if the current stalemate continues, with most MP3 near free in price (e.g. voluntary or less than 25 cents for decent quality), people won't have a reason to desert it.
What really matters, and I know you don't want to hear this, is how many decent Windows Ogg Vorbis encoder/decoder cheap-or-free suites are out there and how easy they are to use. Second impact is how easy it is to do a Linux and a Mac version.
It's all about the market. Ease of use, what you got, how easy it is to swap with friends, and can you get the music you want at a price you don't mind paying.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
If ogg wants to overtake mp3, there is only one way. The recording industry sells "ogg fashcard albums" for ogg portable players.
But that's as likely as getting the recording industry to sell "MP3 flashcard albums."
It ain't gonna happen.
>Good point. How does 'ogg' compare to mp3pro?
Current ogg's have lesser quality than mp3pro
*AT 64KBPS*. At higher bitrates it is the other
way around.
Since 64kbp sounds quite atrocious even with
mp3pro, and higher bitrate mp3pro is not freely
available (and pointless even), this is a no-
brainer.
--
GCP
Aside from the issue of patents (mainly annoying if you're trying to do something commercial with MP3), there are several good reasons to use Ogg:
-Performance. On certain types of audio, Ogg spins circles around MP3. I'm sure MP3 has its own best cases, but I've yet to find them. In the general case, Ogg holds its own against MP3, usually producing slightly smaller streams at comparable quality.
-Flexibility. Ogg streams are very easy to manipulate. To join two streams, just concatenate the files. Streaming software can arbitrarily reduce a stream's size by chopping off the ends of packets, since the less important information is stored near the end. It's also possible to store multiple logical streams of Vorbis audio in one Ogg stream.
-Quality. Older encoders did have some serious bugs, but the newer releases produce excellent results. I added the Vorbis codec to my HipZip portable player, and I use it for almost all of my music, unless it's already stored in MP3 (in practice, I usually encode my own stuff, so that's not a problem).
And no, I'm not an Ogg Vorbis developer. I've just taken an interest in the project.
-John
Well, I remember back in 96 when mp3's were starting to get extreamly popular. People at that time were trading WAV files across the net and in news groups. MP3's were kinda' hard to come by. You had to goto someone's warez/mp3 site and links were usually broken, etc. But they gained more and more audiance every day. But sadly enough it didn't become the 'standard' until microsoft included it in the next release of windows.
... kinda' like DivX ...
Windows 98 had mp3 playing built into it. Thats when it completely became the standard. MP3's had made it extreamily far and were used by unix admins and warez puppies all over the world.. but was unknown to the every day user. Windows 98 and napster brough mp3's to the masses.
The world isn't crying for a new format like it was crying for mp3's. Unless this new format is smaller and sounds better, I don't think it stands a chance. Plus I don't imagine microsoft including Open Source code into their media player
I dunno, guess we'll see.. ???
Supposedly iRiver, the company that manufactures the Rio Volt and writes its firmware, is working on Ogg support for its next-gen MP3-CD player, and since the firmware works with both generations of their MP3-CD players Rio Volt owners should be getting Ogg support somewhere down the line. I just got my Rio Volt in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I'm already looking forward to re-encoding my CDs in Ogg -- hopefully the firmware upgrade won't take too long.
But the hardware manufactures aren't the ones collecting the patent royalties, they're the ones paying them. Manufactures can make money off of anything they can sell. I wouldn't be surprised if the various MP3 player hardware started supporting Ogg, just because it's royalty-free and the decoder source is available. It's not a big effort to include support, and customers might want it, so it's a good feature to have.
The people who can't make money off of a free codec are the people who make the codec; in this case, the Ogg team.
Could you rephrase that in something more closely resembling English??
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Ogg is apparently not the best (but who's to trust those musically inclined people)... so what's the purpose of this article?
Now before I get trolled for not discussing the patenting issues, I'm specifically targeting these two lines:
and
(which is the title of the article.) Judging by this I'm afraid to try Ogg Vorbis, and even more so that it'd become the "standard for the internet"... ick! Good effort by the Vorbis guys, but to me, in a music file sound quality is #1, size is #2. Just my thoughts...
I know the BBC was exploring other streaming formats since they are quite unhappy with Real. However cross-platform compatibility is an issue which is why Microsoft's MPEG4 based stuff wasn't considered. Recently they have been testing streaming on Microsoft's products regardless. I'll have a shout to my chum who works there to see if he'll comment further. BTW wouldn't OpenDivX be on dubious legal grounds still? I mean it's still based off stolen source code right? Even at a minimum there's the trademark issue with DivX itself (what a stupid name for it!). Ogg Vorbis is ace though. Just needs the bugs ironed out and for version 1.0 to be out the door. (RC1 of the encoder is still not released)
I AM, therefore I THINK!
You may be right but I don't recall recording length being the reason. VHS was an open, or at least more open, format while Beta was tightly controlled by Sony. If I recall, JVC or whoever didn't demand the high licensing fees Sony did, causing manufacturers to favour VHS, resulting in far more and far cheaper VHS than Beta players on the market.
>erm... I did this already... took about 4 days
>for my Classic P233 to convert almost 3 gigs of
>MP3 to ogg.
From quality point of view that was a very bad
decision. MP3 is lossy, converting it to OGG will
only make it sound worse.
Because of the fundamental differences between
the two codecs, the result is quite bad actually.
There was a post on the vorbis list about this
earlier today.
--
GCP
It does not matter. If you have technology that
might potentially endanger RIIA's future,
you damned well right that they will get midevil
on you ass, wether you are innoncent or not.
You say that you can keep yourself from being
bullied by being comletely innocent? Hahaha...
Ever watch simpsons, didn't you learn something?
p.
> Is .ogg a more compact method? Can I fit more of
.ogg than .mp3 at
> my collection onto CDROM in
> equal sound quality?
Well duh! Of course you can stupid, read the FAQ!
Doesn't "a Vorbis file at the same quality will sound better" automatically mean that a Vorbis file can achive the same quality at a lower bitrate and thus smaller filesize?
it rocks. the compression is often better with no sound loss. some mp3s and wavs don't convert due to bugs but I'm confident they'll get things patched up.
Please don't anyone use this. Re-rip from the original. Double encoding with 2 lossy formats is going to give you shit quality. I tried converting a 160kbps mp3 to see what it would sound like, and it sounded like hell, lots of clicks and pops.
I've re encoded my entire cd collection into Ogg format. It took awhile, but I just used grip and popped another disc in every time I sat down or walked by my computer. Ogg encoding is slow. But, if you're encoding your stuff to actually archive it, wouldn't you want the best quality possible since you'll probably be listening to it for years down the road?
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Software patents in general - sure. You've almost certainly paid more for some software because its components had to be licensed due to patent issues.
MP3 in particular- maybe not yet. If Fraunhofer goes through with their plans to charge all encoder makers, you won't be able to get a free MP3 encoder any more at all. Thus the potential of Ogg Vorbis. I mean, if the MP3 phenomenon proved anything, it's "never underestimate the power of free" :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Basically, the same people telling us how much better sounding OGG is are the same people who've been telling us for the past two years that the Mozilla nightlies are better than IE. Don't fall for the bullshit again.
Why do I need Ogg?
You don't. Hardware manufacturers, though, will find it appealing because (A) it's royalty-free; and (B) the codec is already written for them. As portable digital music players become more popular with the mainstream, these factors will make Vorbis more and more attractive to hardware developers looking to compete on price. I realize MP3 has "mind-share", but consumers are flighty. Already, MP3 is showing signs of its age, and MP3Pro had to be trotted out, so it is assumed that users will eventually switch to something else. Why not Ogg Vorbis?
Now, back to the topic at hand. I'm sure OV will have it's niche market for the people that like the small difference between it and MP3. But, there is little product differentiation between the two.....and no real force to cause people to switch or bring in a new market segment or demographic. But, that's ok. Just because it doesn't have a large following does not mean it is not any good. It seems like a good standard. As my one professor use to say "The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."
As one simple example of the usage of PNG -- I believe that all the graphics in KDE are in the PNG format.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I've been ripping CDs using what I assumed were free codecs like LAME. I thought that mp3 was just an standard format. Who owns the patent to the mp3 format, and what restrictions are there to it's use?
No, it's not, it's 16 bit. Sound cards do not feature 64-bit DACs. Some of the higher end cards have 18, 20 (most people consider this to be the limit of human perception), or 24-bit DACs, but definately not 64-bit, and in any case your source sound is 16-bit.
Or are you saying you can perceive the difference between your 1-inch deflection speaker cones moving an average of .0000152 inches too much or too little instead of .0000000000000000000542 inches? (I'm not completely sure but I believe the latter number represents less than one N2 molecule moved by the speaker cone, and it might actually be a fraction of an electron of output from the DAC.)
I recommend using GoldWave software as your WAV recorder. It's free, easy to use, and excellent. It allows you to make any WAV quality *you* want.
There is too much infrastructure around MP3 (hardware players, software players, encoders, "sharing" services...) You think everyone is going to re-encode all the songs that are now in MP3 format just to get it into a "legal" and "open" standard? Yes MP3 is patented but unless Fraunhofer-IIS enforces these patents more strictly than they have, MP3 will keep Ogg from becoming a necessity. There is little benefit to the average Joe Twelvepack in terms of quality. Besides, if any new format will dominate the landscape, we all know it'll be M$'s WMA. (FP maybe?)
I thought the name was pretty bad for a while, too. However, nearly any word can sound good or bad depending on conditioning, and I must have been conditioning myself pretty well, because it no longer sounds bad or even all that strange in my own head. Funny, yes, but the good kind of funny, not the relationship-is-about-to-end funny.
;)
;) That might win the day!
"MP3" is just three syllables -- "emm pee three" -- that wouldn't mean anything if they didn't also mean "More Phree 3ntertainment"
"ogg" sounds funny at first, Yes, but not more or less meaningful than "emm pee three" unless you believe that most MP3 users are just using it as an abbreviation for "Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer three." I secretly do not believe that most users know that it stands for anything. And why should they? Unless they've reverted to "Digital Versatile Disc," even DVD (another otherwise meaningless term) has officially dropped its meaning, to just be 3 cool letters.
Maybe we should say "Oh Gee Gee" instead of "ahgg."
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Pr0n comes in .jpg format, not PNG. Therefore, PNG is dead. Wait for JPEG 2000
Sure it does ... but can you pronounce PNG?
I think that one reason why PNG is not so popular is because it lacks portability in pronouncability. You can't talk about it with your buddies.
On the other hand, Ogg Vorbis is not handicapped in this area. It just rolls off the tongue.
However, this project would be in jeopardy if I did decide to use MP3 over Ogg Vorbis simply because the patent holders of the MP3 format could step in at any time and kill the MP3 libraries I use, kill the MP3 files I use, or even kill my project for using MP3s altogether.
It seems that the decoding libraries are pretty safe. From what I hear, they are protected by something (a loophole perhaps? I haven't checked, just heard from many library maintainers)
Howveer, the encoder and format arguments are still very valid. I used to help out with LAME and I remember when the Fraunhoffer (sp?) guys started putting the heavy on all the encoders. It was very scary how much power they could weild over something that was supposed to have so much "prior art".
I just LOVE vladinator's site! Especially the "fash" section, where I learned to cut the bottom off of an old shirt to use as a hair enhancement! Oh, and the "dance party" photos!
Of course, don't forget to read vladinator's emails! Here you will discover how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have a pizza party? A fash party? Go to the mall with all of your friends? Have a sleepover and call boys on the phone?
In short, if you haven't checked out vladinator's site, you don't know what you're missing!
OpenDivX / DivX4 doesn't have anything to do with DivX 3.11alpha (which was really based on M$'s MPEG-4 version). And I guess they've settled the naming issues as well, because few months ago OpenDivX project became the owner of divx.com domain which used to belogn to Circuit City (the owner of now-ceased DIVX format).
7up is running a bunch of commercials like that. Funny stuff.
MP3 is -the- format.
.wma, .ram, and other formats with strict support for licensing. But the people with wallets full of green notes and good credit ratings want MP3.
The guy who posted about GIF has a good point. It doesn't matter that the technology behind it has patents; it is the de facto standard. It has oodles of hardware and software support. And most importantly, it's the standard that -customers- want.
Geeks maybe want Ogg Vorbis. Corporations want
What's preventing Ogg from taking over MP3 is that Ogg's place in the market is already taken up by MP3. Being first-mover is a strong advantage. Ogg's a long ways behind MP3, and there's really no advantage to it from a consumer's point of view. That's the reason why strictly-controlled music formats aren't competing well with MP3 as well: There is no advantage for the consumer.
I can acquire, make, and listen to MP3's for free. No cost. There are free encoders, free players, and free MP3's of all kinds everywhere. Why do I need Ogg?
That's a great point. Ogg Vorbis is great for software development purposes where you don't want to pay a licensing fee but need high quality digital music compressed into a small space.
Enough said?
Okay, maybe not... maybe I have to spell it out. GIF is a format we're all mostly familiar with. It's out there, it's common and there is an important patent associated with it. PNG was created as the GIF alternative. It's superior in every way to GIF. Where are we now? How old is PNG? How accepted it is? How many rhetorical questions will I ask in this message? Dare I ask?
I would disagree. Its like saying that for the government to implement left-turn arrows on traffic lights would take as long as adopting traffic lights in the first place.
The manufacturers are already making devices capable of decompressing and playing digital music, for them to incorporate a new file format is much simpler than to have created the device in the first place.
The main problem with Ogg-Vorbis as I see it is that MP3's are just too easy. You can get a decent encoder bundled with most CDRW drives, so why go through the hassle of switching? (Ok, I know its the 'right' thing to do, but people are lazy, well I am anyways).
If found, please return this sig to lostsig@stardotstar.org
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
To make OV popular, you'll need to give it an advantage over MP3, that can be understood by Joe. Patents and 'free (as in speech) software' are no such things.
At the moment MP3 has all the advantages, and there's no reason why OV will take over.
I think MP3/OGG is a bit different than Beta vs. VHS. For one thing, availibility isn't limited to what the movie studios and Blockbuster decide to carry - it is as easy to rip a CD to MP3 as it is to OGG, and as easy to download, if both are availible. So, the only thing limiting acceptance is availibility, and hardware support.
Personally, I think stand-alone MP3 players are still a niche market, still in the first generation. The digital audio enthusiasts are buying huge hard drives and ripping their CD collections, 40 gig at a time, and playing them over some computer-to-stereo setup. The consumer electronics are too primitive to not have a computer at the center of your digital audio setup.
As I said, these enthusiasts are ripping their entire CD collections, and, when possible, making them availible on Napster or Napster clones. If you want the "universal jukebox" effect, it's not the 14-yr-old Spears fans who support it, but these enthusiasts, who aren't afraid to admit they bought a dozen albums from eighties hair bands.
