Ogg Vorbis 1.0

uvasmith writes "According to the Ogg Vorbis website... Release 1.0 is now ready and tagged as 'vorbis1_0_public_release' in CVS. This is a full release of a 1.0 encoder, decoder and tool set. The encoder, decoder and tools now implement all Vorbis 1.0 specification features including low-bitrate, cascading and channel coupling." Update: 07/19 17:05 GMT by C :It seems someone jumped the gun a bit in mentioning the release, but now it's official! Check out the download page, the letter from their CEO and (if you wish) cough up a few bucks at the donation page! For those audiophiles among us, you can check out a side-by-side audio comparison here. Oh, and don't forget the free music!

Comments

Serious question: iTunes

[Dark Paladin]

I like iTunes and my iPod, and I'm curious: does anyone know of a plug-in for these two products?

I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my beloved MP3's, but I wouldn't mind trying something that isn't tied to somebody else's patent.

Bad Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that when I "rip" music from CDs into OOG Vorbis Format that it has poor playback quality (very crackly).
I'm wondering if other readers out there experience similar problems. I was thinking this might be some copy protection on CDs similar to that on video cassettes.

Re:Bad Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you get crackling when you rip to compressed formats (i.e. ogg and mp3) but not uncompressed formats (i.e. wav)? Could be an artifact caused by the fact that audio CDs lack sector numbering. If the audio compression causes the ripping software to start and stop reading audio CD rather than it reading continuously, there may be gaps and repeats in the resulting data read from the CD, thus causing the source of crackling.

Ogg Vorbis 1.0 sounds better than ever

[boa13]

Try quality 0. Or even -1. Yes, you're under 64 kbps. 'nuff said.

Re:Still no specification

[Anonymous Coward]

There's alot of documentation been put into CVS the last few weeks so you'll have to see the docs.

Re:Still no specification

[RadioheadKid]

Umm...no, check CVS...module vorbis/docs, there's tons or specs in there for you. I think Monty finished them up last night. So before you jump down their throat, get your facts straight. Monty and the other guys have done a lot of work the past few weeks. Why not say thank you instead of spouting off about things you don't even have all the information on. BTW, Ogg Vorbis 1.0 sounds amazing. Better than an other CODEC out there. WMA is in the dust now.

Re:Now begins the hardest part...

[oever]

Yesterday, I signed of for beta-testing some hardware: a portable device for playing music from memory or from CD. You had to fill in a form with questions like What kind of environment will you use the apparatus in? - Dry - Wet - Cold - Hot.

One question was: What is your favourite audio format?

And, tadaa, OGG was one of the options.

If you are curious to know which hardware vendor has public beta testing. Heheh, I'm not telling.

Re:Ogg at Emusic.com

[Milo Fungus]

The point was raised in yesterday's discussion that in order to stop piracy, the content industry simply needed to offer a better alternative. Emusic.com was one such alternative suggested. Rather than attempt to hobble piracy with DRM technology, they would be directly competing with pirates. With their financial resources they can easily make their services quick and convenient. Adding ogg would just make it that much better. Media files would not only sound better, but they would also be smaller on average. And Emusic won't have to pay anyone for the priviledge of using them.

Hopefully, R3mix.net will pick this up

[miracle69]

I'd love for r3mix.net (or a similar site) to analyze the OGG format so I can be ensured that at x bitrate, it is the same as CD-quality. I currently rip mp3s at 256k, using options that r3mix.net recommends, and I must say I've been very happy. However, now that ogg is out, I will switch all future rips to that format.

Anyone know of any good links?

(don't flame me) Why?

[foobar104]

I know this may be an ignorant question, but... why?

I have about 400 CDs at home, but six months or so ago I ripped 'em all to MP3 at 160 Kbit-- small enough to be reasonable, big enough to sound find through the stereo system I have wired up in my house. They're occupying about 15 GB on my iMac at home, and when I want music I fire up iTunes and play 'em. I can't think of anything about this setup that I'd change.

What is there about Ogg that I don't know yet that would make me say, ``Yeah, that's way better than MP3?'' Is it technically better, somehow? Can I squeeze that 15 GB music collection into 1 GB with no noticable loss of sound quality, or something?

I don't mean to detract from anybody's work or achievement, but I guess I just don't understand why this is cool. Somebody please educate me.

Re:(don't flame me) Why?

[FooBarWidget]

> That sounds cool and all, but I don't think a 2:1
> savings in library size is a good enough reason
> for me to spend hundreds of hours re-encoding my
> CD collection. 10:1 might be, but 2:1 isn't a big
> enough deal to me.

10:1 isn't even possible (well not now anyway; perhaps after 10 or 20 years). Ogg Vorbis is one of he BEST codecs out there. Nobody has ever achieved to create a format that is 10 times smaller than MP3.

