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Non-MP3 Codecs?
Vanth Dreadstar asks: "While
MP3 is okay, I have begun researching other codecs that would be
suitable for my home music use. Lossy codecs such as Ogg
Vorbis, AAC,
and MPC all seem to have promise, not to mention the lossless codecs
such as Shorten
(otherwise known as .SHN),
LPAC, and FLAC.
I would like to know what non-MP3 codecs people are using out there,
and why."
Ogg Vorbis over MP3 because obviously Ogg is free while MP3 is locked up in patents, and if you're one of the golden-ears that can tell the difference, FLAC for high quality (and still free).
1/3 better compression than .mp3.
my hearing is not so good, so quakity is not of paramount importance.
I'm using .nap because Napster is going to come back! Just you wait!
...is what is preferred over MP3 by the audio engineers I know. I can't hear a difference, but they claim it simply sounds better.
-my 2 cents
Whatever it is that comes on these shiny round things I get from the music store...that's the one I use.
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
i use a non-lossy format known as the Audio Interchange File Format, or AIFF, to store my audio files. They can be burned to CDs very easily -- you can't fit as many on one CD as MP3, but the CDs will play in every CD player I've come across, and the sound is CD-quality.
go get it
I use Ogg becuase:
1. it seems to give better sound quality for the same quantity of bytes.
2. encoding to Ogg is legal, unlike encoding to MP3 when using ISO-code based encoder (pretty much any encoder i know. enlighten me if im wrong).
3. "Ogg" sounds cooler than "MP3"
I'm using Ogg Vorbis for a number of reason. The reference encoder, while not perfect, is certainly not bad. The vast majority of the time, .ogg's sound noticeably better than MP3's of the same bitrate.
.ogg files with the track names grabbed from FreeDB. To actually encode, one symply drags the .ogg file to another directory, and the IO slave works its magic.
More importantly, Ogg Vorbis is free of any patents or any other restrictions. I could make a commercial hardware player if I wanted to, and not have to pay any royalties to anyone.
Finally, it integrates nicely with Konqueror's audioCD IO slave. You can simply type "audiocd:/ogg/" in Konq's location bar, and it shows you a list of
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Most of the time, the standard MP3 format is fine. The average MP3 of good quality is about 4MB, and that doesn't take too long to download on a cable or DSL connection. Hell, you can even buy off-the-shelf MP3 decoders/players. If you're about sound quality, you could simply encode at a higher bitrate/frequency. As for the other formats, they might be technologically more advanced, but the MP3 format has already earned its merits as being popular, small, and easy to mess with. A 2nd generation MP3 format would be nice, but I'm set with MP3 for as far as I can see.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
lossless compression is the only way to go.
Another consideration is the straightforwardness of the API for the library you intend to use. Vorbis has a somewhat reasonble API with a liberal addition of quirks. Also you can easily add metadata to Vorbis files. Ever tried adding metadata to an MP3 file? ID3v1.1 is trivial but ID3v2 has a 95,000 line reference implementation. Uh? UH?
Any application has to support PCM audio also, since most music collections are primarily on CD.
Presently, I use OGG with XMMS for my "online music", and SHN for backups/working copies of my CDs.
I've been happy with the Ogg's quality at 128kbps, but not too impressed with encode speed. I'm not using the latest RC yet though. Once the Ogg tools mature a bit (ie. they reach 1.0 and switch focus to speed rather than quality), I'm sure this will improve.
On the lossless side, he SHN files are nice, but decode speed on my 300MHz box makes re-ripping seem more feasible than decoding the SHN file, say, if I need to burn a CDR to go in my disc changer in the car. (I hate keeping originals in my disc changer in the Texas heat.) I haven't tried FLAC yet, but it looked reasonable from the benchmarks on the FLAC site.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
its great, no loss.
HD's are cheap, hell save them as XML.
ZAP (an acronym for "Zero-loss Audio Packer") is, as its name implies, lossless, and the ZAP app has the ability to play back audio from a compressed archive.
The ZAP application compresses raw audio files to about 40-to-70% of their original size. This is much better smaller than typical .zip or .sit compression on audio files.
Archives can be made self-extracting. I find this useful if I do an audio project for which the files total about a gig in size but want to back it up to a single CDR.
Interestingly, I just looked at emagic's web site, and they do not have a link for ZAP. Maybe their site is incomplete, or maybe they have discontinued the product.
I'd like to know if they are using them.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
I would like to use Ogg Vorbis, but as you probably know there is a sparse few number of them available to download from the P2P community, and I can't seem to find a nice easy Ogg-compatible ripper anywhere... does anyone know of an easy-to-use program which can rip to .ogg (as well as other formats perhaps)? I seem to be restricted to Mp3 only until I can find a nice app.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Of a good old wav. Except maybe for pure vinal, but is that a codec?
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
* Much better than OGG and MP3
* Picture perfect at 128 kbit/s
* Supported by hardware (unlike ogg)
* Next version (Corona) will sport 5.1 Dolby, 24 bit samples, 96khz sampling rate, better compression.
* Existing hardware will update firmware to support Corona
is the *best* lossy audio codec I've yet seen. At -q 3 (ends up being around 112 kb/s average) most is transparent to me, and at -q 4.99 pretty much everything. (I don't use -q 5 because it jumps up to lossless coupling which makes the bitrate jump quite a bit).
Aside from sounding great, it's 100% free (open source, patent-free) for everyone, and I can always annoy people on #vorbis (opn IRC network) with technical questions.
If you're looking for lossless compression, wait for the people currently working on vorbis to write Ogg Squish, which will be their lossless codec, and should kick ass as well.
I'm also looking anxiously forward to Ogg Tarkin, the currently-in-the-works lossy video codec, which is using new technology (wavelets) to encode video. I believe it shows a lot of promise.
--
grep "xercist"
WMA is the best...um...err... yeah.
when Slashdot itself is failng to address the REAL ISSUES we are concerned about??
Because I have to quit this filthy .mp3 habit. I need the music industry to help me overcome my addiction to free music, so with digital content controls I won't be tempted to download gigabyte upon gigabyte of free music. I won't have to continue working this extra part-time job to support my purchases of extra hard drive space.
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
If quality matters I just burn it onto a CD. For mixed CDs I nearly always go from the original CD, rip to uncompressed (usually WAVs) then burn the CD with a few of those. Modern CD drives can rip a track in a few seconds, and burners can of course burn the disc nearly as fast.
If I want my PC to play songs then I don't mind high bit rate MP3s. MP3s also have the advantage of working with everything. Especially on my Mac with iTunes.
I'd be really impressed if S. Jobs introduced a better codec as a big new iTunes 3 feature.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
I've migrated all of my old mp3 files to ogg vorbis. Well actually I re-ripped everything and encoded them to ogg. The music is a lot more crisp than it was under mp3.
Granted, Part of that was the more stingy encoding rate that I had used. I let ogg go with the defaults. And it is much better.
And I must admit that I think that there is some cool factor in using something different and Free/Libre. YMMV
-- Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
...but has optional copy protection, like MP3 does. OGG was too close to MP3 in quality, and isn't very well supported IN HARDWARE. WMA is nice, but I'm sure there are far too many people here who are mindless anti-MS zealots to even give it a listen. They usually complain about the optional copy protection, similar to MP3.
Since all of these formats have different bit rates, you can scale it up or down to suit your ears and storage budget.
Being a musician and selling music online from our site, we are also trying to deal in electronically distributable compressed formats for $. I dont feel right distributing a Llossy compressed format for minimal $, but I know a lot of people dont really care one way or the other. Ideally, they would be able to melt a cd of the orig 16bit 44.1khz wavs and listen on thier gnarly audiophile system w/ some snacks, but doing this w/ mp3z could be a swarm of annoying artifacts and blorps. This doesnt really matter w/ headphones downtown or in a vehicle going 95mph. Maybe we should offer both lossy and lossless compressed k-rad, so people that care can have the real bits. Do we think enough people have fast enough connections to pay a couple bucks for 300MB of lossless k-rad sound and music?
*I used to be quite irreverent and ignorant. I am probably much smarter now. I seem to realize this every 45 days or so.
Sticking with MP3s is a no brainer unless you have to use open software for moral reasons, since Apple has enhanced MP3 encoding/decoding for AltiVec, and this is an area where those gigaFlops do wonders at quick, high-quality encodes and freeing up more CPU for your work (or the visualizer :) during playback.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
is a ftp database and crawler similar to audiogalaxy only for ogg. it would catch on in no time.
For most distributed applications (music player in my living room) I use the MP3 side. If push came to shove, I'd find some way to delete the MP3's and play the WMF's on other devices, just because they're so space-conscious.
Because the few songs I have ripped are in that format, and the few songs I get from friends now and then, are also mp3.
:)
I don't really play "clog the modem", so I guess I am the wrong person to answer that.
But I am not going to play the elitist game of switching to Ogg because it has better compression (cheap HD, cheap bandwidth) or because it preserves some frequencies more (come on, you can't hear it either).
I could think to switch just because of the licensing and the patent issues, I am like that sometimes... but right now it is too much trouble to make a point noone will notice (as I share my music as much as I DC for new - almost never).
I do personally hope that for those that this really matters to, that something like Ogg will come and take over, so we can see AOL buy that too. Just kidding.
1
0
[8 times per sample]
Subject says all. Has it just not hit mainstream, or is it getting steamrollered by Ogg, WMA, and any of the other popular formats?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bear in mind that the ~4x compression rate listed for lossless compression schemes is heavily reliant on the input. Don't be surprised if you get 1.5-2.5 compression a lot of the time, and remember that there's a good chance you'll get 1:1 (or worse) compression results with a 'random' enough song file.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Just use MP3. It's standard that is supported by everyone, everywhere, in everything.
And also, here's a recent addition, PlusV, that allows you to halve the bitrate without loosing too much quality. There are already plug-ins for winamp, lame and mpg123. It's downward compatible (if your player doesn't support plusV, it just sounds like a regular MP3 with a halved bitrate).
Now...Ogg Vorbis? Who has ever even heard about something like Ogg besides a couple of geeks with OSS-glasses on?
JPEG users have available to them some command line utilities that permit simple alteration of images without loss of quality, for example, rotation and flipping. Are there any similar utilities available for any of the major audio compression formats?
The reason I ask is that I have ripped a number of CDs and the volume levels vary noticibly. I like to listen to MP3s as I work, with the volume turned down far enough that I can hear the music, but any one that I'm on the phone with won't. Unfortuately, there doesn't seem to be a single setting for everything that I've ripped. While I could go back and re-rip, I'd much rather have a toolbox of useful batch utilities. Ideally, it would allow me to write, say, a Perl script that generates a histogram, checks the average and peak volume, and then tweaks a single number in the file header to force it in line with the rest of my collection.
Is this sort of thing possible?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
My portable MP3 player is capable of playing WMF files, but I would never use it. It's a matter of principles as well as I can download MP3's for free everywhere. I bet M$ will have to put some kind of copy protection in WMF very soon.