If you can convince these folks that you have a better format, one that isn't controlled by record companies or patents, which sounds better on their systems, then they will take the time to re-encode their stuff. It will be availible through the usual suspects, and people will learn that, if you want obscure stuff, go Ogg.
Like the original MP3 revolution, this one won't be led by Joe Six-Pack. This one will be led by the audiophiles and the pioneers.
Oops, my bad *sheepish grin* Still sounds Good Enough(TM) to me.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
I see a bigger chance of windows media files to keep growing in importance.
When I first got WinME with windows media player on it, I was happy to see a "copy to disk" function that looked like it was copying mp3s. Of course, now I have a bunch of *.wma files (luckily winamp can read them).
I'm not the only person I know that uses media player to copy music to my computer. I see this as more likely than Ogg vorbis overtaking mp3s.
-PYves
One of the problems with PNG's is the size
A 256-color PNG image is smaller than the equivalent GIF if you don't include information on physical resolution or gamma because the Deflation algorithm packs pixels more efficiently than LZW.
If an alternative format is created that's superior
PNG can do 24-bit images with alpha transparency and gamma correction. It's already replacing TIFF in many domains.
and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available
GIMP for Windows is free software and can create PNG images. Mozilla and IE have good support for PNG.
then it has a chance of being adopted.
I already use PNG for all non-animated non-photoreal images on web sites I run. As soon as GIMP exports MNG (mozilla already reads it), I'll convert my animated images.
IMHO, the primary thing holding up use of PNG is that PNG cannot represent animated banner ads, and its animated cousin (MNG) doesn't work in IE 5.x for Windows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well I'll be a good little slashdotter and add my probably redundant reply to the pile.
All karma-whoring aside, however, I've been playing around with mp3's for as long as anyone but haven't bothered to rip my entire collection. The only time I ripped my own CDs where to make compilations for other people. After I was done I needed the hard drive space to install my Nth operating system and wiped the mp3's. I used bladenc for a long time and then switched to lame when it was more supported and higher quality.
Now I'm finally getting around to ripping my large CD collection and yes, I'm using ogg. I encode at 256kbps, and ogg does VBR. It sounds good to me on my vanilla stereo equipment, and it's a hell of a lot better than ANY of the poor quality MP3's that I've downloaded. This isn't a slam against the MP3 format, just about the morons who gave it a bad name by encoding at 128bit with awful encoders.
No, I'm not expecting to walk into Best Buy and pick up a portable ogg players, but that's not an issue for me. I believe in the ogg project because they are doing the right thing with regards to their licensing. It's as simple as that. Everyone should be using their product. These people deserve your support, and supporting free software is more important than your music collection anyway, in the long run.
I'll buy hardware that supports the ogg format, and if I need to I'll build my own. With all the linux PDA's around, it won't be that hard.
So this converts your 128kbps MP3s to 256kbps OGGs... providing what advantage, exactly?
agree with you fully...but bad analogy: BetaMax was here first, and they lost. Hmmm, that gets me thinking: Maybe we should get the porn industry to distrbute sound clips in Ogg format.
(If you have no clue what I'm talking about [ie: history of VHS] ignore the joke)
By the way, I also think that a change in the name is in order.
... James Brown" than if it was "Bed of Roses ... Bon Jovi"
Ogg Vorbis sounds cool in a geeky kind of way, but I rather think that mp3 has a nicer ring to it, and has more street cred.
mp7 any one????
If you think a name does not mean much, think of it this way. Imagine our names were songs.
Now how much different would you be if your name was "I feel good
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
I used specific examples of objective performance: luminance resolution, chroma resolution (horizontal and vertical), as well as chroma S/N ratio. If you are too ignorant or stupid to understand commonly-used video performance measurements, don't blame me. You, unlike me, seem to feel that no measurements are needed to compare the performance of the two formats.
Of course, if what you really want is for the world to pirate their music and download it, that is another issue entirely.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
There's an official nullsoft ogg vorbis plugin available from the winamp site already. I've been using it for ages
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
I know "me too"s are mostly noise, but I think it's ok to show people that there are more of us. I too encode all my new CD's in Ogg. I know that mp3 is THE format, but that certainly won't change unless someone ignore that. If Ogg doesn't win, so what. It works anyway. It's not like the files are lost in the big black "dead format" hole.
-segfault
My last name is OGG.
If this format blows up like MP3 did, no one will EVER be able to find me on the web. =)
When my old stereo started to go I started converting my ogg format. (I'm about 1/3 done.) It sounds great and works well with FreeBsd.. I just need a good receiver to connect my system to my good speakers. More importantly, we need a front end to ogg123 that will that will allow a user to select music based on it's attributes ('Play some alt-rock from the seventies'). Any suggestions?
As far as I've been able to find out, MP3Pro has about a 15 KHz cutoff, and then tries to add the high frequencies back in automatically when it plays: sounds good when it works, but blurry and awful when it fails. It's probably a touch better at compressing than Vorbis release 1 will be -- but I won't be able to play MP3Pro files back in Linux, or using a player I write myself, will I?
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
It took hardware manufacturers years until they jumped on the MP3 bandwagon. A new standard will only site idly by a few years until it is even considered.
First of all, Slashdot is the last place I thought I'd see attitudes like this. "MP3 equals GIF", "MP3 is mainstream, so I stick with it", etc.. What the hell? Where's your spine and guts?!
You're sticking with MP3s because you're too afraid that it won't make it to the mainstream?? As if you would be considering to buy that portable Ogg/MP3 player anyway.. How many of you even own such a device? Not many - surprise surprise. Afraid of change? Oh please..
What Ogg-Vorbis really needs now is support. People who are willing to try it out, and start using it. Preferably make some noise while doing it. What it doesn't need is unjustified suspicions about it's technical quality.
I've been using Ogg as a substitute for MP3s for some time now. And I can say the sound quality is much more better than in most crappy MP3 encoders. Those who say that Ogg's quality is below of MP3, I challenge you to proove your words. I bet most of you are just repeating hearsay, without any actual, first-hand evidence.
Think about MP3's early days. The industry didn't just accept it as a standard, it took time and a user base in the Internet to create market for every kinds of MP3 devices. We will need to make that user base in order to overcome the MP3 format.
What do you think would happen, if industry was offered a format where they wouldn't have to pay any license fees? Would they just reject it, because MP3 is already a self-proclaimed standard? I don't think so.
Ogg Vorbis can only have a positive impact on the current situation.
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A few points here. (MD is quite popular here in .ie land). Firstly, the ability to live-record onto MD is quite useful, which most (all?) Mp3 players can't do at any decent bitrate. Secondly, with MDLP, you can fit up to 320 minutes on a disc, so depending on how hard you choose to compress, you can fit much more onto the disks.
Also, CD-RW disks are very fragile, so if using 8cm disks, chances are they'd have to be boxed up like MD disks, invalidating the size/compatibility arguments.
Finally, I have never seen a CD-RW disk that can be re-recorded several thousand times without needing to be thrown out!
If Ogg Vorbis is supported by iTunes, then you get the style leaders using it, and they will like it . With the geeks, and the design types supporting it, you have a lock on what marketing types drool over; the trendsetters.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
1) STUPID name.
2) "It's patent free so it must be crap". This is reinforced by the low sound quality the "free" mp3 codecs produce in comparison to the Fraunhofer codec.
Once again Free software has produced a technically equal product that is too little too late. Yea MP3 is under patent, but i havent payed for any of my music software, so i dont care. I did buy a hardware player, and i suppose a few dollare found their way to Fraunhoffer. Ogg would be a possibility, if of course it was actually done. Untill some one is producing decoding chips for the format, your're pissing in the win. Next time, try to innovate, not follow.
It sounds better, it takes up less space, and I'm not infringing any patents. Sure, it takes a little longer, but it's worth it.
By the way, you shouldn't ever convert mp3's to ogg's. You'll get a noticably degraded ogg, since you're losing information from both psychoacoustic models (which were never meant to be layered). Encode all your Oggs from lossless sources and leave your existing mp3's as-is. After all, there's lots of software out there that can play both.
The only way you'll be able to hear the audio differences from equivalent VBR'd mp3 and ogg files is if you're using studio quality equipment in an acoustically sound area. Mp3s encoded with lame will be indistinguishable for almost all music from ogg files. I think that and the fact that the size difference isn't that big with ogg files being a bit smaller; people won't bother trying ogg files except to test them out. If we want oggs to start replacing mp3s then we'll need to petition for the mp3 patents to be enforced and get the developers of mp3 projects to either pay or stop development because otherwise there isn't much to convince people to stop their time hardened and proven practice of mp3 encoding. Either that or have some real university acoustic majors (note more than one) do a conclusive test on both formats and determine which reproduces the most accurate (as in to the source) sound. Of course for that you'd have to use an infinite amount of audio samples to appease the fans of the losing format. So i guess in summary, the only thing that will get people to really use vorbs, as i like to call them, or oggs is to make encoding an mp3 for free illegal and getting free mp3 encoders out of development and replace them with ogg encoders.
There's oggdrop.
It's a square with an icon of a fish. You drag
and drop your files on the fish and it starts
spinning. When it stops spinning your oggs
are ready.
--
GCP
Converting from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis would defeat the purpose of both the codecs - lossy compression of audio.
I, and many of my friends, encode all our new rips into Ogg Vorbis RC1 because it sounds better and is smaller. Simple fact.
However, we also keep all our old MP3s. There is no reason to either re-rip or re-encode.
Scott.
i converted all my 600+ mp3s to OGG last month.
Since we've got so much stuff out there already, I don't know why most of the players wouldn't continue to use mp3 as their default format, either.
Spare me your rationalizations. All I know is, stem-cell research kills a quasi-living four-day-old blob.
step one to this is getting a .ogg-module for winamp ( might exist already ) and then getting them to promote the format and distributing the module along with the program..
>1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the
>players on the market today support mp3 and wma,
>but none play ogg. This is a problem.
Iomega HipZip does, others are comming...
--
GCP
Once the 1.0 encoder is available, I think I'll never encode anything in mp3 format again.
I teach high school, and there's a "jukebox" (linux PC w/sound card connected to a Sony receiver) in my classroom with lots of custom software that allows students each period to electronically vote for albums they want to hear. My server then queues up a random selection of tracks off the winning albums and does the deejay thing all period.
Currently I've got 10G of mp3s on there (168 whole albums), mostly from albums submitted by students and ripped and encoded by me. But there's no reason I couldn't have it play oggs instead. I can't hear any sound quality difference on my home computer's crappy speakers, I like the improved file size, and the whole free software/patent-free/open algorithm aspect makes me very happy. Plus, using primarily oggs makes it less likely that people could accuse me of illegally obtaining the songs (say from whatever file-sharing program the kids use these days).
In order to get an album on the jukebox, students must bring in the physical CD and sign a form indicating that 1) they own the album, 2) they haven't made any "archival" copies of said album, and 3) they give me the right to make that copy. Once the student is no longer in my class, I erase the album unless some other student comes forward to sponsor it.
So probably by the end of next year I'll have however many old re-sponsored albums still in mp3 format, and all new albums in ogg. Plus a good 25% to 33% of the albums on the jukebox belong to me personally, so I'll probably re-rip and encode those as oggs, too.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
Unless ogg uses a conceptually different technique to compress audio it should be possible to create a lossless converter for .mp3->.ogg. Course I ain't gonna do it. My car mp3 player don't play no stinking ogg...
Don't worry; in short order, integer-only code will be written. Floating point makes some computations more convenient, but you can always re-write so that floating point is not necessary. That will happen with Ogg Vorbis.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I too experimented with Ogg recently, but even to my tin ears beep there were significant artifacts click in a 128kbps-encoded bloop track that were not present pip in a 128kbps-encoded MP3 psst.
I will, however, be monitoring its progress, as with so many free software projects, it deserves to succeed.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
So the evil empire supports open standards better that its "competition" does it :-)
I think you've got it.
I saw a lot of posts today about geeks who say they're about to rip their 300-700 CDs into .ogg format. Hey, if you have the CDs, that's a great idea.
But lossy-compressed-music didn't catch on just because you could stick ten albums onto a CD-R, it caught on because you could have a Pretty Damn Good copy of the music for free - as in "beer" - without owning the CD.
If you've got 700 CDs' worth of MP3z, you're not gonna convert 'em to .ogg, because the second lossy compression (MP3 -> OGG) is going to destroy the quality of your recordings, and you won't do it. (And you probably shouldn't!)
MP3 got its first-mover advantage because allowed for distribution of music on an unparallelled scale. For every copy of some rare or out-of-print CD or vinyl recording that can be re-ripped to .ogg, there will be several dozen, perhaps hundreds, of MP3 copies that can't, because the owners of the copies of the MP3s have no access to the original recording.
With the audio universe populated almost entirely with MP3s, and with transcoding not being a viable option, why would anyone go through the trouble of trying to simultaneously support archives in two formats? (It's hard enough to find MP3-playing consumer electronics that correctly handle all the variations of MP3, let alone one that properly supports two formats.)
As cool as Ogg is, I'm afraid it's destined for a niche market.
> Ogg Vorbis is most useful for streaming media servers.
Niche, however, isn't that bad a thing. This is a particularly good niche to be in.
> Get the decoder into a lot of the client software people are already using (winamp, wimp, and real), and the free streaming server will "sell" like hotcakes, if it's any good.
In fact, I think that Ogg, if it went into the streaming audio niche, could really whip some serious llama ass.
For streaming audio, the end user probably isn't archiving the content, so the format doesn't matter. Streaming audio also includes live broadcasts, and having access to the "original CD" doesn't matter -- the "original" is the DJ's voice speaking into a mic.
Besides, wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where aspiring webcasters no longer had to fork over $BIGNUM to RealMedia for .rm streams or MSFT for .wma streams?
You're not the only one who chose Coke. According to his autobiography, when John Scully was president of Pepsi, he took the challenge, and chose Coke!
> To join two streams, just concatenate the files.
Holy snot, this actually works! 'cat file1.ogg file2.ogg > file3.ogg' and play file3.ogg, and it happily plays one and then the other. Can you do this with MP3s?
Doug
Don't I miss the days of playing volleyball after work and guzzling beer. My blood water level was probably .46... sigh...
I have been heavily into mp3 for the last 4 years. I have a couple gig of files and just last weekend ripped my first .ogg. I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality. There are already several software players that support ogg like freeamp and xmms. There are two things missing that will hold ogg back:
1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.
2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg. This is 5 times slower than modern CD to mp3 rippers. And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg. Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.
One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.
MP3 Has charisma, it has clout, it has marketshare. We aren't going to see portable ogg players for at least 2 years. Unless ogg is a substantially huge boost in technology over mp3, it's just going to be another dead technology. People said the same thing about VQF and WMV, the only reason WMV is still in existence is because microsoft is behind it. Otherwise it would be dead. I mean, if somehow we start seeing some amazing things being done with ogg I don't think it's going anywhere. The no-patents thing is a definite advantage, but unless there is a hardware market, I don't see people opting not to download mp3 files to find an ogg file, or converting their entire collections to ogg. If we start seeing things like car ogg players, or wrist watches running linux running ogg players... I predict failure.