> I'm listening to an MP3 stream right now.
> (Limbik Frequencies at 128 Kbps, if you're
> curious.) I haven't heard a skip or a blip for
> at least three hours. So I don't see how Ogg
> could make it easier to stream audio over the
> Internet.

Error detection and bitrate peeling.
Especially bitrate peeling is interesting. That means Ogg Vorbis files can be 'peeled' to a lower bitrate (not the same as transcoding to a lower bitrate). The result is a file that sounds as if it was encoded at that bitrate in the first place. This makes it *a lot* easier to provide different bitrate version of the same file.
The actual peeling tools don't exist yet, but the files created with the current encoder can be peeled using future peeling tools.

> And as for free-form tags goes, that's also not
> very interesting to me.

It doesn't have to be interesting to YOU. But it is interesting to a lot of other people. They can now sort their files by language, country, company, price... you know, ANYTHING.

> Doesn't matter to me one bit. I listen to
> music; I don't write software. (Actually, I do
> write software. But not audio software. And
> that's not my point, anyway.)

But it DOES influence you! Open source means freedom and low cost. Companies are more likely to accept a high-quality open source codec than an expensive commercial codec with all kinds of restrictions. And the amount of companies (think creators of portable players, etc.) supporting have a direct influence on you!
And being open source also means that it's very unlikely that the format will contain any copy protection. You, as a CD ripper, is also directly influenced by that.

Don't think that open source is irrellevent just because you're not a programmer.

> I didn't have to pay anybody when I downloaded
> iTunes from apple.com. It's free. It encodes
> and plays. So this doesn't affect me, either. I
> know some people have strong opinions on
> patents and make decisions based on principle,
> but I'm just not one of 'em. If it doesn't
> affect me, I'm hard-pressed to care.

You're just lucky that Fraunhofer doesn't sue home users. But you're actually a criminal because you didn't pay for an MP3 license.
Yes, there are people in this world who DO care about the law.

Re:(don't flame me) Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just applied to beta test a new Phillips "Portable Digital Music Device" one of the boxes I had to select was perfered format.
Ogg was one of the choices.

Re:Now begins the hardest part...

[Artifex]

If you are curious to know which hardware vendor has public beta testing. Heheh, I'm not telling.


Yah, I get the emails from those people, too, only my notice came over a week ago =) Notice how the first questions they ask are about whether you want something that looks good with lots of colors, or something with lots of features? My guess is that since this is a beta step, they've already decided which way the hardware will be, and this is actually a way to cut people from consideration. Also, ironically, they probably only want people for the solid state player who have already got one, based upon their questions... which doesn't make sense. Should they be going after the small segment of the market that already owns players, when they'd have to find some way of convincing them that what they already have sucks, or should they go after the large segment of people who haven't yet found something that appeals to them?

Oh, and to get this back to topic: I picked only MP3, because there should always be MP3 players around, so that's the format I'm storing everything in. I have lots of gigabytes of space, so I don't care about the best compression. I've already had problems some AVI codecs no longer being supported, and don't get me started on the whole Quicktime for Windows not playing some MOV files mess. =) MP3 is a standard standard, with the only real question being whether a player will support high-rate VBR, which I prefer. Now, if you could get me totally lossless compression of sound, then I'll consider switching...

OT: Ogg is such a crappy name for a format, anyway. OGG stands for "hi, I'm a geek, I'm going to name what I create after fantasy characters."

Re:oggenc -1 mode

[PM4RK5]

The operative word being _was_. I have a song (in wav format) that I recorded off of a reel-to-reel tape. I encoded it using qualities, 10, 6, and -1. Honestly, for me, it was rather difficult to tell the difference between the 3, past the size difference. The fidelity of OGG at -1 is incredible, with an average bitrate of 34 kbps, or 4 kilobytes a second. Thats almost streamable over a modem!

(for those of you interested, the 3:52 song was only about 974k at -1, from a 16bit 44100kHz stereo .wav)

Kudos to the OGG team and all the hard work they put in to the codec, as it performs extremely well for a wide range of bitrates!

PEELING (Re:(don't flame me) Why?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitrate peeling is, by itself, a reason to start thinking about Ogg. Although the 1.0 encoder does not have a built-in peeling utility, my understanding is that the files it generates are, in fact, peelable (and there may be a standalone utility to do that).

This means that you can archive your entire collection of CDs onto your hard drive at, say 192kbps or something, and then directly derive lower-bitrate versions (say 64kbps) to put on a portable (player, storage device, etc.) without having to re-encode from the originals.

I know, I know, there currently isn't a mass-market portable Ogg player. But most players claim that they are "firmware upgradeable for future audio formats" (or some such language), and the Vorbis guys license a fixed-point Ogg decoder (very useful for portable players), so that functionality is (hopefully) not too far off.