Posted by
timothy
on from the rollin'-rollin'-rollin' dept.
bdesham writes "Mac OS X Hints has a story about a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."
I'm not a breathless Ogg fanboy, but enough of my friends use Ogg that I'd be pleased as punch if Apple decided to go whole-hog with Ogg. (I promise that I didn't plan for that to rhyme.) It'd be just another one of those places where Apple can say, "well, yea, of course we do that."
Re:About damn time!
by
bahamat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.
But 100% of what I rip myself is ogg. And that's what I want to take with me. Not some crap riped with poor hardware at low bitrate by Joe Blow in MP3 format.
You won't belive it, but there are people who buy CDs. And when they want to listen to the music with portable (mp3-) players, they grab it. And if there would exist any (portable) ogg player, they could grab it to ogg (in much better quality than mp3)! And they wouldn't hav any trouble with encoding because of patents! sorry, a little bit off topic now...
"I'm not a breathless Ogg fanboy"... "well, yea, of course we do that."
+5 insightful (but should be bloody obvious).
How perverted is the Microsoft business model?
Re:About damn time!
by
cygnus
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?
it probably isn't... once apple works out some licensing stuff, it'll probably support AAC.
AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance. and a lot of people pooh pooh it because the head to head tests always show ogg coming out on top. but this is largely because they're all done at like 64kbit, where ogg shines. AAC shines at 128kbit, where it reportedly is acoustically transparent when encoded with CD-quality source.
ideally, they'd provide functionality for both formats, but i doubt they will, because they're already wedded to AAC with Quicktime's MPEG-4 capabilities.
-- Just raise the taxes on crack.
Re:About damn time!
by
jc42
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Now if I could get ogg tunes to work on my linux boxen...
I have downloaded, compiled, and (maybe) installed several purported ogg packages. I've also fetched a small collection of tunes off the net. But so far, I haven't discovered the trick of getting sound waves from them.
F'rinstance, I have a directory full of libao-0.8.3, libogg-1.0, libvorbis-1.0, and vorbis-tools-1.0, all of which compiled without any obvious problems. But there don't seem to be any clues as to how I make the latest mozilla fire them up with it gets an ogg file.
I think I'm missing something somewhere. Or maybe ogg is just not for dummies like me.
-- Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Re:About damn time!
by
rseuhs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.
So?
When I rip a CD (yes, there are still people who buy CDs) I rip it to ogg becuase I can get better quality on less disk space.
What is wrong with that?
Re:About damn time!
by
tuffy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance.
Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this press release.
Yeah better not encode into a patented format. Also, stop using your patented computer hardware parts, patented mobile phone, patented communications protcols, patented car parts, anything manufacturered by a patented method....
It goes on. Why is it so bad to use a patented compression system that works? I can understand not wanting generic software patents but a patent on some seriously clever compression routines that took them hundreds of man hours and a lot of money... come on.
Should we all give our time away for free?
Troc
-- Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
AAC shines at 128kbit, where it reportedly is acoustically transparent when encoded with CD-quality source.
Yeah, right... CD quality at 128kb/s. That's what they said about MP3 a few years ago. Today (they say) we can achieve CD quality at 64kb/s when encoding to MP3Pro or WMA.
I have about 14000 of them (No, that's not a typo!). All of them ripped by myself. People download them like crazy, so I know there are a lot of OGGers out there..;)
It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.
Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
Oh, that's right, we IA-32 people keep forgetting how much Macs and PowerPC's cost. I was about to flame you, but now I pity you.
Here's a quarter. Go buy yourself a faster processor. (Just kidding! Just kidding!)
"All's fair in love and war" (and buisness). Sony's console department might hate MS's console department, but they do see eye to eye in other areas. I'm sure there are other examples also.
-- "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
finally? not really...
by
nebenfun
·
· Score: 4, Funny
we now know that Apple supports "OGG".... but does it support "ORG"? who knows...
nbfn and btw... imagine a beowulf of these things....
I think ogg should have been named ...
by
llordsmiff
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· Score: 1
orgy. My $0.02.
If I have a sig, replace it with this blip of text that I manually typed in instead because I don't remember what the sig says (if it exists) and it may not be representative of my current beliefs.
-- "To live" is to ignore the possibility of death.
Re:I think ogg should have been named ...
by
MyHair
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I think it should've been named "og3" (oh-gee-three) to associated itself a bit more with em-pee-three.
The non geek probably ignores "Xiph Ogg Vorbis" but might pay attention to "og3" and understand what the hell it might be.
Plus ogg is a generic container format and will be used for other Xiph codecs, including video. So calling a Vorbis music file Ogg is shortsighted.
Re:I think ogg should have been named ...
by
jericho4.0
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· Score: 2
I think you make a very good point, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
To many cool projects get bitten by a lack of marketing/presentation, more so in the open source world. Been to the GNU site recently? Ugly as hell. There's a good reason people will pay a premium for Macs.
-- "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Re:I think ogg should have been named ...
by
spinlocked
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· Score: 1
The non geek probably ignores "Xiph Ogg Vorbis"
And some geeks. It's such a naff sounding name - I detest it...
-- # init 5
Connection closed.
Oh......bugger.
Re:I think ogg should have been named ...
by
steveha
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· Score: 2
I think it should have been named "XPX". This combines "XP" (as in "Windows XP" or "Athlon XP") with "X" (as in "OS X"). Thus it would ride the coattails of about a hojillion dollars of advertisements.
There should also be a dodgy logo, "Designed for XPX", that uses the same font Apple uses in their ads.
Do it right and no one will be sure what the heck XPX is, but they will figure they need it.
steveha
-- lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Re:I think ogg should have been named ...
by
zero2k
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· Score: 1
Sweet name, especially when sounds like eXPerience-seX to me when spoken quickly.
Re:I think ogg should have been named ...
by
psamuels
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· Score: 1
The non geek probably ignores "Xiph Ogg Vorbis"
And some geeks. It's such a naff sounding name - I detest it...
Sure it sounds horrible, you're cutting it off. You have to say the whole thing. "Xiphophorus Ogg Vorbis". Five times fast. If that doesn't impress your friends, well, I guess try hanging out with people who are easily impressed. What can I say, works for me.
(Of course it seems they're now just calling themselves Xiph.org - how lame, no pun intended.)
-- "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
CD Burning works!
by
plazman30
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Just tested CD burining of ogg files and it worked flawlessly. Since I don't have a portable MP3 player, I can safely say I will never make another MP3 file again.
Soon as ANYONE makes a hardware Ogg player, they'll get my money.
So am I. I ripped all of my CDs to oggs about a year ago.
The first portable ogg player gets my money. I don't care if it doesn't do mp3, I can always re-encode 'cos I can live with the loss of quality if I can take them anywhere.
This is great
by
seanadams.com
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· Score: 5, Insightful
... but Ogg isn't going to make any major headway until the embedded decoder vendors (Crystal, Micronas, ST) start supporting it. Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation, and two, the DSP vendors need to be convinced that it's worth the precious ROM space to fit another codec in there.
Ogg just came to the party WAY too late. It is up against a massive chicken-and-egg problem if it wants to supplant MP3. Nobody's using Ogg because it's not supported, and nobody's supporting it because nobody wants it. The advantages of Ogg (slightly better quality, free) are massively outweighed by the ubiquity of MP3. Like 'em of not, Fraunhofer did a fantastic job with the original codec, and it's going to take something with a massive improvement in quality/compression/cost to supplant it. Ogg is better, but not "better enough".
Re:This is great
by
Scooby+Snacks
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· Score: 4, Informative
Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation
Well, the first part is already taken care of with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.
--
-- Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
Re:This is great
by
mosch
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That's an excellent point, but there's another more important one. 95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap. They're not going to pay an extra $50 or $100 for an ogg-enabled iPod, and the general public doesn't give a fuck (flying or otherwise) about ogg, so they won't pay anything extra for ogg support.
So why would anybody support it? Until the costs of implementing ogg are damned near close to $0, nobody's going to spend the time and money implementing the code, integrating it all, testing it and supporting it.
I'm using Ogg for a while now. With 80kbps it is a least as good as MP3 with 128 which means it is "better enough". It means I can save much more on this cheap 64MB cards used in MP3-players.
And OGG sounds in general better. I never had this eeks like in some MP3s and if there were some things badly converted it was just some missing things in the sound instead of distrubing sounds.
I thinks this should be enough for the normal user.
b4n
Re:This is great
by
rseuhs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better. In listening tests from heise.de, 64kbps oggs were closer to the original (or better) than 128kbps mp3s. (And it was the best codec of all, better than WMA, AAC and MP3pro.)
So if the hardware manufacturers support ogg, they can say that their device holds 2*x songs instead of x. If you buy such a device would you go for the one that holds 1000 songs or the other that holds 2000 songs if they cost the same?
Also, the hardware vendors sure don't want to pay for mp3 forever so it's in their interest that another format replaces it. (Even if it takes a long time - like a decade or even longer.)
So I'd say ogg is "better enough".
Re:This is great
by
Graymalkin
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For the hardware vendors though it is a question of space. Can an Ogg codec fit into the same ROM space as an MP3 codec and only use the same resources as said MP3 codec? If not they will not use Ogg codecs. Nor will they use Ogg codecs if it halves the battery life of the device, if the Ogg needs so much processing muscle it uses twice the wattage as the MP3 encoder they can't really sell that to people. Who cares if the device holds twice as many songs if the battery life is only half of what it would be otherwise. If playing an Ogg made my iPod only last 5 hours there's no way in hell I'd ever use them better quality or not. I routinely run my iPod for 8-10 hour stretches any period of time less than that is unacceptable for me personally.
Work on Ogg is going to continue and some intepid soul or souls are going to make a super cool Ogg decoder that can run on a paper clip taped to a Dorito but until then MP3 and WMP are going to dominate because they fit on the existing hardware.
Also, the hardware vendors sure don't want to pay for mp3 forever so it's in their interest that another format replaces it. (Even if it takes a long time - like a decade or even longer.)
In a bit more than a decade, the mp3 patent will have expired, so it's more the 3-5 year timeline that this makes sense for.
--
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Just look at a device that sais: "holds 1000 songs" [of 128kbps.mp3] and then look at the device right beside that sais: "holds 2000 songs" [of 64 kbps.ogg which sound better than 128kbps according to listening tests]
They won't really. For one, most of the general public is well aware of and uses MP3. Secondly, remember that a person's attention span is short. That disclaimer about.ogg sounding better than MP3s according to [subjective] listening tests, for 90% of the people (and most of them can't tell the difference) won't matter. So they'll ask the sales guy what it means, and he'll say
"well basicaly if you already have.ogg files or you want to make new ones, it's more songs on the player"
customer> "Well what about my MP3s?"
sales kid> "It'll hold the same as all the others.
-- T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Re:This is great
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
YOU ARE A MORON. You don't know what you are talking about and are spouting off on some problem that is a pure invention of your mind.
The facts are that:
OGG decoding requires only 75% of the CPU power that MP3 decoding does. So decoding OGGs instead of MP3 gives you longer battery life.
This is using the "Tremor" integer-only decoder that is meant to be used in embedded devices.
Re:This is great
by
andrewski
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· Score: 2, Insightful
95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap.
I would LOVE to see you try to quantify that statement. I would guess that most Ogg fanboys are actually the dudes who had iPods (or another mp3 player) LONG before J-Lo and Tony Hawk and all your other standard consumers did. You know, the early adopters. The people who spend MORE money on gadgets than anyone else.
Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better. In listening tests from heise.de, 64kbps oggs were closer to the original (or better) than 128kbps mp3s. (And it was the best codec of all, better than WMA, AAC and MP3pro.)
