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Ogg beats MP3 & The Rest In Listening Test
Nice2Cats writes "The
Ogg Vorbis format came out far ahead of MP3, MP3Pro, RealAudio
Surround, and Windows Media 9 Beta in a comparison
of different audio formats by Germany's respected computer magazine c't. More than 6,000 people took part in
the test. Heise says Ogg's dominance was most pronounced with 64 kBit/sec
samples; the full magazine article (out on Monday) mentions that in
pre-tests, some people actually mistook the 128 kBit/sec Ogg samples for the
uncoded version. Let's hear it for those strangely named open source file formats!"
Anyone who has their computer linked to a less than cheesy hifi knew this already... Story is -1 redundant? :)
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
I knew Ogg could beat MP3! This is the beginning of a new world order when it comes to music compression formats. I would say that MP3 will start to collapse.
A babelfish English transtaltion can be found here.
Rich
(some karma whoring :-)
Here is the link to the translated article (Google)
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
think that's my queue. time to convert to ogg. :)
questions:
1. can anyone recommend a conversion utility for mp3->ogg?
2. what's the best linux, windows and/or mac ogg player?
3. what pocket portable players support ogg?
-transami
:T:R:A:N:S:
I don't know, but what I understood is that over 6000 listeners took part to this comparison, so it's scietifically sufficient amount to trust the results!
So, am I going deaf? or are some people exagerating again?
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
Anyone have a mp3->ogg batch converter? (Yes I know I've already lost the extra information, I just want to have a single format, and I've gone RIGHT OFF mp3)
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For great justice!
I think we need to promote fullscale deployment of ogg vorbis. Windows Media, Quicktime, all of the major players should be equipped to play it. With Microsoft pushing WMA, Windows Media support is probably going to have to come from third parties. Ogg Vorbis playing hardware should be cheaper than proprietary format playing hardware, but I doubt anyone will release a player that DOESNT play mp3s.
The best way to support ogg is probably to rip your entire cd collection as ogg; pull your mp3s off kazaa and share away. This action might possibly be illegal depending on your cd collection, but if the entirety of Slashdot stopped sharing mp3s and started sharing oggs, I bet the public would take notice and it would take off. Although, the media companies would probably take notice too.
I do fear if ogg vorbis becomes to popular, patent holders will pop up (like the jpeg dilemma) and start wanting money. Ah well.
Gnuyen
Surely if the aim of the codec is to reproduce the sounds in such a way that it sounds better to people then this is a valid technique.
Rich
You are mistaken. It's Windows Media that does that. And anyway, this is a subjective test - what matters is what people say sounds better. You could also say the test was flwad cos they only chose people who liked listening to music with tin cans on their ears - it just wouldn't matter!
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
As the article says, despite all this hailing Ogg as the most wonderful format under the sun (as has been done quite a bit recently), look more carefully at what the article has to say: (translation follows)
Especially at 64kbps Ogg Vorbis won over convincingly, and left the competition behind. From 128kbit/s, the noticeable difference between the formats became significantly lower, such that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3, to most ears, was difficult to differentiate.
Yes, Ogg is good for low bitrates, and it'd be great to see it adopted as a streaming format, but I don't think there's really a need to convert to Ogg yet.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
(No, I did not know which sample was which. I also know not enough about those codecs to recognize artifacts etc.)
Actually c't has conducted listening tests some years ago (but only with mp3, they were interested in CD-music vs. compressed) and mp3 was found *better* than what is on the CD.
It's probably the annoying frequencies that are filtered away in compression...
My point?
Well, there are a couple:
MP3 and Ogg are lossy formats. Re-enconding data stored in lossy format will reduce quality significantly. If you want to switch to Ogg, rip your cds and convert wavs to Ogg.
However, this result is only significant for streaming audio. For archiving you should use MP3 at 256kbps or high-quality VBR in Lame. Thus only difference between Ogg and MP3 will be small saving in space, which isn't significant.
Get over it!
;-/
If it sounds better, then it is better; irrespective of mechanism by which it does that.
According to your argument, one could as well say the athlon is not a better chip wrt the pentium IV because the only reason it performs better at the same clock speed is that it does more instructions per cycle so the benchmarks are flawed
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
I don't know the url, but last time I read something similar to this it said that it was Windows Media that increased the volume.
How can we know which encoder is the real cheat? This technique can introduce distortion for high amplitude sound waves.
I thought it was WMA that did the 3dB boost. I just encoded my Crystal Method stuff yesterday, and it came out crystal-clear, with the same loudness as the CDs...
.ogg files of a nominal bitrate at ~220 kbit/sec. Most people can probable be happy with -q 4 or -q 5, and end up with far smaller files as well (The Xiph people recommend -q 6 if you want lossless stereo coupling).
Either:
A. I'm going deaf
B. danny256 is on crack
C. Someone slipped some crack into the french toast I ate this morning.
Here's what I encode with:
oggenc -q 7
Most people will say this is insane, and it probably is. I end up with
you're thinking of Houston 6000 Gangbang.
That's not it.
$ for i in *.mp3 do; sox $i ${i%mp3)wav; oggenc -o ${i%mp3}ogg ${i%mp3}wav; rm ${i%mp3}wav; done
So, Ogg is better at lower bitrates and like the others at higher ones. To me this means that overall it is better than the others.
Maybe there is no need to convert to ogg, but at least it is worth considering for new encodings. The need will come when most of the files you find around will use it.
All you need is some advanced shell scripting, like this: $ for i in *.mp3 do; sox $i ${i%mp3)wav; oggenc -o ${i%mp3}ogg ${i%mp3}wav; rm ${i%mp3}wav; done
Don't do it - it will sound horrible.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The point is _not_ to make it sound better necessarily. The point is to make it sound as close to the original CD audio as possible, despite the compression. The point of the CD recording is to make it sound as close to what the artist wanted.
Some people just can't hear the differences though.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
I don't see the need to create any non-ogg CD rips anymore. What's the problem with having both formats?
I've found 192kbit CBR MP3 to be more than adequate for my music copy-ahem- archival needs. The resulting quality is largely the result of using a good encoder. I can't read German and the fish is of little help, so I don't know if they used a good encoder like LAME or Fraunhofer, or some garbage like Xing when doing their MP3 comparison.
MP3 player quality also seems to vary considerably. The best player I've heard on Win32 is one called Nad (seriously, that's the name). From what I understand, the author sold the rights to some company and that was the end of it... Winamp's quality has varied over the years as the decoding engine was changed several times over the course of its life. Sonique seems to be pretty good as well. While Fraunhofer's encoder is very good, the free playback-only codec bundled with Media Player seems to have lackluster high frequency response, giving the audio a less "defined" sound.
Despite all my rambling, my point is simply that it is hard to do an objective comparison of MP3 to other formats since there are so many variations of the encoding and decoding software. I've done my own listening comparisons with OGG and found it to be comparable to MP3, but since my portable MP3 CD player only plays MP3s and redbook audio CDs, my use of OGG has been quite limited.
While I applaud the open source community for producing such a high-quality competitor to MP3 as OGG, the real issue of getting people to switch still lies in hardware support and easy-to-use, CDDB compatible OGG CD-rip utilities.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
As many companies have found out, if you're going to compete with someone who has a large share of the market - your product will fail if there is no absolutely compelling i-must-have-it reason for making the switch (and enduring all the recoding of your, possibly, hundreds of MP3 files).
For me at the moment:
- 128 kbps sampling is by no means perfect, but (for me) it's acceptable
- There are hardware based MP3 players out there
- All my friends encode MP3's - not one uses Ogg.
- I have a large number of MP3's - it would be a serious slog to re-encode them
- The amount of Ogg files available out there pale into comparison with MP3.
In short, like the vast majority of people out there (who don't read slashdot and never have heard of Ogg), going to Ogg would be a step backwards for them. They'd have less choice, less options and would be isolating themselves from everyone else.In a situation like that, you have to have a pretty damned good reason for going through all that - and as of yet, for the common man, there isn't such a reason.
Doesn't mean I won't keep watching Ogg though ...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Listening to music over a couple of soup cans tied together with string is better than MP3 encoded at 128Kbps. At this sample rate, MP3 has always been a bit naff (which is one of the reasons my 3000+ MP3s are all my own encodings from my own stuff). I always encode at 192 or VBR (variable bit-rate) with a minimum of 160Kbps using LAME, and to be honest, think it sounds pretty darn good (Ok, it doesn't quite stand up to direct comparison with CD, but then it's only one-tenth the size and way more convenient). And yes, I *do* listen through a good HiFi. So can anyone tell me a) is there really much detectable difference (in terms of audio quality) between Ogg and a well-encoded, high bitrate MP3, and b) how the file sizes really compare, when one of my average 3-4 minute MP3s weighs in at 6-8MB?
