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What Sounds Better, MP3 or Ogg?
I've never been able to make a clear decision on the subject. These days I rip all my CDs to MP3 at 160kbs which means about 80 megs for a longer album. With a 100g drive on order ($220. I remember paying more then that for .1% of that space) disk space isn't really the defining issue, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna rip everything at 300kbs just because I can. I'm curious what people think sounds better, and what bit rates they find to be acceptable for both casual listening, and more picky listening. Don't forget to mention what sort of equipment your listening on so we know where you are
coming from.
Ogg sounds better, but I can't go to walmart and buy a portable Ogg player. Hopefully this will change with some reprogrammable units. Anything like this on the horizon?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
cassette-quality music has never let me down:)
They sound about the same, really. What encoder you use has a lot more to do with the end sound quality then the format.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I can't say that I've ever tried using Ogg, but for my listening pleasure, I can't justify encoding anything at less than 256 Kbps. I started at 128, and slowly moved up after I started to be able to hear artifacts in my music. They're especially evident in the extreme highs and lows.
:)
But then maybe I'm just one of those audiophile, elitest types
I think oggs sound great but i am still ripping mp3s at 192 bits or better because they also sound great and everything i have is geared towards running them, (WinAmp, SoundBlaster Live, Creative Nomad Jukebox, nothing flashy) I think that ogg has what it takes to supplant mp3s in the future (better sounding compression and smaller filesize) and all that it lacks is maturity.
This is really, really starting to get on my nerves..... I cannot see the point of ripping music FROM A CD at higher than CD QUALITY (128 kbps). Unless I'm missing something, isn't it totally pointless to do so?
This sounds similar to a previous /. story. Although the tests were apparently run with a variety of people in the musical arena, the tests weren't run blindly (apaprently the panel knew if they were listening to an mp3 or an oog file.)
But, it's still worth a read, imho.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I've never really noticed a lesser quality between the original cd and the mp3. Except maybe when on full volume on giant speakers(but who does that anyway!!!). I could not test ogg because of endianness issues
Sig you!
I like mp3 a lot more than ogg. I have an album or 2 ripped with ogg as well as some randoms songs from compilations. I did them around 200kbps VBR and my mp3s are 192 kpbs CBR. I'm listening on cambridge soundworks 4.1 surround speakers on an MX300.
I found the ogg files really tinny and light, so I'd stick with mp3.
Question for the masses:
Doesn't the quality of the speakers, the noise on the wires, the interference from the monitor and the size of the bass cabinet etc etc etc have a more pertinent effect on sound quality when you get above a certain sample rate.
128 is better than 64, sure, but above that isn;t the difference between monitor mounted speakers and a dolby 5.1 creative surround sound system, say, the most important one?
I dont know - I'm asking you...
I usually rip all my CDs using the MP3 format at 192 KBps. This is usually a really good sounding format. I tend to listen to most of my MP3s on my computer using nice-sounding JBL Multimedia 2000 speakers.
For music portability, I use a Sony MZ-R90 Mini Disc player which I hook up through a analog cord to my computer's sound out (headphone) port and the sound quality tends to be fairly good even though it's not digital.
I haven't tried Ogg, so I have no clue if that sounds any better.
First, the off topic part....
When I first heard about all this Metallica Vs. Napster crap...I immediately ripped my Metallica albums (that I am ashamed to have bought) to MP3, put them all on one CD, and then sold the originals back to a local record store. Hah.
But anyway, What I have noticed is that if you don't have an amazing sound card and speakers, you're not going to be able to tell the difference between 160Kb and 1024kb. I have most of my older albums ripped in either 128kb and 190kb and I can't tell the difference unless I turn it up really loud and listen very carefully. And I do have a decent sound card and speaker system.
---------------------------
even though i also use 192kbps on my mixed song, i found that 128kbps on mp3 is pretty good enough for everyday listening.
check out http://ff123.net/cbr128.html
Frankly,if you ask me,the thing that sounds best is ME! How i love the sound of my own voice.......
Wanted : A Signature.
IMHO, more often than not, ogg sounds better at 128k than mp3 does at 160k. ogg still has some issues with some songs however. Monty and the gang are working on that though.
Nonetheless, I'd opt for ogg any day of the week for quality reasons (not because of the open source angle).
Seeing that oggenc is currently at RC2, quality should improve even more before the final release. It's supposed to be on par with 160k mp3s at 80k.
Lame Mp3
VBR 160min 320max Joint Stereo
You don't really think Slashdot users would objectively say "yes, MP3 sounds better" when there's an inch of political ground to be gained by throttling an alternative that toes the OSS party line? It's a real shame what has become of this place.
--- Linux R00lz!
Personally I think using r3mix on LAME mp3 encorder makes the mp3 sound exactly like you are listening to the cd. And if you rip the cd with EAC, you have a perfect copy. I never really liked VBR before but it is actually starting to prove itself to be worthy. Check out http://www.r3mix.net for more info.
all my files are ripped to ogg 192 kbits. the sound is excellent, and it takes about 60-65 MB per album, depending on number of songs and song length, etc. i listen on some fairly nice stereo headphones at work, and a medium-range stereo at home with a nice 'whoofer', and the sound is great.
-sam
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
i had thought it was the patented mp3 format that was the core issue, not exactly the quality of the playback? i've ripped using ogg and mp3, and really can't tell a difference in quality using my 15$ speakers or headphones along with the onboard sound chip. i default to now encoding everything into ogg format just because, from what i understand, the encoding is not patented like the mp3 format. i would speculate that we'll see ogg players on the market in the near future. when that happens, then maybe i'll buy one. till then, i'm stuck using my pc to play the encoded music.
I often encode with oggenc at 64 kb/s (avg under 60 kb/s). It sounds very close to cd quality to me, and a compression of 1:25 or 1:30. For better quality, I choose 128 kb/s (avg 110 kb/s, compression around 1:13) and I honestly can't tell the difference between that and the original CD. This is on a medium-end music system (Bose "bookshelf" speakers, Kenwood amplifier). MP3s sound strangely hollow and tinny even at 192 kb/s; admittedly I haven't tried encoding any myself in a couple of years, but whatever I've downloaded is pretty much unlistenable on my music system, unless you like your music to sound like it's synthesised by a computer.
I actually just did a pretty vigorous test of this the other day. I tested 128, 160, 192, and 256 bitrate mp3s and oggs against the source wav file. At 128 they both sounded similar, but the ogg file did seem a little brighter and clearer than the mp3, and the wav file of course blew them both away. At 160 ogg vorbis really shines... the mp3 remains kind of dull, muddy, and the high end is very "sizzly" compared to the ogg file which sounds brilliant and clear. I barely noticed a difference between the wav file and the ogg at this bitrate. Going up to 192 I found the difference between the ogg and the wav indistinguishable while the mp3 STILL retained some of that annoying high-end sizzle and midrange mud. If you've got the space... 192 oggs amazing... I'm doing mine at 160 because while disc space is cheap, the difference between 160 and 192 is negligible. As for 256... don't bother doing oggs at this level... it's just a waste of disk space. As far as mp3s go... IMO you'd have to encode them at 256 to get the same fidelity as a 160 bitrate ogg vorbis file.(your milage may very... i have been an audio engineer for a while and have picky picky ears.)
Now, if only I could flash my Rio into decoding these files i'd be in digital audio heaven! Also... I'm cannot wait for the 1.0 Ogg encoder to come out... encoding times should be much faster and fidelity even better. Amazing work!
Hope this helps.
-auttie
--->auttie
It doesn't matter to me. As long as i can hear it.
I love music, not stereo equipment, if i can hear the music i can enjoy it...
Do me a favour, everyone:
1) Rip your CD to 128kb mp3s.
2) Re-burn it to CD. (use a rewrite if you're a cheapskate)
3) Listen to the two side-by-side.
Big Fscking Difference!
192 is the best bang for your searching efforts, because any higher takes up too much bloody space. But that encode I can burn to a custom CD and it'll sound fine.
Now, back to Ogg... Ogg sounds about the same at 160kb as an mp3 at 190, (debate and argue all you want...) which is why I like its compression system. Still, I wouldn't touch a 128kb ogg either
I listen to a lot of black metal, and I find that 128kbps is ideal for that style of music. Anything more is harsh on the ears and sounds like crap. In fact, I took my Dimmu Borgir CD (Puritanical...) and ripped it to 128kbps mp3s because the CD sounded too clean. Atmosphere rulez!
The World is Yours.
Bring back the 8-track!
Also, I've found that particularly at lower bit rates, the LAME encoder produces noticably better MP3s than the Fraunhofer encoder.
just because of the availability of resources since ogg is new and what not not manny people use it I am sure it will grow more as it time carries on btw I use a sblive 5.1 mp3+, and klipsch promedia 4.1 and btw mp3 and ogg sound very similar on this system I find very little difference in the sound quality, so to each their own
The first time I heard ogg I could hear it clipping from time to time and I thought it sucked, but later on I downloaded a bunch of different encoders and did some tests to see how stuff came out and compare file sizes and honestly, the tests I did they sounded the same and the file sizes weren't significantly different.
What is the best Ogg encoder?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Unless you are an audio nut, you'll have trouble telling the difference at any high bitrates. The real reason to use Ogg is that it's not encumbered by patents :-)
Gerv
I would agree with the general sentiment that -- despite any quality difference -- MP3 is certainly going to be easier to use because portable players and software have been built to use it.
Remember that ultimately, the "best" any format is going to get will simply be as good as the original CD. So as long as the audio quality you're getting is indistinguishable from the original, it won't matter what format you're using.
That said, I think 160 is something you'll regret if you're doing a large number of songs. I originally used 160 on my 800 CDs, and it sounded fine -- until I hooked the digital out on my soundcard to my dolby digital 5.1 system. On good speakers with a clean connection you can definitely hear the compression artifacts. I went up to Xing VBR 192-320 and have been very pleased with the results. As you said, disk space is no longer an issue, so I'm comfortable using what i think were probably overkill settings.
These source files are good enough, BTW, to re-encode into WMA at 64k for use on my portable (a NEX II -- highly recommended). With a 256MB compactflash card, I have about 150 songs with me for running (this can use a microdrive too, but it skips when running). The WMA 64 quality is perfectly acceptable for cheap headphones, but it would be total crap on good speakers. This (and streaming) are the only places where files size really matters anymore...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I just added the mp3 pro plugins to winamp and my nero can encode wav to mp3pro.
anyway, I rip 80k mp3 pro and it sounds better than 160k mp3
I rip mp3 at 256k. Long ago when I started ripping with lame I compared 128, 192, and 256. The difference from 192 to 256 was noticable on my material. In particular, the stereo imaging was off much worse at 192 than 256. There is still a noticable difference from 256 to CD, but I can live with it.
I listen with a set of Boston Acoustics speakers with an external subwoofer. It has a tiny sweetspot, about head sized, but for a single listener they are quite good, especially the stereo imaging. (I also have a set of their less expensive model that I got at compusa, these are not so good. You want the ones with the bigger speakers.)
Although I listen mostly at my linux machines, I also use a Mac for portable work. As soon as there is an ogg plugin for itunes I will switch to ogg and re-encode all my CDs. I'll redo the bitrate selection exercise at that time.
I had heard, and now I've confirmed, that the benchmark song for the MP3 standard was Tom's Diner. (according to this ).
In the article I heard, Branderburg decided he found a good match when he couldn't tell the difference between the encoding and the original song. Doesn't that imply that MP3 works best for that type, or sound, of music?
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
44100 (samples per second)
* 16 (bits per sample)
* 2 (stereo channels)
= 1411200 bits per second
= 1378.125kpbs
More than ten times your 128kbps.
ATRAC encoding, used on MiniDiscs, takes a fifth of that, about 275kbps, and sounds fine to me (a serious listener with good kit, though not exactly an audiophile). MP3 at 128kbps sounds poor. FWIW.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I don't know much about ogg, as I use mp3 for most of my music encoding. I've played around with various bit rates and finaly settled on what I felt was the best for me in terms of quality vs size.
I now encode all of my music at a variable bit rate 64-256kbps with lame. Lame 3.70 does a really good job of this and produces files (at least for the types of music I listen to) that sound very good. For the most part, they encode smaller than a 192kbps, as the average bit rate used is less. As a check, peeking at John Coletrane's Giant Steps, the average bit rate is right around 150. The bulk of my music averages between 160 and 192kbps.
The cool thing about vbr is that if the file needs more than that, is can use up to 256kbps to help make the harder to encode spots sound better. So I guess the worst case size you could get would be a song completely encoded at 256kbps (but I can't say that has ever happened).
I have a hard time telling these vbr 64-256kbps files apart from the orignal cd. Sometimes I can tell, but it is rare and difficult. However, IANAA (I am not an audiophile), so doing your own tests should help.
All of your standard tools should support vbr files. Xmms does a fine job. I did need to upgrade mpg123 to pre0.59s, however.
Anyway, consider vbr before you go straight to 300kbps.
This sig is false.
now that the pro plugin is available for winamp, and nero converts directly to mp3-pro, what is the point of debating on an old format?
IMHO 80k mp3 pro sounds better than 160k mp3
I just read this article about Croteam using it for their next game:
"We did a major change in the sound engine between FE and SE. And its name is Ogg Vorbis. Yeah, that's right, we're using ogg for music playing. In case someone hasn't heard of it yet, Ogg Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com) is a patent-free, open source audio codec project. Or in english: a music compressor that plainly rocks. Make sure you check it out. We've tried encoding all the music for SE with Oggdrop at 64kbps and the quality was perfect even at such low bitrate. In the final version, since we won't need the extra space, we'll be shipping with 128kbps music tracks, for even higher fidelity. The guys there are really helpful and supportive and the whole project is surprisingly functional already. There are plugins for all major music players and other music programs."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
But if you do care about the actual sound, rip some tracks you like from different types of albums. Then, cut out one part of the .WAV file and encode it using different MP3 encoders and different bitrates. (Or, if you want to save time, use only LAME for MP3, because there's a near-consensus that it gets the best sound. Don't forget to try VBR.) Then encode it in OGG format, also at various bitrates.
Now, the important step:
Decode the OGGs/MP3s back to a .WAV file, and make sure you name your files so you know which is which. Now, ask your roommate to burn all these .WAV files on a CD in an order that will not be revealed to you. Also burn the WAV that never went through compression/decompression (see if you can identify it by sound). Now, get your best pair of headphones, go to your stereo with a pad of paper, play the tracks over and over, and take notes on which track sounds the best.
Only after you've decided which tracks sound the best can you ask your roommate which tracks were encoded with which method.
This is not hard to do, and absolutely necessary if you want anyone to take your opinion about encoder quality seriously.
spork
in:
... )
(... I remember paying more then that
mail: rusty@kuro5hin.org
icq: 69598559
aim: rusty
I'm only 23 now, so i'm too young to remember back when a 3K disk was big.
but hell, even I remember when a 500 MB hard drive was a huge drive, and cost around $5000.
weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
I agree. The part I like most about Ogg is that if you have a decent stereo setup (speakers separated appropriately, or headphones), the difference in stereo separation is very noticeable. Ogg encodes the left & right channels separately, where mp3 has a hacked one stream + stereo hints setup.
At least in my own experience, I think Ogg-Vorbis files sound much better than MP3 if you're using the same bit-rate (nominal bit-rate for Vorbis of course). Take note, DON'T TEST IT BY RE-ENCODING YOUR MP3 TO OGG. It will sound worse of course because more losses will be introduced. Using the original (as in ripping music from your audio CD) would do the trick. Tested this using some classical music, acoustic rock, metal, and some techno. the sound of the instruments are reproduced better with Ogg-Vorbis files. Like the sound of cymbals, acoustic guitar, very low frequency instruments don't get reproduced correctly on MP3s compared to Vorbis.
BTW, I used Bladenc and lib-vorbis Beta-4 , both for Linux of course. Even if I use other Windows based encoders, still the same results.
Take-off every
Well, I'd have to say that with my 16 bit sound card and my 1 speaker hooked up to it (that's right one, we've all done it, I don't have the cash flow at the moment to go and buy a Soundblaster 5.1 and 4 speakers and an amp from boston, if I did then I wouldn't put down that I had 1 speaker hooked up to the really old isa sound card that is 16 bit, now would I?) and I can listen to both pretty fine. I think the problem will be three fold. The compression rate, the hardware issue, and the software issue.
:)
1)The compression rate- By this, I do not just mean 64 kbs or 192 kbs, but also what you decoded it with. If you were to do it with software a versus software b, that software may compress it differently, causing tiny bits of saturation in the bass or the higher octanes. Of course, people of the art of music have been using isdn for the longest to do compilations together across great distances. I assume they would know the best way to encode.