Well, it's a good thing that statistic is useless information to me. I don't listen to 128kbps MP3's because they typically sound like shit. 256kbps on the other hand start to sound reasonable, at least with my 'puter speakers.
If you buy such a device would you go for the one that holds 1000 songs or the other that holds 2000 songs if they cost the same?
That would be ogg. I've found the results in the listening tests from heise, several thousand readers participated, each had to rank 7 samples from best to worst. Nobody knew which sample is which codec and which was identical to the original.
I give here the average rankings: (lower is better)
The sample consisted of 3 sections - pop, jazz and classic music.
heise also made an inhouse-testing session at 160 kbps, but with only 8 testers (so this test should be taken with a grain of salt):
The results (from best to worst):
wav-ogg-aac-wma-real-mp3-mp3pro
At 128 kbps, there is practically no audible difference between the original and ogg according to this test. Also, ogg is the only codec to come close to the original wav - notice the gap between ogg and wma. And ogg won all 3 test categories (but as I said, the 160 kbps test was made only with 8 testers)
Try it yourself, encode some oggs, mp3s and mix them into the original, then shuffle the playlist and try to guess which is which without looking at the playlist.
Or even better (and more challenging): encode 160 kbps mp3s and shuffle them into 128kbps oggs. I bet that the oggs sound better.
Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better.
No, Ogg is only slightly better than mp3. What is massively better is MPC. The drawback is that MPC, like MP3, is encumbered by patents, and no one seems to be interested in it. I'm not sure why. Can anyone explain the lack of interest in MPC? Is it just the patent issues?
-- If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I have a 10GB iPod and I am an Ogg fanboy. I'd give my 10GB to my girlfriend and get a 20GB right away if they started supporting Ogg.
--
mbbac
to repeat a post from macslash
by
Knife_Edge
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Someone on macslash (first post I believe) question why anyone would care about ogg. I think that question bears repeating. What is so great about ogg that would make people want to use it instead of mp3?
Re:to repeat a post from macslash
by
puck01
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is a legitamite question. I'm a big fan of.ogg, but most people I know just don't care. MP3 is good enough, and all the hardware they've purchased supports it, not.ogg. This has been said many of times, because its true, and that is if.ogg is going to go somewhere it needs to be supported on hardware just as much or more that mp3. Most people have not been given an obvious reason to switch and unless mp3 starts costing consumers $$, most will never care.
Hell, its damn near impossible to find.ogg files on the p2p apps out there anyway. I tend to share hundreds of them, just to try and spread them around, but hardly anyone ever downloads them compared to any mp3s I'll share.
In any case, the more progress.ogg makes the better, even if it is small steps like this. Hopefully, we'll start seeing some huge steps in the near future with hardware.
puck
Re:to repeat a post from macslash
by
Meowing
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· Score: 1
There really isn't any compelling difference between the two formats from a normal user perspective. One comes with license fees, the other doesn't.
The fees for MP3 software are small to the end user, but they are a big problem for those who would like to give away stuff that uses the format. That does ultimately limit your options, but if the comercial options already available to you do what you want or need, you might not care about that.
Re:to repeat a post from macslash
by
jericho4.0
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· Score: 2
Licensing and sound quality. Simple. Still, that's not going to be enough for quite a long while. If you're happy w/mp3s (as I am) stick with it.
-- "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Re:to repeat a post from macslash
by
scotch
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· Score: 2, Flamebait
What, are you new here?
-- XML causes global warming.
Re:to repeat a post from macslash
by
MoneyT
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· Score: 2
Licensing really isn't an issue for a lot of people. P2P junkies don't often care about licence schemes because they don't see it. As for sound quality, again, talk about most people and it doesn't matter, most of them can't tell the difference cause they're using crappy quality dollar store headphones anyways.
-- T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
ahhh grasshoppers...
by
llamalicious
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· Score: 4, Interesting
simply use Audion ! Sure it's not an iApp... but it's probably the best audio-player on the mac. Take a look: http://www.panic.com/
DISCLAIMER: The author of this post sure as hell doesn't work for panic. Thankyouverymuch.
There are others
by
erik+umenhofer
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· Score: 4, Informative
This program seems to have OGG support. I like iTunes but I don't think it should be the thing holding you back from listening to music on a mac. That's a little silly.
any good P2P progs to find ogg...
by
dfj225
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Wondering if there are any P2P programs that have a lot of users w/ ogg files...I use kazaa but I'm not finding a lot of ogg files.
-- SIGFAULT
Re:any good P2P progs to find ogg...
by
Istealmymusic
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· Score: 2
Internet Relay Chat. There are currently two major Ogg Vorbis-only releasing groups and several minor (one-person) "groups" which often have their own IRC channels with iroffer XDCC's and private FTP's. I'm not going to mention their channels and IRC network which they reside on for security reasons, but here's a hint: Team Inaniation Network and Ogg Ripping Network. I'll leave you to find their location.
-- "The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Re:any good P2P progs to find ogg...
by
Entropy_ah
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· Score: 2
i've found that about half of the music on giFT is ogg. It's still cvs only, but its getting better every day.
-- my other penis is a vagina
Re:any good P2P progs to find ogg...
by
RestiffBard
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· Score: 2
a possible reason you might not find ogg files on p2p apps is that possibly the people encoding in ogg are not interested in sharing their tunes as they have enough already.
also, one more item. For those that use the argument that p2p is good cause it introduces you to new music you wouldn't get anywhere on the radio might I suggest you turn off clearchannel and turn on NPR. My two local public radio stations in southeastern virginia have intorduced me to some of the best music ever made.
Give rollie radio a try. 7-9 I think. You can listen online at
whro
-- -/* dead coders leave no comments */
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the greatest...
by
asparagus
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· Score: 2, Insightful
H0re of them all?
Actually, I've never done this. But on the (off) chance you guys/. his server, here's a mirror.
Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhere?
by
SexyKellyOsbourne
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The.ogg file format is open source, portable, stable, and has no legal bindings whatsover, unlike mp3s -- what prevents hardware companies from doing a few quick source code cut n' pastes and adding a feature? ROMs are cheap enough that adding ogg support would even be trivial on the hardware end.
I and many others have over 100GB of ogg files on my hd, and I'd really like to see more support for them by hardware manufacturers -- there is no reason they can't do it.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Kevinv
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· Score: 3, Interesting
With proprietary software (i.e. MP3 encoders like iTunes has) there may have been all kinds of backroom deals we may never know about. For example Apple may have gotten a super cut-rate deal on the encoder license in exchange for promising thomson to not include Ogg support for encoding or playback.
I could be blowing smoke out my ass too and apple is just really slow to respond to new formats and the next version will include Ogg support.
Re:Ode to Slashdot
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
Unless you toe the party line.
Why should your toe adhere to any particular ideology? Does it matter which particular toe?
Or you could use
by
jerrytcow
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· Score: 5, Interesting
a nice small program that plays both out of the box. I've been using whamb today and it plays.mp3 and.ogg files just fine.
As a bonus it "only" uses 7-10% CPU on my iBook as opppsed to iTunes' 20-30%.
Mac fans are going to hate me for this, but my old AMD K6-2 400 wasn't using much more than 7-10% cpu on MP3s. So what's up, is the iBook really *that* slow?
Unfortunately, it sure is. My old iBook 500mhz with 640MB RAM and OS X 10.1 took 35% of the CPU for iTunes to decode MP3.
There was an interesting thread about this on MacSlash. Something is seriously screwed with the way OS X allocates CPU time. There is simply no reason that an MP3 player should need that much CPU to work. OS X browsers (IE, Mozilla, etc.) have the same problem. Stick them in the background and they will suck up CPU even when they should be idling.
Re:Or you could use
by
MoneyT
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmmm, regardless of what the processor meter is reporting, when I ran OS X on my iBook (300 / 192) iTunes played very nicely in the backgroud with other apps, though on a 300 Mhtz iBook, OS X wasn't that speedy to begin with, so maybe I just never noticed it eating up other program CPU time.
-- T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Sure I could. Assuming that the person posting the information was using a 600 Mhz iBook. 7% would have been roughly 42 Mhz. 42 Mhz on an Athlon 2000 (IIRC that's roughly 1.7 Ghz) comes out to 2.5%. So it seems to be nothing more than a difference in CPU cycles.
-- T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
ogg may be great...
by
nuckin+futs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
but how many portable players actually support it?
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Goalie_Ca
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· Score: 1
Sony for example, is in tight with Microsoft. They also produce records and want some of that good old drm that wma seems to offer.
Whamb is a brand new MP3/Ogg Player for 10.2 that is 100% cocoa and sweeeeeeeet.
--
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Mac OGG Problem...
by
Shuh
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Why is it that the oggenc on the Mac won't encode if you give it the path:/Volumes/Audio\ CD/Track\ 01.cdda?
I get some sort of volume-is-read-only error. Of course it's read-only! It's the CD! I finally got it to encode after I copied the track from the CD to my HD.
This sux. Anyone have the answer to this?
.cdda - CD digital audio, isn't in cd-data format, it's in cd-audio format! You need to extract it before (or while) you encode. I'm not sure if oggenc can extract cd-audio but either way I wouldn't do it. It's easy to foul the extraction process if the computer is under heavy (or any) load so encoding while extracting, which is what you want, isn't something I'd recommend.
Why is it that the oggenc on the Mac won't encode if you give it the path:/Volumes/Audio\ CD/Track\ 01.cdda? I get some sort of volume-is-read-only error.
You must use the -output="foo" option because it is trying to send the encoded file to/Volumes/Audio\ CD/
Example shell script...
for file in/Volumes/Audio\ CD/*.cdda; do oggenc --output="~/Desktop/`basename $file | sed 's/\.cdda//'`.ogg" "$file" done
Alternatively, use oggenc - <inputfile >outputfile
what took so long?
by
toothfish
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· Score: 2, Interesting
i have been gleefully ripping CDs and AIFs to OGG for a couple days now, and although itunes seems to choke occasionally, it hasn't been much of an issue. this has been sort of an off and on type project, actually, but this it the most painless method to coerce OGGs to play in itunes so far. oddly enough the qt components page still claims that the component is busted under qt6. i like how the guy learned how to code on a mac on a lark over a weekend.
Re:what took so long?
by
EverLurking
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Man, I think I caused the poor guy to be/.'ed by posting information on his plugin on MacOSXHints. According to the author of the plugin (Jordan):
"The binary I put up was just a bug fix and a small performance enhancement. I posted the bug fix to sourceforge and mailed the author Steve Nicolai, but he was pretty busy and said he wouldn't get to it for some time. I put up the binary in the mean time."
Great job Jordan!!
The plugin is working well for me, aside from a brief delay on starting the playback of Ogg files (about 0.5 -1 sec, depending on CPU load. Due to switching to Quick Time internally to playback?) it is working flawlessly.
iTunes also can successfully read some of the information Tags embedded in the Ogg files as written by Ogg Drop (Track Name, Artist, Album, Genre) and thus organizes the Ogg files properly into your music collection. iTunes lists the file as a Quicktime Movie file rather than a Ogg Vorbis file and is unable to tell the bitrate of the file. Also, during playback, iTunes is unable to sample the sound output of the Ogg file so unfortunately no visualizations.
Hey, I'm happy, it was free after all. Maybe it is time to pull down the patch from Sourceforge and see if we can get the visualizaitons working?
DaveC
-- There are no stupid questions...just stupid people.
What about Windows Media Player?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
What about Windows Media Player?
Can you play OGG in that somehow?
