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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 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
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
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.
(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:
It is not so easy. You will, in best case scenario, end up with crappy sounding music. Since the algorithms for Ogg and mp3 are different, you can not just "translate" it from one to the other. You could encode your mp3s (say via wav) to ogg, but then you will have had destructive compression applied to the songs twice.
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
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 don't see the need to create any non-ogg CD rips anymore. What's the problem with having both formats?
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.
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.
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
Or maybe you need to see a doctor , just joking :)
Seriously, 128kbs/s is clearly different from CD quality, it's just not as brilliant, as clear, or as limpid, well you feel that there is very subtle thing missing. But you need good HIFI
MP3s don't have as good bass as CD quality, at least from what I've heard. Oggs do seem to handle bass very well though; quite often I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between them and the real thing.
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!
It's you, you're going deaf. 128k MP3's sound like hell. They're OK for listening to music on cheap headphones while mowing the lawn or something, but in any kind of real situation, 192 or 256K mp3 is minimally acceptable. I'm anxiously awaiting the first OGG compatible portable.
:-/
Of course, depending on the kind of music you listen to, munging up the waveform may not have any noticable effect
Perhaps the 64 kbit format could be called a hard-boiled ogg.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully results like this will make hardware manufacturers more keen to include ogg support in their players.
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.
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
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.
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?
Floating point maths is never a problem for hardware encoders. You just need to do your floating point math through fixed point math instead. It's more work for the silicon developers, but certainly not a problem.
Just a nitpick. Think nothing of it :)
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
Personally, I think one of the main incentives is not for the listeners, but for people who sell anything with an encoder in it: they won't have to pay Fraunhoffer. Once mp3 players are no longer maintained, the listeners will switch, just as they did with previous media changes.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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!
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.
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]
What? Rip from CD? Re-rip? Heck, boy, I just download them from WinMX, Kazaa, DirectConnect, etc. Tphffft - buy a CD. I'm the bastard the RIAA is trying to get!!!
and it has been proven in tests that soft leather moccasins are better for your feet and feel better than the horribly designed dress shoes that most of us office workers wear.... yet widespread acceptance and the ability to buy dress-moccasins in a store cripples acceptance..
You want Ogg to win? it HAS to be in the hardware players.. and more specifically, in the next firmware update for many of the recent players (NEX-II.... Audiotron... etc...)
the numero-uno reason people use mp3 is for their portable devices.. If the only place I could listen to mp3's was my computer then I wouldn't waste my time encoding them.... except for maybe trading them... but that's illegal and nobody would do that...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
As a moderately proficient German reader, I'm glad to be able to enjoy these kinds of technical articles.
Kind of OT, what other languages are folks finding interesting in today's Internet world? I've seen a lot of content in English, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish, but really, not much else, aside from the Italian page or two.
Is the Internet speeding up the proliferation of these 5 languages, and these 5 alone? And what happens when the Western world all speaks English/German/Spanish and the Eastern world all speaks English/Chinese/Japanese? I tried learning Japanese, but my meager brain was not up to the task. German and Spanish come fairly easily to an English speaker.
MORTAR COMBAT!
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?
.. 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
"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.
2. what's the best linux, windows and/or mac ogg player?
Try WinAMP for windows, and FreeAMP for for everything else
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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!
but don't be downhearted.
Like running, listening is a skill that varies from person to person and can be improved with practice.
I've worked in a recording studio through which many many people have been and I've witnessed the variation first hand.
engineer : "Which do you prefer, this... or this?"
client : "Okay, play the second one now."
What makes me smile is that when I was a lad we were satisfied copying records to tape by playing the record loud and utilising the condenser mike on the tape recorder. Good quality was when there wasn't the sound of someone walking in the room followed by "your tea's ready, oh. what are you doing?" "shhhh mum, we're taping" on it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Okay, so I've got about half my 300-CD collection ripped. Some is ripped with 128k MusicMatch (with crappy joint stereo artifacts and pumping), some with 160k LAME, and more recent stuff with 160-256k LAME. I want to finish ripping everything, and re-do all the old stuff, at once (I even found an old 18-CD SCSI jukebox to help automate it just a little).
:) ), can I then transcode to MP3 at a lower quality (96 to 128 or so) without significant artifacts? Or will the simple fact of combining two lossy compression steps totally hose me? (sort of like re-compressing a JPEG image)
So, if I'm going to go through all this trouble, I'd better rip it to as good a format as possible. I'm generally happy with 160+ LAME, but if OGG can give better quality with smaller size, then I'm all for that. I briefly considered a lossless format (like FLAC), but the idea of a half-terabyte array for music, while cool in an uber-geeky way, doesn't sit well with my bank account right now.