MP3 is _the_ standard. What's more interesting is what the next huge video standard is going to be; MPG/x, DivX, Quicktime or anything else?
Ciryon
In the Grateful Dead/Phish/Jamband trading community, there's a strong preference for the shorten (.shn) format. The .shn codec provides lossless compression, and compresses ~ 2:1.
.shn files, you can fit approximately 1 hour 55 minutes of audio on a single 650 MB disc. Plus, because you are writing a data CDR, the data is protected by better error correction. I'd really like to see CD players incorporate the .shn or some other comparable codec. It would be a "super CD" with 115 minutes of music, but none of the artifacts of lossy compression.
.mp3s are "nearly" indistinguishable from the original digital recording, but if you can afford the bandwidth, why not have your music files in a format that is *identical* to the original digital recording. What's the saying -- it only costs twice as much for the very best ... in this case, it costs 5 times as much, but you don't have to compromise one way or the other, and that's, if nothing else, a nice feeling. Nice feelings are what drive the audiophile market, btw.
.shn codec support in *some* portable player. A 1GB microdrive would hold ~200 hours of .shn data. Not bad, considering that those 200 hours would be true CD quality, instead of "near" CD quality.
:)
If you fill a data CDR with
Sure, you can say that high bitrate
I'd really like to see
I predict that within a few years, MP3s will go the way of 16-color graphics -- mp3 will be remembered as an intermediate stepping stone -- an obsolete historical format that bootstrapped digital audio onto the internet. They are not the future of digital audio on the net -- that future belongs to lossless codecs.
IMHO!
I use MP3. I've taken a look at other codecs at various times but of course the limiting factor is what will actually play them. My entire music collection lives on a server so it can be played from our room in the house with random access of course. I've got a Slimp3 in the lounge which is a godsend for the missus, even she can drive the remote and the big vacuum florescent display. That wont play anything but MP3 This is a proper music collection of nearly 1,000 CDs encoded over the space of years. I started way back when L3Enc was all there was! Since then I've reencoded it all with LAME, using something non-lossy is absolutely unpractical from a storage stand point. With the greatest of respect I have to point out that those people here talking about using non-lossy compression clearly do not have their record collections in these formats. I suggest they are using these formats as little more than convienient stashes of music rather like a few tapes you'd have in the car. I've used MP3 portables for ages (since the Rio) and still do. My current unit only plays MP3 and nothing else. I've ordered an iPod and I don't think that plays anything but MP3 either. My standards of MP3 compression are fairly high and in this respect LAME is an absolute godsend. It's been developed for so long and the quality at higher bitrates is certainly in excess of my ability to to differentiate from the original CDs. I'm very happy with my ability to control it's settings and the excellent results I get out of it. Sure the MP3 license situation is a bit iffy but what do I care? All my equipment plays it and I can encode it for free. I like Ogg in theory but practicality wins out for me every time over some sort of moralistic stance on the MP3 patent issues. If I was going to choose something obscure to start with, it probably would have been MPC. I think the design philosophy for that is superb. It's got the modern technique of MP3 without the suspect elements which make MP3 difficult to achieve transparent audio even at high bitrates. MPC is absolutely stonking if you spend the bits, IE 192-256kbps. But then again, at those bitrates MP3 is the same with only some real oddball stuff showing signs of audible artifacts. MP3 until such time as some superior codec is playable in all my equipment and the encoding software is up to the same high standards as LAME. That's a long time away, in my opinion, if ever.
I can't really tell much of a difference between 128kbps mp3 and the original cd. Maybe others can, but mp3 is plenty good enough for me. As is ogg. To me, it doesn't really matter about the format as long as its convienent. And considering the 200+ cd's of mp3's are full of mp3's and no other format... and the effort required to convert them would outweigh the slight gain by converting to another format.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
No, really! Windows Media kicks the hell out of any other lossy encoding format this side of ATRAC (Sony's MiniDisc codec). 128Kb/s WMA *smokes* MP3's encoded under 200Kb/s. Score one for the Evil Empire.
--------------- Murphy was an otpimist.
sound quality : size
which wins? ogg or wma
I like midi. But I've heard on this new thing called mod, it takes samples and tone shifts them to recreate the song! Pretty cool, like midi but better!
in the mean time - I can't stand mp3s, ogg might be the way for me to go now.
For music I listen to often, I extract APE files (www.monkeysaudio.com), which are lossless and compress decently. At least that way I don't have to fumble with piles of discs. To my knowledge it's not supported in Linux yet, but it will be.
I use Ogg because I don't like the licencing for MPEG. As a developer I like the idea that if I wanted to make a great bit of software that is able to play a popular music format, I should be able to do so for free without having to pay licences or be subject to any restrictions.
Ogg seems good for this.
Mike
-- Mike
In most cases, a 60kbps OGG file sounds as good as an 128k mp3. An 80k OGG is as good as 160k mp3 and half the size.
If you are serving audio streams, you can actually strip away parts of the files to make lower bitrate streams--without re-coding. (wow!) MP3 can't.
You can have more than 2 audio channels. MP3 can't.
The comment fields are well defined and you can have whatever attributes you want, with strings as long as necessary. ID3 for mp3s is a hack; string lengths are limited and you can't add easily add your own fields.
If you have a portable player, you would appreciate the smaller size with high quality.
In the future, you can select how you want stereo coupling done (not in this release). (Mp3 can.)
If you make computer games, you have a high quality free way of adding a lot of music to your games. (possibly patents for mp3)
You can do 44.1khz and 48 khz audio.
You can concatenate multiple streams together to make one file, and it will play correctly. You can also cut portions out and paste them together without re-encoding.
Ogg's are exactly the same length as the original WAVs--something MP3 lacks--so that when you make recordings of live shows, gaps don't appear in you r audio.
The encoder sounds good by default, so music traded on file sharing systems sounds good (unlike all those terrible 128k mp3s encoded by anything that isn't LAME).
Well, I'm trying my hardest to encode simultaneously to FLAC and MP3 currently. The problem isn't the compressing itself (that's simple). It's the disk space.. =) I do FLAC for audio archival. I want untouched copies of my CDs. The prime reason for that is so I can switch from MP3 to another format in the future. The reason I keep MP3s around is for portable players. As soon as Ogg gets better than MP3 and players support it, then I can reencode everything from the FLACs so I don't lose quality. Takes up some disk space but is very handy.
besides the fact that it's hard to go up against an established standard and the fact that there is no hardware support, is that storage is so cheap now. If I can get a 60GB drive for under $100, why would I want to sacrifice a big chunk of processing power to make my music 1/3 smaller? Only if I absolutely wanted to use something open.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
as far as codecs go, there are a couple good ones at this link does anyone have favorite wavelet codecs?
It's free, as in beer.
You can stream it! And a little app called abcde works great with it.
It's slowly becoming a new standard are more software players are supporting it.
Too bad there is no hardware support. I think we should start off with a DC port. What do ya' think?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Editing with 1-sample resolution, for example. This allows you to cut your live music into tracks without that silly gap introduced by mp3.
Support for 256 channels, channel coupling, etc, are also extremely important for streaming applications.
CDs tracks *are* stereo 16bit 44kHz audio.
I think you mean 200 minutes, not 200 hours.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...however, I don't see a format shift happening too soon, since the majority of computer users (the "dumb masses", I like to call them) are being spoon-fed by the OEMs, and we all know what they're using in place of strained peas. Not even Winamp support is enough; nowadays, every Compaq/HP/Dell/eMachines/craputer is pre-configured with Windows Media Player or RealOne, and they don't support OGG or the others (mostly because no one can profit from them).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
DirectStream Digital (DSD) - it is from Sony, supports mono, stereo and multi-channel, it has excellent quality (better than regular CD) but not that great on space savings.
I'm not interested in some "super small" music file - disk space is cheap and MP3 is already small enough for transfering over the Internet. I'm more interested in audio quality and hardware compatibility. MP3 and WMA sound great (moreso the latter), and are both commonly supported by cool hardware. I don't see the point in all these other media formats. I like to listen to my music on something other then my computer.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I will probably continue to use mp3 format files, because it is basically the standard that everyone on the internet goes by. If you have broadband and a decent hard drive, size/bitrate should not be a deciding factor. Unless you're one of those that hear like a dog, mp3s should be sufficient for everyone to use.
you might want to check out http://www.geocities.com/mp3gain/
I haven't used this program, just saw a ref to it on a mailing list, but it sounded like it would do what you want. (probably Windows only, though).
//
I teach Computer Science at the high school level at a largish school near Austin, Texas. For the past several years there's been a "jukebox" in my room where students could vote for albums to hear during programming lab time, and random tracks off the winning albums play over the speakers in the classroom.
Over Christmas break I changed the "player" portion of the system to play Ogg Vorbis files instead of mp3s.
Why not mp3?
So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?
By the way, if you haven't listened to Ogg since 1.0-rc3 came out (on New Year's Day), try it again. The sound quality has been much improved. Note that you should not use the "-b" option to encode as it uses CBR and thus produces larger files at lower quality. Default is quality 3, which is 112 kbps but sounds as good as 160 kbps to most. If you really can tell the difference, quality 4 averages 128 kbps and sounds much better (and is maybe 3% smaller) than an mp3 at that rate. You've got to experiment to find your own sweet spot.
The biggest downside is that whole ubiquity thing. There's been an official Winamp plug-in for quite some time, but Nullsoft have yet to install it by default (rumor has it that it is AOL 's legal department which is holding this up). I'm also pretty sure there's a Windows Media Player codec, but don't quote me on that.
Also the only hardware player that supports Ogg Vorbis is the HipZip (via a firmware upgrade). Other units that support it are coming soon, but not yet available.
Since I don't own a hardware player (yet) and don't download my mp3s, the ubiquity factor isn't an issue for me, however.
On the plate for rc4 is sound quality tuning for the low (a.k.a streaming) bitrates. Then a coat of polish and it'll be called 1.0
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
I use MP3s because they're much like Interet currency.
:)
I convert MP3s to WMAs when I want to squish music onto my PocketPC.
If I bought an OGG car player (if there is/was such a beast), I'd convert my MP3s.
The point: When in Rome, I do as the Romans. It's a simple life, really.
WhatEVA
Modded Troll?
I was going to say something funny here, but apparently few people would get it.
Pax, Ardax
There's a batch Ogg replaygain tool at: http://sjeng.org/ftp/vorbis/
ReplayGain tself is explained at: http://www.replaygain.org
The latest XMMS plugin already supports replaygain (as does latest Ogg123), and it should be in the Winamp plugin soon if not already. Right now it's up to individual apps to support ReplayGain, but we're deciding on an easier way to encourage/include support with core Ogg.
Monty
I didn't realize that any comment supporting a Microsoft-developed format is considered a 'troll.' My bad. :)
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
I'm not familiar with the state of MP3 tools which support ReplayGain, but I know that Gian-Carlo Pascutto just wrote a tool to add ReplayGain information to Ogg Vorbis files. There is an XMMS support in CVS which uses the information, and I just got done adding support for ReplayGain to ogg123 (it will be about a week before it goes into the xiph.org CVS pending the approval of some other changes). Winamp also supports ReplayGain using Peter's Vorbis plugin
Ogg has had high bitrate from the beginning. It will happily take you up to just under what the lossless codecs will give. in rc3 stereo, -q10 will do ~400-600kbps, and -q0 will give you ~48-80kbps depending on material.