Re:What about Windows Media Player?
by
DeeKayWon
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· Score: 3, Informative
I was talking about putting Ogg support into portable players where CPU power is an issue. Any desktop computer made in the last 5 years should be able to play oggs files, I would assume.
In other words, since apple provided a plug in architecture for QuickTime, you can't really bitch about it not supporting OGG, since you can write one yourself (as these people did)
The other point was that supporting OGG in small devices requires more CPU usage, which might be more expensive then paying for MP3 or WMA licensing costs.
There really isn't any compelling difference between the two formats from a normal user perspective. One comes with license fees, the other doesn't.
Oggs require more hardware to decode, There is an integer engine out, but I'm not sure how well it works, or how much CPU it needs compared to other codecs.
But the fact of the matter is, it does cost money to support ogg files on small devices, probably more then the licensing requirements for Mp3. It's not like they can just slap ogg support onto a device that might not have enough CPU power as an afterthought.
Oggs require more hardware to decode, There is an integer engine out, but I'm not sure how well it works, or how much CPU it needs
compared to other codecs.
I remember when `ogg123', the reference ogg player, used something like 35% of my P166 CPU, while `mpg123', a popular mp3 player, used less than half that. (Well, "I remember" is a bit strong, I don't actually remember the numbers....) That annoyed me at the time, and I really hoped it would improve.
Now, I don't know about the Tremor implementation, but the original floating point codec has come a long way. I just now benchmarked them on my P4, because I was curious. Result: the mp3 player needed 10 seconds of CPU for a 3-minute song; the ogg player needed only 5 seconds of CPU for a 4 1/2-minute song.
Of course, this isn't scientific. This wasn't the same song or even the same genre, and I think the mp3 was fixed-bitrate as opposed to vbr, and possibly there are more efficient mp3 decoders out there. But the days of saying "ogg takes too much CPU" are long past, at least for the desktop codec. (And, I've heard, for Tremor, but that's second-hand information.)
-- "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
finally, decoding ogg...
by
fishboy
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· Score: 4, Informative
While ripping to.ogg is fairly common, the most important thing that this plug-in provides is a means to convert.ogg files over to.aiff or.mp3, something that I haven't been able to find any software to do for the mac on either X or 9.
Thus I can play the rare.ogg files I find on my iPod, albeit via mp3.
Also, It does not require 6.0.2-- if you have 6.0 or 6.0.1 it works fine. Now I just wish I could get it for OS9.
Vorbis vs mp3
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
One, if you ask me, vorbis sounds much better than mp3. Even at high bitrates mp3s still have a lot of artifacts, over-ringing, what have you. Vorbis encodings don't have that, and therefore makes the quality drop much less noticeable.
Second, the people who work on vorbis spent a lot of time on low-bitrate encoding, which translates into very decent sounding low bitrate vorbis, as compared against low bitrate mp3.
Third, vorbis supports a much wider range of mean encoding bitrates, which is useful if you find the perfect bitrate for you that balances size and quality.
Fourth, vorbis supports 2^8 - 1 (255) different channels of audio. Say it with me: surround sound, and then some.
Fifth: Vorbis is free as in beer and in speech. People who make players/devices won't have to pay royalties to produce said players/devices. That translates into a (possibly) cheaper car stereo player that supports vorbis.
One counterpoint I'd like to respond to is vorbis' appetite for CPU time. I will admit that vorbis does require more cpu time than mp3 does to decode. This is not that big of a problem for two reasons: One: vorbis isn't nearly mature yet. It's getting there, but there is still a lot of room for improvement, including CPU time. Two: prices of micro-controllers are falling. Car stereos have had gienormous [sic] microprocessors for quite a while, displaying all of those silly screen savers that everybody must have. Also, because of mp3's current ubiquity, there are already tons of players that already have the architecture required to play compressed digital audio, therefore many players will require only a few tweaks in order to support vorbis.
One last point: yes, I know that mp3 is already here, and that for many purposes it will settle. Does that mean you should settle for less when a much better alternative is available?
Just because he has TiBook doesnt mean he uses OS X exclusively or at all. I bet he installed linux on there as soon as he got one
-- Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Not New!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
There has been a quicktime plugin for ogg-vorbis since well before it went 1.0 (actually, IIRC there were two of them, and if this is a new one, now there are three).
I am so sick of people complaining about things that they just assume quicktime/itunes/etc can't do.
Your ignorance is not an excuse to apple-bash people!
actually, no.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Informative
On modern general purpose CPUs (such as the pentium) Vorbis actually takes less cycled to decode than MP3 (as measured with the pentium cycle counter).. If your windows taskmon shows it using more, that just because the decoder works in larger chunks of data, thus yealds less often and the task monitor misreports its use...
There isn't a DSP based MP3 player without enough CPU available to decode OGG. (it needs about 40mips on most DSP archs, most portable mp3 players are 70mips DSPs. The real problem is memory requirements: Because of it's ultra flexiable format, Vorbis needs more ram to decode than mp3 and some older decoders only had 32k or 64k of RAM!!! (Vorbis could probably be done in that, but it would be hard.. while 128k would be easy.)..
All the modern players (esp that hard disk ones) have tons of ram (32megs in the ipod for example) and tons of cpu (something like 140mips for the ipod) which makes vorbis decode free and easy.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Did it ever occur to you that maybe just apple doesn't support ogg because there's no demand for it from their customers?
What just about nobody realizes about apple is that they are vastly, vastly under-resourced. They just don't have the people to spare. They probably aren't going to go and add support for a poorly documented format that no one within their walls are familiar with because a bunch of linux-using slashdotters that probably won't buy an ipod anyway go "hey, it would be so cool if apple would do this".
No. Apple doesn't care about what would be "cool". They generally don't care about *anything*, really, but when they do they care about what would attract people to their platform, they care about finding new ways for people to use their computers, and they care about giving their customers what they want. I've yet to meet one person with an ipod who actually gave a shit one way or the other about ogg support. So if the customers don't care, why should apple bother?
Why don't we all just reverse-engineer the ipod firmware so we can add games and ogg support and a game boy emulator?
OGG has been making some rather good headway in games. A number of new games that have come out (UT2003) or are comming out soon use OGG for music. Most of the popular music plugins like FMOD support it and developers are finding that it rules on account of having good compression and no liscencing hassles.
That indirectly helps OGG adoption generally as it increases awarness since people to like to listen to music from video games and with OGG they can just play it straight in Winamp or the like.
What, are you a moron?
by
BigumD
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yeah, I' bet there's a huge number of Apple users who rip their music to OGG when there's no available player for it on their platform.
And before you tell me that there is some obsucre player for it, reminder that your AVERAGE Mac user isn't going to know about anything that isn't made by Apple, and sure as hell isn't going to FINK something.
This isn't a step forward until it's built into iTunes.
-- --The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
Re:What, are you a moron?
by
godawful
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· Score: 1
Audion [panic.com] is a very well known player that has supported ogg for what seems ages. the argument that people wont know of a program unless apple makes it is really weak. if people want something, they look, its not hard.
-- Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
DMCA's gotta love ogg
by
Espectr0
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· Score: 2, Funny
...if you can't find them on p2p sites.
Yes ogg is so good, it eliminates the piracy problem;)
Oops, I guess I'm more stupid today than usual. Oh well. I actually thought you were complaining about desktop CPU expense for a while. I'll try not to operate any heavy machinery for the rest of today.
Does supporting OGG require more CPU usage in portable devices/DSPs than MP3 because OGG is really more processor intensive or because existing chips were designed with MP3 in mind? (Honest question, I don't know.) Seems like some devices are supporting MP3 and WMA; can OGG be that hard?
WHO CARES I WANT MP4/AAC
by
mstrjon32
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't care about Ogg. I want MP4 support for the iPod (tada 5 gig model goes from 1000 to 2000 songs) and support built into iTunes. MP4/AAC is the next big thing. Apple already has a decoder/encoder working and in Quicktime 6, now just implement it already!
Amen. Fuck Ogg. MP4/AAC offers me things I actually give a damn about.
Woo. Ogg can encode smaller files with higher quality at low bitrates. Care factor zero. Hard drives are cheap, and all my mp3's are 320kbit. All 200GB of them.
Anyone know of a free MS Windows program that will convert LOTS of mp3's to ogg files for me? I realy would like to convert my collection, but hand by hand converting 2000+ files is not my idea of fun.
Re:mp3 - ogg
by
lostchicken
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· Score: 5, Informative
There is no point to doing this, unless you want to drop the bit rate, or just want ogg for political reasons.
When you encoded into MP3 (or any lossy format, for that matter) the quality went away for good. Re-encoding it will just re-encode the low quality stream, introducing the new Vorbis (OGG Audio) artifacts on top of the MP3 ones. If you re-encode your library, the audio quality will get worse, period, although the drop will me minimal, and you might squeeze a little more compression out of it.
To answer your question, though, dbPowerAmp should do the trick.
Thanks, that works a treat! I am aiming at making smaller files with a lower bitrate. So I don't mind losing more quality. I am also politically interested in ogg over mp3. Those songs that are my favourite will be converted to ogg from original cd, but this isn't necessary for all song. Once again, thanks for pointing me towards dbPowerAmp.
[just a note of encouragement to someone who got the transcoding issue exactly right!]
Monty
Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Rhetoric...
by
loply
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."
I wish people around these parts wouldnt act as if everything does is delibartely designed to harm you. That evil, evil Apple, doesnt want you to play your ogg files! All of us are lumped with tons of ogg files on your hard drives but apple wont support us! Oh no!
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
invisibastard
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· Score: 1
Is there an easy way to burn ogg files in Linux? (sorry, GNU/Linux...don't hit me!) I am reasonably new to Linux, not a total idiot, but I just cannot figure out how to do it. Someone please show me how stupid I am, and how easily done it is.
Is there a WMP plugin yet? Beacause that's what needs to be targeted first. There are a hell of a lot WMP users then there are Quicktime or ITunes.
-- If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Common sense, people
by
acoustiq
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple.
Whose bright idea was it to download "all of those Ogg Vorbis files" that you couldn't play?
Or, for those of you who don't download...
Why did you rip all your CDs into a format you couldn't read?
--
-- I romp with joy in the bookish dark
Re:Common sense, people
by
Tokerat
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· Score: 5, Informative
They all support Ogg. And I'm sure I forgot at least a dozen more. Claiming the Mac can't play Ogg because iTunes doesn't support it is about as ridiculous as saying Linux can't do your budget because there is no spreadsheet built into the kernel.
The article poster is trolling on that last sentence, plain and simple.
-- CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Re:Common sense, people
by
Burning*Cent
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· Score: 1
Perhaps the article poster didn't want to use crippleware. Macamp limits recording streams to 3 minutes for non-paying users. Audion limits sessions to thirty minutes after the first fifteen days. Mint Audio doesn't remember playlists if you haven't registered. I could go on with other limitations on the shareware programs you mentioned, but you get the idea.
Also, seeing as iTunes is included with the Mac OS, it has been payed for. The article poster has good ground to complain about Apple's lack of Ogg support.
Yes, but for simply playing Ogg files, Macamp is fine, Unregistered.
Of course, Apple should include as many file formats as possible. I even think they should license the Real and WIndows Media codecs for Quicktime (playback only, of course).
But the article makes it appear as though it's simply not possible, which is obviously untrue. I'm just trying to keep the lesser informed, well.... informed:-)
-- CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Re:mp3 - ogg (You wouldn't want to do this...)
by
Malic
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· Score: 5, Informative
MP3 is a "lossy" format - so is Ogg. Conversion from MP3 to Ogg would result in double loss in comparison to the original source CD.