It's too late for me to die young
So, gentlemen, start your xterms and start 'migrating' :) Some advanced shell scripting is needed to get the dirty job done. $ for i in *.mp3 do; sox $i ${i%mp3)wav; oggenc -o ${i%mp3}ogg ${i%mp3}wav; rm ${i%mp3}wav; done
As a person that's insatisfied with mp3@192kbs (CBR). I made a personal test and ogg is clearly better than WMA (at 64kbs, and yes, ogg CBR and not VBR). But that't not all, what's amazing is microsoft saying that it invested about 500 Million Dollar in technology research, and then seeing it's technology being beated by an opensource alternative .. (in quality). One may say that low budget resources leads criativity to it's peaks .. Way to go Ogg team!!!
Let's see what u can do with tarkin ;D
One day your head will be your box, your brain will be your client, and all energetic problems will be solved...
MP3s don't have as good bass as CD quality, at least from what I've heard. Oggs do seem to handle bass very well though; quite often I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between them and the real thing.
Because only it becomes of a billions-worth software (Microsoft) and content industry supported. And over the content a format does not sit down through by its quality. Whether a format is open or closed is completely all the same to the user. Also at DRM he will accustom if it the content only in this format gives oneself. Co-operation with hardware manufacturers (DVD Playern etc. usf) show fruits: Windows Media 8 can play already many.
/. should make rather times an action that more Playerhersteller Windows Media to integrate - at this format none will come more past. I find that not at all bad - one must read only MSDN and one knows which in the EDP and Consumer Electronics format the next "wave" becomes. Is nevertheless beautiful!
Nowadays nobody can define more except Microsoft of formats - one must resign oneself to it. If one does this, one has to along-earn still the chance well at the system. Nevertheless Microsoft brought out brutalst standardized (I use "standard" as "usually" and not according to academic ISO standards) and thus competitive PC companies - which presses the system price meanwhile far under that of other platforms.
Thus this test is also relatively unreasonable.
Be hip, be cool.
Be the first one among your friends to use Ogg, and *brag* about it. The format is 1 month old, and already there exists hardware-players and a growing user-base. Keep your old mp3's, but from now on only encode in Ogg, and talk all your friends into do the same thing.
If you feel bored one day, re-encode your cd's in ogg and delete those old mp3's.
was NAD (which cannot, and is now MAD Plugin for Winamp -i n/
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plug
Perhaps the 64 kbit format could be called a hard-boiled ogg.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
c't is a good computer magazine, but it's not an professional audio magazine.
If you want to learn about audio encoding, listening tests and so on, visit audio-illumination.org and ff123.net
A discussion about heise's listening test can be found here.
The WorldLingo Translation seems to be better than babelfish because of the option to do content specific translation...
Compare the different translations of the same text...
BabelFish: "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
WorldLingo: (using Computer, Data Processing as the subject) "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
You can also do your own translation here.
It's about a little boy from Buenos Aires who had an heart disease and requires a transplantation. The operation costs 115 200 $. VA Software and OSDN will give 0.01$ for each reply with the subject : CON BRIAN If you can, you can copy this message on other sites, such as Kuro5hin or e2. It takes only two minutes and can save a little boy's life. Don't break the chain and remember the title, it's their only way of controlling. THANK YOU !
That maybe Ogg would take off much better if the name weren't stupid?
It is. Just listen to it? And I'm not joking. Asthetics in some things wins over a greater majority of the time vs functionality.
Maybe if the file format was called something like OVM or something, then we would actually have a cool file-format name that is cool to say, even cooler than MP3 (which just sounds cool and high tech.)
Imagine...
Person: "Man, I was listening to those OVMs, this weekend... they sound really good!"
Person 2: "OVMs? I've seen those, are they cool?"
Person 3: "Are you guys talking about thos OVUMs?"
Person: "The wuh?"
Person 3: "Those OVUMs... I keep seeing them when I do web-searches for MP3s, they keep popping up instead."
er... well... maybe a little more thought should be put into a name. Heh. OGG... "Did you download any Eggs this weekend?" You know -- there --IS-- more to a file format than the technical specs.
If you think the above post was a bad attempt at humor, put good taste aside for a moment and concentrate on the point.
Ogg just sounds stupid.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Aside from the patent encumbrance problems, possibly not. Though, since ogg beats out mp3 so handily at low bitrates, I would trust it to be better (even if my ear couldn't notice it) at higher bitrates.
I think the patent encumbrance problems are easily enough for me to give up on mp3, even if ogg were slightly worse.
More poached oggs!
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I don't know why, but I don't seem to hear any difference between CD Audio or mp3 (128kBit/s).
I'm the same way. I'm not an audiophile type person so I haven't invested a lot of money into sound equipment. I believe that is probably the main reason we don't hear a difference. Find a friend that has a $3,000 set of speakers on his stereo and see if you can hear a difference then. Let me know what you find out.
Obviously, you haven't gotten sick of MP3 artifacts like I have. Back in the day when everyone here was promoting mp3 ("It sounds just like a CD"), I thought it was perfect, too. But now, I can pick out MP3 artifacts pretty easily. MP3s bug me now.
I've never figured out what Vorbis artifacts sound like. To me, Vorbis still sounds perfect. This is why I rip to Vorbis now.
Squashing bash commands together on one line to make them appear more complicated than they really are doesn't equal an "advanced" script.
Look at it again and tell me if you still think it's "advanced"
for i in *.mp3 do;
sox $i $i{i%mp3)wav;
oggenc -o $i{i%mp3} ogg $i{i%mp3}wav;
rm ${i%mp3}wav;
done
What about my car audio that only plays MP3s?
If it's the latter, that's quite naive.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You can find a comprehensive overview of windows mp3 players here.
Thanks for your interesting remarks.
What makes you say that "ogg vorbis" sounds like something out of Germany? Neither "ogg" nor "vorbis" are commen german words, so there's no more relation of the name "ogg vorbis" to the german language than there is to chinese, as far as I know.
Take a look on the vorbis-Webpage, perhaps they explain why they choose to call it that way.
Many people are using ogg for streaming already. IC Radio, Raw and several other UK Student Radio Stations are using it. The BBC were also using it for a while, but I think it vanished :(
A voice spake from the darkness and said unto me "Smile, things could be worse." So I smiled and lo, things bec
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
I just read the partition. It sounds better in my head than any compressed format, and it compresses very well if you want to store it.
And you don't need any power hungry device to read it on the move, just a sheet of paper. Way more efficient...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
doesn't mean people are going to use it. MP3s are pretty dug in. I've been hearing about Ogg Vorbis on SlashDot for quite a while now. Maybe I live under a rock or something, but I've never actually heard anything encoded with Ogg Vorbis.
It may be better, it may have better compression, but the fact is, people seem pretty satisfied with MP3 and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
If you asked most people in the know, OS/2 was a much better OS than Windows for a long time, and it was backed up by a major player (major player shrewd marketer). But it never took.
That happens a lot in this industry. Linux is more stable than Windows, but you don't see it on the desktop. Borland had the best development tools, but look at them...
My point is, Ogg can be twice as good, but unless there's a really compelling reason (besides better sound and better compression), I don't see the masses making the change. What kind of compelling reason? I don't know. Maybe if MP3s somehow become "digitally protected" or something.
Its not a put-down. I have several friends who can't tell 64kb/s mono Real format from the original.
No joke.
In Other News:
:)
WinMX has included ogg as one of it's search options in their newest client v3.3. Their website is devoid of update changes, but I haven't seen it prior to the release of v3.3. (as far as memory serves at least.)
As far as format of Choice(TM), i still perfer mp3s over ogg. I backed up a chunk (109 cds) of my cd collection into 320k mp3s and that was a *bitch* even with automatic cddb labeling. I recently purchased a portable mp3/cd player as well. There are a good number of car mp3 players as well, which extends the convenience of the format, not to mention the abundance of mp3 home stereo solutions.
MP3 is a proprietary format yes, but it isn't restrictive. John Q doesn't need the source code for the format, he just likes the fact that the mp3 format gives him lots of options when it comes to where he listens to his music.
Ogg definately has potential, it seems like they got the format down pretty nicely. Its the hardware-player area that they need to spend some time focusing on to really be a challange to the mp3 format. And I wish them luck because to me, it's nothing but choice, and choice is good.
As far as the name itself, i still find it a bit "weird" speaking the name. "Ogg", i mean that's the kind of noise i make when i'm sick
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
He is using the same translation for both.
Man, I click that link, hoping to see that gaping ass, and instead I saw microsoft's webpage! I almost puked!
It might be a new world order but what ever gave them the idea to use such a screwy extension?
Laying on his deathbed King Brak of the Oggs called for his military advisors to warn them that his two enemies were sure to attack all Ogg islands once he passed away. Brak and his advisors came up with a plan to organize and train the Ogg tribesmen to use weapons for the defense of thier villages.
Meanwhile Nanny Ogg can tell us whether MP3's are best served at weddings, Dinner or Audio Compression Victory parties in her cookbook.
I mean there's nothing like launching a new world order when it comes to audio compression using an extension whose browsing can find you great Poinsettias at www.ogg.com
Whatever you do, folks, don't convert your MP3 files to ogg. If you do, you'll end up with the MP3 artifacts encoded in the ogg file, along with the music.
Better to re-rip. If that's not possible, keep the MP3s.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
just because it's better, doesn't mean it will win.
the only way it will win is if people start demanding money for encoders/players.
either way, you know where you can shove your DRM.
