Slashdot Mirror
Ogg The Conqueror? RC2 Is Out
jonathan_ingram writes: "There has been a lot of discussion recently in Slashdot about sound compression formats. Much has been focused on
Ogg Vorbis, but the most recent version available has been a beta released in Feburary.
Today, RC2 of Vorbis
has been released. The most important of the
many changes
is
channel coupling,
which means that Vorbis can now encode bitsteams at a much lower
bitrate than before.
Try it out today!"
Here are two reasons why some users will want to switch to Ogg Vorbis:
For me, the second one was the killer. Try it yourself! Pick a challenging piece, and encode it with LAME and Ogg Vorbis at the same bitrate, listen to both files, and see which sounds better.
(everybody loves oversimplification)
Ogg Vorbis's popularity will be proportional to the enforcement of the MP3 patent(s?).
It doesn't have to be popular to serve a purpose. The mere threat of a completely free format waiting in the wings could just mean that MP3 is effectively free, aside from a few particularly litigation-sensitive companies paying patent royalties.
I'm sure more than one group has replied to UNISYS intimidation with, "We could be using PNG tomorrow."
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
Did he use a 44.1khz sample? Ogg currently only works with 44.1khz, if he fed it a "professional" file then it was probably 48khz and the playback would be 10% slower then the original.
"I submit that, even if it fails the "classical music test", that's ok, because those guys probably don't do a lot of MP3 and won't do much ogg either. But it does need to cope with techno, trance, rave, and singers. It needs to be able to do Brittney Spears (gag), even." and I submit that you, sir, are making a stereotype...I keep a large, QUALITY classical mp3 (and growing ogg, btw) collection. Just because I don't like the ummmm "music" that you listen to (yes you and billions of others, and I'll still always refer to the "music" as "music" because it IS only "music"). The "music" isn't known for it's complexity (whereas classical (and romantic and baroque etc...) were for the most part, BASED in complexity (complexity of texture, of tone, and lots of other terms many people don't know exist)), so the "classical music test" SHOULD be the de facto test for an encoding scheme. The rest of that "music" will fall in line. And don't even try to say that it's just because I'm old...unless you consider almost 20 as old? --Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Vorbis developer Nick D'Amato has a working Quicktime component that lets Quicktime Player, the Quicktime plugin, iTunes, and any other QT app play vorbis files. See this thread from vorbis-dev for details, and download the plugin to help test it out.
Congratulations to the OV team. While I haven't used it for a while, when I did it seemed quite nice.
Having said that what I currently use, which is MP3s, sound great and they work great, so why should I as Joe Consumer care about OV? What sort of license fees does the MP3 patent owner (Fraunhofer?) put on companies such as Winamp, or do they only charge MP3 ripper type products?
I guess my question is this: If I don't have a religious problem with patents, why should I care about alternatives if they're only as good as MP3?
Our "The Name Sucks!"/"The name Rulez!" mail ratio is about 50/50. Some of you have threatened to kill us if we change the name, some of you have threatened to kill us if we don't. So you're gonna hear what I think about it. I'm not going to waste the opportunity my minor fame gives me for a healthy round of peer-mockery.
<tongue-in-cheek>
<neeneer-neener>
I Like The Name. I Wrote the Software. The Name Stays. </neener-neener>
But there's more to this story than 'nyah nyah'. The 'rename Ogg!' forces have provided me with some of my favorite mail ever. I recall fondly the guy who went on, in great detail, why 'Ogg Vorbis' sucks, and that I must adopt 'a cutting edge, truly kick-ass name like "FreeMP3"!!!!!'
As for 'Ogg Vorbis', I hadn't really meant the 'Vorbis' part to get tacked on. The name of the format is Ogg. Just Ogg. Vorbis happens to be the first codec. Had 'Vorbis' been perhaps one more syllable (like, say 'Sorensen'), we wouldn't have this problem. People would just call it 'Ogg' like God (that's me) intended. Of course, particularly obsessive people *do* occasionally say 'QuickTime Sorensen', but they don't get invited to parties much, and when invited, they are shunned. 'Course they're usually just arguing with the punch bowl so shunning is easy.
I don't want my users to be shunned at parties, so I'm gonna help you out here. Just call it 'Ogg'. Ogg is a good, simple, very satisfying word.
It makes a good noun, a better verb and can even be used effectively in a curse. It is a real word and contains no numbers. It has only two unique characters, making it simpler than mp3. It is only one syllable, making it shorter to say than mp3. If you still can't handle it, try reboot-reinstall.
</tongue-in-cheek>
Monty
xiph.org
What is currently being done in the matter of multi-channel compressed audio? At this point, all of these formats seem to support stereo only. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to implement a Dolby Digital compression algorithm. There is currently limited support for the format outside of DVDs but the music that is out there is impressive. Perhaps the OV guys could put something together after they finalize this format?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Are you sure that you're using an up to date version of Oggenc? I know that my old version (beta1, IIRC) was painfully slow, but that a newer one (beta4) was about as fast as lame (about 2.5x on my PIII 500) and produces good sound quality at 128 kbit/s. This is confirmed by what they say on theirweb site. They made substantial progress with beta4 and strongly reccomend that you upgrade if you're using anything older than that.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The code quality is horrible, but that might not matter.