--
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
Tag Support?
by
cappadocius
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The following song information tags in the Ogg files are correctly recognized in iTunes: Song Title, Artist, Album and Genre
So will my ratings, play counts and last played features work with.ogg's? I find more and more that iTunes dynamic playlists are a cool thing, and most of mine rely on these tags.
--
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Re:Tag Support?
by
luphus
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yep - they should. I keep my tunage on a readonly nfs mount and my dynamic playlists, ratings, and playcounts work just fine. I think all that wonderful metadata is stored in the iTunes prefs somewhere.
That said, I'm having trouble to get the plugin to work (either that or the encoder on that site). Not sure what's going on yet...
-nwp
Don't read slashdot much, do you?
by
billybob
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Everytime there's a discussion on mp3s here it always turns into a "i like ogg better waaaaa" "i like mp3 better waaaa" bitchfest.
I dont give a flying fuck if ogg is better personally, I already have way too much time (encoding 100s of cds) and money ($400 ipod) invested in mp3's. Besides, both LAME and iTunes encode mp3's that sound VERY nice at 192kbps... lots of mp3s you get from the internet sound like crap because they're encoded by Little Billy (age 7) or smoeone really stupid who doesnt know how to change the default settings in their crappy encoder. These are the mp3's everyone hears and says "oh mp3 sucks!".. but the ones I encode, I can't tell apart from the CD.
I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.
-- Joseph?
Re:Don't read slashdot much, do you?
by
messiertom
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· Score: 5, Funny
I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.
Oh, imagine the new Apple commercials:
I was ripping my songs in MP3, and in the middle of the song, it was like, "beep beep beep beep," and my song was ruined, and I had to rip it again, and it wasn't as good, because it was at a lower bitrate.
Re:Don't read slashdot much, do you?
by
dunkstr
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· Score: 1
Actually, I find that MP3 still has this weird tinkling in the upper registers that's really annoying. It doesn't matter what the bitrate/encoder is. I used to scoff at those who claimed they could tell the difference; but now that I can I can't stand certain songs as MP3s anymore.
From the Xiph FAQ:
An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense.
Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.
A product name that come both from Netrek AND Terry Pratchett's Discworld can only be a hit for nerds! I know it is with me!
I hope they call the memory module for a Ogg Vorbis player 'Brutha'!! (Of course you HAVE to read Pratchett's Small God to get that one)
you can play.mp4 files in itunes, simply drop file on itunes, ta da. you cannot however encode to mp4 from itunes, yet.
-- Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
another project
by
elohim
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· Score: 4, Informative
here's another attempt to use ogg with quicktime.
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
from the site:
This site is dedicated to open source QuickTime development for popular open source audio and video codecs. We are currently working on Ogg Vorbis, an audio codec developed by Xiphophorus, and MNG, an animation video codec.
We have just begun the project, expect many changes over the next few weeks. We will offer a site for developers, as well as one for end-users interested in using our software. At the moment, some areas of our site are not yet implemented.
The Ogg Vorbis component does not work with QuickTime 6. It turns out that QuickTime doesn't support audio with packets of varying durations (only constant duration audio is supported.) This limitation is not in the documentation. This limitation exists in QuickTime 5 as well (and it's not in the documentation there either). But QuickTime 5 did fairly well when playing back audio with varying durations. QuickTime 6 will give you a few pops and clicks when trying to play an Ogg Vorbis file. Ask Apple to fix this problem and some others.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Graymalkin
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· Score: 3, Informative
If it's so trivial why haven't you done it already? Integer only MP3 decoders are all over the places and MP3 decoding using only integer math is well understood. MP3 is also standardized such that anyone with the specs can write a decoding algorithm for them if they desire to. The Tremor codec has just recently been released which means there's still a bit of development time before you see it adapted to handhelds like the Rio and iPod. Even if you've got a strong processor, which most MP3 handhelds don't have, you need to get your decoder on a MIPS diet so your chip isn't running full bore and sucking power out of the batteries like an electricty vampire. Integer only MPEG decoding is a well understood practice while Ogg is still relatively new even though it shares many concepts. Decoding algorithms are one thing, decoding algorithms that don't require 100+ MIPS are another.
Which is it? Does Ogg require more hardware to decode, or do you not know how much hardware it takes to run that decoder?
Yes, adding codecs can be straightforward. That the hardware used in this week's models uses the minimum hardware to support the currently supported codecs doesn't automatically imply that it is insanely expensive to support other things.
This would be a good project for Clive Sinclair.
95% of the population doesn't even know about OGG
by
mitchell_pgh
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I feel, as a well informed computer user, that there are various reasons to choose Ogg over MP3. The major issue facing Ogg is that almost nobody knows about the format and almost nobody really feels the legal/$$ issues associated with MP3.
A typical Mac/iTunes user receives a free encoder and decoder with their computer system so for the end user, MP3 is essentially free (actually, Apple picks up the bill on that one -- Thanks Apple!). The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care). I also feel that the if the MP3 people were trying to limit the availability of the encoders/decoders we would have issues, but they really aren't.
There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.
Any desktop computer made in the last 5 years should be able to play oggs files, I would assume.
Apple's 5 year old desktop is the PowerMac 7300/200 (released February 17, 1997). Yes, you can play MP3s on that machine, but only just barely. It will work, but don't plan on doing anything else with the CPU.
It's my understanding that OGG needs quite a bit more CPU power than MP3 for decoding, so I'd think you probably COULDN'T play OGG on a 5 year old Mac.
Re:Poor hardware?
by
octalc0de
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· Score: 2, Informative
What's the quality of the hardware got to do with it?
Crappy CD-ROM drive sometimes => No Digital Output. No Digital Output => Crappy Rips.
Most of the chips used in handheld MP3 players are lightweight integer only processors or DSPs that handle the sort of integer ops MP3 and WMA files need to decode. With the more general purpose chips you need to write a decoder that can fit in the device's ROM and then not use signifigantly more processing power than the other decoders. Vorbis files need more math ops performed on them than MP3 files do. MP3 audio was designed to be run on systems whose processors performed fewer MIPS than a potato chip. Ogg Vorbis is from the era of Athlons and Intel space heaters. it simply requires more processing power period.
Squeezing an Ogg decoder into the same space as an MP3 decoder is hard enough but getting it to not drain the batteries in Planck time adds a whole level of complexity on top of it. The more work a chip has to do the more power it consumes. I wouldn't buy an iPod that only played 3 hours worth of music before needing a nuclear generator to recharge it.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Dr.Dubious+DDQ
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· Score: 4, Informative
Is there an easy way to burn ogg files in Linux?
If you're using KDE, that audiocd "ioslave" is ridiculously easy to use...
Plug in an audio cd, type "audiocd:/" in Konqueror, then drag the.ogg tracks that you want off of the "Ogg" directory to wherever you want them. KDE encodes the track when you do.
I'd be surprised if there weren't similarly easy methods outside of KDE somewhere as well...
What? I played Vorbis files fine on my Pentium 166! While doing other things! My 66Mhz 7100 could decode Soreson 1 video...there is no way that a 200Mhz PPC can't decode Vorbis. Maybe you are confusing processor power with the multitasking problems of the classic Mac OS (I bet that the program "on top" never yielded control to the mp3 playing program).
--
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
iTunes does use Quicktime to encode and decode audio files. Do you homework before you post FUD.
pfftplplplptpffplplpffft
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
brandorf
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· Score: 1
Err. sony has it's own audio compression (ATRAC3) and seems to have figured out DRm with it's OpenMG software. All of Sony's portable hardware uses this.
I have about 15,000 MP3s, a few OGG files, and tried the MPEG-4 out. I really like the MPEG-4. way smaller than MP3s, plays natively in iTunes, and sounds great. I purchased Quicktime Pro and "rip" CDs to MPEG-4 with a nice applescript from this site:
Yeah, the files don't play in my iPod...and that is a cryin' shame. Otherwise, I can't find anything wrong with MPEG-4.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
Darren+Winsper
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· Score: 2
Insightful? I'm a Linux user and the only reason I didn't buy an iPod over the summer was because it doesn't support Ogg. I won't replace my Minidisc player until a good MP3/Ogg player comes along.
Why Tremor won't always help
by
yerricde
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, [decoding Vorbis on DSP chips] is already taken care of with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.
Three reasons why it may not help:
1. Some players decode MP3 audio with an ASIC that isn't LBA-complete[1]; they take MP3 on one pin and produce WAV on the other, and they cannot be reconfigured for any other audio format.
2. Though the iPod player, uses a pair of ARM processors for decoding the audio and running the menus, and those ARM processors can be upgraded in firmware, the flash chip may not have enough storage to hold both the MP3 decoder and the Ogg decoder.
[1] "LBA-complete" denotes a machine that can run any algorithm that fits into RAM, that is, a general purpose computing device. It's a weaker form of Turing-completeness which cannot be achieved because it requires infinite storage; a Linear Bounded Automaton restricts the available memory to a multiple of the size of the input.
Re:Why Tremor won't always help
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
2. Though the iPod player, uses a pair of ARM processors for decoding the audio and running the menus, and those ARM processors can be upgraded in firmware, the flash chip may not have enough storage to hold both the MP3 decoder and the Ogg decoder.
incorrect. The iPod doesn't use flash ROM for storing the firmware image. Why on earth bother with that, when there's an N-Gb hard drive sitting around? If you want Ogg on iPod, then ask Apple to support that format.
As to point #3, this has nothing to do with the realities of the industry. The royalty is nearly insignificant, and no major consumer electronics company is likely to hobble themselves that way. Especially when the market leader (Apple) already supports multiple formats and can be expected to add more support as time goes onwards.
Patent evergreening can delay generics even longer
by
yerricde
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· Score: 4, Informative
In a bit more than a decade, the mp3 patent will have expired
It won't matter if Fraunhofer manages to "evergreen" the patent. Patent evergreening, which involves patenting a minor variation, intermediate product, or process used to produce a product, is common in the pharmaceutical industry. Often, when a drug's patent is about to expire, a pharma company will patent a new version of a drug and then lobby the FDA to label the original version no longer "safe and effective" and make it a controlled substance. It happened to Seldane. I see no reason why an analogous technique (patenting minor variations on MP3, or slamming MP3 as a "music piracy tool" in favor of mp3PRO) could not be applied to codec patents as well.
Hmm. My old performa 6116 could *barely* play mp3s with SoundApp (lean mean audio decoding/converting machine - wish it was carbonized). That there is a 60mhz 601, if anyone cares. Also, at least when it comes to DES crunching on distributed.net, a 200mhz 604e is roughly 5 times faster than a 60mhz 601. I would think it would be able to handle ogg fine, although granted, you wouldn't want to be demanding a whole lot more of the machine;)
Think before u reply, mp3pro is higher then ogg in quality and is smaller then ogg. I am not talkin bout mp3 which though small isn't as small as ogg.....
As another reference point, I used to own a Powerbook 5300 (100mhz). It could decode MP3s just fine - as long as you quit all other programs, started one playing, and then walked away from the machine. Another beyond that, it would stutter and break up.
Compare this to a Pentium 100 mhz, which has no trouble playing MP3s.
My old Performa 6200 (75 MHz 603) from '94 (I think) played Mp3s in the background while playing WarCraft 2 or DOOM II in the foreground. It was also acting as an LPD printserver and a fileserver at the time -- albeit on a low traffic in-home lan.
I have no idea why you say that the 7300, a much more powerful machine, would have problems doing the same thing.
--
t'nera semordnilap
Re:MP3Pro
by
c13v3rm0nk3y
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...ur copying illegally the songs so get over it.
