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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!"
A babelfish English transtaltion can be found here.
Rich
do not convert from mp3->ogg
this will not get you the result you want to
i am afraid you will need to re-rip all your music
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
For companies to produce portable Vorbis players, they need to be made aware that there is a market for them. Every day, I hear the same thing from Vorbis listeners; 'I'm not buying a hardware portable music player unless it supports Ogg Vorbis.' It's nice to hear, but we can't do anything about it (we're not a hardware company). So, this page is here to let you send that message to people who can. Remember, be polite!
The Companies:
Frontier Labs - URL - has told a lot of people that they're considering implementing Vorbis support for the NEX II machine. Here's their information:
Frontier Labs
Unit 2206 - 8, Cyberincubator, Kodak House II
No. 321 Java Road
North Point, Hong Kong
Telephone: 852.2527.3322
Fax: 852.2528.5277
E-mail: techsupport@frontierlabs.com
iRiver - URL - has said they are planning to support Ogg Vorbis in the future via firmware upgrade, but the schedule is not yet finalized. Here's their information:
iRiver America
1716 Ringwood Avenue
San Jose, CA 95131
Telephone: 1-408-452-7940
Fax: 1-408-452-9944
E-mail: contact@iriveramerica.com
UPDATE: Forwarded E-mail from iRiver America
The engineers have Ogg Vorbis under consideration to support. However, at this time, there is no decision whether it will be supported in the future or not.
Regards,
Erica L. Briggs
Customer Service Representative
iRiver America, Inc.
Direct: 408.452.7940
Wouldn't you like to see Vorbis on the super-sexy iPod? We would, too. Here's some contact information for Apple Computer (URL):
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
Telephone: 408-996-1010
UPDATE: Don't forget to drop a note to Apple about the iPod at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html!
Other companies producing audio hardware:
Archos Technology Inc. - URL
3-A Goodyear
Irvine, CA 92618
Telephone: (949) 609-1400
Fax: (949) 609-1414
ReQuest Multimedia - URL
435 2nd Ave.
Troy, NY 12182
E-mail: bizdev@request.com
Evolution Technologies - URL
118 Kitty Hawk Drive
Morrisville, NC 27560
Telephone: 919-544-3777 / toll-free: 866-848-8070
E-mail: info@nowevolution.com
UPDATE: Note from Evolution Technologies
Evolution Technologies, Inc. is committed to support our consumers music appetite. We will support the formats that are consistent with both their desires and good business practices. While we have not ruled out supporting "open source" formats, we must first evaluate the acceptance levels with the buying public so that our organization can justify the expense of developing a new compatible CODEC. When the demand is sufficient, we will support the technology.
Sonic Blue - URL
2841 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1838
Telephone: (408) 588-8000
I-Jam Multimedia LLC - URL
1092 National Parkway
Schaumburg, IL 60173
Telephone: 847-839-1233
Fax: 847-839-1277
E-mail: ehamnett@geltzerpr.com
Alaris, Inc. - URL
44061 Nobel Drive
Fremont, CA 94538
Creative Labs, Inc. - URL
Developer Relations
1901 McCarthy Blvd.
Milpitas, California 95035
Telephone: 408-546-6425
Fax: 408-432-6717
E-mail: devmusic@creativelabs.com
Daisy Technology, LLC - URL
111 N. Market Street, Suite 624
San Jose, CA 95113
Telephone: 408-286-7697
Fax: 408-351-3330
E-mail: info@daisytech-usa.com
Procell Media - URL
69 Wrexham Road
Whitchurch, Shropshire
SY13 1HT
UNITED KINGDOM
Telephone: +44 (0)1948 665048
Fax: +44 (0)1948 667099
G-NET Canada Headquarters - URL
11 Sinclair Court
Cambridge, Ontario
N1T 1K2 CANADA
Telephone: 519-623-4901
Fax: 519-623-3229
Gnuyen
It is you or your earphones. Why don't you people *invest* in good earphones? For example, for $50 you can get a very high quality KOSS earphones and your music listening experience will be unbelievable enjoyable! You don't have to buy HIFI equipment which costs several hundreds of dollars - buy decent earphones!
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.
However with a component amp and hi-fi speakers, it is easily to hear that mp3 has serious deficiencies up until around ~256kb. 320 vbs is pretty darn close to CD tho.
mp3 particularly has a bad habit of turning the treble into a munched up whooshing sound, i believe this is due to the higher sample rate necessary for higher frequencies. When you restrict this too much, its not so good for sound quality.
My local alternative radio station www.radioactive.co.nz has a big mp3 server they leave on at night, its very easy to pick.