2)The Hardware Issue- Do you have surround sound? That would be a major question. I mean, if you are worried about different kinds of files playing the same music, you probably would need surround sound to tell the difference. It's the honest truth. Someone said in an earlier comment that distortion from monitors, your server (they're not workstations, they're servers. Look at the stats, p3 1.7 ghz with 2 gis of ram... what else could it be?) the phone lines, electric cabling, anything. And everything. If you were really into this, you would make a sound room like in music halls. No distortion, sound proof walls, etc. They're pretty cool to have too.
3) The software- I mean this as an os and as the software you listen to as well. If you use real player, winamp, freeamp, would that sound better than other said software? What about the os? What services are bogging it down so that you cannot use those resources to power your music.
In conclusion, do what a friend of mine did. Make yourself a "napster box". Hook it up, you only need a 2 gig hard drive. Put on a 4 speed cd-rw, and you don't need anything above a k6-2 for processor. More ram the better though. (Of course). But put on every kind of sound hardware you can. Also only put on a 10 inch monochrome monitor, if any kind of monitor at all. Put it in a closet, and just administer it through the network, voila, sound system. Later
Listening to ripped music on home stereo equipement try the shorten format. It is a
lossless compression scheme, you can't avoid a
loss in quality when ripping to MP3 (can't speak OGG). It comes with the price of larger files,
since reduction is somewhere between 1/3 1/2.
There is a shorten plug in for win amp.
for more information check out http://www.etree.org
I've been using MP3 for my initial ripping. It is more of a lingua franca for players, sharing, etc.
For my portable, I use Windows Media Player. I can get better sound at lower bitrates, which is important with limited amounts of space.
The cake is a pie
There are over a dozen lossless audio compression packages available. They all sound the same. I'll just note that FLAC is open source (GPL & LGPL), patent free, and has WinAmp and XMMS plugins available.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
I find the quality of music that is mostly vocals suffers a lot when encoded at a average bitrate like 128/160. Electronic music is much more forgiving with lower bitrates as is music with heavy guitar although it seems you lose a little bit of the "grittyness" but it totaly depends on how much you listen to music and how much you care. I have been encoding my music at 192 and am thinking of moving up a bit to 256 just because harddrive space is so cheap nowdays and I want the best sound I can get. A lot of my music is ripped from CD's that I don't have anymore so having music that still sound good to me while I continue to upgrade my sound system is important. I would love to just keep all my music on CD but I really value the quick song access and the abilty to make playlists.
The birds are back! The birds are back! -Dudley Do-Right
I usually use 160 to rip CDs for storage on a hard drive. For me, that is the best comprimise for quality & disk space usage. I listen with generic computer speakers (sub & satellites), so I'm not going to be able to tell that much difference anyway.
For my portable device (Samsung Uproar Sprint PCS phone...64MB of space...it was on sale for $100 yesterday, & needed a new phone anyway), I convert them to 96. That way I can get about 1.5-1.75 hours on there, which is more than enough for a run or gym workout (which I believe is the best use for an MP3 device anyway...one without any sort of disk-based media, anyway). And again, with the crappy earbuds, there's not much difference. Of course, if there wasn't software that would convert the mp3s from 160 -> 96 on the fly when uploading it to the phone, it would be too much of a pain in the ass.
The title says it all, really. While Ogg definitely still has artifacts, they're much softer and less noticable than mp3 artifacts. The first time I sent an Ogg to a friend, I didn't really go into how much better it was, but his first words were "WOW, this sounds _alot_ better than mp3s". Add to that the fact that Monty's still working hard on tuning Ogg... remember, it's still only on RC2. And if you're into low bitrates, 64kbit is pretty damn good considering it's only 64kbit.
But in the end, you should probably just go by your own judgement. Try a double-blind test and see which one you prefer. Info on how to do that can be found over on the PCABX page. I think the software is for Windows only, but check it out anyways... there's lots of good info about the double-blind test in general.
if disk space isn't any issue, why not use FLAC?
I've been using MP3s for a while now, and even built my own MP3 player. I chose the CMedia CM8738 sound card which provides optical input/output to my Sony ES receiver. I'm using Mission 703 speakers which are ok. I hope to upgrade to B&W speakers next year. Anyway, long story short, I can definately tell the difference between 192, 256, and 320 kbps encoding. I have about 65GB of MP3s, all in 320 kbps. I would use higher kbps values if I could. I even thought of using WAV files instead, but disk space isn't that cheap yet. I _am_ planning to setup a 4x 100GB RAID5 file server, so I might switch to WAV at that time.
Jean-Sebastien Morisset, Sr. UNIX Administrator
I've been using variable bit rate MP3's for awhile. They only use as many bits to encode a sample as are needed... one MP3 may contain samples from, say, 64 to 320 bits.
Some older players may not support them, but I haven't run into one yet. I'm surprised they aren't more popular and I haven't been able to find a reason why that is.
^X^S ^X^C
I believe ogg sounds better at the same bitrate as a mp3.
.wavs to mp3s (lame@128, no VBR) and to oggs, both at 128kbit. I came back a day later and loaded up each group of songs (the mp3, the ogg and the wav) into xmms and winamp. I turned on shuffle and began switching back and forth between songs (so I wouldn't know which format I was listening too) with my eyes closed. Obviously the .wav sounded the best as it was an exact copy of the CD, then I found that the ogg sounded better than the mp3. Ogg seems to sound crisper and bring out the little details of a song much better.
I took some of my favorite CD's (ones that I've listened to over and over again and know very well) and did a little comparison. I ripped one track off each of the discs (usually my favorite track), encoded the resulting
For some fun, take your headphone or speaker connection (as long as its a barrel connector) and pull it about halfway out. Now, if you do it right you can hear some kind of fuzzy noise on mp3's, maybe encoding artifacts but it sounds like noise. The higher the bitrate, the less prominent it is. I'm imagining I can hear that when I'm listening normally but it's mixed correctly so it's very low-key. Anyways, it sounds strange and ogg doesnt seem to produce this "noise".
Just my OPINION,
Geoffeg
Since I'm on a SoundBlaster16 ISA (Yes, the really old, NonPNP one) sound seems bad to begin with. I have a pair of $20 ($19.99) speakers plugged into the sound card, so sound sounds somewhat like noise.
I have used ogg for about a year now, and I must say , it's been progressing very nicely. RC2 sounds much better than RC1. I like oggs, just because it's open source technology in action. So that's what I use. However, it does have some problems.
I've been using MP3 since back in the days of FTPing them was just about the only other option besides dcc'n them. =) And I do like Mp3s also, but since it's got that closed source going for it, I do tend to stay away from them if at all possible. However, don't get me wrong, they are still good if there isn't another way around them.
Now onto conversion. *Don't attempt to convert from MP3 to ogg, you'll get a bad first impression of ogg.* When you convert you lose so much quality that it just isn't worth it.
The last thing I'd like to point out is your sound drivers. For those dual booters out there, play a song on Windows. Reboot to Linux or BSD, and play the same song. Sounds better? OSS has a richer sound quality. 'Nuff said. And for the brave Linux people, try using ALSA. Play the same song as before. Decide which one you like, and stick with it. I personally use OSS/Lite because I like it better than ALSA, but I've heard people say ALSA is better for certain cards. (Mainly the SB Live)
To summerize all that, I use ogg because I like the way it sounds, and because it's open source. Besides, since it's open source, there is room for improvement.
Location: Mt. Xinu
If VBR does the job much better, especially when done with a decent encoder (like LAME)
lame -v -V3 -b112 -ms x.wav x.mp3
gives kick-ass sound quality, and averages around 150kbps for instrumental/soft and 175kbps for hardcore.
I get really disappointed when opennap'ing, 99% of what I find is CBR. Sometimes I download the stuff at 320kbps, decode and reencode it to save space.
C'mon, dudes, anything plays VBR these days (even my crappy kenwood in-dash car player). Am I missing some wonderful CBR advantage here?!?!
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
mp3 @ 256-320k, file size is irrelevant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hi all, I rip most of my CD's I get onto ogg 192 kbits, and I have no worries with quality. HOWEVER, I sample via my KORG Triton at the same via Winage, and I get MUCH better sounding quality *all optic leads*, whats the input/playback level via the midi triton on both NT and ME then?
The site gives no figures, but there is a shite load of fall off on the NT box, or so it appears/sounds!
160kbps CBR? Have you tried VBR? You get *much* better quality for the amount of disk space. A friend and I spent some time playing around with notlame trying to figure out what was the best things to tweak one day, and VBR makes a huge difference.
Of course, with a drive that size, you could go all-out and use Monkey's Audio, lossless audio compression (you can decode to get *exactly* the same WAV file that was encoded. Compression ratio of only 2:1 or so, but again...what's the 100 GB drive for?!! Get on Google and search around for some comparisons, and make an educated choice.
What I mean by this is, are you trying to be as true to the original recording as possible, or do you just want decent sound? If the former, you're trying to approach hardcore high-end audio and you don't want ogg or mp3. If the latter, then just go by what your ears tell you -- from everything I've experienced, the two formats are virtually indistinguishable on a standard speaker setup.
Second, you're playing said file from a computer or some kind of mp3 player. How good are your speakers/headphones? Do they have the range, presence, crispness, etc. that you want? How good is your player's line out and D/A converter? How noisy is your sound card? Hell, how much RF interference does your computer produce or induce in the sound card? If you want to be really anal, what kind of cables are you using to run to the speakers (or stereo)?
Ultimately, since you know that you're going with something that's not going to be totally true to the original, you just have to go with what you think sounds good. You have to remember, not all ears are created equal. Go by what's good for you.
Having said all that (and at the risk of contradicting myself), with -specific- songs I've noticed a difference between encoding at 128k and, say, 192k. This is especially true when listening with quality headphones. Classical music in general or music like Orbital in specific seem to sound better to me at 192k. After 192, I personally can't tell a difference. Your mileage may vary. I've listened to two identical classical pieces, one compressed at 128k and one at 192k, over a friend's hifi stereo and there was a difference in hearable elements and sense of presence. Over my lofi stereo there's no discernable difference.
So, of course make sure you take this with however much salt you desire. It all comes down to what sounds good to you, and what kind of sound setup you're using. As the question was stated, it's difficult to give an accurate answer -- and of course, even a "correct" answer may not necessarily apply to you.
Including this one.
- Jonathan
Copy a cd directly to a mini disc using fiber optics with everything on high and then you'll hear some nice portable quality
As much as I like ogg, MP3 is the standard format right now. If you, for instance, encode your files as mp3... and you later buy one of those cd-players that can read mp3 cd's, you won't have to re-encode. Ogg is a new format so support for it is not high, so if you have portable devices in mind, go for mp3.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
If ultimate best sound is the issue, then what you need is something lossless. That rules out MP3 and OGG. And WAV is a waste of space. But there is FLAC, which is lossless sound compression. I haven't tried it yet, as the sound quality is not yet the defining issue for me. But as soon as I get beyond these tiny speakers and this cheap sound card, and have a laboratory grade ultra-linear DAC doing my analog conversion, feeding speakers with more watts than my PC power supply knows about, then quality certainly will be an issue.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
as i read along i only see references to technical stuff. stuff like: "i only listen to 320 kbit-mp3s because everything else is too bad." but i guess most of the people hear already have such fscked up ears that they don't really hear a difference between let's say 192 to 320.
.SHN owns ogg and .mp3.
.net :p... And not cringe and hear those tinnny highs that mp3's can so often sound like.
True lossless compression. True audiophiles delight. Now we can listen to the tunes of the Net not
// C'mon, dudes, anything plays VBR these days (even my crappy kenwood in-dash car player). Am I missing some wonderful CBR advantage here?!?!
Why yes of course!
VBR makes the numbers all jump around when playing, CBR makes em nice and steady.
I sent them an email asking for ogg support and they said if there was enough interest they would implement it.
course. someone'll have to mod this up first. ;).
Bullshit! Use ID tags, especially if you're sharing with others.
Not all of us have or want the same directory structure as you, and some of us don't have long filename support. If the ID tags are there, I can rename them to fit in the Mac.
I'm constantly bitching about this to people on alt.binaries.sounds.mp3. ID tags help everybody, but only if they're done correctly.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If you can't easily tell the difference, how much can it really matter?
The bottom line may matter. That is, which is actually better and what the final repercussions are. But, from the stand point of making a choice, don't have anxiety just because it's hard to make a choice.
If you'll be listening on your home stereo, I'd recommend using MP3 at 192kbps, Ogg at around 160kbps, or better. But if you're ripping primarily for your car or portable, lower bitrates will probably be acceptable, since in both cases there'll be enough ambient noise to wash out the fine details anyway. Of course, if you use your portable in a quiet room, or listen to the stereo in your parked car with the windows closed, you might again consider higher bitrates.
It's my personal opinion that MP3s sound better. However I'll admit it's been a while since I tested Ogg's (the encoders may have improved significantly since then). At that time I felt Oggs changed the overall tone of the music by making it brighter, and therefore felt MP3s were better because they didn't seem to suffer from that problem. But because I don't have experience with the new Ogg encoders, I won't mention them anymore.
Now, on to the subject. Most of my music I listen to is metal (Megadeth, Children of Bodom, etc) and classical. A 128kbps MP3 of any type of metal is unbearable in my opinion. They have horrible high end response and sound about like a FM broadcast. Once you get up to 256 or 320kbps, I can't tell the difference between them and the originals on 99% of the songs I've tested. However, for my classical music, I can rarely tell the difference between (128kbps MP3s on the softer tunes and 192kbps on the more complex ones) the MP3s and my CDs. Another example is a Harry Belafonte song (Monkey) that I downloaded. It was a 56kbps MP3 and I can't tell the difference between it and the original on vinyl (for those who don't know, it was recorded many decades ago).
Therefore, I feel one of the most important things to base your format/enocder/bitrate selection on is the type and source of music you'll be encoding. 128kbps might seem like CD quality on classical music, but for a Children of Bodom song it's not even close.
Also, I listen to all my encoded stuff through a SB Live Value connected to my Sony STR-DE415 receiver using either my pair of Sennheiser HD590 headphones or JBL S38 loudspeakers. For my MP3 ripping I use Exact Audio Copy with a Plextor PX-W124TS and encode them using LAME 3.89beta with the --r3mix command line.
The reason for encoding CDs into digital formats are size, archiving, convenience, portability.
Size - some say Ogg is better at smaller sizes, but it's debatable. Storage has never been cheaper and is getting cheaper still. Why would anyone encode at 128k anyway? MP3 with VBR and the right options is about the same size as 192k and without some very high end playback equipment is indistinguishable from CD.
Archiving - there is no real difference in quality if you know how to use Ogg & MP3 encoders properly. Archival encoding means you want to have it forever, so you're not going to be caring much about size differences between formats, minor as they are. Quality matters most here. Can you tell the highest quality encodings in both formats from CD? Day to day use, no. Again you need some very high-end gear to hear the differences, i.e. not your soundcard or your portable.
Convenience - both formats give you the ability to playback what you want without reaching over to the CD rack, just open the player. No difference there.
Portability - MP3 has it all. Ogg has virtually none. Come on, someone reply with a link to some tiny Korean company that promises to make an Ogg player Real Soon Now.
Why would you bother with Ogg? Maybe if you absolutely will not use something that anyone has a patent on, but if that's the case you're going to have a difficult life.
If you just want to listen to them, Ogg will get you more bang for the disk buck. However, FLAC (and lossless in general) is the only option for long-term archival. People make "backup" MP3s for CDs and don't realize they're tossing future format conversions out the window. sigh...
You get almost the same quality at half the size with WMA. I'm sure this will be interpereted as flamebait or propaganda by some over-zealous moderator, but that's just the way it is, IMHO.
Are there any Linux WMA enc/dec? It's much more frequently supported than ogg (players, portables, etc.).
Dast: Yeah man VBR is excellent.
lame --r3mix -b112 source.wav out.mp3
That's a ready-made VBR setting that I (and many others) find remarkable. But lame has made an amazing number of possibilities for modifying how the mp3 is going to sound in subtle ways. Check out r3mix.net, and their forums.
Never understimate the power of the placebo-effect! I used to think all formats sounded like crap at 128kbit, but I guess I was fooling myself.
The other day I did a blind test comparing wav, mp3, mp3PRO, ogg, wma and acc. Since my speakers aren't all that good, and the acuostics of my room are less then perfect, I use a set of nice headphones connected to my EWS64XL soundcard. I tested with a few different songs, both classical and "modern". I converted the a wav to all the formats at 64, 96, 128 and 160kbit (except for mp3pro which I could only encode at 64 and 96kbit and acc at 64, 96 and 128), and then back again to wavs (so buffering delays won't reveal what I'm listening to). Then I made a playlist of them in winamp and randomized it. I put pieces of paper on my monitor so I could only see which number in the playlist I was listening to and then tried to guess what I was listening to.