Um, no. I personally own everything I've ripped, and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law.
As for quality? Well, there are good rips and bad rips and some formats seem to be better at some bitrates than others, depending on the source. The real fact is that every single one of the lossy compression formats throw away data to get the total sampled size down.
The main application for these lossy digital audio formats are convenience and media flexibility. With any of these formats data fidelity is, by definition, of lesser importance.
-- --
clvrmnky
But 128kbps mp3's don't cut it...
by
KH2002
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· Score: 1
Someone said earlier that Ogg's advantage is greatest at low bit rates. But I have no interest in getting 128kbps mp3 quality at 64kbps- I have no interest in getting 128kbps mp3 quality, period- it's not good enough.
I encode mp3's at 224kbps, which sounds pretty good to me. This is the minimum quality that I want, and not having had a chance to check Ogg out, I wonder what you need to encode Ogg at to get comparable sound. And how does AAC compare to Ogg at 128kbps & above?
AAC is actually worse than mp3 at higher bitrates and ogg is best at both low and high bitrates. At 128kbps, the differences to the original are no longer audible for the vast majority of users.
Try 128 kbps, if you still hear a difference to CD-sound (which is unlikely) try 150 or 160 kbps.
And when I say "try it" I mean "don't lie to yourself - make a blind test".
My old Performa 6200 (75 MHz 603) from '94 (I think) played Mp3s in the background while playing WarCraft 2 or DOOM II in the foreground. It was also acting as an LPD printserver and a fileserver at the time -- albeit on a low traffic in-home lan.
Ah, bullshit. I had a PowerMac 7200/90, a more powerful machine, that could barely RUN Doom II, let alone anything else at the same time.
It has never been about what is "better"
by
slantyyz
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ideological dogma aside, success in marketplace adoption has never been about survival of the fittest. It's about being first to saturate the market.
I don't think I need to give examples, but Beta vs VHS, Windows vs. everything else, MP3 vs Ogg, blah, blah.
If Ebola were to kill everyone on the planet, would it matter if a newer, deadlier (and arguably better) virus appeared on earth?
Unicode??? Is it too much to ask?
by
pschmied
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· Score: 2
Man, encoding my CDs with unicode track names is turning out to be a bitch. iTunes does it well with mp3s, but oggdrop seems to unicode, and the command line tools seems to also.
I can rename the files and then name them back after encoding, but man, what a pain.
So, consider unicode #1 on my feature wish-list. Or maybe I'll quit bitching and fix it. Nah.
How can I prove it to you? I know what my computer did. As for just running DOOM II, I have no idea why you had trouble. It ran just fine. It may be important that my machine had 64mb of ram (the max it could handle).
--
t'nera semordnilap
portable ogg player for sale!
by
mosch
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· Score: 2
I just made a portable ogg player out of a flight case with a 19" rack in it, a VA Linux server, a LaCie LCD panel, and a 2001 Toyota Solara. asking price: $45,000. in stock now!
Also available, above system installed in a 1998 Mercedes SL500. asking price: $69,500.
Re:portable ogg player for sale!
by
RestiffBard
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· Score: 2
Doom II on Mac ran at about 1/2 the framerate it did on a Windows machine with equivalent clock. If that meets your definition of "just fine", well, then okay.
Ummm. . . I have to wonder how much you've been paying attention to the ogg project.
It's been stated several times by Monty that decoding an.ogg file has about the same complexity as decoding an.mp3
Perhaps you're basing this idea off the fact that for a long time the only decoder available needed a floating point unit. But this has since been fixed by the release of Tremor (an integer only ogg decoder).
But in any case your information is wrong, or at the very least out of date.
Where do you get the idea that Ogg enthusiasts are cheap? All signs to me would point in the opposite direction:
1) Ogg advocates tend to be Slashdot-type geeks - those who are typically willing to spend more on "cool toys" than your average Joe, and have the means to do so.
2) Ogg development is supported in part by donations of people who use it. This may not be a huge amount, but this is people paying for something when they don't even have to.
3) Comparing Ogg people to MP3 people... most people are into MP3s because they can download (for free) all sorts of cool songs they didn't spend money for. Ogg, mainly for lack of available downloads, is used primarily by people ripping their own (usually extensive) collection of legally purchased CDs.
4) I've heard many Ogg enthusiasts claim that as soon as a portable Ogg player exists, they will buy one, even at significantly higher cost. I am one of these.
A free integer decoder exists. Xiph will help with engineering resources to the best of their ability. No licensing fees. And with software that can play both, a seemless transition from MP3 to Ogg is trivial. Seems pretty attractive to me.
Vorbis decode currently requires more memory to decode than mp3/WMA (about 120kB using Tremor; we plan to reduce that to about 30-40kB).
It does not require more CPU.
Monty
"You sounded pretty authoritative for being dead wrong."
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
almaw
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· Score: 1
Mmmm... 100Gb of OGG? At 128kbps (and I wouldn't imagine you'd encode ogg over this), that's 1820 hours of content. Now, assuming that each music CD you own fills an hour, that's 1820 CDs. At an average price of say $10, that's $18,000 on CDs.
You, er, do own all of those of course, don't you?:)
Right now, I have XDarwin running rootless with Blackbox as the window manager. I'm running XMMS, and it's playing an OGG. It's using between 2% and 5%, with ESD using up 4-5%. It's free, open-source, supports OGG, and gives me X running when I need it!
Yes but you will lose the nice interface of iTunes. I have used xmms for years, and when I saw iTunes in pictures etc I didn't think it could be so great - but it is. I'll never go back to xmms et al. iTunes is just so much better to use, especially v3.0 with the dynamic playlists and all...
I mean if xmms works for you, great; but I'd much rather have iTunes with ogg support.
Am I missing something here? Even if a drive doesn't have an external digital output, surely an application can still access the raw digits on a CD and encode those? Unless you're telling me that when I'm reading data from my CD-ROM drive, it's actually making "crackle crackle" sounds down the IDE cable?? I mean, I know that's how things used to be in the days of the Spectrum / C64, but...:)
...but your assumptions are incorrect.
by
xiphmont
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.
We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.
Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.
When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.
At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us:-)
Monty
Re:...but your assumptions are incorrect.
by
slantyyz
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· Score: 1
Actually, there are no assumptions. Market saturation rules apply whether or not there is a "corporate" entity behind the standard or not. The fact that Ogg is free is laudable, but not relevant to its widespread adoption.
But the debate throughout the thread about Ogg becoming more widespread than MP3 because it is technologically better applies just as much to the OSS Ogg effort as it does to the arguably superior (to MP3) corporate backed WMA format.
DVD is overcoming tape rapidly because of _vast_ quality differences (240 lines vs 500, stereo vs. 5.1). Ogg, WMA, and MP3Pro don't offer that kind of difference, IMHO. Not yet, at least. The barrier to entry has always been that everyone and his brother are already using MP3 and that the perceptual switching cost (not necessarily a financial cost) is too high.
Just because my examples seem to use businesses doesn't mean that they don't apply. Marketing is not just about dollars. It's about social psychology too. Like it or not, Ogg's users are its market.
and if Apple shipped Ogg, they may still not know
by
xiphmont
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· Score: 2
A typical Mac/iTunes user receives a free encoder and decoder with their computer system so for the end user, MP3 is essentially free (actually, Apple picks up the bill on that one -- Thanks Apple!).
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size. Not to mention it makes a good commercial and lords your power-userness over your friends.
There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.
...just like there's no real reason for anyone to use a Mac when Windows machines are cheaper:-) I mean they both can do all the same things, right?
Monty
(who develops Ogg on a Powerbook G4, BTW)
Uniwhatsis???
by
xiphmont
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· Score: 3, Informative
I don't think unicode means what you think it means. You're using it in a few different contradictory ways in your post...
[FWIW, Ogg Vorbis comment fields use UTF-8 and support full internationalization. Not sure if the plugin for iTunes posted in this story does...]
The DirectShow filters at vorbis.com add Ogg support to WMP and all Win apps that use DirectShow, including DiVX apps.
Monty
Whine, Bitch, Moan
by
xiphmont
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· Score: 3, Funny
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.
Yeah, me too! I'm SICK to DEATH of Slashdot posters just COMPLAINING! I mean these losers have nothing better to do but bitch and moan about other people's nasal, annoying posts and... oops, damn!
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
You are not suggesting that users will just accept having to re-encode all their music as OGG, are you? MP3-players will have to be around for a long time. There is no money saved in the short run (or even medium run).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size.
Just like they will quickly notice that they can't share their songs with anyone else, can't just download them easily from P2P networks and can't use their songs on various MP3-players.
just like there's no real reason for anyone to use a Mac when Windows machines are cheaper:-) I mean they both can do all the same things, right?
The difference is that the Mac has some very big advantages, while OGG has only two small ones: - Free - Small
Those don't offset the disadvantages for 99.9% of the population. Being free doesn't matter much because we don't directly pay for the encoder and the cost isn't that high to begin with. Being small doesn't matter much when you can't download OGG-encoded music. Storage prices are so low that it hardly matters to have a 2 instead of 4 MB song.
..." and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law."
So... How hard is it to become a Canadian these days?;)
It really all depends on the soundcard too. I have a old P120 laptop (with 32Meg RAM), that could play MP3's just fine, even wile surfing for example. (Only under Linux, W95 sucked bad) However I had to set mpg123 to play by default in joined-mono. That was no problem since the latop had only one speaker anyway. If I tried CD-quality stereo it would only stutter. The reason for this was the ESS688 soundchip in my latop didn't support 16-bit, 44.1KHz, stereo in hardware and thus had to fall back on CPU-cycles.
Well, that's how I understood it...
Without a job or reason to be Canadian (i.e. refugee), I think the going rate is $500,000 CDN, which is about $12 USD. It would be cheaper if you could contribute as a tax payer.
-- Patience is a virtue, but I don't have the time - TH
So... How hard is it to become a Canadian these days?;)
Seriously, much too hard. I know a couple (he is Canadian, she is Swedish) who married and wanted to have her come over and become a citizen. The hoops they had to jump through were ridiculous.
I suppose it makes sense to someone, but it seemed pretty arbitrary. She was gainfully employed, spoke several languages, university educated, and they still gave her a hard time. They asked a lot of very personal questions, and ones they _can't_ ask once you are a citizen. They made him sign some crazy paper about how he was legally bound to support her, and could go to jail if she broke the law. I suppose this only proves that Immigration Canada is being fair, as she wasn't a member of any visible minority.
Canada is built on immigration from other countries. Both the US and Canada would have negative population rates unless we accepted people from elsewhere.
That being said, all my American friends who moved here to become Canadians did so with a concious choice to no longer live in the US (all for various reasons). This is not a dig, but a personal observation.
Everyone thinks their country/city/club is the best. Canada is great! Don't believe all you hear on Southpark;)
The processr itself was plenty fast.... It's the lack of DMA that probably killed you, IMO....
-- 120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
by
andfarm
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· Score: 1
This is a repeat of previous comments, but:
Apple didn't get a 'cut rate deal' on the iTunes encoder because they got paid.
Apple got a good deal on the encoder taken from SoundJam MP, which was pretty good for its time but now is much worse than LAME. Use LAME, not iTunes!
--
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
A tragicomic history of Linux sound
by
psamuels
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· Score: 2
F'rinstance, I have a directory full of libao-0.8.3, libogg-1.0, libvorbis-1.0, and vorbis-tools-1.0, all of which compiled without
any obvious problems. But there don't seem to be any clues as to how I make the latest mozilla fire them up with it gets an ogg
file.
