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."
About damn time!
by
Shuh
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· Score: 5, Interesting
So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?
Re:About damn time!
by
bahamat
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· 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.
Re:About damn time!
by
cygnus
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· 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
rseuhs
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· 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.
I'll stick with an open format, personally.
--
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Sounds more like a bugtraq issue
by
jukal
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· Score: 5, Funny
Ok, I know this is cheap but...the wording in the article makes the useful plugin sound more like a security problem:))
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...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
Does this mean it'll play BOTH of my OGG tunes perfectly?
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.
finally? not really...
by
nebenfun
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· 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....
CD Burning works!
by
plazman30
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· 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.
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.
Re:This is great
by
rseuhs
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· 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
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· 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.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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%.
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
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?
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.
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--
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.
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
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
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.
-- -twb
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.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
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...
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: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.
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.
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.
Re:MP3Pro
by
c13v3rm0nk3y
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· 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.
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.
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."
...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
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.
Slashdot Mirror
So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?
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....
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.
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.
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
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.
As a bonus it "only" uses 7-10% CPU on my iBook as opppsed to iTunes' 20-30%.
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?
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.
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--
"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 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
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
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.
-twb
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.
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.
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
This is all you need.
Why can't you play your Ogg files with Audion?
Or Unsanity Mint Audio?
Or Macamp?
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?
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:
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?
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
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.
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."
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
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