Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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
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.
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?
.. 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
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.
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...