The sound situation is Linux ain't pretty at the moment, since there are about 4 or 5 competing standards none of which have won yet. Let me try and clear it up a little -
The original was/dev/dsp, but most original sound drivers would only let one process open that at a time (to match the sound card only having one DSP to play sounds with) so if you were say playing a game, and it had/dev/dsp open, nothing else could play sounds. This standard is called the Open Sound System, or OSS.
Similar is ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, which has a/dev/dsp-compatibility mode but whose main drivers implement a much more sophisticated framework, suitable for "3D" sound cards etc. ALSA was not actually packaged with Linux proper until very recently, but many vendors integrated and bundled it, so it is widely available.
Unhelpfully, ALSA became popular back when it was still in heavy development, so there are really two ALSA interfaces in use: version 0.5 and version 0.9. Presumably 0.5 will eventually spin off into irrelevance, now that 0.9 has basically stabilised.
To solve the one-process-at-a-time problem, several solutions have come out. The oldest (and little-used anymore) is NAS, the Network Audio System originally from hardware vendor NCD. Yes, "network" means you can upload noise in realtime to someone else's machine (assuming they don't lock you out). Fun stuff. NAS may not have been strictly the earliest - it had a couple of competitors, way back when, whose names I can no longer remember.
A slightly more recent development was ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon (or something like that), which sits on your machine holding/dev/dsp or ALSA open, accepts requests from multiple simultaneous programs, and mixes sound as needed. Used quite a bit, but the programming interface is rather baroque, so nobody really likes it much.
The KDE project, recognising the problems with ESD, created aRts, which I think is an acronym but I don't remember for what. aRts performs the same function as ESD but reportedly in a cleaner / more powerful / generally better way. Last I heard, GNOME was adopting aRts as well, so this is probably the wave (har har) of the future.
The sad thing is, whichever of the above your environment is using, it can't easily coexist with any of the others. So you have to know which you are using, and tell all your applications.
Now back to ogg vorbis. The `libao' - that is, "audio output library" - is an attempt to abstract away the actual sound output methods (the above, plus a few custom methods for other versions of Unix) into a single interface. So any libao-using application can use several if not all of the above schemes. In ogg123 see the man page under '-d' for how to specify the output driver. Alternately, you can put the correct driver in/etc/libao.conf (or wherever that file lives in your compile): "default_driver=oss", sez mine.
So you may just have to find the correct "-d" switch for the `ogg123' command. Read the FM. (:
As for launching from Mozilla, well, I don't know what to tell you, except go through Edit / Preferences / Helper Applications / New... and fill in the fields "Ogg Vorbis audio", "ogg", "application/x-ogg", and "/usr/local/bin/ogg123 -d esd" or whatever. Good luck. Suggest making sure you can play a local ogg file using that command before adding it to Mozilla.
-- "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Am I missing something here? Even if a drive doesn't have an external digital output, surely an application can still access the
raw digits on a CD and encode those?
If the hardware is crap, it will make mistakes. Mistakes are not acceptible for a CD-ROM, where someone's actual data is at stake, so the standard CD-ROM format allows for gobs and gobs of error correction - I think that's why an audio CD sector is 2352 bytes while a data CD sector is only 2048 bytes. Audio is seen as less important. After all, who cares if your playback is 100% the right bits or only 99.9%?
Try ripping a whole CD twice. For extra fun, turn off all those error-detection/correction algorithms in cdparanoia so it will go faster. Then do a bit-by-bit comparison of each track. If your hardware is less than perfect, or your CD has any significant scratches, some of the compares will fail. Heck, I've got a ~1.5-year-old Dell-OEM CD-ROM and it picks up the occasional string of bit errors even on CDs straight out of the shrinkwrap. Not sure if this is the fault of the CD manufacturer or my drive, but my point being.
I agree with you that the "external digital out" is not the important factor here - except that if your hardware is 'leet enough for digital out, it just may be of passable quality in terms of ripping per se.
-- "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Slashdot Mirror
So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?
Enough said!
Now people can shut the hell up with the "but does it support ORG" posts... Nearly annoying as bewolfs!
Tournament Management Online &
a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive
Does this mean it'll play BOTH of my OGG tunes perfectly?
AWESOME!
It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.
Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
we now know that Apple supports "OGG"....
but does it support "ORG"? who knows...
nbfn
and btw...
imagine a beowulf of these things....
orgy. My $0.02.
If I have a sig, replace it with this blip of text that I manually typed in instead because I don't remember what the sig says (if it exists) and it may not be representative of my current beliefs.
"To live" is to ignore the possibility of death.
Just tested CD burining of ogg files and it worked flawlessly. Since I don't have a portable MP3 player, I can safely say I will never make another MP3 file again.
Soon as ANYONE makes a hardware Ogg player, they'll get my money.
... but Ogg isn't going to make any major headway until the embedded decoder vendors (Crystal, Micronas, ST) start supporting it. Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation, and two, the DSP vendors need to be convinced that it's worth the precious ROM space to fit another codec in there.
Ogg just came to the party WAY too late. It is up against a massive chicken-and-egg problem if it wants to supplant MP3. Nobody's using Ogg because it's not supported, and nobody's supporting it because nobody wants it. The advantages of Ogg (slightly better quality, free) are massively outweighed by the ubiquity of MP3. Like 'em of not, Fraunhofer did a fantastic job with the original codec, and it's going to take something with a massive improvement in quality/compression/cost to supplant it. Ogg is better, but not "better enough".
Someone on macslash (first post I believe) question why anyone would care about ogg. I think that question bears repeating. What is so great about ogg that would make people want to use it instead of mp3?
simply use Audion !
Sure it's not an iApp... but it's probably the best audio-player on the mac.
Take a look: http://www.panic.com/
DISCLAIMER: The author of this post sure as hell doesn't work for panic. Thankyouverymuch.
Wondering if there are any P2P programs that have a lot of users w/ ogg files...I use kazaa but I'm not finding a lot of ogg files.
SIGFAULT
H0re of them all?
/. his server, here's a mirror.
Actually, I've never done this. But on the (off) chance you guys
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~skoonce/ogg_mirror/
The .ogg file format is open source, portable, stable, and has no legal bindings whatsover, unlike mp3s -- what prevents hardware companies from doing a few quick source code cut n' pastes and adding a feature? ROMs are cheap enough that adding ogg support would even be trivial on the hardware end.
I and many others have over 100GB of ogg files on my hd, and I'd really like to see more support for them by hardware manufacturers -- there is no reason they can't do it.
With proprietary software (i.e. MP3 encoders like iTunes has) there may have been all kinds of backroom deals we may never know about. For example Apple may have gotten a super cut-rate deal on the encoder license in exchange for promising thomson to not include Ogg support for encoding or playback.
I could be blowing smoke out my ass too and apple is just really slow to respond to new formats and the next version will include Ogg support.
Unless you toe the party line.
Why should your toe adhere to any particular ideology? Does it matter which particular toe?
As a bonus it "only" uses 7-10% CPU on my iBook as opppsed to iTunes' 20-30%.
but how many portable players actually support it?
Sony for example, is in tight with Microsoft. They also produce records and want some of that good old drm that wma seems to offer.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Whamb is a brand new MP3/Ogg Player for 10.2 that is 100% cocoa and sweeeeeeeet.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Why is it that the oggenc on the Mac won't encode if you give it the path: /Volumes/Audio\ CD/Track\ 01.cdda?
I get some sort of volume-is-read-only error. Of course it's read-only! It's the CD! I finally got it to encode after I copied the track from the CD to my HD.
This sux. Anyone have the answer to this?
i have been gleefully ripping CDs and AIFs to OGG for a couple days now, and although itunes seems to choke occasionally, it hasn't been much of an issue. this has been sort of an off and on type project, actually, but this it the most painless method to coerce OGGs to play in itunes so far. oddly enough the qt components page still claims that the component is busted under qt6. i like how the guy learned how to code on a mac on a lark over a weekend.
What about Windows Media Player?
Can you play OGG in that somehow?
I was talking about putting Ogg support into portable players where CPU power is an issue. Any desktop computer made in the last 5 years should be able to play oggs files, I would assume.
In other words, since apple provided a plug in architecture for QuickTime, you can't really bitch about it not supporting OGG, since you can write one yourself (as these people did)
The other point was that supporting OGG in small devices requires more CPU usage, which might be more expensive then paying for MP3 or WMA licensing costs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
he's right!
There really isn't any compelling difference between the two formats from a normal user perspective. One comes with license fees, the other doesn't.
Oggs require more hardware to decode, There is an integer engine out, but I'm not sure how well it works, or how much CPU it needs compared to other codecs.
But the fact of the matter is, it does cost money to support ogg files on small devices, probably more then the licensing requirements for Mp3. It's not like they can just slap ogg support onto a device that might not have enough CPU power as an afterthought.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sony for example, is in tight with Microsoft.
Those two companies hate each other.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
While ripping to
Thus I can play the rare
Also, It does not require 6.0.2-- if you have 6.0 or 6.0.1 it works fine. Now I just wish I could get it for OS9.
One, if you ask me, vorbis sounds much better than mp3. Even at high bitrates mp3s still have a lot of artifacts, over-ringing, what have you.
Vorbis encodings don't have that, and therefore makes the quality drop much less noticeable.
Second, the people who work on vorbis spent a lot of time on low-bitrate encoding, which translates into very decent sounding low bitrate vorbis, as compared against low bitrate mp3.
Third, vorbis supports a much wider range of mean encoding bitrates, which is useful if you find the perfect bitrate for you that balances size and quality.
Fourth, vorbis supports 2^8 - 1 (255) different channels of audio. Say it with me: surround sound, and then some.
Fifth: Vorbis is free as in beer and in speech. People who make players/devices won't have to pay royalties to produce said players/devices. That translates into a (possibly) cheaper car stereo player that supports vorbis.
One counterpoint I'd like to respond to is vorbis' appetite for CPU time.
I will admit that vorbis does require more cpu time than mp3 does to decode. This is not that big of a problem for two reasons:
One: vorbis isn't nearly mature yet. It's getting there, but there is still a lot of room for improvement, including CPU time.
Two: prices of micro-controllers are falling. Car stereos have had gienormous [sic] microprocessors for quite a while, displaying all of those silly screen savers that everybody must have. Also, because of mp3's current ubiquity, there are already tons of players that already have the architecture required to play compressed digital audio, therefore many players will require only a few tweaks in order to support vorbis.
One last point: yes, I know that mp3 is already here, and that for many purposes it will settle. Does that mean you should settle for less when a much better alternative is available?
-Kevin
Just because he has TiBook doesnt mean he uses OS X exclusively or at all. I bet he installed linux on there as soon as he got one
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
There has been a quicktime plugin for ogg-vorbis since well before it went 1.0 (actually, IIRC there were two of them, and if this is a new one, now there are three).
I am so sick of people complaining about things that they just assume quicktime/itunes/etc can't do.
Your ignorance is not an excuse to apple-bash people!
On modern general purpose CPUs (such as the pentium) Vorbis actually takes less cycled to decode than MP3 (as measured with the pentium cycle counter).. If your windows taskmon shows it using more, that just because the decoder works in larger chunks of data, thus yealds less often and the task monitor misreports its use...
There isn't a DSP based MP3 player without enough CPU available to decode OGG. (it needs about 40mips on most DSP archs, most portable mp3 players are 70mips DSPs. The real problem is memory requirements: Because of it's ultra flexiable format, Vorbis needs more ram to decode than mp3 and some older decoders only had 32k or 64k of RAM!!! (Vorbis could probably be done in that, but it would be hard.. while 128k would be easy.)..
