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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?
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));
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.
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.
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
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 :-)
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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".
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
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
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.
>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.. ???
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?"
I AM, therefore I THINK!
>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
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?
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
>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
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 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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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. :-)
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."
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.
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.
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
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
To my (tin) ears, Bladeenc does a very good job at 160kbps.
I tinkered around with Vorbis, but "ogg123" (clone
of mpg123) locked my FreeBSD system up solid when
I tried to play a tune--so I scrapped it. Maybe
it's in better shape now.
I'll happily use Ogg. I just hope the folks at
Rio give us Firmware upgrades for the RioVolt
(that I just bought and love) to support MP3Pro
and Ogg Vorbis. I can dream, right?
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
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
BladeEnc is just a mildly tweaked version of the ISO sample code. If you want to stay with MP3, get a recent version of Lame and you'll be amazed how much better the music will sound at the same bitrate.
I tinkered around with Vorbis, but "ogg123" (clone of mpg123) locked my FreeBSD system up solid when I tried to play a tune--so I scrapped it.
Looking through the Vorbis development archives, I see some reports of (fixed) problems with OpenBSD, but nothing about FreeBSD. Download it again and try it - and if there are still problems, email them a bug report.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
...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
In fact, the word from Nullsoft is that they have an Ogg Vorbis plugin that will be included in Winamp 2.77.
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.
[
Ogg came in last, no?
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.
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
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
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
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
=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)
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
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).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.
I might agree with you if you were talking about software, but you're not, you're talking about hardware players.
Hardware developers usually benefit more using open source because there are no royalties to be paid to software owners. This is why Linux is making great inroads in the embedded device market. An Ogg Vorbis player wouldn't have to pay royalties to Fraunhofer/Thomson, but every MP3 player does.
The only thing missing in this equation is popular support of Ogg Vorbis, but from the comments posted on this story, it looks like its becoming more and more popular.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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); }
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
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
Can someone please explain what DRM is?
Digital Rights Management. Watermarking, copy protection, etc.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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!
uh uh. not in the beginning.
I got my first VCR in 1980. it was a Panasonic VHS top-loader. monster. it finally died about ten years later.
anyway, the point is this: when I got a VCR, I couldn't rent tapes. any tapes. there were no video rental outlets in my city.
about six months later, the first video rental store in the city opened. (it's still open, actually. it makes me angsty for lost days when I go there. it's so clean and not like how it used to be now. :) it had maybe 50-100 tapes for rent.
you could buy tapes there too. I think the cheap ones were $80 canadian.
that changed around 1984 when Paramount cut the rates to $20. eventually, everybody followed suit.
I remember back in the early '80s when the Cool Thing was if a store had a copy of Star Wars. you couldn't rent it legally. it wasn't released on video until sometime in the '90s.
anyway, the point is that by the time I got a VCR Beta had already lost.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
The voice reproduction of OV is unbelievably good. I heard the OV of Richard Stallman's speech. I have also done some experimenting on my own. OV is the best voice reproduction I have ever heard.
I need to make voice recordings for international tech support. However, I am having trouble finding an application that records, has a pause button, and can be set to low data rates.
Bush's education improvements were
LAME is the best MP3 encoder available. It's free, open source, and multiplatform.
On Windows, the best ripper/encoder is CDex. On Linux, look for packages for Lame, CDParanoia and Grip for your distribution.
For discussion of the best MP3 encoders, take at look at R3Mix (and in particular at the forums).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
That was a pretty gay script
.wav files.
Here's a better one that doesn't produce intermediate
bash:/home/mp3$ for i in *.mp3 ; do mpg123 "$i" - | oggenc - -o `echo "$i" | sed -e s/mp3/ogg/`; rm "$i";done
I dunno what kind of crack rock you were smoking when you learned bash, but that's ok. We were all dumb bash users at one point.
...if quality mattered, GENEROUS CAPITALISERS would have their posting privileges REVOKED.
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
...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.