Monty
I can hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and the original CD (192kbps CBR or 160kbps VBR are good enough for me), however the difference isn't nearly so great as the difference between playing the music on $30 vs. $100 speakers. You can get decent computer speakers today (if you're not an audiophile and don't need very high volume) for as little as $60, but the prevalence of 128kbps recordings on the internet suggests to me that most of these people are still listening to music on the little white buzzers that came with their computer.
This should do it for the mp3's you compress yourself.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cvaill/normalize/
It has a plugin that reads normalize settings from mp3 id tags but I didn't test it.
Voila...
If you just want playback, try the XMMS Volume Nolmalizer at: http://www.xmms.org/plugins_effect.html
Another one to try is Normalize It alows you to adjust volumes across different types of input files (.wav, mp3, etc...)
Grip is just about as easy as it gets. It comes with Red Hat 7.2 now, preconfigured for ogg, preconfigured to query the freedb servers for tracks and titles. I'm still using it with lame, but when I move everything to ogg it makes that easy, too, with "Auto-rip on insert" and "Auto-eject when finished" boxes checked.
what you suffer from is lack of normalization. many many CD's are poorly mastered (in fact 90% of all Cd's today are very poorly mastered, it is very rare that anyone takes the time to properly master a CD anymore.) what you are getting is that the mixdown mastering was set at an arbitrary level by the studio staff. they just picked a level and spun off a master without running a calibration on the equipment. They usually calibrate every morning, but many places assume that the calibration was good from yeaterday, and the equipment wasn't touched or turned off so just fire away.... they have 300 albums to master today... this usually leaves you with CD's that have a horrible noise floor because the audio program is too low and not using the entire abilities of the CD. (NOTE there are some that are messed up the other direction.... Nutral-milk-hotel comes to mind.. clipping on the cd because it was not normalized.)
so you need to normalize up. basically use a program that looks at the entire song and then brings the higest peak up to 99% or 98% of max. the program will look at either each track, or all tracks from an album, find the highest peak from that album and then normalize all to that peak. either eay works great, I prefer each song getting normalized.
Now... you can do this to mp3's you have already. problem is that you need to decode-normalize-reencode which adds more loss and noise artifacts.
I would start over, grab your cd collection and start from step one again. (lame has awesome encode now... it's improved massively)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Say it with me, "mup-thra"
This is not exactly right. To keep in line of the rest of your examples it would have to look like this:
4. Musician with Internet only distro:
MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3
2 generations of lossy copying
MP3 is definitely a lossy encoding method in that every time it is decoded there is a good chance that you will not get out EXACTLY what you encoded in the first place. You will instead get something that sounds close enough that the human ear can effectively treat them as the same. The problem is that artifacts tend to crop up with each encoding and you will most likely end up with garbage after a few encoding/decoding cycles.
You are correct in that you don't need to encode/decode and then encode again to copy, however that is true of your options 2 and 3 also. Once your data is in digital form you never need to encode it again, just do a lossless digital copy and it is likely that you will never lose quality. This has nothing to do with codecs, but rather with the nature of digital data.
Sapere aude!
2. Original CD -> Tape -> Tape -> Tape 3 generations of lossy copying.
3. Original JPEG -> save as JPEG -> save as JPEG
2 generations of lossy image manipulation.
Hence the term lossy
While that is an interesting way of looking at it, you are the one misusing the term "lossy".
When it comes to compression, lossy has a specific meaning - it means you can NOT recreate the original input bit-for-bit. With lossless compression, you CAN recreate the original input bit for bit. It has nothing to do with percieved quality.
In the future, please make sure you know what you are talking about before accusing others of ignorance. :)
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
you'll be able to hear comparatively more garbage from lossy compression on your home system (rather than on an earpiece headset or cheapie speakers.)
I disagree. I can hear tons of artefacts in mp3s with my $250 Sennheiser HD590s.. Yet with my $250 Mordaunt Short speakers, it's fine. I'd say that headphones are actually much 'better' at demonstrating the inadequacies of a format.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I mean seriously, a 160GB drive costs $259,-.
That's 618MB/1$. In other words you can pretty much store an entire CD for 1$.
The advantage being that you don't have to dick around with proprietary formats or players that seem to have been designed to support the wackiest skinz but have a horrible user interface. Needles to say you have no degradation of audio quality.
I can't believe nobody mentioned this. Don't you all have Music Clips?
...and their parent co is far from buds with Mr. Gates. Even if they TRY to close it off, you'll be able to get around it.
The formats are called lossy because given a compressed file, you cannot perfectly reconstruct the original data file. This applies to both #4, and #5.
I am relieved to know that you are totally deaf, and thus cannot hear the difference between a badly encoded mp3, and a SACD. If you wish to remedy this problem, you might want to consider getting new batteries for your hearing aid.
For the rest of us using high-caliber playback systems (clue: this means NOT Bose, NOT Panasonic, NOT Sony, NOT Yamaha, NOT Klipsch), and actually have some sense of hearing, the difference between those so-called lossy files and the original is night and day.
(clue #2: high-caliber DOES mean:
Mark Levinson
Krell
Plinius
Nelson Pass
Manley
Sonic Frontiers
Dynaudio
Sonus Faber
Avantgarde
Rockport
Siltech
Nordost
Goldmund
FMS
47 Labs
Catching the drift yet?
> In the professional video world, many people (perhaps wrongly) call the DV format LOSSLESS.
> However DV is intra-frame based, saving each frame separately, and uses a fixed 5:1
> compression ratio to reduce the size of video files.
Virtually all video formats use some form of lossy compression (starting with the different sampling of the colour channels). DV is compressed but it has no _generation_ loss, meaning you can copy it over and over with no change in quality (unless, of course, there is an error during copy).
However, if you convert from DV to an uncompressed format (ex., uncompressed AVI), and then recompress it to DV, you probably _will_ lose some quality (and this loss also depends on the compressor you use - not all compressors use the same algorithms and some do a better job than others).
The same thing happens with music. Some people download files in MP3 and burn them to an _audio_ CD. If they later rip those CDs to MP3, they probably will be losing some quality. Same is valid if they decide to edit the file (ex., trim it or change the volume). Load the MP3, it gets uncompressed, edit, save again and it's re-compressed.
Some people just don't understand that it's not the _formats_ that introduce the "loss", it's the compression process. Computer files are digital data, and digital data can always be duplicated without any loss.
RMN
~~~
Undeniably true. But established standards die enventually. MP3 R&D has been mostly abandoned. It will be around for a very long time yet, but it's being attacked from all technological sides. Microsoft wants to kill it for WMA, Tompson wants to kill it in favor of MP3 pro, FhG wants to kill it for AAC, Real wants us to use Real--ermm, sorry, ATRAC3, etc. MP3's been superceeded and abandoned by cutting edge research.
MP3 the king is a mighty warrior, but he's showing new wounds. Ogg is the successor to the throne, and the only codec individuals are going to have ready, unrestricted access to once MP3 eventually falls. It's not happening this year, but it's happening.
and the fact that there is no hardware support
A mostly fair thing to point out. Ask again in a year; the FPU-less codec exists (he says, hacking on ARM7 assembly), now it's mostly the business distribution arrangement that's up in the air. Commodity hardware designs can't quite live in the same open framework as software.
is that storage is so cheap now
Most of the big Geek music collections of friends around me are each over a Terabyte of music. That's still alot of money.
If I can get a 60GB drive for under $100
If quality is not a concern, you can get a cheap turntable for much less than that and it never runs out of space.
why would I want to sacrifice a big chunk of processing power to make my music 1/3 smaller? Only if I absolutely wanted to use something open.
This one confuses me slightly...
Compressing from WAV->Ogg makes things ~10-20x smaller, depending on your quality tastes.
If you mean 'why would I replace my mp3 collection I already have?', in that case I agree with you. An equivalent Ogg will sound better/more consistent and be smaller, but if you're satisfied with what you've got, there's no need to replace it. Certainly don't transcode it! It could only end up sounding worse (see rant here)
If you mean, "why would I encode to Ogg rather than MP3; it's not worth it", then you're just confused. You get smaller, better sounding files for no extra effort (and no extra CPU). In this case, Open Source is not a compromise; Vorbis is the best out there. All we're lacking is the portable players.
Monty
I'm a taper, and a converter of live recorded music, so for this purpose, I'll record the original DAT tape of a show to hard drive, split the rather large wav file to tracks, then burn an audio cd for listening, and a SHORTEN disc or discs for archival purposes. It's a lot cleaner, and more bit-perfect for archival use to extract a check-summed [ md5 ] file using a series of shorten files, than to extract audio from the disc. Too much jitter.
For listening at work, or while mowing the yard, I use MP3, since we have idiotic Novell desktop policies that prevent us from using any non-approved executable. The only thing I've got is Windows Media Player, piece of crap it may be, but it's there. Even winamp is disallowed in our office, for which there's a SHN plugin, even!
I'd use ogg if I could, however.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."-Tennyson
If you have ears of tin then fine - go with lossy compression.
But nothing is as sad as hearing a great concert reduced to crud by 128kb mp3 or worse.
DAT->SHN->Burn to CD-ROM -> Delete huge files from HD.
The only requirement is to have drive space aplenty.
It's never been about who is better technically, it's all about support. VHS won the VCR battle, despite being technically the weakest, because it was first to have real support (can you say "pr0n"?). MP3 has all the support. Many recent CD and DVD players can play MP3 files from a CD. There are portable MP3 players, MP3 jukeboxes, MP3-playing cell phones, you name it. Name any one device that supports Ogg or any other lossy audio format... MP3 is free as in beer for most uses. It isn't as free as Ogg, but you have to live with it if you want any *real* support in the *real* world, not just some obscure OSS.
There is also an MP3 extension PlusV, which uses the idea that human ear is not very sensitive at high frequencies, and compresses higher half of the used frequencies in only less than 10kbps. This allows 128kbps MP3 audible quality to be reached at around perhaps 70kbps. Files are compatible with old MP3 players, though without PlusV support the just play the lower half of the frequencies. It's technically better than mp3pro, and even better, its specs are open and freely available. Actually, PlusV isn't even MP3-dependant, it could be implemented in Ogg as well. Yes, PlusV has some patents, but the company's policies are pretty liberal.
That's because if you master it well on the first try, you only get to sell the CD to the fans once.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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When working on music projects that require either the sending of high quality samples over the internet or if I need to fit them all on one CD I use Shorten or RAR. Shorten is widely used and RAR can be easily obtained for just about every platform. RAR doubles as pretty decent replacement for zip when it comes to compressing non-audio files as well. The multi-media function it uses also compresses the heck out of bit-map and TIFF images. The down side is that you can't play a rar compressed audio file.
