Listening Comparisons For Audio Codecs At 64kbps

waaka! writes "Hydrogenaudio has just wrapped up a listening test of various audio codecs at 64kbps. Check out the results, where Ogg Vorbis performed quite well, scoring significantly better than WMA, RealAudio and QuickTime AAC, and kept pace with MP3Pro and HE-AAC (AAC with the SBR extensions that MP3Pro uses). Clearly, though, no codec can honestly claim 128 kbps MP3 quality at 64 kbps. The charts at the end show entries for 128kbps LAME MP3 and 64kbps FhG MP3, but these are used as high and low anchors for reference, as MP3 is really out of its league at bitrates such as these."

Comments

some good listening test material

[MarcoAtWork]

I saved this thread quite a while ago and I agree with several of the recommendations (notably with the 'Tori Amos' 'Boys for Pele' CD, not that it's the type of music I usually listen to, but I have to admit the production values are outstanding), after all using hyper-compressed (re: other slashdot articles) crappy source material is not that helpful in terms of figuring out how good the various encoders really are...

the thread on google

Personally I rip my own CDs with lame --alt-preset extreme (on said Tori Amos' CD it seems it hovers around 224kbps with -lots- of frames at 256 and 320), for fun I transcoded (I know, transcoding is bad, mmkay?) a few of them to vorbis 48kbps and it's amazing how good they sound at that low of a bitrate.

Digital Music artist perspective

[merlin_jim]

As an artist that releases mainly online, I found these results very interesting, and thought I'd share my feelings with the slashdot community.

While MP3Pro and Vorbis were good competitors overall, and have a fairly good footprint to boot, I'd have to say that if I'm forced to encode to 64MBit/s, I'd absolutely choose Ahead HE AAC, if I'm judging solely on this comparison (which I am at this point in time...)

Why? Because there was no sample that Ahead HE AAC did POORLY at. MP3Pro and Vorbis (and all the other codecs) each had one or two samples that they just totally choked on, quality-wise. So if I was forced to use a 64 MBit/s codec, it would absolutely be Ahead HE AAC, because while it didn't score highest on every test, and the three codec were virtually tied across the whole competition, I would feel far safer trusting my best digital work to a codec that, according to this test, would have the least chance of representing it particularly poorly.

I wonder how these results compare to higher encoding rates; I could easily imagine that most codecs have a sweet spot, where the encoding quality/bitrate maximizes... it would be interesting to do some research to find this sweet spot.

Anyone want a quick way to slashdot a server? :D

Re:MP3 is the standard.

[StaticEngine]

The Game Industry has embraced OGG, although somewhat silently. With slim budgets, we're always looking for the cheap (and free) solution, and OGG is perfect when we want compressed audio at a good quality.

The sole deciding factor in whether or not compressed audio really gets used in a game is available minspec bandwidth. If marketing is forcing us to target a 500MHz machine, and decompressing OGG audio kills our framerate, then audio compression goes. It the sad truth that the tech heads do not call the shots in this department.