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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."
So given Microsofts stated goal to bring us innovative technology, they should throw in the towel and ship OggVorbis and derivatives with Windows, right?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
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?
Good to know MP3 is still improving. Yes vorbis and others are great, but i know every software and hardware player out there plays MP3. I'll be ripping all my cds to high quality MP3 befor i go to college, not because its the absolute best, but because its a standard. Standards aren't always the most efficient, but their strength lies that you cant change them on a week to week basis. Whatever hologrphic storage based finger sized half terabyte 24th generation iPod i buy ten years from now will probably still play my 128 and 256 MP3s.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Because this was designed to test various codecs at 128Kbps. You can't make flac do 128Kbps. Besides, flac, being lossless, sounds exactly the same as the source media, so what's the point of testing how it sounds?
i realize the geeks of the populace want the highest quality encoding to win. naturally. and it helps when something such as vorbis is rated so highly; it gives it even more geek cred.
however: as someone who studied music and audio, i am constantly surprised at what people will listen to. my friends (well some of them) have no problem cranking low quality mp3s of 50 cent, while i drop my jaw at the poor audio quality as a result of lost information. one time i even remarked to my dad "oh its an mp3" when he was playing something i had given to him which had been apparently later encoded. he wasnt sure (he didnt do the encoding) but doublechecked and yes it was mp3 (probably 160 kbps). he was impressed, when to me the timbral change in the cymbals was a dead giveaway. another time i asked a friend of mine if he was using aac to import all his cds in to itunes when he had been recently doing so. he looked at me blankly and said "whats aac?". which meant, yes he was.
i apologize for rambling, this is what im arriving at:
despite early adoption influence etc that geeks hold, how much does all of this really matter. most people dont care what format its in as long as they can listen to it. and often they cant discern loss of quality unless its extreme. so while i applaud these efforts, im simply wondering if -- aside from research -- they arent futile.
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.
It is interesting that the note that they used the AAC encoder in iTunes 4.2 instead of the newer 4.5 because of "quality" concerns.
Apparently there's some "high frequency ringing" going on.
Better stick to something else for now, if planning to rip to AAC.
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.
it isn't everything. Microsoft still has enough cash to fight this. Our local radio (Switzerland) still broadcasts in .asx. I sent them an e-mail asking them why. They said because their server is sponsored by Microsoft.
Now I listen to virgin radio, they broadcast in broadband ogg
That really doesn't look very fair to me! MPC and Vorbis using about 20% more bits than Lame and iTunes AAC.
Lalala
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.
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
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.
Having designed and written a mp3 decoder and now working on a vorbis decoder I can't say I'm that suprised by vorbis coming out on top.
From a technological standpoint the Vorbis codec has 10 years of audio compression R&D in it since MP3 was invented.
MP3 is a subband DCT based codec using fixed window length. Vorbis is also DCT based but encodes an approximation to the orginal frame's spectral curve and also uses variable length window length.
In using the source from the vorbis library and the decoder specification to help guide its development I have to say it is a real joy to code. The people at xiph.org have really done a first class job and have approached some of the problems of audio codec design with some of the best lateral thinking that I have ever seen.
Believe me! Coming from me that is very rare praise.
1) Is it really a codec? Seems to me it is a compression method for media, like .zip .tar etc., not an encoder... technically.
.zip/.gzip are very poor at compressing audio recordings. FLAC and similar lossless audio compression look for things like (I would imagine) relatively small deltas from each sample point to the next, since this is a common characteristic of audio data.
Compressers are encoders of a particular variety. They just choose a different data representation as an encoder does, but make an effort to take advantage of specific known characteristics of the data they are compressing to get a smaller, reasonable representation..
ZIP and gzip (tar does not do compression, just file joining) do very poorly at compressing audio. They do things like look for patterns of repeating (or at least commonly seen) sequences of data, and simply say something like "every time you see "z1", I really mean ";lt&a href="". This approach often works very well in computer-generated files.
However, it's very unlikely that you will get exactly the same sequence of bits in an audio recording, so
FLAC is indeed lossless.
May we never see th
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
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)
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.
according to this, 54 results was discarded because they ranked the reference file, instead of the encoded file. If flac was to be included in such a test, I'm sure it would have won, but im also sure it wouldn't have scored a perfect 5, even if it should have.
a post: the reply:Disclaimer: I am NOT new here
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
The MPC codec was neck-and-neck with Vorbis most of the time, except for one song by Debussy. What is interesting though is that it only encoded at 91kbps for that song---suggesting that perhaps if it were forced to use more bits it might have scored higher. It seems the heuristics it uses to determine how many bits it needs didn't quite work for that song.
The way it works is, you listen to a given music clip. You have three streams to choose from. One is the uncompressed .wav, and is labeled as such. The other two are not identified, and consist of the compressed source and the original source. You then rate the two unidentified sources based on how closely they approximate the original. Then you repeat the process five times for each of the codecs. When you're performing the experiment, you don't even know which codec you're testing at any given time.
That seems like a questionable methadology to me. If the use couldn't tell the difference, it seems like that should be an automatic 5. Dropping cases where there isn't a perceptible difference woud tend to underrate the quality of the best encoders.
The problem is that it's difficult to develop a consistent and fair method of determining what to do with results where the reference was ranked. Maybe just assigning 5 to these cases is one way of dealing with it. I can see doing this for someone who marks 4.9 for one of the references, but what about somebody who scores 3.5 on multiple references (I'm exagerrating, but not too much!)? Is it wise to even keep results from such a listener? I think that as long as there are enough results, which seems to be the case here, the fairest and most consistent way to deal with these cases is to simply discard them.
ff123
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
The speed of CDparanoia is not limited by the cdparanoia code. Regardless of future improvements, speed gain would never be one of them. If anything, additional error correction would only ever make it slower. Your limit is Linux forcing programmed I/O because the IDE subsystem doesn't know how to use DMA on non-multiple-of-512-byte sector sizes. CDDA is 2532 bytes per sector. Linux 2.6 partially fixes this.
;-)
Also, cdparanoia (III) was finished long ago. It has not bitrotted. As new kernels came out, we+others kept it up to date. The distribution maintainers have added whatever fixes have been necessary for their distros. Nothing that worked in 1999 is broken today.
In summary... paranoia does 100% of what *I* need it to. I write software that I need. I don't have to keep releasing 'improved' versions of software that already works as an ego-trip or to placate a marketing department desperate to sell you the same thing in a new box every six months.
Others have expressed interest in doing new things with paranoia, but no one has followed through... at least not yet. Paranoia isn't all that complicated to use or hack. That speaks to a pretty damned low demand for new versions.
The website: yah, OK, I'm lousy at writing HTML updates. My diary hasn't been updated in three years. There is certainly a website attention span problem
Theora: I'm not one of the primary coders today, I only did the initial code import. Also, the Helix project has required relatively little time; Real has done nearly all the heavy lifting on integration there.But, if 'Theora is dead', why does CIA show 500 commits in the past two months?
DirectShow issues can be summed up as 'ugh, what an awful system'. But we'll make it work. The discussion about mux was proposed changes to spec. Voluminous discussion reveals what we have now is still the best option, as designed five years ago.
Monty
I'll probably get to it eventually actually; ATAPI finally added packet commands for dealing with cache management on ATAPI drives, just like SCSI always had (but most drives just ignored). ..Or you can increase the cache thrashing constant and rebuild. These days computers have more than 8 meg, it's probably worth doing ;-)
Monty