You're shallow, and superficial!
for really good mp3 you have to have high compression rate = a lot of megabytes. For good ogg you need less, 'coz there is floating compression rate. There was somewhere an analysis of ogg, the guy complained about bad results between 12-15KHz. There is not so much difference to hear between mid-class mp3 and 128kbps ogg. So rather to stay with good old mp3 with tons of software, encoders & supported by electronic industry. BUT what will happen, when on-line radios become real massive listener base ? They will charge you more & more according to the Thomson's new licencing policy for mp3/mp3pro. So now is not the question what is better or who is using it, but why to use Ogg or mp3 besides of looking into the near future. So ogg is/will be used by peoples who are not lazy to try out something new, which has possibility to stay free/opn-sourced. That means active listeners, far away from geeks, and more far away from passive listeners of music, which doesn't care.
I would be happy to uss .ogg except for the fact that I do not listen to MP3's sitting in front of my computer very often....
.ogg? NO
.ogg? NO
.ogg? NO
A. I have a Kenwood MP3 player for my car...does it or will it support
B. I have a portable MP3 player for walks and work....will it support
C. My DVD player hooked to my home stereo will play MP3's....will it support
Bottom line....Like it or not....Outside of sitting in front of your computer to listen to music....what good is it??? It has taken a couple of years to get all of these "Consumer Devices" to support MP3.....Do we all think that the consumer device market all of a sudden decide to support Ogg Vorbis in the next generation???.....Hmmmm
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
of Ogg Vorbis. It's enough to make you foam at the mouth and fall over backwards. Is he foaming at the mouth to fall over backwards or falling over backwards to foam at the mouth? Tonight's 'Spectrum' examines the whole question of frothing and falling, coughing and calling, screaming and bawling, walling and stalling, brawling and mauling, falling and hauling, trawling and squalling, and zalling. Zalling. Is there even a word zalling? If there is what does it mean? If there isn't what does it mean? Perhaps both, maybe neither. What do I mean by the word 'mean'? What do I mean by the word 'word'? What do I mean by 'what do I mean'? What do I mean by 'do' and what do I do by 'mean'? And what do I do by do by do and what do I mean by wasting your time like this? Good night.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
It needs a good file extention: .ogg - those three letters are the biggest hinderence to it being accepted.
The decoder needs to be included in Winamp.
The biggest advantage is it's non patented process. So mp3 to ogg convertion features can be build in or bundled with free software players. And free software players can now add ripping features. If winamp came with a perfectly good ogg encoder how many people are going to bother finding and or purchacing an ogg or mp3 encoder?
Cringely's latest gossip (www.pbs.org/cringely) claims that microsoft aims to rid the internet of TCP/IP all together. That's one standard down, two to go! God bless Microsoft in their neverending quest to screw everything up.
- Don't get in fights with ugly people, they've got nothing to lose. -
The convenience is not the same. You don't find much ogg music on the net. There isn't enough support for ogg in common rippers, cd-authoring tools, and portable players.
Heck, there is probably more support for WMA in these areas... sigh.
1)Ogg rips are a little better than real time, currently, using N2MP3. About the same as you said for Intel systems. MP3s rip farkin' fast for me (G4/450/SoundJam MP).
2)Audion is a software player for the Mac. Not terribly impressive, but good enough if I wanted to move to Ogg.
Having recently purchased an AVC SoulPlayer, I'm quite impressed with its MP3 playback ability, and it's software updatability. Right now, it supports MP3, WMA, ASF, and normal CD audio. So, in short, I wouldn't even consider Ogg a contender until I can carry CDs of it around with me to listen to. (And yes, I have books on CD that have ~25 hours of audio and am quite happy with those).
As it stand now, most people wouldn't be able to tell the differnece between at 96kbps and 128kbps mp3 because of poor speakers and crappy motherboard-intergrated sound boards. (EM noise interference is large within the mobo.)
Quality may matter to you and me, but as pointed out before with Beta vs. VHS and the two laserdisc formats, Joe Sixpack will be very happy to have a small quality drop for a greater recording length.
I'd not go that far, the thing with Ogg is that they're trying to make it relatively easy to convert, the XMMS plugin exists, and it should be transparent to the user to play ogg files. Granted, people do need to start encoding to make the codec survive, but I'll admit that I'm willing to give it a chance, especially if it means that I don't have to worry about my music encoder ceasing to release newer, better versions because it got it's ass sued into the ground for being patented...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
pr0n is big because you can get it for free over open transmission protocols (ftp, http), or if you're in a college dorm, smb (not free oficially, but free as in warez).
Is the problem with stereo separation common to all MP3s or just the ones encoded in joint stereo mode? I noticed a huge difference between joint stereo and full stereo, especially on headphone. (The difference is bigger with certain types of music than others.) Unfortunately, I have noticed that many encoding tools steer users towards joint stereo, saying it results in better sounding output at a lower bitrate. I am usually unable to tell the difference between MP3 files at 128 kbps and 160 kbps, but I've had 128 kbps full stereo files that sound better than 160kbps joint stereo files.
"Ogg is better at relatively low bitrates blah blah blah" is just plain stupid, I mean, who cares about low bitrates? If ogg people have been focusing to them, they have already lost.
If 128, or even 112kbps ogg is a bit better than 128kbps mp3, so what? It still doesn't sound nowhere as good as 192kbps mp3, which is the bitrate everyone is using today.
I'd been considering setting up a commercial streaming radio server, but news of the MP3 licensing requirements chilled my enthusiasm. Vorbis perked it back up, though, and I anxiously await the release of Icecast's Vorbis-compatible version.
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
Ogg Vorbis (like MP3) doesn't support DRM, which is the new "must-have" for music playing.
:) like DRM. It's must have from thier viewpoint, but not the end users. Isn't that why the RIAA et all don't like digital music? And vice versa, why the populous loves it?
:-D
Must have? For whom? I, for one, despise the DRM formats, like liquid, and avoid them like the plaugue. Can you honestly tell me that you enjoy songs that only work for a limited time, and all the other hassles DRM formats can give you?
Not only that, but including DRM would go against the whole philosophy of Ogg Vorbis, which is a free, open standard, suitable for use with any sound application you want to use it for. This is, of course, why I use it-- (along with MP3, though this appears to be infathomable to some people) because the format isn't owned by a greedy company that would screw me to make money.
Remember, only the Record Companies (and perhaps crazies like you
Anyway, for me, DRM is a must NOT have feature of digital music, which is why i'm fully behind Ogg Vorbis, and eagerly awaiting the 1.0 encoder, with its cool new features.
...is just as featured. In fact I believe it holds more information (possibly no more than id3v2 though). I ripped a cd to oggs using Grip a few days ago, and it inserted all the data from the cddb quite happily. Check your setup?
Ogg Vorbis is the lamest name ever.
Its not only geeky, is ultra geeky.
Please god... change that name...
just the name makes me laugh and not waht to use it...
is ogg for Other Geeker Geeks?
I don't get it. I always seem to hear that,
"My MP3 encoder is faster than any current Ogg encoder..."
What exactly has that to do with anything? You encode a piece no more than once. Isn't the fact that it's "free" and (to my humble ears at VBR 256) sounds better more important?
Now when the hardware players, sans Digital Rights Management, start hitting the market is when we'll really see things start to take off.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
#!/bin/bash
for c in *.mp3; do `mpg123 -w "$c".wav "$c"`;
for i in *.mp3.wav; do `mv "$i" "$(echo "$i" | sed s/mp3.wav$/wav)"`;
for k in *.wav; do `oggenc -b256 "$k"`;
rm -f *.mp3 *.wav;
done
Anything else you need?
I've not 100% finished the updated howto, but you can have a look at what's finished:
http://www.plus24.com/mp3-howto/mp3-howto.html
Get Ogg'ing :)
Phil
I'm no super audiophile with a golden ear, but I do have a better than your average PC speakers connected to sound card setup. I have a 12 year old Pioneer Amp/Receiver and 12 Year old Acoustic Research speakers with subwoofer (since replaced the drivers), and a Soundblaster 64AWE with gold coated analog outputs to the receiver. Whole thing, minus PC and soundcard, cost $1000 back in 1989.
What I notice is that at the office on some cheap ALTEC PC speakers with subwoofer, NONE of the differences show through. Pretty much all CODEC's from the various years sound the same... pretty good, artifacts seem to magically go away... and hey that's not bad for the office.
But for home, it's got to be ogg and a non PC dedicated system sound system.
First piece I encoded to OGG was a rendition of Igor Stravinky's Ballet Petrouska... full ballet mind you, none of this condensed suite business *G*. I marveled at how airy it sounded and how percussive the base was, thumping, rumbling tightly on my subwoofer.
No, this was different, the high end was definitely there... but something else too, "stereo separation." Now this is something new. Mp3 makes some of its best gains through the use of cleverly comparing left and right channels and optimizing where they are very similar. Good in theory, but what you end up with is a lost stereo separation. It's cool for rock/pop, but classical absolutely needs stereo separation. In fact, encode some classical music (any classical music) in mp3 and then in ogg. You'll never go back.
You COULD put it in stereo encoding mode, but then mp3 doesn't shine at relatively low bitrates
You might also say that ogg has to do extra work in each channel individually and how the hell could it possibly sound better. It's got to consider each channel independently, encode them AND it sounds better than the industry standard at the same bitrate? She can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan?
Can this truly be the case?
Hell yes.
I don't understand the deep wizardry of OGG, nor its team's fanatical devotion to one thing: quality and duty. Two! Two things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency. Three! Three things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency and quality. Bah, I'll come in again.
One thing is clear: OGG's codec is next generation. Mp3 is definitely suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Great for 1996, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is an inferior codec RIGHT NOW. Mp3's tradeoffs and optimizations where great for 1996, but there was room for improvement. Nothing but OGG has stepped up to fill the void.
If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have encoded 700+ CDs into this format, occupying around 40 gigabytes of space. Took me a couple of months, but now that it's done, I breathe a sigh of relief (as I create a disk mirror for backup) that it is now forever free and libre...
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Why would you want to reencode the files? That will just make them sound worse. It's not like all your audio files must be in a single format. I switched over to .ogg a few months ago, mainly because it promised better quality for the same size. All my older encoding is mp3. I can play both kinds just fine with xmms and Winamp.
.ogg support to hardware players is a no-brainer for the manufacturers. The code is free and with just a bit more ROM they can add another acronym to the feature lists. A lot of the early adopters are geeks who will choose an ogg-and-mp3 player over a plain-mp3 one any day. Or at least I know I will.
Adding
By "go round" he probably meant rotate around its axis, not go round the sun.
I buy CAV laserdiscs. I write all images from my digital camera as TGA, even though i can then fit only 10 of them on a 64 meg card. I bought Dunlop DP-5000s and NJK plugs and nothing but Mobil-1 will ever touch my engine.
But I will *NOT* use ogg. Partly because of quality: it sounds similar, if not more washed out than, mp3 at the bitrates I encode my mp3s (archival VBR from Lame, iTunes and AudioCatalyst). Mostly, however, it's a conceptual thing. I consider it the difference between mini discs and CDs. Mini disc is slightly nicer sounding than CD in most cases, you can fit a little bit more data, it's smaller, it's more convenient, longer lasting (due to the covered case) and has less of a chance of skipping. And, let's face it, mini-discs are pretty cool. But when faced with the task of taking my 1000+ CDs and recording them to MD, buying a nice sounding home player to add wo my already cramped receiver, a new head for the car stereo, a new sound card, &tc...it turns MD into this huge investment of time and worry that isn't worth the meager gains.
With OGG, it's even worse. There are no home players to replace my Harmon-Kardon Progressive Scan DVD & MP3 player. There is no add-on for my Rio Volt or Cassiopeia to play OGG files. Furthurmore, I'd have to ditch ALL of my software for encoding, learn new software and keep on top of the weekly enhancements to OGG and so forth. And for what? Because a company that came up with a great sounding format would like other companies getting rich off that format to hook them up with a little dough? OGG is a format based in a something-for-nothing desire loosely wrapped with patriotic pleadings about open standards. It is a cumbersome format that has no hardware support, no commercial software support (yet, I know, Nullsoft is on it, but they also wrote a plugin for MOD files...ain't nobody uses tracked music anymore!) and a team of Fraunhoffer lawyers on their ass for concepts they might have stolen. Not exactly the sort of overhead baggage I'm looking for when I want to compress my copy of the Screaming Trees SST Anthology.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Well put. Put a bunch of mensa members together and what you get is basically slashdot at threshold -1.
I was involved in one of those blind taste tests of Pepsi's. I know what Coke tastes like and it tastes nothing like Pepsi(which tastes like medicine to me). When I chose the Coke instead of the Pepsi, the guy was like "ummm...well Pepsi isn't for everyone, you must really love Coke!" Then I said I don't drink Coke that often. Subsequently, I got hurried off the stage and given a coupon for a free Pepsi. I think I was the only person there (I was there for 15minutes) who chose the Coke.
The biggest benefit with Ogg being open is that manufacturers don't have to pay any royalities for products sold which use Ogg codecs.
This means that a lot of mp3 playing devices can add Ogg support "for free". (Not counting hardware / memory foot print.) This alone can be a good reason for companies to do so.
Furthermore it can be freely used in other technologies, like webstreams and such. And converting to other devices is easier since the source is freely available.
Ogg Vorbis is superior to MP3. It allows greater compression, better sound quality, free-form comment fields as opposed to MP3's ID3 hacks.
In fact, in it's current beta stage, Ogg Vorbis is already superior to MP3.
since he says ... "I thought that the ability to change music "on the road" would give the HipZip an advantage over other MP3 players -- I wonder what the sales figures are for the various MP3 players are?"
t ml, which I think are the same things that were called Clik! before.
;) -- hard to find, few providers anyhow. They so seem more reliable though, from what I've heard, but I've never had enough of a compound of interest and money to get one.
According to the iomega page on that device (http://www.iomega.com/hipzip/index.html), they use these disks, http://www.iomega.com/pocketzip/pocketzip_disks.h
OTOH, Minidisk has a lot of the same problems
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Lets see. MP3 plays in:
Media Player, Winamp, My CD player, my iPAQ, some cellphones, Real player on multiple platforms, Sony's Clie, and bunches of solid state portables....
Ogg Vorbis plays on:
Ogg Vorbis won't usurp MP3 because MP3 is already PERVASIVE.
Just because us geeks say it's open source, doesn't mean that Mazda gives a crap about it. (with their MP3 econocar...guess what it plays and what it DOESN'T)
But, it'll also be there as MP3, RealAudio, and *gasp* Windows Media. As a practical matter, I don't really expect many people to download the Ogg file (I'm not really sure I expect many people to download any of the files, really.) We're putting it up there as Ogg Vorbis for 2 reasons. First of all, it's a matter of choice. Looking at the end user, we want people to be able to get the data they want, in the format they want it, with a minimum of fuss and muss. Secondly, and unofficially, it's a small show of support for free and open standards; a very minor political statement, if you will.
