I don't think unicode means what you think it means. You're using it in a few different contradictory ways in your post...
[FWIW, Ogg Vorbis comment fields use UTF-8 and support full internationalization. Not sure if the plugin for iTunes posted in this story does...]
Monty
and if Apple shipped Ogg, they may still not know
on
Ogg Support For iTunes
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· Score: 2
A typical Mac/iTunes user receives a free encoder and decoder with their computer system so for the end user, MP3 is essentially free (actually, Apple picks up the bill on that one -- Thanks Apple!).
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size. Not to mention it makes a good commercial and lords your power-userness over your friends.
There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.
...just like there's no real reason for anyone to use a Mac when Windows machines are cheaper:-) I mean they both can do all the same things, right?
Monty
(who develops Ogg on a Powerbook G4, BTW)
...but your assumptions are incorrect.
on
Ogg Support For iTunes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.
We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.
Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.
When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.
At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us:-)
It's true, it's all true... at least three ships have been sunk and two Bahaman-registry cruise liners set afire and left to drift in the Atlantic. And all we've managed to pillage so far is some bloody silverware and a goddamned shuffleboard set. Emmett hasn't even found a decent lounge chair.
But seriously, we 'support piracy' because we regularly talk about how copyright has gotten whacked so far out of balance that it's in danger of furthering only a corporate bottom line? We kick people out for trading because that's an immediate liability. We kick people out when they conclusively hurt the ability to use the channel for development coordination. And we've kicked one guy out for being an annoying compulsive liar.
But to suggest that we should crack down on the very UNAMERICAN practice of discussing what's on our minds? Please. Don't be an ass. And don't put words in our mouths, nothing pisses me off more.
Forgive the tone of this reply, but this guy is smoking so much crack
that it's simply impossible to take seriously. There's nothing I hate
more than self styled 'experts' who just make it all up.
Sir (and I use the word loosely), if you're a plant for the
competition, try a bit more subtlety and you'll blend in better. I've
also found that borrowing buzzwords liberally from 'Star Trek' will
help your gobbledygook sound more convincing to both low level nerds
and the common man.
Off we go...
I've been studying psychoacoustics in my spare time,
Oh boy, a *real* expert... Give me a second to contain my excitement.
It sacrifices a lot to "sound better" than MP3, and
while some of their tradeoffs do manage to improve sound quality
A terrible, terrible thing it is to sound better... there must be something wrong
First off, Vorbis concentrates its encoding in the more audible midrange
...as does every psychoacoustic compression, because your ears have
the greatest perceivable signal depth and resolution in the midrange.
This is page one of most psychoacoustics textbooks (and it also happens
to be true). Go study some more.
completely cutting out higher overtones. While MP3 works
similarly, it manages to keep enough of the high range to maintain the
"feel" of the original music.
Bzzt. False statement number one. Go study in your spare time a
little harder, do some ABX testing then come back and tell us what you
learned. However this one is almost forgivable compared to the nonsense below.
Vorbis claims to support more than two channel audio, but this is
misleading.
Bzzt, no it's not. 255 channel support, all of which may be totally
independent and un-coupled. You need not use 'joint stereo' (our
method is more general and we call it 'channel coupling') at all.
MP3 encodes stereo using a "joint-stereo" method, which couples
both tracks together into a mono track, giving each frame a different
balance to simulate stereo on a mono track. This is equivalent to
playing a mono tape and turning the balance knob!
No, idiot, that's 'intensity stereo', not 'joint stereo'. Vorbis does not
use intensity stereo.
Obviously, this is less than optimal
It certainly would be, unfortunately--- *GASP* ---it's not true!
While Vorbis supports true stereo encoding, it fakes 5.1-channel
audio using a "joint-joint-stereo" method, where the
left-back/left-front and right-back/right-front channels and joined
together into the two stereo tracks in a similar fashion. Not very
good at all.
Bzzzt. Go read the spec again Bucky. You could do what's described
above, yes, but that's not 'the way Vorbis does it'.
