Slashdot Mirror
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!
Ogg Vorbis 1.0 is already uploaded to Debian sid and should be installed today. It should be compiled for all arch within a few days.
Hey, maybe we could replace JPEG with this!
It's finally 1.0! Too bad it still has the worst name ever.
Just wait a few more minutes, the mirrors and the website are being uploaded. :(
WTF are you talking about?
Backwards compatibility with pre-release versions? Uh, yeah. Since the RC's were started, OGGs have worked right up through the chain (or at least mine have).
Now, if the next release means you can't play any previously encoded OGGs, then go ahead and repost your rant.
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
oggenc now has a -1 quality mode with a nominal bitrate of 45kbps. It actually sounds very good try it out.
To quote irc.openprojects.net/#vorbis:
<xercist> sites are down, and staying that way until it's ready. period.
And slightly afterwards:
<xiphmont> Hello. Slashdot jumped the gun. So that we can actually get to our own servers, xiph.org and vorbis.com have both been taken down so that we can finish the release in peace. Or at all.
Mozilla 1.0, OpenOffice 1.0, now Vorbis 1.0. This year should be considered a watershed year for open source software. It is great to see things coming together like this.
All xiph.org and vorbis.com servers have been taken down to prevent slashdotting untill the mirroring is completed.
Thank you slashdot, you just ed us.
--
GCP
Try quality 0. Or even -1. Yes, you're under 64 kbps. 'nuff said.
You're sure? According to a post on hydrogenaudio (search for '#vorbis') the release might be a few days off due to updates needed to the specification. I quote:
"I'm sorry, folks, but we have to wait. We're being very thorough with the spec, and it has inadequately documented areas. Official 1.0 release is soon, days as opposed to weeks. It's my call, and I take full responsibility. See you soon" -- Emmet on #vorbis
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Vorbis at 96kbps is usually somewhere between the quality of a good 112 or 128 cbr mp3, and I and quite a few other are already in the belief, after early testing from 1.0-ish CVS-code, that it is better than wma8 at 64kbps.
ff123 will be conducting a 64 kbits/s blind listening test where people will send in their results, and that will show how vorbis stacks up against the likes of wma8, mp3pro and quicktime-AAC.
IMO it doesn't really matter if it is better.. if it is at least comparable, than that should be enough for us to make the switch. Because besides being a flexible codec of high quality, it is open source AND completely free of patents (amazing!).. oh yeah, plus it has that really cool bitrate-peeling feature. Anyway, this is one of the few chances we have to get something right in the computer world (for a change!), so let's not blow it! Spread the word and take your hats off for xiph and vorbis!
The waiting is over people, at last we can start ogging for real! ^_^
You can get a beta quicktime component that will allow you to play oggs in iTunes and other quicktime aware apps. The iPod does it's mp3 decoding on hardware and there is not currently a solution for software decoding. I wouldn't expect one any time soon either.
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
The problem is that Emusic uses mp3. If they would offer songs in ogg vorbis they would be greatly increasing the quality of their product, giving listeners less reason to pirate and more reason to do legit consumer purchasing. I might even consider joining their service myself.
Adoption.
Any piece of technology, no matter how open, free or innovative is useless unless adopted and widely used.
Microsoft uses Market Development Funds to "assist" adoption of their stuff... Such funds are usually in the form of paid holidays to some exotic location for some key executive/manager of companies.
Opensource usually cannot afford such gimmics and rely solely on the merits of the technology.
We can hope (and prey for the religeous among us) that the powers that be at the corporations like the BBC, CNN, ITN, News-Corp etc realise what is the best way to go and don't get their decisions bought by a company which is willing to spend millions of dollars on MDF.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
As far as I know, there's no Ogg support for iTunes or iPod at the moment. There's a SourceForge site up with info about an Ogg plugin for Quicktime playback, but that's all I can find so far.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>
A reference implementation is great and all, but until they get off their arses and release an exact specification of the Ogg format and codec, it's never going to take off.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Vorbis 1.0 comes with a full specification.