I donated usd25 to vorbis a couple of weeks ago, (first open source donation) and feel strangely proud now. I have not ever used any of their stuff - it just felt like that what they are doing is really important. Go vorbis.
What the text does not say, but you can see from the figures in the magazine is that at 128 kbps, the difference between the 'original' .wav rating and the 'compressed' ratings is minizing (as expected).
.wav.
However, the rating of 128 kbps Ogg Vorbis is almost identical as the rating of the 1411 kbps
original, while all others have noticably worse
ratings than
Every kid on EARTH knows MP3. It is cool sounding, even moms and dads know it. Every time I see orgg vorbis i think of some remote or breakfast dish. I dont see it happeneing.
I believe these tests have been done in the U.S and else where in the world.
It was known as the Pepsi Challenge
and it has been proven in tests that soft leather moccasins are better for your feet and feel better than the horribly designed dress shoes that most of us office workers wear.... yet widespread acceptance and the ability to buy dress-moccasins in a store cripples acceptance..
You want Ogg to win? it HAS to be in the hardware players.. and more specifically, in the next firmware update for many of the recent players (NEX-II.... Audiotron... etc...)
the numero-uno reason people use mp3 is for their portable devices.. If the only place I could listen to mp3's was my computer then I wouldn't waste my time encoding them.... except for maybe trading them... but that's illegal and nobody would do that...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes, Ogg is good for low bitrates, and it'd be great to see it adopted as a streaming format, but I don't think there's really a need to convert to Ogg yet.
I can give you at least one good reason: Ogg Vorbis is an open and patent free "standard". Ogg Vorbis also produces smaller files.
Unless you need MP3 because you have a hardware player that only support that, I see no reason to encode using anything but Ogg Vorbis. I'll not buy a player that doesn't support Ogg Vorbis and I've told the manufactures that.
What do MP3 artifacts sound like? I imagine I would notice if I knew what to listen for, but since I don't...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
From the comments I've read so far, it seems like most /. readers are listening to their MP3/Ogg's through $20,000 HiFi systems. For me, listening to 128 kbps MP3 is ample, seeing as it'll be through my crappy old Sony headphones I've got.
Maximum quality per bitrate is not the point when you're trying to drown out the other shit music around the office (:
Ladies, form queue here -->
http://free.superhits.ch/cgi-bin/superhits.cgi?pag e=search&search=ogg
After twenty years of going to raves and concerts and using walkman headphones at 9.5-10, I defy anyone to create a file format that can overcome the constant ring of tinitis in my ears!
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
If you wanted to change the name to something that's less gutteral, perhaps just calling it 'Vorbis' or "O.Vorbis" would be sufficiently velvety to virgin ears.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
I take what he wrote to mean that Ogg sounds better at more bitrates.
The real question is not: does he "never use high bitrates", but "do you ever use lower bitrates".
As a moderately proficient German reader, I'm glad to be able to enjoy these kinds of technical articles.
Kind of OT, what other languages are folks finding interesting in today's Internet world? I've seen a lot of content in English, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish, but really, not much else, aside from the Italian page or two.
Is the Internet speeding up the proliferation of these 5 languages, and these 5 alone? And what happens when the Western world all speaks English/German/Spanish and the Eastern world all speaks English/Chinese/Japanese? I tried learning Japanese, but my meager brain was not up to the task. German and Spanish come fairly easily to an English speaker.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Well, if you use it at less than 192kbps, the bass will sound like it was recorded underwater. If you use it at above that, then you don't really lose enough size to make it worth using. If Ogg sounds good at 192, then maybe i`ll take another look at lossy compression. MP3 is just shite. (I don't download, so I`m not bothered about download speeds/sizes, just how much you can fit into portable systems.)
If you can't hear the difference then don't worry about it, obviously!
What do MP3 artifacts sound like?
Try 128 kbps joint stereo. Try harsh swooshing and ringing in the high frequencies. Try a flattening of the stereo field.
Try 32 kbps mono (standard for streaming over dial-up). Try the whole thing sounding underwater.
Now try Ogg at each of those bitrates. (Use OggDropXPd to find the quality levels that roughly correspond to the popular MP3 bitrates.) None of the artifacts I mentioned are present. Ogg Vorbis is designed to create complex and subtle "differences" in the signal rather than easy-to-pick-out "artifacts".
Will I retire or break 10K?
.. is a standard. AAC may not be as good as Ogg, but I'm encoding to it in my application because it is part of the MPEG-4 standard.
The Ogg team should get on the MPEG bodies and start lobbying to be included. This is the only reason MP3 was able to be as popular as it is-- it was a clear standard. Ogg should do the same.
IF, for instance, it had been part of Mpeg4 then any of the hundreds of thousands of cellphones, computers, pdas, musicplayers, stereos, tvs, DVD players, etc, that come out over the next 10 years that make use of the MPEG4 standard would be able to play back ogg content.
The last major standard like this was MPEG2 (and MP3 is part of MPEG1) so these are not things that happen often, and companies are highly unlikely to add playback support for something that's not part of a standard.
Phones will be MP3 capable going forward, but not ogg capable unless it becomes at least a defacto standard-- getting it into the Profile 0 of MPEG4 would have accomplished this....
This is not to bash the Ogg developers, just to give a recommendation for going forward.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
"Ogg Vorbis also produces smaller files."
Actually, I decided to do a test comparison of lame vs ogg at 64, 128 and 192.
Ogg is smaller at 64 (and sounds MUCH better), but lame mp3 is just slightly smaller at both 128 and 192.
but don't be downhearted.
Like running, listening is a skill that varies from person to person and can be improved with practice.
I've worked in a recording studio through which many many people have been and I've witnessed the variation first hand.
engineer : "Which do you prefer, this... or this?"
client : "Okay, play the second one now."
What makes me smile is that when I was a lad we were satisfied copying records to tape by playing the record loud and utilising the condenser mike on the tape recorder. Good quality was when there wasn't the sound of someone walking in the room followed by "your tea's ready, oh. what are you doing?" "shhhh mum, we're taping" on it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Okay, so I've got about half my 300-CD collection ripped. Some is ripped with 128k MusicMatch (with crappy joint stereo artifacts and pumping), some with 160k LAME, and more recent stuff with 160-256k LAME. I want to finish ripping everything, and re-do all the old stuff, at once (I even found an old 18-CD SCSI jukebox to help automate it just a little).
:) ), can I then transcode to MP3 at a lower quality (96 to 128 or so) without significant artifacts? Or will the simple fact of combining two lossy compression steps totally hose me? (sort of like re-compressing a JPEG image)
So, if I'm going to go through all this trouble, I'd better rip it to as good a format as possible. I'm generally happy with 160+ LAME, but if OGG can give better quality with smaller size, then I'm all for that. I briefly considered a lossless format (like FLAC), but the idea of a half-terabyte array for music, while cool in an uber-geeky way, doesn't sit well with my bank account right now.
I need to retain some kind of MP3 compatibility, for small portables (64k Nomad) and my "long trip" portable (20G Rio Riot), not to mention my three Rio Receivers (though we've got 3rd party software supporting FLAC and some OGG at this point).
My question, then, is this: If I rip everything to ogg at quality 6 or 7 (it's sounding like 6 would be 'best' for my purposes -- I'll never own a super-audiophile tube amp with 20-pound speaker magnets
I understand why you can't take a decent mp3 and encode it to a 'better' ogg, the information simply isn't there. But if the output of a q7 ogg decoding is a near-perfect wav file, can't I then encode that at a lower bitrate without any significant differences from an original mp3 rip? Or will inaudible artifacts and/or the resultant lossy frequency spectrum coming out of the ogg decoder confuse the MP3 encoder?
Is not Vorbis this particular encoding, not Ogg? Ogg is the name of the project that is supposed to produce several multimedia encodings. Is it not stupid and lame to continue to call it Ogg?
Sorry.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
unless ether one of 2 things happen
;)
1: I buy a car cd player that supports it, not going to happen (soon at least), for one nothing supports ogg and 2 I just spent 300$ on a rockford fosgate cd/mp3 player .
2: software mp3 players and rippers start charging as it stands for now it costs me "nothing" to use mp3, ya I know it costs poor aol a few 100k a year to keep winamp running, but if they want to spend the money so I can have a free mp3 player its there problem.
I know the problems with mp3 as in for small/oss developers cant make mp3 players ( and still be leagal) but I, and most people just dont care at this moment
sorry for the bad spalling errors but its 8 am and dont feal like running a spell cheaker
I just visited the websites for Philips, Apple (iPod), Samsung, Archos, and Creative, found their "Contact Us" page, and asked each of them to include Ogg Vorbis support in their portable digital music (i.e. "MP3") players. Please join me in doing the same. Perhaps if they get enough input from the buying public, they'll build Ogg support into their product lines.
Don't forget to include a link to xiph.org.
BTW, please don't grumble about the lack of links in this post. The webpages are easy to find. I don't have time to pamper you. ;-)
Whatever you do, folks, don't convert your MP3 files to ogg.
This reminds me of people that converted their GIFs to JPEG because "JPEG is better". *shudder*
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
I'd like to see OGG go head-to-head with a high-quality Vinyl disc/player combo. For years I've heard audio enthusaists claim Vinyl was better than CDs, and on a clean professional setup, it usually is. I'd like to see them take a vinyl, encode it using studio quality A/D equipment, and test from there. Should be a more interesting result.
They are difficult to describe, but one of the most common artifacts is a "thickening" or slurring of transients. Imagine a sharp, compressed, closed hi-hat hit. You might make such a sound with your mouth by touching the roof of your mouth, just behind your upper gum, with your tongue, and making a "t" noise, like the very first phoneme of "tick".
Now try it again with your tongue touching the back of your teeth. It's more like a "th" sound, isn't it? Now Ogg does this a tiny bit as well, but MP3 seems to do it in quite a noticable way.
Also, with some encoders, certain harmonics (such as an overtone from an instrument) are retained in such a way so as to turn into a 'morse code' instrument. My wife has a rip of "The Day the Music Died" that does this. There's an annoying "deet de deet de de deet" that comes from a quantized overtone of some instrument. And what's worse is she can't here it.
As for the "underwater" sound -- it's similar to the sound you get from a warped, aged cassette tape. Sortuva "warbly" sound to anything high pitched, especially cymbals. And depending on the encoder, it may also sound a little muffled. Many encoders low-pass filter the sound before encoding it, so it sounds like you're listening to it over a telephone or through a cotton ball or something.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
The test results that were collected from internet users, are questionable. Some
users took it as competition, as in "who identifies most files correctly" and not
"which file sounds best". They found that, when played back in WinAmp, the
spectral analyser display gave information about the frequency bandwidth. This
is an indicator to the compression of the wave.
This information was public on HEISEs (publisher of Ct magazine and conductor
of the test) news server well before the end of the test. Nobody knows how many
testers have judged for "political" motivations rather than perceived sound quality.
jetmarc
With all the posts of people talking about a name change, why dont the Ogg team ask Naughty by Nature if they can change OGG to OPP? :-)
Stupid, but at least quite a few people will know what OPP is... hehe
I'm a musician who's into home recording -- mostly acoustic stuff. I've experimented with converting my original recordings to MP3 and OGG and must say there is a *very* noticeable difference.
With acoustic and classical music, there are subtleties in the sound that I've never been able to reproduce with MP3 at *any* bitrate. What blew my mind was that OGG preserved them beautifully at only a 128k bitrate. With other music genres, the difference isn't as apparent -- especially anything that's heavy on synth or midi, mainly because these are "noiseless" methods of making sound (there's either sound, or there isn't). They compress well because the instrument "voices" lack the resonance and complex noise frequencies of real instruments.
I don't really have anything against MP3 -- I use it quite a bit -- but my point is that OGG definitely provides a *much* superior sound.
Just my two cents...
Compare cymbals on cd vs mp3. It sounds more swooshy and less distinct on mp3.
... ogg too. Ogg is the greatest. I love ogg too. Ogg is the greatest.
Dammit, shut that thing off!
I know some people went to great lengths to do this test carefully, using high quality amplifiers and waveform analyzers and what more. I simply plugged headphones into my SB Live, listened to each piece twice, and then gave them a grade from 1-5.
I thought the 128 kbit was very hard because there were hardly any noticeable differences between the samples. The fact that they were very short didn't help. I handed out 5 points to 5 of the seven pieces, so the order there is almost random.
After the testing period had finished, C'T sent me the following results:
Ihre Bewertung für 64 kBit/s-Codecs:
Platz 1: MP3Pro
Platz 2: unkomprimiert (WAV)
Platz 3: Windows Media Audio
Platz 4: Ogg Vorbis
Platz 5: AAC
Platz 6: RealAudio
Platz 7: MP3
Ihre Bewertung für 128 kBit/s-Codecs:
Platz 1: AAC
Platz 2: MP3
Platz 3: Windows Media Audio
Platz 4: RealAudio
Platz 5: unkomprimiert (WAV)
Platz 6: Ogg Vorbis
Platz 7: MP3Pro
The order may not be what I'd like it to be, but my only conclusion can be that compression in general is good enough for me!
This makes ogg the ideal lossy compression method for classical music.. just one problem! There's no support for portable players!
Thousands of souls cry out, but are suddenly silenced when I commit the sacrilege of transcoding ogg to mp3, so that I can listen on-the-go. So I have to give up all the wonderful benefits of ogg (quality, gapless, great tagging, free, etc) for all the limitations of MP3, so I can actually listen to the music!
The moment I see a cdplayer that will play OGG and MP3, I'll put all my new music in ogg from then on!
Most everyone I know uses Winamp to play their Mp3's. Some of my friends were actually amazed when I told them that WMP could even PLAY mp3's This is one area in which the general populace's ignorance is a good thing, because there is a .ogg plugin for Winamp. Oh yeah, and everye on the planet hates RealJukebox.
So if the post says it's good at low bitrates, that implies it's bad at high?
Also, Ogg supports streaming.
I've seen another test showing the opposite: At 64kbps mp3pro was the way to go, while Ogg rocked at 160kbps and up. That was from another listening test I even think was posted on Slashdot.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
128kbit and 160kbit sounds like ass on my stereo. Once you get up to 256+ they sound great. I have an Soundblaster 5.1 hooked up to my JVC RX-7010 with an Optical Cable. They speakers are a set of Celestion Dittion 442.
I'm never going to achieve Nirvana with my Karma
Why? Do you never use high bitrates? Or are you just assuming that if it's better at low bitrates, it must be better at all bitrates?
If it's the latter, that's quite naive.
If you think the oppposite (assuming low bitrates sound good => high bitrates sound bad), that's also quite naive.
The test doesn't show that Ogg is bad at high bitrates, so why *not* use it if it's patent free and better at low?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Try comparing "OGG" against "MP3" when including the file size variable (OGG-files are always larger, and I am not just talking about 3-400 bytes, but kilobytes and megabytes). It adds up.
As for the listening test, human beings and their prejudice nature should be avoided altogheter. Programs (of course, developed by human beings) should take their place in determening the quality compared to the original.
Maybe the current encoder is faster, or can be made faster. If not, Ogg has a nontrivial disadvantage that hasn't gotten discussed much.
If they were large pseudo-photographic GIFs that might have been the way to go. The files would be Smaller (although you've already lost most of your colorspace), and it's not like GIF is a lossy compression format (unless you had to drop an original 24 bit image to 8 bits). Plus there were patent issues...
A better idea would have been to convert your gifs to PNGs, although it won't save you as much space as the JPEGs will, you will retain the perfect copy of the original image.
I read the internet for the articles.
They leave so much out of the test. I expect more for Germans than their test data revealed. Ok so we compare sound tests for various formats. Problem right off the bat is apple-orange bitrate comparisons exist that must be factored. For instance which sounds better a 128 bit OGG or a 320 bit Mp3. What about a 96 bit rate Mp3Pro. Where is the realation between the two? Then what about the compression ratios being matrixed in? If a 128 bit Mp3 sounds better than a 96 bit OGG but at only a cost of 5-8% where does that factor in? The space requirment is factored leaving this survey lackluster at best. The only decent way I can see in representing an Encoder format is some kind of QUALITY PER BIT ratio. But that doesn't work as certain types of music, when encoded at various bitrates, perform diffferently. Case in point compare live music at 95 bitrate versus studio tracks at 96. Compare Techno at 128 bit versus GT slide-guitar att 128bit.
I feel that until we get a complete test, not some quarter-point test, we will not get a real result that we cen depend on.
My tests come out like this:
Pink Floyd - Shine on You Crazy Diamond - Live
(From the Delicate Sounds of Thunder CD)
MP3 320bit 15mb Quality 100% (Base line)
MP3-Pro 96bit 4mb Quality 94%
OGG 128bit 7.6mb Quality 96%
MP3 128bit 7.1mb Quality 99%
Under these circumstances OGG lost not due to quality but size. The difference between 7.6 and 7.1 is 7% size. ON an archive of say 1TB of audio data that is significant and should be considered.
Another issue is encoder performance. I can encode the same identical track with 4 different MP3 encoders and get 4 completly different results. It boggles the mind. the lack of data. Grr... they just didn't give us enough.
Here is my solution: Make an encoder format that actually contains all the formats. Do a signal analysis on the original wave file and use the best encoder format for that particular sound! There, all our problems are solved. We'll call it say "File Audio Group Interchange Encoder" and have it parent these formats in one Codec. There don't we feel better?
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I'd like to see an audio encoding comparison test conducted this way:
Source material: About 50 clips, 20 seconds each representing a variety of musical styles. Two thirds should be normal music and the rest will be material that is known to be difficult to encode using psychoacoustic encoding.
Bit rates: each encoding will be tested at multiple bit rates. The purpose is to find the threshold at which the codec is indistinguishable from PCM. Another interesting threshold is the bit rate at which the codec can be distinguished from PCM but the artifacts are not annoying.
Media: Material will be encoded and decoded back to PCM and recorded onto CD-Rs. Listeners will listen to them on their favorite high-quality audio gear, not through a sound card and PC speakers.
CD-Rs are numbered and individually customized. All disks will have the same order of sound clips, but each one will be encoded with a different encoder/bitrate. Disks may be mailed to listeners and the results gathered by a web form.
The clips will be divided into two groups. The first group is designed to detect the bitrate threshold for each codec where the result is indistinguishable from the PCM source. Each clip will appear three times on the disk using the R/A/B methodology: R is the reference (original PCM), one of A or B is the encoded/decoded clip and the other is identical to the reference. The listeners will need to answer whether A or B is the original.
The result for each codec will be the bitrate at which listeners were not able do discern with any statistical significance the difference between the encoded and original PCM.
The second set of tests is for rating bitrates below the threshold of indistinguishability. Each clip will appear twice: first the reference then the same clip encoded by some unknown codec/bitrate combination. The listeners will rate them on a subjective scale of 1 to 5:
1. The quality of the encoded clip is inadequate.
2. The encoded has noticable annoying artifacts but it is still adequate for enjoying the music in situations where a higher rate is not practical.
3. The encoded clip has a noticably lower quality but is not annoying in any way.
4. Different, but it is not possible to really tell which one is better.
5. Indistinguishable from the source.
Results for each codec/bitrate will be averaged for all clips and presented as a graph. Results for normal and known-hard clips may also be displayed separately.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
this is probably not going to get seen as there are already a ton of posts and as we know on slashdot only early intelligent posts get recognition.
Anyway, yes ogg vorbis IS free and open. And yes ogg vorbis sounds much better at low bitrates. That's really all ogg has in its favor. The way I see it, who gives a crap about file size anymore? I have many many gigs of hard drive space. If I really care about high audio quality I make variable bitrate mp3s or 320kbps mp3s. If you're that much of an audiophile to tell me that you can hear a difference what are you doing using ogg OR mp3? They are both lossy! You need super cds to get the perfect audio quality you desire.
Since most of us are not audiophiles (I hope) then it only matters whether or not you care about hard drive space or audio quality more. I personally care about both. But hard drive space and bandwith are so plentiful that I'm going to get a high bitrate mp3 for any song I care about. Even better I'll use the lame encoders great vbr encoding. After 192kpbs I can't hear a difference, can you?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Rip those mp3s to wav, then rip the wavs to oggs, takes longer, but you wont have to get out all your old cds again, also i would like to ask if anyone knew of Nero (cd burning program) has any plans to suport ogg in audio cds?
What I hear from the apple rumor mills is that iTunes 4 will have a plugin architecture and ogg support. It probably won't happen until 2003 sometime, but it is coming.
Watch it get sued out of existence and watch everyone get ATRAC-3 or some other proprietary closed-source $5,000-a-user-license bullshit rammed down their throats.
So the higher the bitrate gets, the harder it is to tell between the formats? That's hardly surprising really - if you take the bitrate up close to 800kbps Flac among others can do it losslessly. The higher the bitrate, the closer any format can get to the original, and the smaller the differences.
What about my car audio that only plays MP3s?
Now that Tremor has been released under the BSD license, try petitioning your manufacturer to release a firmware upgrade that adds Ogg support. That is, unless your car player has a cheap dedicated decoder chip that takes an MPEG audio bitstream on one pin and puts a WAV bitstream on another.
Will I retire or break 10K?
that came with your DELL computer ;)
Tony
1. Dont promote ogg on the basis that it is better quality than mp3. It is, but if you're listening on cheap headphones at a bus-stop right next to somebody digging the road up, who cares?
:-)
2. Do promote ogg on the basis that hardware devices will be cheaper as there are no royalties to pay.
3. Do promote ogg on the basis that it is the 'right thing'. Mp3 is *so* last year
4. If people want to convert mp3->ogg - LET THEM. If they are that uninformed that they don't understand why it's stupid, just let them do it.
I just wish people would use the correct names, for once. Either use Ogg Vorbis, or just Vorbis. Not 'Ogg'. Ogg is only the wrapper format. Vorbis is the codec.
I know Ogg is shorter and cooler, but think: what's more relevant, the wrapper format or the codec? Especially in this case?
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
And on the 128kpbs tests ogg was found to be identical to wav (Wav: best to worst: 21%/17%/15%/13%/13%/11%/10%, Ogg: 21%/16%/15%/13%/13%/12%/10%)
The percentages are interpreted so:
21% thought that ogg sounds best of all 7.
16% second-best
15% third place
etc.
So at 128kbps, ogg was the only codec that was pretty much identical with the wav, all other codecs were much worse. (For example WMA was the best of the rest with: 13%/14%/15%/14%/16%/17%/11%)
At 64kbps, the difference is even higher: 41% found .wav to be best, 25% ogg-vorbis and only 11% mp3pro, 10% wma, the rest below 10%.
I'm guessing you find 128k MP3s 'acceptable' quality. Personally, to be tolerable I only generally rip to 160-170 VBR MP3. I could go bigger but it starts to get to ridiculous sizes. For my ears, it sounds LOTS better.
Now contrast that with an Ogg Vorbis file encoded at around 140k. Amazing differerence. By going from 128 to 140, you acheive an even greater increase is sound quality than taking an MP3 from 128 to 170+. But to me Ogg is noticebly better than MP3 even at 128.
Personally, I find the bass (kick drums) to sound a lot tighter. The sound spectrum seems to open up, in comparison the MP3 sounds muffled. MP3 steals some impact from the music, sort of how just slightly blurring a jpeg can acheive higher compression. The MP3 sounds blurred to me. Ogg sounds tighter, sharper, and more clear. For reference, I primarily listen on a Cambridge Soundworks Digital using w/SPDIF inputs.
Music listening is very subjective, but theres just no doubt that Ogg Vorbis does represent a much more efficient encoding algorithm.
One song might sound great at 64kbps while another might need 128 or even more.
ogg comes with a quality setting, which will encode the music in the quality you need. You won't throw away disk-space for easily encodable files and you won't have difficult songs that sound bad.
on the note of getting OGG into the mainstream... check this mix out... (hope my ISP doesn't blow up... )
Williamsburg The Movie
one thing that I noticed that ogg streams lack is allowing random seeks... but the sound quality definitely rocks...
r.S.
Converting from one lossy compression to another degrades the file farther.
Rather, if your MP3s are from CD or wav samples, convert the original cda or wav to ogg and delete the MP3. If you don't have an original wav or cda, keep teh MP3 file.
Converting an MP3 to wav and burning to CD does NOT make a CD quality CD, no matter what the morons from the RIAA tell you.
-steve
thefragfest.com
Open source would probably be better served if some thought was given to naming the products. Ogg Vorbis doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And whoever thought to name the DivX format after the failed format of the exact same name ought to be shot. And then healed and shot again.
If you have to tell people it's funny, it may not be funny. Also, let's assume there actually are humor-impaired people (not so difficult to believe). By including this disclaimer, you're presumably trying to keep them from modding you down. However, you're overtly calling attention to their disability, which will actually increase their chance of modding you down.
"For the humor-impaired": just don't do it.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
use headphones and you'll tell a difference. If not, your other hardware must suck.
If all you have to listen to is five dollar PC speakers, rip to 56k and save the disk space. If you have quality electronics then 360k probably won't be good enough.
-steve
thefragfest.com
I'm in contact with an iTunes developer. Commencing OGG advocacy NOW...
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
* users don't know what it is.
* regardless of how many flaws OGG fixes over MP3s, most users don't even know that MP3 is flawed
* OGG's features aren't used. OGG is capable of surround sound, but I don't know of a single DTS->OGG ripper. That would really rock.
* Even in the open source communities, OGG is relatively ignored.
* Open source apps should encourage OGG, not ignore it. Where are the programs which try to encode to OGG by DEFAULT???
* Open source platforms (KDE, GNOME, SDL, etc) need standardised multimedia APIs. Preferrably, one API shared between them all.
* Where are the codecs for OSS APIs which actively encourage open source media apps to use OGG for audio & the audio layers of video?
* What is the point of creating and buying opensource tools like blender, if no one can even agree on open video formats for rendering?
* When are linux folks even going to agree on a single low-level sound API for playback? Is it OSS? OSS-Free? ALSA? ARTS? ESD? one of the others? Has anyone who actively encourages and supports one of these APIs bothered to port the features it lacks from other APIs??
There are decent, modern APIs available for implementing streaming media, including it's production. It's possible to write codecs for OGG and anything else ONCE, and have it work on all Open Source Software. We just need some damn standards!!!!
When a respected magazine like Audiophile or at least Sound and Vision does a test like this, I will believe the results. Until then I will continue to listen to my compact-disc-sound-quality compact discs.
I'm a high-end audio buff and have heard Ogg Vorbus, and it's truly superior. But it's too late. Ogg Vorbis has a lousy, lousy name that the public will never accept (even "ogg" is lame). And it won't take over MP3 cuz that's been locked-in. Ogg is the betamax of the music-swopping industry.
You can do this with VBR mp3's, too. And they still work on hardware platers.
...Betamax is better than VHS.
Failure is not an option. It comes automatically enabled in every Microsoft product.
Aren't most mp3 artifacts the result of clueless users who don't know how to encode rather than the technology itself?
Just thought it interesting that everyone is posting babelfish / translating service translations when there is an English version available from the site.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Then it's bound to LOSE in the marketplace!
Edith Keeler Must Die
Consider the following results (I have the full magazine article):
Wav: best to worst: 21%/17%/15%/13%/13%/11%/10%
What this means is that of all users 21% thought the WAV file had the best sound of all samples, 17% thought it was second best, etc., while at the lower end 10% still thought it had the worst (all encoded versions were rated better).
The statistical average (just guessing which is the original) is 1/7=14,29%
This means that the truth of the whole matter is: users (probably including you and me) cannot really tell much difference between the original and encoded versions, even though everyone likes to think he has superior hearing (some exceptions such as music professionals only prove the rule).
Just to be on the safe side, a VBR recording with a minimum of 192 kbps should probably do it (which is what I use for my personal stuff on my MP3 player).
I can already hear many scream and shout, but why don't you do a test yourself? Have a friend encode some songs with different encoders at different settings and write a script that randomizes the playing order (and writes the order to a log file). Listen to it and see if you scored much higher to the statistical average afterwards.
But be fair and make it double-blind, like you should not know which encoders and which settings were used and whether and how many originals are among the samples. Then just say which ones you believe to be closest to the reference original.
Maybe you'll really surprise yourself.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
The test looked something like his: Blind test, 3 sets (different music styles) of 7 sound samples (20 seconds each) in Wave format, one original, the others compressed. Rank them in order of "best sounding", if you can't decide in the middle, just rank randomly there.
At 128 kbit/s Ogg got almost exactly the same distribution of rankings as the original, 21% at rank 1, 16% at 2 (original 17%), and 15% at 3. IOW >50% of voters placed it in the top 3. Next best for place one was WMA (13%), Real got 12%, the others 11% each. For top 3 it's WMA 42%, Real 41% ,MP3 and MP3Pro both 40% and AAC 34%. AAC got 26% votes for rank 7.
IOW such that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3, to most ears, was difficult to differentiate doesn't enumerate Ogg for a reason.
The "real" (not Real ;-) test with only 8 persons was different - and no, I'm not going to post he results.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
That webpage is just a teaser, it doesn't include the real results.. They conducted two tests, a web test which showed poor differentation at 128k (i.e. people couldn't tell 128k mp3 from the orignal, i.e. they were crap listners).. They also conducted a test using professional listners, sound engineers, etc.. Their rankings should a lot more differentation (most could tell the wav from the best of the 160k, etc)..
Here is the results:
64kbps: WAV, Vorbis, MP3pro, WMA, AAC, Real, MP3
128kbps: WAV, Vorbis, WMA, Real, MP3pro, MP3, AAC
160kbps: WAV, Vorbis, AAC, WMA, Real, MP3, MP3pro
Not only did Vorbis win the tests by a clear margin, but it showed the best consistency across bitrates (AAC sucks at 128K but does well at 160, while Vorbis just works)
There were two tests.. A web test and a test of experts.. The web test was worthless, many of the listners couldn't tell 128k mp3 from the orignal.. I'm sorry but thats just negligance...
In the printed mag there was another test conducted using experts (recording engineers, etc).. The results: Vorbis won at all bitrates by a clear margin...
64kbps: WAV, Vorbis, MP3pro, WMA, AAC, Real, MP3
128kbps: WAV, Vorbis, WMA, Real, MP3pro, MP3, AAC
160kbps: WAV, Vorbis, AAC, WMA, Real, MP3, MP3pro
It would be interesting to have a redefined CD format that contains a OGG stream. It should be VBR so the masterer can play with the amount of allowable distortion for various passages. The compression could vary to fit the amount of music to be put on the CD.
Why not?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I notice artifacts on MP3s I've encoded with LAME. Maybe that just means I'm a clueless user :-).
First 128-bit encodings sounded fine, but then I started noticing swishy noises in the high frequencies. For a while I was encoding, listening, and re-encoding at higher bitrates or VBR until it sounded good.
I encoded the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I had to take it to 256-bit encoding before it sounded good.
With Vorbis, I can just fire and forget.
The Xiph folks will say that MP3 is a comparatively old technology, and that Vorbis uses recent advances so it can sound better at the same bitrates.
I currently have all of my cds (200+) ripped as 192kb/s mp3s. If I was to re-rip them as ogg's, what would be a good bitrate to rip them at (comparable to the 192)
it's a huge shit sandwich and we're all gonna have to take a bite
when we look back on all this in 5 years time. With the current rate of progress in internet bandwidth and hard disk/memory capacity, soon no one will be using any kind of compressed audio.
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major
There's an interesting detail that's commonly misunderstood about OSS projects. They don't have to be #1 in market share to "win".
.ogg will win - eventually. So, re-rip your CDs, and with every single song, .ogg moves forward that much more.
All it takes for OSS projects (such as ogg) to succeed is that somebody continues to develop the project, and some people use it.
Linux is just now really starting to "take the enterprise"... I read about it every week in my CRN weekly trade rag, but Linux has been around over 10 YEARS before this!
Was Linux "losing" 4 years ago just because it wasn't well known yet?
OSS slowly wins because it is:
Good enough. Come on, let's face it: Apache isn't as easy to set up as IIS, and there are other alternatives out there that have some clear advantages over, say, Apache. But Apache is "good enough" and seems to have the most mindshare, so Apache it is.
Cheap/Free: Traditionally, the low-price leader is the one that wins. EG: WalMart, Microsoft. Linux is free, Apache is free, and OGG is free.
NT is cheaper than Unix (and so was slowly taking it over) until Linux came along, which is cheaper than NT. Now, Linux has arrested NT's progress into the enterprise & Unix spaces, and is slowly taking the market, piece by piece. Not overnight. Slowly. Linux will be here tomorrow, too.
Market share changes happen more rapidly when circumstances change to provide a clear financial incentive to switch.
Thus, Microsoft's license changes provide a financial incentive to switch. The active persuit of royalties for MP3 players provides a new financial incentive to switch.
And the price doesn't have to be high, it just has to be higher than before.
How many times have you driven by a gas station because the other one a mile down the road is $0.03 cheaper? Never mind that it adds up to $0.60 cents for a 20-gallon SUV, and you spend ~$0.50 of that savings driving the extra mile and a half, you do it. Be honest...
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why
So, give it time, and ENJOY!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/data/anw-09 .09.02-002/
Here the original article in English
Keep it simple baby. =)
128kbps Ogg is roughly equal to 192kbps MP3, or so I've found it to be with the music I've encoded myself.
check out the listening tests for AAC vs MP3, WMA.
Blah, blah, blah...
Yes, Ogg is good for low bitrates, and it'd be great to see it adopted as a streaming format, but I don't think there's really a need to convert to Ogg yet.
True, and there's no real need to step out of the way of that train just behind you.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The BBC [bbc.co.uk] were also using it for a while, but I think it vanished :(
It was just a test, part of the process of establishing feasability. Now, to show your interest, write to them (snail mail better than email, it sticks better on the desk).
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Although Ogg is better I have thousands of MP3s and reencoding to Ogg will simply reduce their quality below that of the MP3 version. For lots of the files I don't have the original, unencoded versions, so I can't switch without reducing the quality.
Talk about a social faux pas!
You just pissed off a whole bunch of slash dotters by saying "like the vast majority of people out there (who don't read slashdot and never have heard of Ogg)...."
This is not the place to express your opinion unless you actually enjoy reading the work "fuck" or some variation of it used in a reference to you or your name.
As an independent thinker posting on this site, you'd better keep your posts lock-step with those of all the other independent thinkers here!
I sent requests for the iPod (listed above) and iTunes (not listed above) so I can trade Ogg's with my Mac friend.
Most of this info is from Vorbis
"...using Vorbis means your player and encoder choices aren't bound by licensing terms. Right now, you can only choose from a few encoders to create your MP3 files, because most companies won't or can't pay the licensing terms for encoders. Using Vorbis lets you choose from a wide variety of encoders."
A free open standard with not patent restrictions is always the better way to go.
For me its more a matter of principle.
--DarkFrog
If the dead rise again, we're going to have some serious population control issues.
A while ago I looked at the Ogg Vorbis pages and read a rant by that Ogg developer guy about how he listened to Microsoft's examples for WMA 8 and couldn't understand why they were posted at all...
I have to wonder if he has two ears. All of the samples were showing off some sort of stereo imaging technology. WMA 8 has infinitely better imaging at 80-192k(its highest rate) than any other compression technique. It makes a difference to ME anyway.
It's also true that WMA isn't better otherwise:
1. it occasionally gets too agressive with masking
2. ogg is better at 80k
3. ogg is better at near lossless (real high bit rates)
Does anyone know how to improve the stereo imaging? I wonder what WMA does anyway.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Use Exact Audio Copy with LAME and the --r3mix command line, and never worry about quality again.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
I run an indie mastering house with room treatment and scary homebrew monitors, and I've distinguished 256K mp3 from 16 bit AIFF in an ABX double-blind test. I've also got very close to distinguishing dithered 16 bit from truncated 16 bit audio (only about 94% confidence- my ear gave out after about 10 trials! Fatigue!). Ogg Vorbis' strengths are absolutely relevant for high bit depths.
In fact I've done an objective study on it- feeding encoders a 'torture test' sample, subtracting the spectrogram of it from the spectrogram of the original and looking at what was changed. Across the board, Ogg Vorbis does better than mp3 at maintaining both tonal purity and transient accuracy. Pretty much ALL mp3 encoders at ANY bit rate have to make a choice between these qualities, Ogg consistently manages to preserve both at once. At high bit rates it combines the tonal purity of BladeEnc with the transient aggression of Fraunhofer, while both of those encoders make a mess of each other's strong points at any bit rate- Fraunhofer never sounds really tonally convincing, and Blade can't do transients at any bit rate.
I would say that Ogg Vorbis is BEST at really high bit rates. You can always strip it if you want lower bit rates out of it...
Finally someone has the printed mag. Very interesting. Please mod the parent up.
I can hear the difference between 128kbps and CD quality, but I still rip some of my music at 128kbps because I really don't care. It's not that hard to hear it--in your mind--without the imperfections.
It's occured to me a few times that naming and calling Ogg Vorbis files ".og3's" (oh-gee-three) might lessen the unkown factor for the general public. "What's OG3? Oh, it's like a newer, better MP3. Better sound, less space. Try it. The new [insert hardware Ogg player here] plays them and your crappy old MP3's!"
.ogg just fine. My only MP3-only device is a DLink player that I rarely use.
In a way it's stupid, but I think it could help. It's akin to Athlon XP's "1800+" naming scheme; it's saying "you don't know us well, but we're like this well known product but a better value."
Besides, IIRC Vorbis is the codec and Ogg is a chunked/taggged file format that could be used for other audio codecs and even video, so using ".ogg" for Ogg Vorbis is shortsighted anyway. When Xiph finishes their viedo codec maybe it could be ".og4" or whatever number to match MPEG video's latest version (if they use Ogg file format for it).
By the way, I tried to explain Ogg Vorbis to my mom about a month ago. I said I'd like a player for it and told her that MP3 is covered by patents and charges for encoding and creating commercial decoders while Ogg Vorbis is patent and royalty free. She said "I don't care". She has her 20-gigabyte MP3 player with all her favorites ripped to MP3 (by my brother and I) on it. She doesn't care if it's MP3, Ogg, MiniDisc (what she used before this) or CD as long as it's convenient and she can listen to it at work. I think "the revolution" will have to come from the hardware and software vendors and not the typical consumer. The consumer will buy what they can listen to their music on. Ogg Vorbis isn't there yet.
While I'm a big fan of Ogg Vorbis I haven't reripped my CD's yet, even though I almost exclusively use software players that can play
Vorbis has something like 230dB of internal dynamic range.. It's psy model assumes the loudest sound within a time window is at the human pain threshold and compresses accordingly.. Other codecs have a much smaller dynamic range than vorbis and assume the maximum 16bit volume is the human pain threshold, thus assuming that some parts are audiable when they really arn't and vice versa (absolute volume levels affect masking).
This is why Vorbis excels on classic and accoustic music which have a large aparent dynamic range, while other codecs are left in the dust. Vorbis is the only perceptual codec that has a chance of sounding *better* then CDDA (by using a high bitrate Vorbis + 24/96KHz input)..
In my own recordings, (mostly small chamber ensambles) I've found Vorbis files at ~300KBit/sec created from my 24/96 ADAT masters sound noticably better then properly dithered and downmixed 16/44.1 audio. There are still a few gotcha cases where the vorbis is differnt from the orignal on these recordings, due to bugs I'm sure are being fixed, but the differences verge on non-existant and can be solved by throwing a little more bitrate at it.
Now, time to play with some ambisonic recordings.
"some people actually mistook the 128 kBit/sec Ogg samples for the uncoded version"
I challenge you to not find some people who think even a taped copy of a CD is indistinguishable from the original.
--- What?
Maybe I don't want to use the free Ogg library. I want to write my own Ogg player library for a commecial product (I don't want to rely on Xiph for updates and support for example). The specification for Ogg Vorbis is always behind the library implementation. The library is not something you can just reverse engineer and expect to beable to decode future Ogg files. I'm just disappointed by the whole sketchiness of the specification
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You hear the cymbals crash and it sounds more like waves on a beach splashing than a sharp cymbal. it's especially noticable if you get several of them in a row.
Also MP3 compresses the range quite a bit. This isn't noticable on most rock songs, but it is if you listen to classical. Dynamic range is needed if part of the song is just a whisper (like a single flute) and another part is booming loud (the entire percussion is beating away like maniacs).
Of course CDs do this too, I don't like the dynamic range on a CD. 16bits just ain't enough. 20bits or event 24bits would be a LOT better. But CDs don't compress the range quite as badly as MP3s. Ogg Vorbis seems to do the same thing as MP3s but to a lesser extent (to my ears, I don't have any numbers on this).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That's a well known artifact called "pre-echoes".
Sorry, have to disagree. The last thing you want is a legion of people who convert their libraries, notice that the result sounds like garbage, and then spread the meme "This Ogg thing sounds like crap!"
Roughly 5% of the sample population mistook the clips as Pepsi.
Would you be shocked to learn that the vast majority of mp3s as used by people today are not compliant to the MPEG standard? That's right, most mp3s are not standards compliant, because most mp3s include an id3 tag, and the inclusion of an id3 tag into an mpeg stream is definitely invalid according to the mpeg standard.
As a second example, I should mention the practice of packaging an mp3 file together with a .wav file format header. which also renders the mpeg stream invalid according to the standard. This practice is perpetuated by none other than Fraunhofer themselves, who at one time made an mp3 encoder that prepended .wav headers onto mp3 files by default.
Advocating standards support is fine, but from that perspective mp3 as commonly used is just as broken as ogg with regards to international standards.
oh two g. 0 2 g file format. instead of ogg. ogg is just too gutural to be cool. though i guess if some DJs promote ogg format as a tribal thing it might be able to spawn a whole new way of looking at audio media. but that aside. lets call start calling it oh-two-gee. ok? go on pass it on.
Decide for yourself and stick with it. Me, I ripped a CD track into a 192kbps MP3 and an ogg file with the same filesize (level 5?) and listened to them. I chose the one which fit my tastes better (MP3 had much more bass), but I don't need to go around telling everyone that ogg is worthless or inadequate.
If the sound quality is indistinguishable at 128kbps and one is in a free format there is a reason to at least start encoding new files in the ogg format.
I've been looking strictly at car players. It looks like the only one close is the PhatNoise (and the Kenwood AudioKeg). It already supports WAV, MP3, WMA, FLAK, and Audible.com so it looks like a minor issue for them to add OGG later (it supports firmware too). Also possibly SSI America NEO. And I have no idea but if they are flashable perhaps Rockford Fosgate RFXMP3.8 or Blaupunkt MDP-01. I've written all of the above to see what their plans are. Nothing else even looks capable of ever doing OGG (ie Alpine, Sony, etc.)
//m
I play my MP3s on an old computer.
It's not unusual for the thing to slog along at 30-35% CPU capacity doing nothing but running Winamp.
Vorbis jumps that load up to 70%.
Xiph took issues with the monitoring software and asked that I re-run the test using Winamp's diskwriter and gauging processing overhead by how long it took to write the files.
The MP3 took 18 seconds.
The Vorbis took 45 seconds.
Granted, on a faster processor these differences are less significant.
Granted, on new processors with extended command sets these differences might not exist at all.
Granted, newer, streamlined versions of the Ogg Vorbis decoder will improve their standing.
Despite the fact that I agree that Vorbis sounds better than MP3 at a comparative bitrate, I will not be re-encoding or encoding future rips to Ogg Vorbis. At least not until it doesn't try to eat my computer.
The track was Deep Forest - Second Twilight, 1m24s in length. The file was encoding using the default drop-in settings of LAMEv3.92 and OggDropXPd V1.1(20020719). The MP3 was 1.332MB the Ogg was 1.157MB. The computer has 128MBpc133, 200MHz AMD K6, and runs WinXP Pro (and runs it quite well, if you're curious). Winamp v2.81 with the default MP3 and Ogg decoders was used. The disk writing test was run three times with no uneccessary tasks running (I.E. just Winamp, folks).
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
I *think* it's a joke.
Part of the reason Ogg hasn't gotten too popular yet, is simply that it can still be considered brand new. Before 1.0 (i.e. rc3) 64-kbps sounded like crap. In addition, anything other than 44kHz often ended up being encoded incorrectly (a 22kHz song played as fast as the processor would allow).
At this point, there's no BSD port of Ogg 1.0 so many of us can't even try it yet (it might help if they made it more portable, rather than just Linux-only).
I'm not criticizing, or saying not to use it. I'm merely pointing out that it has just recently evolved into something that even matches AAC/MP3pro, so it will take quite some time before many people are willing to trust their files to Ogg, and even longer before you see many devices with Ogg compatibility.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The simple way to look at this is that ogg vs. mp3 is like the difference between vhs and beta. As in the past, ogg (like beta) is better, but mp3 (like vhs) will be, and already is, an adopted standard. The majority of people are using mp3, and for a non-significant difference, will probably not adopt ogg in a wide-spread manner.
Sure, but since Ogg Vorbis is at least as good as MP3, what is your point?
My point had nothing to do with whether ogg was better (IMO, it's not, sound-wise, but to each their own), just that politics should only be used to decide when both formats are otherwise equal. IMO, I'd rather pay a little extra (75 cents on my $200 MP3 player, and Winamp is still free) for what I feel is a better format to my ears.
75 cents today...what will it be tomorrow?
Why it wouldn't be easy for ogg to win
What one application can I use to rip cds to ogg easily? For Windows? for Mac? For linux?
Now lets toughen it up a little, lets say I want variable bit rate, auto naming of songs, and I'm sure there are many other things.
Does anything compair to what is currently out there for mp3s?
Unless you're chained to your desk all day.
"Especially at 64kbps Ogg Vorbis won over convincingly, and left the competition behind. From 128kbit/s, the noticeable difference between the formats became significantly lower, such that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3, to most ears, was difficult to differentiate."
It all depends on how good your ears are trained.
I've been a self-proclaimed 'psychoacoustic audiophile' for awhile, and I have learned tons from fellow people at HA and other great sites. If trained to hear such differences as preecho and other things, OGG *greatly* increases in quality over many many other formats, including MP3, at almost every bitrate or quality setting. Hell, WMA just raises decibles to "sound" better (uhm, near-origional reproducability anyone?)
Run some of your own tests, do some ABX'ing, and then report in. Don't trust these, and don't trust others' ears over yours, ever.
Perhaps the best site ever for psychoacoustic recording:
Hydrogen Audio
For MP3, the guys over at r3mix.net have put a lot of effort into fine-tuning the LAME settings to get "archival-quality" MP3s. Archival-quality by them is defined as MP3s that are indistinguishable from CD audio by people with very good ears and very high-end audio equipment. That sounds perfect for me, since I don't have great ears, and I don't have high-end audio equipment. If *they* don't hear any degradation, I know I won't. And by following their recommendations I don't have to waste a lot of time fiddling with various settings and trying to hear if my music was messed up by the encoding process.
So, is there any similar concensus for Ogg?
I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of answers like: "If you want full CD-quality, keep the CDs", and "Why not just try it at various settings and see how it sounds." So I'll answer these now: I don't really care if it's CD-quality, I just don't like the idea that I might, someday, be able to hear the difference, and I can't afford to store WAVs and don't like fiddling with CDs. I don't want to just "try it", because to be sure of what I was getting I'd have to encode and listen to a bunch of different kinds of music at different settings, and I don't have time for that crap. I'd rather stick with r3mix VBR MP3s.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Btw, patents don't make software bad. There is potential for abuse (in which case I can fall back to ogg), but it is nice to have your software protected.
Cool ass, way to go ogg, MP3 always SUcked ass. never where cd-quality, or anything like it.
have you tried any ABX tests using the LAME encoder? I've done some of my own, and I have pretty sensitive hearing for this stuff, and I have been unable to ABX any samples encoded with lame --alt-preset standard. Although, this testing was done with a $100 pair of headphones, so perhaps your equipment is better than mine - I'd be curious if you could try a test using lame --alt-preset standard and see if you can hear a difference in an ABX test.
- Windows Media Audio (nearly the same codec that has been out for years now, uses selectable constant bit rate, e.g. 64kbps, 128kbps, etc.)
- Windows Media Audio Lossless (I have seen a description of this to mean mathematically identical to the source material, consumes somewhere between 400MB-600MB per CD.)
- Windows Media Audio Variable Bit Rate (VBR) (Uses a low end and high end range to encode, e.g. 50-95 kbps, 90-128 kbps.
If you have WMP 9 installed, go to Tools | Options | Copy Music, the drop list on the format has these 3 listed. Someone else posted that Ogg is VBR, so I would think for this to be a fair comparision, WMA 9 VBR should have been used.Untrue. As I wrote to Monty last month (he didn't reply):
That's all very noble, but I think what you meant to say was:
I'm sure you weren't intentionally trying to be deceptive, so I thought I'd clarify.
I'm sure that iTunes and the iPod will eventually work with ogg, and at that point, I won't really care what people use. I'll download in mp3, cause that's what the release groups are using, buy my cd's of the stuff that I want, and rip using Ogg. It sounds better. Well, everything but the name. Frankly, I don't really care if it overtakes mp3 or rules the industry. It sounds a little bit better to me than even 256 Lame vbr, so I'm using it.
Human ear can detect near 20-bit resolution, CD quality is 16-bit, according to the Hype as soon as RIAA finalizes a way to copy protect DVD Audio 24-bit resolution up to 192 kHz (4 C program thats supposed to work :) the CD format will begin to be phased out, DVD Audio will begin to be ushered in to a larger amount of titles... hardware support for DVD Audio playback will rise, and good by lousy CD quality music and possibly MP3s will only exist as a legacy format. .WMA 9 supposedly can be 24-bit 192kHz so where does OGG fit in?
Most people who have compared it to other codecs, including MP3 and Ogg, claim it is superior. You can read some of the discussions at Hydrogen Audio in the MPC forums.
I understand MPC, unlike Ogg, may be encumbered by some patents (as is MP3), but for a pure quality comparison, it should be included. Does anyone know why/if it was omitted from this comparison?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Whilst avoiding your possibly crappy sound card...
* Rip as best you can you favorite song.
* Encode it with a few encoders with what you believe to be the best quality settings.
* Decode them back into raw wav's and burn them onto a CDR.
* Listen to that CDR in your stereo, noting which tracks were encoded with which encoder.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
...to switch?
I don't know about anyone else, but I want people to switch to OSS not necessarily for those reasons, but also because they feel that OSS will get the job done better.
Of course, that is in no way in touch with reality. The reality is that commercial organizations switch to new technologies usually due to financial reasons. If the new technologies also happen to get the job done better, then that is a bonus, not a necessity.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I have over 7000 tracks from my CD collection riped to Ogg at 350 kb/s. My only complaint is that the audience clapping at the end of a few tracks is noticably distorted.
I am wondering if anyone else has noticed the same thing.
I have thought of writing to the ogg, and if anyone else has noticed it may do so.
More and more players these days are MP3 and WMA compatible, like my Rio SP250 CD-MP3 player. With upgradeable firmware (like the SP250), it couldn't be that hard to add Ogg into the mix. I mean, nobody I know of uses WMA, but there it is. That would solve a good deal of your conversion issues right there. Simply don't. But until I see media devices go in that direction, you won't see me creating anything in Ogg anytime soon.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Yeah they'll take a paper letter about as seriously as they would take a
compliment about their website layout and design sent to them in a brown
paper wrapped box from Ted Kazynsky...
They'll believe you even own a computer that can listen to ogg- - sure they
will... ha
I participated in the test myself, and it was a true blind test; it was really hard to tell between the three best sounding files at 128kbit, but there were definetely three codecs better than the rest at 128 kbit. And after receiving the results, I was glad that I could trust my ears, as I correctly identified the uncompressed version at 64 kbit and put it 2nd at 128 kbit.
I am really annoyed by MP3 artifacts, and I observed that I became more sensitive to them during the years of listening MP3s. This coincides with blindly placing MP3 on the bottom in both tests.
I am really excited about the outcome and it will have two consequences for me:
1)I will get an OGG Encoder/Player asap and encode my CDs in OGG from now on.
2) I will enjoy listening to compressed music much more than to date as I know now that I wasn't able to tell the difference from the original at 128k.
Here are my personal test result, and at 128k I was already a bit tired, and I could not really find a difference between the top 3:
Ihre Bewertung für 64 kBit/s-Codecs.:
Platz 1: unkomprimiert (WAV)
Platz 2: AAC
Platz 3: Ogg Vorbis
Platz 4: MP3Pro
Platz 5: RealAudio
Platz 6: Windows Media Audio
Platz 7: MP3
Ihre Bewertung für 128 kBit/s-Codecs:
Platz 1: Windows Media Audio
Platz 2: unkomprimiert (WAV)
Platz 3: Ogg Vorbis
Platz 4: AAC
Platz 5: RealAudio
Platz 6: MP3
Platz 7: MP3Pro
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
Ogg probably has patent encumbrances too. It's just the relevent patent holders haven't stepped forward yet. (Maybe biding their time until the format is well accepted?) I mean, JPEG Group tried very hard to make sure their format was patent-free, and they got sued anyway.
That would be decibel, as in 1/10th of a bel. You know, a bel. Sure, that one.
You can stream OGG via peercast and either oddcast/winamp or ices2 on linux.
The quality is brilliant, even for a 24kbps ogg stream!