For recreation purposes such as using my laptop to listen to music while riding on a train or plane I prefer MP3. The environment is noisy enough that I don't mind or notice the lack of quality. That kid screaming and kicking my seat is much more of an issue. I would most likely use ogg over mp3 but ogg isn't yet incorporated into iTunes (my prefered player, ok it has more to do with my iPod).
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The more I talk to (to be acurate the more I am talked at by) audiophiles the more I get the feeling that its a geek weenie measuring contest and has nothing to do with what stuff sounds like. One guy I know told me at great length how his $2,000 cd player was superior to the cheapie Philips unit it shares its main circuit board with because of the accuracy and freedom from wow/flutter of the CD drive mechanism.
So when I hear about golden ears and such I tend to think Bovine Excrement.
I would much prefer to use Ogg or Windows Media Player than MP3 because they are better compression formats and allow more tracks to fit on my Archos device. Problem is that the Archos won't play them to the better compression is moot.
I am not that much interested in the Napster/Gnutella scene any more than I am aware of any other WareZ scene so use of the codec by others is not that interesting to me. However if someone came along with a 6Gb Hard Drive of 'stuff' I could well imagine preferring to do swapsies than encoding the stuff myself. Ripping off tracks one at a time over Napster while being spamvertised is not my idea of fun.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The reason the live music trading community (most notably etree.org) uses the shorten format is because there was not a way to widely distribute exact copies of, say, master DATs. Now, assuming the person transferring the DAT, did a reasonably good job, every person after that who receives the SHN files can create an exact copy of that DAT. This is crucial because of the way shows are distributed. One person gets a copy from his friend, and he passes it on to his friends. If there was a lossy step involved in the middle of the chain, each copy would be worse than the one before. Note tape trading. Copying a cassette is lossy, so someone who got such with a 4th or 5th generation tape was stuck with all of the artifacts that were introduced in each generation above. Even copying CD audio is not perfect: programs that do digital audio extraction need to do a good job reading the data without any error correction. Shorten makes 100% sure that every copy is just like the original.
To tell you the truth, MIDI files are as small as you can get. I use them all the time!
samrolken
... because it's an alternative.
Not only that, but it's smaller for the same quality output than mp3 or wma.
I do not want to encode my music to something that will cost me in the long term because of OS restrictions. Not long now and Microsoft will force you to buy their mp3 and wma playing licence software. (As has happened with the Windows Media Encoder in XP...)
My 2 cents.
Finally, it integrates nicely with Konqueror's audioCD IO slave. You can simply type "audiocd:/ogg/" in Konq's location bar, and it shows you a list of .ogg files with the track names grabbed from FreeDB. To actually encode, one symply drags the .ogg file to another directory, and the IO slave works its magic.
And you guys thought Mozilla was bloated!
"And like that
Some guy claims he knows audio engineers and that Windows Media sounds better to them. Wow, *so* informative. Thanks for that rock-hard information.
4 people fell for this troll!
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
About *every* CD mastered today has its peak volume at appr. 0dB, you can't go further and normalize them cause they are already have been normalized in the studio.
These "gain-ups" which exist as plugin for Winamp or xmms do the same but instead of scanning all the samples from a song to gather the amount the samples have to be scaled with they scan just the next second of the song which will be played and normalize this samples, so the song will not just be normalized but compressed badly.
And this, my fellow, just sounds like hell.
The difference between normal and LOUD songs is that the loud ones have been compressed this way in the studio. (See "Red hot chily peppers - Californication" for example.)
Since when were slashdroids known to be keenly observant of others' intellectual property rights?
Whenever a headline or blurb contains the words "GPL" and "violation". (Read More...)
Will I retire or break 10K?
As you pointed out, DVD users MPEG-2, which is a lossy compression format. Thats why you often see crappy artifacts when you watch DVD on a high end TV. My roommate has a 42" HDTV, and watching poorly encoded DVDs can be quite annoying due to the artifacts.
So, yes, I would consider DVD's lossy, even though they can be perfectly copied many times - the loss just happened before the copy was made.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Use shorten. With plugins which will allow for realtime decompression and playback (with searching within each song) available for XMMS, Winamp, and Macamp the only issue remaining is storage capacity and processing time involved in decompressing the files. Any Celeron or higher will handle the processing necessary and with 120gig drives well below $300 and 160gig starting to come out...that's a healthy sized cd collection.
A number of online communities use shorten for trading live recordings...www.etree.org is one such organization. WAVs are generated from a number of different sources, compressed, checksum's are generated, then the files are distributed freely.
Another great advantage of shorten is that if something comes along that provides better (or more desireable) compression you can un-shorten all of your files to their original state and recompress them using this newer compression scheme....something that no MP3 (or any other compression scheme that I know of) will do.
since then most of [MP3 encoding] happens on cirrus logic processors or TI DSPs.
However, the TI DSPs that handle floating-point arithmetic are much more expensive. Nobody (except Iomega, and even that's not officially released) has made a portable Ogg decoder because the Vorbis reference decoder from xiph.org uses extensive floating-point rather than fixed-point arithmetic.
If you write a Free integer decoder (or fund writing one), they will come.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That definition of "lossy" applies to all digital forms of music (and any other translation of analog information into digital). Even a CD is lossy because if you play it back, the sound-waves are not identical to the originally recorded sound waves. They may be pretty close, but they are going to be limited by the sampling rate. What goes into the Analog-to-Digital Converter will be a smooth waveform, what comes out of the Digital-to-Analog Converter will look like a step function where the size of the steps is delimited by the bit-width and rate of sampling.
Another way to look at it is:
Original Performance -> CD1 -> Playback to Analog -> CD2
CD1 and CD2 will not be bit-for-bit identical.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
if you havent tried VQF, you should. less room than mp3s, better sound quality. relies more on cpu though, and less on other things, thats why its less space with mroe quality.
Wow! Thanks for telling us about PlusV. I was sceptical of your post, and couldn't believe a 64kbps mp3 could sound anything like a 128kbps one.
So I downloaded the stuff (the documentation sucks) and ran a few tests.
Test 1 was Philip Glass' Violin Concerto, Third Movement. A 160kbps lame encoded mp3 versus a 64kbps MP3PlusV. It was good, but not really amazing. The 64kbps MP3PlusV was *way* better than the bog-standard 64kbps comparison MP3 I made though.
Test 2 was Overprotected by Britney Spears. Wow! I could hear the difference, but for general listening it was actually very pleasant. That 64kbps MP3PlusV blew me away. I can be sure that most of my non-audio geek friends wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and the 160kbps one.
So thanks for the tip! I'm going to play with this for some time..
mogorific carpentry experiments
I use ogg cos I feel cool doing so!
I've used shorten for online trading of Widespread Panic and other live bands, and it is by far the codec of choice for me. When used together with md5 checksums, it is definetely the best lossless codec out there. You can download shnAMP plugin for winamp or a similar program for Linux, which will play shns and, if shnV3 is used to encode, you will be able to seek the shns. Etree has all the programs that you need to listen, encode, and decode shns. The program written by Michael Weise (mkwACT and also found on Etree) also makes it very easy to convert to shn and a variety of other codecs.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
Sorry if this is a little too mainstream/microsofty for /., but the musicmatch(http://www.musicmatch.com) mp3 player has a volume levelling feature that I find quite useful. You just turn the feature on and when you add mp3s to the library it automatically normalizes the volume. Unfortunately it's only for Windows, but that's what I have to use at work anyway.
Wrong! You are completely confusing the analog vs. digital distinction of generational copy degradation with a specific property (lossy vs. lossless) of a digital compression algorithm.
A compression format is lossy IFF the output from an encode/decode cycle may not be identical to the input. Period. I.e. Playing back your DVcam tape doesn't produce the exact digital data that was originally output by the cam's CCD, due to the lossy compression used in storing that data to tape. This has no bearing on generational loss, which digital formats (uncompressed or no, lossy or no) don't suffer from.
Exactly. He is confusing lossy archiving/transfering with LOSSY COMPRESSION, which only has to (and does, technically) apply to the tranformation of usually analog or just uncompressed (in a certain manner) data to (in this case) digitized, compressed data. When compressed, an audio track -- whether compressed at the studio or here at home -- looses some data; hence "lossy." The true definiton of this term is evident most simply because in use, it refers to the difference in quality between real and compressed (e.g., bitmap/png v jpg or wav/shn v mp3/ogg).
It will adjust the volume on your files in batch mode. Also, version
Of course you can always use notlame, mpg123, sox and other tools to do a variety of other things with mp3s and wavs. For an example of how to do this, take a look at preparing the tracks.
If electricity is produced by electrons is morality produced by morons?
Try the below script, you'll need Python, mpg123 and sox, all of which are easy to obtain for Linux. This process stores the volume in the comment as text, you might want to consider storing it at the end of the comment in binary if you use the comment field for real information. There are a multitude of other improvements that could be made to this script (command-line options would be a good start.)
/dev/null 2>&1' % (tmpfile, song))
I also have a fairly simple random MP3 player script that also uses mpg123 with the volume settings generated. It normalizes on a song-by-song basis (unlike many of the player plugins that normalize continuously, making the quiet parts of songs no longer play quiet.) It would be fairly easy to modify it to do album-by-album normalization if you so desired. (Assuming your MP3 collection is well organized.)
#!/usr/bin/env python
# standard Py libs
import os, sys, stat, random
# available from: http://id3-py.sourceforge.net/
import ID3
def compute_volume(song):
tmpfile = '/tmp/randplay%d.wav' % os.getpid()
os.system('mpg123 -w %s "%s" >
p = os.popen('sox "%s" -e stat -v 2>&1' % tmpfile)
v = float(p.readline())
p.close()
os.system('rm %s' % tmpfile)
return v
def recurse(directory, callback):
for i in os.listdir(directory):
path = '%s/%s' % (directory, i)
m = os.stat(path)[stat.ST_MODE]
if stat.S_ISDIR(m): recurse(path, callback)
if stat.S_ISREG(m): callback(path)
def do(song):
if song[-4:] != '.mp3': return song
i = ID3.ID3(song)
v = 0.0
if i.comment and i.comment[0] in '0123456789':
v = float(i.comment)
#v = 0.0 # uncomment this to have the script (re)compute the volume of every file
if v >= 1.0:
print '%s: %f' % (song, v)
else:
print '%s: ' % song,
sys.stdout.flush()
v = compute_volume(song)
print '%f' % v
i.comment = '%f' % v
i.write()
return song
recurse(sys.argv[1], do)
It gets 99.99% compression. I think it's termed "lossy" compression.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I gave a try to Liquid Audio which is a flavor of AAC, and was fairly happy with the results. However Liquid Audio is not ISO-compliant implementation of AAC. A Psytel and FAAC are ISO-complient non-encrypted implementations. I haven't tried Psytel but apparently it shows some remarkable results. The major problem with AAC is that it is heavily patent-protected, much worse than MP3. In this respect, OGG is the best since it is free of any restrictions.