My conclusion was that if a good encoder was used for MP3 (I used LAME at highest quality settings) I could tell that it was compressed about half of the times at 128kbit. At 96 and 64kbit it always sounded awful, and at 160kbit I could never tell it from the original.
I was really impressed with ogg. It has been tremendously improved with rc2! I could actually not tell which was wich at either 128 or 160 kbit, and about 50/50 at 96kbit! Ogg was also the format that took the crown at 64kbit. I would say 64kbit ogg is really enjoyablem, at least with less than perfect equipment. The default bitrate in the oggdrop encoder seems to be 80kbit. I guess that's a good choice.
WMA sounded better than mp3 at 64 and 96kbit, but I could actually tell more wma 128kbit's from the original than mp3s. I couldn't tell the original from 160kbit wmas though. The encoding scheme of wma seems to be quite different from the others. There seems to be less "compression-sounds" but it is as bad as some others at buchering the comes through. When few sounds are heard (a single violin for example) it sound really good at 96 (and quite nice at 64kbit too), but as soon as lots of sounds at a wide frequency range appears (such as big symphony orchestra chord), it sounds as if it is doing rough low-pass filtering or something. Really nasty.
MP3Pro sounded worse than wma with the violin but better with the orchestra, at both 64 and 96 kbit. I could always tell them from the original though.
ACC is as good as (possibly slightly better than) MP3 at 128kbit, about as good as mp3pro at 96kbit, but really bad at 64kbit. This could have been due to a bad encoder though. Sounded like it did lots of low-pass filtering.
Overall, I'd say ogg is the winner. I now encode all my music with ogg at 128kbit. I'm eagerly awating ogg 1.0!
Well, just my thoughts.
Regards / ushac
I, too, encode at 64kpbs VBR OGG files. I'm listening on a good pair of stereo headphones, and the quality is amazing. Or maybe I have bad hearing. Whatever.
I find it depends on the music. Stuff with aucustic guitars and such need to be ripped at higher bit rates to sound good. Techno is fine at MP3-128. If you put Ogg and MP3 in a bag, shake them around, they'll come out about the same. But, it's really going to be an issue of your listening skill. Personally, MP3 sounds fine to me, but then I don't have well trained ears. At the same time, my eyes are much sharper and JPEGs with more than like quality level 8 compression look bad, to me, and can be annoying.
-- Gordon Worley
I'm not too familiar with Ogg, but I encode all my albums into Mp3s using VBR at "100%" quality. The files stay reasonable in size and the quality is the best that the encoder can manage.
I honestly don't know, does Ogg have variable bit rate capability? If so, that'd help its popularity, but only because it would use less space.
Also, what I'm seeing to be the defining factor is that Ogg can encode with lower bit rates, generating smaller files, and get the same audio quality. I think we've decided that "size doesn't matter". I've got two 60gb drives striped together in my file server. My old roomate has two 80GBs, a 60GB, and a 40GB in his. We just do everything as 100% VBR Mp3s, and they sound great coming out of a SoundBlaster Live and a TurtleBeach SantaCruise.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
From my own experiences:
.WAV's. I wonder if at such a high bit rate you even gain anything? Although I know little about the inner workings of MP3s i would assume that the compression scheme in general is what stops mp3s from being wav quality once you pass say 192k and not the stream width. Can anyone enlighten me on this?
Size vs sound WMA wins hands down. I songs ripped in 64k WMA which are listenable, where as 64k in any other format is pretty laughable. If your not being picky about sound quality or anti-MS beliefs 128k WMA's encode fast, take less space and sound great.
Mp3 is still my format of choice because it is the most transferable/accessable. However, I find there is a *huge* difference between mp3 encoders. LAME is by far and away the best. Some songs I listened to (use Aphex Twin's "Girl/Boy" song as an example) just never ripped correctly (the snares sound wacky). However lame can make these songs sound much closer to the original even at a modest 128k.
I have heard about something called MP3PRO which attempts to seperate high and low frequencies and encode them seperately. Anyone have any info on this?
To be honest I am an advocate for extreme high definition. The more information the better (even if we can't hear it). As such, from a quality standpoint vinyl is actually my favorite format. With a good setup, nothing can beat it (note i have no DVD audio CDs). I would rather see more data coming through than better compression. Lets hope something like Sony's super CD takes off.
With people doing silly things like ripping songs at 256 and even 320k MP3s I wonder why they don't just start distrubuting zipped
I've never heard Ogg, but mp3's at equal bitrates can sound excellent on one encoder and sound like crap on another.
It all depends on the encoder yer usin.. What bitrate to use also depends on the use of the track. For casual listening I always use 320kbps to encode, just to be safe. I've actually been able to hear some instances of where some harmonics are gone when encoding at 128kbps.
but I believe there is quality loss even at 320kbps. When it comes to mastering tracks, I always use the raw wav and never mp3's.
- Alex
I've played around with many MP3 bitrates and I firmly believe that VBR is the ONLY way to go if you're interested in archival quality. All modern codecs use VBR nowadays (WMA is a notable exception). The folks at www.r3mix.net have a pretty sweet analysis of MP3 codecs. I agree that the format is not as important as the encoder. Why would anyone choose OGG when the world is MP3-everything right now? OGG will die a slow death unless it gets the backing of big software companies (e.g. MS). It has some nice features, but nothing that is going to push people to change. Go get a free copy of EAC, winlame, and rip all day using the --r3mix switch. Sounds absolutely indistinguishable from the original. And the encoder and ripper are FREE!
It will turn a 650MB cd into around 400MB of files.
Not the best compression in the world, but:
And while you're at it, check out shnapster (flash warning), a peer-to-peer system of trading live music in the shorten format with over 1TB of shows currently hosted.
-Jackson
"A matter of internal security, the age old cry of the oppressor" - Jean Luc Picard
Theoretically you should arrive at the same results (or at least very similar results), but I don't see the need for the CD burning process. I guess any double-blind test will do the job, though.
I wish I had an 100Gb hard disk for my music
My audio system is:
SB Live!
NAD 216 THX terminal amplifier
Infinity Delta 40 speakers
croteam http://www.croteam.com/ switched to ogg vorbis for the game music engine in serious sam: the second encounter. the first game used mp3s.
uh hahaha
AFAIK, every piece of mp3 encoding software out there defaults to CBR. Most home users don't know what VBR is or why they would want to use it, so they just leave things at the defaults. Only the most technical users who take the time to learn about these things well check that VBR box or add that additional command line parameter.
This is why you find so many CBR files out there. You're not missing some wonderful CBR advantage.
[Side note: Whenever I encode, I make VBR .ogg files.]
I encode all of my MP3s using the Fraunhofer codec at 128kbps, and my encodings sound better than a lot of what I download off Napster at 192kbps.
i personally dislike mp3. i've never actually used ogg. i'm sort of the audiophile type and do not believe in destroying music by compressing it and ripping out the warm lows and lushes highs. the format i use is shorten (shn). it's a lossless audio compression format that achieves a compression ratio of up to 2:1. not spectacular, but i feel it is well worth the preservation of the audio. i can listen to the shn files directly using winamp, or xmms (there is also something for mac) or decompress them (to exactly the original file i started with) and burn to an audio cd. my audio system isn't spectacular, but i do notice when the bass end bottoms out and my speakers cackle. i'm also taking into consideration that i will one day have an audio system worth thousands of dollars (being a student sucks in that respect...). for more general information on shorten, try www.etree.org. not the official shorten page, but they have lots of free software and scripts for different platforms.
VQF at 96kbps kills both Ogg and mp3 quality-wise at 128kbps, and mp3 a run for it's money at 256kbps (though it's very system-intensive). It's a shame it never caught on. Open source too!
www.vqf.com
Chris
This may be a dumb question, but has anyone put any thought into hacking or .ogg? Is the
.ogg support in various mp3
submitting a patch to the firmware of the Audiotron to play
encoder hardware or software based? Are there any hardware based solutions for
.ogg? Just curious, cause it doesn't sound like it should be too terribly hard
to implement. Any projects around to try to get
players (interested esp, in home and car based players)?
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Use Flac, or shorten, or any lossless compression codec with (at least) source available.
This gives you approx 2:1 compression on clean CD rips, much better on quiet stuff and (of course) closer to 1:1 on noise. So we're talking about maybe 300Mb or so per album.
For $1 per album or less (prices always falling) you will kick yourself if you rip to 128Kbit MP3 now and then waste another week of your life re-ripping the CDs (if they haven't died) at higher quality later in your life.
Think you're never going to want higher quality? If you're at 192Kbit/s or lower think again, the artifacts in MP3 and Vorbis get more obvious the more you listen to compressed sound. Originals sound eerily "more lifelike" and eventually you will go back to your CDs "just to check" and find that the difference was there after all.
Why use Flac rather than just leaving WAVs on the disk? Well for one thing, disk is cheap but it isn't free. I save up to 50% just by running some free software == bargain.
Also, please for the love of all that is good use paranoid / seamless CD ripping. If I hear one more person playing their "CD quality" rips with obvious jumps in them I will scream.
Ogg still inmature, give it a year or 2. Use vbr, whichever you decide to use.
Unix is a standard, DOS is a standard, windows XX is not.
I encode at 350K for home, where I'm far pickier about quality. The PC I use has a SoundBlaster Live card with a digital I/O card. A digital signal is sent from the sound card to a Rotel RSP-985 decoder, where I listen with either a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 headphones or a pair of B&W 604s2 main speakers by way of a Rotel 5 channel THX theater amplifier. All cables from the amp to the speakers are alpha silver Synergistic Research cables, and the digital interconnects are Siltech. It's not from RadioShack, and is does make a difference.
I can't tell the difference between 350K Ogg files and CDs (which I can listen to through signals coming from either a Rotel CD player or a Sony S7700 DVD player, both of which use the Rotel decoder to decode the audio). The important point in mentioning all this is that the Rotel decoder is doing D->A decoding for either direct from CD listening or Ogg listening. Even with the Sennheiser headphones I can't tell the difference at 350K. Ogg sounds fantistic.
At work I use 160K streams, because my laptop doesn't have anywhere near the disk space I have at home. I can occationally hear artifacts at 160K, but it still sounds damn good. Much better (IMHO) than a 160K MP3 (encoded with LAME) -- probably about the same quality as a 256K MP3.
There's other things to consider when deciding between Ogg and MP3. Here's some of my reasons for going with Ogg rather than MP3:
- Patent-free format. MP3 is weighed down with all kinds of patent issues, which is unfortunate. If this weren't the case, I don't think Ogg would have been invented.
- Ogg doesn't use ID3. This is a good thing, as ID3 is a huge hack (ever look at the ID3 spec? Bah.). Labeling is built into the Ogg format and is a much better way for tagging than MP3.
- Ogg files are exactly the same length as the WAV files off a CD, which is not the case for MP3. This is important it you're going to later burn CDs from those Ogg files and want to have CDDB lookups work every time.
- Ogg files can be sliced up without the need to re-encode. See the "vcut" utility that comes with RC2. This is pretty damn slick.
- Multiple channels. This isn't such a big deal for CDs, but later you can do multi-channel files, which you won't ever be able to do in MP3.
The only bad thing about Ogg is that it has (at this point) limited support in DJ mixing software -- the XMMS crossfade plugin and the DBMix stuff for Linux is about all you have right now. You can't mix Ogg files using (as far as I know) any Windows DJ software. Hopefully that'll change, especially given that there's Windows decoding plugins available for free.So, there you go. That's my $0.02 on the subject. Bottom line is that Ogg is an excellent format for digital audio, and has many advantages over MP3. If you're deciding between MP3 and Ogg, you should go with Ogg.
see ya,
-nate
Be sure to check out http://www.r3mix.net, and http://www.hydrogenaudio.org. Both sites are dedicated to discussion of mp3 quality. Hydrogen Audio also has discussions on ogg, mpc, and AAC.
In short, here are some mp3 switches for you to try with LAME 3.90 Alpha 7 (which is the current reccomended version), in order of increasing quality (though this is currently being debated).
--r3mix
--dm-preset standard
--dm-preset xtreme
--dm-preset insane
I use --dm-preset standard myself.
Both have some new changes in store for the next beta release, so I reccommend you hit those sites to keep on top of things.
128 kbps is nowhere *near* CD quality. It is simply 'acceptable' quality for casual listening for most people. ie: It's not bad enough to make them say 'This sucks'. SO they don't notice.
There is a definite, easy to hear diffrence if you compare them though.
I can't detect any real difference between a bladeenc-encoded mp3 at 192 and a Vorbis file encoded with VBR.
So I use Vorbis, because it's unrestricted and my distribution of choice ships with the tools.
You're claiming that Vorbis has great audio quality. Have you done any listening tests to back this up?
Over the last few public beta releases, we've fixed many of the outstanding bugs that affected audio quality. We're still working on fixing the rest as we move toward a 1.0 release. The beta releases are primarily intended for developers and early adopters to sample our technology.
The Ogg encoder always does VBR.
I don't think space is really an issue these days. With today's 100Gb drives, you can fit literally thousands of MP3s on, and the exact bitrate doesn't really matter. I'm in half a mind to encode everything with lossless compressor like FLAC (which average about 15Mb per song) and be done with the quality debate for good.
First thing's first. I listen through a Yamaha SW1000XG sound card, a mid-range Phonic mixer, and a decent pair of Technics headphones (no, they're not stunning; I'm about to order a decent Sennheiser pair). I do a bit of sound engineering here and there, and have had much better things to listen to.
I can tell the difference between some MP3s encoded at 256kbps, and at 320kbps. Personally, my MP3s are LAME VBR encoded, with a maximum bandwidth of 320kbps, although it rarely reaches that.
I've tried ogg before, which is probably what's stopping me from trying it again. The version I tried quite substantially chewed up the treble. It's probably got better now, but I don't see a vast amount of advantage in it.
SHN is the only format worth using. It is a losses compressed .wav
Hmm... I'd recommend using 256 if you have a good amplifier, and good speakers (and a good ear :-). My setup isn't strictly high end, but is better than average.
With typical computer speakers, I agree that 160, 192 or something like that is plenty, depending on the kind of music.
If you want a bunch of good information on ripping *almost* perfect quality MP3's at sane bitrates (about 200 VBR), check out http://r3mix.net. I've been ripping like they suggust, and man does it sound nice!
If you really want to do reliable tests on wav files, then visit PCABX to get the PCABX program and to read more about the testing methodology. The program takes in two wav files, and then chooses one of the two randomly and lets the user decide which of the two is the one chosen randomly. Basically, once this done a good number of times (say, 20) the program can then tell whether the user can actually tell the difference between the two files.
Also, a wonderful website dedicated to the task of creating archival quality encoded audio (which is indistinguishable from the original) is r3mix. Lame even has an optimized parameter that comes from the work at the site, --r3mix! This VBR parameter gives incredible quality at a fairly low bitrate. Check out too a listening test carried out at r3mix that showed the blind preferences of 42 users over a month of time.
...but, I can't tell a difference between Ogg and MP3 once you get above a 128 bitrate, sounds just like CDs and FM radio to me.
The riovolt has upgradable codecs, and is (imo) the best cd-mp3 player out there even despite that fact. Go to rio, http://www.rio.com and send them some e-mail begging for an ogg upgrade. I have one of the first generation mp3-cd players, but as soon as the Riovolt supports ogg, I'm buying one, and re-ripping my cds into ogg.
Sometimes we cannot avoid lower-bitrate mp3s (such as those from mp3.com). However, there are some decent xmms plugins designed to improve playback of audio. You might want to check out the Crystality Plugin. It seems to give me quite a boost in quality on my sound hardware (Altec Lansing ACS295).
My DVD player in my living room doesn't play OGG, my car stereo doesn't play OGG, therefore why bother with it? They both play MP3 however. MP3 wins, game over.
Ogg might be the better technology, I'm not that familiar with the nitty gritty of these to even argue this point, my point is, MP3 has wormed its way into my car stereo, my home stereo, and my life as the only file format of music worth bothering with since any OTHER format will never leave my harddrive.
----
Do not click here
Grimster
--- www.f-theocean.com
I don't embed headers on the top of all my
Ideally people would be trading albums via archives (such as
I don't know if it's just me, but I'm reading the forum and seeing people say they are using 80-250 Megs per album on high bitrate lousy formats. There are several lossless audio compression projects out there that are getting pretty decent compression rates.
Of course the result is never going to be near as small as MPG or OGG, but it does get rid of all the tweaking disscusions (i.e. Which VBR/CBR, CODECs, Bitrates, is best) that seem to be big time wasters.
I look at it like this. HD Space is cheap these days, 60 Gig drives are starting to dip below $100. A pair of 60 gig drives could store 300+ Lossless Albums.
I've heard a lot of people whine about how they wish that OGG would be supported on their Rio or Nomad or whatever. As somewhat of an insider in the portable MP3 player industry, I can say that the people who code the player applications for these devices wish that they could get their hands on a fixed-point algorithm for decoding Vorbis. If someone were to write a proof-of-concept library or application and put it up on Freshmeat or Sourceforge, I'd personally insure that it gets in the hands of the right people.