I need to retain some kind of MP3 compatibility, for small portables (64k Nomad) and my "long trip" portable (20G Rio Riot), not to mention my three Rio Receivers (though we've got 3rd party software supporting FLAC and some OGG at this point).
My question, then, is this: If I rip everything to ogg at quality 6 or 7 (it's sounding like 6 would be 'best' for my purposes -- I'll never own a super-audiophile tube amp with 20-pound speaker magnets
I understand why you can't take a decent mp3 and encode it to a 'better' ogg, the information simply isn't there. But if the output of a q7 ogg decoding is a near-perfect wav file, can't I then encode that at a lower bitrate without any significant differences from an original mp3 rip? Or will inaudible artifacts and/or the resultant lossy frequency spectrum coming out of the ogg decoder confuse the MP3 encoder?
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
Whatever you do, folks, don't convert your MP3 files to ogg.
This reminds me of people that converted their GIFs to JPEG because "JPEG is better". *shudder*
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
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.
Well I took the Pepsi challenge back in the 80's as a kid and always chose Coke.
Back OT though, the quality of OGG at 64k is really unbelievable. Maybe Nullsoft will consider making this a part of their NSV format.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
... ogg too. Ogg is the greatest. I love ogg too. Ogg is the greatest.
Dammit, shut that thing off!
I know some people went to great lengths to do this test carefully, using high quality amplifiers and waveform analyzers and what more. I simply plugged headphones into my SB Live, listened to each piece twice, and then gave them a grade from 1-5.
I thought the 128 kbit was very hard because there were hardly any noticeable differences between the samples. The fact that they were very short didn't help. I handed out 5 points to 5 of the seven pieces, so the order there is almost random.
After the testing period had finished, C'T sent me the following results:
Ihre Bewertung für 64 kBit/s-Codecs:
Platz 1: MP3Pro
Platz 2: unkomprimiert (WAV)
Platz 3: Windows Media Audio
Platz 4: Ogg Vorbis
Platz 5: AAC
Platz 6: RealAudio
Platz 7: MP3
Ihre Bewertung für 128 kBit/s-Codecs:
Platz 1: AAC
Platz 2: MP3
Platz 3: Windows Media Audio
Platz 4: RealAudio
Platz 5: unkomprimiert (WAV)
Platz 6: Ogg Vorbis
Platz 7: MP3Pro
The order may not be what I'd like it to be, but my only conclusion can be that compression in general is good enough for me!
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!
Simple. A bit of pitch-shifting and filtering, and the sound to be reproduced will heterodyne with your tinnitus, resulting in lovely full-bandwidth audio playback. The tinnitus will still be there, but masked by the other frequencies, and in fact becomes part of the music!
Most everyone I know uses Winamp to play their Mp3's. Some of my friends were actually amazed when I told them that WMP could even PLAY mp3's This is one area in which the general populace's ignorance is a good thing, because there is a .ogg plugin for Winamp. Oh yeah, and everye on the planet hates RealJukebox.
So if the post says it's good at low bitrates, that implies it's bad at high?
Also, Ogg supports streaming.
I've seen another test showing the opposite: At 64kbps mp3pro was the way to go, while Ogg rocked at 160kbps and up. That was from another listening test I even think was posted on Slashdot.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why? Do you never use high bitrates? Or are you just assuming that if it's better at low bitrates, it must be better at all bitrates?
If it's the latter, that's quite naive.
If you think the oppposite (assuming low bitrates sound good => high bitrates sound bad), that's also quite naive.
The test doesn't show that Ogg is bad at high bitrates, so why *not* use it if it's patent free and better at low?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Maybe the current encoder is faster, or can be made faster. If not, Ogg has a nontrivial disadvantage that hasn't gotten discussed much.
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.
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? ]=-
I'd like to see an audio encoding comparison test conducted this way:
Source material: About 50 clips, 20 seconds each representing a variety of musical styles. Two thirds should be normal music and the rest will be material that is known to be difficult to encode using psychoacoustic encoding.
Bit rates: each encoding will be tested at multiple bit rates. The purpose is to find the threshold at which the codec is indistinguishable from PCM. Another interesting threshold is the bit rate at which the codec can be distinguished from PCM but the artifacts are not annoying.