From the hardware support, there is MP3CD player from Philips which supports non-encrypted AAC (so it can play Psytel-encoded tracks), and nothing at this point supports OGG though my understanding is that iRiver is working on providing the support
Personally I would rather use AAC given there is a sufficient hardware support. OGG is probably the second best, and most likely will remain a second best after AAC.
Of course, the main motivation for non-MP3 encoding is to push the rate to 128Kbps and lower. At the higher rates MP3 is fine. I'm doing LAME with '--alt-preset standard' which averages about 200Kbps and the result is remarkably good as heard on PC with a good soundcard and decent headphones.
I'm a lamer. for the past 4 or so years I've been collecting mp3's from the internet (filequest back in the day, napster, and currently audiogalaxy) so now I have a rather large (10 gig) collection of mp3's. I would very much like to take advantage of Ogg's smaller file size but I am hesitant to re-encode the mp3's into Ogg... Is there any file-trading service that explicitly supports Ogg?
Also, I don't know of any apps that will let me burn Ogg directly to CD, which is another reason I am hesitant to go full-forward into Ogg.
for mac, but I tried it and it didn't work. Maybe you'd find it does.
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I like ogg vorbis.
But, one thing which is a -major- irritation for me is all these people whining about how they can't switch to ogg because they have 10 exobytes of mp3's that they don't want to convert. So DONT! There is no point in converting your old mp3's. Just leave them. Once I switched to ogg, I simply started ripping all CD's with ogg instead of mp3. (Thanks abcde!) All my old music is still mp3's. So what. Not like you can tell in winamp or player of your choice without looking at file properties. It's quite easy to convert an ogg to mp3 if you have a portable too. Besides, 90% of the stuff you download with Morpheus is mp3, so there's no escaping it. But that doesn't prevent you from ripping your own stuff to ogg. So there. Start using ogg -now- and eventually mp3's will be phased out.
- keir
Listen to any of the music from alt.binaries.sounds.aac You need the WinAmp LQT plug-in as well. Although it is proprietary, there are illegal copies of the encoder floating around. 128kbit files are pretty indistinguishable from CD quality, and by indistinguishable, I mean by musicians with their $5000 stereo system who've just got their ears cleaned. Most of the files are 192kbit because these people are perfectionists. I just hope Ogg gets this good. Sooner or later, we'll meet some kind of limit with one of these standards (a la ZIP) at which point, everyone will have to re-rip their CDs. Until then, MP3 will stay. WMA8 works comparatively well at 64kbit and under. Dave.
If you are ever trying to download stuff through binary newsgroup with non-premium news servers or have bad connections in p2p, then you would find out that even digital data degrades through generations of being copied & re-encoding...
As long as the original format is 16bit 44.1khz, debating what will give us the best sound quality isn't very interesting, since even the original sounds terrible.
I long for the days when SACD or DVDAudio will give us the joy of listening to music back. The fuckers who stole that from us, simply to reduce manufacturing and shipping costs, should in my opinion be @#$%@$%#6
AAC is quite nice and is supported at least in Philips portables. it's used in all kinds of places already... (DVDs...)
it's smaller and a proven higher quality. (check pretty much any sound test done by a respectable source)
Thanks all you guys :) I think I am pretty well set now. Especially thanks to those guys who pointed me to Windows rippers, because yes, I am still sadly an M$ luser... but not forever, one hopes.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
I'm a huge CDex fan myself, and it has always performed beautifully on .wav's and .mp3's, but it crashes on me (page fault) every time I try to encode an .ogg. I've tried contacting the writer of CDex, but the contact email address listed on the site is no longer a valid address, so I can't contact him. I've also tried oggdrop, which simply refuses to work as far as I can tell (nothing happens).
So I guess I'm going to grab a copy of EAC and hope it can do better. I'm stuck with hardware that can't run Linux, so I'm trying to find anyone who's written a competent and functional ogg encoder for Win98. Apparently, CDex and Oggdrop are not.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I'm an APE fan too. It's free. It's fast - even on slower computers (I recall about 1/3rd real time on a 233MMX). It compresses things to about 1/3 their size or better (frequently much better) losslessly. Best of all, I can cue them up along with mp3's using the supplied Winamp plugin.
I like lossless. I'm a packrat. I'm afraid if I use some psychoacoustic modeling to throw out some bits, someday I miss 'em and won't be able to get them back. If you toss 'em, their gone.
If it came to me as a WAV and I want to save it for posterity, I use APE (particulary if it won't fit on one CD otherwise). Otherwise, I like 128 to 160Kbps MP3's as a nice tradeoff between quality and size.
Now personally I use ogg/vorbis, but by this time there are more than enough posts supporting it. I'd just point out that maybe you should think ahead in terms of where the file format will be.
Why use an open format? Because in the end that's the only choice that makes sence. What program will you use down the road to play these things? With WMA MS owns the format, and thus can dictate who can play their files. What if they charge you a subscription fee just to use the program in the future? Who knows what they'll do, and they can do whatever they want - they have the rights to the format. You might also think about portability, and choice. If you don't like Winamp 7, you can use Sonique 5 or whatever. Chances are any player worth anything will have a plugin for ogg. With WMA, again it's up to Microsoft. What OS will you be using? It might not be MS or Linux. It may be something else entirely. Will you have to dump your collection because there isn't a player for that OS? I could go on and on, but you get the picture...
goatse.cx sounds pretty cool going through /dev/dsp.
- The BOFH Troll
What's really going on is this: using aggressive, fast-release peak limiting, musicians can get mastering engineers to push the volume of their CDs past zero. Actually, one popular technique is in fact clipping and then taking the overall volume down 0.2 db or so (to get rid of digital full scale values that can cause problems glass mastering, and with D/A converters)
Mastering engineers have been trapped in a jam comparable to clueful sysadmins being ordered to standardize on W2K/IIS: what's driving it is A&R reps and radio. Briefly, there are a lot of fools out there who figure their CD will sell better and get on the radio better if only it is louder than the next guy's. Sometimes that's even true as some of the radio program directors are also idiots who love horrible distortion and blasting loudness...
The trick is, there is NO one volume level that is 'the loudest' you can get out of digital. It's simply a tradeoff- how much distortion and grunge can you tolerate? It can be like putting a CD into a distortion box almost: look at modern music in a sound editor and you'll see a black ribbon because every sound is slammed to digital full scale. Look closer and it looks like the peaks get planed off with a surface planer. Sometimes this sounds like flat-out distortion, sometimes it doesn't, but it all more or less damages the richness of the sound.
At least with modern CDs, I'm not aware of ANY studios that put out CDs with peaks only going to part of digital full scale. The problem is in the other extreme- they pretty much all cover digital full scale peak to peak, but push beyond that in wildly varying amounts, which affects the RMS level. Some of the greatest albums in history were recorded with crest factor (amount peak is higher than RMS level) of 20 db and up, as much as 24 db sometimes (the Boston debut album). Some of your modern albums have a mere 6 db crest factor, or even less. If you put them on after the older album, they blast out your speakers and you have to turn it down (as the original poster said). Once you've turned it down, it's the same volume only sounds much lamer and weaker.
Which is all just a lot of information, no doubt, except that it is also the reason why your advice will totally NOT WORK in the slightest. Now, if you were talking about a 'normalize' function that looked at RMS volume it might be different...
A few years back there wasn an AAC encoder out there (Astrid/Quartex) which outputted rather descent quality audio. It was also a unique codec because it allowed for 5 channels of audio (the ISO standard, Astrids only supported stereo) and had comperable playback at 96kbps.
We coded a small GUI frontend for it and released it for the web to use. One month later we recieve a 28 page cease and desist from Dolby.
According to them, the Astrid/Quartex encoder was illegal and violating their patent on the AAC codec. The document stated a liscencing fee of over $10,000 a year for use of the codec.
So, as far as I'm concerned, AAC will be forever buried under the fat cats over at Dolby.
Mp3pro would be the one of my choice, if many songs become available on the internet.
"Do something man. Right now."
OK,here's a question to you: why did you chose FLAC instead of Monkey's Audio? MA seems to be by far the fastest and it gives a bit better compression than FLAC. Now, I am asking you this because I want to archive my own recordings, and I need something future proof.
So, can you give me any good arguments that would support your choice, with regards to future-proofness?
thanks!
Sigged!
Because OGG won't play on my Nomad Jukebox !
I know a local software developer that uses mpeg-2. The size is about the same, from what I understand, but you don't get the messy license agreements with it.
Yes, and we all know there's no way on earth to decode DVDs, or copy MDs or DATs or anything else. It's impossible. So when Microsoft puts the clamp down (like they've been supposedly just about to any minute now, for years, according to paranoid open source zealots) we're just totally screwed. Just like when the GIF patents came home to roost - it's impossible to encode GIFs now without multi-billion dollar rendering royalties. We won't have any options. If only I'd have encoded everything to ogg and not been able to use it on my Jukebox. But hey, it's all about 'freedom' to conform to narrow-minded paranoia, isn't it?
Feel free to keep the wool over your eyes. I'm surprised you're so thick you haven't noticed the wool is actually lining your sphincter.
I love things like OGG, because they provide just enough functionality to keep the proprietary useful technology free (as in $0, for you pedantic OSS types).
With the quality of the latest RC3 release, Vorbis now sits on the throne in the low to middle bitrates, easily beating out MP3Pro and WMA even in the very low bitrates of 64kbps. The best part about it is that Monty has mentioned that he's still not happy with the quality at 64kbps and will still be improving it further. At middle bitrates of 128kbps, it is at least as good as the best AAC implementation. At the high bitrates, it still hasn't matched MPC, but it is catching up really fast. Whether Vorbis (a transform coder) can ever overtake MPC (a subband coder) quality in the future in the high bitrate arena (usually ruled by subband coders where pre-echo artifacts are nearly non-existant) is very much unknown, and probably depends on Vorbis implementing a really good anti-pre-echo system better than all the current techniques being used.
So therefore, for the best quality now, use Ogg Vorbis at bitrates of 160kbps and below. Above 160kbps, use MPC.
Read the source Luke! - The reference source code _is_ readily adapted to fixed point. One company has done so already.
I will leave it up to the reader to search the mailing list at xiph.org to find the (recent) thread regarding EXISTING fixed point code.
do you have any clue as to what the term lossy means?
use kde version 2.1 or higher on linux.
You can rip CDs straight to OGG within the file manager, Konqueror. Settings are stored in the KDE Control Center.
This is what I use. XMMS plays them back just fine.
Sounds awesome!
Okay, here are my three situations:
Recording radio (Ogg Vorbis and SoX, 6620Hz mono, 2500Hz lowpass): oggenc -q0 gives about 115 kB/m of sound (~7MB/h) of audio, and I can still record it on my spare Pentium 75 Linux box. Also, there are no hassles with RealAudio, especially the never-ending upgrade nags from the RealAudio client.
Recording from CD (Ogg Vorbis and cdda2wav or CD-DA X-Tractor): 96 kb/s Ogg files sound as good as 128 kb/s MP3 files, and players and plug-ins are easy to find. Even whiny Windows users can find Ogg Vorbis plug-ins at the Nullsoft site, and installation is a snap. I use FreeAmp on Windows, though.