Which, to be quite honest, doesn't really bode well for the format. I'm not sure I can think of many technologies that overtook marketplace momentum because they were ideologically appealing.
"almost every home user gets his software illegally."
Umm...no. MOst of the non-techies I know are terrified at the idea of "pirating" software. "My god, what happens if I get caught?" They don't understand that getting caught is very rare, and they don't know where to find pirated software anyway. You are unfairly maligning the average user, my friend.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Can you honestly tell me that you enjoy songs that only work for a limited time, and all the other hassles DRM formats can give you? [and other rants against DRM]
Not at all! Obviously, my post wasn't very clear. The parent post to all this was about adoption of the format by manufacturers, and I was trying to indicate that because the RIAA is cramming DRM down their throats, they'll have an incentive not to support Ogg Vorbis. Over here, I explained that manufacturers will tend to want to support it because it's cheap and easy. It's really a question of where each manufacturer's comfort zone is. Since the RIAA might sue, but users won't, I think it'll end up that adoption of Ogg Vorbis by manufacturers will be slow.
On a personal note, when I first heard of Ogg Vorbis, I immediately re-ripped my CD collection. The only MP3s I have now are Napster downloads of my audio cassettes, and I'm hoping to replace those soon. I don't use portable music players right now, so the entire issue is academic to me. :-)
For Pepsi, they run the taste tests because they have a product that tastes better to most people, and that's what they can sell.
Wrong. Pepsi runs taste tests because they have nothing else. Coke is more popular, and Pepsi is sore about being #2.
If Pepsi really tasted better, they would just say so - instead of advertising their competitor's product.
When I see a Coke ad, I see a Coke ad.
When I see a Pepsi ad, I see a Coke ad.
Both companies tell me that Coke is better (because they keep mentioning it), so who am I to argue.
Are you refering to the test performed by the professional musical types? I think it was posted on ZDNET. I don't think it went into great detail about the process of the tests. The big barrier to market for me will be the hardware support. I wish APEX would include that in their firmware.
Bill Lumberg
I don't suppose you'd consider a HOW-TO or an FAQ on how you added the codec to your mp3 player? I certainly don't know how to do this :) Maybe a download?
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
Yes, thank you for advertising your company's MP3 player. Other companies sell better for less.
Why would anyone do this? Converting 1 lossy compression scheme to another does not improve sound quality! You just reduced the sound quality of your whole collection, with nothing in return (except possibly reduced disk space if you picked a lower bitrate for OGG).
I've heard that DVDs didn't look quite as good as laserdiscs when they first came out, but now that encoding techniques have had time to mature a bit more, DVD surpasses laserdisc in terms of video/audio quality. (Admittedly, it's not exactly an unbiased source.)
But manufacturers can't make money off anything they can't patent.
Actually, it seems to me that manufacturers of MP3 devices, unless they held the patent on MP3, are the ones who would be losing money to licensing fees. If they used Ogg Vorbis, they would not be forced to pay those fees, so they would be able to pocket the difference - as in make more money.
i am sure it's not vorbis problem
Yeah, and it's been the only test ever that said anything bad about Ogg Vorbis, and it was the worst-administered test of them all too. Any good test will do a double-blind or at least a single-blind test (think: Pepsi Challenge-- how many people would say they preferred Pepsi if they knew it was Pepsi?). This did none of that.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Chris Cheney
Debian Ogg Vorbis Maintainer
Change the name to MP5. That way people won't think of changing file format, they will naturally want to upgrade their file format. Think of Thompson and MP3-Pro... Also if you get file sharing software to pattern match music to .mp* instead of .mp3 the files will start to be shared a lot more quickly. Finally a relaunch under a different name will give excellent press release opportunities.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
About 3 months ago I started switching all my music to Ogg Vorbis. Sharing it with friends asking me about this "funny" format does wonders for advocating the idea. I just send them the xiph.org URL and a winamp plugin, and they usually don't complain. even converted a few fellows. there, just start using it and then ppl will notice, and eventually mp3 will vanish (wishful thinking:)
2 Gig's of Oggs and Growing...
Maybe if someone made me a let perl script that converted all my mp3s to ogg files... then maybe. But right now, mp3 has been my personal standard for four years. Why would I change now? I don't care if it's patented. I use copyrighted and patented software all the time for free. It's what I do. B/c I'm poor. Oops, I meant 'making a statement'.
I've been in an endless-remastering phase getting together equipment and software- and I figure I'm going to be whipping out the ol' hacked DropMP3 again, and not using Ogg Vorbis. Why? Partly encoder/decoder availability (try supporting older MacOSes such as you'd find in a dedicated DAW with specific picky hardware! We don't _upgrade_ on a whim, stuff can break), and partly because I suspect I'd have to do all the hacking over again, and I'm lucky I got the LAME sharedlib to work at all- I am _no_ programmer. I am not confident I'd be able to work the magic trick twice...
And the point is, my needs are different from consumer needs. When I was first looking at MP3, I hopped up and down and stamped my tiny feet and demanded a whole bank of controls over the parameters of encoding, to be able to do mastering to mp3 properly. Nobody listened, nobody cared. LAME is open source- I downloaded software, spent far too much on Codewarrior (standard environment for Mac programming, very nice, but priced accordingly), and I did end up able to put in the controls I needed.
Now I have what I needed from MP3, and a copy of the source code, and here's Ogg Vorbis. I love what Ogg Vorbis _means_, but I don't know if I have it in me to do another feat of stumbling, barely-capable hacking on it to get what I need- and the people doing it are not in the least interested in catering to my every whim. I swear, I would drop everything to help them if they wanted to be helped- but they don't. It's their baby, and not my business to tell them how to do it or what platforms (inc. archaic ones) to support.
So fine- I'll keep an eye out for if anything happens, and FWIW the stuff _I_ code (poorly, by programmer standards) is mostly audio these days and all GPLed. So if they want to take anything I do and incorporate it into the standard Vorbis encoder, they're free to do so. I could picture a bit of sidechain compression to bring up detail that the encoding will tend to cut back again, something like that based on what lossy encoding tends to do... but that's as may be.
I won't be using Ogg Vorbis in the _immediate_ future. I have a pet sound player, 'SoundApp', which is a wonderful and free tool (not my own doing), and if that starts supporting Ogg Vorbis I'll take more of an interest. I have personally written the author of SoundApp inquiring about future support for Ogg Vorbis. No reply, but maybe it will come someday. There's a kludge of an encoder that is the only non-commercial Ogg encoder out there for Mac: it crashes on OS8.1. And so it goes...
Lets face it, the MP3 populatity is due in great part to Napster and other services like it.
And, I don't think this patented stuff has anything to do in this game. If that were true, PNG would be the standard for net images (GIF and JPEG still holds their places).
For what I have seen of this format, it looks pretty good, but for it to became a de facto standard the way MP3 is today, using a patent free algoritm is not enough. Most users don't care about it.
I, for once, don't see many people using it in any forseeable future, unless something else give it a push and make it interesting for people to use it.
morcego
Let's compare this to the old VCR battle
Both Beta and V2000 were quite a lot better than VHS, but in the end VHS won it. Why? as far as V2000 is concerned you were able to get pr0n on VHS.
Pretty much the same here (although no pr0n). Joe Sixpack doesn't care about formats, and he doesn't care about money (really) as almost every home user gets his software illegally. But even if he did have to pay for it: Nowadays you can get MP3-walkmans, photocamera's etc etc. Nothing is there for Ogg Vorbis.
To make OV popular, you'll need to give it an advantage over MP3, that can be understood by Joe. Patents and 'free (as in speech) software' are no such things.
At the moment MP3 has all the advantages, and there's no reason why OV will take over.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Oh but that will be a huge problem! Not only do Ogg Vorbis and mp3 differ in the encapsulating file formats, (that one would be real easy to fix) but the data reduction algorithms are entirely different to the point that converting mp3->wav->ogg will yield seriously degraded audio with extremely audible artifacts. What happens is that data already reduced according to the mp3 algorithm, which is one approach to data reduction, then gets reduced by another different method of data reduction which cuts out another set of audio characteristics which in turn leads to a very inferior listening experience.
The best thing to do would be to rip all these audio cds again and encode them with ogg. If that's not acceptable, leave what you already have as mp3s and convert the new stuff you get to Ogg Vorbis.
You can get the beta HipZip codec from the Vorbis developers. Easiest place to catch them is probably irc.openprojects.net, #vorbis.
The HipZip runs a modified version of Cygnus' eCos, apparently. I'm sure you could get Linux on there if you really wanted to, but you'd probably have trouble getting enough information out of Iomega to do it.
The Ogg Vorbis add-on is just that, an add-on. It doesn't affect the existing MP3 or WMA (ugh) support. It does have a few bugs (occasional lockups between tracks, etc), but nothing showstopping, and apparently they'll be fixed in the final release.
-John
I don't really care whether Vorbis becomes really popular or not. I think Vorbis files have superior sound quality -- certainly they handle the `ssss' sounds much better. I haven't compared against VBR MP3s, though (dunno why they aren't more popular).
I also usually listen to my music through some very nice headphones (I don't want to bother other people with my music), which really tests the strength of any encoding technology.
I hope it gets supported by portable devices sometime soon, but I'm not going to worry about that until they finally get to be as cheap as CD players.
The original specification did not include the capability. While I might agree with you that animated images are abused way more often than used properly and make too many web pages overly cluttered, it is the case that this is part of what the non-geek world came to the internet for. If you don't want to provide what they want, then what you are providing is limited to just the geek community. And that is what PNG effectively did and it was the reason it just didn't catch on to take over GIF. Today it's available almost everywhere, but today GIF has just ingrained itself so much in the web, that PNG is simply not going to replace it. It had a chance to do that right when it came out, but they blew it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Mp3 was here first, .ogg.
more people use it,
and it works!
Why change something that works?
It gets the job done,
I have over 2 gigs of MP3's, I don't want to have to rerip everything to
I guess I may start using it if it gets built into xmms/winamp and filesharing programs start to create a section just for it.
But I'm sure I couldn't tell a difference, I only have a Mad16 soundcard.
I encode in .ogg now and it's fantastic. I just put a request in to Intel awhile ago telling them to include ogg vorbis support in their next revision for the Intel Pocket Concert. That's one great little player.
With M$ pushing for Windows Media, Real for Real Media, MP3, and now Ogg, we're going to end up with a different problem: fragmentation.
Your average user does not want to install 10 different players to listen to music and view movie clips. So they'll often not bother installing a new player and stick with what they already have (which is, surprise surprise, Windows Media that comes with Windows).
Not convinced? Look at what happened to Netscape... =\
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
interesting little post, except for one thing.
Betamax was there first. VHS overtook it. Sony marketed Betamax VCRs in the US before RCA marketed VHS. (Which is why Universal Studios sued Sony, not RCA, to stop VCRs from being distributed in the US.)
The reason VHS won is simple: people liked being able to tape six hours of crappy NTSC on one tape. Sony thought they'd care more about quality. JVC had already caved a little by suggesting maybe a 4-hour format would be useful sometimes. RCA pressured them into providing the 6-hour format.
RCA was right. 6 hours makes timeshifting much more practical. Broadcast TV is crap quality anyway, we don't need high-quality formats to preserve its defects for the future.
Anyway, the point is that that comparison has really nothing to do with OGG/MP3. Where .ogg stands to gain is if some of the major media player writers support it. It has no chance of support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox, Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a momentum shift.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
But manufacturers can't make money off anything they can't patent.
AFAIK, the patents in MP3 are not owned by the companies who manufacture the players anyway. So supporting Ogg Vorbis would not make them lose money. Actually, it could give them some independence over companies that develop proprietary codecs (Real, MS, Fraunhofer).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The internet is as big as it it because of OPRN standards. HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. If everyone had to pay a licensing fee to implement each of these, the net would be smaller and less useful.
Does anyone know what patents are used by MP3 and when they expire?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Ever try encoding live music with MP3? Ever try to cut it into separate tracks? Notice that big ugly gap of silence between each track? That SUCKS!
Well ogg/vorbis supports edits with a resolution of 1 sample, so you can seamlessly join tracks together. With MP3, you either put up with the sucky gap, or make ONE HUGE FILE for the entire recording.
What's that you say? You have a 4-channel surround sound recording? You have a 5.1 stream you ripped out of a DVD? Too bad the designers of the MP3 file format didn't think about that. The vorbis file format supports 256 channels.
I've not been impresssed with the quality but it may be the encoder I am using ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's a Pentium PRO 180 with win95, this computer, and there isn't a lot of space on the disk, and when I last tried, it had 32 megs of RAM. Recently, I got another 64 megs for it.
I ripped to WAVs, but had to settle for 8 bits, mono 11 kHz, that's all my software could do. So, I've got a bunch of large WAVs, but I haven't been able to encode it to Ogg Vorbis.
It seems the best thing to do, is to encode directly from tape, while it is playing, through the sound card to Ogg Vorbis. Anybody know about Win95-software that can do this....?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
No one cares about patent laws. Most people using mp3s are downloading them without paying for them, do you think they care about breaking some patent laws when they steal their mp3 encoder? No way.
Ogg Vorbis is most useful for streaming media servers. Get the decoder into a lot of the client software people are already using (winamp, wimp, and real), and the free streaming server will "sell" like hotcakes, if it's any good.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
>a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg
>file anyway.
This is debatable...certainly _not_ for equal
average resulting bitrates.
>But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first,
>MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS
>versus Betamax.
That would be good. VHS won because it was more
usable and was a more open format. Vorbis has all
this and better quality.
--
GCP
oggenc makes a perfect drop-in replacement for any mp3 encoder. Now I rip everything to ogg without even thinking about it. And since players such as xmms and Winamp support ogg it's completely transparent from a user point of view, appart from the increased quality off course ! And there is nothing that prevents mp3 and ogg files from cohabitating : my 44 GB of mp3 are still here, but there is a growing minority of ogg that comes on top of it as I rip new CDs.
Then we know what to do, convince the pr0n business to use Ogg...
It's worked before, and it's working for DivX ;)
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
It's archos and you can get a lot of information on these players at www.funmp3players.com the owner of this site sells hacked archos jukeboxes up to 30 gb, but you can buy them now for $200 and buy a new hard drive and put it in yourself.
I thought the early VHS players could not play EP (aka "SLP") mode...?
Proliferation of this standard will require 4 things. Ogg will have to be of equal or better sound quality than mp3. Ogg will have to use comperable or less space than mp3. There will have to be numerous players available for the format, or at least it will need to be supported by all the popular players. And it will need to be used. Personally, if all else is equal, ogg and mp3 can mix on my HD without any problems and other people will see it the same way.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
My theory about the Pepsi challenge is that Pepsi is sweeter and thus tastes better in small doses, but once you've been drinking it for a while, it gets nasty, and that's why many people prefer Coke. Since the Pepsi challenge is all about small doses, it's biased toward Pepsi.
