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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!"
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
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.
This story will only be redundant when I can buy an ogg compatible portable device at my local electronics store.
That could be soon, thanks to recent developments, but anything that helps it happen sooner will be helpful.
I think the listening test qualifies as helping, so it's hardly redundant.
(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:
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.
this will not get you the result you want to
i am afraid you will need to re-rip all your music
Unfortunately, this is a major issue which will always hinder the adoption of Ogg.
If you can't convert from MP3 to Ogg without losing sound quality (which you can't) then I think you'll find an extremely large number of people (that is, the 99.9% of people out in the world that don't read Slashdot) reluctant to change.
We have to face it, someone whose downloaded even as little as 50 songs from Napster is never going to touch Ogg if converting is going to screw over the sound quality.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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
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.
Don't convert your mp3s. Keep 'em. From now on, if you rip a new cd, use Ogg.
Maybe on a boring afternoon you could re-rip your already ripped cd's to Ogg and send the old mp3s to the bitbucket.
Fraunhofer's mp3pro doesn't have mp3->mp3pro converters. Why should Ogg Vorbis need that?
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!
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]
.. 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
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? ]=-
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 agree. converting a wav file is like taking a piece of paper and crushing it so it'll fit in your pocket. sure, the paper can be smoothed out again to the same size as the original paper, but all the creases would still be there.
so basically taking an mp3 and encoding it into ogg, is like taking a crushed piece of paper, uncrushing it, and crushing it more carefully again.
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...
Why believe some snooty, know-it-all "audiophile"'s opinion on it? Do you really need to wait for someone else's thoughts on the subject before you can take action? Get a backbone, and TRY IT FOR YOURSELF.
If you don't, it's only your loss, not anybody else's.