Audiophile (CD): I used to love my Rio because the battery life was good, and it didn't skip. However, it died because it took too many falls to contrete. My replacement was a $47 Philips CD/CD-R audio player with 45-second skip protection. I take care to not drop this player, but it's amazing how much better the CD sounds than most compressed audio formats. Disk space is zero, no worries about parallel port vs. USB, and most important, no worries about the portable memory format of the day.
No, I am not a microserf, but neither am I a kneejerk linux zealot.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
long duc dong
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I posted to a Ask Slashdot a while back, and got some good feedback. The result was the following essay
Hope it sheds some light on the subject.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
If the variable level of loudness bugs you, use something that normalizes the level, e.g. 'normalize', it normalizes the level (surprise, surprise)...
Search on freshmeat, it's there.
You were beat up a lot in highschool, weren't you.
Probably ignored by you family and friends too.
Well everyone on slashdot knows that you are better than us, so that should make up for it.
- Unbiased listening tests prove OGG sounds better then WMA8 at 128Kbit/sec.
- Current software (not just the format) supports 255 channels, 24bit sample depth, 96KHz+ (though it's not tuned for >48KHz, it works fine and gives acceptable results)
- The Vorbis format is far more extensiable the the WMA8 format, there should be room for at least another 20% quality vs bitrate increase with no decoder change.
- Most modern mp3 players (the same ones which can play WMA) are technically able to be firmware upgraded; all thats missing is your demand.
Beyond that, by using Vorbis you are not giving up your freedom to control and manage the format in which your own content is stored. That is an important feature, at least if you have intrest in audio beyond violating copyright law.QDesign has an audio codec designed specifically for compressing sound from musical instruments (it isn't as optimal for voice or effects). If you have a lot of classical, techno, or plain instrumentals it should give you better quality/size ratios than MP3 or OOG. Check out this audio clip. The quality is pretty good for a 300k file that is almost 2 minutes long.
The downside is that the professional encoder isn't free, though the player is. In fact any audio player that supports QuickTime will work without downloading any other plugin.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
The third test shows statistical conclusiveness that WMA is outperformed by OGG, AAC, and MPC. The other two didn't say anything about WMA8. Stop playing word games, your favorite kid lost in a little test.
I have heard QDesign's codecs. Quicktime uses them extensively, and they are very poor. Bad move on Apple's part.
Why has no one else mentioned Yamaha's amazing SoundVQ format (.vqf files)? It is amazing, giving better results than 128 kb/s MP3's at only 44 kb/s (1/3 the size of mp3). For links, google search for soundvq or vqf and/or yamaha.
I discovered VQF a year or so ago, compared to mp3 is kicks ass, lower bitrates, higher quality. More info on it can be found at dalnetvqf.com.
I'm not sure how it compares to current Ogg builds as I've been going through the whole "It doesn't matter what format it is, analog CD still sounds better" phase =).
Cheers,
leroy.
Check out this utility (dbpowerAMP Converter)
which in addition to ripping,conversion, etc, including batch work, also has a volume normalizer that works very well.
aG
http://ff123.net/128test/interim.html
At 128K, OGG is statistically superior to WMA8 in at least one blind listening test.
While I know this may be inconsequential to a lot of people, but what about processor usage? OGG vorbis, while more efficient than MP3 at keeping sound quality for space, is a cpu hog. While most people don't run a p233, at work, thats all we got. OGG vorbis is not a good choice, because it seems to batter my cpu around. THe machine can just barely keep up playing the song. It often skips! Also, when I play it on my 550 at home, its not much better. While I love to use it on my 1600xp athlon, for use on my car player, p133, 32mb ram, it is not such a good choice. Just a rant, not a flame.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
Microsoft is going to disable your computer and delete all your music files and format your hard drive and.....
I guess when you repeat it year in and year out, it's more likely to come true one of these days.
OGG/Vorbis is already used in several commercially released games, including some PS2 games.. Furthermore there exists a working ARM7 port (HipZip).
OGG/Vorbis certantly isn't perfect, but speed isn't a big stumbling block for anyone right now.
This codec was developed by a German student in his spare time. He was dissatisfied with the quality of MP3, so made his own better codec.
Look at the MPEGplus home page for more information.
It achieves better compression than MP3 with better sounding results.
Also check out these webpages where other people have gone through a lot of trouble to compare audio codecs: Eric Mrozek's Audio Compression Page
Radified Guide to non-MP3 Encoders for CD Audio
Legal just because you own the music or legal because the music is free? Technically I don't think that you are allowed to play your own CDs in a public place, like a school. ;). Also IANAL, so I might be wrong.
Not that I'm gonna stop you, though
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Absolutely, DVD is lossy. If I took a DVD, decoded the content (which I think is always encoded with MPEG-2), re-encoded it with MPEG-2, and burned it to a DVD I would most likely have a worse copy than the original DVD. The process of encoding MPEG-2 is lossy.
Now it is true that I do not have to decode and encode every time I want to copy a DVD. I can use a non-lossy method of copying the digital data directly. This still does not change the fact that DVDs are lossy because the MPEG-2 codec is a lossy codec.
As for the "older and more established" definition, I could only find the following definition at dictionary.com:
Sapere aude!
Legal just because you own the music or legal because the music is free? Technically I don't think that you are allowed to play your own CDs in a public place, like a school.
Well, the mp3s are legal. You're correct that the "public performance" is illegal, but if we're going to start busting teachers for that, we won't stop after getting rid of my jukebox. Ever watched a movie in a class?
;-P
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
You can keep your fancy MS Office, IE 6 can crash elsewhere, Quickbooks and Quicken -- you can have em;, games are for kids...But man if I could have 1 "port" from the evil demons it would be wma8 encode/decode. I am a bit of a music freak...and can not help think I get the best "bang for the buck" out of WMA's encoded at 64. The perfect mix of size and quality -- granted through headphones I did not mind the sound of mp3's at 56 back when 32 meg players were the rage....(So I don't have a professional ear...But until then Lame is cooking up pretty good 64's for me I guess.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Some of my own informal tests (Sound Blaster Live and Sony MDR-G82LP not the best setup, but what i had available), i tested, ogg, aac (psytel and liquid audio/fraunhoffer), mp3, aac, vqf, wma7, wma8, mp3+ and more that escapes my mind (all lossy codecs), this is what i found:
aac consistently came at the top, but original psytel codecs gave a weird background noise, later versions fixed that though, it also had one of the highest decoding complexities
next came ogg vorbis, suprisingly this codec really delivered, there were subtle flaws (weird minor echos or treble highs just not sounding right, maybe wavelets will fix that) and it also had a very low decoding complexity
to microsofts credit, wma8 was quite good, coming mostly 3rd but it still had that weird swishy sound at times and it just sounded a bit synthesised (think 80s), but also came with a high decoding complexity
and a summary of the rest, vqf isn't worth a grain of salt, constant muffled sound, wma7 you need not worrya bout now there is wma8, mp3+ seemed to be an odd sort of tradeoff, not always getting better than mp3
these tests where done under windows, all codecs where forced to encode as close to 128kbps as they could, when i say high decoding complexity, i'm comparing that to mp3s
my final words would be, i'm looking forward to mp4 if it will take the best of both aac and vqf (dunno whats there in vqf, but hey they're giving it praise that i can't find for it), but its been indevelopment for so long and there aren't any available encoders (that i know of), it also comes with a high decoding complexity, in the meantime aac is very promising
ogg vorbis is what i choose, it has a favourable decoding copmlexity to mp3 and it still hasn't gotten up to its peak optimization so there's a lot of promise, i can't wait for this codec to be finished, it is just so great in every way, with sound only slightly worse than aac but a decoding complexity so much lower, it takes the crown, and there's still improvement to be done, note that i did these tests before there was an RC build, currently i'm builing a little decoder for ogg vorbis for my program, it sure got my attention
After collecting 60 Gb worth of mp3s, I switched to almost strictly shn format
over 2 years ago. Here is my reasoning:
1. Stick with a lossless format if you can afford the bandwidth and storage
space. Plan for the future, when bandwidth and hd space will be much
more plentiful.
2. I can definitely hear the difference between lossless and any compressed
format at 128 kb/s (that annoying wavery sound), and even at 256 kb/s (barely)
on very delicate passages and high-end speakers.
3. Also, if you want to reprocess the music (dehiss, dehum, equalize, normalize,
respatialize, etc) you experience a much more noticeable degradation in the
sound if you start with a lossy format.
4. shn is the standard format for trading music.
It is a lot less work to store in shn then have to decode and reencode every
time you make a music trade.
For lots of good links on shn format, see my trading page at
http://www.vsl.ist.ucf.edu/groups/vtb/TradeList
(Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here
.
;-)
I'm curious -- has anyone been able to metamod some of the moderations on the thread in question? Given that there have probably been more mod points expended on that thread than probably any other story, ever, it seems a bit fishy that at least I haven't seen anything about it. It might make the editors see things a little better if they got metamodded into oblivion.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Others have replied quite well, but I have a detail to add.
Microsoft is creating a new codec called "Corona" and sticking it in the WM8 file format. That means older players will not be able to play it - makes sense, right? After all, DirectX is like this - newer hardware does not function with older versions of DirectX.
Well.. this is just one of those things that makes me like open-ended specs better. Ogg Vorbis already supports 8, 16, 20, 24, and 32-bit in spec, though the reference decoder and encoder focus on 128kbit-16bit. It also supports up to 255 channels (as of 1.0rc2), and all that is needed is a common spec for what channel means what. This is all aside from my real point, however. Ogg Vorbis is designed so that older decoders will be able to decode newer oggs with features that the older codecs don't support. You can test this right this second. Go to www.xiph.org and grab an old decoder and a brand spanking new encoder.
It's such a well thought out design and compliments the feature so well I wonder why nobody(microsoft) ever thought of it before oh, wait
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
i like monkey's audio... good lossless compression.
- = S y L e N T P R o F e T = -
NTSC and PAL use color compression and are therefore are lossy formats anyway,
Has anybody here converted large numbers of mp3's to ogg? How did you do it? Any comments on the quality of the audio after conversion?
After some thought I found out what the app needs to do for it to be really usefull:
1. Convert all mp3's in a specific directory and subdirectories to ogg.
2. Find the bitrate on the mp3 and convert to a similar bitrate ogg-file.
--
\ Christian A Strømmen
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
I have seen a lot of comments on mp3/ogg/wmf quality. Most people can only here the top 10% or so of the music. This was proven with both ADCPM and that Delta what ever compression, anyway same arguments different decade, no reliable differance in sound quality was ever found. Neither is there a reliable differance between mp3/ogg/wmf.
Now as for playing them thourgh a stereo sytem i can hear very little differance between mp3 and the original cd. I have a B&K Referance 30,HK Signutare 2.1,Sony X7 ESD(old but one of the finest cd players ever made, sound quality though is irelevent since i use the ref30 to decode the pcm stream) and Infenty Bettas and a 18" JBL Sub pwered by a 1400 watt amp. Now on the computer side i have a old AT AMD 300MHz with a Soundblaster PCI128(with SPDIF outpt) running digital in to the ref 30.