Why fixed point? All of the portable, mobile, and stereo component MP3 players are based around microprocessors that don't have any hardware floating point coprocessors. Since software FP is too sluggish, an efficient way of doing the Vorbis decode with integer operations alone is necessary.
If anyone is interested, don't hesistate to email me at the address above. No promises, but I might be able to get some development hardware for whoever is interested...
MP2 is better than Ogg but bigger size.
Ogg however is best for its size.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
After being an extensive user of MP3's for years, I happened across Ogg almost by accident. Since then I will never turn back.
.05% :P]).
MP3's sound flat while Ogg's have more of a spacial quality. Also - to get the best results - try the very latest encoder. It's still a work in progress and with each encoder release the sound gets better and better.
There is a major disadvantage in hardware players because there are only a few that support Ogg. The one I know about is the Iomega HipZip.
I like Ogg not only because it sounds great, but because it is an open-source, patent-free format. Frauenhauffer has started to clamp down on their patents which will eventually be a real kick-in-the-balls to the users.
I listen to music on either my Sony MDR-V6 headphones, my Cambridge dtt2500 5.1 set, or my dad's stereo (5.1 set of Paradigm pro series speakers + a Marantz SR-19 receiver [which has total thd of
you can even get a streaming shorten plugin for xmms.
in the tape trading network (such as the grateful dead tapers), shn is the preferred format.
while it initially wasn't designed for realtime playback (it was meant for batch compression and file transfer transmission, like ftp), its now considered a streamable format as well.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Using mp3 192kbs - 256kbs, everything barely meets good sound quality. As for the sound hardware the amp + cd (approx. $1000) from Onkyo and the speakers from Canton (approx. $1200).
Haven't done much with Ogg yet, seens to be pretty good though.
I like MP3 better, because:
Mother: "Son, what are you doing?"
Son : "Nothing, just downloading ogg files from the internet"
Mother: "Not in my house you're not, I don't want that filth here, thats just sick"
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I am somewhat of an audiophile, and have invested what some people would call an insane amount of money (and time) in sound reproduction equipment over the years, from Rotel components, to Acoustic Image speakers , down to the 8 guage O2 free, gold plated copper wiring.
I love digital format music for it's ease of portability and storage. But I have to admit, digital media, be it CD, DAT, MP3 or OGG loses something in the translation. For honest, true to life sound reproduction, the best way to go is *still* vinyl with a quality turntable.
and yes, I'm still pissed to tool for not releasing Lateralus on vinyl.
These questions really gets down to how the music is going to be used. I have two ways I listen to music - at home, and on the road.
First a little background on where I'm coming from. I listen to music through Paradigm Active 20 studio monitors, which are professional studio speakers with internal amplifiers, or through medium/high end Sony MDR-V900 headphones. I'm also a video professional, so I've very attuned to quality (I don't watch movies on VHS, for example, as the poor quality is too distracting). I'm not quite so fussy about audio, but am still pretty fussy.
At home, I have all my music on an old PowerMac G4 400 I had lying around, which I also use to rip with. I use Maxtor 75 GB external FireWire drives, which are pretty much infinitely daisy-chainable to expand storage, so the only real issue in data rate is balancing quality per cost .
On the road, I listen to music via iTunes on my PowerBook G4. Quality is less important than storage effeciency, since I have a limited amount of space I want to spend on my hard drive for audio (2GB is my budget - I need a lot of room for video files). Also, I'm pretty much only listening the the music while I'm writing. I've found a 128 Kbps with an average data rate around 155 to be good enough that I'm not actively distracted by poor audio quality, although I can hear artifacts if I pay attention. However, I continually add and remove audio from my local storage
I did a bunch of encode tests, and spent quite a while figuring out the best way to go. I found audio sounded "good enough" for high end listening at 192 Kbps MP3. However, given the amount of labor of encoding all my CD's (34 days worth of music so far), I really, really wanted to make sure I wouldn't EVER have to go back to the original discs again. I assume I'm going to be recompressing from these files to new audio codecs for at least a decade to come, so I want the quality to be not only transparent for listening, but not to have a minimum of sub-audible compression artifacts that would make later recompression more difficult. Because of this, I encoded everything at 320 Normal (not joint) stereo, with no filtering. 256 might have worked, but it was worth spending a little more on storage in order to not have to worry about having to rip all those CD's again. Even assuming your time is only worth minimum wage, it's way cheaper to buy more storage and spend less time fussing. Still, it's a little irritating to know all those bonus tracks with 10 minutes of silence in them are still eating up 40 K per second.
For my laptop music, I encode at 128 max VBR, joint stereo, with a 10 Hz filter. These files sound just fine. I reencode all of these from my master array of music as needed. In the future, I'm sure I'll migrate to other audio codecs for this as the technology improves, allowing me to get more music on the laptop, the car stereo, or whatever I wind up doing with the stuff.
-Ben Waggoner
My video compression blog
In my (subjective) opinion, Windows Media Player is superior to both MP3 and Ogg in terms of quality/file size. Pretty close to CD Quality at 64kbps. Small files, and excellent quality.
Thus WMA is ideal for streaming media.
Since OGG is opensource, I really wish that it would have been better. However, encoding Ogg files takes unacceptable time on my Athlon 1,5 Ghz. The result is large files, with only decent quality.
This is NOT flamebait : )
I use Mp3 because when I play ogg files xmms is a
litte bit heavy on the cpu even with mpg123. I don't know why but it's to hard for my coy to play ogg on my computer
Taco, 192, 160, none of that. Go to r3mix.net to learn more. Using lame --r3mix, you get quality virtually indistinguishable from the CD, at a size usually lower than 192kbps. 360 is always an option, but the quality of this will equal that. Be careful though, not all VBR encoders are created equal. There's a reason they picked Lame. There are also programs like Exact Audio Copy for Windows (and some Linux equivilent though the name eludes me at the moment) that will double-check your audio extraction to confirm its correctness. Yes, this means I only rip at 1x or so on my slow cd-rom drive and duron 650 box, but it's killer quality. I output straight from my sound blaster live to the stereo on my desk, so I should know (well, it isn't a great stereo, but better than most any computer setup).
here's a question that hasn't been asked. i wonder if there is a difference in terms of streaming mp3's or ogg over a home lan. is one better than another? would streaming wav files be better if you got the 199G hard drive? should we all start to wire cat5e and go gigabit, or fiber? i figure i would be nice to listen music in the kitchen on the hacked 3com audrey, from the cerfcube music server.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
'mon, dudes, anything plays VBR these days (even my crappy kenwood in-dash car player). Am I missing some wonderful CBR advantage here?!?!
I've had a friend tell me that you can't stream VBR with icecast or shoutcast or something. He said it gets all choppy and sounds like total crap. He had to rerip his entire collection (and 5GB I gave him) to CBR so he could stream it.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Since the Ogg compression sounded awful...
.wav to check that it had read the track right. The sound was very plastic, it felt like a cheap radio playing inside a box. It wasn't even a question about any snobbish high-end audiophile 'take away information and it sounds like crap' kind of thing. It just sounded plain wrong...
Decided that it was about time I checked out the Ogg Vorbis encoder since, well, many people have said many good things about it.
I downloaded the vorbis tools, decided to get a CD that displays different charactistics and that I know well, and settled for the Delerium Karma album.
I started RipperX, choosed to encode the first track using the highest setting (320k), High Quality mode, no CRC, no VBR and ran the encoding.
The result, well, to tell you the truth, I had to listen to the
Equipment used was my Denon AH-D750 headphones (decent quality, not studio reference quality though) driven by a NAD 3020i amp (leftover from when I got new stereo equipment) fed through my SB Live.
//Humming
I'm too stupid to preview.
It's a real shame that when dealing with perceptual redundancy you can't get a computer as the expert listener. If such a thing existed and could say something like "Sample A differs 10%" from the original and then give some details, it would probably help developers of these formats a lot....
The only test I can think of that makes sure that the output of the compression is good is to attempt to bzip an mp3 and see if it shrinks much - if it does, it isn't fully entropic/compressed. But this has nothing todo with fidelity.
-- Mike
Go to http://www.r3mix.net and read the articles and follow the links. Great info!!
In february 2000 c't magazin organised a blind listening test. 300 Audiophiles were involved, finalists tested 17 1-min clips from different artists (classic and pop):
original CD recording
128 Kbit/s Joint Stereo [MusicMatch (FhG) v4.4] encoded PC decoded Mac
256 Kbit/s Joint Stereo [MusicMatch (FhG) v4.4] encoded PC decoded Mac
Basicly it says, under most circumstances, 256kbit is indistinguishable from original CD (not the same, just that humans can rarely hear the difference).
But since size is a consideration, you can get close to the same quality using VBR with the latest LAME.
Hey says forget Xing, use either Lame or Fraunhofer for CBR, for VBR Lame is the only decent choice.
With my files --r3mix tends to average around 170kbit, some as high as 214kbit, some as low as 130kbit.
Go check it out, in particular the quality page:
http://users.belgacom.net/gc247244/quality.htm
Now if only someone sold a CD changer with a PC interface so I wouldn't have to rip my CD collection one CD at a time....
The r3mix comparison shows that LAME (and by extension, notlame) is probably the best way to go for mp3 encoding. Some discussion is also provided regarding the advantages of using VBR for encoding in general (click on the "encoding" tab).
As for my own observations, I found that using this set of command line arguments works best:
notlame -v -V 1 -B 320 -p tempcdda.wav [outputfile]
The results are files that will go as high as 320Kbps if needed (on average, they tend to float around 200Kbps) at 44.1Khz. There is no loss of quality that I can hear; the parts of the music that need a full 320kbps get it, and the silent parts drop to 32kbps.
And the players I've tried all seem to work fine; winamp and xmms (using mpg123) have no trouble with the VBR files. I don't know about portable players. For streaming, I use liveice to resample the files to a particular CBR (128Kbps for my apartment, 64Kbps for sending out over the network); so I can listen to the files at whatever quality I want without sacrificing the quality of my archival files.
So, if I did own a Rio or a CD player that would read mp3 CD's, I could just resample the files I wanted to a particular bitrate (pretty much on the fly).
I see no reason why anybody would only sample their files at 160kbps or 256kbps; every file I've done has needed 320kbps at some point to get the best fit. And the size isn't unreasonable; a typical album is between 70-80MB, with some extreme cases taking up to 110MB. Sure, it's big, but I've only used 25% of the 30GB drive I bought for the purpose (which right now costs very little), including the RedHat install to run the machine.
As for using Ogg, I looked into it. If I could be convinced that the quality would be good enough to archive my entire collection, I would have used it. But it just didn't seem mature enough at the time I began all of this (such as no support for joint stereo), so I chose mp3.
Of course, with storage at its current price, I am tempted to give up compression altogether and just store entire CDDA images. A typical album would then take around 700MB to store, but a $200 drive could then be used to keep over 100 CDs with absolutely no loss in quality.
I have done a >REAL3000$ stereo equipment (Van den Hul
cables, atacama stands, gold plated connectors
etc) to play 2 tracks in :
a) vorbis, 192
b) mp3, notlame, high quality VBR, stereo, 128-320, 195 kbps average
c) original wav file
The tracks were ripped from a superb quality
classical recording (I play the piano), from
DECCA.
I then had 3 of my friends compare the track
quality "blindly".
The difference between vorbis and mp3 is
immediately noticeable. Vorbis was found superior
by all the listeners. Some people had difficulty
telling vorbis from wav but they generally
tended to prefer the wav. (each one was
questioned individually)
Personally I find the difference quite striking
and was truly amazed!
This was an important finding for me, because
I make amateur recordings at home and I need
an easy means of archival (we are talking many
GB here, and I don't intend to fill my HD).
I decided to use vorbis at 350 for all my
archived recordings. (I also keep
cds).
I cannot say whether vorbis is also superior
in lower bit rates such as 128kbps.
Petros
What difference does it make if your receiver does Dolby Digital? Your MP3s aren't an AC3 source. Receivers with "all the bells and whistles" are often of LOWER quality than those dedicated to doing one task well. Dolby Digital is for movies with earth-shattering-kabooms.
Are there really people here that think a "16 bit" sound card can't reproduce full CD audio? How do you think they play WAV files?
It's amazing the number of completely irrelevant factors people are bringing up here. Is there a word for the phenomenon that occurs when someone shells out money for something and then feels the need to factor its presence into anything remotely related to it?
It's also amazing that nobody is bringing up some REAL issues:
The quality of your connectors is more important than that of your sound card. Bring the audio to your receiver over SPDIF or TOSLINK, not over analog RCA cables! Sound cards --- ALL of them --- have really awful RCA connectors.
Even SPDIF and TOSLINK aren't lossless --- but the conveyance of waveform audio in your computer to your audio peripherals is. Since the inside of your computer has lots of interferance (hard drives, power supplies), it logically makes sense to deliver your audio as far away from your computer as possible before converting it to send to your receiver.
So USB audio makes a *lot* of sense for setups that simply want to do faithful MP3 playback --- a cheap Roland UA-30 will do SPDIF, TOSLINK, powers itself off the bus, and can sit yards away from your computer.
I don't understand the original question or some of the responses regarding bit rates. I encoded my entire CD collection at 192kbs MP3. I'm not an audiophile by ANY means (and I don't want to be: I'd rather not TRAIN myself not to like my sound system!!!) --- but I *regret* doing this; guitar and (real) drum driven music sounds awful in a good car stereo (Pioneer+JL+DynAudio) at 192, and tolerable at 256.
Even 2 years ago disk space was cheap enough to make 256 the reasonable choice. But when you can get a 75G stackable firewire drive/enclosure for less than $200, what possible incentive could you have for encoding at less than 256?
I can't tell the difference between 256 and anything above. VBR improves sound quality when you set a floor of 256 and a ceiling of infinity; otherwise, it's just a silly hack to save disk space at the expense of your MP3 files. It may not noticeably damage audio quality, but it sure as hell makes your MP3 files more complex, harder to analyze and play with/sort/etc. MP3 is just a poor file format for what VBR asks it to do.
Another big gotcha with MP3 is joint-stereo, the "reasonable default" in many encoders. Joint stereo is another psychoacoustic hack that saves an inconsequential amount of disk space at the expense of noticeable degradation in sound quality. It "spoofs" stereo for frequency ranges that its model believes is hard to localize in human ears. Make sure you nail your encoder at real stereo.
The most painful gotcha of all, fortunately, is one that most people have managed to avoid, and that is that codec quality is a HUGE factor. My original batch of 600 CDs was done with bladeenc (mass groan!); bladeenc is/was completely broken. People aren't kidding when they say that Fraunhofer sounds better than random other encoders. Fortunately LAME is a great choice.
As for Ogg: it's great that we have an open source codec. This will come in very handy for streaming audio delivery and for the cores of sound engines in games or other random programs. Because of this it's also great that Ogg is (apparently) more efficient than MP3. One hopes it will continue to become more and more efficient so it can give Microsoft's compromised but extremely efficient format a run for its money.
But since disk space isn't an issue, if you don't trust MP3 (putting you squarely in the minority), I'd say use Shorten or some other lossless format before making the irrevocable decision to put all your music into young Ogg Vorbis. It takes a *long time* to re-encode all of your CDs (*sob*).
Remember this: your time is far more valuable than disk drive space. Don't encode your music to the weak sound system you may have now: encode it to the ideal, even if you can't exploit it now, so that you'll be able to listen to your music without wasting time re-encoding it later on.
I have no idea where you got the idea that 128/44 is standard CD quality. I'm not even sure what 128/44 means.
Let's figure out what the bitrate of CD-quality audio is:
1. 44100 Hz (i.e. 44 kHz)
2. Two channels
3. 16 bits per sample
44100*2*16 = 1411200 bits per second, or 1411 kbps. That's the bitrate of CD audio.
Note that these are bits, not bytes. A CD takes up 1411/8 = 176 kB per second.
So the fact that an MP3 sounds pretty good at 192 kbps (which is 24 kB per second - the capital B for Bytes instead of bits) is actually quite impressive. It's compressing by about a factor of 7.
Luckily, most rippers don't even give you a choice. They just rip the raw bytes and stick a WAV header on each track. Good rippers verify that they're reading the CD correctly, of course, but they don't do any compression or re-encoding.
I use an experimental version off libvorbis by Gian-Carlo, that he released on the vorbis mailinglists. His mode will probably be in RC3. The sound is absolutly perfect, I have not yet found a single file that I can differ from the original, and I have more than 10000 OGGs (600 cds) ripped with that mode. Some songs have an average as low as 80kbps (speech) and some (The Clash - Guns Of Brixton) need 220kbps. Average average is ~165kbps. I often see peeks at 600+ kbps when that is needed not to compromise soundquality!
