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Ogg Vorbis RC3 Released
xercist writes: "Let's start 2002 off with some good news! The long awaited RC3 release of the Ogg project's Vorbis codec is now out. Major changes include much improvement in the quality to bitrate ratio, ability to specify a hard bitrate min/max to the encoder (good for streaming), and an entirely new bitrate management engine which can emulate CBR, do constrained bitrates, and will accept quality settings via the -q flag from 0 through 10 in .00000001 increments (currently only tuned for 44.1 KHz modes). Vorbis has kicked MP3's, WMA's, and Real's asses for a long time now, hopefully this release will change the minds of anyone yet undecided. Download RC3, then show your appreciation for all their hard work and dedication by making a donation to support the project."
If you want to take the listening test yourself, read the instructions and jump in. For now, there's also a page of interim results, but to quote ff123, "Major conclusion: I need more listeners!"
Monty
The best tests we have at the moment were conducted by
ff123 at 128kpbs. There have been two so far (the second is technically still underway, although it's now based on outdated encoders, so I imagine a third will start fairly soon). The
first listening test compared RC2 Ogg Vorbis, LAME MP3, Xing MP3, Liquifier AAC, MPC, and WMA8. The formal analysis showed that, on the file compared, the encoders could be divided with 95% confidence into three groups (from best to worst):
- MPC and AAC
- WMA8 and LAME and OGG
- XING
.The second test used a CVS version of OGG from about a month and a half ago. This time there are three test samples which participants can choose to evaluate. While technically still underway,
the interim results can be found here. Of the three test samples, the first can't discriminate between the encoders, the second looks like it will but needs more listeners (and the results so far look interesting), and the third discriminates well, to the extent that it shows that Xing and WMA8 are statistically much worse on that clip than all the others.
Now all we need is a third test with the latest updates of all the encoders - since we now have a new stable version both of Ogg Vorbis (RC3) and LAME (3.91).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
There are plans afoot.
The Ogg Vorbis *decoder* has been stable since RC1, and will be able to play any Vorbis stream produced by RC2, RC3, 1.0, or whatever. There are slight problems in that the reference decoder is floating point, which doesn't fit well with the ARM chips a lot of hardware players use, but that'll be sorted eventually.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Monty
The problem is not the AVI or Ogg; it's that the vast majority of AVI *players* cannot handle a VBR codec. These players ignore all the sync timestamping, assuming the audio is coming in CBR.
Have a look at ww.hydrogenaudio.org for discussion of players that work properly.
Monty
For chatting with developers real-time (but no guarantee when we'll be there), catch us on #vorbis at irc.openprojects.net.
Monty
About once every... oh, 10 minutes... someone asks for a tool to convert MP3 to Ogg.
Do NOT convert MP3 to Ogg! Converting (transcoding) between lossy codecs only makes the quality horrible -- the artifacts interact in unpredictable ways. It's like faxing a photocopy of a fax.
Rip your CDs with Exact Audio Copy (win32) or cdparanoia (Linux, et al.). Encode them with oggenc (or LAME if you need MP3 for portable devices). Share them with your friends.
As for ABX: Oops, you're right. The results ff123 asks for are not ABX, they're the traditional 1-5 scale that MPEG has always used. ff123 *does* suggest using ABX to certify the results, but that's not the same thing, and you're right to point that out.
Last, parts of the tests are automated, parts aren't; if you go the ABX route, there are automated testing packages to use (linked from ff123's page). I've not added my results to this test only because it's a little too easy for me to cheat. So, I didn't go through the test process myself, I've only been watching the results.
Monty
I know everyone will get into a discussion about music quality... so here's another question.
.. they were about the same price as my old but trustworthy Sennheiser HD330s.
We all know (I hope) that what you hear is also limited by your listening equipment.
I recently bought a pair of Sony MDR-V500 headphones
I was dissapointed when I actually had them side by side; the Sony headphones are basically, well, crap. Any listener could distinguish that they are severely lacking in several areas. The sennheisers sound oh so much better.. and that's on a computer, through a cheap desktop speaker headphone jack, listening to 160Kbps mp3.
So what's the point of arguing over compression formats, or whether something is *really* CD quality, or studio quality, when your equipment can't even come close to reproducing it?
Oh.. to the unitiated.. I highly recommend a good pair of $100 headphones (Sennheiser or Grado, and yes, that means towards the lower end of their product lineups..don't let that discourage you. A low-end Grado or Sennheiser sounds fantastic compared to anything else you'll find in the store.
And those $100 headphones will sound better than a $2000 stereo, anyday.
So what do you guys/gals use?