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

Google Translated link

[CvD]

(some karma whoring :-)

Here is the link to the translated article (Google)

Conversion

[billd]

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)

Re:Time To Switch

[Anonymous Coward]

1. can anyone recommend a conversion utility for mp3->ogg?

As said many many many times before: don't convert one lossy compression format to another.

Re:Time To Switch

[nervlord1]

ARGH
we keep saying this, but u just wont listen

Converting from one lossy format, to another = alot worse image quality.. imagine making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy and ull get the picture.. the quality degrades over time and you don't get all the good qualities of OGG.

Rip from the source.

Better than the fish...

[OneFix]

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.

Just because it's "the best"...

[Pedrito]

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.

Re:Time To Switch

[incuo]

Without re-ripping all your music, you can actually conserve audio quality by using XMMS (xmms.org) like this:

1. Open an MP3 file in XMMS;
   
2. Go to Preferences in XMMS (CTRL-P);
   
3. Choose 'Disk Writer Plugin' as the output plugin;
   
4. Close Preferences;
   
5. Play the MP3 file in XMMS;
   
6. Go to your home directory (or to wherever XMMS saved your file.wav);
   
7. oggenc the WAV file generated by XMMS from the MP3 file.
   
8. That's it.
   
   

Of course, quality depends on the parameters to oggenc. You can use something like

oggenc -q 7 file.wav -o file.ogg,

assuming file.wav is the WAV generated by XMMS from file.mp3.

Good luck.