Now does the sony playing the orginal CD sound better yes. Does it sound $1800(I paid $1900 for the x7 esd i spent about a $100 on the box) better no , the mp3 have a little more sizzle and are litle harsher thats about it. The point i wanted to make is this most people blame lossly compression, the problem is the speakers or head phones or what ever and mainly the cheap sound cards found in pc most of which have 14bit converters not the 24bit burr browns in the ref30. If you are going to compare non compressed PCM to mp3/ogg/wmf then you have to get rid of all other variables and i bet my whole stereo that only 2/10 would be able to tell the differance in a true blind ABX test.
You could also check out Normalize. It's a utility that converts .wav (and .mp3 if you have the MAD library) files so that they sound like they have the same volume.
Check it out at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cvaill/normalize/
Echo works well with ogg vorbis files, go for that. As for QuickTime, a component is available. There are other players available, do a search on versiontracker.com for ogg.
Last time I checked, it was perfectly legal to possess mp3s, even of copyrighted material. It is also legal to play those mp3s, even in public. What would be illegal would be to sell those coprighted mp3s, or to use them for commercial gain (e.g. in your bar or dance studio) without compensating the copyright holder.
If I am wrong about this, prove it!
And quit chaining yourself to the immortal vultures (RIAA, MPA, corrupt feds, etc).
I would jump to Ogg, no more mp3, no more anything else, if there were some l33tz0r Ogg hardware players... as it stands, I'm waiting on the very edge of getting an mp3 player, now that flash cards are moving at acceptable prices...
Please, someone show me a good Ogg player!
mp3s are a format of convenience for me. I spend 15 minutes encoding and storing, and then roll on from there. But I'd love to replace it with Ogg...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
You should probably report a bug on oggdrop (go to http://bugs.xiph.org ) - they are very interested in getting all of the default tools working right.
.wav files onto it, and it will automatically convert them to .ogg. That is what you are trying to do with it, yes?
Just to check - oggdrop is a very simple tool, where you drag
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
i prefer mpc for high quality songs. it is particular smaller than a high quality mp3 and beats it easily! look here: http://www.mpegplus.de/eng/whatis.html
this test is from 2000, but still very true!
Never mind how hi-fi it is, I need something to use at 8kbps for mono speech. I am streaming audio to 3rd world countries.
Anyone know any MELP, CELP codecs?
They have heard of it at the plusv.org site and support the use of ogg vorbis with this new compression method.
It works by filtering out the noise in the higher frequencies and just compressing the music. If you play this music back on a normal decoder then it only plays back upto 11kHz of frequency. With a plus V enabled play back device you get normal frequency response in the playback.
It looks plausable.
I'd need to hear it to tell if it actually works. If this does work then I will need to re-rip all my CD's at 48kbit variable rate ogg vorbis, and fit my entire music collection on about 3 CDR's.
They also seem to be friendly to individuals using their technology.
-- Never make a general statement.
"Now, if you were talking about a 'normalize' function that looked at RMS volume it might be different..."
I find the problem isn't necessarily the RMS volume (although that is an issue)- the real problem is the RMS content- viz:
'I found a solution to this dilemma: I respond, "As an Atheist, I don't celebrate Christmas, but thanks for the good wishes." This way, I can stand up for my views while still being nice to the person who wanted to be nice to me.'
'For me there is nothing to value in sex with someone who felt no attraction or warmth for me'
'GNU/Linux'
graspee
If the developers (hey, if you can code, why not lend a hand?) can bring out Version 1.0 (It's RC3 right now) in the not-all-too-distant-future, and it gets just a teensy little bit of hardware support, Ogg Vorbis is well on it's way to the mainstream.
I would highly recommend reading these sites:
http://www.r3mix.net/ - Explains how to ge the best Quality from Mp3.
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/ - How to rip a CD properly under Linux
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ - How to rip a CD properly under Windoze
With a 60Gb Disk sitting on a spare machine on a 100Mbit switched network I just use FLACs because its open source and available for Linux unlike Monkey Audio Compression:
Marilyn Manson.flac = 75% of original
Moonlight Sonata.flac = 42% of original
I just tried encoding Kosheen - Catch.wav at 64Kbit using Lame and Ogg with all other settings optimal. The Mp3 did'nt even come close to the Ogg. The Ogg was obviously gonna be a bit tinkly at 61Kbit average but the Mp3 was all muffled and horrible.
Hey, nobody's mentioned MLP -- Meridian Lossless
http://www.ambisonic.net/mlp.html
I know its not open (why in gods name they have a format with no available software encoder is beyond me) but anyway, its supported in DVD audio production hardware...
Steve
It's lossy because you lose quality from the original input. With lossless compression you can do something like:
compress as zip -> uncompress -> compress as gzip -> uncompress -> compress as rar -> uncompress -> compress as ace -> uncompress
and end up with the original file. With an audio example, this means you could transcode between LPAC, Shorten, etc. without any loss in quality.
With lossy compression, this is not possible. If you do CD -> wav -> mp3 -> wav -> mpc -> wav -> ogg -> wav, you'll end up with a really crappy wav at the end.
This has practical implications in that it makes transcoding unattractive. If for example you wanted to rip your CD collection to Ogg for archiving, but had an mp3 portable player, your mp3s in the Cd -> Ogg -> mp3 process would be of lower quality than if you had directly encoded the mp3s from Cd.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You are wrong about that. You need a license even to play a CD or even the radio in public (I am not kidding)!
If you own a restaurant, and you want to play CDs or the radio quietly in the background, you need a license from ASCAP and BMI. JWZ talks about this some and all the crap he had to go through to do a webcast from his club. Here's a snippet that relates to what you were saysing:
One of the more absurd things about this system is the triple-billing that occurs. Consider the scenario of a retail store that has the radio on. That store is expected to pay ASCAP/BMI for the privilege of playing music. But here's what you get when you do the math:
When CoolPlayer went open source we couldn't resist switching it over to use the MAD codec its still MP3 at heart but you really can tell the difference. And you dont need to re ripp your collection, but if you do want tte ultiamte re ripp with LAME and play back with MAD. CoolPlayer is still short of a good Vis engine ( currently integrating http://www.DreamRender.com) so if you like pretty picture with your sounds you can get the MAD pluging for Winamp.
MP3 rocks! But I guess it does not get you as many geek points when your friends come over. Get over it dood.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html.
This uses the most up to date versions of the encoders, and includes a useful comparison chart of the features of the various lossless formats (of course, in his comparison chart, Flac wins :).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Worked out which colour speaker cables sound best yet?
Wow!
What magical mathematics do they use to get them past 0 (thats 0dBFS I presume, all bits turned on)
Wasn't this topic brought up not to long before the end of last year..
Who makes you Sig?
I started out using Sheridan Disc Cataloger, but somewhere after cataloging 100 CDs of MP3s the thing started getting flaky: the search function stopped working (even after running the various maintenance functions which I hoped might regenerate the indexes). I can still browse the catalog, but I really also need the search.
Can anyone suggest an alternate software package? Or a way to fix Sheridan? A non-proprietary db format would be nice also so I can browse it in MS Access (I'm using Win98 right now on my PC). Thanks.
Check out ripperX or Grip, both do a pretty good job.
I am so elite I use FLAC for my archives, look at me! Really FLAC is the best. For cd's I don't really cherish (or I can get anywhere) I use ogg. Ogg RC3 sounds fantastic at the default. And you can stream both fotmats so you can set up some PHP streaming web based database and listen in any room of your house with a wireless card setup.
I use mp3 for the everyday stuff I don't really give a big crap about. But SHN is what's accepted in the live music trading scene.
But I have no clue where to start looking for ogg music files. With mp3 there's BearShare (gnutella), Morpheous, AudioGalaxy, etc... but what about ogg?
~ now you know
It seems that most of the talk about the various digital music formats is in terms of how close to CD quality they come.
What about the newer media formats (and perhaps some older ones too) such as SACD or DVD-Audio that exceed CD quality?
Are there any digital file formats that are good for encoding these better than CD quality medias? What sort of bit rates do these require?
Roll out the lawyers... :)
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Hey guys, mod this puppie up!
Ok I have been corrected... I was trying to de-confusalize my explaination of normalization.. yes RMS is the best way to go and the program normalize does this in fact.
What I was trying to explain was that the mastering done today is horrible all the way around. Right now the high end audio shops are demonstrating HDCD and the sony HDCD system. everyone that listens to it comments how it's amazingly clear, wonderful sounding.... etc.... well back in 1987 I bought a CD that cost me $45.00 and sounds that clear. it is a Gold digital master of Supertramp's crime of the century album. and today it still blows away every other CD I have heard on any player in clarity,dynamic range, and overall quality. it is very close to this new HDCD format (in fact I had the salesperson use my wonderful CD in his player, he swore it was a HDCD until I had him find the copyright date, and try it on a regular Cd player.)
regular CD's cane be AWESOME, but the recording studios choose not to spend that extra hour to make it awesome.... because 90% of the CD's sold will be played on car stereos, boom-boxes, portables, and stereos costing less than $500.00
so yes, you are correct sir, but I still contend that the final mastering is still being done sloppy... and as you say, at the insistance of the buyer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The best lossless encoder, bar none, is AAC. Anybody who has done controlled listening tests can tell you that. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of consumer AAC encoders out there.
Lossless, LPAC is pretty good.
However, you should think about your applications. While AAC and Ogg sound better than MP3, there is a great dearth of portable players, etc. for these formats and you shouldn't ecpect to seem them anytime soon. Ther is also the question of exchange. Do you intend to trade these files around? Or even thrown them on a CD and play them in remote locations? And remember, that if you even have a moderately large collection of music, transcoding it to different formats is a major hassle.
MP3s big advantage is ubiquity. It isn't likely to leave the scene anytime soon and ther are a lready a vide variedy of systems/players/components using the format.
So my reccomendation is, generally, to go with MP3 with as low a bitrate as you can stand (192 is my reccomended minimum).
If you're a hardcore audiophile, you probably won't be able to stand any level of compression. Do with PCM.
This would be like saying one blade of grass is blue green and the other is green green while a scientist with a spectrograph is sitting there proving that there is only one color.
the mp3 format I say wins hands down over Ogg Vorbis. For one, there is a lot more hardware out for it then for ogg vorbis. Second, the processor used in mp3 players cannot handle ogg vorbis files. You would need a strongarm processor to be able to handle ogg vorbis files. Here's the simple way of putting it. processor + mp3 license strongarm processor for ogg vorbis format. So you see its not that mp3 is more popular then ogg vorbis, its the fact that it costs companies less money over all to make an mp3 player then it does to make a player capable of playing ogg vorbis files.