:-)
Also, I've written some wrappers to oggenc in Python for use with Grip. The wrapper takes about all available info it can from Grip, and I can add more information in the Album-field enclosed within {}. For example "The Fragile {2CD,1,Left}", which will put the tags "ALBUM=The Fragile", "DISCTYPE=2CD", "DISCNUMBER=1", "DISCNAME=Left". It also adds additional tags like RIPTIME, and more. Then I have other wrappers to easily set/remove/edit tags, rename files (and put in proper directories) according to the tags, put the files in a database, etc etc...
Try doing that with MP3!
Gian-Carlo's libvorbis can be found at http://sjeng.sourceforge.net/ftp/vorbis/ and it is enabled in ogg123 by using "999" as bitrate.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Also, Vorbis is a VBR codec, so it would be better to compare against LAME VBR modes at similar bitrates (note: --abr is not a VBR mode, you need to use -v).
shorten is a lossless (and sometimes lossy, but who'd use that?) format popular among dead head geeks. See ETree.
It's not open source, but it's free($) for non commercial use, which any legal tape trading must be.
As cheap as space is these days, why not just stick with the aif format?
dBpoweramp music converter is the best that i've used so far and it has lots of codecs, like ogg and monkey's audio for example, and it can do ripping as well. You can get it at http://www.dbpoweramp.com
Now the tools are available in a Debian Package so I don't need to build them from the source anymore.
If you just want to rip some tracks for your home system, ogg is particularly nice on linux systems. The sound quality is excellent and the tools are relatively easy to use. Combine these with CD Paranoia and it is easy to make great backups of your cd music. I figure that the ogg vorbis developers have worked very hard for a long time on the project and they deserve for people to use and enjoy the fruits of their labors :-)
Clickety Click
If you search the vorbis/vorbis-dev mailing list archives, you'll find some more info about these.
Don't neglect to make the distinction between the format and the encoder. Both formats are well enough documented that writing a player is a trivial (in the mathematical sense) exercise, but writing encoders is an exercise left to the reader.
Right now, this only really applies to MP3s, but when vorbis becomes more widely accepted I'm sure we'll see commercial MP3 encoders ported over to the new format.
Stupid question, but how much do the vorbis encoder and the lame encoder have in common?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
If you are serious comparing MP3 encodings, I highly recommend getting something like the Stereo-Link (www.stereo-link.com).
Its a simple USB device that bypasses your sound card altogether; you just plug your stereo/headphones directly into it.
Soundcards, in general, suck for music reproduction. I have a SBLive, and didn't realize how bad it was until I got a Stereo-Link and a good set of Sonneheiser (spelling?) headphones.
Only downside is that I now need to re-rip all those MP3s I did at 160, since I can now hear some glitches/artifacts that were generally inaudible before. Damn annoying!
Right now I have found that if you want the best sounding music while not having huge files you should be using either the LAME codec and encoding at 192k Full Stereo, not Joint-Stereo. Or if your on windows you can use Fraunhoffer or LAME and encode at 192k Full Stereo as well. Also don't assume that just because you encode something at 192k its going to sound awesome. It totally depends on the encoder you are using. If you use Xing or some crap like that well expect to find artifacts and have some hissing. But with LAME and Fraunhoffer you should find the best results.
Erin Go Bragh!
I have found it valuable, in the world of MP3 at least, to pick and choose your bit rates according to the content you're encoding. For example, a majestic piece of classical music on CD released within the last five years should be encoded with the highest bit rate you can manage, for the simple fact that you are going to be able to hear technological deficiencies more easily. For less "well-defined" music (i.e. techno mixes, heavy guitar rock and the like), 128 or 160 is going to suffice because you are going to have more difficulty picking up on the "bad parts."
As a personal example, I tested various bitrates from 56 to 320 on a [digitally remastered] Miles Davis CD and the higher the bit rate the better it sounded. However, the same experiment on Metallica Master of Puppets resulted in little to no improvement (audible to me anyway) over 160 kbps.
It is always going to come down to HOW you listen to which kinds of music. When I'm "banging my head," I'm less likely to hear a tiny millisecond pop. When I'm floating along with something more subtle (jazz and classical in particular), if I lose definition in the higher range I'm going to be distracted.
I find the same to be true when I'm watching television on the ole dish. I hardly notice MPEG artifacting when I'm engrossed in a "high-octane thriller" [ouch], but if I'm watching a long dramatic dialogue I will see every digital flaw.
There is no right answer when you're attempting to compress and digitize entertainment. Your mileage will always vary.
Aaron
P.S.- It should be noted that most consumer-grade speakers top out at 22 kHz in terms of their high-range frequency capability, so you're already losing out on detail in your music, particularly in the high-end formats like HDCD, DVD and SACD.
seriously folks, most people listen to cds on equipment less than perfect, in conditions less than perfect (cars, diskmans, one of those refurbished flashing light disco tower things from circuit city). in this case the difference between burned and original cds is probably a lot less than the difference between the different things they get played on. i actually prefer lower sample rates for some things, in cars for instance it makes the music punchier over the white noise of road, engine, etc.
I think mp3 format will prevail even if ogg is superior, just due to the fact that everyone already has hundreds of mp3's. Who is going to take all their mp3's and convert them to ogg? No one(unless they are h4rdc0r3 :-p) And the availability of mp3 players makes the market for ogg players slim. I use mp3's, ripped at usually 192 or greater, and I have noticed that linux plays the same mp3 better than windows.
:)
I was wondering if anyone else has noticed a difference between mp3 sound quality under windows(winamp) and linux(xmms) with the same mp3. Is this true, or is it just my caffinated, sleep deprived brain?
The issue for me is not sound quality as much. I like MP3 and i like Ogg... I like Ogg because it has underdog appeal, and the files are a little smaller for comparable quality (not same bitrate). But the one thing that has not going all over Ogg instead of MP3 is this pesky little issue...
I run a PII 333, with relatively pimp expansion cards (geforce 2, sblive)... and for some reason, probably how winamp handles the Ogg decoding plugin, my system is more prone to hanging at the beginning of songs. Keyboard and mouse lag is the worst. When another program is demanding resources, the Ogg file skips. I guess it's just a more intense algorithm... but unless i get an Athlon, i'll have to pay with more hard drive space devoted to the CD's i've ripped.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Sound Blaster Live!
Juster+Sony speaker system (modified)
Lame 3.89 beta,
-d --verbose -q 0 --vbr-new -b 32 -B 320 -V 9 -p -k
doesn't take much room, uses the bits where it needs it, sounds great... anyone who says differently needs a psych test
I avoided WMA for years, since I was afraid of all the horrible things people were saying about it. I finally tried it, and at least to my ears, a 96K WMA sounds as good as a 160K MP3. OGG is about a wash vs. MP3, and it's not supported nearly as well, which gives me about zero reason to use it. I don't spend much time in Linux, which is pretty much the only area where OGG is better supported than WMA.
Which listening tests are you referring to? I'm pretty darned picky, and I can hear a difference. 96K is pretty bad on OGG and MP3, and very good on WMA, at least for rock music.
And I would urge everyone to do their own listening tests - I took the pepsi challenge, and WMA won hands down.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Now, as many people have said, ogg is better than mp3. And, yes, this is true. Im a professional musician, and I do use digital sampling to do my work. But since, as most musicians, Im poor, hard drive space is at a premium. I find that oggs sound _much_ better than mp3s, and on average sound better than mp3pro mp3s at the same bitrate.
I usually use this formula to encode stuff in different formats to compare them.
ogg 160kbps ~= mp3 256kbps ~= mp3pro 192kbps ~= wma 192kbps (though, I have yet to find a 192kbps wma encoder.)
Though, you should wait until 1.0 final comes out before you do any major archiving of music, since the most recent release canidate of 1.0 might still have bugs, though I am seriously doubting it.
Also, if you do wish to encode mp3s and oggs, I suggest you use lame (http://lame.sourceforge.net/) since it is considered the best mp3 encoder, and the 3.8x and later version can infact use the ogg/vorbis libraries to encode oggs. Plus, its gpl.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
Speaking of MP3 vs Ogg, has anyone heard new info about MP3 pro? When I did some experiments with it a couple of months ago, I was inpressed with the inprovements over regular MP3, with many of the issues that people have stated in this forum being reduced greatly.
I haven't directly compared OGG and mp3, mostly because I'm very happy with the quality of the mp3 encoding.
In my own testing, the r3mix.net settings were pretty much indistinguishable from the original in terms of frequency response. I did notice some changes in spatial effects. One of my CDs in particular was affected, Deepforest 2. With the original CD playing, the sound tended to bounce all around your head when wearing headphones. After being encoded by LAME, the sound still moved some, but it was much more granular. Most of the effect was lost. However, the actual FREQUENCY RESPONSE was awesome, and the only way I could really tell the difference was by listening very intensely. It is more than adequate for normal listening.
I did these tests about a year and a half ago, on LAME 3.81, and apparently it has improved quite a bit since. That team respects the r3mix site enough that they actually added in an '--r3mix' command line switch to implement all of their suggested settings at once. Apparently LAME now keeps more of the original signal; it's not quite so enthusiastic about assuming you can't hear certain kinds of noise. I'm hopeful this may have fixed the encoding issues I had with the earlier version.
Basically, given the fact that he has tons of space available, and given that there's all sorts of portable MP3 players in the world, I think he may still be happiest with MP3. I certainly am.
Equipment used: Non-golden ears, but decent ones. Soundblaster Live Platinum 5.1 (which has some frequency response issues with REAL audiophiles), Sennheiser HD 580 headphones for 'real' listening, Midiland S2 4100s (the older 2 speaker model) for casual music and gaming.
Aside: The 580s are AWESOME headphones, and you can often get them very cheap at auction. I got mine about two years ago for about $125. They have a reputation of having flaky connections. Mine did indeed have a problem when I first got them, which I solved simply by removing and replugging the wire in the bottom of the headphone. They are fully modular, easy to disassemble and clean, and sound INCREDIBLE. Two downsides: they really need an amplified headphone jack to reach their true potential, and they are big headphones. They're very comfortable but large.
Aside on the early model Midilands: great quality speakers, dismal amp. Hissy at any volume. Someday I'll move the way-cool little satellites onto a real amplifier, and will toss the subwoofer/amp in the trash.
Joint stereo means the encoder can switch between stereo (encoding the left and right channels independently) and mid/side stereo (taking advantage of the similarities between two channels - they don't have to be exactly the same, just similar). If the encoder switches between stereo and m/s stereo at the proper times, joint stereo should sound the best. It has a bad reputation because certain encoders (I think Xing) don't know when to switch to stereo, and it's very noticible if you're using headphones. Since headphones have perfect stereo separation, it will sound almost like the signal is going from stereo to mono randomly. But LAME and FHG both do a good job of joint stereo.
I have not tried Ogg - I'm not sure if it has the same sort of variable bitrate options, joint stereo, high-quality special voodoo etc. I'm happy with Lame.
Not yet. Vorbis is always VBR, but you can't do any advanced tuning. It will have options for this in the future. Vorbis has channel-coupling, similar to joint stereo, but some people say it produces a high-frequency hissing sound. It's a fairly new option (introduced in RC2), so it still needs some tuning.
Let me put it another way. We are already able to store WAV's in the lossless ZIP or CAB format, thus saving considerable space. In another generation of technology, CPU's and memory will be fast enough to make the decompression factor potentially negligible.
So go ahead and choose either OGG's or MP3's, I don't care. (I think either one is okay for now). Within a few years, however, there will be little reason to not have the original WAV's.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
Well, if what your saying us true (you have ample disk space and you are seeming to want very good quality songs) why don't you just do what you like better? Have a very good Ogg player? Use ogg. Have a good MP3 player? Use MP3. Have both or one that does both? Use your favorite... I would prefer MP3 since it is more portable, but you can do whatever.
I've been using LAME 3.89 for awhile, with the following command line:
lame -r -o -k -v -V0 -x -b128 -mj -h -q1
After much figuring and careful listening, I've found this to work well enough that I never hear the difference between the encoded file and its original wav. Average bitrate works out to 190-220kbps, depending on source material, which seems quite acceptable in terms of disk use.
Notice the lack of an upper limit on VBR bitrate on the command line; if you're going through all the trouble of doing VBR, why bother with arbitrary limits? LAME's VBR makes very minimal use of the bit resevoir - the same feature which allows it to work as well as it does on CBR encodings. Don't set limits. It's mathematically shown that you'll hear the difference, and you won't care notice the slightly increased filesize of having a few 320kbps frames - especially on a 100GB drive.
Equipment is as follows:
Recent ALSA
CMI-based sound card from Zoltrix
Audio Alchemy DDE 1.1, fed with TOSLINK from the CMI card
Rotel RTC-940AX preamp
Ashly FTX-1001 power amp
Midrange Sony headphones (which I don't have in front of me)
Speakers of my own build (parts from Vifa and Madisound, simple crossovers, -good- cabinets)
The magic here on the hardware end is the CMI card, which doesn't resample its digital output to 48KHz, like most other consumer devices (SBLive, Yamaha XG come to mind) - thus, it is bit-perfect. Being samplerate-locked causes a bit of trouble on non-44.1 files, as ALSA doesn't have good software resampling, but it's a CD player replacement - not a gaming machine - and for that, it works perfectly.
Kid-proof tablet..
The rio volt cdr-mp3 player's firmware is fully flashable, you download the latest firmware and burn it to a cd, put the cd in the player and turn it on, and it will flash its firmware to the version on the cd. Someone should figure out how to put their own firmware on there/hack into the firmware already available for this cd-mp3 player.
What about this new mp3-extension?
I am an audiophile, and listen to my music off of Sennheiser HD600 professional headphones (probably some of the best dynamic headphones on the planet). I can tell you straight off that if you encode your mp3s at --r3mix quality (www.r3mix.net for more info) you will be hard pressed to find any difference between your mp3s and the cds you took them from.
If you mean that the displayed bitrate constantly changes, I know a few people that hate VBR for exactly that reason. Some MP3 players have an option to show the average bitrate, you should see if yours does.
If the song's length keeps changing and the slider jumps around, your MP3 encoder is not adding a VBR header, or your player is not reading it. Old versions of LAME didn't add the header, but upgrading should fix that.
Usually I put my CDs in my stereo system, and play them while recording through the microphone on my computer. I find that I get a far richer and livelier sound this way. While I usually try and record a whole albulm to a single .wav file, I find that this has been eating away my harddrive space. As a result, I usually follow a five-step process which gives me the best size / quality ratio.
.wav
1) Compress to RealMedia
2) Decompress to
3) Recompress to MP3
4) Steganographically hide these MP3 files in my pr0n (so nobody finds those Creed albulms I ripped) (optional)
5) Zip, then Stuff-it
That's it! Now you too know the secret to getting the highest quality rips from all your musics!
Enjoy!!
i-can't-really-tell
Well, then why the hell do you care? It comes down to this: If it sounds good to YOU on your sound system, then that's the one you should pick. If you can't tell, then obviously it doesn't really matter. Why re-rip all your CDs to the other encoding scheme if you don't hear a difference? Asking other people what's better really doesn't matter in this instance. It's what YOU think.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Which look better, PNG or GIF files?
AC's cheerfully ignored
you should have replied to the poster's message, instead of to the top level. you've been here long enough to know that!
I don't use Ogg or mp3 for my stuff.. I use shn (from etree.org) instead, which is a lossless audio compression method that cuts the ripped wav file roughly in half. I listen with Sennheiser 495 headphones plugged into a headphone amp. Ogg and mp3 simply aren't good enough.
You just said "Bose" and "reproduce sounds *very* well" in the same paragraph. Sorry if I'm chortling right now...
Read the Bose Faq, and please be more careful with your future purchases.
>Deep bass tends to get crunchy VERY fast,
Sorry guy, that's your speakers talking. MP3 gets 'watery' when its compressed too much. Your drivers are likely made of plain paper. Read reviews of the product before you moderate. Some high, many, many, many rock-bottom low. And really, plain paper? My clock radio uses the same technology.
Really, I'm not trying to be a jerk, but before you spend mega-$$$ on anything again, look it up on the 'net. You just might be doing yourself a favour.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Wasnt there a similar thread? Well, not one that directly adressed this, but talked about the improvements in RC2, and resulted in the usual quality comparison arguments?
IMPO, its too early to tell about OGG. Its not 100% complete, and im not going to take the time to convert my collection of a couple 1000 songs (all 192k+ mp3 / mp+) just to do a quality comparison on an format that isnt complete.
Wait until the full thing is out, then repeat the question.
WMA 8 sounds better then either formats (especially MP3). No I'm not a troll, facts are facts. 64kbps sounds ok but isn't great. 96kbps is good enough for me, it sounds better than mp3's 128kbps. Also the stereo separation is much better. Oh, and WMA's play on my Rio Volt, which rocks.