1. Edits at a resolution of 1 sample. This is why your live recordings SUCK if you cut them into multiple MP3 files.
2. A file format that supports lots of channels. (So you want to stream that 5.1 audio you encoded from your DVD sountrack, eh?)
Look at betamax vs. VHS (I know, I'm the umpteenth person to say that, but bear with me here). Betamax had superior playback quality, but it bombed. Why? Two reasons. It was less convenient to record in, because there weren't 6-hour tapes like there were for VHS. And VHS was pushed in a way betamax never was. People tend to follow the path of least resistance, buying the technology and using the formats that are placed in front of them without really thinking about it. Regardless of quality, Ogg will never take off unless it's included in windows, just like mp3 and wma. And that's not bloody likely.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Linux car dashboard music player - does mp3 and various others, and you can add whatever codec you like if you can write in Python. Many codecs already exist for it.
Okay, dev seems to have slowed since Diamond bought it, but it still rocks in my car.
I have 580-ish CD's stored on it at 192kb Xing Mp3 compression. In car that is easily good enough. At home I use ogg and it is slightly better than LAME mp3.
So I'm going ogg all the way:)
I bet you also run windows.
Someone mentioned the idea of Ogg Vorbis, so just to kill time at lunch, I took at look at the facts. They were impressive (and mentioned enough above). So then I looked at the API. It was a dream. Everything just kind of came together.
So besides the fact that it is a superior CODEC (dont' flame), it's also very easy to integrate into your programs.
So I wrote the program, converted all of my songs, and think totally in .ogg now.
Boss Ogg is the program, BTW.
It has no chance of support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox, Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a momentum shift.
I don't see this happening. Ogg Vorbis (like MP3) doesn't support DRM, which is the new "must-have" for music playing. Support will most likely remain "unofficial" for a long time.
Yes software patents are not legal in Europe, for the moments. But a lot of lobbys tries to change this in the wrong direction. In France, a law on this subject is currently under project.
I have also seen that same result out of a magazine. I think it was Open, but could be wrong there. If you want to beat the standard you must be better. This will never take flight in my opinion. Maybe someone will work on it a bit more.
Actually, that isn't a bad idea about paper. Trees could finally grow again and make more air for more and more people. People suck.
I archive all of my CDs to MP3, and I'll be sticking to MP3 for the foreseeable future. My MP3 encoder is faster than any current Ogg encoder, and IMHO, a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg file anyway. I'm also planning to get an MP3 CD player in the future for my car. If I had a lot of OGG files, I'd need to decode them and re-encode to MP3 just to put them onto CDR. Not much use. Ogg Vorbis seems to be a good format, but it wasn't first. The fact that there are few strings attached to it is extremely good, and I think Ogg will be very useful for programmers and games developers. But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first, MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS versus Betamax.
mogorific carpentry experiments
It's in beta, no?
Surely they will have something to provide once finished.
Ogg doesn't offer any significant benefits over MP3. Several codecs are already out there which offer marginal increases in quality / marginal decreases in size, but that's not enough to offset the familiarity and infrastructure of mp3.
... well, the process of decoding and mp3 is standard and well documented. Fraunhofer's patented a particular set of algorithms for encoding, but LAME's encoding sounds somewhat better to my ears. (Not to mention that nobody's really gonna growl at you if you slip in a pantented algorithm or two ...)
The other 'benefit' of Ogg is its openness
Me, I'm sticking with MP3 for a while. At 192kbps, I have to listen REALLY hard to distinguish it from CD.
Finally, a MiniDisc user! The ATRAC version I'm using offers great compression and great audio quality in a very affordable format. I don't have a single MP3 recoding, due in large part to my happiness with MD -- the limited occasions I experimented with MP3 left me dissapointed with the playback quality. Sadly, few Americans are enjoying MD. The fact that recording to MD is done in real time (1:1) is one drawback that may prevent wide adoption of MD [as opposed to the compressed time it takes to copy a audio track to MP3]. However, Sony may soon crack the "drag and drop" limitation of MD, offering the convenience of MP3 with the quality of MD. One final thing that I love about my MD: whereas a RAM-based MP3 player reqires access to your PC to upload new songlists, when I want to access a new songlist, I pop in a new disc, no matter where I am. I thought that the ability to change music "on the road" would give the HipZip an advantage over other MP3 players -- I wonder what the sales figures are for the various MP3 players are?
If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.
The overwhelming majority of Slashdot readers are smart enough to be in Mensa. Do you want the world run by Anonymous Coward? ;-)
In the general sense, I agree with you. However, perhaps a review (or view, if you haven't viewed it yet) of a utility curve is in order (see Microeconomics 101).
In short, EVERYTHING matters. But some things matter more.
I liked CAV disks. I hated having to get up 4 times or so during a movie. I'm far more likely to watch a movie straight through than to slow down a movie scene.
I prefer lossless encoding, but I have a 56k modem. If I want a picture or sound file in the next few hours, it's gotta be compressed.
So for most of your examples, you need to include the second part of your comparison. 'Prefer' implies a comparison between two things. One of those is quality, but you don't say 'as compared to what'.
And, again, if you can give up a small amount of quality for a HUGE increase in... usability, for example, that is a net gain to most people. Quality is nice, but it's not the end-all, be-all of the consumer (or even human) experience.
BTW, I'd have to totally ignore your last point. High IQs do not imply a large ability to govern. Look at Marilyn vos Savant (I think that's the spelling). Sure, she might be a genius, but I'm not sure that she plays well with others. An inability to motivate workers and the public is far more damaging than having 'merely' an average IQ.
Again, not disagreeing with your main thesis (quality doesn't matter to most to any great degree) but I think your supporting arguments could use a little help.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I was speaking more about the site I actually administer here.
Thanks for pointing that out - looks like I need to redo my ISP home page!
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Is .ogg a more compact method? Can I fit more of my collection onto CDROM in .ogg than .mp3 at equal sound quality? Patented algorithm or not, I can still get my hands on an .mp3 encoder for free. The patent holder can scream and bitch all they want, but until they somehow come up with the ability to effectively limit my access to .mp3 encoding software, I don't see that as much of a downside. They're sure as hell not getting any money from me. My friends and anyone I'd send a piece of audio to is far more likely to have a .mp3 capable device or software player.
VHS let you do more with less. Quality be damned. I've got a couple South Park episodes in .rm format and while the quality isn't great it get the point across and is enjoyable to watch. Why should I bother with a DVD that has better quality picture and sound when I've got something usable and can concievable fit an entire season's worth of shows on a CD instead of 4 episodes? If .ogg can't do it smaller, then what exactly can it do that would make me and anyone else use it? What's it's pitch?
You do have the original CDs, right? I mean, it's not like you're illegally downloading audio that you havn't purchased, right?
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
PNG has not overtaken GIF because GIF works. User's don't seem to care or concern themselves with the royalty issues their software publishers go through.
MP3 will not go away for the very same reasons. Not to mention there is already hardware (e.g., DVD players) that play MP3 format. Too late to replace it. Sorry folks.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Two reasons.
:). At 128 kbps, most MP3 files sound very washed out to me. Beta 4 has its own problems, but it already sounds better than MP3 to me. (I've also experimented with a prerelease of version 1, which has produced some excellent sounding 80kpbs files).
Firstly, for me Vorbis sounds better than MP3 (even using the latest Lame versions) at the same bitrates: the perceptual model it uses must be better suited to my ears
Secondly, patent issues DO matter. Perhaps not to the college kid that pirates all the software he uses anyway, but to people that matter, like the makers of hardware music players, or console games, that won't have to pay the MP3(pro/whatever) licencing fees.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
erm... I did this already... took about 4 days for my Classic P233 to convert almost 3 gigs of MP3 to ogg.
Ah, the glories of Shell and PERL scripting.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
Sorry, but as great as any new format may be, converting a huge mp3 collection is just no really feasable, and i'm sure as hell not encoding all my cds from scratch again. MP3 does just fine for me - thanks.
...why would anyone use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, aside from just being part of groupthink?
Have the software patents affected anyone here personally?
NO CARRIER
I think that ogg vorbis will have a good chance of becoming a new standard, as long as there are really good (linux and windows based) utilities available, especially all-in-one rip/cddb/encode programs. Most people don't want to have to go through the process of ripping to raw audio (wav, etc), converting, and renaming the files. It's just too much effort.
I plan on converting my 200+ CD collection to ogg vorbis, but I would like to figure out how to do this with as little interaction as possible. In other words, I just want to put the cd in the tray, and let it work. Otherwise, the conversion process will take too much of my free time.
So far, I've encoded about 15 albums to ogg vorbis format. I'm trying to encode my more obscure albums, so that people who are looking for them will probably be forced to download from me and figure out how to use the format. Judging from the number of downloads I've been seeing on gnutella, there must be a few people out there who are listening to them.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
In fact, the word from Nullsoft is that they have an Ogg Vorbis plugin that will be included in Winamp 2.77.
Who are these Arches? And why doesn't a Google search for "Arches" come up with anything more than state parks and a band of that same name?
"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
-- Aldous Huxley
I have encoded around 12G of music onto my laptop so that I can listen to it anytime. This isn't music for anyone else, and I don't download music from the internet, or swap with other people.
Consequently I don't give a toss whether anyone else can read my music or not. Ogg works well for me, and the player support seems just fine and dandy - I've been using XMMS, FreeAmp and ogg123 which all do what I expect.
Ripping the CDs seems no different for Ogg than it is for mp3, except maybe easier, since Debian has never included mp3 ripping software because of the patent problems.
Next year I will be building a small computer to go into the stereo system to play music. I'll get more serious about ripping my music collection in it's entirety at that point, but I can't see that it is going to get any easier for me to rip to MP3 and I can't see that it will ever get any harder to rip to Ogg.
For the next few years I expect to see all of the .mp3, .ogg and .wma (and maybe others) in the market place. The comparison of VHS vs BETAMAX simply doesn't apply because I can play all three of these on any hardware - they are software codecs after all. I personally can't currently play .wma, but that's just a choice I have made, not a majority view :-)
I'd also like to express my thanks to Monty for his effort and vision in making this post possible!
Thanks Monty!
They've lost a major portion of brain functionality if they think I'm going to replace my MP3 hardware with something to play another format. Smacks too much of what the RIAA is doing in making us pay for formats, only now it's paying for the players. I'm looking to use MP3 for *years* to come, so don't even think of pulling upgraditis on me with the hardware.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Sad to say, but quality does NOT matter to 90% of the market. Only the experts care.
If quality mattered, people would use CAV laserdisc in all cases, but the majority uses CLV to put twice the content on each side of the disc.
If quality mattered, people would use uncompressed laserdisc over dvd, but the majority prefer the small discs at the expense of image integrity.
If quality mattered, people would use raw or lossless compression on images, but the majority prefer JPG at crappy levels.
If quality mattered, everyone would record MP3 at 192Kbps, even if it meant two songs fit into your old Rio, but the majority back off the quality to squeeze more music into their player.
If quality mattered, everyone would buy the best high-performance tires, spark plugs and other car parts, but the majority go for average or no-name automotive suppliers to stretch the paycheck a little farther.
If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.
[
....Not unless I can somehow upgrade my Aiwa CDC-MP3 car stereo player to play them.
Try using GIMP and compress a 256 colour image, see which is smaller GIF or PNG.
What about recording your mp3s in "CD Quality" (according to R3mix, LAME b 256 -m s -h --lowpass 19.5) and then when Ogg Vorbis or some other format becomes stable enough to use, re-encoding your mp3s to that. It seems to me that the problems with double encoding should be minimal if the mp3s are CD quality to start off with.
I'm going to be encoding all of my (and my wife's) CDs to Ogg Vorbis when it hits a 1.0 release. From what I've seen, they've been critical of their own work far more than I would be, so I actually trust them very much. I'd been planning to MP3 all our albums (400+) for a long time, and even got through a bunch, but I'd like to support in some way a format that is sponsored by a company I can like. But if the quality can be better for a given bitrate or smaller for a given quality, it doesn't take someone on a moral crusade to come up with the same answer.
Ogg came in last, no?
Arches makes a laptop HD mp3 player. You transfer files via USB and it can playback MP3s but you can transfer any file type to the drive. A small codex software change on the hardware could support something like this. But manufacturers can't make money off anything they can't patent. So I don't see this happening anytime soon. By the way, at $200 the 6GB player is a steal because you can transport anything you want onto it and it holds hours of music and other stuff. It also has a 30 inch drop rating so is perfect for mountain biking, aerobics, and no skip technology. Try to get that with a CD player.
sheesh. this is the most informative post in this thread.
Is there a difference between a software patent and a EULA?
I mean if you cannot enforce a software patent in Europe then how can you enforce an EULA (End User License Agreement)?
-- Andy
...is the same reason that AOL dominates the ISP market: people by and large have crowd mentality about what they don't understand and they want what everyone else has, and everyone else has MP3s. MP3 is cheap and easy and a known quantity; it's the McDonald's of audio.
Convenience over quality: it doesn't get much simpler than that.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
mp3 was the standard long before win98 came out. Ppl would get mp3's from irc and play them with winplay3 (the only player that actually worked at the time) and then winamp came out and blew it off the map. Winamp didn't even have winamp.com back then (my friend did, *evil*) Only then did MS support mp3 playback.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
i use ogg for all my ripped CD's. there are plugins for most of the good rippers out there, and the quality is more than good enough. there are even plugins for WinAMP, so my wife doesn't even notice that she isn't playing MP3s (even though she still calls them MP3s :).
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
So, why not go with "another, better codec" (Ogg) right now and feel good that nobody will be able to rip you off (pun intended), ever?
Fraunhofer: "Here, have an mp3. The first one's free."
Raymond
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Damn RI, you're gonna have to work harder. I can hardly tell that post from the usual half-baked, misinformed, soft-communistic slashbot. I hate to have to poke you in the eye about this, but we all know that you can be a hell of a lot more incidiary than that.
yep
OPRN standards didn't make the internet as big as it is today, free PR0N did.
uses it already Operation Flashpoint uses Ogg
Say today i rip all my CD's to .ogg then tomarrow .ogg 1.0 comes out, will i have to change them all over from 1.0rc3(whatever it is) to 1.0 format? and what happens when 1.1 comes out? so on and so forth.
.ogg if it was supported in the same players/encoders as MP3 is.
I also would change my entire collection to
I disagree. MP3 was successful in the first place because the quality was good enough for techies to really use it. It became mainstream through a "trickle-down" effect. Ogg Vorbis will not be adopted by techies, who are the sort of people who often care about things like sound quality, unless it gives a clear reason to switch from MP3 -- like a better quality/size ratio. Then it might become mainstream.
There is the added issue that if a format is to be used in a future massive commercial music distribution system, artists will most definitely care a great deal about the sound quality.
