Vorbis And Musepack Win 128kbps Multiformat Test

technology is sexy writes "After 11 days of collecting results Roberto Amorim today announced the results of his 2nd Multi-Format listening test: Vorbis fork AoTuV scored the highest and ranks as the winner together with open source contender Musepack closely followed by Apple's AAC implementation and LAME MP3, which improved markably since last year thanks to further tunings of its VBR model done by Gabriel Bouvigne. Sony's ATRAC3 format ranks last after WMA on the third place. The suprising success of AoTuV (compared to last year's performance of Xiph.org's reference implementation) shows the potential of Vorbis and possible room for further tuning and improvments. Take a look at the detailed results and their discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org."

Comments

Re:FLAC?

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Ah. My mistake. WTF? Why are you even listening to lossy codecs then?

Re:FLAC?

[runderwo]

Are you done with your holier-than-thou charade yet? Imagine this -- other people just might have different needs and desires than yourself when it comes to compressing audio. That's why it's great to have choices. Comprende?

Lame CBR better than VBR?

[pfavr]

Recently I decided to use lame with cbr 192kbps after comparing to the preset vbr settings (including extreme). I use the settings: --cbr -b 192 -h -q0

Using vbr I can hear the noise floor being modulated e.g. by a large amplitude low pass filtered bass sound. I contribute this to vbr changing bitrate. Maybe the psychoacoustic model just doesn't fit my ears:-)

The vbr files average around 200kbps anyway, so they're not smaller than 192kbps cbr.

It would have been nice if the test included cbr as well.

I use good headphones: Sennheiser HD-25, and my mp3 player: archos jukebox recorder running the open source firmware Rockbox

Here's the thing

[TechniMyoko]

Ive listened to mmp3, ogg and wma versions of the same song and can't tell the difference. They all sound the same, so I just encode into the smallest format which is wma