I read an article about swedish internet radio station SPRAYdio. They said they were switching over to storing all music in a non-lossy compression format online on harddisks so that they could more easily support new compression formats. But that sounds expensive, and it was before the dot-com death.
I can't really comment on Ogg, since practically none of my files are ripped in that way. Most of my stuff is in 192kbps, anything below that and I can instantly tell.
I can hardly tell the difference between 192 and 256, and 320 isn't good enough for the size.
I much prefer listening to CDs though. I think neither MP3 nor Ogg can replace CDs.
BTW, Kenwood KRF-A4030 2x100W Amp, a pair of Bose 301, rated 75W, SB Live! 1024 and a Pioneer PD-5100 CD player.
in the words of the great Steve Albini.
Picky listening? For my money no digital format is all that good, not even CD let alone a lossy format like MP3 or Ogg. The warmth, the dynamics of vinyl records can't be beaten, especially if played through vacuum tube equipment.
May be one day when the sampling rate is high enough digital will approach analog quality. Audio DVDs have promise. Unfortunately the music industry oligarchs are not supporting it.
But if for convenience or out of necessity you compress, Ogg beats MP3.
My computer is a laptop. I will not carry around external hard disks for it. Therefore, the smaller my encoded music is, the more of it I can afford to have on the hard disk and take with me.
Therefore, the lower the bitrate of the encoding, the more music I can have.
I compared ogg to mp3 and didn't expect much difference... but ogg was the winner by a longshot. My ogg vorbis files average about 25% smaller than mp3's of equivalent songs and have superior sound quality. So, why should I go back to mp3?
SHN format rocks! It is a lossless audio compression format that is ~55% the size of the original wave. It is used primarily for online trading, uncompressing them. Even uses MD5 checksums to verify the files.
MKWAct is a good free encoder/decoder
Shnamp is a good free plugin for Winamp.
I ripped the Playstation Descent soundtrack to .wav, and proceeded to encode it to mp3. Problem was, there was one track with a particular instrumental arrangement that my normal 160K MP3 (LAME) just mangled. I tried various mp3 codecs, all the way up to the max of 320Kbps, and couldn't get it to sound correct. Then I tried Ogg Vorbis just for fun. Even 96K Ogg reproduces it correctly.
;)
Not exactly a scientific comparison, but a valuable example none the less. I've found that mp3's biggest problem is that it will mangle certain patterns in certain songs. Chances are, if you picked a random song out of my 1000+ playlist, it would sound reasonbly good at 128, or even 112 or 96. But there's a few in there, just a handful, that require 160 to sound ok, and a few (as above) that even 320 can't save. Try encoding Metallica's (heh, irony) "Until It Sleeps" at 128 or lower. When the main riff kicks in, you should be moved to vomit by how awful it sounds. Try again at 160 and it should be ok. If you can't hear it, consider yourself VERY lucky
On the other hand, if you admit your listening tends to be mostly casual (background while you work or party) and it's quite rare that you sit still in an otherwise quiet room, intently listening with your eyes closed to great speakers and equipment, then for God's sake, go with "popular". Nothing's more embarrassing than somebody carefully buying the best caviar, then eating it with mustard on Wonderbread.
I have 3000 MP3 files ripped at 128 from my own collection, the library, etc, used for background music, working at the computer, (noisy) parties, and my portable MP3 player that would only get a half hour if I used a high bit-rate. They're fine for those purposes.
If I want a better listening experience, it has to come from a quiet living room and my full stereo - in which case I have or can get the original CD!
CmdrTaco's periodic references to his large CD collection exemplify a common disconnect in the "information wants to be free" community (of which I count myself a member): while bemoaning the DMCA, SSCA, CPRM, and other greatest hits of the media hegemon, most "geeks" simultaneously fork over hundreds of dollars a year in essentially pure profit to that same hegemon, which is promptly forwarded to those despised lawyers and Senators. Enlightened spending is a much more effective weapon against corporations than letters to representatives. Major label revenues are already down in comparison with independents; a Slashdot-sized boycott with a clear ideological agenda could break the back of the fascist IP lobby forever. I wish prominent outlets like Slashdot, which have the potential to influence the buying habits of a massive faction of consumers, would set a better example in this regard.
Ever seen/heard an asx or wma/wmv?
Does microsoft realize that it makes stuff sound like its coming through a tin can?
!
I wonder why always people forget about main CD idea: audio CD doesn't have error correction. Developers of audio CD standard, back in 80's, though that nobody will notice loss of 100 harmonics out of 200 in 'regular' sound.
That's why there are so fscking expencive CD transports - they try to correct unavoidable loss of quality of CD's.
So, actually, whith cdparanoia, ogg vorbis and USB audio with external DAC you can get better quality than from CD. Especially, if you're listening from those cheap damn computer cdplayers.
Ok, the idea again: cd looses harmonics because of never-ideal reads, and ogg vorbis carefully removes unhearable parts of music.
eme
BTW, for more in depth discussion that has been ongoing, have a look at the forums at r3mix.net and the Ogg-specific forums at Hydrogen Audio. I keep up with both forums, and the folks there tend to make prerelease build binaries available for people to play with. For up-to-date detailed information without the overhead of the Vorbis-dev list, those are the places to go.
One more link for folks who want to know more: The beginning of the document describing Vorbis stereo discusses good terminology and qualification of subjective fidelity. It's nothing new to most posters I expect, but it might help keep the discussion consistent.
Happy hacking,
Monty
xiph.org
Shit, if you are getting a 100 Gig drive, why not just screw the lossy compression and just save the wave files? 100 gigs should hold 150 cds in wave format.
.... and while you're at it, why not increase your browser cache to 10GB so you can keep every web page you visit back a whole year??
The Answer: Because you don't NEED to store information you'll never use (or will never hear). That's the whole point of compression.
Also, it should be pointed out that 150 CDs is a fairly small collection, especially when singles are taken into account on top of that.
----- rL
Although I haven't tried OGG yet, I do have a reasonably hefty MP3 library. To answer the bitrate question, I try to encode (or download) at least 192kBps files. I recently upgraded my stereo to a $2300Can ($1500US) system and suddenly noticed that half of my MP3s sounded like shit. My previous (basically free) system was too lousy to notice any defects in the encoding.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
To me, at equal bitrates WMA 8 sounds considerably better than MP3 and for most of the music I tend to have around (rock & classics) a bit better than OGG.
I have a rather low-end setup: cheapo 2+1 speakers on a cheapo Yamaha 724 soundcard.
i havnt really tried ogg that much, but with my Klipsh Promedia 4.1's, 192k makes a noticeable difference above 128k, so thats what i usually rip at. while most modern speakers are well shielded, you gota make sure your subwoofer is in an appropriate stop because this can cause some inteferance.
I don't want to start listening to Ogg until the format name sounds cooler...
"MP3's with PCM ATA DIVX Encoding regulations BYOB with further RMS implications for BVD in the Matrix"
--or--
"Me man. Man want Ogg."
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
The post got me curious as I'd never tried ogg before so I downloaded the plugin for winamp and set about comparing the two formats. I pulled 30 seconds of a song (Electronic's Prodigal Son) to a wav and then encoded that wav into eight files, four files for each format. One for both mp3 and ogg in 64, 128, 192, and 256. I then added all nine files (eight encodes plus wav) to a play list and listened to them at random for a while. To be honest, I really couldn't tell the difference between anything in the 256 range. The ogg, the mp3, and the wav all sounded nearly identical. At 192, I could tell the difference (but not by much) between the encoded files and the wav, but not between each other. At the lower ranges, ogg sounded better, probably due to it's variable bit rate. My guess is however, that no one's considering encoding in 64 these days anyway.
As for what I'm running the sound through, I can't help but think it's all irrelvent. I mean, a good sounding mp3 will sound better than a crappy mp3 regardless of the system. You may be able to achieve higher quality sound via elaborate setups on high end consumer electronics, but the coded file hasn't changed. Seems to me like we were being asked which format was better, not what was the most important factor in determing sound quality. Any true audiophile probably wouldn't even play music on a computer unless he or she had to. I mean come on, do you really think a 100 dollar sound blaster card can do as much as a 2,000 dollar harmon kardon receiver?
In short, senor Taco, my expirience seems to be that if you're looking for good quality take the bastards up to 256 and use what you feel like, there's no difference I can distinguish. If you're looking to save a little space but maintain a decent level of quality, I'd go with ogg.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I have tested this about 6 months ago, i did it together with a friend of mine, who got a HUGE home hifi system, not huge in watts, but in price (25.000£+). We did it to determine what sounded best, we came to the conslusion that it was quite hard to hear difference between normal wave files and .mp3's encoded at variable bitrate (64k-256k). End of story!
check out the cvs code... it is even better than rc2!
Like a few others, this post inspired me to do my own test ...
I ran a comparison with four songs ("Black Crow," "Corner of the Earth," "Love Foolosophy," and "Little L," all by Jamiroquai) with low, heavy bass and crisp high-ends, plus everything in between. I compared each song at 128kbps OGG and MP3, and then with the WAV.
A lot of times, I could hear faults in the high-ends on the MP3. I heard 'em on the OGGs, too, but they weren't as bad, nor as common. The MP3's tended to distort the bass a lot more (though not much, still notable) than the OGGs. The OGGs were an average of 20KB bigger, but that's a small price to pay for better audio quality.
Naturally, the WAVs pulled both formats into a dark corner and beat the living hell outta 'em, but WAVs are big.
Result: OGG VORBIS!!!
> although not perfect
You got that right - the test was only done at 128 kbit/s! Yikes.
i became a fan of .ogg this summer, just because i thought it sounded better on my altec lansings. so when i came to school this fall, i couldn't resist challenging my audiophile next door neighbor/old roomate/good friend to test it.
.ogg, he made a 256k .mp3 with whatever encoder it is he prefers, and then we both decoded them back to .wav, and made a 3-track cd (the 3rd track being the song uncompressed).
.ogg.
i'd just gotten a wynton marsalis cd from amazon, so _carnival of venice_ was used as the testing track. i made a 256k
we did a blind test, kinda. put the cd in his player and set it on random. it was obvious that one track was better than the others (cd) and one was a lot worse than the others (mp3). the ogg sounded remarkably like the cd track, though there were some small things that allowed us to differentiate.
i'm not sure i'd be able to do so well on the same test using my computer speakers, of course. but the difference is certainly there.
test stereo setup:
CD Player: NAD 512
Integrated Amplifier: NAD 314
Speakers: Acoustic Energy Aesprit 300
Interconnects: Kimber Kable PBJ
Speaker Cables: Kimber Kable 4VS
of course, there are problems in the test in that we only tested one track, so the findings are only representative for the wynton marsalis genre. but it made me a fan of
i encourage everyone to try something similar and draw your own conclusions.
When listening to AM band radio, can you not tell how bad the quality is, and does it not affect the listening experience?
Isn't it percievable that there are people who feel the same way about the reproduction quality between, say, an RCA minisystem and onkyo/marantz components?
Why buy a bimmer when you can get a geo for tens of thousands less? Better performance.
I tried it here on the suggestion of a few of the other posters, and the quality seems to me to be -very- good. The compression isn't too bad either; I managed to get a fairly complex WAV of mixed sound effects from 770k to 210k with all the default options. I'm sure you could get it lower than that if you picked out different options as well. Added to that it's lossless :>
too lazy to even log in,
what about those high-fidelity cd's (or something like that) aren't they supposed to have a higer bitrate and require a "special" player to get the high-quality sound, but still be playable in old players?
I know they exist, that's about it, anyone have any indepth info on this?
Well,
.ogg files, I like ogg much better. It may be psychological, but I liked the format enough to switch my entire CD collection to it. I was also "wise" enough to refrain from buying a portable mp3 player, or other gadget that only plays mp3s, so I'm not at a loss there either. I'm willing to wait for a device that will play Vorbis files, but for now, listening to my music at work and home is sufficient for me.
I would have to say that after doing 256kbps mp3's for the longest time and then doing variable rate
So, what is a good MP3-enabled car player that will recognize multi-session discs? I don't feel like maxing out a CD at any given time and would prefer to add new songs as I require.
Another question is are the MP3 players today capable of playing MP3s if they're stored in directories rather than all having to be in the root directory?
i holeheartedly agree :)
SHN is GREAT!
no more lossy sound-like-shit mp3's for me
now if only we could get something like ProTools to use SHN as native files, sure there's quite a few audio engineers that would appreciate the savings in disk space
Because we all know that CD singles take up 650 MB on disk.
Random access.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is good advice. Everyone should do a little of this yourself, a little listening goes a looong way to cut through all the crap that's out there. But I think I know what you'll find.
First my qualifications, since that's a real issue here: Vandersteen 2Ce speakers + Rotel 2 channel preamp + separate power amp and a Pioneer CD player.
(won't go into connects and speaker cable.) I spent 6 HOURS + on just listening tests in the stereo shop to find this.
Anybody with a real stereo knows there is a tremendous variation in recording quality from one artist to the next. Even different recording from the same artist. I want to add to your advice: be sure to choose recordings of varying quality. If you do that this is what I bet you will find:
1. For bad recordings (bad in the not well done sense, not in the distorted sense), one of the mp3s will be your preference because all the annoyances you hear in the real thing will wash out.
2. You will always be able to find the real thing, except maybe on the medium good recordings where you'll have trouble telling the difference between the 300+ kbps and the real thing, where it becomes a trade off between recording badness or encoding badness. The bad recordings will be the most obvious because you'll hear all the crap (clumsy mix, bad micing, thin sound, etc.)
3. You will find "something else". Years ago, the first time I did a comparison of an mp3 and the plain track with just a $30 pair of headphones, the mp3 was better because I had ripped the plain track on a laptop CDROM and it sucked. (cdparanoia complaining all the way) At this point I realized that anybody not using cdparanoia would be completely screwed for ripping CDs. Any serious listening tests are likely to reveal faults in your audio path.
This opinion stems from my general experience and the following: I listen mostly to cd's but my wife brought home a cd she burned of some Cake tracks downloaded from the 'net. Apparently whoever ripped them did it right, because these 128kbps mp3s sounded better than some of the CDs I've listened to recently. It was really eye opening for me. The bass was clear and well-defined, as compared to some some pop/rock stuff which is still kinda thin and without body.
Just my current take on things, we've only had this stereo for 9 months and I'm still learning things. It's amazing.
Im not a fussy user, and so far i havnent downloaded any "crap" music, even at 56kbs! So I dont think there should be a huge debate about this!
Which is better, mp3 or ogg? While we're at it, which editor do you prefer, vi or emacs? Do you like Perl or Python better? Also, please briefly describe the best way to use braces and indent your code. Thank you.
I have about 500 mp3s or more (not that many compared to most :) and a couple hundred OGG format files, and With my SBLive! and Altec Lnasing 4.1 speakers OGG deffinitly sounds bettter at the same bitrate (128 or 192)
--
Sig? What sig?
I like Ogg Vorbis. I guess I never tried doing VBR MP3s, but I really hated how MP3s would consistently screw up `sss' noises (both from voices and from things like cymbal/hi-hat). I've been able to hear problems with Ogg files too, but they have deficiencies in much less common sounds.
Also, MP3s use coding methods that aren't optimal.. even if an MP3 file is encoded at an infinite bitrate, there can be compression artifacts.
I'm the guy who wrote up a 'sonogram encoder study' using a pathologically impossible waveform to encode, and then measuring how much different mp3 encoders fell apart, and in what ways. Like r3mix.net, I wound up supporting LAME, but with some explanations for what people find compelling about Blade and Fraunhofer, respectively.
You also should know that people have been pestering me to add Ogg comparisons for _ages_, even wanting to send me the files I couldn't encode myself on an OS 8.1 Mac.
Well, there have been some changes at Airwindows:
And so, _yesterday_, I set about getting a preliminary look at Ogg Vorbis using sonogram analysis on my Encoder Hell test sound- put in half a day on it, and updated my site to include the new information. And today, guess what turns up on Slashdot? Spooky.
Now, I need to emphasise that the process wasn't exactly the same as last time- I had to include some 'control' sonograms using the same mp3s that I used last time (Frau 128 and Blade 320, strong but idiosyncratic performers of known characteristics) for comparison. It's preliminary, and I don't want to immediately go into a complete shootout again because (a) it's such an undertaking and (b) I'm not at all sure I'm using a current Ogg version here. That said...