The way that Vorbis compresses its audio accelerates speaker
degradation
Actually using the speakers accellerates degredation too. They last
alot longer when you leave them in the box they came in and don't plug
them in.
It breaks sound up into an evenly-spaced array of harmonics which approximate the original waveform
Those are not 'harmonics', and Vorbis's compression pays no particualr
attention to sinusoidal harmonics. Perhaps you'd like to wait until
college and get some signal processing lectures under your belt before
coming back.
"Big deal", you say, "that's how all lossy encoding schemes work!"
[sigh] No, no it's not.
But if we assume, for a second, that you said, 'Vorbis is a
transform-domain codec', which is what you meant, no, not all lossy
audio compression formats are transform based.
But the way that Vorbis does it causes a noticeable amount of
harmonic resonance in speaker systems, stressing their driver system
and accelerating the rate at which they decay.
The problem Sir is that you have a surplus of Zackthorp particles
coming from your warp core, a well known source of wear and tear on
cheap speakers. Make sure your speakers are rated for greater than
warp 4 before trying to use them so close to a Gammagorp Modulator and
your worries are over!
I listened to the result, and believe me, it's true! Because I said so.
If you know the story of the first Tacoma Narrows bridge
[carleton.ca], this is the same principle, working at a smaller and
more gradual pace.
...which has *nothing whatsoever* to do with what we're talking about.
But hey, I loved that TNG episode where Data gets his dick caught in
the food synthesizer, so that goes to show Vorbis is Bad. Vorbis made
him do it. Really. I heard the voices whispering all through that
episode.
Given Xiph's poor track record with Vorbis
OK, let's stop here. Everyone gather around, point and laugh!
The mail archives didn't disappear; they were never there. I made a permissions error in the archive spool after fixing a log rotation bug:-( None of May was logged.
The previous non-Xiph fixed-point decoder releases are derived from a flawed 'good enough for now' port of Vorbis to the HipZip originally done by iObjects/Fullplay. This port was a quick integerization of beta 3 done in late 2000 and has signal depth problems. It does not decode later-than-beta-4 files. Even if updated to full 1.0, it will still have dynamic range problems when playing 1.0 and later bitstreams.
Tremor was originally done as a report to ARM at the request of Fullplay after determining that starting from scratch was easier than repairing the existing beta-3-derived code. Fullplay opted not to purchase the new port, and eventually released their own beta-3 port under GPL on SourceForge. Those who then derived their own versions from the SourceForge project were generally aware that this was an incomplete 'good enough for now' version and that the code would eventually hit bitstreams that it couldn't play well or at all.
Now that Tremor is BSD, there's no reason to keep using derivations of this old beta-3 port.
Nothing strange about it. You can go back to chasing government UFO conspiracies now....
No, that's not us (Although we like them as they're likely the least bullshit-laden codec comparison and development bulletin board out there. These guys were *very* harsh about Vorbis's quality the first few years. That feedback was invaluable for making the codec as good as it is today.)
c't has also run tests including Vorbis, and will have a big test run on several thousand listeners to offer here sometime soon. It's basically a much larger version of the tests ff123 has run on Hydrogen Audio. We're not privy to any of the current results, but I expect we'll do just fine;-)
As for 'cranking it out', Ogg development started in 1993.
Strictly speaking, this isn't 'fixed-point' although it is all integer. It uses primarily fixed point, but in the deep S/N vector paths, it uses integerized movable point in a way that most embedded architectures can do the shifts for free during ALU load (eg, look at the ARM assembly for the shift/multiplies). Have a look at the Vorbis codec spec on xiph.org if you want to know why this is necessary.
Also, this code's been around for a while... we're releasing it for free now as commercial code has a short shelf life. It ran through it's commercial usefulness, and now we want it to be commodity code.
The only serious problem with using Ogg in iTunes and having it work 'out of the box' is that iTunes, believe it or not, would *only* use Quicktime playback for certain extentions.
Ogg works with quicktime.....but ogg was not one of those extentions.
If you install the Ogg Quicktime components, and rename all your Ogg files to.mov, they play. Naturally, this is a royal pain in the ass and we don't seriously expect anyone to do this.