--
GCP
There's alot of documentation been put into CVS the last few weeks so you'll have to see the docs.
from (http://www.nouturn.com/goodies/):
Goodie #1: Ogg Vorbis QuickTime Component
This allows the user to play Ogg files in most QuickTime applications. As for iTunes support, this will soon be available. At the moment, iTunes doesn't use the standard QuickTime protocol, so it doesn't automatically take advantage of the component. Bad Apple! Not following your own standards!
A quick search turns up several iTunes plug-ins for visualizations, but not for audio codecs. I don't think the new iTunes 3 changes this. Developing plug-ins for iPod would be a whole 'nother ball o' wax. So I think you're out of luck.
Vorbis uses a BSD-style license, so you can do whatever you like with your derivative works.
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
The decoder has been frozen for a long time now. The current decoder will be able to play any vorbis file created by any encoder released at any time in the future.
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grep "xercist"
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.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
There's also the basic C runtime stubs (e.g. crt1.o), though I think that's part of glibc.
However, if you actually bother reading the licenses on the code that gets embedded by bison and gcc, special excemptions are made --
Thus, code compiled with gcc may be distributed under any license you want. Sorry, thanks for playing.
DNA just wants to be free...
If they would offer songs in ogg vorbis they would be greatly increasing the quality of their product
How so? MP3 isn't all that bad. I suspect for many casual listeners, the difference between MP3 and Ogg isn't hugely noticeable for most files.
creation science book
The Ogg Vorbis format itself is public domain.
The reference library is BSD-ish.
The reference tools are GPLed.
I thought some of you could be interested in my project Speex (http://speex.sourceforge.net), which is like Vorbis but optimized for speech. Bit-rates ranging from 8 kbps to 32 kbps for good quality speech...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Lesson to be learned here:
Mirror everything before announcing the release.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I find that when I "rip" music from CDs into OOG Vorbis Format that it has poor playback quality (very crackly).
Does the same thing happen when you rip from CD into .wav without encoding to .ogg or .mp3? What happens when you look at the .wav in a spectrogram?
If you hear crackling from the .wav, and you can see it on a spectrogram (it'll look like vertical lines through the whole spectrum), then you're seeing copy protection or some other form of physical CD damage.
If you hear crackling from the wav, but you can't see it on a spectrogram, check your audio drivers.
If you don't hear crackling from the wav, then use the reference encoder and decoder (oggenc and ogg123) to turn .wav into .ogg into .wav. If you get crackling from this, then libvorbis is at fault.
If wav->ogg->wav->player works, but wav->ogg->player doesn't work through the same player, contact the developers of the player.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Get either a newer version of the encoder (hey 1.0 is out. Aren't you lucky :) or turn the quality setting up higher. I use 3 (The default I think). 0 is 64kbit
" Programs written in GCC have to be published opensource because ..."
You don't work for Microsoft do you ?
There are zero, nada, none, zilch, 0 licencing restrictions on code created with gcc. There are specific statements to that effect in the code and licencing. Perhaps you should read them.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
2002-07-15 15:54:22 Ogg Vorbis Goes Gold (articles,announce) (rejected)
Harrumph.
ObOnTopic: So, can anyone recommend a good Ogg-friendly CD-ripper for win32? I'm a big fan of CDex (GPLd even!), but I wasn't sure if there was anything better out there.Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Ok, since I see this asked 5x a day on #vorbis, I'm going to tell everyone now.
If you have an mp3 collection, and want to use ogg instead, please do not convert the mp3s to oggs. It's like faxing a document, then re-faxing the fax. It just gets all unreadable. The result is that people will hear the ogg file and think "Oh my god this sucks! Ogg really blows! I'm not using this format!".
If you have the original CD, rip it and encode. If you don't, keep the mp3s.
--
grep "xercist"
March 27, 2001
Things on hold for now: No, that doesn't mean the project is dead, just that active development is on hold while we throw all the time we have available to get OggVorbis to 1.0 in a reasonable amount of time. Once Vorbis hits 1.0, we'll get back to Paranoia.
