Slashdot Mirror
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."
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
You have a point. There are devices however such as from iRiver which can play Ogg Vorbis and the winning encoder/codec in the Slashdot story AoTuV seems to be just an encoder fork which is bitstream compatible with Ogg Vorbis.
Banu
It was a double blind test (ABC/HR) adhering to ITU-R BS.1116-1. Read more about the methodology in the initial announcement.
In addition to being double blind results were also encrypted so manipulation is very unlikely.
its important to point out two things especially:
WMA brought clearly worse quality than (good old) MP3 at 128kbps
itunes AAC brought clearly better quality than WMA at 128kbps
so why should anyone even a minute consider buying crap quality wma encodes at napster, coca-cola, walmart or however the wma-based music stores are called?
on the legal way -> itunes is better
on the illegal way -> even old mp3 (next to vorbis or aac) is better
Well, I can only comment from a technical point of view, but firstly it is very good news that we are progressing in the right direction in terms of quality. Secondly, compared with the other codecs (esp. the proprietary ones), Vorbis is quite simple and minimalistic and lacks a lot of advanced tools and profiles, yet we've been able to extract quite competitive performance from some adjustments here and there. There is more to do in Vorbis and Monty has some new ideas that he wants to implement in the next major version like a better stereo model, noise normalization (which in its current form is mostly experimental), and support for 5.1 stereo. Given the success of aoTuV and the fact that Monty is fully aware of these third-party tunings, I think Vorbis development is looking ever-more exciting. :)
(Note I don't work for Xiph.Org but just one of those third party Vorbis tuners)
The DAC in the iPod is fairly high quality. It is not unreasonable for someone to simply encode their CDs using Apple's lossless codec and put them on the iPod. With a 40G model around 60 albums (assuming an average size of 650M) could be stored losslessy in WAV; a few more using Apple's lossless encoder. It would be like turning your 40G iPod into a 5G iPod and swapping music around but such is life.
It becomes more realistic when you have 80G and 100G drives in your player; in a few months the Neuros is supposed to have 80G backpacks available (right now up to 40G are available and a few online stores are advertising the availability of the 80G model early) and you can order an 80G backpack right now from Cool4u2View. The Neuros doesn't support any lossless codecs except for WAV right now (although there is support for WMA I have never used it and do not know if it supports WMA lossless or even if WMA lossless is anything more than tagged WAV). 80G is still around 110 albums. The Neuros IIRC uses the same DAC as the iPod so the quality of the sound would be excellent.
For me -b 160kbps Vorbis files are good enough; I plan to re-encode my collection to FLAC when I get a larger HD for music (right now it is a poor little 20G that only has 4G free) as well as Vorbis (abcde makes it easy to encode to more than one format and put them in different directories) -q5 (for my Neuros).
So your last comment still applies to most people. Not everyone though.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
It's odd to keep hearing this code referred to as a 'fork'. Yes, it's based on our reference code while doing further tuning just like all the free MP3 encoders are based off of the original dist8 or dist10.
Fork seems to imply that they're trying to make something incompatible or doing it without our blessing. Neither is true! We never wanted to have *the* only encoder. Nor did we want to be the only people trying to improve Vorbis's encoding.
AoTuV is a 100% real Vorbis encoder and the results of the test speak for themselves. Aoyumi and crew deserve kudos, and I'm glad to see them working on improving Vorbis encoding.
Monty