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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?
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.
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...).
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.
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".
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
internet explorer views png. I think that takes care of a HUGE chunk of the population, no?
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?
...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
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.
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Ogg came in last, no?
This is straying off topic a bit, but I think it is worth mentioning:
First off, if you've ever worked with profesional video recording equipment, you will know that Beta has much better sound and picture quality than VHS. Of course, half inch tape is better than beta and that is where you will find your broadcast programs stored.
Second, I've always heard that it was Sony's licensing problems that killed Beta. Anyone could license the VHS format and produce tapes, players and recorders. Sony kept a tight grip on the Beta format until it was too late.
Sony seems to suffer from this pretty often. Just look at the memory stick and the Sony PDA. Both good products that are incompatable with everything else. Maybe someday they will learn...
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
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
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.)
For a while, MP3s weren't anywhere except on a few PCs.
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!