Funny you should bring this up... It's amazing how much more quality you can squeeze out of your EXISTING MP3 collection just by getting some better audio hardware. Before anyone starts taking my advice too far and goes to their local "overpriced audiophile extreme" store, here's how you can get GOOD sound INEXPENSIVELY:
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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
They used the Fraunhofer MP3 codec from MusicMatch 7.2 (same for Thomson's MP3Pro), the AAC was the FhG Eval Build from Aug 23, Ogg Vorbis 1.0, the Real Audio from HelixProducer 9 Plus, and WMA Series 9 Beta (Build 2798).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
This is not 100% true.
.ogg) to .wav (mpg321 + ogg123 will happily do that).
Since both (mp3 + ogg vorbis) use a psycho accoustic model that drops "unrecognizable" information and both models are quite close, you might not hear a difference.
Just do the test:
1. Take one of your (r3mix) mp3s and convert it to ogg.
2. Decode both (.mp3 +
3. Do a diff of the waves, maybe you'll have to adjust a small timeshift.
4. Look at the diff and drop your jaw while looking at the tiny jiggle in the LSB.
But:
Now rip that song again and encode directly to ogg.
The quality is much better.
Brief:
When converting mp3 to ogg you (usually) don't loose quality,
but a direct rip to ogg will (usually) be better.
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
What do you mean, there's little reason? There's little reason for the consumer, because the consumer doesn't give a monkey's: if people really cared about the sound quality, Kazaa and Gnutella wouldn't be flooded with 128kbit MP3s. MP3s encoded at a higher bitrate can be used as a solution to all of MP3's audio problems, and storage is cheap, so yes, it's unlikely that there'll be an instant switch to any better format, and if there is, it won't come from the consumer.
/sideways/, but still going in the same direction. Instead of being on the centre path of MP3, you can switch to Ogg, and still have MP3 at your right hand. You're given /more/ choice, not less. You now have a choice whether to use OGG or MP3 in many applications. That's a good thing, right?
Now, for the content provider, it's a different story entirely. Thomson/Fraunhofer are actively pursuing royalty fees, and all the other "next generation" codecs do too. Except Vorbis. With Vorbis (one of the Ogg formats; there are several), audio can be coded at a lower bitrate and sound the same as a higher-bitrated MP3, and there's no royalty fee which means the development costs are lower, and (potentially) the product is cheaper. Thomson aren't making any friends running around with their team of lawyers and threatening people left right and centre with license-fee demands. If a good quality alternative presents itself (quality as a function of price and ease of use, rather than audio quality), developers will be tempted to switch. From what I hear, the Vorbis libraries are very easy to use.
New formats are being picked up by software developers (especially console game developers, where RAM and Storage are at a premium). Once developers start using the format, they'll use it in other products too. If it costs little to add a codec to encoding products (and well, the vorbis libraries are free, but you still have to pay a guy to learn the APIs and program for them), then there's little point in not implementing it.
Ironically, Thomson/Fraunhofer are trying to play down the significance of MP3 because they're trying to sell AAC, which benefits all alternative codecs pretty much equally.
Finally, don't be a fool. No one's asking anyone to recode anything. Unless there was an outright ban on the MP3 format tomorrow (and some way to enforce it), there's no point recoding your audio. There's no isolation in using Ogg when you can use MP3 at the same time. Winamp, the next version of RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player (via a DirectX plugin) all support OGG Vorbis files. To the consumer, little changes... to the average windows user, they probably won't even know! Windows hides file-extensions by default, so it'll just be another "Winamp Media File".
There's no "step backwards"; it's a step
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.
KDE's Konqueror has got full OGG and CDDB support. You just type in the URL "audiocd:/" and you get a list of
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Sorry about that, some of you have pointed out that I used the same translation for both.
It should have read...
BabelFish: "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
WorldLingo: (using Computer, Data Processing as the subject) "RealAudio Surround, improved with low bit rates Windows Media 9 beta"
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?
"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.
Uhm, no.
When you decode your MP3 in XMMS, you'll have all the wonderful, yummy MP3 artifacts in that nice WAV file you just wrote. These artifacts will be encoded into the Ogg, along with whatever other artifacts Ogg may introduce. Decoding an MP3 to a WAV does not exempt you from the lossiness that is MP3.
Guess what? The quality will be worse than the MP3 was by itself, and worse than what Ogg could do from a clean rip.
In short: Don't do it, unless you have an Ogg-only player that you need to play the music on, and you *cough* "lost your original."
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
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.
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.
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.
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%.
Just thought it interesting that everyone is posting babelfish / translating service translations when there is an English version available from the site.
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.
Here the original article in English
Keep it simple baby. =)
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?