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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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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]
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!!!
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.
Sorry about that, some of you have pointed out that I used the same translation for both.
It should have read...
BabelFish: "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
WorldLingo: (using Computer, Data Processing as the subject) "RealAudio Surround, improved with low bit rates Windows Media 9 beta"
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
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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%.
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)
Just thought it interesting that everyone is posting babelfish / translating service translations when there is an English version available from the site.
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.
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. =)
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...
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?