We have high hopes that iTunes 3 solves this problem. The Mac hackers are on it now.
As for the iPod, we have all the code needed to make it work. Actually using it can't happen without a blessing from Apple, however.
Oh... um... yeah, we forgot to mention that in the press release. About 50-60% faster when using -q. We're aiming for greater than a full factor of two over rc3 by next release.
Monty xiph.org
We used both MP3Enc and LAME
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
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· Score: 3, Informative
We *are* comparing against LAME.
The first sample on the demo page is encoded using MP3Enc, because that demo is actually drawn from a larger test being done by an independent party. It also shows Ogg competing against a commercial encoder.
All other MP3 samples on the demo page (the 'Heavy Hitters' section) were encoded using LAME. If you check the auxiliary data in the samples you'll see that.
I'll go mark the samples as such to avoid furhter confusion.
Open Source's strength is in making commodity software, the software people actually *need* and *care about*, free and open... part of the infrastructure of democracy if you will. There was no truly free audio before Vorbis, because only about six users in the world had computers that could play decent audio in 1993 (when the work on Ogg began). And by decent, I don't mean FM synth or mono 22kHz.
Similarly, there was no need for Open Source video until now because... no one used computer video in any great numbers until now. Yes, yes, Quicktime has been around for a while. I'm personally not excited about the 80x60 black and white 4 frames per second stuff from 1990, and neither is anyone else.
Real and Apple pushed proprietary standards at a time when it was not at all clear that many people cared about 'multimedia', and those that did could afford to shell out big money, or buy into a single vendor. That time is quickly passing. I use both audio and video on my own boxen every day, and Mom in Ohio is likely only a few years behind me on that front, so it's time to get ready.
(Nor was Quicktime 'first', you've simply forgotten its predecessors. That has nothing to do with my point above.)
The HipZip, unfortunately, never officially supported Ogg and the firmware for HipZip that plays oggs only handles up to beta 4 files. It may well never be updated at this point due to an unfortunate pissing match involving the company that supplied the firmware for HipZip (iObjects/Fullplay).
So, yes, it can certainly be argued HipZip was first. HipZip certainly proved that an embedded processor had the necessary power (the early beta files were even more expensive to decode than current Vorbis files). However, Iomega never officially acknowledged Ogg support.
In terms of official company support, theKompany/Zaurus are definately the first handheld, and the first handheld to play all current/future OggVorbis I files.
besides the fact that it's hard to go up against an established standard...
Undeniably true. But established standards die enventually. MP3 R&D has been mostly abandoned. It will be around for a very long time yet, but it's being attacked from all technological sides. Microsoft wants to kill it for WMA, Tompson wants to kill it in favor of MP3 pro, FhG wants to kill it for AAC, Real wants us to use Real--ermm, sorry, ATRAC3, etc. MP3's been superceeded and abandoned by cutting edge research.
MP3 the king is a mighty warrior, but he's showing new wounds. Ogg is the successor to the throne, and the only codec individuals are going to have ready, unrestricted access to once MP3 eventually falls. It's not happening this year, but it's happening.
and the fact that there is no hardware support
A mostly fair thing to point out. Ask again in a year; the FPU-less codec exists (he says, hacking on ARM7 assembly), now it's mostly the business distribution arrangement that's up in the air. Commodity hardware designs can't quite live in the same open framework as software.
is that storage is so cheap now
Most of the big Geek music collections of friends around me are each over a Terabyte of music. That's still alot of money.
If I can get a 60GB drive for under $100
If quality is not a concern, you can get a cheap turntable for much less than that and it never runs out of space.
why would I want to sacrifice a big chunk of processing power to make my music 1/3 smaller? Only if I absolutely wanted to use something open.
This one confuses me slightly...
Compressing from WAV->Ogg makes things ~10-20x smaller, depending on your quality tastes.
