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

[Paladin128]

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.

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 .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.

Vorbis and flac

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'm writing a new application and I have chosen the supported audio formats based on practical concerns: license, patent status, and API. MP3 is nice but technically you need to a license from the patent holder to make an encoder. Vorbis has no such limitation so I use it. I use flac for the same reason. Its license agrees with mine.

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.

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:Windows Media Format...

[orbital3]

I recently bought a Rio Volt MP3/WMA CD player, and compared WMA8 with VBR LAME, and LAME won hands down. Both encoders are set to come out around 128kbit, and while both of course have artifacts, the artifacts in WMA are MUCH more noticeable. I guess I'm just alot more sensitive to the type of artifacts WMA produces...

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:like so?

[Tackhead]

> > HD's are cheap, hell save them as XML.
>
>Like So?
>1
> 0
> [8 times per sample]

No, it's even worse!

(1-2 k of headers and track metadata deleted)

<BYTE>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
</BYTE>

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.

There's no integer decoder

[yerricde]

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.

I use the MUTE codec.

[MongooseCN]

It gets 99.99% compression. I think it's termed "lossy" compression.

Vorbis below 160kbps, MPC above 160kbps

[tangent3]

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.

Arguments for shn

[guygee]

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_ 20 01-11-25.html

(Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here

.
;-)