AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3

asv108 writes "Yesterday, Apple unveiled their new music service claiming that the AAC format "combines sound quality that rivals CD." Here is a little comparison of lossy music codecs, comparing an Apple ripped AAC file with the commonly used MP3 codec and the increasingly popular OGG codec. Spectrum analysis was used to see which format did the best job of maintaining the shape of the original waveform." Wish they had WMAs in there too. And for the spoilage, it looks like OGG comes out on top.

Comments

Hard To Tell Difference

[Ffynon]

I've got a nice pair of Bose headphones, and I listened to an Apple Store AAC file and an OGG version of the same song. I don't consider myself a real audiophile, but it's damn near impossible to tell the difference between the two; though I can definitely hear the improvement from MP3 to AAC or OGG.

Re:Hard To Tell Difference

[glesga_kiss]

To do a true test, you need to encode the files, decode them to PCM wav format, then burn to an audio CD.

Then, you have to do a blind test with all of them. You also need to use a variety of source material, because different genres of music compress better under some encoders.

It's Vorbis, not Ogg.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ogg is a container format. I could in theory put an ACC audio file into an Ogg container.

The audio format you're babbling about is Vorbis. Usually .ogg because it is inside an Ogg container.

Hell, it's not just a silly name problem, it's an entire naming convention issue.

Re:Anyone seen real specs for Apple's format?

[s.o.terica]

Although the AAC->CD->MP3 route is possible, and I intended to buy a track and see how the quality comes out, has anyone seen anything about how the DRM works on the Apple files?

Regarding the AAC->CD->MP3, I burned a couple of Music Store tracks to CD, then re-ripped them (using iTunes, no less) using VBR High, and they sounded indistinguishable from the original Music Store files (albeit being significantly higher average bitrates).

Regarding DRM, it appears that your Music Store file is locked to your Apple ID, and you have to Register up to three computers that you want to be able to play songs associated with your Apple ID. If you sell a computer, you have to unregister it before you can register a replacement computer. This appears to be the only restriction on usage -- you can still burn the songs to as many CDs as you want, copy them to as many iPods as you want, and streamthem to as many other Macs (and TiVo) as you want using Rendezvous.

Anybody checked out Neuros?

[Ruri]

The Xiph folks have signed up to add Ogg support on the Neuros audio handheld. Its a firmware upgradable handheld which currently supports mp3, but will probably have Ogg support by mid-late summer.

Check out the highlights.

http://www.neurosaudio.com/

Re:That's all very well but

[jc42]

A few years back, Consumer Reports did an interesting set of listening tests. The usual blinds, of course. But the interesting part was that in addition to random staffers, they had two extra groups: sound engineers and musicians. They reported that these two groups differed radically in their rankings of sound quality. The difference was fairly straightforward: The sound engineers gave a high rank to equipment that produced the sound accurately. The musicians gave a high rank to equipment that made the music clear. These are not at all the same thing. In particular, musicians generally liked "distortions" that removed non-musical information, strengthened the fundamentals, and so on.

From a musician's viewpoint, one of the real frustrations with just about anything published about sound quality is that it's always written from the engineer's viewpoint. But what I want to know is which gadgets do a good job of reproducing the music. They never seem to tell you that.