Media: Material will be encoded and decoded back to PCM and recorded onto CD-Rs. Listeners will listen to them on their favorite high-quality audio gear, not through a sound card and PC speakers.
CD-Rs are numbered and individually customized. All disks will have the same order of sound clips, but each one will be encoded with a different encoder/bitrate. Disks may be mailed to listeners and the results gathered by a web form.
The clips will be divided into two groups. The first group is designed to detect the bitrate threshold for each codec where the result is indistinguishable from the PCM source. Each clip will appear three times on the disk using the R/A/B methodology: R is the reference (original PCM), one of A or B is the encoded/decoded clip and the other is identical to the reference. The listeners will need to answer whether A or B is the original.
The result for each codec will be the bitrate at which listeners were not able do discern with any statistical significance the difference between the encoded and original PCM.
The second set of tests is for rating bitrates below the threshold of indistinguishability. Each clip will appear twice: first the reference then the same clip encoded by some unknown codec/bitrate combination. The listeners will rate them on a subjective scale of 1 to 5:
1. The quality of the encoded clip is inadequate.
2. The encoded has noticable annoying artifacts but it is still adequate for enjoying the music in situations where a higher rate is not practical.
3. The encoded clip has a noticably lower quality but is not annoying in any way.
4. Different, but it is not possible to really tell which one is better.
5. Indistinguishable from the source.
Results for each codec/bitrate will be averaged for all clips and presented as a graph. Results for normal and known-hard clips may also be displayed separately.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
People always say that you shouldn't convert from one compressed format to another- it will be horrible etc., but when you think about it, that is what is going on when you rip a DVD to divx.
.> mpg2 (lower bitrate) -> divx.
Actually I have some Dr. Who episodes that I recorded off satellite, and here's the path of compression:
1) Dr Who ep is transmitted on digital satellite in mpg2.
2) I record it on my Hauppage TV card (mpg2)
3) I divxify it.
So: mpg2 -> analog
And these episodes look much better quality than people ripping from official BBC videos... (When ripping divx from videos the codec has lots of fun encoding the wobbly bits at the top/bottom of the screen, video noise etc.).
OK, so I haven't tried converting mp3s to ogg so I don't know anything about that, but as for compressed format -> compressed format in general is concerned I have provided a counter-example.
graspee
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!
What I hear from the apple rumor mills is that iTunes 4 will have a plugin architecture and ogg support. It probably won't happen until 2003 sometime, but it is coming.
Did you digitalize all your vinyl and burnt in on CD when the CD came around?
What about my car audio that only plays MP3s?
Now that Tremor has been released under the BSD license, try petitioning your manufacturer to release a firmware upgrade that adds Ogg support. That is, unless your car player has a cheap dedicated decoder chip that takes an MPEG audio bitstream on one pin and puts a WAV bitstream on another.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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 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%.
I'm guessing you find 128k MP3s 'acceptable' quality. Personally, to be tolerable I only generally rip to 160-170 VBR MP3. I could go bigger but it starts to get to ridiculous sizes. For my ears, it sounds LOTS better.
Now contrast that with an Ogg Vorbis file encoded at around 140k. Amazing differerence. By going from 128 to 140, you acheive an even greater increase is sound quality than taking an MP3 from 128 to 170+. But to me Ogg is noticebly better than MP3 even at 128.
Personally, I find the bass (kick drums) to sound a lot tighter. The sound spectrum seems to open up, in comparison the MP3 sounds muffled. MP3 steals some impact from the music, sort of how just slightly blurring a jpeg can acheive higher compression. The MP3 sounds blurred to me. Ogg sounds tighter, sharper, and more clear. For reference, I primarily listen on a Cambridge Soundworks Digital using w/SPDIF inputs.
Music listening is very subjective, but theres just no doubt that Ogg Vorbis does represent a much more efficient encoding algorithm.
One song might sound great at 64kbps while another might need 128 or even more.
ogg comes with a quality setting, which will encode the music in the quality you need. You won't throw away disk-space for easily encodable files and you won't have difficult songs that sound bad.
Yea -- it's kind of like finding out that their has been a new type of energy that works better and cheaper than electricity (the only catch is - no appliences can take advantage of it.) And silly us -- we have just spent a bunch buying all sorts of appliences that run off of good old electricity.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Open source would probably be better served if some thought was given to naming the products. Ogg Vorbis doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And whoever thought to name the DivX format after the failed format of the exact same name ought to be shot. And then healed and shot again.