On my current collection (several others were wiped out by hard-drive failures) I started out using Ogg/Vorbis, but I've switched to FLAC. I figure that as long as I have plenty of space, I may as well encode losslessly, and then when I start running out, I can convert to a lossy format. The only problem with using FLAC, is that I like to be able to listen to my music at other locations, over the Internet, but FLAC'ed audio takes too much bandwidth for that, as well as lacking popular support. I was hoping that I would be able to trans-code to MP3 (because it takes less CPU power to encode, and I know more people with MP3 players than Ogg/Vorbis) in real time on my gateway (P-166MMX), but it can't quite make it (IIRC, it runs at about .9x, using a heavily optimized version of LAME). If I gave the encoder a head start, it would probably work, but that would require prescience on the encoder's part, to know what song I wanted to play, before I requested it.
Does anyone know of a FREE (as in not buy this shitty $59.95 program to...) utility for burning ogg files to audio cd? I have 3 gigs of oggs sitting on my drive and can't find either a decoder to WAV or a program convert them at burn-time for me. Why is this?
Bullshit, you do not have 'golden ears'.
You are just an anally repressed dick. Do you see the difference?
Less that 0.000000001% of the people who have visited Slashdot have compared an MP3 encoded at 256K with a CD with the setup you've described.
And I *bet* _you_ haven't actually done that either. (I bet the actual, precised answer is: no one who reads or gives a fuck about Slashdot, and problably no one, ever has done that exact perticular experiment.)
I'm *fucking* sure you don't have that kind of setup at home (if you did have that kind of money, you would have to be a complete fuckwit-beyond-all-description to use cheap-ass $30 headphones at work, even *I* don't have any headphones that cost less than 45 USD, and I have 5 pairs, that includes little 'bud' 'phones as well). Also, you'd be able to afford some sort of DSL, if not a T1+, and stream the damn thing from home like I do. And AS you don't have that particular setup at home, what the fuck is the point of your rant?
Now, IN THE REAL WORLD, most people can't tell the difference between a CD and an MP3 at 256K/512K. Why? Because they are
a) HUMAN.
and
b) SPEND LESS THAN 300 USD ON THEIR STEREO.
Yes, less than 300 USD! Most consumer HI-FI systems cost way less than that. Most systems retail for 100-200 USD. See your local consumer electronics store for examples.
You *stupid fuck*, if they spend less than 300 USD on their stereo, and that includes the cost of the interated CD/Tape/Radio player, how the fuck are they going to tell the difference on a pair of speakers that are probably only worth 50-150 USD?
Answer: They are NOT. FUCKWIT.
So the origional poster was 100% correct in his defition, as read by a NORMAL (note THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE *YOU*) person reading REASONABLE meaning in to his statement (AGAIN, DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU, YOU ARE ARE NOT REASONABLE).
AHRRRRR. What the fuck is the matter with people like you? Where the fuck do you all come from? AND WON'T YOU PLEASE FUCKOFF BACK THERE.
One lossless format which I havn't seen mentioned here is Monkey's Audio:
http://www.monkeysaudio.com/
It performs a lot better than Shorten as far as I can tell.
R.
No. Look, your definition differs from the commonly accepted definition of the word lossy: therefore you lose.
when you make a second or third generation copy of a DVD, you don't (have to) lose data. You can, if you DivX or do something equally dumb, but you can rip the VOBs, and keep them. They will have all the digital information of the original.
Guess what: when you upload that file to the latest -1 hour w4r3z site, it STILL retains the original quality on the DVD.
The fact that the encoding used on the DVD itself is "lossy" has no bearing on its distribution. DVDs are digital: they don't lose data when copied. Comprendo?
If you want to talk lossy, realize that music, even on a CD, is "lossy" in terms of the fact that everything is normally recorded nowadays at 24 bits, 96 kHz, and must be crammed/downsampled into a 16 bit, 44.1 kHz redbook format. Remember: information was thrown out. However, I don't consider CDs a lossy format, because, outside of abuse, the data stays on the disc, and (more or less), perfect digital copies can be made (with caveats, believe it or not!). Compare this to a tape, where the data is all analog, and CANNOT be perfectly copied from one generation to the next. Not without startrek-style matter replicators, in any case.
Now, do you see what I mean?
Thanks for the sarcasm, moron.
Did you realize that the signal carried by a cable is affected by the dielectric, be it teflon, PVC, or polyethylene? And that additives change the dielectric of the cover and thus the electrical characteristics of a cable, by the way?
Of course, an idiot like you probably doesn't understand the finer (or even the cruder) points of basic physics anyway. Whatever, go fuck your mom some more, would ja? The tapes I'm making are selling for a hefty sum, you know...
although you're essentially saying the same as i was saying a few posts earlier, i must say i'm disappointed by the tone of your response. no wonder you don't hear any difference, you are screaming all the time.
i do learn interesting words here (as a non-native english speaker).
"fuckwit" hmmm, interesting...
"anally repressed dick" WTF is that supposed to mean !?!
AC is an appropriate word for guys like you though. post under your account and burn your karma if you dare.
"You are wrong about that. You need a license even to play a CD or even the radio in public (I am not kidding)!
If you own a restaurant, and you want to play CDs or the radio quietly in the background, you need a license from ASCAP and BMI."
I believe what you say about needing a license to play music for your customers in a restaurant. I think the arugument for that (however specious) is that the restaurant owner is garnering commercial benefit from the music (as if, the customers flock to your restaurant to hear the muzak, rather than enjoy the food).
I know of somebody in the dance instruction business, who owns a number of dance studios. BMI bills them yearly, claiming they are due copyright royalties, even though BMI has no direct knowledge of what music is actually used in these establishments. The bills have been ignored, up until now, with no adverse repercussions.
there doesn't seem to be a single setting for everything that I've ripped....tweaks a single number in the file header to force it in line with the rest of my collection.... Is this sort of thing possible?
No, because simply increasing the maximum volume level (normalizing) won't increase the average volume (achieved by compression and tailoring EQ.) This is the kind of task that mastering engineers get paid to do.
If you could find an audio program that you could script to do some of this, and were willing to wait for the processing happen, you might get close enough for satisfaction. Such a program may already exist, though I can't name one offhand.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
"But let me restate my example, If you were to by the LOTR DVD, would you consider that distribution format lossy?"
Of course it is lossy. While it is *perceived* to be of similar quality as the original, upon close inspection it quite clearly *isn't*. Artifacts such as banding and ugly squares of uniform colour are par for the course with this type of compression.
No amount of filtering or tidying up at the client end can correct this, as the information simply isn't there. It has been discarded by the *lossy* process of MPEG-2 encoding.
.
.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
mp3 isn't even an option.
I can't believe people are still making hardware for such a license-ridden not to mention obsolete format. I guess just because it's a household name like "VHS" or "Windows".
If I want a lossy audio format similar to what I would have gotten with mp3, I would have to choose the most excellent Ogg Vorbis.
For high-end applications, I would have a look at FLAC.
.
.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Exactly. I fail to understand much of the previous discussion. All you get from exceeding digital levels is massive distortion, really nasty digital distortion, not the warm smooth distortion of tube or tape-type overdriven compression. The sane way to drive up the RMS levels of a digital recording is to apply aggressive digital compression, then normalize up to close to 0 dB.
ok so mp3 is teh industry standard...
but it has been around for so long...
in my opinion Musepack (or MPC) which used to be called Mpegplus is by far the best codec for several reasons...
1. very high quality: for the most part even the standard setting for Musepack files is transparent to most people... and i dont mean about equal with 128k mp3... it is MUCH better.
2. ONE standard encoder: mp3 could be great, but there are so many different types of mp3... Xing, LAME, FhG, etc... they dont all sound the same... and with music on the net, there really is no way to tell what has encoded which file.
3. Low CPU usage: on my tests, decoding a MPC file (or playing a MPC file) uses less CPU power than playing or decoding even a MP3 file. thats something to say for use in portables, as for the most part companies dont want to sacrifice batteries like crazy for a faster more powerful cpu.
4. potential: MPC has come quite far since i have been around... and who knows where it will go. i know for a fact that stream version 8 is now being actively worked on. with this we will get support for multiple sampling rates and multiple chanels, along with a ton of other improvements. also there has recetly been started a p2p sharing of MPC files (visit http://aquaudio.yi.org/board for more info) and we already have winamp support and support in EAC and a slew of other programs.
5. (for now) its free: MPC decoder has always been free. and so has the encoder... with the completion of the software it is possible the (one) creator of the format will charge a small fee, as he has based some of his work on the sub band technologies patented by philips (i believe that is the company). i do believe however that there will never be a charge for playing the files and currently there is no red tape around the format (as there was with AAC).
personally i believe MPC has the best things going for it. sure maybe OGG is 100% free, but it uses more CPU power and is not completely developed yet (and because of its open nature the development is excrutiatingly slow). sure WMA is made by microsoft, but it has all sorts of red tape around it. AAC has great quality, but once again the red tape. sure mp3 has the support, but MPC is getting there...
people need to stop living in the past and hear what they have been missing.
for basic info on Musepack, please visit musepack.net and/or musepack.org (not yet completed).
I admit it, i`m a moron. But theres no need for that sort of language.
Oh, and by the way, no-one i know who works in music (making it, not just wanking over oxygen free cables) gives a shit about all that hifi crap, so when you listen to music (you do listen to music, right?), you`re listening to music made by people on stuff which doesnt pass your `quality` tests.
If you want an OGG player, then stop using MP3.
If more users start picking up on OGG, then they will support the format.
As I write this, this thread is sitting at 533 comments. Except for the trolls, what people have written here has been extremely useful to me.
Thanks to everyone.:)
Hey James you'll be getting a kindly informed and valuable opinion in the mail shortly! I hope that others will also feel the need... in case you didn't realize, this is a discussion about MP3 and other audio codecs and really has f*ck-all to do with Apple's shoddy OS or its closed-source Quicktime rubbish, which you can take and shove up your sloppy assh*le, you freak!
Linux will roll over you and your Apple-bearing cronies and leave no dent in your thick skull, as we leave you behind. Good-bye.
Actually, that's only true for massmarket crap produced by the wonderful big studios. If you look around at some of the smaller record labels like Chesky, MapleShade/WildChild, AudioQuest, etc., you'll find that not only do they have more original (non-mass-market) artists, but that they actually care about things like minimalist miking positions, dynamic range, and all sorts of stuff like that as well...
I encode acoustic music at 56kbps for an Internet station. I have carefully evaluated all available encoders at that rate (or as close to it as their UI's will allow me to get), because I want the best sound for my bandwidth. Nothing beats the Fraunhofer Professional MP3 codec at these rates. I can achieve FM quality at 1-1.5mb per song. When I try the same thing with Ogg it sounds washed-out and fuzzy.
I wish the Ogg Vorbis people well, but from an acoustic standpoint they are not yet an option for me.
Fraunhofer Professional MP3 codec at 64kbps...How much does that cost?
> Fraunhofer Professional MP3 codec at 64kbps...How much does that cost?
Um, it costs the same for everything except a couple of very high bit rates. I think the current price from Opticom is $50 for "Advanced Plus" and $200 for "Professional." Also as I said, I use it at 56kbps, not 64kbps. Compared to the other expenses of running a streaming station, that part is trivial.