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."

Comments

Ogg Vorbis

[xercist]

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.

Re:WMA 8 is the way

[orbital3]

* Much better than OGG and MP3
* Picture perfect at 128 kbit/s

And what is this comment based on? These results have been pointed out in comments for previous articles, but I'd like to mention them again. ff123 has been conducting double blind tests comparing various audio codecs, and the results are here.

The following is from the page:

Comparisons in red below are true as a group with 95% confidence.

ogg is better than wma8
mpc is better than wma8
ogg is better than xing
mpc is better than xing
aac is better than wma8
aac is better than xing
lame is better than wma8
lame is better than xing

Looks to me like WMA8 got beat by pretty much everything... But hey, what good is statistical analysis anyways...

Ogg Vorbis clearly wins

[Teach]

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?

• The sound quality is lower than many current alternatives (AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA).
• The patent situation is scary and I fear a recurrence of the whole Unisys/GIF fiasco.
• Saying I have a hard-drive full of mp3s just sounds shady, even though they're all legal.

So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?

• Sound quality vs. file size is very nice. Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller. That's nothing to sneeze at.
• Patent-free algorithms and open-source license mean The Man can never take my oggs from me.
• Oggs are peelable, meaning that I can encode a file at, say, 160 kbps for listening at home, and peel the file down to 96 kbps later for listening on my portable. The peeling produces a file that has the same quality as if I'd encoded the original source directly to 96 kbps. This is also a big win for streaming folks because you only have to encode one bitrate and can peel to others as needed.
• The mailing list is quite active and you can get advice and help in a hurry. Plus there's a bugzilla, so you can easily report any errors you find.

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

Re:WMA 8 is the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft cheats with WMA8 - all they do is compress the range a little which results in an average 3 dB volume level boost. It has been repeatedly shown in multiple independent studies that even just a small increase in volume makes music "sound better" to the average listener. Often you'll get all kinds of superlatives about accuracy, openness, full-bodied, etc, etc from the people comparing the louder track to the quieter one. MS knows this which is why they play those psychoacoustical games with WMA8.

If you compare a good mp3 encoding (say with LAME and the right arguments) to a WMA8 encoding of the same bit-rate and with the volume levels matched, mp3 will win out, or at least tie, everytime and Ogg will usually do the same with 25% less bits.

Your specific example: Ogg has ReplayGain

[xiphmont]

Ogg has ReplayGain support to directly address the problem of varying apparent music amplitude. (ie, you've noticed that both pop and classical tend to use the whole amplitude range, but pop is apparently louder due to dynamic range compression. Replaygain is a method of figuring out the 'actual' loudness).

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

Re:.wav

[uebernewby]

.WAV *is* PCM. With headers that differ from the PCM files on audio CD's (.CDA). As has been pointed out elsewhere, PCM is simply a way to describe audio data using ones and zeroes. There's no compression involved.

Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]

[gutter]

1. Original VHS -> VHS -> VHS -> VHS 3 generations of lossy copying.

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. :)

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Trepidity]

You don't seem to have been following developments lately. LAME at 256kbps is not perfect - check the ISO test samples, as well as some others people have dug up. There are people who can reliably ABX such encodes 16/16. Ogg tends to be slightly better than mp3 with many of these test samples, though I'd put the extreme high-bitrate category at a tie right now. In the "stuff most people use" category, Ogg at -q5 or -q6 is approximately the same as LAME with --alt-preset standard, and results in a lower bitrate. Ogg at -q7 is about the same as --alt-preset extreme, and Ogg at -q8 or -q9 can only be matched by LAME --alt-preset insane (320kbps CBR), but usually results in a lower bitrate.

Of course, it depends what your ear hears. If you're particularly sensitive to pre-echo and other transient-related problems, MPC is without a doubt the best encoder, at any reasonably high (>200 kbps) bitrate.