"mp3" became a generic term for `audio file stored in a particular popular format' because of how folks used it. The dodgy authorities in the US (damn the lot of them) picked up on it, started getting mediaeval on people's asses, and mp3s started to get frowned upon. Then the hardware catches up and people start to think of real uses for it like in cars, mobile phones, etc.
OTOH it's still possible to go *back* to a simple view of what "an mp3" actually is, and use it as such - if you have a valid audio stream you want to get from A to B, it's probably one of the better formats to use, on grounds of compression rate for the quality you get.
We've had this rise of Ogg-Vorbis stuff for a year or more now; I suggest that people treat it sensibly. If you've got stuff to transfer or archive, use it by all means. If your `transferral' or `archiving' is to bootleg stuff around, please don't. Let's have one format that remains untarnished by misbehavious, please?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
You can encode music with a lower bitrate than MP3 to achive the same quality as MP3.
Or you can achive higher quality by encoding it with the same bitrate as MP3.
It saves space. It sounds better. What does that have to do with "being geek" or "groupthinking"?
The lowest bitrate I ever encode mp3s at is 128. Nowadays I usually use VBR, with a net average of about 200kbps. Disk space is cheap, I want the best quality I can get. I havn't heard any talk about 128kbps ogg being equivilent to 320kbps mp3, and I usually have several frames at that bitrate when I vbr the mp3s. Therefore an ogg will not deliver the quality that I have come to expect from mp3s.
Who says you can't share ogg files with your friends?
What are they gonna do.. Beat you over the head with a brick because you didn't use MP3?
that Operation: Flashpoint uses ogg vorbis?
VHS vs Beta
Windows vs Linux
Its all about the marketing. Sony discovered after losing the vcr wars to VHS that it was content that mattered, and hence its purchase of record label and movie studios.
Unless Ogg Vorbis, can convince publishers to release music in that format, or unless there can be another Napster like craze using Ogg Vorbis, and unless the portable mp3 players/manufacturers will support it, and unless... (I could go on), then Ogg Vorbis will go the way of Betamax.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
I use Ogg Vorbis for all my music, and I am generally very happy with the quality. I think I can hear the difference from MP3.
The thing I don't like is some of the encoders have bugs that make annoying pops in the middle of the music. If they could fix that it would be great.
Not me!
I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?
Yes, you are. Even all my non-computer-literate friends figured out what Napster was and how to use it to get mp3s about 1 1/2 years ago, and even my mom has been downloading mp3s for the past 6 months. I'm afraid you're the last one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Flac is also streamable, which implies that the infrastructure never has to be changed to allow for lossless streaming... however, flac streaming is impractical now. Currently, I re-encode to mp3 for restreaming, but will move to OGG when V1 shows it's head, and it becomes supported by Shoutcast (... yeah, I know icecast supports ogg, but commercial restreamers only have shoutcast at best.)
Yes, there ugliness in the audio arena (WMA/RIAA/MP3 licensing, etc), but I have a suspicion that those who are proprietary and face-to-face with better free solutions don't need help shooting themselves in the foot... the necessary tools will always be there for those with the skill to find and use them. Those that don't are just food for the corporate/legal system (can you tell the difference?).
Andy
(BeNOW.ca)
Quality DOES matter. It just doesn't matter as much as convienence and cost.
Now take an OGG file and an MP3 file. Both cost nothing. Both can be played on your computer simply by installing a program, so the convienence level is the same.
All things being equal to your average Joe, OGG and MP3 are both just ways to play music.
People WILL realize that OGG is better quality, after being exposure to it. People will load up their favorite P2P application and search for music. If both MP3 and OGG come up, why not just opt for the higher quality since they are both free and both convienent to play?
Just give it some time. MP3 will be most used for quite a while because it has momentum, but eventually freedom and higher quality will push OGG more into the mainstream.
I was about to say "Latin American Coke" but that's a whole different topic :-)
Anyway, my sister brought back a bottle from DomRep - man it was good. Part of it was certainly nostalgia, but I'm pretty sure they are using more (if not all) natural sugars in Latin American bottling plants.
All new CDs that I rip, I encode in Ogg. I encourage all of my friends to use Ogg if they can. I explain all about the patent issues and a lot of them are pretty interested in Ogg.
But, in order for Ogg to really catch on, it needs to included in the standard download for a couple of major players. Also it needs to be promoted by whatever music sharing service becomes 'The Next Big Thing' after Napster. A lot of mp3's popularity is due to Napster.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Sure we geeks were dwiddling with mp3s since 1995/96. However, napster was the killer app that really made mp3s a good platform for online music. Do you even remember all the time spent looking for good mp3 sites without TOO many broken links and servers dropping your connection?
Basically, if someone makes a really good app that uses ogg vorbis, you'll get a good market share. If the sound quality is as good as some of the people claim, the growth potential is pretty good.
Now if someone would just make a really good ogg ripper wrapper..
Stop the brainwash
I went there an all I got was hundreds of pop up windows. If I have to close hundreds of pop-up windows just to read about some new sound format, then I'm not reading it.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
>Now if someone made a MP3 (or Ogg) player which used MD media, you bet I'd buy one.
;-).
:-)
Well... if someone with enough clue would make a player for 8 cm CD-RWs [only] then it would beat MiniDisc hands down (well almost). Comapre:
Compression bang-to-the-byte: MP3
Recording Speed: MP3
Re-Recordability / Cassette Tape style flexibility: MD
Non-SDMI crippled: MP3
Universality (debateable): MP3 [if you take the 8 cm disc out chances are someone will have a computer nearby that can play it. Where I am in N.A., I'd have to drive for a bit to find somone with an MD unit].
Ease of use: tie
Ease of getting pre-made songs: MP3 (albeit possibly illegally)
Ease of buying media: tie (While I have no problem finding 8 cm discs, I'm sure that MD would be no harder to find).
Player Size / Portability: tie (the 8 cm disc is barely bigger than an MD).
Maximum Playtime: MP3 (by a wide margin)
Sound Quality: tie (I'd say MP3 since it compresses a little harder, but there are die hard MD users who seem to be able to fool themselves into thinking there's compression artifacts in 320 kbps MP3 -- White Noise could probably compress at that rate
Physical Media Storage Space: 8 cm discs (by 60 MB)
Physical Media Size: tie (MD is 8 mm x 14 mm smaller, bit it is square, and corners count)
Winner (drum roll): 8 cm MP3.
Now _please_, someone make an 8 cm CDR(w) MP3 player so here in North America we can give that proprietary MD format the boot.
BTW: I've been using 8 cm CDs with my MpTrip lately and I can see why MD users (once) sneered at us MP3 CD users. But after using the smaller, pocket sized, discs, I can see what portability is all about!
I heard about OGG Vorbis and thought I'd give it a chance in a similar fashion.
I ripped 2 wavs from CDs.... one classical, one rock. I encoded them into mp3s at 128kb/s and encoded them into OGGs (the most recent encoder out mind you) at a higher bit rate (I raised it until the file size was the about the same). I played each WAV,MP3,OGG one at a time and listening closely (with the equalizer off).
Now, I don't have a thousand dollar system, but I have been a musician for about a decade and have a pretty good ear. From what I hear, the OGG format keeps the lower frequencies more intact but loses more of the higher end. Alternatively, MP3 loses more of the lower end while retaining the higher. If you don't believe me, watch the spectrum analyzer. And, yes, you're right about the stereo loss.
Now, I'm sticking with MP3 for now, and here's the reason why:
Musically speaking, each sound you hear has both a pitch and timbre. The pitch is the note you hear, A, Eb, etc.. The timbre is the tone quality, like whether it sounds like a clarinet or a piano. The timbre is determined by the presence of overtones, the less audible tones at 3/2, 4/2, 5/2... times the frequency. Thus, the higher frequencies are very crucial to the sound quality.
Now, you won't notice this effect in OGG as much with classical music, but if you encode a rock song with plenty of overdrive guitar lines, the timbre is closer to the actual with mp3 encoding.
Since only a small percentage of my library is classical (mostly Elfman soundtracks), MP3 better fits my needs and the loss in the bass can be compensated with an equalizer and a subwoofer.
Maybe OGG will sound better in the future, but then again, MP3Pro is offering an further increase of quality in the upper frequencies, so OGG might have its work cut out for it. I'll wait a few months and give it another shot, but until then I'll still with Mp3s.
my 2cents.
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Apparently OFFTOPIC means nothing when the entire fucking Slashdot group decides to indulge in it..
I heard the BBC (yes, the UK one) is aiming to use OpenDivX and OGG Vorbis as their primary streaming formats some time in the future. They run Linux on most of their hardware anyway, had some quarrels with Microsoft because they refused to support Windows 2000 (with their media server) when running under VMware or something, weren't allowed to link Realplayer Plugins directly from their page by Real.com - so that's the next option.
I'd really like to know more about this, if anyone has some more insider knowledge please reply.
Home Page
the problem with ogg vorbis, and why it will never be accepted widely, is the stupid name.
it should be called something cool and easy to say and remember like mpX. not something you're embarrassed tp say and have to spell out every time it's mentioned.
_______________________________________________
http://www.bearshare.com
hyperpoem.net
In my experience pngs have larger file sizes most of the time.
I don't see how. PNG's Deflate packs pixels tighter than GIF's LZW.
Perhaps this is not a matter of the file format but of the programs i use(d).
How much larger? If you're talking 10%, try not saving gamma or physical resolution and cranking the compression up to maximum. (These options are presented in GIMP for Windows's Save As... dialog.) If you are trying to blend a non-transparent PNG into your bgcolor (necessary to make PNG look good in netscape 4.x), you don't want to save gamma anyway.
OTOH, if your PNG file is twice as big as your GIF file, convert the images to indexed (palette) color before saving them, as your GIF export plug-in is probably doing this automatically, whereas your PNG plug-in is preserving 24-bit color.
Will I retire or break 10K?
=IF= you started getting CD-players from major companies, on the high-streets, which could play Ogg Vorbis-encoded files, you would see it being used. Otherwise, it's a dead duck.
Mind you, it's not helped by the crappy encoder, the heavy media publicity of MP3.com and Napster, and the somewhat poor showing in a recent comparison review.
Ogg Vorbis =should= be as good, if not better, than MP4, VQ, and other "high-quality" lossy formats. It isn't. It's about on-par, but it's just not there.
IMHO, if Ogg Vorbis is to seriously challange the other formats, it HAS to have better handling of different frequences. 5-6 bands seems fairly typical for audio, but with research suggesting that there's a LOT of sound information held in "texture", rather than actual audible sound, you might easily want to have 12-16 bands to reliably handle sound texture.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
DJs. I'll actually be using this software @ a show with The Crystal Method and Hybrid.
I would like to see an online petition to be sent out to various digital music player makers to support ogg vorbis. Most of them support wma, and how many people use that? the open source community needs to get behind some of these open technologies and really push, otherwise we are going to find ourselves paying through the nose for the most basic of services and products down the road.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Actually PNG supports 16-bit channels, which means you can have 65536 levels of opacity, not just your girly-man 256.
Ogg Vorbis has a real chance of taking MP3, but they're going to have to change the name. Part of MP3's success is its trendy name. It's a smooth name that rolls of the tounge, sounds cool, but not too technical.
Ogg Vorbis sounds like a new brand of Mr. Clean. It's funny, strange, un-sophisticated and not natural to say. Personally, since both are technically about the same, I would prefer my files with a *.mp3 than *.ogg.
It's small, but it's something consumers notice. Fashion is just as important as functionality and political freedom.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Well, look at the ad on the top of this page.
What ad?
People use what works
People use Junkbuster because it works.
More colours and alpha channel support is useless if the person needs to create an animated gif.
MNG is supported in 6.0 browsers. Besides, if you really need to show animation, you'll use SWF or SVG+SMIL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since i have a portable mp3 player that wont and probably never will play anything other than mp3 files thats what im going to continue using. If i one day get another player i might reconsider. The only thing i would like to use ogg for at the moment is for the sound in movie files. Something like OpenDivX+ogg instead of DivX+mp3
Now why would I want to:
- Delete all that music (15GB)
- Re-encode with a codec that is slow as hell to encode and could take days.
- Just to get a file that plays in only one player I own and don't really like (Audion).
Not practical, since I can't tell the difference between Ogg and MP3 at 160-220Kb (VBR).I have to say, the quality of Ogg Vorbis isn't too bad, and once this hits a stable release, it's only going to get better.
MP3s are OK, and LAME is a bad ass encoder, but I'm willing to give Ogg Vorbis a chance.
I started an mp32ogg last night. Gripped a couple CD's into oggs as well.
RETARD liar! Betamax had Long tape path between the Audio head to Video head.
This means FEET of tape had to be pulled out of casste and put into casste between fastforward and play and rewind and eject.
It was astounding.
Betamax was merely a smaller version of Umatic cassette 3/4 inch tape.
Betamax was WHOLLY IMPRACTICAL for videocamera usage because of the asinine distance between the standard audio head track and helical head used for video.
VHS **ALWAYS** was far far more resonsive to Play-rewind play and play-fast forward-play.
the quality is irrelevant to the success.
Sony etamax SUCKED purely because the audio tracks and video tracks were ridiculously far apart comapred to the tape loop path in a much more logical design (the VHS).
VHS soon had 4 and 6 hour recording, and then moved on to Super-VHS in same tape housing.
VHS is awesome and all you bigoted betamax lovers can keep your old stories to yourselves unless you want to read some old consumer reports revies of these long lag times.
I have NEVER seen amyone on slashdot ever speak up on this matter. Finally after 200 posts about betamax betamax betamax i had to speak up.
by the way eventually vhs went on to high speed 15 minute per cassette M-Format for pro cam operators. it also went on to use in 10 gigabyte computer backup systems.
VHS is an awesome cassette design.
don't hate on me cuz you know u wanna be like me
Come on guys, we all know what made MP3's famous. Sure, I could have told you about mp3's in 96. When it took me 15 minutes to encode 1 minute of music, and there was no music available to download. But the vast majority of those who use mp3's do so because it was so easy to get them on NAPSTER (remember that thing?) The solution is perhaps simpler than it looks. Adopt or create the next BIG p2p sharing technology that is easy to use and can support alot of traffic. Then flood it with OV files. The only real problem is encoding the music. Course that will come itself. All the new stuff will be encoded as it is released, and the old stuff will be encoded by the millions of people with nothing better to do than re-encode their cd's every chance they get (yes people do this). OV can survive, it just needs help. Perhaps they can have an OGG Open Source music sharing service, which would ensure that it never goes down (because anyone could create a server or client etc.)
