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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?
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
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?
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
Yes, this is a problem if you use portable MP3 players (which I don't). However, the specs for the Vorbis 1.0 decoder weren't finalized until a few weeks ago (and the sample decoder still has some memory usage issues), so you can't really expect any companies to have implemented decoding yet.
AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg.
Well, you're wrong. Anything that can do MP3 encoding on the fly should be able to do it with Vorbis as well. As an example, have a look at CDex, the best Windows ripper/encoder. Most Linux encoders I've seen (for MP3 as well as Vorbis) seem to use the 2 step process, but this should be seamless to the outside user, and not much slower -- you're probably noticing a slow copy because the ripping (with Grip at least) uses CDParanoia, which is quite slow but very accurate.
And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg.
Please don't do this. Transcoding almost always leads to very low quality files -- and will lead people who listen to them to assume that all the artifacts are due to OGG, and not to the transcoding process. MP3 encoding creates certain artifacts. Vorbis creates others. By encoding to MP3, and then Vorbis, you are getting 2 sets of artifacts, plus the Vorbis coder has to waste bits encoding the MP3-created artifacts. MP3 players aren't going to go away, so please don't transcode: re-rip instead.
I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality
Note that all the encoders kicking around are of (at best) the beta 4 release, which, amongst other issues, has no channel coupling. You can expect at least a 10% reduction in file-size in the final release compared with beta 4, and more if you let it try lossy channel coupling (akin to joint stereo in the MP3 world). Beta 4 at 128 kbps already sounds better than 128 kbps MP3s - the final release will sound the same at 112 kpbs.
One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.
Damn right.
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