You can't (and don't want to) switch your mp3s to ogg because you won't get any quality back. You might have smaller files but you will also suffer from further quality loss in the decode/reencoding process.
Sorry. You'll have to re-rip your music from the source CD to ogg, or keep any mp3s you downloaded.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
When a respected magazine like Audiophile or at least Sound and Vision does a test like this, I will believe the results. Until then I will continue to listen to my compact-disc-sound-quality compact discs.
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)
You may however notice that the OggVorbis encoder often will produce files with an higher (and sometimes lower) bitrate than expected. This is due to the encoder's design, somewhat biased towards VBR encoding, and not very accurate when targeting a given bit rate.
However, OggVorbis sound better than MP3 for the same bitrate.
As for listening tests, these formats are targeted for humans, and part of the compression process is to throw away information, selected according to the response of the human ear. In the end, its how good it sounds to humans that matters. Any test software would have to be based on some model of human ears.
Just thought it interesting that everyone is posting babelfish / translating service translations when there is an English version available from the site.
Then it's bound to LOSE in the marketplace!
Edith Keeler Must Die
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.
Consider the following results (I have the full magazine article):
Wav: best to worst: 21%/17%/15%/13%/13%/11%/10%
What this means is that of all users 21% thought the WAV file had the best sound of all samples, 17% thought it was second best, etc., while at the lower end 10% still thought it had the worst (all encoded versions were rated better).
The statistical average (just guessing which is the original) is 1/7=14,29%
This means that the truth of the whole matter is: users (probably including you and me) cannot really tell much difference between the original and encoded versions, even though everyone likes to think he has superior hearing (some exceptions such as music professionals only prove the rule).
Just to be on the safe side, a VBR recording with a minimum of 192 kbps should probably do it (which is what I use for my personal stuff on my MP3 player).
I can already hear many scream and shout, but why don't you do a test yourself? Have a friend encode some songs with different encoders at different settings and write a script that randomizes the playing order (and writes the order to a log file). Listen to it and see if you scored much higher to the statistical average afterwards.
But be fair and make it double-blind, like you should not know which encoders and which settings were used and whether and how many originals are among the samples. Then just say which ones you believe to be closest to the reference original.
Maybe you'll really surprise yourself.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
The test looked something like his: Blind test, 3 sets (different music styles) of 7 sound samples (20 seconds each) in Wave format, one original, the others compressed. Rank them in order of "best sounding", if you can't decide in the middle, just rank randomly there.
At 128 kbit/s Ogg got almost exactly the same distribution of rankings as the original, 21% at rank 1, 16% at 2 (original 17%), and 15% at 3. IOW >50% of voters placed it in the top 3. Next best for place one was WMA (13%), Real got 12%, the others 11% each. For top 3 it's WMA 42%, Real 41% ,MP3 and MP3Pro both 40% and AAC 34%. AAC got 26% votes for rank 7.
IOW such that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3, to most ears, was difficult to differentiate doesn't enumerate Ogg for a reason.
The "real" (not Real ;-) test with only 8 persons was different - and no, I'm not going to post he results.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It would be interesting to have a redefined CD format that contains a OGG stream. It should be VBR so the masterer can play with the amount of allowable distortion for various passages. The compression could vary to fit the amount of music to be put on the CD.
Why not?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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.
"...anybody else reminded of the "Pepsi Challenge" by this?"
Funny you should mention that, that's why Coke released the 'New Coke', quickly followed by 'Coke Classic'. Turns out, a simple taste doesn't a good drink make. Heh.
Does that apply here? Not really. This is different formats, not a religious change. One gives you higher quality, one gives you higher availability. Use the right tool for the right job.
I just hope MP3 vs Ogg doesn't become a religious debate. There's room for both. Frankly, arguing over which is better is dorky. Education's okay, but I'm worried about people being 733T about it.
Since the encoding techniques for both OGG and MP3 take advantage of psychoacoustic phenomenon unique to human hearing (well, maybe other primates too, but they can't tell us), a program to "objectively" determine the quality is a non-option.
You don't feed compressed images or video to machine vision systems either, for similar reasons.
-- Alastair
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 ~$0.50 of that savings driving the extra mile and a half, you do it. Be honest...