'Bout damn time! Lossy encoding I could give a rat's ass about, but byte-perfect audio extraction... now that's real software!
hardware companies ... don't have to pay to implement MP3
THOMSON multimedia, the sublicensor of the MP3 patents in the United States, charges a royalty for decoders, at $15,000 for the first 20,000 annual units and 75c/unit thereafter.
The latter option is infeasible until they get their act together and put out a specification.
Wait a few days for the Ogg Vorbis 1.0 release to be finished, and you'll apparently be able to download the specification as part of the libvorbis manual.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've spent time generating graphs of vorbis 1.0 encoder's output bitrate vs the -q (quality) setting input. They're very cool looking. enjoy.
p h/1.0/
http://www.lammah.com/~xercist/vorbis/bitrate-gra
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grep "xercist"
Will there be any adoption of this format, or will vorbis only be useful on computers?
Serious Sam 2 uses Ogg Vorbis for its background music streams. If more games adopt Xiph.org's technology, Microsoft may add the BSD licensed .ogg codec for WMPlayer to Windows YQ (even Microsoft likes the BSD License, which requires only credit in the manual), possibly calling it "Windows Media Audio 10" or something.
Will I retire or break 10K?
FYI: OpenOffice 1.01 is out now.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Unlikely. I'm not related to them expect by hanging around in #vorbis and having continuously listened to Oggs for the last six months, but it seems to me that they'll focus on Ogg Theora once Vorbis 1.0 is released.
Could you please point me to your favorite ogg streaming radio? I only know of Radio WOPN and I need some change...
Cheers!
Unselfish actions pay back better
Look especially at http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp, http://www.vorbis.com/download.psp and http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/!
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?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
COol! I just wandered acrossed the site this morning; I don't have a Mac that can run iTunes with me at the moment, or I'd have checked it out :)
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Ogg rules, check it for yourself: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html. Don't reply before having read the page and listened to the samples. :)
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.
Here are the md5sums of the files I downloaded from a mirror. * indicates md5sums that have been confirmed by insiders at Xiph.Org.
b1422a6ff7f58131921b9f2fabe2295c libao-0.8.3.tar.gz *
7d4fbdc48b443109618e9739648302bd libao-0.8.3.zip *
6e840822cf8d6a680917383444afe361 libogg-1.0-1.i386.rpm
c0f08ce15f1b0fe44539facc8dd0108a libogg-1.0-1.src.rpm
382a7089f42e6f82e7d658c1cb8ee236 libogg-1.0.tar.gz *
b0cb84b5f03321eb0fbe2c07350205e9 libogg-1.0.zip *
f5f8e08a0afbc3e0196955c4aa73b78a libogg-devel-1.0-1.i386.rpm
c461acec225454aeca034eeca7ecf62e libvorbis-1.0-1.i386.rpm
daec58d8a9d550889391f3f971c9840b libvorbis-1.0-1.src.rpm
d1ad94fe8e240269c790e18992171e53 libvorbis-1.0.tar.gz *
d300b3e50b97a4f4c14ceab8124db539 libvorbis-1.0.zip *
941621aee4865417f4c34b571b74f04a libvorbis-devel-1.0-1.i386.rpm
08090c4f17f531fc9b815b09d9d53a50 oggdropXPd.zip
5e81e5bff436dbe122531db0b63a053e oggvorbis-macosx-libs1.0.tar.gz
7ac318eb6ab3551059fa7232618be2ea oggvorbis-win32sdk-1.0.zip
d956ed3e3af7e0c8623142256f4d331d vorbis-tools-1.0-win32.zip
c0a9fee54835e9c5b32d1f42c02964c9 vorbis-tools-1.0.tar.gz *
e745ccaf378aeb6d057327b391803150 vorbis-tools-1.0.zip *
4ed76d186209fe2eafa5e77854e5d6d8 vorbis-x86linux-libs-1.0.tar.gz
The people who produce these songs are usually working out of hundred thousand dollar studios with better equipment and ears than you. They probably do a much better job of equalizing than you so just leave it alone. If you have crap speakers tho, then you might need to adjust to correct for them.
Liberty.
Can you point me to the technical papers that states iPod uses a hardware mp3 decoder? To my understanding, Apple states that the iPod can handle multiple audio formats with a simple firmware upgrades, which suggests to me that it uses software for mp3 and other forms of decoding. (When building my MP3 player for an EE class project, one of the TAs did a CPU cycle count and found that MP3 decoding can be done on an 9Mhz 80188 chip, along with a basic UI.)
Register Article
>Speaking as an audiophile and an audio engineer, and strictly referring to sound quality: mp3pro is better.
Current group listening tests contradict this. You didn't state how you arrived at this conclusion either.
--
GCP
CDex does not work well at all on Windows 2000 or XP (Home or Pro).
Slow encoding, random crashes, etc. plague it.
I've tried it many, many times using different configurations of Win2k and XP and various aspi drivers to the same effect.
This is using 1.40 release.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Subject: [vorbis] Vorbis 1.0 released
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 13:10:37 -0400
From: xiphmont@xiph.org (Monty)
To: vorbis@xiph.org, vorbis-dev@xiph.org
Nothing much else to say. Vorbis 1.0 is officially out. Have at.
Monty
--- >8 ----
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Please be gentle.
The iPod uses a PP5002B-C chip made by PortalPlayer. It decodes as well as encodes MP3, WAV, and AIFF. Too bad Apple didn't include a sound in jack. AnandTech did a review of the iPod. Now Apple could always code a nice ogg decoder and flash it to the firmware. This would involve codnig an integer decoder for vorbis and would also likely decrease the long battery life the iPod gets. Like I said before, I don't see ogg coming to the iPod anytime soon. And considering the fact that apple is putting all their weight behind Mpeg4 and AAC, I bet we see AAC on the iPod before we see ogg.
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
I'd be very surprised if there was anything significant, but as it happens I'm working on some Ogg software right now.
/. effect to die down? :-)
Should I go ahead or take the day off and wait for the
I have not been following the development of this project but I seem to recall a time when it was touted as an audiophile-quality, free replacement for MP3. Now, from their benchmarks, then seem to be targeting the low-bitrate segment of the market. Has anyone done any technical comparisons with LAME (the undisputed king of HQ mp3 encoding) at higher bitrates? I'm ripping basically every DVD I rent at Blockbuster to DivX nowadays, and I'd love to start doing the soundtracks in .ogg if I wouldn't have to sacrifice quality or space. One step closer to freedom.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I know when I was going to rip my CD collection, it was going to take alot more than 15 gigs... if you really ripped all 400 of your CDs to 160kbit mp3s, that would make the average length of your CDs about 31.25 mins long each. I dont know about you, but mine probably average twice that.
That said, the advantage of Ogg would be either A) far better quality at the same size or B) I could get similar quality while using far less space... closer to that 15 gig mark than the 30 gigs it would take to mp3 my similarly sized CD collection at that bitrate. 15 gigs is nothing to sneeze at...
From reading done a long time ago, I had thought (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that it was trivial (as in almost no CPU cost) to take an OGG of a given bitrate and get a lower bitrate feed.
The advantage I see here is that you could encode all of your CD's at a very high quality level, then when transferring to something like an iPod or other player automatically reduce the bitrate to 128k to fit more on - basically adjusting the quality to maximize use based on size and possible output quality considerations.
Personally, I wish iTunes supported OGG and then and a means of converting to MP3 for transfer to an iPod (even though I know how lossy it would be) - though that would give up all the speed advantage of firewire.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I want to buy portable music players that can play back Vorbis-encoded music. Realistically, that won't happen until there are integer-math decoder libraries.
Is anyone working on this right now? Do we have any estimate of when it might happen?
Note to computer science students: this would make a great student project.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yes... it's really the same thing. If your original is MP3, then it's already lost quality. Converting to OGG (or any other lossy format) will further amplify the quality loss.
I'm one of those obsessed nerds that keeps a local copy of CVS for projects that I am interested in (just to use, typically, not as a developer), and updates them from time to time just to see what's changing (and whether or not I want to recompile to see it).
In the last couple of days, a bunch of spec documents have been added to CVS for vorbis and ogg...
Hopefully now they'll get going on the Ogg Theora project. I wonder, though - how much of it will appear in the VP32 module and how much in the Ogg module? I imagine they were putting off dealing with "video in Ogg" until the 1.0 release...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
AMAZING job, guys.
What is the sound of one jpeg clapping?
Someone should get to work on an open implementation of AAC (the audio codec for MPEG-4).
Ah, I wasn't thinking of C++ development, but thank you. It's a good link.
What I said is easily true of C development, but anyone concerned with C++ should definitely read that FAQ entry as the libg++ licensing situation is a little more complex (though not too bad; it's just important to know what to link with).
DNA just wants to be free...
Manufacturers and developers will begin to take Ogg seriously, especically since it's sound quality is better (or at least as good as MP3). This is a good Friday..a very good Friday indeed....
Since I normally use Windows Media Player, I went looking for DirectShow filters to let me play OGG files in WMP. I was somewhat surprised to find that the only such filters are part of Media XW, an abandoned SourceForge project. The latest files are three month old development files which, according to the site, "can damage your whole DirectShow system and probably requires a complete Windows reinstallation". The latset non-dev release is from sept -01.
If adoption is what we want, someone should get on the job of coding proper DirectShow filters for OGG, and fast. I installed WinAmp just for the OGG support, but I doubt that everyone who uses WMP regularly will be so tolerant. If I didn't have so many OGG files already, I never would have bothered.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
- You lose the contents of a form if you accidently hit the back button or the backspace key (or have your four-year-old neice throw something at the keyboard which does the same thing); hitting forward again restores the contents of the form in Internet Explorer. It does not restore the contents of the form in Mozilla.
- Real-world example of the DHTML problems. Go to www.gatorade.com , and click on one of the product listings. There is some DHTML which causes a scroolbar to appear in the middle of the screen so that one can scrool down to see all of the products listed. This scrollbar does not work in Mozilla; it does work in IE.
Mozilla's advantages are that it has pop-up surpression technology, and that it is available for Linux and other non-mainstream desktop OSes.I just lost ten minutes of work today because the Mozilla developers can not even get something basic like this right. Yes, I will submit a bug to bugzilla when I calm down enough to do so; I just lost the work under an hour ago so I am still rather pissed.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Reading and Understanding Patent Claims
How to infringe a patent and get away with it
Patent Claim Interpretation
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Well here's the answer to you problem:
Check out the OggDS project, their filters work fine.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
If Freenet isn't significant, innovative, and open source, I don't know what is. Some amazing ideas there.
Most software (including closed source) fits into established genres. What particularly amazing closed source project were you thinking of?
May we never see th
There is currently no way for one Icecast daemon to serve both MP3 and Vorbis streams. You have to run two versions of the server, on two different ports. Aside from being inconvenient to administer, this also means you can't do total-bandwidth-usage new-connnection throttling: you have to assign half of your bandwidth to one server, and half to the other, instead of letting the usage determine it.
I'd like to start streaming Vorbis at DNA Lounge, but I won't do it if it has to be a "flag day" where I tell the users "today you have to stop using MP3 and start using Vorbis." The only way I (and, I suspect, just about everyone else) will start streaming Vorbis is if it is convenient to give people a choice of whether to listen to MP3 or Vorbis versions of the stream. As you can see on our audio page, we stream in many different bitrates, by having the "master" stream be downcoded into various lower resolution streams. Until I can do exactly that with Vorbis, there's no way I'll use it.
The way to encourage adoption of Vorbis is to make it be an option without shutting out existing MP3 users. As the number of Vorbis users grows, you can then think about phasing out support for MP3. But a flag day will never happen unless they give us a convenient upgrade path.