All the modern players (esp that hard disk ones) have tons of ram (32megs in the ipod for example) and tons of cpu (something like 140mips for the ipod) which makes vorbis decode free and easy.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe just apple doesn't support ogg because there's no demand for it from their customers?
What just about nobody realizes about apple is that they are vastly, vastly under-resourced. They just don't have the people to spare. They probably aren't going to go and add support for a poorly documented format that no one within their walls are familiar with because a bunch of linux-using slashdotters that probably won't buy an ipod anyway go "hey, it would be so cool if apple would do this".
No. Apple doesn't care about what would be "cool". They generally don't care about *anything*, really, but when they do they care about what would attract people to their platform, they care about finding new ways for people to use their computers, and they care about giving their customers what they want. I've yet to meet one person with an ipod who actually gave a shit one way or the other about ogg support. So if the customers don't care, why should apple bother?
Why don't we all just reverse-engineer the ipod firmware so we can add games and ogg support and a game boy emulator?
OGG has been making some rather good headway in games. A number of new games that have come out (UT2003) or are comming out soon use OGG for music. Most of the popular music plugins like FMOD support it and developers are finding that it rules on account of having good compression and no liscencing hassles.
That indirectly helps OGG adoption generally as it increases awarness since people to like to listen to music from video games and with OGG they can just play it straight in Winamp or the like.
Yeah, I' bet there's a huge number of Apple users who rip their music to OGG when there's no available player for it on their platform.
And before you tell me that there is some obsucre player for it, reminder that your AVERAGE Mac user isn't going to know about anything that isn't made by Apple, and sure as hell isn't going to FINK something.
This isn't a step forward until it's built into iTunes.
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
...if you can't find them on p2p sites.
;)
Yes ogg is so good, it eliminates the piracy problem
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Oops, I guess I'm more stupid today than usual. Oh well. I actually thought you were complaining about desktop CPU expense for a while. I'll try not to operate any heavy machinery for the rest of today.
Does supporting OGG require more CPU usage in portable devices/DSPs than MP3 because OGG is really more processor intensive or because existing chips were designed with MP3 in mind? (Honest question, I don't know.) Seems like some devices are supporting MP3 and WMA; can OGG be that hard?
I don't care about Ogg. I want MP4 support for the iPod (tada 5 gig model goes from 1000 to 2000 songs) and support built into iTunes. MP4/AAC is the next big thing. Apple already has a decoder/encoder working and in Quicktime 6, now just implement it already!
Anyone know of a free MS Windows program that will convert LOTS of mp3's to ogg files for me? I realy would like to convert my collection, but hand by hand converting 2000+ files is not my idea of fun.
"enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."
I wish people around these parts wouldnt act as if everything does is delibartely designed to harm you. That evil, evil Apple, doesnt want you to play your ogg files! All of us are lumped with tons of ogg files on your hard drives but apple wont support us! Oh no!
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.
loply.com
Is there an easy way to burn ogg files in Linux? (sorry, GNU/Linux...don't hit me!) I am reasonably new to Linux, not a total idiot, but I just cannot figure out how to do it. Someone please show me how stupid I am, and how easily done it is.
Is there a WMP plugin yet? Beacause that's what needs to be targeted first. There are a hell of a lot WMP users then there are Quicktime or ITunes.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Whose bright idea was it to download "all of those Ogg Vorbis files" that you couldn't play?
Or, for those of you who don't download...
Why did you rip all your CDs into a format you couldn't read?
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
MP3 is a "lossy" format - so is Ogg. Conversion from MP3 to Ogg would result in double loss in comparison to the original source CD.
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
So will my ratings, play counts and last played features work with .ogg's? I find more and more that iTunes dynamic playlists are a cool thing, and most of mine rely on these tags.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Everytime there's a discussion on mp3s here it always turns into a "i like ogg better waaaaa" "i like mp3 better waaaa" bitchfest.
I dont give a flying fuck if ogg is better personally, I already have way too much time (encoding 100s of cds) and money ($400 ipod) invested in mp3's. Besides, both LAME and iTunes encode mp3's that sound VERY nice at 192kbps... lots of mp3s you get from the internet sound like crap because they're encoded by Little Billy (age 7) or smoeone really stupid who doesnt know how to change the default settings in their crappy encoder. These are the mp3's everyone hears and says "oh mp3 sucks!".. but the ones I encode, I can't tell apart from the CD.
I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.
Joseph?
If you can run 10 billion ops per second, the time to decode dosn't really matter that much. If you can only run a few million, it starts to matter.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From the Xiph FAQ: An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.
A product name that come both from Netrek AND Terry Pratchett's Discworld can only be a hit for nerds! I know it is with me!
I hope they call the memory module for a Ogg Vorbis player 'Brutha'!! (Of course you HAVE to read Pratchett's Small God to get that one)
you can play .mp4 files in itunes, simply drop file on itunes, ta da. you cannot however encode to mp4 from itunes, yet.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
here's another attempt to use ogg with quicktime.
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
from the site:
This site is dedicated to open source QuickTime development for popular open source audio and video codecs. We are currently working on Ogg Vorbis, an audio codec developed by Xiphophorus, and MNG, an animation video codec.
We have just begun the project, expect many changes over the next few weeks. We will offer a site for developers, as well as one for end-users interested in using our software. At the moment, some areas of our site are not yet implemented.
The Ogg Vorbis component does not work with QuickTime 6.
It turns out that QuickTime doesn't support audio with packets of varying durations (only constant duration audio is supported.) This limitation is not in the documentation. This limitation exists in QuickTime 5 as well (and it's not in the documentation there either). But QuickTime 5 did fairly well when playing back audio with varying durations. QuickTime 6 will give you a few pops and clicks when trying to play an Ogg Vorbis file.
Ask Apple to fix this problem and some others.
If it's so trivial why haven't you done it already? Integer only MP3 decoders are all over the places and MP3 decoding using only integer math is well understood. MP3 is also standardized such that anyone with the specs can write a decoding algorithm for them if they desire to. The Tremor codec has just recently been released which means there's still a bit of development time before you see it adapted to handhelds like the Rio and iPod. Even if you've got a strong processor, which most MP3 handhelds don't have, you need to get your decoder on a MIPS diet so your chip isn't running full bore and sucking power out of the batteries like an electricty vampire. Integer only MPEG decoding is a well understood practice while Ogg is still relatively new even though it shares many concepts. Decoding algorithms are one thing, decoding algorithms that don't require 100+ MIPS are another.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Which is it? Does Ogg require more hardware to decode, or do you not know how much hardware it takes to run that decoder? Yes, adding codecs can be straightforward. That the hardware used in this week's models uses the minimum hardware to support the currently supported codecs doesn't automatically imply that it is insanely expensive to support other things. This would be a good project for Clive Sinclair.
I feel, as a well informed computer user, that there are various reasons to choose Ogg over MP3. The major issue facing Ogg is that almost nobody knows about the format and almost nobody really feels the legal/$$ issues associated with MP3. A typical Mac/iTunes user receives a free encoder and decoder with their computer system so for the end user, MP3 is essentially free (actually, Apple picks up the bill on that one -- Thanks Apple!). The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care). I also feel that the if the MP3 people were trying to limit the availability of the encoders/decoders we would have issues, but they really aren't. There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.
Apple's 5 year old desktop is the PowerMac 7300/200 (released February 17, 1997). Yes, you can play MP3s on that machine, but only just barely. It will work, but don't plan on doing anything else with the CPU.
It's my understanding that OGG needs quite a bit more CPU power than MP3 for decoding, so I'd think you probably COULDN'T play OGG on a 5 year old Mac.
What's the quality of the hardware got to do with it?
Crappy CD-ROM drive sometimes => No Digital Output.
No Digital Output => Crappy Rips.
Most of the chips used in handheld MP3 players are lightweight integer only processors or DSPs that handle the sort of integer ops MP3 and WMA files need to decode. With the more general purpose chips you need to write a decoder that can fit in the device's ROM and then not use signifigantly more processing power than the other decoders. Vorbis files need more math ops performed on them than MP3 files do. MP3 audio was designed to be run on systems whose processors performed fewer MIPS than a potato chip. Ogg Vorbis is from the era of Athlons and Intel space heaters. it simply requires more processing power period.
Squeezing an Ogg decoder into the same space as an MP3 decoder is hard enough but getting it to not drain the batteries in Planck time adds a whole level of complexity on top of it. The more work a chip has to do the more power it consumes. I wouldn't buy an iPod that only played 3 hours worth of music before needing a nuclear generator to recharge it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If you're using KDE, that audiocd "ioslave" is ridiculously easy to use...
Plug in an audio cd, type "audiocd:/" in Konqueror, then drag the .ogg tracks that you want off of the "Ogg" directory to wherever you want them. KDE encodes the track when you do.
I'd be surprised if there weren't similarly easy methods outside of KDE somewhere as well...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
What? I played Vorbis files fine on my Pentium 166! While doing other things! My 66Mhz 7100 could decode Soreson 1 video...there is no way that a 200Mhz PPC can't decode Vorbis. Maybe you are confusing processor power with the multitasking problems of the classic Mac OS (I bet that the program "on top" never yielded control to the mp3 playing program).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
iTunes does use Quicktime to encode and decode audio files. Do you homework before you post FUD.
pfftplplplptpffplplpffft
Err. sony has it's own audio compression (ATRAC3) and seems to have figured out DRm with it's OpenMG software. All of Sony's portable hardware uses this.
Bork Bork Bork!!
I have about 15,000 MP3s, a few OGG files, and tried the MPEG-4 out. I really like the MPEG-4. way smaller than MP3s, plays natively in iTunes, and sounds great. I purchased Quicktime Pro and "rip" CDs to MPEG-4 with a nice applescript from this site:
e mpeg4.shtml
http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/itinfo/makemin
Yeah, the files don't play in my iPod...and that is a cryin' shame. Otherwise, I can't find anything wrong with MPEG-4.
Insightful? I'm a Linux user and the only reason I didn't buy an iPod over the summer was because it doesn't support Ogg. I won't replace my Minidisc player until a good MP3/Ogg player comes along.
Well, [decoding Vorbis on DSP chips] is already taken care of with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.
Three reasons why it may not help:
1. Some players decode MP3 audio with an ASIC that isn't LBA-complete[1]; they take MP3 on one pin and produce WAV on the other, and they cannot be reconfigured for any other audio format.
2. Though the iPod player, uses a pair of ARM processors for decoding the audio and running the menus, and those ARM processors can be upgraded in firmware, the flash chip may not have enough storage to hold both the MP3 decoder and the Ogg decoder.
3. What if the player maker got a sweeter unit royalty deal with RCA, the U.S. sublicensor of the MP3 patent, for pledging to keep the device MP3-only?
