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."
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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