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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?
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.. ???
>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
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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? ;-)
...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?
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
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
look here
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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!