[1] "LBA-complete" denotes a machine that can run any algorithm that fits into RAM, that is, a general purpose computing device. It's a weaker form of Turing-completeness which cannot be achieved because it requires infinite storage; a Linear Bounded Automaton restricts the available memory to a multiple of the size of the input.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In a bit more than a decade, the mp3 patent will have expired
It won't matter if Fraunhofer manages to "evergreen" the patent. Patent evergreening, which involves patenting a minor variation, intermediate product, or process used to produce a product, is common in the pharmaceutical industry. Often, when a drug's patent is about to expire, a pharma company will patent a new version of a drug and then lobby the FDA to label the original version no longer "safe and effective" and make it a controlled substance. It happened to Seldane. I see no reason why an analogous technique (patenting minor variations on MP3, or slamming MP3 as a "music piracy tool" in favor of mp3PRO) could not be applied to codec patents as well.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hence why Linux still has a long uphill battle to fight if they wan't to make a break in the desktop market.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Ever heard of fixed point math?
http://members.aol.com/form1/fixed.htm
Hmm. My old performa 6116 could *barely* play mp3s with SoundApp (lean mean audio decoding/converting machine - wish it was carbonized). That there is a 60mhz 601, if anyone cares. Also, at least when it comes to DES crunching on distributed.net, a 200mhz 604e is roughly 5 times faster than a 60mhz 601. I would think it would be able to handle ogg fine, although granted, you wouldn't want to be demanding a whole lot more of the machine ;)
-nwp
Think before u reply, mp3pro is higher then ogg in quality and is smaller then ogg. I am not talkin bout mp3 which though small isn't as small as ogg.....
Compare this to a Pentium 100 mhz, which has no trouble playing MP3s.
My old Performa 6200 (75 MHz 603) from '94 (I think) played Mp3s in the background while playing WarCraft 2 or DOOM II in the foreground. It was also acting as an LPD printserver and a fileserver at the time -- albeit on a low traffic in-home lan.
I have no idea why you say that the 7300, a much more powerful machine, would have problems doing the same thing.
t'nera semordnilap
Um, no. I personally own everything I've ripped, and in Canada it is a consumer right to make as many damn personal copies for whatever reason I want. As long as I keep the original and all copies (or destroy all copies), and do not allow more then one copy to be used at the same time, I am breaking no law.
As for quality? Well, there are good rips and bad rips and some formats seem to be better at some bitrates than others, depending on the source. The real fact is that every single one of the lossy compression formats throw away data to get the total sampled size down.
The main application for these lossy digital audio formats are convenience and media flexibility. With any of these formats data fidelity is, by definition, of lesser importance.
-- clvrmnky
I encode mp3's at 224kbps, which sounds pretty good to me. This is the minimum quality that I want, and not having had a chance to check Ogg out, I wonder what you need to encode Ogg at to get comparable sound. And how does AAC compare to Ogg at 128kbps & above?
Ah, bullshit. I had a PowerMac 7200/90, a more powerful machine, that could barely RUN Doom II, let alone anything else at the same time.
Ideological dogma aside, success in marketplace adoption has never been about survival of the fittest. It's about being first to saturate the market.
I don't think I need to give examples, but Beta vs VHS, Windows vs. everything else, MP3 vs Ogg, blah, blah.
If Ebola were to kill everyone on the planet, would it matter if a newer, deadlier (and arguably better) virus appeared on earth?
I can rename the files and then name them back after encoding, but man, what a pain.
So, consider unicode #1 on my feature wish-list. Or maybe I'll quit bitching and fix it. Nah.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
How can I prove it to you? I know what my computer did. As for just running DOOM II, I have no idea why you had trouble. It ran just fine. It may be important that my machine had 64mb of ram (the max it could handle).
t'nera semordnilap
Also available, above system installed in a 1998 Mercedes SL500. asking price: $69,500.
Doom II on Mac ran at about 1/2 the framerate it did on a Windows machine with equivalent clock. If that meets your definition of "just fine", well, then okay.
Ummm. . . I have to wonder how much you've been paying attention to the ogg project.
.ogg file has about the same complexity as decoding an .mp3
It's been stated several times by Monty that decoding an
Perhaps you're basing this idea off the fact that for a long time the only decoder available needed a floating point unit. But this has since been fixed by the release of Tremor (an integer only ogg decoder).
But in any case your information is wrong, or at the very least out of date.
I said "screw it" when a while back and decided to get fink as all of my playlists are in m3u format - ogg just came naturally =]
Whoa, slashdot is way out of my league now that i must read it with my physics books aside.
Long live liberal art education!
1) Ogg advocates tend to be Slashdot-type geeks - those who are typically willing to spend more on "cool toys" than your average Joe, and have the means to do so.
2) Ogg development is supported in part by donations of people who use it. This may not be a huge amount, but this is people paying for something when they don't even have to.
3) Comparing Ogg people to MP3 people... most people are into MP3s because they can download (for free) all sorts of cool songs they didn't spend money for. Ogg, mainly for lack of available downloads, is used primarily by people ripping their own (usually extensive) collection of legally purchased CDs.
4) I've heard many Ogg enthusiasts claim that as soon as a portable Ogg player exists, they will buy one, even at significantly higher cost. I am one of these.
A free integer decoder exists. Xiph will help with engineering resources to the best of their ability. No licensing fees. And with software that can play both, a seemless transition from MP3 to Ogg is trivial. Seems pretty attractive to me.
Troy
Vorbis decode currently requires more memory to decode than mp3/WMA (about 120kB using Tremor; we plan to reduce that to about 30-40kB).
It does not require more CPU.
Monty
"You sounded pretty authoritative for being dead wrong."
Mmmm... 100Gb of OGG?
:)
At 128kbps (and I wouldn't imagine you'd encode ogg over this), that's 1820 hours of content. Now, assuming that each music CD you own fills an hour, that's 1820 CDs. At an average price of say $10, that's $18,000 on CDs.
You, er, do own all of those of course, don't you?
Right now, I have XDarwin running rootless with Blackbox as the window manager. I'm running XMMS, and it's playing an OGG. It's using between 2% and 5%, with ESD using up 4-5%. It's free, open-source, supports OGG, and gives me X running when I need it!
char sig[120] = "\0"
I don't know, I wouldn use linux on the desktop if I had a TiBook or a g4 for my workstation needs...
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
Am I missing something here? Even if a drive doesn't have an external digital output, surely an application can still access the raw digits on a CD and encode those? Unless you're telling me that when I'm reading data from my CD-ROM drive, it's actually making "crackle crackle" sounds down the IDE cable?? I mean, I know that's how things used to be in the days of the Spectrum / C64, but... :)
First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.
:-)
We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.
Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.
When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.
At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us
Monty
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size. Not to mention it makes a good commercial and lords your power-userness over your friends.
There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.
Monty
(who develops Ogg on a Powerbook G4, BTW)
I don't think unicode means what you think it means. You're using it in a few different contradictory ways in your post...
[FWIW, Ogg Vorbis comment fields use UTF-8 and support full internationalization. Not sure if the plugin for iTunes posted in this story does...]
Monty
The DirectShow filters at vorbis.com add Ogg support to WMP and all Win apps that use DirectShow, including DiVX apps.
Monty
Yeah, me too! I'm SICK to DEATH of Slashdot posters just COMPLAINING! I mean these losers have nothing better to do but bitch and moan about other people's nasal, annoying posts and... oops, damn!
Monty
"Tee-Hee!"
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
:-) I mean they both can do all the same things, right?
You are not suggesting that users will just accept having to re-encode all their music as OGG, are you? MP3-players will have to be around for a long time. There is no money saved in the short run (or even medium run).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size.
Just like they will quickly notice that they can't share their songs with anyone else, can't just download them easily from P2P networks and can't use their songs on various MP3-players.
just like there's no real reason for anyone to use a Mac when Windows machines are cheaper
The difference is that the Mac has some very big advantages, while OGG has only two small ones:
- Free
- Small
Those don't offset the disadvantages for 99.9% of the population. Being free doesn't matter much because we don't directly pay for the encoder and the cost isn't that high to begin with. Being small doesn't matter much when you can't download OGG-encoded music. Storage prices are so low that it hardly matters to have a 2 instead of 4 MB song.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
So... How hard is it to become a Canadian these days?
It really all depends on the soundcard too. I have a old P120 laptop (with 32Meg RAM), that could play MP3's just fine, even wile surfing for example. (Only under Linux, W95 sucked bad) However I had to set mpg123 to play by default in joined-mono. That was no problem since the latop had only one speaker anyway. If I tried CD-quality stereo it would only stutter. The reason for this was the ESS688 soundchip in my latop didn't support 16-bit, 44.1KHz, stereo in hardware and thus had to fall back on CPU-cycles.
Well, that's how I understood it...
Without a job or reason to be Canadian (i.e. refugee), I think the going rate is $500,000 CDN, which is about $12 USD. It would be cheaper if you could contribute as a tax payer.
Patience is a virtue, but I don't have the time - TH
Seriously, much too hard. I know a couple (he is Canadian, she is Swedish) who married and wanted to have her come over and become a citizen. The hoops they had to jump through were ridiculous.
I suppose it makes sense to someone, but it seemed pretty arbitrary. She was gainfully employed, spoke several languages, university educated, and they still gave her a hard time. They asked a lot of very personal questions, and ones they _can't_ ask once you are a citizen. They made him sign some crazy paper about how he was legally bound to support her, and could go to jail if she broke the law. I suppose this only proves that Immigration Canada is being fair, as she wasn't a member of any visible minority.
Canada is built on immigration from other countries. Both the US and Canada would have negative population rates unless we accepted people from elsewhere.
That being said, all my American friends who moved here to become Canadians did so with a concious choice to no longer live in the US (all for various reasons). This is not a dig, but a personal observation.
Everyone thinks their country/city/club is the best. Canada is great! Don't believe all you hear on Southpark ;)
Come on up!
-- clvrmnky
The processr itself was plenty fast.... It's the lack of DMA that probably killed you, IMO....
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
Apple didn't get a 'cut rate deal' on the iTunes encoder because they got paid.
Apple got a good deal on the encoder taken from SoundJam MP, which was pretty good for its time but now is much worse than LAME. Use LAME, not iTunes!
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
The sound situation is Linux ain't pretty at the moment, since there are about 4 or 5 competing standards none of which have won yet. Let me try and clear it up a little -
The sad thing is, whichever of the above your environment is using, it can't easily coexist with any of the others. So you have to know which you are using, and tell all your applications.
Now back to ogg vorbis. The `libao' - that is, "audio output library" - is an attempt to abstract away the actual sound output methods (the above, plus a few custom methods for other versions of Unix) into a single interface. So any libao-using application can use several if not all of the above schemes. In ogg123 see the man page under '-d' for how to specify the output driver. Alternately, you can put the correct driver in /etc/libao.conf (or wherever that file lives in your compile): "default_driver=oss", sez mine.
So you may just have to find the correct "-d" switch for the `ogg123' command. Read the FM. (:
As for launching from Mozilla, well, I don't know what to tell you, except go through Edit / Preferences / Helper Applications / New... and fill in the fields "Ogg Vorbis audio", "ogg", "application/x-ogg", and "/usr/local/bin/ogg123 -d esd" or whatever. Good luck. Suggest making sure you can play a local ogg file using that command before adding it to Mozilla.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
If the hardware is crap, it will make mistakes. Mistakes are not acceptible for a CD-ROM, where someone's actual data is at stake, so the standard CD-ROM format allows for gobs and gobs of error correction - I think that's why an audio CD sector is 2352 bytes while a data CD sector is only 2048 bytes. Audio is seen as less important. After all, who cares if your playback is 100% the right bits or only 99.9%?
Try ripping a whole CD twice. For extra fun, turn off all those error-detection/correction algorithms in cdparanoia so it will go faster. Then do a bit-by-bit comparison of each track. If your hardware is less than perfect, or your CD has any significant scratches, some of the compares will fail. Heck, I've got a ~1.5-year-old Dell-OEM CD-ROM and it picks up the occasional string of bit errors even on CDs straight out of the shrinkwrap. Not sure if this is the fault of the CD manufacturer or my drive, but my point being.
I agree with you that the "external digital out" is not the important factor here - except that if your hardware is 'leet enough for digital out, it just may be of passable quality in terms of ripping per se.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README