-Dan
MP3 has mind-share with the public
MP3 has a huge installed base of players and devices
Users have no reason to stop using MP3
Unless Ogg Vorbis can demonstrate massive storage space savings/technical advantages or MP3 is made completely unusable, users have no reason to switch, and users aren't going to switch without a reason. It's new, it's nifty, it's innovative, it's interesting to us, but like many other open-source initiatives, until it gives Average Computer User a real reason to change their habits, it's just an intresting niche.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
I said: One way to test it is to use deaf people - they hear music from the vibrations, so they could do quality checks on how it "sounds" in terms of vibration.
AC said: Another way would be to drive those big thumping punk speakers through my neighborhood and see if you get pulled over.
Well, that's the untrained or uninterested year. And the acoustics in a car are nothing like those in a warehouse - how does it react to natural woods, railroad ties, metal grate staircases, steel or iron girders. What kind of waveform interactions do you get with glass windows loosely fitted in wood frames.
If, in fact, ogg is undistinguishable from the original music source in these circumstances, or even in my house, then cool. But just because you don't like techno, like those before didn't like grunge, and those before didn't like rock, and those before didn't like swing, and those before didn't like jazz, and those before didn't like classical music (the music of youth in its day) - just because you personally don't like it, it is something that those of us who do like it are concerned with.
Remember, MP3 was made by trying to reproduce Susanne Vega singing - that was the standard. ogg should be able to cope with her (one of my faves) as well as techno (also one of my faves).
I submit that, even if it fails the "classical music test", that's ok, because those guys probably don't do a lot of MP3 and won't do much ogg either. But it does need to cope with techno, trance, rave, and singers. It needs to be able to do Brittney Spears (gag), even.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
In most cases, a 60kbps OGG file sounds as good as an 128k mp3. An 80k OGG is as good as 160k mp3 and half the size.
If you are serving audio streams, you can actually strip away parts of the files to make lower bitrate streams--without re-coding. (wow!) MP3 can't.
You can have more than 2 audio channels. MP3 can't.
The comment fields are well defined and you can have whatever attributes you want, with strings as long as necessary. ID3 for mp3s is a hack; string lengths are limited and you can't add easily add your own fields.
If you have a portable player, you would appreciate the smaller size with high quality.
In the future, you can select how you want stereo coupling done (not in this release). (Mp3 can.)
If you make computer games, you have a high quality free way of adding a lot of music to your games. (possibly patents for mp3)
You can do 44.1khz and 48 khz audio.
You can concatenate multiple streams together to make one file, and it will play correctly. You can also cut portions out and paste them together without re-encoding.
Ogg's are exactly the same length as the original WAVs--something MP3 lacks--so that when you make recordings of live shows, gaps don't appear in you r audio.
The encoder sounds good by default, so music traded on file sharing systems sounds good (unlike all those terrible 128k mp3s encoded by anything that isn't LAME).
Got friends?
The artifact was there, verified by a "no blind" and a "double blind" who made the same observation.
Nono, a "no blind" and a single blind. It's called a double blind only when the person administering the test doesn't know. Double blind means that each time you press a button to change formats, you don't know which one is being chosen. (And, if you yourself can tell from the resulting sound, then it means that you aren't allowed to hear it as you randomly change it). This ensures that you did not, consciously or unconsciously, pass on any knowledge of the outcome you were expecting on to the test subject (your wife). This is called double-blind.
This is, by the way, particularly important for medical tests where you're comparing a placebo (inert substance) with medicine. The doctor instructing the patient about what to report should NOT know whether he or she is administering placebo or medicine, so that, for example, as she is telling the patient about the fact that the patient might be receiving placebo, and what that means, the doctor does not unconsciously emphasize certain parts of her speech and not others. If the doctor can, upon looking at what she gives the patient, determine which one it is (even without being "told"), then it is not completely double-blind either.
Ideally, the doctor should not know the intended properties of the substance being tested either. This means that when the patient comes back to report on the effects of the "medication", the doctor should not be able to conclude from the first half of her testimony that she had placebo and not medicine, and therefore end up recording the second half of her testimony in less detail. If, in fact, it was the actual medicine that ended up sort-of "not working" on this particular person, it is imperative to know all the associated small details, so the data from many such unresponsive people (if there are a whole group of them) can be compared to see what they have in common.
All this can only be done quite accurately if you are controlling for everything except substance X. This means that the only one to know it is someone who never has any direct contact with either the one administering and the one reporting on her reaction to it. (In your case, it would be the computer randomly choosing one and recording its choice at the end of a file, while you have both no way of knowing which one it picked and no way of hearing the resulting sound [but, rather, only your wife's vote].)
Whew!
(IANAD)