If you mean 'why would I replace my mp3 collection I already have?', in that case I agree with you. An equivalent Ogg will sound better/more consistent and be smaller, but if you're satisfied with what you've got, there's no need to replace it. Certainly don't transcode it! It could only end up sounding worse (see rant here)
If you mean, "why would I encode to Ogg rather than MP3; it's not worth it", then you're just confused. You get smaller, better sounding files for no extra effort (and no extra CPU). In this case, Open Source is not a compromise; Vorbis is the best out there. All we're lacking is the portable players.
Ogg has had high bitrate from the beginning. It will happily take you up to just under what the lossless codecs will give. in rc3 stereo, -q10 will do ~400-600kbps, and -q0 will give you ~48-80kbps depending on material.
Monty
Your specific example: Ogg has ReplayGain
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ogg has ReplayGain support to directly address the problem of varying apparent music amplitude.
(ie, you've noticed that both pop and classical tend to use the whole amplitude range, but pop is apparently louder due to dynamic range compression. Replaygain is a method of figuring out the 'actual' loudness).
The latest XMMS plugin already supports replaygain (as does latest Ogg123), and it should be in the Winamp plugin soon if not already. Right now it's up to individual apps to support ReplayGain, but we're deciding on an easier way to encourage/include support with core Ogg.
Does OGG have something akin to VBR? Can it compete with the size:quality of, say, lame's default VBR parameters?
OK, I have to ask... why do people feel the overwhelming need to pontificate/ask profoud questions when they haven't even read the manpage? I'll summarize Ogg's VBR support. You'd have learned this from the FAQ, the READMEs, the manpage a trivial search of the mailing lists, or any of the previous Slashdot stories:
Ogg is natively VBR. It always has been. It's VBR is much better than LAME's because the format *itself* is natively VBR, not supporting it as an extra-spec hack that someone saw fit to kludge in later. Ogg's VBR output is and will likely always be higher quality than its bitrate managed (ie, ABR/BBR/CBR) modes. Don't use -b, -M, -m unless you actually have a *reason* to (eg, streaming). -q will always produce better results for the same output size.
[for the record, the following bits don't apply to this gentle poster, but to other comments]
Also to those below who are complaining, "wah, I reencoded my mp3s to ogg and they got bigger and sound worse," well, think for a second about what you've done. You've taken a lossy format, full of artifacts, and full of characteristics/artifacts specific to mp3 encoding. You're then encoding them in *another* lossy format, with it's own characteristics and saying 'do a good job'. Ogg is going to waste bits trying to reproduce mp3 artifacts perfectly. And because both formats are lossy (even if Ogg is very good), you still lose a bit in the process, a bit like transferring a cassette tape to 1/4" reel-to-reel. The reel to reel is pretty sweet.... but it's still a generational loss.
It seems exceptionally important to nip a few myths here. Most of you will laugh, but there are folks out there who still take a few of these as gospel, because sombody on some website four years ago swore up and down it was true:
Decoding your mp3 to WAV and burning a CD does *not* improve or recover the lost sound quality. Once it was in mp3, those bits are gone forever. Similarly, converting from mp3 to ogg can *only* make it worse. It will not magically restore anything lost in the sound.
bitrate is a measure of *size*, not quality. '128kbps' means absolutely nothing about file quality, just how big the file is. If you're rencoding mp3 into ogg (like a large number of folks here are...), of *course* making 256kbps oggs from 128kbps mp3s is going to result in bigger files! The encoder is doing exactly what you told it to.
"VBR sucks. It saves space, but it's low quality and it messes up players." No, Xing's VBR mode sucks, and since they were the first mp3 encoder to hack this little travesty into a format that can't really support it, breaking most existing players at the time, people only remember Xing. Also add to this that Xing is consistently rated as the lowest quality of all commercial mp3 encoders, people who stopped learning in 1998 remember VBR as being a bad thing.
In Ogg, VBR is not a hack, it's native. We've been designing it that way for eight years. *VBR modes always sound better. Use them.*
Monty
Re:Double Blind Listening Tests... Here!
on
Ogg Vorbis RC3 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
First: They are double blind. Neither the tester (the computer) nor the testee know which is which. They are also randomized, the second big requirement.
