Slashdot Mirror
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.
There are two chips which are very common for MPEG decoding in portable electronics - the MAS3507D and the STA013. Both of these chips are essentially "black boxes" - MPEG in, PCM out. Their DSPs have just enough horsepower to do MPEG decoding, and the firmware is all in ROM. Ogg decoding, as many have already pointed out, needs considerable amount of additonal CPU cycles and RAM as compared to MPEG. Ogg just wasn't designed for embedded systems. Right now the only remotely viable solution for OGG decoding in a portable device would be to go with something like an ARM system-on-chip. Would you pay $250 for a portable player that supported OGG when you can get an equivalent MP3 player for $150? I didn't think so.
I just don't understand the objection to MP3... it's a decent format, well worth the $2/unit royalty for the decoder chips. Maybe MPEG doesn't compress as well as Ogg, but I would consider this an even trade for the less expensive decoding.
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.
Bah. You want to see ogg in commercial players? Use it then dammit and stop using mp3. Stop whining about lack of commercial support; it's a kind of Catch-22 see? If no one uses ogg because it isn't popular then of course it won't get commercial support. It's gonna take an initial sacrifice (so grow a spine and give up your precious mp3) so that ogg can become popular. Only then will we all reap the benifits (ubiquitous Ogg Vorbis).
Also, read this fascinating interview from early this year with Jack Moffitt and Christopher Montgomery, the two head guys behind Xiph and ogg. They discuss many things including the Iomega HipZip, which does support Ogg Vorbis.