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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!"
So, am I going deaf? or are some people exagerating again?
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
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
The thing is that most people really couldnt care less about the sound quality of their music. They're happy to listen to tape recordings of radio broadcasts of music on shitty boom-boxes. They simply don't know the difference.
For mine, this explains the massive boom in P2P music swapping networks. The chimps on campuses and in homes around the States download these tunes in mp3 format and play them through 10W speakers and really don't give a shit. These are the people who are costing the music industry while people who actually care about music quality are still buying, because they actually care about the sound. This also explains the steady increase (and current mini-boom) in vinyl sales.
The point is that MP3 will continue to grow, despite its flaws. OGG will remain a somewhat niche format, preferred by audiophiles. Just like VHS and Windows, they hold the market share despite their flaws.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
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.
Would it not be a better idea to allow the participants to become familiar with the original, source audio, and then get them to rate the various compressed formats (without them knowing which is which) as to how much the sound like the original?
Surely "How much does this sound like the original?" is a better test than "Which sounds best?"
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
anybody else reminded of the "Pepsi Challenge" by this? the consumers always picked the pepsi when blindfolded and handed coke and pepsi, but when they went home, what did they keep buying?
hint: it wasn't pepsi.
-- james
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!
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!
Since when is that negative?
I think you have listen too long to propaganda, in real life Joe Consumer will run away screaming from anything that will not allow him to pirate. (Especially if he is used to pirate it)
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.
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