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why
So, give it time, and ENJOY!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Here the original article in English
Keep it simple baby. =)
128kbps Ogg is roughly equal to 192kbps MP3, or so I've found it to be with the music I've encoded myself.
it's not you, but it's likely your sound system. For instance, listen to 128k mp3's on 10$ headphones and you won't notice the compression, listen to it on 200$ sennheisers with a much larger range of frequencies and you WILL notice the compression. 128k mp3 compression totally messes up the high end frequencies, and in some cases, the stereo field.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
I forgot to mention something. Alot of encoders have the option of using a lowpass filter at around 16000hz to get rid of high treble frequencies so that mp3's at lower bit rates (like 128k) sound better. In this case the treble wouldn't sound as crisp. It actually COULD be you, as ear damage begins with a loss in the ability to hear high frequencies. It's possible if you did have ear damage that you might not notice how much 128k mp3's mess up those high frequencies.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Test results don't amount to a hill of beans if there's nothing on which to play the files. I'll be honest and say that I've never evaluated Ogg Vorbis. My DVD player and my portable CD player handle MP3, but they don't handle Ogg. It's pointless to consider a format that your hardware doesn't support. Once there's Ogg-compatible hardware (and recent events suggest that possibility in the not-too-distant future), I might go ahead and give it a shot. Until then, why bother?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Unlike Windows vs OS/2 it is easy and inexpensive to use both MP3 and OGG at the same time. This is a big difference.
Are you suggesting that his usage of the word queue should have been cue? I thought the only use for the word cue was to refer to a pool cue.
No, it can also mean a signal or stimulus to action, like "cue the music". Queue is used to indicate a line of people.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Fsck 'em if they can't take a joke. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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...
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
I've been looking strictly at car players. It looks like the only one close is the PhatNoise (and the Kenwood AudioKeg). It already supports WAV, MP3, WMA, FLAK, and Audible.com so it looks like a minor issue for them to add OGG later (it supports firmware too). Also possibly SSI America NEO. And I have no idea but if they are flashable perhaps Rockford Fosgate RFXMP3.8 or Blaupunkt MDP-01. I've written all of the above to see what their plans are. Nothing else even looks capable of ever doing OGG (ie Alpine, Sony, etc.)
//m
Part of the reason Ogg hasn't gotten too popular yet, is simply that it can still be considered brand new. Before 1.0 (i.e. rc3) 64-kbps sounded like crap. In addition, anything other than 44kHz often ended up being encoded incorrectly (a 22kHz song played as fast as the processor would allow).
At this point, there's no BSD port of Ogg 1.0 so many of us can't even try it yet (it might help if they made it more portable, rather than just Linux-only).
I'm not criticizing, or saying not to use it. I'm merely pointing out that it has just recently evolved into something that even matches AAC/MP3pro, so it will take quite some time before many people are willing to trust their files to Ogg, and even longer before you see many devices with Ogg compatibility.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sure, but since Ogg Vorbis is at least as good as MP3, what is your point?
75 cents today...what will it be tomorrow?
I'm glad you mentioned that. In my trips to both Australia and Brazil, I noticed that Diet Coke tastes subtley different than in the US. Heck, I've noticed it tastes different in California. I, as you can probably tell, drink way too much Diet Coke. It's funny because the friend I visted with in Brazil has also had Diet Coke in both USA and Australia and can't tell the difference.
That's why I wrote my post about concern over OGG vs. MP3 becoming a relgious battle. People tell me that Diet Coke tastes awful. Do you really think that my taste buds are going to suddenly go "oh wait.. you're right!"? It's the same with your ears. I can lightly detect the artifacts of Mp3, but they don't really bother me. They would if I listened to a higher quality version of the same song many times over. I can understand an audophile becoming adamant about their sound format.
Okie, I'm done beating the horse.
For MP3, the guys over at r3mix.net have put a lot of effort into fine-tuning the LAME settings to get "archival-quality" MP3s. Archival-quality by them is defined as MP3s that are indistinguishable from CD audio by people with very good ears and very high-end audio equipment. That sounds perfect for me, since I don't have great ears, and I don't have high-end audio equipment. If *they* don't hear any degradation, I know I won't. And by following their recommendations I don't have to waste a lot of time fiddling with various settings and trying to hear if my music was messed up by the encoding process.
So, is there any similar concensus for Ogg?