No matter whether they call it "Zip-Mini," "PocketZip," "Clik!," "Clikka-clikka-clikka-whirrrzzzghbbbb" or anything else, those little disks are a) hard to come by except in large urban areas b) have the trustworthy heritage of lasting storage we've come to expect from Iomega(r) Zip(tm) brand storage. That is to say, little to none ;)
;)
If iomega would offer a CD-R/CD-RW based hardware player that played ogg for under $175 (I'm fudging, I wanted to say $150), I'd buy it. Even if it didn't have upgradeable firmware, or the addition of a SM or CF slot as well, I'd buy it. With those things, I'd be willing to pay more
Iomega, does some young buck in your hardware engineering, or Imagineering or whatever department, read these words?! Please, hand that man a whiteboard and a budget!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
KDE!!! MP3 has licensing issues, KDE has licensing issues.... yet the (arguably) better window manager is KDE and the more popular format will be MP3. -nuff said.
I don't know, I can get an 80 gig hard drive for $200. I prefer .shn. Is that patented?
Right, but in 2.77 they'll be including it by default. You'll get Vorbis support simply by installing Winamp. No need to download a separate plugin.
Urban Legend Sighting
As there is no Napster for .ogg
Most of the second-systems that popped up when Napster was beginning to show signs of weakness support sharing any type of file, including Ogg Vorbis.
Without good support in standard browser and players (winamp)
Winamp.com features both a decoder and an encoder for Ogg Vorbis audio. (Don't try to transcode mp3 to ogg; the underlying audio models are too different for a good conversion.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Quality does matter, or else DVDs wouldn't be as popular as they are. The reason why DVDs aren't as popular as laserdisc is because they don't require compromises in order to get quality. They're not only of higher quality than VHS, but smaller, cheaper (to the producers, at least, which explains the big promotional push), and more feature rich.
I can't say whether Ogg will succeed, but it offers quality without any drawbacks, and therefore I think your argument is irrelevant.
I'm already using consumer devices that use mp3. The cost of switching them out to OGG or any other format is too expensive. A Kenwood Z828 isnt pocket change. And I dont have the time to convert my 100's of mp3 cds to OGG...
look here
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
a) wow, a G4 can rip 200 CDs in 12 hours? That's pretty impressive! :) How long do Ogg rips take on the same machine by way of comparison?
... My dad has a windows / Intel (of course) machine on a cable modem, when I was down visiting there, I found an Ogg-ripping program (name I forget)found it easy enough to set up and rip with. Since that's not something I've done with MP3s on that or any other machine, I can't really compare the speed, but I'll admit it was pretty slow. (Maybe 40-50 seconds per minute of audio?)
b) What is Audion? Is that a software player on your Mac, or is that a hardware player?
If it's software, then if any of your other favorite players have plug-in systems, I bet they'll soon be playing Ogg as well as MP3
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
FWIW, I like Pepsi in cans and at the soda fountain, but I love Coke in the bottles. And yes, I think it is probably an emotional thing.
It's not just an emotional thing. There are still some places where you can get te old, good stuff - they really did make it differently back then: Just last week, I grabbed a 12 oz. *returnable* glass Coke bottle from Mexico at a Chevron station that sits by itself somewhere between Smithville and Bastrop on US 71 between Houston and Austin. I'm not even a serious Coca-Cola fan, but this was *good* - the taste of Coke I remember as a child: the old, original Coke formula, not "Classic" which never was the same.
For a real eye-opener, try a Dr. Pepper from the Dublin Dr. Pepper bottling company in Dublin, Texas: They're the last still making DP with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, and there's all the difference in the world. I suspect real sugar may be the reason why those Mexican Cokes were so good, too...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Does anyone know of any good websites that discuss the advantages/diadvantages of differnt mp3 encoders/decoders. Also, people mention writng their own media servers for their home stereos, any links regarding how to approach doing something like that?
The vorbis specification itself is completely unrestricted, so if you write all of your own code then you don't have to comply with any licensing terms.
The basic vorbis libraries are under a BSD-like license, so that use of the basic implementation is essentially unrestricted. This allows anyone to write a player or encoder with minimal effort and very flexible license.
Most of the other code (including the reference player and encoder) is licensed under the GNU GPL.
The mp3 engineers hire a bean counter who tells them how much money they are losing annually because of the popularity of their format. They begin to enforce royalty and licensing issues with an iron fist.
As providers of mp3s encoders and content providers begin to get hit financially by the Germans they set out for a new alternative to mp3. Something similar, if not better in quality than mp3 which would contain no financial implications. Ogg is discovered in 2002! Marketing and PR dollars by many organizations are spent on promoting Ogg as the next evolution in digital music.
Other forward thinking production companies, music labels begin to release music using EFF's new open audio license therefore by passing all the BS of copyrights for music that will be exchanged by the masses anyway.
Additional companies begin to insert FreeDB tags into their ogg files so that players released in 2003 can pull info off their now completely free and open music system. Early adopters include NPR, IndyMedia and other production companies. By 2004 WMP and QuickTime have codecs for playing ogg files.
The only twist here is if Franhofer never attempts to forcefully collect on the mp3 codec formula. If it doesn't cost anything for developers to use, there will never be reason enough to switch at this point of acceptance.
Broadcasting LIVE from a Bonus Room Over the Gara
At the very least, the existence of Ogg Vorbis means that Fraunhoffer will have to behave. If they tried to control mp3s more they'd be shooting themselves in the foot with another, better, codec trying to break through.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
This doesn't deserve a -1. It accurately characterizes the cited paper, which is soley about economics. There's no technical analysis of video quality there, nor are the authors even capable of such an analysis. The issue is basically dismissed with a single, non-technical paragraph. The paper fails entirely to "debunk" this "myth", or even to seriously address it.
Because I already do.
Magazine covers Napster, Metallica, Dr. Dre and every website in the world have all made the word "mp3" part of everyday language.
Slim Shady says: "I say download the audio on Ogg Vorbis and show the whole world how you gave Eminem" uh... MP3 is easier to rhyme with "MTV", "STD", and other bad things, and could be stretched into rhyming with "Jack Valenti".
Will I retire or break 10K?
I seriously doubt that any of my friends will be switching to ogg (or anything else) any time soon, and what's the point of converting to ogg if I can't share ogg files with my friends?
import sig.my.*;
Until it does it won't go anywhere except on a few PCs.
Ironically enough, the only support on Macintosh that Ogg Vorbis seems to have is in a shareware (nagware) client called MacAMP and other commercial products. The codec for some reason is not supported in the free (beer) QuickTime player.
Liberty in your lifetime
YOU PEOPLE HAVE IT ALL WRONG!!!!! The reason that VHS won over Beta is because the cartridges are bigger. To summarize it, VHS is a phallic symbol. Bigger. Beta not only sounds smaller but has smaller cartridges. Subconsiously, an entire generation once again allowed sex to dictate their marketing needs. A typical couple... Him: Hmmm lets get VHS. I identify with that. Her: Hmmm. I wish he was bigger. Let's get VHS. At least I can pretend. Nanopause... Ok, its a stupid theory
You can convert mp3s to oggs. just start the program running overnight and in a few hours you have a crapload of your own .ogg files, rather than a bunch of patented-codec mp3s.
If you actually sat there and ripped you "huge" mp3 collection, doing the conversion will be simple as pie.
MP3 patents: http://www.mp3licensing.com/patents/index.html Royalty rates: http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html
Will I retire or break 10K?
Can someone please explain what DRM is?
I have to agree. Any oldsters out there will be nodding to themselves and thinking "beta vs vhs". Better does not always win when "pretty close" costs less and is readiy available.
We'd all probably scream bloody murder if this weren't a free (beer) codec and someone else was pushing it on us. But we're symbolically behind it for just that reason; it is free. And I doubt we're all ready to toss out our Rios and Archoses and Nomads. I know I'm not. MP3 will take the same course as CD audio I predict -- "it's good enough, let's go with it".
- I am made of meat.
Any half-decent cd-ripper will let you tell it what encoder to use. CDEX is my personal favorite, and has a very simple drop down box to choose between LAME, Blade, OGG, and many others. then all you do is rip, and it puts it in whatever format you told it to.
we've all spent money that goes to Frauenhoffer for their mp3 patent. AND we've all suffered the software quality problems from encoders not being freely available because of the patent issue. .ogg anyone can work on it any which way. No more getting sued by The Man.
With
Genuinely intelligent people see MENSA for the sham that it is. No person who can use their intelligence in real world situations would consider becoming a member of MENSA. Being a MENSA member means "I can do puzzles but I am unable to apply intelligence to practical situations". Be wary of people who feel the need to have their intelligence validated. I remember I was impressed with being a member of MENSA until about the age of 15 when maturity started to kick in. I would suggest that anyone impressed by MENSA membership should find out the celebs who claim membership. Famous members in the UK include Garry Bushell, Jimmy Saville and Kathy Lloyd. Norris McWhirter is also a member - this is a man who has spent his life memorizing The Guinness Book of Records parrot fashion - probably the stupidest waste of a brain possible.
too late!
plus they have no actual basis for suing them. I mean, the mp3 codec aren't open source or anything. So how could the Vorbis team have copied their source? And since so much work has gone into the codec, and it has already been released, there's not anything they can do about it. They can kill OGG about as good as the MPAA killed deCSS.
IMPOSSIBLE!
TAKE THAT CORPORATE FUCKING GIANT ASSHOLE LITTLE-GUY-RAPING ANTI-FREEDOM GREEDY PIGS!
TAKE THAT CORPORATE FUCKING GIANT ASSHOLE LITTLE-GUY-RAPING ANTI-FREEDOM GREEDY PIGS!
TAKE THAT CORPORATE FUCKING GIANT ASSHOLE LITTLE-GUY-RAPING ANTI-FREEDOM GREEDY PIGS!
TAKE THAT CORPORATE FUCKING GIANT ASSHOLE LITTLE-GUY-RAPING ANTI-FREEDOM GREEDY PIGS!
TAKE THAT CORPORATE FUCKING GIANT ASSHOLE LITTLE-GUY-RAPING ANTI-FREEDOM GREEDY PIGS!
People who pirate music care even less about patent. Most of them don't even know that mp3 has associated patents. Mp3 is very popular. Even of Ogg Vorbis has a higher sound quality/bit rate ration and even if it's free of patents, it won't catch on. Most mp3 user probably never heard of it. Without some marketing, mass promotion, it will never gain much use.
Follow this link to Rio's web page and e-mail them requesting support for Ogg Vorbis. Personally this is the only thing holding me back from buying a compressed-audio cd player. The first one that comes out supporting .ogg will have me reripping all of my CDs into the supreme .ogg format and purchasing their player, regardless of cost.
u bmenu=cs&item=cs_email-form&detail=other .ogg files. Below is the text that I sent to them.
With portable support for .ogg, I think it has a great chance of overtaking mp3.
.ogg format as soon as their encoder reaches 1.0 (which will be soon).
I noticed that the Roivolt has upgradable codecs.
If an upgrade is released for the Roivolt to play Ogg Vorbis, the Roivolt will win the hearts of audiophiles and geeks all over. :)
http://www.riohome.com/default.asp?menu=support&s
That is a link to e-mail Rio requesting that they release an upgrade to their Roivolt to playback
Rio,
I'm interested in buying a cd-mp3 player. I think this would be a GREAT way to backup all my cds, as well as make them easier(and funner!) to listen to. I could fit my 100cds on around 10 cds. That's awesome.
There is only one thing holding me back. MP3 is an aged format, and also requires that related software pay royalties to Frauenhoffer for the mp3 patents. Same with "mp3pro" or whatever their next mp3 is.
Ogg Vorbis is a free codec which isn't blocked by any patents whatsoever. It also sounds better than mp3, AND takes up less space. I will be ripping all of my cds into
Thanks!
Ever heard of VQF? Its been out for a few years now and developed by Yamaha. The quality is MUCH better than mp3 and the files are 30% the size of the same quality mp3. Has anyone ever seen a .vqf file floating around? Nope. Never. I use it for archiving large wav files and the ability to encode live from the soundcard is great. I don't expect ogg to make a dent outside of the linux fundies area.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Any REAL audiophile interested in quality would not be listening to highly compressed audio on a Pioneer receiver. You might as well switch back to the crappy pc speakers.
Count me in - I am also probably not going to be using DivX except when I have to. I don't like to support Microsoft, or patented technology in general because I am against *all* patents.
You've got your facts screwed up dude. The one thing you did get right was that Beta used a U-shaped tape path, which was longer than the M-shaped path of VHS, and meant that tape loading/unloading was slower when you inserted or removed a tape.
However, once loaded, a Beta tape stays on the same path for all operations (stop, play, ffw, reverse, etc.) which means it can switch from one to the other almost instantaneously. With a VHS unit, the tape is only strung through the path during play operations and is returned to its case for ffw, play, and stop. That makes VHS slow in switching from play to ffw, for example. So the tradeoff is between slow loading/unloading on a Beta VCR, versus delays in switching to/from play, ffw, rev, & stop on a VHS VCR.
Also, you're totally wrong about the head spacing. All VCRs have four heads: the helical scan head, the erase head, the standard audio head, and a head for reading control information. The latter three are inline with the tape path and are usually combined into one unit. The helican scan head rotates on a drum and is used for video and Hi-Fi mode audio. The size of a Beta drum is larger than a VHS drum, but spacing between it and the inline heads is roughly the same - on both designs they are placed practically right next to eachother.
The combination of Beta's tape path and larger drum reduced tape misalignment (which improved audio & video quality), provided greater video frequency response, and put less stress on the tape so recordings didn't degrade as fast. The downside of the long tape path and large drum was the extra space it took up. That was the reason why the Beta format was ill suited for video cameras. It had nothing to do with the spacing between video and audio heads.
A website I frequent tried to use PNG. It came up as a big broken image. I downloaded it and looked at the header, since my image software said it was bad.
It had the LF replaced with a CR-LF! I kid you not! Just the sort of thing the magic header is supposed to detect.
They must've FTP'd it in ASCII mode (!) and didn't check the result.
They switched back to GIF.
I probably should've told them about the munged
PNG and it might've been fixed rather than replaced.
PNG was innocent, but looks like it got the blame for user error.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Sonic Foundry has been supporting OGG for about a year in all their products, including the jukebox application SIREN.
I still haven't seen Ogg CODECs written in optimized m68k assembly... (so kill me :)
There are good m68k MP3 CODECs... go figure...
HAHAHAHAH!! Ogg Vorbis. Replacing mp3's.
I think you all should come out of your holes and look around.
The voice reproduction of OV is unbelievably good. I heard the OV of Richard Stallman's speech. I have also done some experimenting on my own. OV is the best voice reproduction I have ever heard.
I need to make voice recordings for international tech support. However, I am having trouble finding an application that records, has a pause button, and can be set to low data rates.
Bush's education improvements were
Personally I have a two sided approach to the format. Firstly I have a reasonable collection of MP3 files to complement my rather large CD collection, and the majority of those files are encoded at 192kpbs. I have no idea why people encode MP3's at any less than 160, and i've put it forward to MP3.com to accept files of higher than 128 (why 128! - this is supposed to be a site for musicians!).
