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!"

Comments

Of quality & compression

[Powercntrl]

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.

Re:I actually scored the 64kbps sample above..

[Mwongozi]

I always wondered about tests like this.

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?"

Ogg doesn't need to "win"...

[mcrbids]

There's an interesting detail that's commonly misunderstood about OSS projects. They don't have to be #1 in market share to "win".

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 .ogg will win - eventually. So, re-rip your CDs, and with every single song, .ogg moves forward that much more.

So, give it time, and ENJOY!