Here is the result of this early look at Ogg Vorbis, and I think I managed to sort of exactly what Ogg is relative to mp3. Quotes from the final report:
That is, to my mind, a pretty strong endorsement, requiring only that high bit rates be used (as is intended) As such, I think Ogg will only become more relevant as bandwidth and storage space inevitably expand. It also is, in my professional opinion, very well positioned to keep mp3 in check- mp3 can only maintain its dominance by not getting carried away with licensing and IP abuses, because Ogg is sonically superior enough to be able to take over _if_ given the opportunity of a situation involving harsh mp3 licensing, given widespread use of higher bit rates rather than low ones. (This is why I dismiss WMA- it belongs to yesterday, an era of limited storage space and harsh licensing restrictions)
Now, about iTunes? I have some observations that I'd love to learn more about. Basically, I picked up iTunes because there's a patch making it possible to install on system 8.6, and I did that- only to be startled by a distinct difference in sound quality which I have the background to interpret. Briefly, it sounds like iTunes dithers its mp3 output to 16 bit, instead of truncating it.
A bit of background: any decoder, either mp3 or Ogg or whatever, is effectively synthesising a waveform from limited information. It's adding harmonics together to produce a linear PCM representation that's piped to the sound output hardware.
I suspect everyone making mp3 players has been simply truncating the waveform to 16 bit on the assumption that it's low quality anyway and doesn't matter... until iTunes... which has startlingly better dimensionality and depth than any other player I've heard.
However- there's no patent on the general concept of dithering. Some of the fancier ditherers and noise shaping algorithms are proprietary, but I happen to know many that are actually GPLed...
It's exciting to see the pieces of a truly superior free audio technology come together...
You might call me a digital audiophile. I like to try different audio packing formats and compare the results.
OK, about the test gear: I've got a TerraTec EWS XL 64 soundcard with a very pure output. The output goes to a Behringer Eurorack mixer, and from there to MB Quart 400-series earphones. A very decent set of audio gear, I might say.
MP3, no matter what the encoding software might be, doesn't sound too good to my ears. It has troubles with the high frequencies, so music types like techno and metal don't do well with their cymbals and high-pitching synths.
Ogg, on the other hand, sounds extremely good. The only bad thing I can say about it - and this is mostly a vague feeling - is the stereo image. It seems that Ogg encoding narrows down the stereo separation a bit. Not much, but just a little bit. I don't know how this could be possible, or is it due to players, or just my imagination.
Some say, that Ogg needs market penetration, Ogg isn't popular, etc.. Who really needs the Ogg players? I use MiniDiscs anyway, because they are handy and good for portable recording. The real issue here is of a personal kind. What do you like, can you really tell the differnce, what do you need, etc.. It's rather pointless to argue on what's better, because the only thing you need to consider is what suits your needs best.
I wanted to give Vorbis the ultimate stress test, seeing whether I could stand its sound at 40 kbps or not. This is the bitrate I would use for my mp3 player if it didn't sound so damn awful in mp3.
I couldn't get ogg under 64k (which sounded surprisingly good, like 112k or so mp3 - good enough for El Cheapo earplugs). IIRC "low bitrate support" came around RC1. Any hints on that?
c:\progra~1\LAME\lame.exe --r3mix *.wav *.mp3
"You techies disgust me!"
You modern whippersnappers disgust me! Whenever I want to listen to music, I have a band come to my house.
Secrecy corrupts democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
I have had good results with variable bit rate encoders that use higher bit rates for the peaks and lower bitrates for the flattened parts of the signal where the extra bits would be wasted. If space is an issue this can save you some KBs that when amortized over a large collection can add up to hundreds of MBs. SoundForge has a variable bit rate MP3 encoder and there are others. I am not aware of an open source product that provides the same level of quality with regard to variable bit rate encoding but I have not spent much time looking. If you simply dont care and have tons of space then higher bit rates are preferable. 256 and higher all sounds the same to me.
well last I knew cd's where encoded at about 160kbs. So then why go 300kbs. I evenk know some cd's runing at 192, but 300 is just a waste of space. If you think you can hear a diffrence between cd riped music between 192 and 300, then there is a problem
my 2 cents plus 2 more
Lame VBR at max an output of ~160 is really nice. Makes a nice compromise between space and quality (and for speach it beats everything).
As for Ogg, it just needs to mature a bit more. Mp3 took a long time to get to were it is now.
If you have your no-name it-came-with-your-computer speakers, you won't tell much of a difference between the various bitrates. But if you blew off $100 at Best Buy for some nice speakers and a subwoofer, you'll be able to tell.
Going from 128kbps to 256kbps is pretty noticeable. frequencies are more accurately produced all around, and some sounds that are in the background of the music sort of get cut out at 128kbps. For example, if there's some subtle tamberine sound in the background, you probably won't hear it too much with 128kbps, but you sure will with 256kbps.
From 256kbps to 320kbps, you have to pay VERY close attention to tell, but once again, there's a very subtle difference. Frequencies are produced a bit more accurately. I can barely tell the difference myself, so it's probably better to stick with 256kbps if you're concerned about saving space.
I go 320kbps everytime I encode a CD. I paid $15 for it, so I better damn well be listening to it at the best quality possible.
The encoder is important as well. I use Soundjam MP or iTunes (same thing basically). They are very good encoders. I have never heard a single pop, crack, or whistle that those PC encoders can do. They're both very fast and developed programs. For maximum speed, I use Soundjam. I usually have iTunes open for playing MP3s (sounds better), so if I'm lazy I'll use that, but it's slower. They both take advantage of dual processors and altivec, so a dual G4/800 should encode at like 25-30x. I know a dual G4/450 can do it at 12x in Soundjam. Very impressive speeds. My G3/280 can do it at...pay attention now...5x!! WOOHOO!!
A 128kbs mp3 does not sound too bad if you put it though some good sound filters specificly for your speakers.. i use a dfx plugin does wonders for my system,
Wait til they get legislation passed preventing the manufacturers from creating units that don't include "copyright protection technology."
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Umm... don't you guys remember this article?
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
I like MP3. The "EM" is a nice hard sound to start with, and transitions nicely into the rhyming "pee" and "three" to lead into the next word.
"Ogg" just makes me feel like I'm choking on a donut.
:-)
sig fault
When I decided to rip my music collection, I decided on flac, an awesome lossless codec than averages around 50% compression.
Lossless compression obviously sounds (literally) perfect now, but makes more of a difference for the long-term health of your digital music collection. If you had ripped everything to mp3 last year, and then this year decided to convert your mp3s to Ogg, then your music would have gone through two generations of lossy encoding (or you would have gone through the effort of ripping everything all over again). Not good, especially if a more desirable codec is going to come along next year... Besides, your hard drive size is going to grow exponentially, and in a few years you're going to feel pretty silly having a compressed, shittier-than-original-fidelity music collection that takes up a miniscule percentage of your hard drive.
If you want to stream your music and don't have a spare T1 to saturate, then you can always convert to mp3/Ogg/Codec-du-jour on the fly (if you're not serving tons of streams), but the important thing is that a lossless encoding of the original bits sits on your hard drive.
I recently did some tests (ABX) to determine which format could get by with fewer bits, and still have me not be able to tell the difference. My conclusion was that for a significant number of songs (about 20% of the ones I tested) I could easily distinguish 320kb/s lame from the original. That's not to say that I would have noticed it in normal listening, but when I listened carefully I could tell everytime. There were a few places where it sounded really tinny, and I believe that I would tell in normal listening.
With ogg I only found 2 songs where the same is true (and that's at the max ogg setting, which worked out considerably smaller 320kb/s), and even with them I struggled to tell the difference; I know I would never notice this in normal use.
This is running off my home PC (complete with noisy athlon fan), SBLive, and some pretty decent speakers, but no audiophile stuff. I now use ogg for all my music. I would use wav, except that xmms's playlists don't work properly with wavs, for some reason.
I disagree, you should do these tests on the best audio system you can find, because the files you will be producing are archival. You can always upgrade your playback equipment, but once encoded you can never upgrade this source material.
How about using 48bps compression on the same cd source and see how each sounds.
The one that sounds better should sound better at 256 or higher. Wouldn't the audio artifacts that appear at the high compression still be there at lower compression, only less noticable?
If this sounds plausable, then comparing the two is simple? no?
It is so hard to find songs from independent lables that are freely (legaly!) distrubted at over 128Kbit Mp3 anyways, that shoot, I don't really have much of a choice.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
They both sound like crap compared to my old reel-to-reel tapes played on my Studer A77, thru my Mackie HR824's. Regardless, with any decent digital hi-fi system if you play a mp3 or other compressed format, versus the CD you will notice a difference in sound quality. I don't care what anyone says.
This on top of the fact that the 16 bit 41 khz signal you get from a CD is lowsy compared to the analog/24 bit digital your music was probably originally recorded in. I can't see why anyone would continue to slaughter the signal even more by applying one of these lossy compression formats (other than to disseminate your music over the internet or something, that's worth the compromise I think.) Especially if you've got a 100 gig harddrive.
Man, if quality is such an issue just buy a turntable and get LPs. For top-notch mp3s you can hook it up to you computer with maybe $15 worth of cables. Mp3s and Ogg music just lets you listen to the song before you go out to buy it. Since you don't want it badly enough to pay money for it just be happy with what you've got. Incidentally is it really that much of a surprise that you get artifacts in compressed music? I mean, an average mp3 will get you a 9:1 or 10:1 compression ratio. Regardless quality still depends on the encoder and setup of the person ripping the CD.
Large animal tranquilizer, you're my only friend.
I use Mp3's for a practical aspect.. like for long trips I have the RioVolt so when I'm driving for 8 hours I don't have to mess with switching CD's on the fly as well as I don't have to mess with spending gobs of money on a CD changer that I have to pay someone to put in my next car.. The portable I just unplug and take with..... As for ripping my music .. the only reason I do this is to mix between albums for long sets of time.. Otherwise I stick to just listening to singles CD's or Records.. Yes and I did say Records.. I love vinyl.. i just haven't scrounged the money yet to really invest in more vinyl stuff and a better sound system to play records on. Anyways.. with that said I still use the bitrate I started with which is 128k ... for me yes, you can here a difference if you're really listening for it but that small small loss for most music is worth it to not have to dealing with changing CD's every 45 to 70 mins of an 8 hour trip.. as well as not haveing to reconvert everything to a higher bitrate... really I say if you're going to spend the time to go to a higherbitrate then just goto a lossless codec as a previous reply suggested..
Who makes you Sig?
Short answer: Yes. That is, once you find a sampling rate for which (1) you can't hear any difference, or (2) the difference you hear doesn't bother you, then go with that one, and spend your money on upgrading your audio chain instead of buying bigger hard drives.
Longer answer: It's not a static, answer-it-once-and-forget-it process. The better the gear, the better it will be at showing up the flaws in whatever you're playing. And the more "educated" you become as a listener, the more sensitive you will be to the flaws that are there. Either of these factors can make today's "acceptable" recording be "unacceptable" tomorrow. So repeat your comparison periodically. You may change your mind.
If you're using MP3s primarily for storage/handling convenience (and if you'll have future access to the source material), use the lowest sample rate that will do the job for you today. But be prepared to find that once you've upgraded your equipment, you may find yourself disatisfied with your recordings.
But beware: If you're planning to keep your music for a while, especially if you won't be able to re-rip it, I'd suggest that at minimum you use a sampling rate that generates no perceptable difference (to you) now. I've got a lot of stuff on 1/4-inch quarter-track tape that I dubbed in the 60s and 70s at 3.75 ips. Most doesn't get played any more, but the gems that do make me want to kick myself for not spending the extra buck or so that it would have cost to double the recording speed (with better frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio) at the time.
Always try to use your best technology for the irreplacable stuff, even if you can't hear the difference. Today that means high sampling rates and lossless compression. Thirty years from now, you'll be glad you did.
I have found the Ogg32 works really well. The fact that it is an open type format is what really makes me prefer it.
This seems attached to the wrong comment...
anyway, someone asked about the Super Audio CD.
I have a sony-booklet in front of me which says:Super Audio CD, 0-100kHz vs 20kHz of a normal CD and it also says 120dB, which doesn't say much to me. But to look it up here are to model-numbers
that play SACD: SCD-555ES and SCD-XB940QS, both Sony.
Hack hack hack.
I would like to point out that someone with the hearing of a dog would still be unable (in my opinion) to tell the difference between something burned at 128, and something burned at 192. My real problem with burning above 128 is that some CDs don't allow you to play them if they are burned above 128.
The sound there is always the best !
My last comment was marked "flamebait" so I'll try this again.
It doesn't matter which is "better" I don't see OGG car stereos, OGG home stereos, OGG portable players. We may, and when we do I'll be one of the first to give ogg a try then. Maybe I'm just a rare case but I don't JUST listen to music on my computer, I also like to listen to music in my car, in my living room, when I'm out working in the yard, and other times, and that's where Ogg loses, it can have the most awesome sound in the world, if I can't listen to it in my car or anywhere else BUT my computer it just doesn't matter.
Call it flamebait but that's simply how it is, when the day comes when I need to decide "MP3 or OGG in my system" then I'm gonna care a LOT which sounds better, until then it's a moot point, if I can't pop a burned CD full of ogg files into my home stereo/car stereo or dump a couple gigs of OGG to my portable player then I dont care which is better.
--- www.f-theocean.com
The flac site has a feature-oriented comparison of various lossless codecs. The Monkey's Audio site has a performance-oriented comparison (they compare an older version of flac, unfortunately).
For those who are listening to your mp3s over your hifi system, consider investing in an external DAC and put it between your soundcard's digital out and your amplifier.
The reason is that the soundcard is a very bad position for digital-to-analogue conversion to take place, due to the presence of all sorts of interference in the computer casing. Furthermore, the electronics on the soundcard are usually not good enough to properly drive your line-out RCA cables (or worse, stereo jack out).
Audiophiles will claim that putting an external DAC between your CD player and amplifier makes a world of difference. From my own experience, putting it between your soundcard and amplifier gives a real improvement even to non-audiophiles.
Cheap but good entry-level DACs can be gotten from $200-$300. (Check out Cambridge Audio, AMC etc.) Its shelf life is at least 8-10+ years, and so IMHO is a very worthy investment, especially if you listen to a lot of mp3s over your hifi system.
I've done personal tests and compared the quality of 320 mp3 ( max bitrate ) to 160 WMA ( max bitrate ). To me, every wma file sounds a lot better than the mp3s and it takes considerable less space. About half. Maybe Microsoft got something right.
Mp3 sounds like shit at anything below 192kbps on any decent set of speakers, and even 192 is merely tolerable.
.vqf from the original .wav, using a nice set of speakers. The thing is, these things are encoded at 96kbps, which is amazing. When trying out any encoder though, make sure you have it set to 96 at high quality and then go make a sandwich. The only downside to these things is they take forever to encode.
Try out TwinVQ (www.dalnetvqf.com). In an admittedly informal (though blind) test, some acquaintances and I could in no instance distinguish a
The SPL is the sensitivity of the speaker. Because dB are logarithmic, a +3 dB change represents twice as much sound output. The SPL is a measure of how much sound output there is per watt.
My argument about the resistance (Ohms) doesn't hold water though because when you change the power (watts), not the current or voltage, it reflects the change in resistance. The equation is Power = Current^2 * Resistance. As far as the amp is concerned, though, if it it can handle more current putting a 4 Ohm speaker rather than an 8 Ohm on it will effectively double the volume coming out of the speaker at the same level on the dial. Oh well, I guess I shouldn't post when I'm tired!
Anyways, back to the meat of the matter. Because the 93 dB speakers are 4 dB more sensitive than the 89 dB speakers you'd get more sound out of them than the 89 dB speakers (if they were 50 Watts to begin with -- at 25 Watts I'm wrong. Oh well).
Basically SPL is a measure of efficiency of the speaker. Sorta like Gas mileage. Higher is better (but watch that the distortion rating is OK).
There's more info here.
I have a screwed up ad from Radio Shack displaying a 50 watt subwoofer @ 116 dB sensitivity for $199. I seriously doubt that anyone would tolerate a subwoofer that loud in their home, nevermind that at that price it isn't possible (yet).
HTH
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
..this is what and why I do.
thhp://minitunes.kentidwell.com/
Isn't this MP3 vs Ogg thing sorta like the old VHS vs Betamax battle of the 60s/70s? Remember that Betamax was actually the higher-quality format of the two, but that VHS won out anyways. And then, a few decades later, DVD came along and is pretty swiftly crushing it.
Use your cheap MP3s now and when telepathic music comes along, remember the good old days when you had something to complain about
Try LPAC instead. When you invest in many thousands of dollars of audio equipment like I did, you don't want lossy compression. I own a Minidisc recorder for recording things off the radio, but otherwise, good mid-fi equipment or better (right about where I'm sitting is what I'd call mid-fi) demands you chuck all them (WMA, MP3, OGG, etc.) out the window for serious listening.
Since I run around a fair bit and I have an AVC Soul (OEM Clone to the Rio Volt) I prefer to have my collection in MP3 format encoded at 128kbit. Since there's a fair amount of ambient noise from my surroundings I can't really notice the subtle difference from my original CDs played over my custom designed Hi-Fi system.
