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.

Comments

ogg vorbis all the way!

[auttie]

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

Re:How to do listening tests

[jonathan_ingram]

If you don't have a spare friend, you can use the ABX testing method to see if you can distinguish between two files. Take a file, compress it, save to a WAV, and then give the files to the ABX program, which acts as your spare friend :)

If you're running Windows, you can get ABX from http://www.pcabx.com/. On UNIX systems, the LAME source code comes with an ABX program (in the misc/ directory, I think).

Here is an example of a test that took place using a slightly different testing methodology, more akin to MUSHRA (which is used to evaluate lots of encoders at the same time): http://www.ff123.net/128tests.html.

Re:MPEGplus

[jonathan_ingram]

You must be using Windows. Monkey's Audio is a Windows only format... and you should not trust your data to a single-OS file format (yes, I would say the same for Linux-only file formats). Use FLAC instead.

MPC has better licensing than Monkey's Audio: the *decoder* is open source (GPL even), so you will always be able to decode your music. *encoding* is only possible on Windows however (although there is an older binary version available for i386 Linux systems), and the encoder will be made shareware in the near future. This is a real pity, because tests have shown that even at 128kp/s MPC is up there with AAC (MPEG-4 audio).

Re:I am reminded...

[jonathan_ingram]

The tests that you link to were done incredibly badly, and should just be ignored.

Here is a test that, although not perfect, was at least semi-blind. The conclusions: at that bitrate, MPC ('MPegPlus' not 'MP3Pro') and AAC were the best, followed by LAME MP3, OGG & WMA8 all together, and finally the very worst was XING encoded MP3.

This test was run with Vorbis RC2. RC3 will be out in a week, with much improved noise masking. For a taste of RC3, you can check out the Vorbis CVS, which includes most of the RC3 fixes but encodes at a fixed rate of 128 kp/ps. This raises the low pass, improves the noise masking, and the stereo channel coupling code.

BTW, some terminology and thoughts from us at Xiph

[xiphmont]

My first thought when I saw this article was, "Oh boy... this should get ugly and yet remain light and fluffy" but all the posts I've seen (reading at +2) have been pretty good. I don't really have much of anything to add other than 'we have some really nice quality improvements in store for rc3', mainly new noise estimation metrics, lots of stereo fixes, and other random nicities (like 20kHz cutoff at 128...)

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