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Who'll Be Using Ogg Vorbis Instead Of MP3?

Posted by timothy on from the every-man-and-his-monkey dept.

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?

5 of 731 comments (clear)

  1. Help advocate Ogg Vorbis by Eloquence · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There is a dedicated Ogg Vorbis advocacy mailing list if you would like to help getting this patent-free format into mainstream usage. What can "normal" OGG users do? To quote myself, we can do lots of stuff:

    • spread the word about Ogg to our friends and family -- this is something that can obviously only be done on a very individual level.
    • spread OGG files! :-) How about copyright-free speeches and other archive material?
    • write tutorials and FAQs for newbies (check existing ones first).
    • ask creators of cd burning software, cd-rippers, encoders etc. to support/include OGG
    • ask creators of video codecs to include OGG for audio encoding
    • ask creators of video games to use OGG for their soundtracks
    • ask streaming media services to use OGG instead of MP3 or other formats
    • ask radio stations to release archival material in OGG
    • ask the media to include OGG on bundled CD-ROMs instead of MP3s
    • encourage artists to spread their work in OGG / help them spread their work if they use OGG
    • ask universities to release speeches and audiostreams in OGG
    • etc. etc. etc.

    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.

  2. Need hardware players and conversion tools by lessthan0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Why I Encoded 700+ CD's with Ogg Vorbis by Uggy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    from a 6 year mp3 warrior.

    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...

    ... a CODEC to grow old with.



    --
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  4. Rumours: BBC are experimenting with Ogg and DivX by Jens · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is just a rumour, so get your grain of salt here.

    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.

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  5. There's even a car called MP3 - Mazda MP3 by ch-chuck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    look here

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }