Audio Format Listening Tests Concluded

Pointing to the conclusions of this listening study, nullity writes: "The results are interesting, and show a high variation in the performance of the various codecs on different musical styles. Ogg seems to work well on dance music, WMA8 on chamber music, etc."

Comments

WMA8

[af_robot]

Ogg seems to work well on dance music, WMA8 on chamber music, etc.

Like requiem...

Re:WMA8

[Snork Asaurus]

Ogg seems to work well on dance music, WMA8 on chamber music , etc.

This might explain why I only think of WMA as being good enough for recording the sounds that I hear while sitting my "chamber" on my "throne".

(no offence to those sounds intended).

Re:WMA8

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb@ss - requiem is not chamber music. Shows mhow much Americans know about classical music.

Didnt read the article yet but....

[FuzzyMan45]

The summary seems inconclusive, it seems that music you listen closely too sounds better with WMP, and fast, not listened to music sounds ok w/ ogg. HM

btw, FP

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[mccalli]

it seems that music you listen closely too sounds better with WMP, and fast, not listened to music sounds ok w/ ogg.

Well....not quite. There's a different frequency distribution between electronic, pop acoustic and classical music.

Specifically, electronic music, which most dance stuff is, has a very flat frequency distribution. See this for yourself - load your favourite media player, siwtch on the graphic equaliser graph and watch how basically nothing happens except in the mid-range.

Now try again with an orchestral piece. There will be much more variation, though in most it will tend towards the top end.

Now try again with rock. Tends towards the bottom and top, with middle frequencies missing.

Keep going with any format you feel like mentioning...you'll get the same.

Actually, this is a striking example of how recording techniques can ruin sound as well. Take a look at the Apollo 440 album - Gettin' High on Your Own Supply. A good mixture of guitars and electronics, right? Well, look at the frequency graph again. See how virtually every guitar frequency variation has been cut out: this music was recorded digitally, mostly using samples by the looks of it. The normal variations you'd associate with having guitars play live are all filtered out, and the graph goes back to the flat digital sound again.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you didn't read the article. You were too busy trying to get First Post. Which is why your comment was inane and pointless.

Fuckwit.

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary seems inconclusive, it seems that music you listen closely too sounds better with WMP, and fast, not listened to music sounds ok w/ ogg. HM

Obligatory Simpsons Quote - I can see the music!!

How the fuck can you not listen to music? (Besides the Aphex Twins' face?)

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[hfranz]

Just a side note about the frequency distribution of different styles of music:

The reason why classical music generally compresses better is because the frequency distribution of the sound of natural instruments like for instance string instruments (including the human voice) is harmonic. This means that the sound spectrum consists mainly of a superposition of peaks at the base frequencies of the instruments played and their corresponding harmonics at higher frequencies.
If you were to make a two dimensional spectral analysis of a such sound recording with the time axis to the right, the frequency to the top and the amplitude as the color intensity of the point you would see a lot of wiggling lines at
regular distances. (BTW: this would make a great visualization plugin for xmms)
Since audio compression algorithms also make such a spectral analysis and after that discard some of the information below a threshold they can
reproduce a mainly harmonic spectrum easier than that found in pop or rock music, which is much more complex and more "noisy" because of the
use of distorting amplification and all kinds of
percussion.

Holger

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck can you not listen to music?

When you are in a department store are you listening to the music? You probably hear it but that doesn't mean you are listening to it. Most people over the age of 12 understand the distinction. I will put it to you in words you can understand. When your mommy yells at you about doing your coloring homework you probably hear her but you probably aren't listening because you are watching Barnie.

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[The Dobber]

I believe he means -paying attention to it-. As in "my wife was talking to me, but as usual I wasn't paying attention to a word she said"

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[cassady_]

to quote:

Actually, this is a striking example of how recording techniques can ruin sound as well. Take a look at the Apollo 440 album - Gettin' High on Your Own Supply. A good mixture of guitars and electronics, right? Well, look at the frequency graph again. See how virtually every guitar frequency variation has been cut out: this music was recorded digitally, mostly using samples by the looks of it. The normal variations you'd associate with having guitars play live are all filtered out, and the graph goes back to the flat digital sound again.

Actually, this has little to do with digital vs. analog recording. The phenomenon you are refering to here is the overuse of compression (not data compression but audio compression) in dance music. Most recording engineers, especially in classical or jazz music, try to maximize the dynamic range of instruments, to mimic a live listening situation. Dance music is often hypercompressed, where the loud sounds are made quieter, then the overall mix amplified, to create a mix with a much higher overall loudness, but with the same peak levels. This kind of record will stand out in a mix as "punchier", getting a dance floor more worked up. It does however, severly blunt the natural sound of live instruments which comes from their dynamic range. But for a bunch of kids in a dark club high on pills dancing at 4am, this is highly desireable.

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[Kevin Mitnick]

...And RAP sounds like shit in all of them

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[FuzzyMan45]

Thanks for the info man, i understand how it works now.

=)

Re:Didnt read the article yet but....

[cornflux]

The first thing I thought of when you were describing your 2-D representation is the The Music Animation Machine:

The Music Animation Machine display is a score without any measures or clefs, in which information about the music's structure is conveyed with bars of color representing the notes. These bars scroll across the screen as the music plays. Their position on the screen tells you their pitch and their timing in relation to each other. Different colors denote different instruments or voices, thematic material, or tonality. And each note lights up at the exact moment it sounds, so you can't lose your place.

As someone who knows little-to-nothing about the technical aspects of music, I find this relatively fascinating.

Sound Artifacts

[alatesystems]

While mp3s encoded at lower bit rates seem to have a tingly sound sometimes, almost every wma file I've gotten or encoded ALWAYS sounds like someone is blowing windchimes in my music. I can't stand it.

In my opinion, 192kbps MP3 is the way to go, but then what do I know? I can't hear about 13khz.

Chris

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Anonymous Coward]

I always equate WMA audio to the sounds of someone whistling in a tin bathtub. Every peice of WMA I ever heard, from static files to streamed audio, has that tinny, whistling sound to it. I don't know if its me (Not being subjective and all!), or if its just poor encoding options (By everyone? Well, its possible I guess) or just WMA.

Either way, I stick to Ogg these days. MP3s @ 192kbps are fine, but take up more space. Ogg sounds better than MP3 (IMHO, to my ears, etc. Your mileage may vary, yada yada), keeps my disk usage down, and all my audio is playable across all three OS's that I use (WindowsNT 4 in work, Linux & Syllable at home)

Re:Sound Artifacts

[funky womble]

I have problems with some 192Kbps CBR MP3s, I find --r3mix usually sounds a lot better (and takes up less space), though sometimes I neeed to bump it up to ABR (usually around 220Kbps if it's a difficult piece).

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Anonymous Coward]

For years, I shyed away from VBR mp3s, all because of old versions of XMMS playing them at a, well, a variable rate :)

Re:Sound Artifacts

[13Echo]

I thought about switching to OGG, but I wouldn't find much benefit to it unless I wanted to go with smaller filetypes, which is where it really shines. But since I encode all of my MP3s in Lame r3mix VBR 128-320 (averages 192), I get the best sound possible.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[zbuffered]

I have a friend who claims to be able to hear the difference between 192kbps and CD audio. Not only that, but he says the only way he can get his music to sound as good as the source is by using LAME, 320KBPS CBR with all the acoustic models turned off. He says that at that point, the differences btw the CD and the MP3 are "negligible", whatever that means. I think he's full of s**t. I use VBR, end up with files less than half the size, and it sounds good to me.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[gazbo]

That is because you have crap hearing. Get a very cleanly (over) produced song - I recommend TLC - Unpretty (no, you don't have to like it.

Listen to the percussion at the intro at 128kb, 160kb, 192kb, 320kb and CD audio. Do it through a proper system (hint: those hi-fi quality computer speakers you bought for £30 don't cut it) and compare the difference.

On the song in question, the intro is actually painfully distorted until 192kb when it becomes merely aging tape standard.

If you can't hear this difference having done exactly what I've said then I suggest you are not qualified to ever post a comment to a thread discussing audio quality again.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Anonymous Coward]

Well aren't you fancy. I'll bet you read The Economist, too.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[PainKilleR-CE]

I tend to agree. I use flat 128 or 192kb MP3 encoding for everything, but I do it primarily for space concerns and ease of use (it's much easier to manage my music in MP3 format than to juggle CDs, even with a large multidisk player). For background music I simply want a minimum of tape quality (which is about what 128 or 192 gets you), with no overwhelming artifacts (gotta love the old Xing encoder coughing up a pop or hiss out of nowhere). If I want to actively listen to the music, Ill dig up the CD and throw it in the DVD-ROM drive.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[sheldon]

It depends on your listening environment.

Most computer audio systems introduce a ton of noise and distortion themselves. I had some ESS chipset in my computer at work, and everything sounded just horrible until I found this switch buried deep in the settings which was causing it to try to simulate surround sound on two channels.

There's also a high level of S/N, if the volume is over a certain threshold I hear a lot of hiss.

I've also had problems in the past with soundcards plugged into the PCI bus picking up excess noise from the video card.

It's like listening to music in a car... it works, and sometimes it sounds ok, but it's certainly not ideal.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[MrResistor]

If you really want to hear the "loss" in mp3 try a few Pixies songs. Jimi Hendrix would probably work, too. Both derived alot of their "feel" from overtones and harmonics, stuff that's really only noticable in it's absence, and apparently stuff the mp3 folks decided we could do without.

IMHO, nothing shows off the shortcomings of mp3 like the Pixies.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Jucius Maximus]

"That is because you have crap hearing. Get a very cleanly (over) produced song - I recommend TLC - Unpretty (no, you don't have to like it. [...] If you can't hear this difference having done exactly what I've said then I suggest you are not qualified to ever post a comment to a thread discussing audio quality again."

And if you log onto kazaa and download the mp3 to and then attempt to do this quality comaprison, you are not qualified to ever post on slashdot again. :P

Re:Sound Artifacts

[zbuffered]

Elitism and snobbery, the mark of an audiophile.

I'm not going to buy a TLC album, but another poster reccommended Jimi Hendrix, and I have a CD or two of his, so I'll give it a shot when I get home. I'll also see if I can think of any overproduced crap music I might have accidentally bought or been given. I have the same audio hardware (Sony MDR V700 headphones, SB Live) as my friend, so I'll at least be able to replicate his listening environment. So 128, 160, 192, and 320. I'll also throw my default VBR settings in there. I still want to see somebody pass an actual objective test in my presence. I want to see someone pick out the lower quality btw say, 256kbps and 320kbps, 8 times out of 10.

If you can't hear this difference having done exactly what I've said then I suggest you are not qualified to ever post a comment to a thread discussing audio quality again.

If you ever wonder why people don't like you, it's because of rants like this. It's not difficult to get the same message across without trying to offend the person you're talking to. Try it out.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Oculus Habent]

Most people are playing 128kbps MP3s through computer speakers. For the average person who, based on my personal experience, listens to music far louder than they should, the quality differences aren't noticable.

I encode at 160 usually, and a just accept that d/ls are 128 most of the time. I don't mind unless it's a really good song, and then (*note to RIAA*)I get the CD.

I think this survey was badly flawed. How many people listen to 64kbps MP3s? Streamed, maybe. They should use fair comparisons of the different formats. I suppose at higher bit-rates, the differences become more negligable to the average listener, though.

Of course, I also know people who say RealAudio sounds better than MP3.

Sigh.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Lord Kestrel]

--quote--
Of course, I also know people who say RealAudio sounds better than MP3.
--quote--

I hope you're joking here... I can't imagine that anyone would think that RealAudio sounds good at all, let alone better than a 128kbps+ MP3 file.

Re:Sound Artifacts

[Anonymous Coward]

It is possible to hear the difference between the output of msot MP3 encoders (probably all) and CD audio. But only in difficult parts of the song. Usually sharp sounds or mixtures of tonal and atonal sounds. I seriously doubt he can always hear the difference and that it sounds horrible. You really get diminishing returns for extra bits so 320kb/s may well have similar problems. In fact MP3s will always lose some information no matter how high the bit rate is.

On the other hand, it's good to dispell the idea that 128kb/s MP3 is equivalent to CD audio. It's not even with a very good encoder and non-buggy decoder and in reality most encoders suck.

Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[splorf]

These tests are all at 64 kbps and most people use much higher bitrates for real music. I'd like to see comparisons at 128k bits minimum, and preferably 160k or 192k, which is what most quality mp3's are at, for direct comparison.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[aechols]

At those bitrates you'd need a golden ear to tell the difference.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[keller]

People who wnat to stream audio of course! .K

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[ProtoCat]

64Kbps is where the flaws of a codec are truely exposed. It's a great median between being too high to produce much results and too low where everything completely falls apart. You may not think any of this has any relevance to you as you're encoding above 128Kbps, but it actually does make a difference when you stress your encoder with a difficult piece of music.

However, if the difference between sounding 'good' and sounding 'accurate' mean little to you, as someone who'd make an argument of 64Kbps tests being worthless would, then you really aren't the intended audiance of such tests. You can merrily use any of those encoders at 128-192Kbps without ever really noticing or caring much.

I, personally, would like to see OGG1.0, MP3 Pro and WMA8 take on some real tough to beat codecs such as Dolby's AAC High-Complexity Mode (which no AAC freely available encoder supports, including QuickTime) and Sony's ATRAC3. But, that'd be kinda moot, because most people out there do not have access to those toys.

For now, I'm content to just watch people hop around and proclaim whatever they want as king of audio formats while sticking to 256Kbps Fraunhoffer MP3 (archival purposes) and 192Kbps LAME HQ MP3 (general usage) as something both widely supported and pratically indistinguishable from the source. Even if AAC-HC and ATRAC3 were freely available, it'd take an awful large effort to wean people off of MP3 so far as support base and to migrate them to a new format. New P2P programs, new players/plug-ins (in some cases) and new hardware players. Not gonna happen for a while.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[flipflapflopflup]

> Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I thought your sig was part of your comment, and was going to agree entirely. 64 kbps tests are pointless because no-ones uses those rates, and at higher rates the differences become negligable.

At the kind of bit rates that real people actually use (160, 192, and up), it takes a real pro/audiophile/picky git to tell the difference. Which makes the whole thing seem a bit pointless really.

Chances are then, it's not going to be audio quality that makes or breaks these standards. Look at betamax...

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[nagora]

64Kbps is where the flaws of a codec are truely exposed.

Running your car over a cliff is where the flaws in its safety system are truely exposed but I don't tend to drive over cliffs much.

However, if the difference between sounding 'good' and sounding 'accurate' mean little to you, as someone who'd make an argument of 64Kbps tests being worthless would, then you really aren't the intended audiance of such tests.

What do you mean by this? 64Kbits is worthless for listening to any music I own while 128 is good enough to not actually annoy me much of the time so why should I be interested in these tests? Are you saying that the intended audience for these tests are people that are not interested in the quality of the music they're listening to?

TWW

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Entropy_ah]

I tend to agree with you, however if you are dealing with a portable music player with limited memory (i.e. a PDA) it is nice to know which formats perform the best at low bitrates. It sure is nice to squeeze as many songs in there as possible. I believe that the Sharp Zaurus already has software that will play ogg files.
-entropy

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[new_breed]

The website of mp3pro mentioned something about reducing the size a mp3pro file takes on your harddisk, compared to a normal mp3 file. In order to reduce the file size, could it be that mp3pro is smaller at 64 kbs, yet has got the quality of a normal mp3 file at 128?

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[forgoil]

64kbps are more interesting when it comes to streaming music, obviously, so the test is valid for that purpose. I would love to get internet radio at something better than 64kbps 22khz, mono mp3s that doesn't eat bandwidth.

But most importanatly, at which kbps does the codecs become equal? MP3s do sound a lot better at 192kbps, and surely will beat ogg at 64kps. The music won't be better with one format over the other, as long as the "I can't belive it is lossy" barrier has been reached. Which format will make the music sound as the original (all the others can be discarded now thank you), and of those, which does it at the lowest bitrate?

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Tomah4wk]

How about anyone who streams music/radio?

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[TummyX]

64 kbps tests are pointless because no-ones uses those rates, and at higher rates the differences become negligable.


With MP3 maybe, but OGG, WMA, MP3Pro and ACC all aim to get MP3@128Kbs quality at 64Kbs. That's what this test is FOR! Try comparing a 128KBps MP3 with a 64KBps OGG file. You'll find the quality to be quite comparable. It's a pity the test didn't include MP3 (at 128KBps) so we could see how good these new codecs really are.

And BTW, you might as well say it is pointless to test 128, 160 or 192kbps and that we should all be testing uncompressed 1500Kbps audio.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Jugalator]

like to see comparisons at 128k bits minimum, and preferably 160k or 192k, which is what most quality mp3's are at

Yes - mp3's. I thought both wma and ogg used lower bitrates because they were more efficient.

A bitrate isn't a measure of quality - it's more like a measure of consumed bandwidth.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Jugalator]

... this is btw very similar to the pitfall MHz = peformance, just applied to sound.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[gleam]

You don't often intentionally hurl your car at 45 miles an hour into a steel box, either, but insurance companies do it all the time to see how well a particular car stands up to the abuse.

Even if you don't knowingly take the insurance institute's results (or federal crash-test ratings) into account, the company selling you insurance does, and your premiums will be higher.

To say "just because i'll never do something this way it has no merit" is silly. Performance in a 45-mile-per-hour offset crash will tell a car company how well it would stand to you accidentally bumping into the corner of your garage, or into the bumper of another car.

Tests like this are important because they're indicative of performance at all bitrates. If you want to know WHICH codec will sound the best at 128kbit, you should look at which codec sounds the best at 64kbit--the two are likely to be the same.

There are two intended audiences for this test: 1) people trying to decide which audio format to use for a stream (which are very often in the 32-64kbit range)

and

2) people who realize these tests can tell us much more than simply which codec performs best at 64kbit, and want to know how to maximize the quality-to-diskspace ratio on their own encodings.

Hope this clears something up for you.

-gleam

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[jorleif]

What do you mean by this? 64Kbits is worthless for listening to any music I own while 128 is good enough to not actually annoy me much of the time so why should I be interested in these tests?

I suppose he meant that since at 128Kbps all codecs perform quite well. Therefore personal preferences affect the results too much, i.e. some people like bass boosts and lots of treble, although this is not accurate in the sense that it differs from the original recorded signal.

If 128kbps is 'good enough' for you then I too suppose you would fall into the sounding 'good' instead of sounding 'accurate' category.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[wyndigo]

Simple, people who are trying to decide what to
use for streaming audio. Internet broadcasts anyone?

--Matt

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[nagora]

If you want to know WHICH codec will sound the best at 128kbit, you should look at which codec sounds the best at 64kbit--the two are likely to be the same.

Any proof of that?

TWW

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[nagora]

If 128kbps is 'good enough' for you then I too suppose you would fall into the sounding 'good' instead of sounding 'accurate' category.

If accurate is what you want you don't use any of these: just save raw samples! There is a balance in all compressed formats between good enough and accurate. Anyone reading this test is, by definition, looking for "good" rather than accurate.

TWW

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[perlyking]

64 kbps tests are pointless because no-ones uses those rates, and at higher rates the differences become negligable.

Not quite true, I used 64kbps wma files for about a week and listening using really shitty earbuds and walking alongside noisy truck filled roads on the way to work I couldnt tell the difference :-) Now I have some decent portable earbuds though (etymotics) you wont catch me using 64k wma (or I suspect any bitrate of wma!).

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[SlaterSan]

The structural engineering for cars is a (mostly) continuous scale. If it doesn't break at 50 mph, it won't break at 45. Computer science is a descrete enginnering field. These codecs could easily be tuned to work better at 64kbps without making them any better at 192kbps. Therefore they could also be tuned to work better at 128 or 192 and not work as well at 64k.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[alanjstr]

The whole point of the test, and I say this without reading the article, was that with these codecs, you don't have to code at higher bitrates any more.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[13Echo]

Agreed. Even certain MP3 encoders very quite greatly, depending on the bitrates that are used. BladeENC really blows at less than 256 kbps, but shines at higher bitrates. Xing just blows all the time. LAME just rocks no matter what, and is especially nice with its VBR implementations. FIIS's officialy encoder is the best for lower bitrates.

They aren't always the same.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right ... who uses 64kbps?

If 128 kbps sound similar in every format, then the degree of file size reduction is probably the next most important characteristic to compare.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about comparision of quality at or around 320 kbps? Personally, 320 (constant) is the only bitrate I use when *I* encode (I don't have much choice with what I download, and it seems most people rarely use 320) and I'd be interested to see any subtle differences present between ogg and mp3 at this bitrate (not so much WMA8, as I don't use windows).

Part of the reason I encode with 320 kbps is I know I usually end up loosing CDs so it's best to preserve the music as best as possible. Plus, even on my limited pentium III 500 I don't feel I loose much CPU time as a result of the higher bitrate, and the lost time is a fair compromise for better sound quality.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[jonathan_ingram]

I think I can confidently state that a 128kbit/s encode in *any* encoder will reduce the file size by exactly the same amount (to 128/1440 of the original size, to be exact).

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Lumpy]

A better test would be to loop an encode. take a piece and encode/decode/encode/decode this will magnify the problems with the codec. granted encoding at a very low bitrate will do this also. but then some codecs (mp3) use different systems for different bitrates. and also the encoder has a really large part of it at least in the mp3 world. lame with the right settings is the absolute best mp3 encoder availabe short of the $25,000.00 hardware unit used by studios and radio station conglomerates. Yes it blows away every pay-for encoder on the market... hands down.

so I do agree that the 64K test is a bit inaccurate, but it was for a reason and unfortunately the testers were not educated enough in what they were testing in order to perform an accurate and meaningful test.

I would grade these results as valuable as that of an 8th grade physics student... there is some info there but nothing that makes a difference.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[jonathan_ingram]

But only WMA is claimed to be 'CD quality' at 64kbit/s :)

After this test, we can quite comprehensively rebut that piece of misinformation, at least.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[McCart42]

But is the lost hard disk space worth the compromise? Personally I opt for LAME VBR.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[karnal]

I somewhat agree.

I've gone over this in my head a little bit, but I think the solution I've found is pretty decent (to my ears). I set the low end rate to 160, and the high end rate to 320, set the quality to 0 (overkill, but hey, why not?) and disable the lowpass filter. My command line looks something like this:

-v -V 0 -b 160 -B 320 -k

if I recall correctly... :) To each his own though.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[orbital3]

I actually haven't done many tests with Ogg 1.0 yet, due to a lack of time, but in the future, when portable devices are available that play Ogg, I really might be interested in ~64 kbps rates. Right now I have a Rio Volt and encode with lame 3.92 set at vbr -q 9. The files usually average a tiny bit under 128kbps. No, they aren't perfect when listened to with a decent sound setup, but they're not real bad.

But in reality, 99% of the reason I bought the Rio Volt was to be able to take one or two CDs in my car and have a decent selection of music. My car has a pretty crappy sound system, and the whole thing is being played through a tape adapter which further mangles the sound, and to be honest, I really can't tell a difference when I'm driving with the noise of the road/wind/AC.

If Ogg made it possible to have 64kbit files at about the same quality as the mp3s I have now, then I could fit twice as much music on one CD, which would put it at around 25+ albums. It'd be fantastic to be able to carry around my entire CD library in one of those 10 or 20 CD cases. Portable devices are where filesize reigns king.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

Running your car over a cliff is where the flaws in its safety system are truely exposed but I don't tend to drive over cliffs much.

But when consumer reports takes and runs the top 10 selling cars off of a cliff you read the report.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

The realone player default encoding format is atrac3. I didn't know what it was, just that it didn't play in WinAmp. Dumb thing wouldn't rip mp3 above 96 but a friend showed me this link that's lets you rip mp3 above 96kbps. I like the realone player only because it's one of the few apps whose CD burning makes sense. Adaptec EZ CD creator *YUK*

I, personally, would like to see OGG1.0, MP3 Pro and WMA8 take on some real tough to beat codecs such as Dolby's AAC High-Complexity Mode (which no AAC freely available encoder supports, including QuickTime) and Sony's ATRAC3. But, that'd be kinda moot, because most people out there do not have access to those toys.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonvmous Coward]

Oh but it is CD quality.

"We took 1,000 people and had them listen to an NSync song off a 64-kbit WMA file, and then off the CD. When asked 'Do you like the song any better?', 999 out of 1,000 people said "No. Can I go now?"

So yes, there is no quality difference between WMA and CD's, it's just a matter of asking the right question.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Zeinfeld]

Everyone is saying 'you would need golden ears to tell the difference' yadda yadda. In my view the whole test is bogus because we don't have figures for the original CD track.

I would not be at all suprised to see people favor the compressed over the original. The fact is that a lot of so called audiophiles are really pretty ignorant gadget freaks. At university I knew a friend who made money by helping to repackage the components of a bog standard Philips CD player in a pretty box to sell to audiophiles for ten times the price.

I had a so called audiophile witter on for ages about how this was actually quite rational and how using a more stable motor with reduced wow and flutter dramatically improved the sound. He still does not believe that the quartz crystal controls the sound output rate.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[crisco]

Take a look around his site. He's done other listening tests, including two separate tests at 128 kbps, with MPC and AAC highest in the first and MPC and Ogg Vorbis highest in the second.

Note the tests at 128 kbps seem much more difficult to discern a clear winner without resorting to some statistical work.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Jucius Maximus]

"At those bitrates you'd need a golden ear to tell the difference."

I'd be surprised if most people in the ~20-30 year age range, and especially females would not be able to tell the difference between Jesse Cook - Fall At Your Feet between 256kbit and 340kbit using oggvorbis1.0. The difference is amazing.

Age matters because as you get older, your ability to hear up to 20 khz becomes more and more impaired. Furthermore, the effect is much more rapid and the threshold decreases much more quickly in males than in females. A 60 year old male might only hear up to 14 khz, while being in the aforementioned group myself, I have been tested and can hear 18-19 khz.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[biostatman]

I dunno, for those of us who don't shell out $300-$500 on a regular basis for MP3 players, having 64 kpbs mono copies of my music lets me use my 32MB Rio (reliable, can use with Linux) for an hour - perfect for a workout, or a jog, where sound quality is not necessarily at a premium. It is at least reassuring to know that you can get reasonable sound quality at such a low bitrate.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[benedict]

Nobody's shown that the relative performance of
codecs at 64kpbs correlates with their relative
performance at higher bit-rates. I'm not saying
that there is no such correlation, only that it
hasn't been shown, so I would hesitate to base
any sort of decision on this study of relative
performance at 64kpbs.

Or maybe that correlation has been shown, but I
don't know about it.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're stuck in the mp3 world. The bit rate is totally independent of the quality. The bit rate just says that it takes X bytes for 1 second. With better compression, that number is going to be lower, but the quality can stay the same. Anyone who is satisfied with a 192kbps mp3 would probably be satisfied with a 128kbps ogg. And getting your 24 hour mp3 collection from 2gigs to 1.4gigs is not a negligible difference. Not just in storage, but in bandwidth transfer as well.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[cduffy]

But most importanatly, at which kbps does the codecs become equal? MP3s do sound a lot better at 192kbps, and surely will beat ogg at 64kps.

I'm not so sure of that -- Vorbis.com used to have one techno song in particular available for download encoded at about 45kps that sounded absolutely amazing -- to my ears, on par with a 112kps MP3. Unfortunetely they seem to have taken it down, so I'm having trouble backing up my assertion; I'll post a reply to this if I find a copy on my desktop machine (I'm presently on my laptop). In any event, I suspect that your evaluation of ogg at 192kbs would be different were it based on a different variety of music, a newer encoder release, or were it not for some technical fault (such as the transcoding of music previously stored as MP3s -- a big nono!)... I'd appreciate hearing how and when you came to the determination.

Oh, and in answer to your question... if you only want it to sound like the original, it depends on how good your ears (and speakers) are; for many, 192kps encoding with either MP3 or Ogg is good enough. If you want truly lossless audio encoding, see the review here.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? Anyone who may rip a borrowed home-burned CD.

When you convert mp3/ogg/wma/etc to .wav or .cda, it does NOT magically revert to the fidelity of the original. Any loss in fidelity is gone FOREVER. Your CD that was burned from MP3s is NOT the same as the original CD.

If this is then ripped to a lossy compression format again, more is lost. After three or four conversions back and forth your 192 bps mp3 will sound like a 56k wma file (without the viruses).

The answer would be once ripped, leave it ripped- but that isn't always feasable, as few CD players will (yet) play compressed music.

I mentioned viruses- they can be carried by wma files, which are microsoft's famous "active data", like a Word document. Like a Word document, you can use these scripting capabilities to build viruses, trojans, or any other manner of mischief into these files.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Microsoft's media player will play a wma file WITH its RIAA trojan even if the wma has been misnamed to MP3.

No other format besides wma has the capability of carrying payloads (which all players will execute), and no other player but WiMP will play a wma file with its extension changed.

So kids, before you burn that file-

1. Note on the CD where it came from; vinyl sample, mop3, etc

2. Never use wma files unless you like getting rooted by Sony

3. Never play music files with WiMP unless you want to be rooted by Sony, or have your collection sent to Microsoft (who rooted your box before it was ever put on the store shelf)

-steve
springfield fragfest

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first time your car goes off a cliff you'll want to know if the seat belts and air bags work properly.

They DO test cars, you know. We've had seat belts for almost 40 years now.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[timeOday]

There is a balance in all compressed formats between good enough and accurate.

...in all *lossy* compressed formats, you mean.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Oculus Habent]

Then they should have had 128kbps MP3 in the mix as well. Until a new study shows (with lots of people - it's hard to negotiate the personal preference differences in a small sample sizes) a comparison of these formats to 128kbps MP3, we don't really have a platform of comparison. They should compare CD-Audio and 128kps MP3 as test standards against which to measure the quality of the formats.

Until there's a comparison to something we can measure difference against, we have no quantitative data. Sure, it's nice to know that you are the 2nd best student in the class, but if the best student is still failing, where does that leave you?

--
Statistics are only as accurate as their intentions.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[nagora]

...in all *lossy* compressed formats, you mean.

Since you mention it, are there any non-lossy compressed audio formats that actually give reliable compression with real music?

TWW

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Paradise Pete]

You don't often intentionally hurl your car at 45 miles an hour into a steel box, either, but insurance companies do it all the time to see how well a particular car stands up to the abuse.

If I accidentally drive into a steel barrier I might die. If I accidentally encode something at 64k...well, I can just encode it again.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[timeOday]

Define "reliable," I guess.

You can check out FLAC:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Gogo Dodo]

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I think so, Brain, but if we didn't have ears, we'd look like weasels.

Sorry. Couldn't resist and it seemed quite fitting.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[mcg1969]

The man who conducted these tests, a regular on the Hydrogen Audio forum, knows darn well that 64kbps is not high fidelity. He wouldn't dare archive his CD collection at that bitrate. But 64kbps is a decent streaming audio rate, first of all; and secondly, it exposes weaknesses in higher-frequency reproduction---weaknesses which, if corrected, benefit higher bit-rate encoding as well.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Skuto]

>Until a new study shows (with lots of people -
>it's hard to negotiate the personal preference
>differences in a small sample sizes)

If you had actually looked at the results, you would have seen that

a) the sample size was enough to draw 95% confidence level conclusions

b) CD audio _was_ included as a reference (5.0)

--
GCP

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[rodolfo.borges]

Almost the same as mine.
I just use -b 32, instead of -b 160.
Useful to save space for the silence parts, and (threorecticaly) won't degrade quality with -V 320 and quality 0..

But now I think I'll switch to Vorbis.
Ogg at 80kbps sounds like mp3 at 128kbps to me.
The only drawback is that my portable mp3 player won't play .ogg, and I'll have to encode one for the PC and other for the portable player. :(

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Skuto]

>A better test would be to loop an encode. take a
>piece and encode/decode/encode/decode this will
>magnify the problems with the codec.

This isn't a valid way of comparing. The codecs are not designed to reencode music.

A codec may be perfectly transparent after a single encoding, and fall apart when comparing the second encoding with the original. (Think about this: the codec doesn't know what the _original_ signal was like when starting the second encode)

--
GCP

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason insurance companies do that is because putting real people in the car on a real road and performing the test is both illegal and too expensive. The best test for these encoders would use them as they would be used by users.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[nagora]

Define "reliable," I guess.

Results in compression at least 75% of the time would be a starting point. It would also need to be a reasonable degree (15%?) before it would be worth the time to encode it.

TWW

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[Oculus Habent]

I don't see where the CD Audio is listed - they were all ripped directly from CD, but that is to be expected.

And the 95% confidence ratings:

Each vertical line segment represents the 95% confidence interval (using Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference) for each codec.

One codec can be said to rated better than another codec with 95% confidence if the bottom of its line segment is at or above the top of the competing codec's line segment.

It has nothing to do with sample size - it's a statement that if the lowest average a codec received was higher that the highest average another received, we can be reasonably assured that it's an issue of quality vs. sample group.

The mean sampling group was 29 (29.25) users. While that doesn't invalidate the findings, it does give you a consideration for the basis.

--
Statistics are only as accurate as their intentions.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[tlotoxl]

You state:

If you want to know WHICH codec will sound the best at 128kbit, you should look at which codec sounds the best at 64kbit--the two are likely to be the same.

Many codecs, while including an ability to degrade 'gracefully', are optimized for a certain bitrate. There isn't just no guarantee that the one which degrades the most gracefully will have the best quality at higher bitrates, but in fact the opposite is generally true; codecs which are designed to degrade gracefully use algorithms that are often inefficiently designed for higher bitrates. I've read through a lot of papers describing codecs that are applied over a wide range of bitrates, and without fail (as far as I can remember) the tradeoff to these codecs was that they had poorer performance at higher bitrates (128+kbps). This inefficiency at high bitrates might be avoided if a multi-mode codec were used that used different algorithms for higher bitrates, but that would again invalidate any extrapolations made from lower bitrates.

I do agree that listening to a particular algorithm at a low bitrate may be a useful way of learning its characteristics, but you cannot reliably infer from these results its performance relative to other codecs at high bitrates.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[tiedyejeremy]

higher bit rates? Hell, a LOT of use use lossless compression because it actually sounds good!! http://www.etree.org shorten is the ONLY way to go. Check out .shn and shnamp

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[forgoil]

It was a general statement that a codec that is "less good" at the same bitrates can outshine the other if given a huge bitrate advantage. I am sure OGG will still outshine MP3s if both do have 192kbps, but I suspect that I will have a heard time hearing the difference.

I simply wanted to reverse the question somewhat. Instead of "how good at bitrate X" I wanted to know "how high bitrate do I need for quality X". The reason a lossy scheme is used in the first place is space. A 24bit/196khz PCM really kicks ass, but it would burn disk space like nothing else.

The reason for this line of questioning is, if I would go rip my CD collection, how much harddisk do I need to buy to encode it without me hearing that it is no longer the original CDs?

Well, sounding like the original means "I won't hear that it is encoded". I am not an audiophile, but I can hear a distinctive difference between my stationary DVD player and my computer playing WAVE files (through the digital out, I have no idea how this can sound worse), but I can't heard the difference between an 160kbps ogg and the wavefile comming from the computer.

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[cduffy]

Ahh -- I understand your statement now.

When you said "MP3s do sound a lot better at 192kbps, and surely will beat ogg at 64kps", I presumed you were discussing two separate straight-across comparisons. Sorry for taking the adversarial position.

Interesting that the WAVs sound worse than music off your DVD player when coming through the digital out. Could that be an input-side issue or perhaps a speaker-related difference?

Re:Who cares about 64 kbps tests?

[SurrealKnife]

Not quite correct, unfortunately. Due to the way the different algorithms work, they all work to different levels of efficiency at different bit rates. I once saw a comparison of four MP3 encoders where each one gave the best sound at a different bit rate (tested at 64, 128, 192 and 256kbps).

Therefore, there are liable to be very great differences at higher bit rates. I know I prefer WMA at 64kbps and MP3 at higher bit rates, for instance (WMA gives better midrange at low bitrates but always has severe phasing, even at the higher bitrates)

Hmmmm

[cca93014]

Tests confirmed that attempting to encode "Aphex Twin" with any of these codecs caused the PC to tremble at a frequency that, when connected to a refracting laser stuck up Bill Gates' ass, had it spell out "we're all dead" on the nearest wall.

Re:Hmmmm

[aechols]

Actually, Aphex Twin would be good for testing the frequency response of the various codecs. Lots of sounds and noises all over the place. Heck, a few songs have stuff drawn in frequencies. Richard James (the guy behind it all) put a picture of himself in one of the songs, I can't remember which though. You can see it if you run it through an analyzer that scrolls if you have the CD. Supposedly the MP3 version obliterates it because of lost frequencies.

Re:Hmmmm

[_Laban_]

It's the 2nd track on the Windowlicker EP. This was posted on slashdot a few months ago. People claimed that the face could not be seen while using the MP3 version. Some people pointed out that this was not true

Ogg Vorbis

[by Steven Woston]

In some circles, it's believed that Ogg Vorbis is the future of lossy format music. You get higher quality in less harddisk space than with MP3, plus it's a far more open codec allowing more customisation with less legal risk.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm missing the point you're trying to make.

In some circles, it's believed that Ogg Vorbis is the future of lossy format music.

Well, uh, yeah: for any view, no matter how crazy, there's always someone who'll believe it. Witness Jerry Springer.

You get higher quality in less harddisk space than with MP3

The report didn't prove that conclusively. At a quick count, I make MP3 beating Ogg 6-5 at this bitrate with one tie.

plus it's a far more open codec allowing more customisation with less legal risk.

Open how? MP3 is a published specification.

Customisation? Why would you want to customise it? If they got it right first time (and you're not an audio engineer) how are you going to do any better?

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, no more fucking Steve "SuperProgrammer" Woston posts.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

Asides from the fact that you're replying to a Troll (And really, Steve Woosten again? Whats next, OOG?), you're also talking ass.

I make MP3 beating Ogg 6-5

You must be looking at a different comparision then, because MP3 isn't even tested in the one linked in the article. They compare MP3Pro, Ogg (Two variants), WMA8 and AAC.

Open how? MP3 is a published specification.

a) MP3 is patented; if you implement an MP3 encoder and it is used by more than x people (x being set by Fruenhoffer), you either pay up for a licence, or they shut you down. b) MP3Pro is even worse.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

And really, Steve Woosten again?

Never heard of him. Yeah, I thought it might be a a troll ('by by').

because MP3 isn't even tested in the one linked in the article. They compare MP3Pro

Forgive my ignorance. I thought MP3Pro was just a particular MP3 encoder rather than a different CODEC.

a) MP3 is patented; if you implement an MP3 encoder

which makes zero difference from a user's point of view.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

which makes zero difference from a user's point of view.

It does, if the user is ripping their own CD's. If the ripper they're using does not support MP3Pro (Why should it, if the developers have to pay to support it?), then they're not going to use it. Conversly, if the player they are using does not support MP3Pro (Same reasons), then the user is unlikely to stick with the format.

The commercially backed software rippers out there are not going to back MP3Pro, either. Windows Media Player pushes WMA, RealJukebox (Or whatever it is these days) pushes Real Audio (Ha!) etc. etc. Nor the players; WinAMP supports Ogg, but doesn't do MP3Pro. Note that I'm talking out-of-the-box here.

Either way, I don't see MP3Pro making much of a splash.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Alan Partridge]

It does, if the user is ripping their own CD's. If the ripper they're using does not support MP3Pro (Why should it, if the developers have to pay to support it?)

Why should it? Because it's obviously FUCKING GOOD.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to pay for a ripper so that you can use MP3Pro, go right ahead. But the commercially backed, free rippers arn't going to push it because they have a vested interest in their own formats. The free rippers arn't going to push it, because they're not going to pay the royalties.

Now get back to work, its only 11:13.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Alan Partridge]

I don't mind paying for a high quality compression tool at all. If my car stereo supported MP3Pro as well as the VBR MP3 that I currently use, I'd go MP3Pro and cram even more of my albums onto my car CDRs. Judging by this listening test, MP3Pro deserves to succeed. Whatever happened to people paying for worthwhile products? I'd far rather pay for MP3Pro than get WMA for "FREE".

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[funky womble]

After what happened with jpeg, I'd have thought there's going to be less legal risk in using a codec that you can pay to license. (Not that most mp3 users are really going to be /all/ that bothered!)

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to people paying for worthwhile products?

I think Microsoft killed that concept off when they started giving Internet Explorer away. It certainly killed off Netscape, lets face it.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Salsaman]

Isn't mp3pro limited to 64K ? Why would you want to use that, when you could create 128K ogg files that were much higher quality ?

It looked to me from the results that mp3pro performed about equal with ogg at 64K, but would you really want to play 64K files in your car ?

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I hadn't seen the "Steven Woston" troll in so long, I had almost forgotten about it.

Re:Ogg Vorbis

[renderhead]

You guys need to read up a little more on MP3Pro. The point of it is that it fills in the missing overtones and sound quality that is lost when you get down to 64K, meaning that it should have a comparable sound to a normal MP3 file recorded at 128K.

As for "Why would you want to use that, when you could create 128K ogg files that were much higher quality ?", there's this little thing called "storage." Perhaps you've heard of it? It means you can store a whole lot more songs in the same space if they have a lower bitrate.

Not surprising.

[neksys]

This isn't terribly surprising, as it was already known that the different formats have different frequency responses. More specifically, the way they compress the music dictates what frequencies are cut out. MP3s, for example, are notorious for removing high and low frequencies from music - not a big deal for casual listeners, but those with high-end stereo systems will definitely notice the lack of high overtones, and the "flat" low end bass response. WMA sort of sounds like certain frequencies are cut from the raw audio, leaving the rest to fill in as sort of an approximation of the original full sound - it sounds hollow and "chime-y". Ogg has its defining sound characteristics as well. Thus, it isn't surprising that different styles of music sound better encoded in different formats, as different styles take advantage of different frequencies. Rock music has high frequency cymbals and low frequency bass drums and guitars, as well as a very full mid-range, so a well-rounded encoding system works well. Classical is somewhat more compressed, as a result of the physical limitations in terms of sound reproduction of the instruments, so to the undiscerning ear, a format with especially good mids will suffice. The examples go on and on, but the point is that different tools are needed for different jobs - if nothing else, this study shows that having having a number of encoding tools on hand is actually a good thing. When you look in your tool box, you've got more than a couple Phillips-head screwdrivers - you should have enough tools to deal adequately with any job. The same applies to music.

Re:Not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

"frequency response" has nothing to do with it. This is nonsense. Psychoacoustic compression does not work in a manner similar to audio components. A codec does not have "great mids", or "clear highs", etc. Psychoacoustic encoders are all based on the principles of masking and the exploitation of other phenomena. They aren't designed like conventional speaker systems or something.

Frequencies are not "cut-out" either. What happens is that noise, quantization noise that is, is added in differing levels in time to certain frequency bands. The degree of this noise, or degree of "allowable" error, is determined by the psymodel. This determination is based on many factors. Examples would be loudness of particular frequency bands, especially in relation to other bands (hence, some bands may be masked), the type of signal (is it tonal or is it noise-like? Tonal signals make added noise more perceptable), it's orientation and the degree in which it changes in time (transient signals tolerate less noise at the start, but after such events occur, our ears take time to recover, allowing more noise immediately following), etc.

The reason some of these codecs sound better or worse than others is not because they are tuned to drop specific frequencies, it is because their psymodels are tuned differently (better or worse), they utilize different technologies to reach their compression (AAC is very different from Ogg Vorbis for example), and they have seen different levels of stress testing.

As a general rule, it's fair to say that most codecs released by large corporatons have seen nowhere near the degree of end-user testing and validation as some of the competing free versions. Case in point would be LAME (the best MP3 encoder at mid-bitrate VBR. Sorry but Blade is based on the horribly buggy and incomplete ISO codebase.. hence it sucks) and Ogg Vorbis. Mp3pro is interesting purely from a technological point of view, and fhg's codec does fairly well simply because they have had significant experience with it over the years. Taking a look at their AAC implementation (which does have some bugs not in the private version according to Ivan Dimkovic, PsyTEL AAC developer) and of course at WMA futher emphasizes all of this.

Also, while at 64kbps there is a relative toss up between certain codecs as to performance, at bitrates of 160kbps and up, this is not the case. MPC clearly wins the mid to high bitrate competition (Monty himself has even conceded this fact), AAC coming in slightly in second place, for the most part matched by Ogg Vorbis. At lower bitrates (128kbps range), MPC becomes less of a player and Vorbis and AAC take over.

For the most part, one can get by with simply MPC for transparent mid-to-high bitrate encoding, and Vorbis for lower bitrates. MPC has the lowest number of known problem samples out of any codec that currently exists and it has the highest degree of transparency also judging by the relative lack of listeners able to discern it in double blind tests (these are highly sensitive and trained listeners, tests carried out are usually in the 160kbps range). MPC really has no weaknesses on any particular type of music, and it does not suffer from any sort of so-called frequency deficiency. In this case, one size does fit all.

Re:Not surprising.

[jonathan_ingram]

The corresponding problems with MPC are:

1) The encoder is closed source.

This means that you are perpetually beholden on the developers to make a version available for your particularly OS. Not a problem if you're a Windows user, admittedly.

2) The format infringes on a number of the patents applicable to all MPEG audio compression (as it is a highly-modified version of MPEG1 layer 2).

This means that it's very unlikely ever to appear in either portable players, or built in to players such as WinAmp -- it took 6 months of patent searching before they allowed Vorbis in by default.

Vorbis is 'good enough', and free in just about every sense you can think of. 'good enough' (in this case, at least MP3 quality) is often all you need to win the battle.

Re:Not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of this is of course true when factoring in a practicality/functionality point of view. In regards to quality though, it's mostly irrelevant.

At any rate, the main point was not necessarily to plug MPC, but to emphasize the point that a mass of encoders are not needed to cope with different sonic conditions as was implied in the original post.

In pretty much all cases, MPC and Vorbis are enough to suffice.

Also, about MPC being windows-centric Windows.. Linux users (x86, which should be the vast majority) are covered as well.

Re:Not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you mean to tell me that this flat-head screwdriver I've been using doesn't double as a chisel.... No wonder this totem pole im making is taking so long.

-Anonymous Coward

Should compare Ogg as a single entry

[Russell Coker]

Let's assume that anyone who likes Ogg and is seriously into music will compress their music with both Ogg variants and use the best variant for each file.
Therefore we should also consider taking the best of the two results and comparing it to mp3.
From a quick look at the results it appears that Ogg will still be edged out by mp3 when analysed in such a fashion, but it's much closer.
Also a test on several bit rates would be useful.

Re:Should compare Ogg as a single entry

[Anonymous Coward]

Those tests compare to MP3Pro, not MP3. So Ogg hasn't been edged out by MP3, its been edged out by MP3Pro.

Question: Has anyone seen an MP3Pro file "in the wild"?

Re:Should compare Ogg as a single entry

[Skirwan]

Let's assume that anyone who likes Ogg and is seriously into music will compress their music with both Ogg variants and use the best variant for each file.

Even better, let's assume that anyone who is seriously into music will compress their music with everything and use the best variant for each file.

Kinda defeats the purpose, eh?

--
Damn the Emperor!

Re:Should compare Ogg as a single entry

[Mr_Silver]

Let's assume that anyone who likes Ogg and is seriously into music will compress their music with both Ogg variants and use the best variant for each file.
Therefore we should also consider taking the best of the two results and comparing it to mp3.

No we shouldn't.

You would be chronically distorting the results by merging both Ogg variants. What you would end up with is MP3Pro vs. some super-Ogg thing that doesn't actually exist.

They should be tested seperately. If people are going to do what you suggest then, yes, they will get the best. The problem is that you're making additional assumptions about usage which will serve no other purpose than to boost Ogg's results.

Re:Should compare Ogg as a single entry

[V. Mole]

No, those of us who are seriously into music and audio quality will buy bigger disks and compress with a lossless encoder like flac.

So I guess its time for a new frontend

[CableModemSniper]

I guess grip will have to use Genre info from CDDB to decide what to encode the the files as now. I wonder if you coudl set up something to optimize individual tracks. Like scan a wav and pick the best codec for the frequencies used in the audio.

How about speech?

[GCP]

I'd be interested to know how these codecs perform when streaming things like news or talk radio or foreign language lessons. Clarity at a low bandwidth would support a lot of simultaneous listeners from a low-end server. Clarity at medium bandwidth could provide the extra sound quality needed for something like language learning/practice, again from relatively modest servers.

Re:How about speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err no... these are general purpose audio codecs. Speech has properties (same sounds being produced over and over in a certain way) that mean it can be encoded very well and with much higher compression by considering things like the sound you make in your larynx and the shape your mouth/lips form. These parameters can then be passed over the link and used to regenerate the voice at the other end. This specialised compression could never be matched by a general purpose audio codec which is just trying to get the produced waveform as close as possible to the original (and taking into account what humans can hear...)

Re:How about speech?

[horace]

An unecessarily harsh reply to a good question I feel but you have a vary interesting point.

What would be a good codec for voice material?

Re:How about speech?

[MrHanky]

I haven't tested it myself, but speex is both free and intended for this.

Re:How about speech?

[yoz]

Take a look at Speex, an open source codec project aimed at speech compression. It uses Ogg for its file format (but don't confuse it with Vorbis). The quality's pretty good already.

MP3PRO not MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed a number of confused posters here... The tested codecs were AAC/MP3PRO/OGG/WMA, not MP3. Had mp3 been tested, it would have lost every round as all of the tested codecs are vastly superior to plain MP3 at this bitrate.

It also should be noted that the only two samples that WMA beat OGG at (indeed the only ones that it didn't totally flop on) were two very simple samples that are demonstrations of two differnt weaknesses in the current revision of vorbis. Orignally the results page had some very interesting commentary from Monty on this, but it looks like it got pulled.

With the exception of those two samples, OGG clearly won. Even including those, it was only beat out by MP3PRO by a small margin. When you factor in that MP3PRO isn't available at anything but such low bitrates and that it's substantially more propritary then MP3, it seems like pretty much a no-contest.

Re:MP3PRO not MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

the word is THAN you stupid fuck

Re:MP3PRO not MP3

[Mr_Silver]

When you factor in that MP3PRO isn't available at anything but such low bitrates and that it's substantially more propritary then MP3, it seems like pretty much a no-contest.

Except that to get the best quality with Ogg I have to encode in one of two ways depending on the type of music.

With MP3Pro, there is only one.

For the music purists and geeks, this would matter. But for everyone else on the planet they'd rather have one encoding that does well.

It would appear that MP3Pro is pretty close to that.

Re:MP3PRO not MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the scores at the end, you'll see that BOTH of the ogg modes performed statistically as well as MP3PRO. Yes, some did a little better with the managed mode, but the reason for testing both it that one is mostly intended for streaming the other for general use, not because users are expected to change modes depending on content.

Re:MP3PRO not MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you born a dumb shit, or did you have to work at it?

Even on the test setup page, the guy reflects that most people will use the -q 0 option for everything. Basically only one way of encoding, just like there's basically one way of encoding mp3s. Or would you say that mp3s are unpopular? The music purists would be tweaking the bit rate anyways, regardless of the codec, and they would probably encode at higher than 128 kb/s regardless.

I just can't believe what stupid, illogical, unfounded opinions people can come up with! I'd go on, but who has time to educate all the fools in the world about reason?

music styles

[Anonymous Coward]

it was interesting to note the diversity in music genres. i especially took a liking to seeing metal being included, since that is mostly what i listen to, and is something not usually included in tests like this. is this the first real, good blind listening test like this ? i remember a while ago when a test was done when people were actually told what formats they were listening to, and the results were presented as a professional test. that caused some uproar, obviously.

opeth, which was included in the test, is one hell of a band by the way, changing from the more brutal to quiet and 'nice', but always with melodic as a base. yeah, that's off-topic, i know. :)

Re:This is interesting.

[tlotoxl]

Who cares what music was used?

I agree that each song should have been evaluated by every test subject, but I think it's completely valid to include Green Day or music for which the original recording was of mediocre quality; the purpose of the test was obviously not to see which codec had the best transient response, lowest weighted snr or what-have-you -- the purpose of the test was to determine which codec was subjectively preferred under realistic low bitrate application of the codecs.

People encode Green Day and the Mamas and Papas (frighteningly enough), so those artists are fair game.

What i would be interrested in however...

[Anonymous Coward]

How would the codecs compare in bitrate given a minimum quality requirement. Say eg at least 99.9% of the samples produced when decoding must match the original wave with 99.9% accuracy, at what bitrate can this requirement be met by the various codecs (which is smaller). And a nice graph of some sort for various musical styles.

Re:What i would be interrested in however...

[scosol]

That's not how it works-

The waveform outputs will look TOTALLY different-

That's what compression does- remove parts of the waveform (data) that you can't hear anyway.

The goal is to *sound* the same, not *look* the same.

Maybe A design decision?

[nervlord1]

Maybe the music the respective formats are best in represent the musical tastes of (most) of the authors, Microsoft with WMA chamber music, OGG vorbis getting good in techo type music (and even though i prefer Power metal (think manowar, western europe metal bands (not rammstien, ugh)), i know alot of nerds love techno.

Just a thought.

P.s. It doens't explain too clearly the diffirence between the two ogg vorbis formats, atleast for me, can anyone expand a little?

Re:Maybe A design decision?

[SK-null]

Its not diferent formats. Just diferent encoder options.
The oggq0 entries are for music enconded in a Variable Bit Rate mode (oggenc -q0) -- the encoder defines a quality treshold and uses whatever bitrate necessary to keep it there.
The ogg64 entries are for music encoded with a nominal bitrate (oggenc -b 64 --manage) -- it atemts to keep the bitrate around 64 kbps without looking at sound quality.
Why did only Ogg Vorbis got to show these two modes? Because though the test focuses on 64kbps (nominal bit rate) encoding, its likely than most Ogg Vorbis users will use variable bit rate encoding with it. I know I do.

Re:Maybe A design decision?

[Datafage]

Least you can manage is to spell Rammstein CORRECTLY, and just because they're actually available in the US does not mean they're exactly inferior to Megaherz, Tanzwut, and Oomph!.

Who cares? The guys who run streaming servers...

[Elphin]

There's been a couple of posts along these lines, citing cheaper hard disk costs and improved client side bandwidth.

The bottom line is that if a codec like Ogg Vorbis can deliver a similar experience at 64kbps to another codec at higher bitrates, that can be quite a saving in bandwidth at the server end. If you're running a streaming music service, that can be quite a saving.

MP3Pro Rocks

[abhikhurana]

It confirms what I always believed. Mp3 Pro is a format to be taken more seriously. I mean same quality at half the size. Trouble is that it won't play very well on my Archos Jukebox. So guys writing the open source OS for Archos, any chance of incorporating Mp3Pro decoder on it?

definition of quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the codecs are all designed to optimize perceived audio quality, I'm not sure what you'd hope to achieve by taking an objective measure of the quality of their outputs. Are you interested in seeing if there is a correlation between SNR and subjective quality in these experiments?

OMG get it right

[tomstdenis]

OGG is not a sound format. Vorbis is the audio codec and OGG is the bitstream manager!

Tom

Re:OMG get it right

[Anonymous Coward]

1) You know what they mean here ("ogg vorbis")
2) A lot of people say "ogg" the same as people say "wav", meaning the file format ".ogg". There, they're right in their usage. (HA! 3 THARE's in 1)

Re:OMG get it right

[big.ears]

Whatever. You claim vorbis is an audio codec and ogg a bitstream manager, but you don't tell us what the sound format is. Why is the executable called oggenc (ogg encoder) if ogg is not a sound format? Why are the files name .ogg by default if ogg is not a sound format? Why don't you go troll on the xiph mailing lists, because it appears that they are the ones who have perpetuated this.

Re:OMG get it right

[tomstdenis]

Many idiots don't make something true.

Look it up yourself in the source code. Vorbis is the actual codec and OGG is the bitstream manager.

That's like calling streamed movies HTTP's or something...

tom

Poor Steve Jobs...

[salimma]

His team looked so enthusiastic mooting AAC audio in their MacWorld NY keynote presentation.

They must be kinda broken-hearted :p

Ogg in peace,

Michel

Re:Poor Steve Jobs...

[Greg W.]

AAC's performance at 64 kbps is not necessarily indicative of its performance at 128 kbps.

Re:Poor Steve Jobs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but according to Ivan Dimkovic (PsyTEL AAC developer, widely regarded as the highest quality AAC implementation available at mid-bitrates), the Quicktime implementation of AAC has some serious flaws/bugs. Apparently it's using the Fraunhofer implementation of AAC, which is supposed to be extremely good, except that Apple appears to have tweaked things, to a negative effect. Short block triggering (the bit that handles encoding of transient signals like drum attacks) in Quicktime AAC is broken for example. I think it's highly likely that these problems also exist at higher bitrates as well. The sad fact is that most of the time, these large companies just don't tune well at all for very high quality. They either don't use sensitive enough listeners, don't use the right kind of test samples, just don't care because Joe Average Blade/Xing user doesn't, or there are other reasons.

Re:Poor Steve Jobs...

[cryptochrome]

or 80 and 96, comparable to 160 and 192 for mp3s respectively. Any lossy codec is going to break down at some point. The question is where and how quickly? One way is to design a codec to perform as well as it can at some bitrate, determined by needs. But for music, when your goal is to have audio that is virtually indistinguishable from the original rather than merely audible, the goal is for it to be as indistinguishable as possible for as low a bitrate as possible (which means you have tradeoffs). Below that, who cares? A codec that can do that is not necessarily going to scale properly to very low bitrates. And I have yet to hear of any codec that can handle near-indistinguishable music at 64.

Re:Poor Steve Jobs...

[salimma]

As other people have indicated, though, testing at 64 kbps stresses the codecs and *are* indicative of their performance when encoding difficult pieces.

FOO

[Anonymous Coward]

BAR

BAZ

[Anonymous Coward]

NI

lets see how your Russian is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to offend your fine sensibilities, but I'm not primarily an English speaker. Lets see if your Russian fairs any better than my English.

Re:lets see how your Russian is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

how do you know that I AM?

Re:lets see how your Russian is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I'm not the original poster, the guy may have misused a single English word in his post, but at least he can understand simple punctation. Capatalisation of the first letter of the first word in a sentence, and avoiding sentence fragments, for example.

Re:lets see how your Russian is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

don't complain about my grammar and then misspell "capitalisation" you fool. There's no need to properly form sentences in a conversation. So fuck off.

Re:lets see how your Russian is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

don't complain about my grammar and then misspell "capitalisation" you fool.

Hey, I never claimed to be a perfect speller. I don't even claim to be correct.

There's no need to properly form sentences in a conversation.

You're not having a conversation, you're leaving a written message on a website. Even then, are you claiming that you don't have to use proper sentences in order to communicate?

At least try to actually communicate properly. You won't always get it right (For example, you may misspell a word, or you may misuse a word), but at least you won't appear to be a thirteen year old fuckwit who has decided that the rules don't apply to themselves.

Re:lets see how your Russian is.....

[dirtyhippie]

People who argue about grammar and spelling are funny. Keep up the good work guys!

You may have been sarcastic

[MrFredBloggs]

"Are you saying that the intended audience for these tests are people that are not interested in the quality of the music they're listening to?"

but you hit the nail on the head. And the answer is `Yes`.
I listen to loads of music, and I cant stand lossy compression systems. I can see the point, like Napster or whatever, but the idea of spending £400 or whatever on an iPod is laughable. Blank cds are 20p each, writers are £60 - why bother arsing around with wondering about 64Kbits vs 128 etc? Anyone listening to music at 64K is wasting their time. 128 still sounds like much of it was recorded underwater, especially the bass.

But obviously to some people its just about how much music they can hoard away.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[nagora]

But obviously to some people its just about how much music they can hoard away.

My particular problem is that I hate the noise PC CD-ROMS make while spinning at 1x. Since I like to listen to music while working, I make recordings that play without that noise in the background (my PC fan is very quiet). Plus, I can play from a large subset of my CD collection from either machine at home or from my machine at the office.

TWW

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[Alan Partridge]

but the idea of spending £400 or whatever on an iPod is laughable.

Why? A 20Gb iPod can hold a shitload of UNCOMPRESSED music if that's what you want. It a very compact solution even if youu aren't interested in lossy audio compression. Choose AIFF if that's what you want - there's nothing stopping you.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[MrFredBloggs]

Yeah, but then you may as well just get a £40 diskman, if you are going to rip and copy a cd onto a HD. And if they`re your cds, why bother ripping them? I have a diskman and a cd carry case. If it gets lost/stolen its not as big a deal as if i lost a £400 device - even if i have to buy all 12 cds again!
But you`re sort of right - my problem is with the audio artefacts of lossy compression rather than inherant problems with the iPod (other than the price).

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[zbuffered]

Convenience, convenience, convenience. I've got an MP3 CD in my car that's been in there for nearly a month. It's got all my current favorite tracks/albums on it. When I get tired of it, I'll burn another CD that may last as long. Also, lossy compression is very acceptable for mediums such as speeches, books on ta--MP3, etc. I've got a road trip coming up, and I'm planning on listening to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy that I borrowed from a friend. At 64kbps, I can fit something like 21 hours of audio on one CD. As opposed to the 18 or so CDs that it would take if it were pure CD-Audio. You don't have to get rid of CDs, but MP3s have their place, and they're not going away. Lossy compression or not, you can make an MP3 sound as good as CD Audio. You can. Just turn up the bitrate, play with the settings. Use lossless compression if you want, but I guarantee you can rip an MP3 of almost any track that you won't be able to tell from a ripped wav file from the same disc. For me, the quality of the original sample is usually the smallest factor in the imperfections of the audio. Usually, static from the amplifier, and/or inadequate powering of the speakers, and/or crappy speakers, and/or background noise, are the biggest factors. If I were an audiophile freak, I wouldn't rip MP3, but I'm not. I live in the real world. MP3's imperfections are the least of my audio-related problems out here.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[Ravensfire]

Personally, the idea of NOT having a $200+ mp3 player is laughable.

I tend to be outside a lot - yard work and exercise (running, stadium stairs, etc). A CD based mp3 player is too large and bulky for what I want. But a small mp3 player - perfect! I've got a samsung player, have had it for 6 months, and have found it perfect for my needs.

-- Ravensfire

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[Alan Partridge]

I DO generally agree - I don't have an iPod as the cost is too high for me now, but if I was still at Uni I'd snap one up like a shot, as that's when I use to use my Discman a LOT. Where I do listen to music now is at home and in the car, my Pioneer 7400MP is a great machine which allows me to make up "MP3 CDs" using iTunes and thereby have a decent selection of music in my glovebox. I usually get around 6-7 albums per CD, and I can stand to carry around 12 such discs in my car without grief. Maybe a hard disk head unit in the car with Wi-Fi so that I could rip on my Mac and just beam the files across while the car is in the drive would be even better, but until then it works for me.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[marmoset]

I cycle about 100 miles a week. My bike is probably where I end up listening to the most music. A good portable player (I use an iPod, but this would apply to some others as well) beats the crap out of a discman in this situation, because of the vastly superior portability. The iPod is about a third of the size of any portable CD player except for those useless 3-inch models, has an effectively infinite anti-skip buffer, and requires hauling around no bulky media.

As for theft, since the iPod is only the size of a cigarette pack, there's no reason to leave it in the car to be stolen when you go inside somewhere -- that's what pockets are for, chief.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[Alan Partridge]

I don't want to sound like your dad, but cycling while listening to music is appallingly dangerous. It's also really motivational if you've got the right music... but that's life I suppose.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[afidel]

Depends where he is cycling, around me we have some bike paths that run along old railroad lines. Outside the very popular parks where there are large numbers of parking spots for cars there aren't many people. In fact some of them are remote enough I have had complete 5 miles hikes where I have seen 2-3 people the whole 2 hours. At least around me most people who are serious about hiking or biking do it to get away from people, life etc as much as the exercise.

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[MrFredBloggs]

Is it dangerous? I saw stats suggesting that people had less accidents, due apparantly to people overcompensating for loss of hearing by looking more and being more careful. Of course, this was a few years ago (and in the UK)..perhaps people are getting more careless and stupid nowadays (what do i mean `perhaps`....)

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[benedict]

Just wait for the dollar to drop through the floor,
and then order your iPod from the U.S. It'll be cheap!

Re:You may have been sarcastic

[Alan Partridge]

You're right, of course. The natural conclusion is to wear both headphones and some kind of LCD visor (like an Eye-Trek, perhaps) too. You'll be overcompensating SO MUCH, that you'll probably acquire Superman style senses.

Problem Is

[BlackGriffen]

that these codecs are lossy, and take advantage of the fact that the human ear is better at hearing certain things than others to pair out extraneous info and improve compression. IOW, it doesn't matter how technically different the new files are as long as they still sound the same to the human ear.

BlackGriffen

from someone who participated

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, people should NOT confuse mp3 with mp3 pro.. mp3 pro has very little support, is only useful for lower bitrates, and is even more mangled than mp3 when it comes to patents and stuff. So even though it won by a small margin, it still doesn't stand a chance against vorbis in practice.

Besides, vorbis will improve at 64 kbps in the future, and probably beat mp3 pro one day. The vorbis-team has focused most on the 128-ish bitrates for now.

One more thing.. mp3 is not even included in this test.. but perhaps they should have, as I know from experience that mp3 at 64kbps sucks very much.. would it suck even more than wma8 and QT-AAC? Probably! But they should almost have included mp3 if only so some hesitant people could see how bad mp3s really are for streaming..

More tests will come in the future.. one at 128 kbps too I suppose.. and there I guarantee you that mp3 will be included and get its ass kicked by vorbis. Vorbis is a superior technology, don't get that confused. Its main competitor is aac, but aac is patented and not free, and currently not very tweaked.

Re:from someone who participated

[Anonymous Coward]

So, by the looks of things, you're one of those Linux hippies who can suddenly "hear" the superiority of Vorbis because it agrees with your philosophical beliefs.

There goes any credibility this test ever had. Thank you, come again.

QUUX

[Anonymous Coward]

QUUUX

No Control

[SpringRevolt]

Just as in many scientific experiment (and especially psychology experiments) it is very important to have (at least) one control.

A control is where the experiment is performed expect without the difference being tested for. The results of the control show (or not, as the case may be) that it is the thing being tested for that causes differences, not the experiment itself.

Here, there is no control - crappy experiment.

The participants could have just been scoring on "this is different to the unencoded track, therefore it must be worse".

So put a copy of the unencoded track as a test track and see if it gets marked down (and also, of course do NOT tell the participants that it is there).

Re:No Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, there is no control - crappy experiment.

The participants could have just been scoring on "this is different to the unencoded track, therefore it must be worse".

So put a copy of the unencoded track as a test track and see if it gets marked down (and also, of course do NOT tell the participants that it is there).

Umm.. did you bother to read about the testing methodology before coming to your grand conclusion here?

ABC/HR.. as in ABC/Hidden Reference... as in, there is a copy of the original track included as a hidden reference on every single trial.

The users are given 2 sliders per sample laid out on a panel. The samples are loaded in random order. On the sliders for each sample, one slider is for the original sample, and one is for the encoded. These are also randomized per sample. The user does not know which is which. If they happen to rate the original sample less than 5.0 (highest rating, meaning it should be transparent), then their results are disregarded entirely for that sample.

Re:No Control

[jonathan_ingram]

Please moderate the parent up - unlike the grandparent, this anonymous coward actually knows what he is talking about.

Re:No Control

[quake74]

The participants could have just been scoring on "this is different to the unencoded track, therefore it must be worse".

Well, I don't see anything wrong with that. That is EXACTLY what the were supposed to judge. It is not a contest about what sounds better, it's a contest about which codec reproduces the source more faithfully (in the sense of Hi(gh)Fi(delity)). The more different from the source, the worse.

quake74

Re:No Control

[SloppyElvis]

The parent of all of this was certainly in err, but this still isn't a very good experiment. Look at the number of testers that were used. Most tests numbered in the 30s with respect to the number of subjects. While that number may be sufficient for small sample statistical tests, it is not a sufficient sample to test for such a normative value across the human population, such as judging music quality represents. Having achieved a small variance of opinion must not be determined to prove that the sample size was large enough to account for variance in opinion for the greater population, and while these tests are interesting, they are incomplete IMHO.

Re:No Control

[nedron]

I have to agree. Not showing the rating of the control in the charts makes the chart pointless. It would be interesting to see how the user ratings for the control line up against the codecs.

It's possible that the data from the control showed that the listener preference had little to do with how the rated the codec reproduced the original.

Re:No Control

[ff123]

By definition, the original was rated 5.0, or perfect. If the listener failed to rate the original 5.0 on any codec for a particular music sample, then all of the ratings for that listener on that sample were discarded.

This is a rather drastic way to screen, and certainly I might not have done this if there was less data and if more people had rated the original less than perfect. However, given the large amount of people who participated and the level of experience they had, I had that luxury.

A couple of things I personally would have like to have included but didn't for the sake of getting more reliable statistics: a 128 kbit/s mp3 anchor, and something like a 7 kHz lowpassed anchor. Just to kind of keep the ratings in perspective.

Oh, and to answer the criticism that the test doesn't represent the general population, that is quite true. The people who participated were not randomly selected off the street, but rather volunteered their services. I agree with the person who replied to this criticism, though, that I'm much more interested in the opinions of these motivated volunteers, who are much more likely to care about audio quality, than those of the average joe.

ff123

Multi-Codec Codec anyone?

[BlackGriffen]

Considering that different codecs do better at different music w/ different frequency spreads, who else thinks that the next generation of audio codecs will be multi-modal; in effect, be several codecs in one. Then have each codec specialize on certain types of music. Perhaps even have them run in an advanced mode where they do a frequency analysis of whole songs, rather than just using genre, to automatically select the best codec for the job. Perhaps even use different codecs for different sections of the song. That would definitely help songs like Bohemian Rhapsody and orchestas with movements, etc.

Would this be too time consuming to implement or what?

BlackGriffen

Re:Multi-Codec Codec anyone?

[John_Booty]

Using different codecs for different parts of a single song would be technically possible, but I don't think it would be desireable.

Different codecs have different sound qualities, because of the different ways in which they discard information in order to achieve their lossy compression. So I think that using different codecs within the same song would result in a pretty wide variation of the way music sounded within a single compressed song...

Re:Multi-Codec Codec anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant to say that you use the same codec for the whole song, but you decide what codec to use by analyzing the song/audio piece from before...

Re:Multi-Codec Codec anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

A bunch of fucking losers have replied talking about what a bad idea this is, but I think they're wrong. I think this is a *great* idea!

IIRC, Djvu uses different codecs for different parts of an image. Why shouldn't the same thing be done for audio?

A friend also tells me that he does it with video (although I'm somewhat surprised at this, I believe him).

Re:Multi-Codec Codec anyone?

[BlackGriffen]

Both, actually. Whatever works best. Since the codecs would work on parts of the song that sound different anyway, listeners may not notice the transition, and may even appreciate the reduced drop in quality.

BlackGriffen

Re:Multi-Codec Codec anyone?

[cefek]

Presently-used Variable Bitrate does almost that same, but employing only one codec for a song. That's MUCH easier to play, encode and... share.

constant quality variable bit rate

[oliverthered]

I'd like to know if there are and codecs that support constant quality but a variable bit rate?

A codec with a target bitrate of 64k but maintains quality by channing between say 1k(for silence) and 100k through the streem would be nice.

Re:constant quality variable bit rate

[John_Booty]

The Ogg encoder supports this. Also, the LAME mp3 encoded can be configured to do this through some command-line trickery. I don't know about the other encoders; I don't use them.

Re:constant quality variable bit rate

[leviramsey]

For LAME

lame --abr <i>rate</i>

Is what you're looking for. I'm not a huge audiophile (I'm more concerned with having my collection not take up too much space), so I've found that anywhere from 105-115 kbps for the average bitrate works very well (I get a few frames when I do this in the 192-224 range, so I'd tend to suspect that this abr is in the actual quality area of a 160kbps mp3).

Re:constant quality variable bit rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Drats!

Should've hit preview!

Re:constant quality variable bit rate

[tomstdenis]

Dude,

its not a "ogg encoder" its a vorbis encoder. Ogg is just the packaging and Vorbis is the actual audio codec.

Tom

Re:constant quality variable bit rate

[Anonymous Coward]

- Look - a flying fuck.
- Well, don't give it to me then.

I listened to 3 samples..

[Anonymous Coward]

okay so that's nothing considering there were 12 samples.. but for me, both vorbis variants came at top, mp3 pro at second, and wma and aac I won't even mention. Had I done all 12 tests perhaps mp3 pro would've won with me too, who knows.. but mp3 pro is NOT mp3.. it's not very supported, even more patented, and only useful at lower bitrates like 64kbps.. it was much hyped once, but now it seems to be almost a dead format.

Ogg on the other hand is the future. Great at 64 kbps, and Monty even said 64kbps is not even heavily optimized yet, so some improvements are yet to come.

You know, I thought it was bull that vorbis at 96kbps can equal an mp3 at 128, but it's not actually bull.. I usually cannot distinguish a 96kbps ogg from a 128kbps mp3! Btw.. I even have some toni braxton-songs I tested where I actually think 64kbps ogg equals a 128kbps mp3!! But that's an exception, not a rule.

Anyway.. I AM beginning to think that vorbis is indeed about equal to mp3 at 30% lower bitrates.

What about VBR?

[xA40D]

Okay, so everybody has pointed out that a 64k bitrate is useless for their needs. Some claim 128K is the best, others 192K. Personally I prefer a variable bitrate - indeed OGG encodes VBR by default.

But is their some fundamental reason why nobody else insists on VBR?

Re:What about VBR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every "professional" CD ripping group uses VBR today. They use LAME with the -r3mix setting

Re:What about VBR?

[jonathan_ingram]

Which continues the trend of l33t ripping groups being at least a year behind the times. --r3mix, while good for the bitrate, exhibits obvious artifacts on a wide range of material. Recent versions of LAME include Dibrom's --alt-presets, which are VBR presets of *much* higher quality than r3mix. --alt-preset standard averages around 200kbit/s, and produces results which are spectacularly good, considering how old and creaky the format (MP3) is.

Stats note: 95% confidence level

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, 95% confidence level is really low grade in my opinion. It is about the bare minimum which most folks would accept as a possibly interesting result. If 95% confidence was the best they could do, it suggests that randomness played a fairly large part in the results.

Re:Stats note: 95% confidence level

[Anonymous Coward]

a 95% confidence interval is the standard statistical confidence interval.

as for randomness playing a large part in the results, please, learn what a confidence interval is before yapping about it.

Re:Stats note: 95% confidence level

[jonathan_ingram]

Plug the results into the linked non-parametric stats analysis page, and you find:

mp3pro is better than wma8 (99.9% confidence)
mp3pro is better than aac (99.9% confidence)
oggq0 is better than aac (99.3% confidence)
oggq0 is better than wma8 (99% confidence)
ogg64 is better than aac (97.2% confidence)
ogg64 is better than wma8 (96.1% confidence)

Is 99% good enough for you? Or perhaps you should just take the two at 99.9%?

Dammit, the lameness filter is kicking in. No, these are *not* junk characters - I'm trying to show the peon some useful statistical information, you worthless piece of software. I've already removed all the hyphens, what the hell more do you want me to do? Is a percentage sign 'junk'? Is a question mark? Is a space? What the *fuck* use is this, when it doesn't stop all the crapflooders in any way whatsoever - they just flood with random gay/incest/beastiality sex stories instead... I've been posting on this site for years, and for my sins haven't crap-flooded once - give me a LITTLE FUCKING LICENCE TO POST MATERIAL.

Re:Stats note: 95% confidence level

[Anonymous Coward]

Had he used a smaller p then the confidence marks (the vertical bars) would have been longer -- and making any useful conclusions impossible with a relatively small sample size.

64 kbps tests / difference

[^Z]

64 kbps can be useful for internet broadcasting, etc. Not the most important use now, agreed.

As for me, at 160 and 192 kbps ogg is better than mp3, and it does not take a sound expert to hear the difference: it is not negligible.

Yay for metal!

[PsyQ]

I never thought I'd see a black metal band and one of my favorite melodic death/progressive metal bands BOTH listed as test material.

But when you think about it, it makes sense. Modern black metal with its "wall of sound" approach and all the progressive stuff with the wild tempo changes, switching from acoustic to electric guitars in the middle of the track etc. provides a whole lot of substance to really put a codec through its paces. And it's probably stressing entirely different frequency ranges than "boom boom" bassdrum heavy dance/hip hop stuff, providing a nice counterbalance.

Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, I'm not a sound engineer or anything.

Re:Yay for metal!

[archen]

Probably the biggest problem is that a distorted guitar sort of seems to reach a threshold for quality, and it seems like you can go lower quality with a less noticable difference. Which is probably why a band like Opeth is preferable as they have a very wide range of sound. I've ripped all my Opeth albums to vorbis, and been satisfied with the results. Then again I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about what would be the perfect sound/size ratio, I just dumped everything at 256kbs.

Re:Yay for metal!

[Sherloqq]

...one of my favorite melodic death/progressive metal bands...

Heh... good thing I re-read your post... at first glance I thought it said melodic depressive metal bands :)

Re:Yay for metal!

[fred666]

Of course, Darkthrone is definitely out for this kind of test... ;-)

WMA is better

[Anonymous Coward]

for the chamber pot to help you go

We need

[Anonymous Coward]

a chamber MAID to clean up after M$ WMA

Outiers skewing the results?

[Outland Traveller]

Looking at the data, it looks the two samples where Ogg performed poorly ended up being encoded at a significantly smaller average bitrate than any of the other encoders.

The table at the end lists LiszBMinor with an average ogg bitrate of 45 and BachS1007 with an average bitrate of 47. Since the other codecs encoded those samples at a bitrate 64 or higher, this may explain the results.

The results may point to a flaw in Ogg's VBR login rather than in the lossy compression scheme.

Re:Outiers skewing the results?

[tomstdenis]

OGG is not an audio codec. vorbis is. So get ir right.

Re:Outiers skewing the results?

[jonathan_ingram]

If you read the thread on HydrogenAudio (which is the message board where most of these tests / codecs are discussed), you'll find the following information from Monty, the lead developer of Vorbis:

Ogg had a very low bitrate (in the forties) on all the classical samples, which is the way it should have been (Classical solos with their deep noise floors and simple harmonics are relatively easy). But the real reason Ogg scored so low in both (and Beauty Slept as well) was a) the tuning behind noise normalization is still not perfect. This is the very first release of that feature, and the test found flaws b) also the first release of new, more aggressive stereo modes and I think that they too need more analysis infrastructure driving them.

I expect Ogg's performance on Liszt and Bach to be very subpar NN performance. The poor performance on BeautySlept and Waiting was most likely insufficient stereo analysis. Ogg had the infrastructure to win those four samples, but the encoder didn't know how to do it yet (because I didn't know it would be necessary).

Re:Outiers skewing the results?

[Marc2k]

I don't know *which* table you were reading off of, but the one that I'm currently staring at shows that BachS1007 was encoded at a bitrate of 64 for oggq0, and 67 for ogg64. Beyond that, oggq0 had an average bitrate of 70 and 74 for two different tests (in both it utterly destroyed the others). So while I agree that this report is inaccurate, and should have been subject to a larger sample and reported with a trimmed mean, I do not believe that it was skewed against Ogg format in any way here.

Yes, look at the SCORES

[tweakt]

OVERALL RANKINGS (12 SAMPLES)

mp3pro 49.00
oggq0 44.00
ogg64 40.00
wm8 24.00
aac 23.00

The AC above me speaks the truth. mp3PRO has no hope of gaining enough market share to become a worthy competitor. It's a very proprietary extention to MP3. OGG being open source and free (as in beer) has clear advantages for hardware vendors (where it really counts). Lets hope the codec is easy to embed into portable products.

I want my Portable OGG CD Player! I'll buy the first one that comes out. Could you imagine? Twice the capacity of normal players and it STILL sounds better (or same capacity truly indistinguishable from CD -- at only 128k). Right now I have to encode my mp3's at ~180-220kbit to get something acceptable. =/

Re:Yes, look at the SCORES

[micromoog]

mp3PRO has no hope of gaining enough market share to become a worthy competitor. It's a very proprietary extention to MP3.

mp3PRO has one very specific advantage over all the other formats on the market-share front. It has the characters m, p, and 3 in it. Everyone has heard of mp3, and people who don't care about the open source cause (read: the vast majority of people) will buy an mp3PRO device way before considering an Ogg Vorbis device.

As I've said before, name is really important when marketing comes into play. And Ogg Vorbis' name simply blows.

Re:Yes, look at the SCORES

[Greg W.]

Twice the capacity of normal players and it STILL sounds better (or same capacity truly indistinguishable from CD -- at only 128k).

Vorbis 1.0 does sound amazingly good at ca. 128 kbps (VBR -q 4). That's what I've been using lately for CDs that I rip. But it's not "indistinguishable from CD" in all cases. On at least one song ("Feed My Hungry Soul" by the Lords of Acid), I can differentiate Vorbis -q 4 from the original in ABX testing. And I'm not a trained listener, and not using high-end equipment.

I urge everyone to encode for themselves, using their favorite music CDs, and decide what works best for them. Some people are very sensitive to the lossy stereo separation that Vorbis RC3 and 1.0 employ at low-to-mid-bitrate settings. I was able to hear this clearly on several of the samples in the 64kbps test, though I'd never noticed it at higher quality levels.

Re:Yes, look at the SCORES

[qwerpoiu]

As I've said before, name is really important when marketing comes into play. And Ogg Vorbis' name simply blows.

This from a guy named micromoog...

Precisely.

[sydb]

This is just what I was thinking. It seems such a waste of an otherwise well conducted trial.

Unfortunately I have no mod points at the moment.

Sound test

[Sir_Stinksalot]

Man did you guys even do the test or are you just looking at the results? I did the test with my klipsch speakers and I got nothing like what these crackheads got on this site. Makes me wonder what they were listening to. I was at my fiances house and used her speakers and the worse compression sounded the best. Then I cam home to my beautiful klipsch (best computer speakers I have heard) and the difference was amazing. In most of the tests not only could I see a huge difference but I could tell you which one was which. The only ones I had trouble with were the two oggs and on some files the mp3pro. The oggs tend to increase the highs a tiny bit making them very different than the other compressions that tend to remove highs. The mp3pro on some occasions wasas good or a little better than the oggs. But both oggs where in the top 3 every time I did the test. I call for a redo because I think either people were guessing, using bad speakers or had too much wax in their ears. I did my own test with the blind player with ogg and did the two styles of ogg versus mp3 at 96k and 128k. The 96k was horrible but at 128k you could hardly tell the difference from the 64k ogg files. The two oggs were almost identical in every test. The 128 was a little better in almost every test but at twice the size it was incredible. I also tried then to compress the ogg files as much as I could to 45k max bitrate. Man it still sounded good but on songs with lots of simbols you could see obvious compression. Bottom line if you use on a regular basis 128k mp3's switch to ogg at 64k without having them side by side you will _NEVER_ know the difference.

Re:Sound test

[jonathan_ingram]

Man did you guys even do the test or are you just looking at the results?

Yes, all 12 samples, and my results broadly agree with the general conclusions (particularly on MP3pro doing much better than AAC and WMA on almost all the samples).

The only ones I had trouble with were the two oggs and on some files the mp3pro

In general, the results agree with you, so I don't understand why you're so annoyed by the test. When Vorbis was good, it was *very* good - and when it was bad, it was terrible. Luckily, Monty will use the results to help the 64kbits performance for the next version of Vorbis.

(OT: you *really* need to learn about paragraphs)

Re:Sound test

[indybrett]

Uhhhh, what's a simbol? Is that a new instrument?

Re:Sound test

[sh4de]

Umm, hate to tell you this since you're obviously on the high horse... but:

Klipsch speakers are hardly anywhere near setting any standards in audio quality. "The best computer speakers" they may be, but having separate "computer speakers" is silly. There's nothing stopping you from using real speakers with your computer -- except maybe price, but high fidelity never was for the poor.

Hint: to get higher quality stereo sound out of your computer, get an amp (an entry level NAD will do nicely) and a pair of high quality two-way speakers (like the Amphion Argon).

Combine these with a soundcard that doesn't produce audible hiss at a comfortable listening level. Then, only then, may you be able to say something about the differences between audio codecs.

Note: not a troll, but will probably be modded as one. Got karma to burn.

Re:Sound test

[0111 1110]

Try a comparison between your Klipsch speakers and a pair of Castles, Mordaunt-Shorts, or (high end) B&Ws. I think you'll find the Klipschs wanting. It's tough to beat British speakers. I would recommend a headphone test but you really need a headphone amp and a real pair of headphones (Senn HD600, Etys...) to do that. I think you'll find that from 160kbps to 320kbps MPC will rule the day right up until lossless ape or flac compression.

Re:Sound test

[marauder404]

Get a pair of reference headphones. A $200 pair of headphones will probably sound better than most $2,000 speakers except bass will be lacking. The problem with speakers is that you end up with problems setting up the room properly. You have to be in the right place, facing the right direction, and have all ambient noise turned way down. I love listening to speakers, but when it comes down to only listening for the sake of listening, headphones are the way to go.

Re:Sound test

[Sir_Stinksalot]

Well I am just saying the only ones I could not regularly point out were the ogg's and some songs the mp3pro. But the results show quite a few songs doing well with the mp4(quicktime whatever) which I was quite disapointed in. I dont know how in the worl that sounded good to anyone.

Re:Sound test

[Sir_Stinksalot]

sorry cymbal hehe hooked on phonics werks four mee

Re:Sound test

[Sir_Stinksalot]

I said best computer speakers for a reason. And I do have a nice surround sound system in the other room with Infinity speakers JBL sub and a Harmon Kardon amp which sounds great to me. No I am not an audiophile so $300 for a center channel speaker is enough for me heh. I do not hook my computer up to my system because I 1) do not have a optical digital out to go to my amp from my computer and I don't trust a sound card to do the job. I do have a regular sp/dif digital out but then again trying to isolate the noise a computer throws out on the ground line is hard to do. I would need to lift the ground and use a line conditioner. 2) becuase I don't have a vid card with a nice svideo out to bother. And well I can say alot about the audio codecs because I can do and have heard the difference on my Klipsch speakers.

oggq0's variable bitrate

[cornette]

I haven't seen anyone else mention this yet. At the end, he gives a table of the bitrates for each song for each codec. The one with the greatest variation appears to be oggq0. I noticed that for the songs where that codec did well, the bitrate was much higher, and where it did poorly, it was much lower. I don't realy understand how the bitrate is chosen, but as I understand it, the encoder chooses it automatically somehow, right? I wonder how effective that really is.

Re:oggq0's variable bitrate

[SK-null]

Quite. It defines a quality treshold and uses as much bitrate as needed to keep it.
Unless you have real problems with bitrates going over a certain treshold (streaming, for example), its the best way.
Not only it saves some space on parts of music that don't need less than average bit rate but it saves you from glitches in the parts where you really needed a bit more.

Re:oggq0's variable bitrate

[moncyb]

I've tried ogg quality 0. It is the lowest quality setting and it sucks. Use at least level 1.

You are correct in questioning the oggq0. Me thinks comparing a file encoded using a quality setting with one using a fixed bitrate setting is like comparing apples and oranges. I didn't check (as this seems to be a MS Windows only test), but I assume they used sample rates of 44100 Hz. I think they should've thrown in some 22050 Hz samples and tested those. I think encoding at 64 bits, the lower sample rates would perform better--that's how I encode many of my oggs...

Hopefully the ogg people will find a way to make the quality settings work well--it seems to be a new feature.

Re:oggq0's variable bitrate

[damiam]

Well, technically quality -1 is the lowest quality setting (averaging at about 45kbps), but I'm not sure if that's documented.

2 files were actually 45 and 49 kbits/sec

[Alsee]

The 60 files (12 songs * 5 formats) were all compressed at between 64 and 74 kbits/sec - except LiszBMinor and BachS1007 for OGG q0. They were actually stored at 45 and 49 kbits/sec respectively. No surprise the testers rated them low.

-

Ranking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone statisticly inclined enough to explain why the &^%&^% anyone would use ranking to process these results?!

Since all the data are on the same scale there is no sound reason whatsoever to do this! As a matter of fact it could produce artifacts, the least it will do is reduce the significance.

Re:Ranking?

[jonathan_ingram]

Yes - my 4/5 may have no connection to a 4/5 given to a different sample, or to a 4/5 given by a different person. In fact, he should have done the ranking to the individual results as well, which would further reduce the 'power'.

Unless we can have a set scale of non-transparency which we can guarantee is being adhered to (which is only the case in certain special circumstances), all we can keep is the ordinal information.

Re:Ranking?

[ff123]

The statistical technique used to evaluate differences in each individual sample was a parametric method: Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference, using each listener as a "block." That is, the fact that different people use different parts of the rating scale is taken into account. The Tukey's method also takes into account the fact that multiple samples are being rated, not just two.

The statistical technique used to rank the codecs overall was a non-parametric method: A Friedman omnibus test to see if there was a difference at all anywhere in the experiment, followed by a non-parametric Fishers Least Significant Difference (also "blocked"). A non-parametric method means that ranking (first, second, third, etc.) was used instead of rating points (4.7, 3.5, 2.6, etc.).

The ranking method was used for the overall evaluation because ratings for one sample don't necessarily mix and match with ratings for another sample.

ff123

No CD Audio comparison?

[Disco2k]

Does anyone else feel it would have been nice to see Red Book CD audio (16-bit 44.1KHz uncompressed) compared as a control? Seeing how "pure" audio compares to these compression standards could make the results seem more objective.

Re:No CD Audio comparison?

[jonathan_ingram]

Comparing 'pure audio' to the compressed version is inbuilt into the test methodology. I suggest you download the program used for the tests, and try it out before commenting further. Hopefully this will give you some semblance of knowing what you're talking about.

Ogg on Quicktime

[heroine]

Been using Ogg/Vorbis/Squish on Quicktime for a year. The Ogg/Vorbis/Squish codec got much better between 1.0rc2 and 1.0. At 128k it's already better than mp3 and the managed bitrate encoding is faster than the hard drive can read. The real value is of course, the ability to read these encoded files as long as there is UNIX. Mp3 is going to die and when it does there won't be any appliance makers interested in paying the $10,000 royalty to support mp3.

64kbps encoding

[Cyclone66]

Don't the codecs adjust their alogrithms according to their bit rate? Is it possible that some encoders don't proportionally sound better at higher bit rates than other encoders? I believe this test reflects sound quality for 64kbps and nothing else since different methods are used in encoding at this bit rate compared to at 128kbps and higher.

This study tells nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to me it seems the study is worthless. I am a sound engineer of 10+ years and it seems that the way the study was conducted, the test itself has affected the results. An honest double-blind listening test is extremely difficult to arrange, and there is no evidence whatsoever on such on the site.

The listeners weren't hearing differences between the codecs, just what they were expecting to hear.

There is very good information on double-blind listening tests here:

http://www.pcabx.com/#Nine_Req

Re:This study tells nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

The test was done with a ABC/HR blind test tool also supporting ABX if needed (but because 64kbps is very low bitrate, most of the time ABX wasn't needed.
Listeners didn't hear which codec they were listening.

Check out http://ff123.net/abchr/abchr.html

Re:This study tells nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Listeners didn't hear which codec they were listening."
A typo: listeners didn't know which codec they were listening.

Re:This study tells nothing

[Greg W.]

I am Karma Man, hear me Whore.

An honest double-blind listening test is extremely difficult to arrange, and there is no evidence whatsoever on such on the site.

This is how the test was conducted.

The test required access to a Windows machine (probably Win95 and up, didn't try with Win3.1) with a sound card. Users were required to download the ABC/HR "practice" Zip file, which includes the ABC/HR program, the Ogg Vorbis 1.0 command-line encoder and decoder, a LAME command-line encoder/decoder (I forget which version), a FLAC command-line decoder program, and a .flac sample file (the instrumental introduction to The Eagles' "New Kid in Town").

After unzipping this, the user had to run a batch file (encdec_foobar.bat) which un-FLACced the sample file, then encoded it with Ogg Vorbis and LAME, then decoded both of the resulting files back to .wav.

Then the user executed the ABC/HR program, which is a Win32 GUI application. After loading the sample into the application (pull-down menu and file selector dialog), the interface became a row of double-slider pairs. Below each slider was a "Play" button. Below each slider pair was a "Play Ref" button. Below that was a "Stop" button. There was a pair of sliders for each decoded sample -- so for the practice run, there were two pairs of sliders: one for file #1, and one for file #2. The user did not know which file was Ogg Vorbis, and which was LAME MP3.

The user then listened to the Reference file by clicking any of the "Play Ref" buttons. After hearing the Reference, the user could then click any of the normal "Play" buttons. The first task was to determine, for each pair of sliders, which one was the original and which one was the encoded file. Having determined that, the user used the slider (which went from 1.0 to 5.0 in increments of 0.1) to "score" the sample on the subjective quality of the result. There were also text labels on the slider: 4.0 was "perceptible but not annoying", 3.0 was "slightly annoying", 2.0 was "annoying" and 1.0 was "very annoying".

Finally, there was an ABX button, which launched a different window. In the ABX window, the user could select "Original", "Sample 1", or "Sample 2" for the "A" and "B" samples. Normal ABX testing proceeded from that point. (If you don't know what ABX is, go to pcabx.com.) I found that the ABX window sometimes helped me to focus on a specific sample so that I could find its flaws; armed with that knowledge, I was able to make a determination of which of the two sliders, right or left, was the encoded version.

Once a slider was pulled down from the default 5.0 position, another button became active above that slider. Clicking on it opened a new window with a text box, into which comments could be typed. When the user was finished with the test, the slider positions, the comments, and the ABX results (if any) were written to a plain text file (DOS CR/LF format), which was to be mailed to the test administrator. (Though, of course, you weren't supposed to mail the practice results.)

Now, that was just the practice session, which was a prerequisite for participation in the actual test. For the actual test, the process was similar, but differed in a few details.

The actual test samples included copyrighted, patented codecs for which there are no freely distributable decoders. Therefore, the WMA, AAC and MP3Pro samples were distributed as FLAC files, and decoded by the batch file. Since MP3 did not participate in the listening test, the LAME encoder was not used during the actual test. The Vorbis encoder, of course, was used twice: first with -q 0, and then with -b 64 --managed.

With 5 encodings per audio sample in the actual test, there were 5 pairs of active sliders instead of only 2 pairs. But otherwise, the actual test was exactly like the practice session.

(Personal note: I did 10 of the 12 samples, skipping the two classical ones. Out of 50 encoded versions of the 10 samples, there was only one case where I couldn't tell right from left -- "The Source", encoded with MP3Pro.)

Re:This study tells nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a blind listening test, true, but one that guides the listener too much. Basically, after the first listening, you have already instinctively 'decided' how the sample sounds. How many times were the tests repeated? Was there a correlation between different tests done by the same individual? Was there a control group?

Also, there is no information on the sound system used and no measurements on its effect on the test.

My suspicion is, if the test were repeated, the result would be completely different.

Re:This study tells nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

And now to make that sentence into English:

either
"Listeners didn't know which codec they were listening to."
or
"Listeners didn't know which codec they were hearing."

Re:This study tells nothing

[Skuto]

>Basically, after the first listening, you have
>already instinctively 'decided' how the sample
>sounds.

If this were true, it would never have been possible to make conclusions with 95% certainty, and there would have been no correlation between the results of the listeners.

Both are false, and hence, your unsubtantiated claim.

>How many times were the tests repeated?

One test per listener per sample.

>Was there a control group?

There was a control group in the form of 'trusted' listeners also participating in the tests. The results were similar to the general ones.

>Also, there is no information on the sound
>system used and no measurements on its effect on
>the test.

If you had bothered to actually look, you would see that each tester used the system he generally uses to listen to music on his computer, whatever that was.

>My suspicion is, if the test were repeated, the
>result would be completely different.

There is nothing that supports this claim and past tests contradict it.

--
GCP

What about this point? Re:Who cares about 64

[dh5fbr]

> These tests are all at 64 kbps and most people use much higher bitrates for real music.

Maybe the difference at 160kB is such small that any opinion is based on biased preferences. So if you do a test at 64kBit and then proof/estimate the "scaling" behaviour. You should be able to really tell about the quality of the codecs.

FLAC

[Graspee_Leemoor]

I use flac (lossless compression). What was the problem again ? ;)

Seriously, the reason I use flac, even though it takes up a shit load of space is that in the future, inevitably we will have more space to store everything. When we do, thousands will be cursing their crappy mp3s that they ripped at 128 to save space.

Of course, ahem, if you kept your original CDs to rip from then you can just re-rip them to flac or another lossless compression then, but still, why do it all twice ?

graspee

Re:Stats note: 95% confidence level (N/T)

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.
On the former, and on the latter.

Confused..

[Marc2k]

The header states: "Ogg seems to work well on dance music, WMA8 on chamber music, etc."

However, as far as I could tell the only chamber pieces here were LisztBMinor and BachS1007, and for both of theses pieces mp3pro beat out WMA8, in the case of Liszt by a rather large margin.

Ogg Vorbis eh?

[Jacer]

Looks like I'll have to get the white album, *again*!

Am I a freak??

[squaretorus]

Personally, I can hardly tell the difference between MP3 and CD and my old vinyl. When I play something on CD, then MP3, then CD and listen carefully for the 'crappy bits' I can hear them - but they don't bother me in the slightest when listening to them.

Are my ears just a bit shite? Are most of you guys able to tell the difference - or are the audiophiles just more vocal?

Re:Am I a freak??

[ActiveSX]

I can hardly tell the difference between ... CD and my old vinyl.

I recommend that you look into a new set of ears. ;)

Re:Am I a freak??

[chez69]

No, your not a freak, some folks have better hearing then others.

mp3 files and such are nice for portable players and in the car, but for music at home give me at least CD quality, or even better SACD.

Re:Am I a freak??

[Snodgrass]

No, you're not a freak, you've just forgotten the first rule of Slashdot: Everybody is an expert. Nowhere else in the world can you find such a collection of experts on every single subject in the universe!

On a more personal note, I'll take vinyl over the alternatives any day of the week!

Re:Am I a freak??

[marauder404]

Nope, you're not a freak at all. Different people have different sensitivities to different kinds of sounds. If you can't hear the difference between CDs, MP3s, and the radio station, then it's all good ... you're saving yourself quite a bit of money, time, and frustration. It took me a while to be able to tell the difference between CDs and radio, but now I can pick it out like black and white. A good mp3 sounds indistinguishable to me in most situations.

Part of good listening is good equipment. Most people have a hard time justifying a $2,000 pair of speakers. But, as the saying goes, most people have never really heard a $2,000 system. It's hard to give up when you've been exposed to it.

Re:Am I a freak??

[squaretorus]

On a more personal note, I'll take vinyl over the alternatives any day of the week!


Ahhh - respect! You must be pretty knowledgeable to chose the oldest format as your favourite... ;-)

I dont see how it matters...

[NeoSkandranon]

I think, that for anyone who would actually be interested in which codec does best on which kind of music, it's a moot point, since by now they delete anything below 128kbps on sight

Re:I dont see how it matters...

[Skuto]

>I think, that for anyone who would actually be
>interested in which codec does best on which
>kind of music, it's a moot point, since by now
>they delete anything below 128kbps on sight

One word: Streaming

--
GCP

Those two oddball tests

[WhyDoubt]

I do not know why Vorbis tried to compress those two so much more than the others. But until the
developers do something about that, I guess we'll want to specify the bitrate when encoding chamber music. Wait a minute, why would we want to listen to chamber music comprossed to this low-quality anyways?

Re:Those two oddball tests

[Skuto]

>I do not know why Vorbis tried to compress those
>two so much more than the others.

Vorbis with the -q mode tries to maintain a certain quality level. The other codecs try to maintain a certain bitrate.

On an easy clip, Vorbis uses less bits because it can do so and keep reasonable quality. The other codecs use more bits because they try to reach the certain bitrate.

--
GCP

Re:Those two oddball tests

[WhyDoubt]

Apparently those two samples were *deceptively* easy. At least that what I get from the test results.

Opeth - Blackwater Park

[MicroBerto]

I am truly impressed with the selection of music on this test.

For those of you that don't know, Opeth's Blackwater Park is one of the most earth-shattering CDs I've ever been privy to witness. They are my favorite band. Check out the last song, Blackwater Park. Wow.

You can get a taste of them in #mp3_metal or #mp3_death in dalnet. type @locator opeth blackwater park and you'll get plenty of results.

Caution - very harsh grunting vocals. May take some time to get used to, but their musicianship is absolutely brilliant.

Re:Opeth - Blackwater Park

[jjoyce]

Amen -- they rule. I just noticed that they released a special 2-disc edition of Blackwater Park with a video for Harvest and two new songs.

Re:Opeth - Blackwater Park

[erikdalen]

I wasn't very impressed by the selection of music at all. Sure, that song has it's place in this test. But there was not a single song representing the type of music I listen to.

I listen to synth music, like Welle:Erdball, Covenant, Beborn Beton etc.

I'd like the test to include a song that contains triangle waveforms. /Erik

Re:Opeth - Blackwater Park

[Anonymous Coward]

Covenant is synth music? Uhh, not the Covenant I know of...

Nexus Polaris certainly is an interesting album, although I no longer listen to it.

WMA is good...

[10Ghz]

...For me to poop on!

Re:WMA is good...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a Troll ... A Late Night with Conan O'Brien Fan!

No ATRAC?

[Winterblink]

Overall an excellent test done on a wide range of songs and codecs. Though, I would have liked to have seen how they all compare to the ATRAC codec used in minidisc recordings. Some say MD is dead thanks to MP3, however local stores in my area can't keep players and blanks in stock for long. Would have been nice to see how the two compare.

Re:No ATRAC?

[jsdkl]

I'm the proud owner of a Sony Minidisc recorder and a recording/sound engineer. While I haven't sat down to do any real testing, I can safely say that the LP2 mode of ATRAC3 is far superior to 128kb/s mp3 encoding.

For more info on ATRAC and minidiscs, check out minidisc.org. They have several good whitepapers, some with pretty graphs!

Newer algorithms of limited use to many

[dh003i]

To thsoe of us who just want to listen to music on a PC, the newest greatest best algorithms are always good (mp3pro, oggs, wma8). But for many, the goal is to put that music on a MP3Player and listen to it anywhere. I'll summarize the support of these various codecs by MP3Players, as well as mention whether or not my MP3Player (RioVolt SP100) supports them.

MP3PRO -- little support on MP3Players. Not supported by RioVolt SP100.

Oggs -- little/no support on MP3players. Not supported by RioVolt SP100.

WMA8 -- little support on MP3players, though many support older WMA's. Not supported by RioVolt.

So, in summary, all of these new formats are completely useless to me on my MP3Player. The one option they present is if I want to encode something in two formats -- one for my computer, and another for the MP3Player.

Personally, I think more work should go into fractal endcoding, as most music has fractal patterns in it (especially Bach's music).

Re:Newer algorithms of limited use to many

[jeeptj]

Please define little support since WMA8 is supported by a bunch of devices less than 2 years old through a firmware upgrade. I've tried looking for a RioVolt that didn't support and the only ones were the Coke brand and the SP50. So there you go, the vast majority of players support both MP3 and WMA.

Re:Newer algorithms of limited use to many

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I think more work should go into fractal endcoding, as most music has fractal patterns in it (especially Bach's music).

Congratulations on the single most inane and incorrect statement in this whole story.

Re:Newer algorithms of limited use to many

[dh003i]

Duh, they all support MP3. But few yet support MP3Pro. Even if they did support MP3Pro, that's also of limited use as we only have access to 64kbps compression w/ MP3Pro -- which sucks.

NONE support OGG that I can think of. OGG is the best format I've come accross -- and I'm speaking from listening experience here.

As for WMA8 -- so what? WMA8 sucks anyways. I'll be the first one to tell you I gave it a try, but after trying it out, I realize that for the most part its crap: like everything else produced by M$.

Re:Newer algorithms of limited use to many

[afidel]

I agree on WMA8, except for streaming applications it kicks plain mp3's arse. I did my own tripple blind testing WMA8@160, lame mp3@r3mix vbr avg 210, and the raw 16bit 44.1khz PCM wave. Of the three the only one I could pick out was WMA8, it sound ranged from noticibly different to such suckily bright highs that I literally ripped the headphones off my head. Since right now there are only 3 formats that have been used for streaming in any volume, mp3, wma, and ogg and ogg is the best according to this and other tests at low bitrate I will stick to high quality vbr mp3's for my ipod and pc and encourage ogg for streaming applications.

The problem with ogg

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with ogg adoption will never be a technical one, but rather a branding/naming one. It would not matter if ogg was capable of reproducing music at any bitrate, no body will care with a name like that.

Like most other things in the open source world, ogg has an absolutely atrocious name that appeals to no one beyond the world of geeks. Who wants to say "I'm going to go download some Oggs!"? While such a petty and asthetic issue may not be of concern to the Slashdot crowd, it means a lot to the rest of the world. The name of a product can make or break its success in the consumer world; and whatever you believe it is that world that will determine the fate of this and many other oss projects.

If the people behind ogg want it to be successful, they really had better consider a name change. As it is now, it's based on two bits of extremely nerdy trivia, ogg and vorbis, neither of which the general public has any interest in. Ogg sounds like some sort of disease or a grunt, and Vorbis sounds like some planet from Star Trek or something.

Re:Who cares? The guys who run streaming servers..

[PainKilleR-CE]

I believe all of the codecs have had claims of being equivalent to 128kb MP3 format audio at 64kb. The issue, though, is that they didn't include a baseline with 128kb MP3 compression in the test. Sure, you know how the various formats compare with each other at 64kb, but you can't really tell if the claims that they can perform with 128kb MP3s is accurate or not, assuming that anyone will even take the word of this to begin with.

Bog-standard tests....

[Drogo Knotwise]

Any self-respecting test should have known that the Yo-Yo Ma rendition of the Bach Cello Suites is utter drivel.

If they want to test with any authority, they should have worked with the Pablo Cassals version.

Re:Multi-Codec Codec anyone? -- NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

Using different codecs for different parts of a single song is just silly. Interesting idea though.

Variable bit rate encoding helps (this already is being used).

What would help is analyzing the entire song multiple times before encoding. Multipass encoding obviously would take longer, but as fast as computers are -- who cares.

-=> Funk Master =-

Insights please?

[Festering Leper]

OGG files seem to represent the latest in "CPU usage creep" (as opposed to the better known "feature creep/bloat"). The older Nitrane MP3 decoding engine took a mere 1.5% CPU usage, while current versions of Winamp ,using the ISO decoder, use 3% CPU usage.

Not much to whine about but it does represent the application using twice the CPU power to the the same thing! Now along comes OGG. Great idea considering all the intellectual property BS happening. I am not a programmer and don't claim to know the slightest bit about the algorithms used in the OGG file format but the decoders out there sure seem to be poorly optimized for a 1.0 release. Now, playing a 128 kilobit file requires 9-10% CPU usage! What gives?

Can anyone give some insight as to why is this format so hungry that it has to gobble up over six times the CPU time it took to play a 128 kilobit file 8 months ago?

64kbs ALL THAT IS NEEDED

[Anonymous Coward]

A 64kbs mp3pro file sounds JUST LIKE A 192kbs mp3 file!! Pretty obvious why they tested using 64kbs isn't it.

Use this

[Anonymous Coward]

I use this commandline because I can't hear past 16 kHz: --alt-preset standard -Y

"LIVE" format is best...

[turnstyle]

Just worth mentioning that the single best audio format is "LIVE" - it sounds so good, it'll seem that you can reach out and touch the performers (please don't).

I know that the thread is about compression formats, but hey - go to a bar/club with "LIVE" music, pay $10 at the door, have a drink and a good time.

Hopefully, the guys playing are getting a percent of the door, and they'll be happy to see you in the audience. Feel that bass!

Re:"LIVE" format is best...

[Saturn49]

I've been to several live concerts. The professional ones are done well, and the audio quality is superb. However, at lessor places, the audio quality is bad - the vocals are often too soft, the instruments are not mixed well, feedback happens occasionally, and the overall quality is bad. At those times, I'd rather be listening to a professionally recorded CD, ripped to the compression format of your choice.

For Detailed Audio Discussion...

[aligas]

Check out Hydrogen Audio

Its pretty much the best audio discussion you can find on the 'net.

Different tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I knew I was doing something wrong trying to pre-drill holes in wood with a hammer and nail... No wonder it was taking so long. ;)

-Josh

question

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth is the parent post not +5 informative yet?!

Re:question

[jonathan_ingram]

Because the story is more than 30 minutes old, so all the moderators have got bored and moved on. :)

Rapida Carrera

[Mulletproof]

Apollo 440 is actually a prety damn good test bed for this stuff, especially (in my opinion) the Rapid Racer theme. Vocals, guitars, high frequency synth and ultra-low "theta-bass". Of course, you could have just used one of those Dynamic Frequancy test CDs, but what fun would that have been?

