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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."
When everyone gets an iPod, dood, or the WinFooTunes player that you get with your Dell only works with WMA, or your in-dash CD player only groks 128kbps MP3s, whats the practical application of the other codecs? It's nice that we propeller-heads on Slashdot can smirk while we rip everything to FLAC and write custom Perl apps to transcode-on-the-fly to our wireless enabled MythTV box, but for John Q. Drone^H^H^H^H^HConsumer, none of this matters.
So how do we get the word out? How do we start the revolution? Open-Source hardware?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
No matter what researchers find the best format, the best format for users is what they can doubleclick to play, use on their el-cheapo portable mp3 player or whatever music device they own.
This might be of interest to musicians but the proverbial "jane doe" will keep using mp3 for quite a while
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
The open source ones don't have the big push amungst the general population. So, number 3 on the list Apple (ACC) can say in independent tests ACC scored higher than WMA or MP3. The top 2 don't have the marketing push to get out and be popular in the general population.
This does give more fuel to Apple. Although I'm not complaining about them having fuel over Microsoft.
Evolution or ID?
Assuming FLAC is truly LOSSLESS:
.zip .tar etc., not an encoder... technically.
1) Is it really a codec? Seems to me it is a compression method for media, like
2) It should sound exactly like the original. LOSSLESS = no loss. No point in comparing it to lossy codecs, unless it's not truly lossless.
3) The stored file sizes although smaller than the raw music are still way to big to be portable IMO.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
I read some of the results, and I'm not a Vorbis hater or anything, but how much of this is open source fans voting for their favorite codec? I looked at the test just now, but can't tell if it was blind or not.
Compare this with radio. There are a lot of popular AM and LW radio stations here in the UK even though FM is a superior format. MP3 will be around for almost ever due to the popularity and level of takeup.
Omnis amans amens
1) Is it really a codec? Seems to me it is a compression method for media, like .zip .tar etc., not an encoder... technically.
"Codec" means "coder-decoder". FLAC sounds encoded to me, if you need a FLAC library to enable a piece of music-playing software to read it, then I'd say the FLAC library is a codec.
2) It should sound exactly like the original. LOSSLESS = no loss. No point in comparing it to lossy codecs, unless it's not truly lossless.
Actually, it's interesting to compare lossless and lossy compressions because, these days, there's a fair chance that very good lossy compression sound so good it's almost impossible to tell the difference with the lossless compression.
3) The stored file sizes although smaller than the raw music are still way to big to be portable IMO.
Depends how much smaller. I'd say anything that doesn't produce at least 5x compression is worthless in any music player. You can zip a wav file and despite being much smaller than the original, it will still feel worthless to you in a compactflash card in terms of size.
One way I see Vorbis making it into the mainstream is if there were high availability of Vorbis content on the net. This includes P2P channels as well. If music releasers in the underworld start adopting vorbis, then Joe 'I own the original CD' Downloader will get a far wider familiarity with the codec, same as to what happened IMHO with xvid. More content will eventually lead consumers to start demanding vorbis compatibility in their hardware.
I think he was getting at the fact that MP3 is pretty future-proof. Sure, maybe a couple portable players support OGG and FLAC right now, but people who look for that feature are RARE. If the product doesn't do well and the company sees that that feature isn't something people want, they won't use it in their products in the future. MP3, however, is pretty much guaranteed to be around for a loooooooooong time.
Would you want to be stuck using a 10-year-old OGG player in the future when the awesome 300GB new-tech MP3 players built into your watch are out?
No, they won't. Their definition of innovation is making the same thing in an incompatible way.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Because I want to fit more than two songs on my MP3 player. If the encoding is good enough, then it is indistiguishable from the original are close enough. I don't want to dedicate an entire 80GB drive just to house my music collection.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
"I don't want to dedicate an entire 80GB drive just to house my music collection."
Glad to hear it. But i sure don't want to have saved a small (think future with me) amount of space at the cost of crappy audio. Your call.
It would have been nice to have an original unencoded piece and rate it against the masses. That way we'd be sure the listeners weren't picking up on a mastering problem that is muffled by an encoder.
IMHO, the best way to test is to provide an uncompressed source and a variety of compressed files, and ask "which most closely matches the uncompressed source" -- and NOT "which sounds best."
Years ago, I did an a/b switch test with a high-end audio engineer between a CD and a 128kbit/s MP3. Though we could both clearly hear a difference, he actually guessed wrong.
My point is: the test needs to be blind, and the test should be looking for compressed files that most closely sound like the uncompressed original -- and not the ones that "sound best."
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
It could also be marketing.
MP3 players got *heavily* marketed after Napster and friends got press and serious college use. "MP3" became associated with "free music". They took off.
The iPod, a decent but not earth-shattering MP3 player, sold *much* better than other MP3 players out there. Why? Marketing. Lots of ads -- the only significant difference to cause such a change.
Vorbis doesn't have a lot of ad money behind it pushing it.