Secondly, as I am a musician myself, and one who has accumulated a large number of samples and beats, I've recently employed compression onto my primarily WAV sample collection. What I chose was the OGG format as it allows me to encode at 350kps, reducing most of my files to a quarter of their original size, and still retain a high level of quality (for perfect quality mixes, the original files can always be resourced). The primary reason why I switched to OGG though is that its always free!, every music application I use exports and imports OGG files, and I don't have to register a damn third party encoder / decoder to use it.
I think either format is acceptable for listening (if they've been encoded correctly), and I think acceptability will come down to how well their implemented - for example the P2P search engines such as Audiogalaxy. This is the best example of post-napster music-engine, and its a pity its MP3-centric.
Chris Fraew Andrews
Anyone know of a mod to let it play spc's? :)
You're ubiquitous hardware devices are the result of about 3 different single chips, which accept MP3 and output digital data. When somebody with the skills gets ahold of a formal spec, then we'll see where Vorbis goes.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I have to admit that I didn't believe all the stuff about sound quality. I couldn't tell the difference between the original CD and 128KBps (Mp3) or 96KBps (WMA) and so I had started to rip everything to WMA. This was with expensive speakers and an old Rotel Amp. Then I got a new amplifier and listened to the difference between a CD (Eurythmics) and my WMA copy - ALL the very low frequency bass was either gone or muted. I then spent a day trying all the different codecs available and found that only OGG and mp+ (NOT mp3PRO) kept those very low frequencies. So now I'm stuck with a hard disk full of poor sounding music till I can get it all in OGG format. The quality difference may not be audible to you now but may well be at some point in the future and you've got nothing to lose by encoding in OGG unless you use an portable MP3 player.
Just watch how fast the chip is produced in real silicon if the implementation is released under a non-restrictive-enough license.
(I like and use Vorbis enough that, if I weren't so busy, I'd take on this project myself).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
hey, ingram, are you still doing L365? i haven't thought about that place for a year -- has the sense of community changed any? is it gross and commercial-ridden yet? did they ever come up with "Current Tracks" html/java that works consistently?
good to see you again....
Any good encoder will actually optimize as best as it knows how to fit within the limits of the "Golden Ear" and your bandwidth rules. The least important audio data will be the first to go. The amount of "padding" left is determined by the bitrate.
An interesting side-affect is "phase-shifting", where some frequencies will move through time. As long as the amount of motion is smooth, the human ear will not generally perceive it (which is why filters for audio use have such atrocious phase-responses). Mind you, this can mess up if it's not a smooth delay. Digital filters don't usually manage to skew the phase, but some audio compressors do.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
mmm yes?
Haha, fashion is just as important as political freedom? I wish the authors of the Declaration of Independance and the US Bill of Rights had known that! What would they have included (or excluded)?! Examples:
As you can see, these would have nicely complimented such rights as... you have the right to bare arms, you have the right to speak freely, you have the right to vote even if you're a chick or black, etc.
To be on topic for just a moment: no one in their right mind gives two shits about the name of the encoder used on some music! The things people care about are: "Is it free?" and "is it easy?" ...and that's it. "People" being the general public, not slashdot.
As many people have commented, the thing holding Vorbis back are not its technical merits - to most tin ears it sounds fine - but the fact that it's the new guy and MP3 usually sounds "good enough" anyway. OGG will have to make sure that Vorbis is very free (beer/speech) and leave it at that. 3rd party people will make snazzy decoders and hardware vendors, like anyone, will look hard at the bottom line - trying to figure out if pushing a new format on consumers will eventually translate in a lower overall cost.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
...if quality mattered, GENEROUS CAPITALISERS would have their posting privileges REVOKED.
Interactive Objects has an embedded OS for playing many digital audio files... .ogg's due to the fact of using this reference hardware.
one that can be included OR upgraded to is Ogg... As mentioned earlier, the HipZip can play
The answer to who uses Vorbis is: anyone who wants to.
The only problem with Vorbis right now is that there aren't hardware that support it yet. So if you want portable players, car players, etc. then Vorbis isn't the right choice right now. But for home players, Vorbis has already won, and it's not a future thing: it's here right now, and has been quite usable for about a year.
The hardware player issue will eventually be addressed too, so in the end, there will be no barriers to keep anyone from using Vorbis. Then performance considerations will come into play, and the group of people who want to use it, will grow.
Some people will continue to use MP3 because they've already made a hardware investment, or have already ripped a few hundred CDs and don't want to do it over again (heck, probably half my music encoded with Vorbis 0.3 even though 0.4 is noticably better, but redoing them is something I've put off until after I die). And then some people will keep using MP3 because they don't rip CDs; they just hork music from the 'Net. Well, yeah, these people will keep MP3 from dying for a long time (probably the patents will expire first ;-) but even so, these
people's habits are only going to effect other people through network
effects. But there's plenty of music listeners whose music files are
not subject to network effects.
The GIF/PNG parallel is a good predictor. You still don't see PNGs very often even on the Internet (even Slashdot doesn't use them) but many people have been using PNGs internally for 5 or 6 years now, and any other type of interchange where a web browser isn't involved. Eventually time itself will erase the last of the barriers, and then even web d3$1ng3r$ will just say, "eh, why not use PNG?" and that'll be that. (I guess what I'm saying is that PNG hasn't really lost, and is still growing, and Vorbis will go the same way.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Perhaps you have cable. I don't. (Huh, never saw the point. I have DSL instead. :)
And even cable suffers from transmission defects. Unless, of course, there's a cable running from the broadcaster right to the cable co. Which there never is.
FWIW, I own laserdiscs (both analog and digital) and DVDs. I think I like the digital laserdiscs the best, at least the ones that are well-mastered. You can see some of the compression defects in the DVD. It's hard though. And certainly the convenience of the DVD makes up for it.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
we're probably actually agreeing.
it's kind-of both. you see, the reason why RCA was able to lobby for the 6-hour format is because JVC (the inventors of VHS) wanted to use them to market the VCRs in the U.S. RCA made the 6-hour tape the breaking point. No 6-hour tape, no contract. JVC's engineers headed on back, said to each other "Those crazy Americans, nobody'll ever use it" and produced the SLP format. (Also known as EP. Gah.)
in other words, it was because VHS was a more open format that this happened in the first place. Sony's tight grip over Beta meant that nobody else could help them out. I'm sure JVC got other helpful suggestions from its partners along the way; this is just the one I know about.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
IMO, comparing png to gif and saying png is larger is like complaining that DVD uses more data that VHS. Sure, DVD uses WAY more data space than VHS BUT it uses this space for better quality and options, you COULD disable many of these features to create a smaller file size. PNG can make an identicle picture to a gif at a smaller file size, and in fact can make a better image and the same or smaller size. most people tend to go with options over file size because png just look so much better and are more versitile.
The only way Ogg can beat MP3 is to support arbitrary multichannel setup. Stream should include information about speaker placement for each channel and audio player should be able to interpolate this information for actual speaker setup. This allows Ogg Vorbis to be used with movies and other stuff that can use multichannel information. Perhaps it's not supported by legal movies first, but were the first MP3s legal (are they now?).
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
When PNG was initially developed, they forgot to include animation. I never got a real story as to why, but I heard it had been discussed, but was tabled. That was its biggest mistake, because it left GIF with an important advantange. Lots of graphics simply could not be converted from GIF because they were animations. When I looked at the PNG design, it was clear to me that including a primitive form of multi-frame motion and cycling would have been very easy (and primitive was all that GIF had, anyway). I'm guessing some graphical purists wanted something better more like MPEG. They could have had both (simple animation at release, sophistication motion eventually). Instead, at release time, PNG emerged with a defect that prevented it from getting the maximum momentum it could have had. The developers, unfortunately, apparently lacked a "marketing think".
The fact that the next generation of browsers to then come out lacked PNG support was killer number two. Some of that may have been due to the above problem. Certainly a lot of it was just the numbmindedness of the browser developers (I expected such from Microsoft, but not from Netscape, but Netscape ended up having more of it than Microsoft).
PNG is better. That didn't make it preferred. Today browsers have it and a few web sites use it. End users see no difference. Ask the average Joe what a GIF is. Then ask what a PNG (either spell it or say "ping") is.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is a lot of prior art as in MP3 files, but not as in MP3 players and encoders.
Have you noticed the incredible lack of free (both as in Freedom and as in Price) MP3 encoders out there? Do you ever wonder why?
Just take a look at the Ogg Vorbis FAQ. A few years ago, the owners of the MP3 patent came down upon all the "unsanctionned" mp3 encoders out there. This desimated quite a few of the projects since the developers could not pay the licensing fees. Those that have survived have done so only because of legal loopholes, geographic local (sometimes tentitave), or chance.
So the patent holders have done more than "veiled threats"... they've destroyed quite a few projects.
This extends not just to MP3 encoders, but to MP3 decoding libraries. For example, I am an Open-Source/Free-Software "edutainment" developer. In an upcoming title I am working on, I need higher quality audio with smaller file sizes (i.e., something like MP3 or Ogg Vorbis). However, this project would be in jeopardy if I did decide to use MP3 over Ogg Vorbis simply because the patent holders of the MP3 format could step in at any time and kill the MP3 libraries I use, kill the MP3 files I use, or even kill my project for using MP3s altogether.
Yes - Fifth Post
And you'll probably want to use "short" 8.3 filenames. HTH.
----------
Invalid form key mH1Kx19b1o !
(54ur3 d035 b1o)
Invalid form key cWfFkNYXrf !
Lets see how many of these I can collect...
Although it doesn't have quite the compression of mp3 and vorbis, if quality and preservation are what you are concerned about then check out FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) at flac.sourceforge.net.
...and none seems to be coming. Given Ogg's stand against DRM, manufacturers may be fearful that if they support this format, they may open themselves up to lawsuits for contributory copyright infringement. MP3 is grandfathered, predating DRM, but to introduce a new, information-wants-to-be-free format now would be waving a red flag at the RIAA.
just some humble thoughts:
.ogg's opportunity. If most people here are geeks who agree with freedom && openness, we should support .ogg even if it's chances of widespread acceptance are nil (which they're obviously not even bad at all). It's the principle. Let us support free formats as much as possible. It is good for free && open software users worldwide. Please don't bag on it just because .mp3 was first. If .ogg is better (for freedom or quality or size or all of the above) then embrace it as much as you are capable. Compare if you care about quality or size or both. Talk about the freedom. Most of us geeks are totally respected by our families && non-puter-nerd friends for our technical opinions. If we believe in ideals, in human (aka consumer) freedom, && purchasing decisions && encoding decisions etc. make a difference, people around us will take note. Don't leave "good enough" alone! Please.
.mp3 ... maybe it sounds too geeky or whatever. Maybe it can be renamed to something goofy like .goo which is similar, easily pronouncable, && actually conjures an image. A cute little booger mascot or something =). Anyways, that's not a big deal. The numerous merits are far more crucial (AFAICT).
.mp3 format's usage with more prohibitive licensing restrictions at any time. Vorbis is not susceptible like this. Once tons of coders have the source to a stable Vorbis encoder on their puters, the project cannot be stopped. It's a beautiful example of the free software future blooming. Please don't transcode (or whatever it's called) directly from .mp3 over to .ogg but re-rip straight && clean. Always rip the highest quality you have space for unless you're cramming for a portable (which won't be an issue for .ogg until some firmware upgrades come out [soon]). Vorbis can overtake .mp3 but geeks need to appreciate it's value && basically bring it down off the mountain to our families && friends && in articles && on forums. It is better. Help it to win so that we can have a growable free music format forever. If you love or even just kinda like free or open software, please don't say ".mp3s have too much clout" or "the difference is negligible". These aren't true. It matters.
It seems that way too many posters are being pessimistic about
Maybe the name doesn't "flow" or "roll" quite like
Regarding the killer app, it's very simple: First the library needs to be finalized && stabilize. Then gnutella/freenet/gnapster/aimster etc. just need to be as easy as napster was for Joe to use. If ripping to Vorbis can be easily incorporated into the client, it will take off. It's better in crucial ways. You all already know. The best is that once it's decent, it cannot even be slowed. Fraunhoffer could stifle the stagnating
-Pip
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
One reason why OGG is going to have difficulties to become a widely accepted standard is its lack of documentation. I do have some engineering knowledge in the field of signal processing, communications and information theory. Recently I tried to gather some information about how OGG actually works (I have studied several aspects of MP3 before: psychoacoustics, algorithms, coding).
I tried to find similar documentation on OGG. Nothing. All the official webpages provide is some unfinished, poor documentation. It seems that the OGG project was driven by a few enthusiasts wit a LOT of technical background. I also scanned the archived mailinglists related to OGG development for insightful technical details. But after a few hours not finding any useful material, I gave up.
The lack of technical documentation is going to kill OGG (that is: never let it becode a commercial success). What vendor of hardware devices, integrated circuits or microcontrollers is ever going to release an OGG compatible player when there is no technical specs? All there is, is source code. Open source code. So far, so good. But this is not enough. Even a skilled programmer and specialist in this technical expertise will require weeks to get a complete understanding of the OGG encoder and decoder. Even though I am technically interested, I am not willing to take this approach.
Any ITU or ISO industry standard is properly documented (audio: MP3, MPEG-1,2,3, H.263, etc).
Usually engineers first read the specs and then study the sample source code. So, please OGG creators, supply the documentation. It is YOU alone who know how this works. The rest of us (engineers) just needs some education.
--- Eat my sig.
mmmpgh
Now this is just a hypothetical, you understand, because I would never suggest that anyone do anything that might possibly upset Hilary Rosen, but if someone wanted to promote use of the .ogg format and started offering interesting files on Gnutella or one of the other peer-to-peer file sharing networks in Ogg Vorbis format, that would certainly encourage more people to find out just what this .ogg thing is, wouldn't it?
Just a thought. Most people would have no idea what MP3's are if it weren't for the Napster effect.
Obvious conclusion really, MP3 simply isn't good enough. I'm sure many /. readers will remember the old DOS compressors LHARC and RAR. Both are better than ZIP yet so marginally as to make no difference.
ZIP caught up eventually and will probably remain the standard for decades because it IS good enough for the forecastable future.
However, MP3 has already been significantly improved upon by WMA at low bitrates and LQT at high bitrates.
I suspect there's room for at least two standards, maybe more. Audiophiles at least will demand better.
MP3 rippers have improved markedly over the past few years; while I'm sure that improvement will continue, I bet Ogg encoders will keep improving as well.
:) So I can encode oggs of, say, the soundtrack to The Harder They Come (http://www.cddb.com/xm/cd/reggae/b5df09f28d3b8753 f1da3e21c1a4607f.html) while I listen to it on CD, and next time around, it's done.
... I've not been ripping any more since most of my CDs are elsewhere at the moment.
:)
Real-time / near-real-time encoding strikes me as being not-so-bad (though faster ripping would of course be nice) for the simple reason that that's the speed we listen at
That is, of course, assuming one can listen and rip at the same time, which I could be off-base on
Even if not, it's something I can set up to rip overnight, so I'm not *that* worried about slower encoding, trusting partly in the increasing speed of computers
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5