The new version of Icecast has been an even bigger vaporware disappointment than Vorbis has been (weren't the both targetted for release by the end of 2000?)
(Not to mention that the current releases of Icecast still have completely broken metadata streaming, and are (again) incompatible with Shoutcast's directory services.)
Anyone know if there is a 1.0 version of the vorbis dll for Audiograbber? And if there is, where it can be downloaded?
Vidi, Vici, Veni
We *are* comparing against LAME.
The first sample on the demo page is encoded using MP3Enc, because that demo is actually drawn from a larger test being done by an independent party. It also shows Ogg competing against a commercial encoder.
All other MP3 samples on the demo page (the 'Heavy Hitters' section) were encoded using LAME. If you check the auxiliary data in the samples you'll see that.
I'll go mark the samples as such to avoid furhter confusion.
Monty
xiph.org
Is it just my imagination, or did oggenc get a hell of a lot faster?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The only serious problem with using Ogg in iTunes and having it work 'out of the box' is that iTunes, believe it or not, would *only* use Quicktime playback for certain extentions.
....but ogg was not one of those extentions.
.mov, they play. Naturally, this is a royal pain in the ass and we don't seriously expect anyone to do this.
Ogg works with quicktime.
If you install the Ogg Quicktime components, and rename all your Ogg files to
We have high hopes that iTunes 3 solves this problem. The Mac hackers are on it now.
As for the iPod, we have all the code needed to make it work. Actually using it can't happen without a blessing from Apple, however.
Monty
xiph.org
Decoded MP3 is still missing ~90% of the original sound. It's just that human ears have physical limitations that make this possible. (Things like the eardrum moves 'in' faster than it moves 'out')
Transcoding is trying to force Vorbis to work with its hands tied; a decoded wav is still missing 90% of the original signal.
The result is somewhat like a cook-off.
The task: Create a low-fat chicken parmesean recipie that tases as good as a specific high-fat chicken parmesean recipie
(Wav->MP3) Chef 'A' uses his methods to prepare a low-fat chicken parmesean.
(Wav->OGG) Chef 'B' uses his (different) methods to prepare a low-fat chicken parmesean.
In both cases, either chef may choose from the available ingredients of his/her choice to make the best-tasting meal. In this case, chef B wins easily.
But MP3->OGG is like:
Forcing Chef 'B' to take the meal Chef 'A' created, 'un-cook' [decode] it, use the ingredients Chef 'A' used, and create a better meal.
Chef 'B' has to 'start' with the amounts Chef 'A' finished with.
Chef 'B' would have used an entirely different recipie to create his low-fat dish; but since he's limited to what Chef 'A' 'served', he has to make do.
It doesn't matter if Chef 'B' is a much better cook. He's not able to use the ingredients of his choosing. Chef 'B' is essentially limited to modifying Chef 'A's recipie, and therefore he's not able to achieve his potential.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
My whole collection, is encoded with LAME CBR @ 256kbit because I read an article, pointed from /. long ago, that showed this to be about the best option and listening to the resulting MP3's have shown that I cannot hear a difference with my headphones between the CD and the MP3's. Occasionally I hear a click, pop, warble or ringing and I think "Ah huh!", so I then check the CD only to find that the same noise is on the CD.
If I can get my collection down from 16GB without loosing any quality or even gaining quality I would.
So can Ogg 1.0 provide better quality than LAME CBR @ 256kbit while saving space?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Gee whiz. Talking of arrogance. I asked, very plainly and calmly, why Ogg would be important to a guy who doesn't broadcast and who isn't affected by patents. I'm sure there are more people out there like me than there are like you. I heard last week that 14 million people have downloaded iTunes since Apple released it.
My point is just that it's kind of disappointing that people would spend their time and energy working on an audio codec that's not necessary and that doesn't offer significant advantages over existing codecs. They could have been working to improve MP3 instead, or on something new that we don't have yet. Instead, they just decided to reproduce work that's already been done. That's disappointing, because it smacks of wasted opportunity.