I'd also like to point out that:
* People still use CBR MP3s. CBR was designed for exactly one reason -- allowing constant-rate streaming. It's *stupid* to use CBR for locally stored files -- it gets significantly worse quality for the size -- I've generally found that on the music I listen to, using VBR is equivalent to at least a 30% increase in bitrate in terms of my ability to distinguish between a master an an MP3. If people cared about quality, CBR MP3s would not exist. They wouldn't even have to switch their hardware/software around, since it's the same format, but they won't even go that far.
I *really* get a kick out of it when people buy an MP3 player and a pair of high-end earbuds. It's just plain inane. They just purchased a low-quality audio playback device and then spent a huge amount of money on an expensive pair of earbuds that don't let them hear the now missing nuances of the audio. It's the ultimate in trendiness -- like buying Nike or Banana Republic clothing. iPod + expensive earbuds is not "the ultimate in sound reproduction" even if you really, honestly gave a lot of retailers a whole lot of money for the combo.
May we never see th
What if a lossless codec were included in the test - and it came in dead last?
That would provide useful information: either the listeners weren't up to the job or the lossy codecs at ~128 kbps were truly indistinguishable from the source material.
Yeah. I think that there will always be some sort of player that supports the most common lossless format out there. If FLAC gets overthrown by some other format (which is unlikely), it's just a matter of running a script to convert the files to another lossless format.
Meanwhile, I'm probably going to buy a RIO Karma to play my FLAC library on the road.
If I look at the detailed result page, the bitrates still differ.. They state the average bitrate on the page, so it really doesn't matter how many GBs of music they encode.
How can you compare 128 kbps to 136 kbps and be surprised that the 136 kbps encoding sounds better?
128 / 149 = 86%
Vorbis is not a CBR codec like WMA. It's almost impossible to get it directly on the nose. The encoder doesn't easily allow that kind of control without seriously damaging the quality of the finished file. I'm not sure that the 14% difference really matters as much as you insist.
To be fair though, WMA does perform reasonably well for a CBR format. However, that's not what the test is about. It's about getting the best sound out of a similar amount of space.
I don't doubt that Vorbis would still beat WMA if the bitrates were 100% even, to be honest with you. It's just not that simple to get it directly on the nose. It would have been interesting to see the results of Vorbis on a quality level that is a notch lower, so that we could see how much variance there is between each level.
If a sound was perfectly accurate except for an instantaneous annoying pop every few seconds, it would probably average as the best codec, but it would be useless as a consumer standard. I remember a codec shootout years ago where Mp3Pro sounded "tinny," WMA sounded "flat," and MP3 sounded "fuzzy." Was being objectively closer to the source material more important than the type of distortion introduced? Not at all.
When dealing with sound equipment, from pre-amps to encoders, the tone of the introduced distortion is very important. Everything introduces distortion, in some way or another. You just want it to make the sound better, not worse.
The ______ Agenda
An 80 GB drive should hold nearly 200 (or more) FLAC encoded CDs. That's CDs, not tracks. This is assuming that the CD is nearly full, and the FLAC compression averages out at its usual 60% of the original.
Lossless is a more viable solution as we get larger hard drives and faster Internet connections.
I guess that if you are like many people and you have a ridiculous collection of pirated songs though, FLAC may not be a good solution.
I think you are way off here.
Firstly, a number of portable players support Ogg Vorbis. There is a list of four here, I'm sure the number will increase.
Secondly, I'd doubt that many of the public know about Ogg Vorbis, let alone consider it to "reek[s] of piracy and hackers".
Furthermore, the "success" of P2P music sharing indicates that the public are the last group of people to have morals about the source or the format of the music they listen to.
Ogg isn't as widely used by the public, because it is not known by the public, it is as simple as that. That will change, as more and more players support it, and the public find out that it is a DRM free alternative to the flexibility restricted formats such as AAC.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
But this is the day and age of the Internet, where WinAmp took off like a rocket and made its author very rich. "Ad money" shouldn't be a factor.
There is something inherently wrong with Ogg Vorbis. Think about it: Despite being free, none of the major manufacturers (Panasonic, Sony, Phillips) are embedding it in their electronics, so you get also-rans -- "iRiver"? "Rio"? Not exactly household names.
Possible problems:
1. Firmware instability. The list at http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware says stuff like "firmware 1.41 out, fixes some problems with Vorbis files", "iRiver flash players support Vorbis with firmware update. ", "Note that firmware versions prior to 1.25 cause stability problems for some people", and "There are reportedly problems with some versions of the firmware...". Is that a result of the algorithm? Why are they having so many problems writing stable firmware? I read a review of a Rio player where the reviewer complained about lockups and warned readers not to buy it.
2. Floating point format , ie Ogg Vorbis mainpulates everthing in floating point format. While this is no problem for a standalone computer, this is an additional expense for a portable battery operated device, because you have to have an additional floating-point coprocessor. This extra chip
eats up the battery more quickly
adds to the expense of the device.
Alternatively, you convert everything to fixed point, and thereby lose the fidelity of the original Ogg Vorbis result. Indeed, is it possible that the internal floating point is the reason that Ogg Vorbis has a better sound fidelity than MP3 simply because the error quantization is less in floating point numbers than integer discretization?