However recently I have made a docking seat for my AVC Soul on my Hi-Fi system so I've been re-encoding my MP3s atleast at 192kbit to preserve most of the quality. Admitedly I would prefer a lossles compression system but until my portable player supports such a format I guess I'll be using MP3 till then.
come on people. i get sick and tired of reading these debates on the sound quality of mp3s, oggs and the sound that comes out of a computer. fact is, unless you put together a pro music system (and sometimes not even then) you're not going to get anything other than low fidelity sound out of a computer.
think about it. get a sound card for $100 and it will have some $20 worth of components on it. analog digital converters - $1 each. ten cent op amps. cheap resistors. little or no power output (hey, even line level preamplifiers have to have headroom even if it is only about a tenth of a watt). your average boom box has better sound than the audio section of a computer.
usb speakers displace the burden of generating good sound from the computer to the usb speakers. but if you expect to get good sound out of such a system, expect them to cost about $1,000 (couple a hundred each for the analog digital converter and analog amplifier stages and the rest for the speaker drivers. and that still assumes the computer is going to feed them with clean error free digital feed.
bottom line is that you can have a digital source file equal to, say 96 kilohertz pulse code modulation or 20 megahertz delta modulation or whatever, and no computer will be able to make it sound better than a bad boom box or clock radio. they just don't have the analog audio hardware to do it. even the portable players can't do it. the digital electronics are too expensive. by the time you factor in the cost of the digital electronics stage (memory and cpu), there isn't enough money to make a decent analog section without making the device too expensive for the market.
add to that mp3s and oggs are lossy digital formats and you know you're not going to get anything other than tinny lo fidelity sound.
which leaves me constantly wondering. what is the purpose of these sound quality debates? mp3 or ogg, wmv or realaudio, they all sound like crap. you might as well use the same criteria as you use to pick out a boom box - just get the heaviest system. and base your decisions on the only reason why you use mp3s in the first place. which is cheapest and has the most convenience features.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Go on everyone, keep ripping at various rates, then VBR, then ogg and spend your time.
I am very happy myself ripping using lame at 256kbit/sec for all of my own CDs.
The advantages?
* It is a much faster to rip than with VBR.
* The quality is good enough that i feel this is an acceptable backup of my music suitable for reburning normal CDs should the originals die a microwave death.
* I rip it once and never have to rerip it for different size or quality.
* My Aiwa CDC-MP3 car stereo displays the time position in the song properly (it plays vbr fine but shows the time wrong)
* I can fit 8-10 albums on a single CD-ROM. I'll have to buy gas or use the bathroom before having to change that CD in the car.
Ogg may be a nice open standard (three cheers for that!) but unless it gets mainstream cheap player hardware acceptance (cheap car stereos, portable cd-r players, etc.) it won't hit mainstream.
VBR encoded stuff sounds good, that's true, but there is no economical reason to try and save that last little bit of space.
Why not write a simple program to compare the waveforms of the orignal .wav file, and the decompressed .ogg or .mp3 files. This way the test will not be so subjective (as is the case with the human-ear test that seems to be so popular). Mabye somone has already done this? Or mabye I'm missing somthing...?
Ok, we got many things (using lame style names):
CBR = Constant bit rate = Variable quality
VBR = Variable bit rate = Constant quality
ABR = Target bit rate = Variable but not as much quality
OGG normally uses a form of ABR, but is capable to do true CBR and true VBR as well (not sure which versions enabled for).
Also, even if you are using true CBR, there is little room for flexibility in the form of the "bit reservoir"; you can save some bits in the "easy parts" so they can be better spent in the hard parts.
Second, mp3, being open in some way or another, has the side effect of many encoders available. Different encoders produce different quality. Take 4 192kbps mp3s encoded with 4 different encoders, and you will discover quality differences as day to night.
And to use Lame properly, first, let me suggest that you *at least* use Lame 3.89b. Lame 3.70 is *too old*. If you get Lame 3.90a, even better.
Want to be on the safe side? use this single option:
lame --dm-preset standard
This will produce near 256kbps files, and its the hightest quality you can get out of mp3s.
If you think you can live with 192kbps like files, then use
lame --r3mix
Otherwise stick to the normal, don't apply options you don't know much of. Typically you *always* want -h, and -b for the desired bitrate in case of CBR, or minimun frame bitrate for audio in the case of VBR (usually 112 or 128). ABR is VBR attempting an average bitrate. And no, it is not wise to use option -B at all (let the encoder use up to 320kbps frames when using VBR).
If this topic of lossy compression is of interest for you, then you should visit:
Proyect Mayhem, channel #Project_Mayhem at irc.openprojects.org
and
r3mix.net, channel #r3mix at irc.openprojects.org
Um... on side note, have you seen The Wavelet Tutorial yet? Wavelets are planned for Ogg Vorbis 2.x, stay tuned... :)
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Ac3 wins, dvd uses them and you can burn them to CDRs and play on even CDplayers which output to ac3 capable AMPs, and they are 5.1 too which OOG IS NOT.
As near as I can tell, the DRM stuff only kicks in if the file itself is copy-protected/DRM'd somehow. It shouldn't gum up non-protected files (Like .oggs and most .mp3s)
Anybody have a Dennon Test CD or digital equivilant? Anyone have a distortion anlyzer? Osciliscope? Spectrum display? Take a CD of some of the sine wave tracks (direct digital mastered) and encode them into the various formats. Check the results. I am interested in THD, S/N ratio, Jitter, and ailising frequencies. Anybody up to this and posting repeatable test results? Lets find out what the artifacts are on a 20 HZ bass signal as well a 440 HZ and 3 KHZ. I have part of the test equipment needed to perform the tests. My amp is rated at 0.005% THD which is below the capibilities of my test equipment to measure it.
The truth shall set you free!
The only downside is having to get up to turn the record over every twenty or so minutes....
Tom.
Oh arse
Well
Explenation: A cognitive dissonance is a state where there is a gap between your "beliefs" (cognition) and behaviour. Cognitive dissonance is a very unhealthy state to stay in, so people usually "resolve" cognitive dissonance by either altering their beliefs or behaviour. Quite often, the former is easier to alter.
So, in the case of buying an extremely expensive HiFi equipment, if you do not believe the sound quality worth the investment, you will be in cognitive dissonance, and hence to resolve it you convince yourself there is nothing remotely like the 10k USD tube-based amplifier you just bought
In other words, Cognitive dissonance is not the process of changing your beliefs, but the reason for doing it.
1) Ogg just sounds better. To me at least.
2) Oggs are much smaller. They take up less space than Mp3s do.
3) Ogg is c00l, Mp3 is n0t.
4) Ogg isn't finished yet, so it's going to get even better.
5) Make sure you have the latest Ogg Encoder; most of the complaints about Ogg were by people using old versions.
I had the advantage of living near an excellent audio store here in Seattle, of which I availed myself before buying my audio gear. They have an excellent page on exactly how you should structure your listening tests: you should listen to the tune.
(The rest of this comment is a small rant; feel free to ignore it.)
I ended up buying my integrated amplifier from NAD (which has the added benefit of a humorous name), CD player from Marantz, and speakers from Axiom. (You can't imagine how good these inexpensive speakers are.) I aimed for decent sound in my office without spending too much money. I'm not an audiophile, but I also know a particularly obvious imperfection will bother me. The system is pretty well-balanced for the price.
After replacing my crapomatic integrated bookshelf stereo in the office with decent components, the issues of MP3/OGG/etc. became irrelevent. They're all crap, and your only options are separating less stinky crap from really stinky crap, if you're listening to generated waveforms coming from your internal DAC. My SGIs, which spank any PC with an internal sound card for fidelity and noise level, don't even match up.
I really want to try one of the USB-connected external DACs, because I like the ability to manage my entire CD catalog from one place, without having to switch CDs. However, I couldn't continue kidding myself that the sound from the computers was the least bit faithful.
I saw this neat comparison on the web quuite recently. It had audiogrammes that showed just how much was missing. As far as I could see MP3 won the contest.
Personally I use 192kbs MP3 since I cannot tell the difference between that and a CD.
128kbs though has poor base and no treble.
The encoder has a lot to say! Xing encoder is blazing fast but cannot compete with LAME in quality.
I don't thinking anyone is going to read this late comment but what the hell.
i n/
/ in_mad-0.13.1b-pre1.zip
I not sure anyone here has heard about it, there is a free winamp plug-in mp3 decoder call MAD, which can be used to replace the default decoder that comes with winamp. In my opinion it produces great/better quality.
Here is the site :
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plug
The latest is 0.13b, but you can try the prelease 0.13.1b pre1 (which I'm using now) at :
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin
this one doesn't come with an installer, just place it in your winamp plugin directory & disable the default mp3 decoder.
Havers, matey. OGG is capable of up to 256 channels, each encoded seperately.
I'm in the process of doing a multi-room setup, but I haven't settled on which DACs to use yet.
My idea is to pipe around SPDIF on coax cable, but again, I haven't tried this out yet.
I can't comment on which sounds better, ogg or mp3, but what I can comment on the the "sufficient" quality of mp3's. I do some amateur PA work, and my brother is studying to become a sound engineer. Between us we have access to a wide range of playback options ranging from cheap headphones to professional studio gear.
I record all my mp3's at 192 and for just about every computer based situation this is just fine. You PC has so much noise, and in most cases quite cheap and nasty sound cards (not many people are lucky enough to have a turtle beach or better). That combined with cheap speakers or your average pair of headphones (say £25 sony lightweights) you just can't tell the difference without listening very carefully.
Yeah, sure, if you playback on a really nice sound card linked up to studio gear, then yes the differences between an MP3 and a CD are glareingly obvious even to my not very well trained ears. But unless you are sitting down to do nothing but listen to your music then I don't think it's worth much better quality that 192 MP3. Having said that, if you really care and are "listening" to your music not just having it in the background, then rip WAV files, get a high end sound card, decent interconnect etc. Or (much cheaper and easier) just use the CD.
For most PC speaker systems and cheap headphones, I would recommend using MP3 at 160 or 192, but check for yourself. MP3 an album with various bit rates of MP3 (with the same encoder) and compare for yourself - it all depends on what your ears find acceptable, if you are happy with your 160 MP3's then I would stick with that, if you are only listening casually it really isn't worth the effort.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Live music sounds the best. Get out, have some fun and pay for some music for a change. You might even meet someone and fall in love.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
CmdrTaco and learn the difference between then and than.
Which is faster, my Pinto or your Rabbit? My pinto is a 6-cylinder, but the Rabbit is a turbo-diesel. Could be close!
Here's the answer. THEY BOTH SUCK!
Hey, even a $200 bookshelf stereo playing a CD is going to sound better than either compressed format out of your standard PC sound system, even one of the expensive sets. Music is made for two speakers. The subwoofer distorts everything through it. Four speakers is just wrong. They don't make two-speaker PC sets that are going to be any good at real music reproduction.
If you care about sound, what are you doing with compressed source?
- Sig this!
Why does everyone think that the SBLive! sounds good for music. It doesn't. It is horrible! The card is great for gaming, but sound quality is quite bad compared to cards that are even older than it is. Don't even let me get started on Creative's speaker sets.
I suggest that anyone looking for a new soundcard should go for a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or that New Hercules or Phillips card. These all sound MUCH better than the Live! or Audigy cards. heck... The Santa Cruz even works in Linux. I think that the Hercules and Phillips cards use the same chipsets too, so they might also work. Give it a shot. I am sure that you will be pleased.
I get a funny problem with one set of mp3s all downloaded off the artist's website www.tonycarey.com. In windows/winamp they were never a problem, in Xmms, they all sound like they are on 45rpm or faster. And only those mp3's too, it weirds me out.
---
The AC I'm replying to is the only onw who pointed this out.
Please don't ask "which track sounds the best". Provide the track numbers of the original WAV files, and ask "which track sounds closest to the original".
If you mix the original WAV file in with your double-blind comparison, you will be picking which one you like, not which one is most accurate. What if your personal preference is for more bass than the original was mixed with? If one of the encoders is muddy, you might pick that over the most accurate.
To do it right, you'd have to double-blind all the various encodings and listen to them back to back with the original WAV file and see which one matches it best. And I wouldn't take the extra step of going back to WAV, as you'd be introducing another encoding layer that may introduce different artifacts.
Nope, no sig
[You don't need to reboot, as] WMA is already a Windows format.
The WMA player cannot run on workstations that do not contain Intel processors, even with a reboot. You have to run Windows Media Player in Bochs, and even the mighty SPARC and Alpha processors can't decode WMA in real time.
Will I retire or break 10K?
LAME is free, and currently legal.
Yes, but not in the United States of America.
Of course those scumbags at Thomson claim it's not legal.
The patents encumber the way MPEG audio layer 3 itself works (polyphase filter, then mdct, then bit allocation, then huffman coding; reverse the process for decoding), not just the techniques used in Fraunhofer's encoder. Of course, it may be possible to create a conforming MP3 file without stepping on patents in theory, but like the "uncompressed GIF," it's probably highly not worth it.
Of course, Thomson isn't the final say in what's legal and what isn't
Unless they have enough money to pay lawyers to filibuster the trial long enough that the defendant runs out of money to pay its lawyers. This situation constitutes still more evidence of a flawed legal system.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe for you, but not for 95%+ of people out there. For them, ogg (and probably you) are irrelevant.
Feel free to convert all your music to a format most portables can't use. Feel free to take up more room, and buy into the conspiracy theory of open source.
True, but drinkypoo's comment referred to those lossy codecs used for distribution of media to the consumer, not for nonlinear editing within an organization that has licensed rights to reproduce the content with maximum quality.
I think I've heard of lossless compressed-audio codecs, but I can't recall any names off the top of my head.
You mean FLAC?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Best of all, when you work out the cost per CD, SHNs only use about 40 cents of storage for an average length CD, so it might be a bit more than you spend with mp3, but it means that a $27,000 CD collection would fit on about $600 of hard drive, and that ratio is only getting better.
Because dB are logarithmic, a +3 dB change represents twice as much sound output.
However, your ears have a cube-root response to sound pressure, meaning that you need +9 dB to get a subjective "twice as loud" percept.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, I'll agree, on a Mac you need one because of the 31 character limit.
Not necessarily. On a Mac, you can keep your MP3s in folders, like this: ...:Rock:Stale Circuit:Die.mp3. Most napclones will index folder names; try doing a WinMX search for "Windows" or "My Documents" or "AOL" to see hundreds of possibly irrelevant results that come from indexing paths above the shared-folder level.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Isn't that what it is all about?
Compressing sound in a lossless format is all about 'hacking'. You cut corners in order to get the performance you want while loosing the performance you don't care about.
If you really wanted to keep all of the information in the music you would use raw WAV files [possibly losslessly compressed in some way, I guess Shorten does this]. I suppose you could go so far as to say that you shouldn't ever use CD's anyway, because they aren't as good as a live performance. There's more that could be said here, but it really gets off the point.
Anyway, I'm glad that the people at Xiph are 'hacking' more features into OGG's. That is what will allow them to be even better at what they do. Compress music in a lossy fashion such that they lose as little of the important stuff as possible.
Good point tho.
this would be why you plug your computer into your amazing sterio system to get 'l33t' sound. I havent used computer speakers since I learned anything about audio.. as for the argument I use CD's on occasion (in my car ect), mp3's on my laptop and .ogg on my desktop, all 3 sound the same while plugged into a good sterio system, I have yet to notice a diffrence of any kind as long as I output non-equlized sterio sound (which is almost[arguably is] identical to what you read off the cd) and let the system play with the stream.
I only use 128 bit encoding in both and I honestly cannot tell a diffrence at all.
I live in a giant bucket.
I thought Jitter was only an artifact of the timing of actual digital signals, and only affects the sound at the D/A conversion. In other words, signals recorded to disk don't have "Jitter" and it really doesn't make and sense to talk about how much Jitter different compression formats produce.... or am i wrong?
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
is there a good resource that explains how and why exactly audio compression algorithms work the way they do? Specifically, I am curious why there exists ANY loss when compressing the file. When I gzip something there is no loss. However I realize that its nature is to unzip completely and then be activated, and that with (I believe) audio and video compression that it is a streaming method. Why is it not possible to have a lossless compression that is also linear in its ability to stream out. Basically having a 'buffer' that is actually filled (like a reservoir) first, then the buffer is what is streamed? I just don't understand why there is any loss.
Last time I checked, Winamp.com listed 4 plug-ins, two of which were outdated and couldn't read files encoded in v1.0.
See you on OpenNap.
The RIO VOLT looks like a typical CD-Walkman, but it plays any CD/CD-R/CD-RW recorded in MP3, WMA, or CD-Audio. Rio has promised to release periodic FlashROM updates to keep current with any popular standards. Uploading new firmware is pretty simiple. You simply place it on a CD with a special filename, and turn on the player!