Bad Experiment Re:No Control

[Essron]

Yes, crappy. There also seems to be no assessment of the hardware used. IMHO, given the current state of consumer acceptance of various playback devices, the results are useless. Some people have great headphones, some poor, machines can have 24bit audio output, or some schmuck who is listening thru the 2" speaker on the side of his PC. I've heard people insist .aif files are poor quality simply because of their playback hardware. MP3's never sounded as poor as people think, they had lame speakers.

Personally, I find the differences in bit rates and codecs obvious only when heard thru a good pair of speakers at a high volume so that distortion exposes the missing bits. As an audio engineer, I would always bet that even a professional could not tell a 256kbps MP3 from a MiniDisc playback at reasonable, personal (not loudspeakers or PA's) gain and EQ levels, and if they can differentiate it from CD playback it is only due to the compression that makes them sound like MiniDisc.

The Cow is Still in the Box

[Anonymous Coward]

At the spring 1998 National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, Microsoft had a large booth to promote their new (still in beta, IIRC) wma audio format. They gave out a little promo gizmo which was a miniaturized milk carton. When you tipped it, you would hear the muffled sound of a cow mooing. I still have it and it still works (that, and MS-DOS 6.22 are the most reliable things I ever got from Microsoft).

Anyway, they had listening booths set up which allowed for blind comparisons of mp3 and wma encoded audio (classical, rock, jazz ...). I tried it and as I stepped out of the booth an excited MS flak asked me what I thought of WMA audio. I told him that it sounded like a cow in a milk carton, watched him try to suppress his consternation and I walked away.

From time to time I have again tried listening to WMA encoded audio and it continues to sound to me like the cow isn't out of the box. Actually, one of the things that drives me nuts about both MS and Real audio is a high frequency phasing/envelope effect that I hear. To be fair to MS, I really don't think that true quality has ever been their objective; only sufficient quality so that Joe Sixpack will accept it, so that they can move on to the next stage of their total Internet/PC audio domination plan.

Creative Playcenter Encoder

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know which encoder Creative's Playcenter 2/3 uses? I was curious as to whether it was their own proprietary encoder, or if they used a third-party one.

This is NOT when you expose car flaws

[ColGraff]

Running any car over a cliff will destroy it, regardless of safety systems. This is not a valid test of a car safety system.

Re:This is NOT when you expose car flaws

[nagora]

Running any car over a cliff will destroy it, regardless of safety systems. This is not a valid test of a car safety system.

Playing music at 64Kb will sound crap, this was not a valid guide to what is a good audio codec!

TWW

Test compares codecs, not formats

[benwaggoner]

This is an interesting and relatively well done test (although it appears that the listeners knew which format they were listening to, so it wasn't truly double-blind, and a anti-MS and pro-Ogg bias can't be ruled out).

However, some discussions seem to be focusing on this saying AAC is bad or WMA is bad, when really it refers to the particular implementations in codecs of those formats.

For example, the Apple MPEG-4 AAC-LC encoder was used for AAC. This is a Low Complexity version of the format. Also, the Apple encoder has a strange limitation where it automatically converts 44.1 stereo to 32 stereo at that data rate. This isn't required by the AAC format. Other AAC encoders yield MUCH better results, and beat MP3 Pro in double-blind testing. I haven't seen any double-blind comparisons between AAC and Ogg.

Also, the WMA8 encoder is due to be replaced by the backwards-compatible WMA9 in early September. Of course, there may well be improved versions of the other encoders by then as well.

Re:Test compares codecs, not formats

[ff123]

I had several obvious choices for the AAC encoder: Psytel, the Quicktime, and Liquid Audio 5 (I hadn't looked into LA6). Liquid Audio 5 is another FhG low complexity encoder, but lowpasses at a lower frequency than the Quicktime. The Psytel encoder is worse-sounding than the Quicktime at 64 kbit/s. I did try to choose the best AAC implementation available to me (I do not have access to the latest and greatest implementations).

It's possible I could have set up the experiment as a Latin Square, and randomized which codecs any individual was comparing, but my home-grown statistical tools are not up to that task. That is, I can only perform balanced analyses, where N is the same for every codec.

ff123

Re:Test compares codecs, not formats

[Skuto]

>This is an interesting and relatively well done
>test (although it appears that the listeners
>knew which format they were listening to, so it
>wasn't truly double-blind, and a anti-MS and pro-
>Ogg bias can't be ruled out).

The test *was* double-blind. Some of the listeners had experience with some of the codecs involved, and were able to identify some codecs based on the flaws they heard.

--
GCP

Re:Test compares codecs, not formats

[benwaggoner]

Indeed. I wasn't critiquing your study, but pointing out that some folks were making the wrong interpretation of its subject.

Compression Sucks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Compressed audio sounds bad. With 200GB hard drives hitting the market we don't really need audio compression as much as we used to. Isn't the day comming soon when we can listen to non-lossy audio and have room to store it? Once we figure out the bandwidth issue I hope everyone tosses their codecs in the trash.

Got me a movie, I want you to know

[gazbo]

Yep, I should have said Pixies really - just as obvious to hear and far better music. I happen to have some of their songs at 128K and you're not wrong. Flat, sounds like it's being played through a pair of headphones 6 feet away.

Nowadays I rip at 192 as standard, but still there's noticable artifacts on certain songs.

Better methods of testing audio quality

[DaCool42]

What we need is a better analysis of what exactly the weak points and strong points of these compression algorithms are. Perhaps some kind of a test involving compression noise with many different patterns and such. A test could be designed using noise and sine waves in different ways that would test all aspects of the compression. Then do an FFT on the result and compare to the original. This would yield results that are much more useful to the developers, rather than just saying which is best.

Re:Better methods of testing audio quality

[feend]

This wouldn't work as the codecs work with human psychoacoustics to leave out sound data that humans are less sensitive to. They are also tuned for 'normal' music in the same way that voice codecs are tuned for human voices. It follows that the only true test is humans listening to music and rating subjectively.

An analogy: JPEG compression discards more information about the colour blue as humans are less sensitive to it. It also focuses on photographic images to the detriment of GIF style logos or POV-RAY type images. If you mechanically compared a JPEG with the uncompressed source then the blue section would show the most difference yet this would be less noticeable to a human than the loss of a similar amount of red or green info. Or if you JPEG compressed a 2 colour GIF logo it would look horrible. Again it follows that they only viable test relies on the subjective evaluation of the target image type by a human being.

Re:Better methods of testing audio quality

[DaCool42]

Agreed, but you can still have your analysis take this into account. You just need to take the human factor into account. Some sort of neural net or similar learning system could be used.

How about uncompressed...?

[Rui del-Negro]

I'm sorry if this has been said before, but I couldn't find it:

Why didn't they also try playing the original, uncompressed music, to see how high it scored...?

RMN
~~~

Saucer of milk, table two

[gazbo]

not difficult to get the same message across without trying to offend the person you're talking to.

Indeed, I was just replying in the style you'd initiated "I think he's full of s**t."

I use VBR, end up with files less than half the size, and it sounds good to me.

...and this is why I posted the line you quoted. It's because you are passing your opinion on the quality of codecs/bitrates when I would claim that it is blatantly obvious that the lower bitrates sound crap. I can't comment on how clearly this will be exemplified by Hendrix, but with TLC at least I should hope you'll think "damn, he was only bloody right!"

If you ever wonder why people don't like you

*cough* *splutter* And yes, I have a proud following of freaks too, but you'd expect that from someone who has done lots of trolling.

Milk Builds Strong Bones and Prevents Osteoporosis

[zbuffered]

Indeed, I was just replying in the style you'd initiated "I think he's full of s**t."

Well, where we differ then is that he's my friend. I tell my friends when I think they're full of shit, and they don't get offended and I don't try to offend them. It goes from, "you're full of shit" to, "look, I'll show you" to, "damn, you're right" or "told ya so", or whatever, but it's a gateway to understanding. But when random people do much the same thing, it's, well, it's just bad etiquette. That's my opinion.

It's because you are passing your opinion on the quality of codecs/bitrates when I would claim that it is blatantly obvious that the lower bitrates sound crap.

If it were blatantly obvious, you wouldn't have people encoding at 128kbps and claiming they can't tell the difference. I can tell the difference btw 128 and 192, but I can't tell the difference btw 192 and 256. Or maybe I just haven't tried hard enough.

I'll spend some time tonight and see if I can figure out what all the fuss is about.

And yes, I have a proud following of freaks too

I saw that. Very amusing. I was actually referring to how you currently post at +0. People don't like to be talked down to, they like to be educated, and they like to be told what a big dick they have, not what a big dick they are. I'm not trying to be a dick here. Can't we all just get along? Or, barring that, agree to disagree?

Vinyl for dance

[Tokerat]

mmm the warm bass... only type of music i ever noticed a vinyl difference was for music with loud or enhanced bass range... it just seems "warmer" in vinyl.

I post, therefore I am. ;-)(

All in the name

[Anonymous Coward]

Ogg can be the greatest codec that ever lived, but it will never amount to anything with a name like "Ogg Vorbis." It's vaguely sickening, almost perverse sounding. Do you want to tell all your nonnerdy friends that you downloaded a bunch of "oggs" last night? It sounds like you downloaded some sort of peat moss, or got an illness of some kind.

What's that you say? You want to explain to the populace at large what the name means? Ha! Prepare to turn them off even more! The names Ogg and Vorbis are themselves rooted in a mire of geekyness, and not the cool kind either. If you try to explain it to a lay person, they will immediately think you are of one of those guys they made fun of in highschool.

Yes, the ogg team need to swallow their pride and roll out a new name, maybe to make it a little less obvious they could do it the next time they roll out a major release. Hopefully they will have enough sense to avoid something like Vorbis Plus!. Failing that, someone take the ogg code and re-release it under the moniker of their choice. I can't see how you could get much worse than Ogg Vorbis.

What the hell where they thinking???

Spectrogram

[yerricde]

If you were to make a two dimensional spectral analysis of a such sound recording with the time axis to the right, the frequency to the top and the amplitude as the color intensity of the point you would see a lot of wiggling lines at regular distances.

In the field of acoustics, that type of plot is generally called a "Spectrogram". See recent stories about Aphex Twin on Slashdot and/or Kuro5hin to learn more.

(BTW: this would make a great visualization plugin for xmms)

Winamp (AOL's proprietary freeware media player for Windows, coming soon for Linux) already has one: Nullsoft Tiny Fullscreen.

They DID have copies of the original CD

[yerricde]

In my view the whole test is bogus because we don't have figures for the original CD track.

By definition, the original track is a 5.00, because the scale measures perceptual similarity between two tracks on a 1.0 to 5.0 scale, and the testers were provided with a .flac (lossless compressed wav) version of the original CD to test against.

Re:They DID have copies of the original CD

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have still been good to include it if for no other reason than to check the reliability of the ratings :)

MP3 CD players

[yerricde]

The answer would be once ripped, leave it ripped- but that isn't always feasable

Once ripped, leave it ripped, and stored on music CD-R. (Use music CD-R instead of data CD-R to make sure that the recording artist and songwriter get paid.)

few CD players will (yet) play compressed music.

Let me clarify my perception of your "few". Most newer CD players that also play DVDs (DVD video or DVD audio) will also decode play RCA's MPEG audio layer 3 ("MP3") format. In addition, a growing number of portable CD players can handle MP3 audio. But currently, the majority of CD players play only Red Book linear PCM audio.

Microsoft's media player will play a wma file WITH its RIAA trojan even if the wma has been misnamed to MP3.

Not if I've associated .mp3 to Winamp, where I've turned off the WMA plugin.

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'll read the story, the MP3Pro (not plain MP3) was also at 64kb/s. Actually the OGG encoding was slightly higher as were the others. So MP3 was at a disadvantage. I wish they had included LAME @ 64kb/s. I suspect it wouldn't have done too well but I'm curious.

Re:Wrong

[TummyX]

the MP3Pro (not plain MP3) was also at 64kb/s.

Well duh. Read my post again.

LAME still keeps the face at 64 kbps

[yerricde]

Supposedly the MP3 version [of the Aphex Twin "Face" clip] obliterates [the image hidden in the spectrogram] because of lost frequencies.

I tried it with LAME at 64 kbps mono, and the face was still recognizable.

No worse than "Em Pee Three"

[yerricde]

It would not matter if ogg was capable of reproducing music at any bitrate, no body will care with a name like that.

It would not matter if mp3 was capable of reproducing music at any bitrate, no body will care with a name like that. Heck, the middle syllable sounds like something you do in the bathroom.

The name of a product can make or break its success in the consumer world

Coca-Cola sells, even though the first half of its name is the first half of "cocaine". Trust me, any name can be promoted by the entertainment media.

As it is now, [the name of Ogg technology is] based on two bits of extremely nerdy trivia

And "Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3" isn't?

It's like ASF or AVI

[yerricde]

That's like calling streamed movies HTTP's or something...

No. It's like calling them ASFs or AVIs when the underlying codecs are DivX and MP3.

Re:It's like ASF or AVI

[tomstdenis]

Same idea, yeah.

It has one big disadvantage at the moment

[hayden]

No integer only codec. This means no portable player support as they generally don't have a FPU.

Re:It has one big disadvantage at the moment

[jonathan_ingram]

There are at least two integer Vorbis decoders out there - a GPL one, and a closed source optimised one called Tremor.

Vinyl is far better than any of them

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if there are a few pops and ticks now and then? And what better format to go with a tube motherboard?

MP+ not shown.

[Anonymous Coward]

64kbps sucks....no one uses, but even if ppl use it, it doesnt mean that the encoder is better at higher bitrates. "64kbps exposes weaknesses in the codec" BULLSHIT, the algorithms are totally different when using different bitrates, thats why LAME is really good for 192kbps and up while Fraunhauffer is better for the 128kbps+. WMA at 128kbps cant even compare to the high quality of LAME @1 128kbps (not that 128 is really HQ). mp3pro has stuff going for it, but ALL these codecs that coming out ARE DESIGNED to be optimized for LOW BITRATE meaning under 128kbps, why else is mp3pro touting 128kbps quality in 64kbps? Microsoft is doing the same. If you really want good lossy archival quality, stick with LAME 192+ or 256. EVEN BETTER THEN LAME IS MP-PLUS, its a format thats picked up and i use it, and have done personal testing, nothing COMPARES at the bitrate. MP-Plus at around 170 beats 192 LAME from my samples. check it out

http://mpegplus.cjb.net

IF u want TRUE lossless archival quality compression, TRY monkeyaudio at www.monkeyaudio.com

Sorry, poor grammar

[jsdkl]

Just to clear up any confision, I don't *own* a recording/sound engineer, I *am* one. :-)

Huge holes in the test

[Anonymous Coward]

There were some huge holes in the test. In particular, there was no classical orchestral music, which is well known for having extremely wide dynamic range and frequency range. (Try Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra for an example that will stretch any stereo.) There was also no opera, though a priori I would guess that the tested vocal tracks would at least hint at what the encoders would do with opera.

A while ago, I encoded some test pieces with Lame. Being paranoid, I used high bit rates or VBR. Last month I listened to one of the operas and had to turn it off, it was so distorted -- and that was through headphones on my cruddy laptop sound card.

The nice thing about lossless compression is that you can always go back home. :-)

Oh, and what about other genres...

[cefek]

...such as widely heard Hip-Hop music? I'm really surprised it didn't make to this comparision. Even more: I was really curious if I'm lame to store all my songs in mp3 format.

Don't forget that car audio plays only mp3, by the way.

Best of Usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

``Up your ass, Hallam-Baker -- you pompous twit. I too have a first in physics and a PhD in nuclear physics, but I don''t going around bleating about my earning capacity like you do.''

Google Usenet

Re:Best of Usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good, now go to the UK court site to see what Judge Morton said about the person who wrote that.