I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of answers like: "If you want full CD-quality, keep the CDs", and "Why not just try it at various settings and see how it sounds." So I'll answer these now: I don't really care if it's CD-quality, I just don't like the idea that I might, someday, be able to hear the difference, and I can't afford to store WAVs and don't like fiddling with CDs. I don't want to just "try it", because to be sure of what I was getting I'd have to encode and listen to a bunch of different kinds of music at different settings, and I don't have time for that crap. I'd rather stick with r3mix VBR MP3s.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
ah I didn't know it was standard, I used lame with a windows frontend (think its razor lame or something like that), and I only enabled the 16000hz lowpass when I was incoding at 128k or less.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Untrue. As I wrote to Monty last month (he didn't reply):
That's all very noble, but I think what you meant to say was:
I'm sure you weren't intentionally trying to be deceptive, so I thought I'd clarify.
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?
"overpriced audiophile extreme"
; ) Audiophiles on the whole, are usually morons with inflated egos.
I remember seeing a "flagship" Meridian CD player that was going for $50,000 au, which was EASILY beaten to death by a $300 Marantz.
They're idiots who make decisions based solely on name and high price. They see gold-like anodized plastic and go oooohhhh, but ignore tests done with proper testing equipment (with names like Tektronics and HP, the type of stuff top military and NASA relies on) by people who know physics, as "non-real World" tests.
NAD is another brand that has a prestigious name, yet does not live up to it. I can design an amp around some affordable MOSFETS that does better for a fraction of NAD prices.
I remember years ago seeing a bunch of audiophuckwits on TV who were doing an A/B listening test of audio CD's that were and were not placed in a freezer. They claimed that during the mfg process, the plastic would change shape as it cooled or heated, causing cracks in the aluminium data layer. The freezing apparently brought the aluminium cracks back together to "rectify" the "problem".
I wish I could have been there to point out that if their completely ridiculous theory was true, then the success of the CDROM revolution has been a complete imagination by billions, since a single bit error on an audio CD could go unnoticed yet a single bit error on a CDROM could cause a complete failure.
The kind of people who covet stuff that is NOT a part of the music, which was put there with valves for example.
The fact is, that the highest frequency a human can hear is approx a 20kHz Sine wave and a 44.1kHz sample can reproduce a 22kHz Sine wave!
I agree that 24bit/96kHz is fantastic for recording and mixing, since it largely allows the elimination of errors [1] introduced from math done on the samples. But bringing 24bit/96kHz all the way to the listeners output is complete overkill.
Anyway, I agree, get some good headphones and enjoy your LAME and Ogg music!
[1] When I say elimination of errors, I mean that although math done on 24bit/96kHz will also result in errors, the errors are confined to the lower order bits, which are discarded at the point where it is all brought back to 16bit/44.1kHz. Thus the whole reason higher sample rates and bit depths are often used for recording and mixing. Practical elimination of errors in the final product.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I have always been able to easily tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, since the 80's. Blind fold or not.
Pepsi is currently a kind of sickening sweet flavour that I cannot tolerate.
BTW, consumers always picked Pepsi? No, Pepsi would film shit loads of people doing the Pepsi Challenge, discard every bit of footage that showed Coke being chosen, and then sort through the coolest looking people choosing Pepsi to put into their adverts.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
But the codec is standardized, with reference implementionas, etc.
That id3 doesn't fit the original standard is irrelevant. How many of the early MP3 players were based on the reference implementation code?
Ogg provides the code, but it doesn't have the market opportunity that MP3 had... that market need is already satisfied, and satisfied by a standardized format.
Ogg runs a big risk of being marginalized... The ogg developers have everything they need to make it playback on operating systems... but for devices with a tiny os, or that are controlled by a hardware manufacturer, Ogg faces the chicken and egg problem-- why build in support for a marginal format into your hardware when MP3 is very popular? And without that support, Ogg remains a desktop, rather than cellphone & portable player, format.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Whilst avoiding your possibly crappy sound card...
* Rip as best you can you favorite song.
* Encode it with a few encoders with what you believe to be the best quality settings.
* Decode them back into raw wav's and burn them onto a CDR.
* Listen to that CDR in your stereo, noting which tracks were encoded with which encoder.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
More and more players these days are MP3 and WMA compatible, like my Rio SP250 CD-MP3 player. With upgradeable firmware (like the SP250), it couldn't be that hard to add Ogg into the mix. I mean, nobody I know of uses WMA, but there it is. That would solve a good deal of your conversion issues right there. Simply don't. But until I see media devices go in that direction, you won't see me creating anything in Ogg anytime soon.
You need a FREE iPod Nano