As for ABX: Oops, you're right. The results ff123 asks for are not ABX, they're the traditional 1-5 scale that MPEG has always used. ff123 *does* suggest using ABX to certify the results, but that's not the same thing, and you're right to point that out.
Last, parts of the tests are automated, parts aren't; if you go the ABX route, there are automated testing packages to use (linked from ff123's page). I've not added my results to this test only because it's a little too easy for me to cheat. So, I didn't go through the test process myself, I've only been watching the results.
Slashdot Mirror
The DirectShow filters at vorbis.com add Ogg support to WMP and all Win apps that use DirectShow, including DiVX apps.
Monty
I don't think unicode means what you think it means. You're using it in a few different contradictory ways in your post...
[FWIW, Ogg Vorbis comment fields use UTF-8 and support full internationalization. Not sure if the plugin for iTunes posted in this story does...]
Monty
Apple could ship Ogg, save money, give the user something better, and the user would still not need to know the difference. A win for Apple, a win for the users. Tremor runs just fine on the iPod, so you'd not even cut the users off from their portable players. Ogg also already outperforms the next-generation of AAC, so still no lose there.
The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care).
True enough, but most will notice quickly when the Ogg files that sound just as good are half the size. Not to mention it makes a good commercial and lords your power-userness over your friends.
There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.
Monty
(who develops Ogg on a Powerbook G4, BTW)
First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.
:-)
We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.
Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.
When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.
At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us
Monty
[just a note of encouragement to someone who got the transcoding issue exactly right!]
Monty
Vorbis decode currently requires more memory to decode than mp3/WMA (about 120kB using Tremor; we plan to reduce that to about 30-40kB).
It does not require more CPU.
Monty
"You sounded pretty authoritative for being dead wrong."
It's true, it's all true... at least three ships have been sunk and two Bahaman-registry cruise liners set afire and left to drift in the Atlantic. And all we've managed to pillage so far is some bloody silverware and a goddamned shuffleboard set. Emmett hasn't even found a decent lounge chair.
But seriously, we 'support piracy' because we regularly talk about how copyright has gotten whacked so far out of balance that it's in danger of furthering only a corporate bottom line? We kick people out for trading because that's an immediate liability. We kick people out when they conclusively hurt the ability to use the channel for development coordination. And we've kicked one guy out for being an annoying compulsive liar.
But to suggest that we should crack down on the very UNAMERICAN practice of discussing what's on our minds? Please. Don't be an ass. And don't put words in our mouths, nothing pisses me off more.
Monty
Read the README file... then if you still have trouble, let us know.
(This Alpha release was developed and tested on Linux)
Monty
Sir (and I use the word loosely), if you're a plant for the competition, try a bit more subtlety and you'll blend in better. I've also found that borrowing buzzwords liberally from 'Star Trek' will help your gobbledygook sound more convincing to both low level nerds and the common man.
Off we go...
I've been studying psychoacoustics in my spare time,
Oh boy, a *real* expert... Give me a second to contain my excitement.
It sacrifices a lot to "sound better" than MP3, and while some of their tradeoffs do manage to improve sound quality
A terrible, terrible thing it is to sound better... there must be something wrong
First off, Vorbis concentrates its encoding in the more audible midrange
completely cutting out higher overtones. While MP3 works similarly, it manages to keep enough of the high range to maintain the "feel" of the original music.
Bzzt. False statement number one. Go study in your spare time a little harder, do some ABX testing then come back and tell us what you learned. However this one is almost forgivable compared to the nonsense below.
Vorbis claims to support more than two channel audio, but this is misleading.
Bzzt, no it's not. 255 channel support, all of which may be totally independent and un-coupled. You need not use 'joint stereo' (our method is more general and we call it 'channel coupling') at all.
MP3 encodes stereo using a "joint-stereo" method, which couples both tracks together into a mono track, giving each frame a different balance to simulate stereo on a mono track. This is equivalent to playing a mono tape and turning the balance knob!
No, idiot, that's 'intensity stereo', not 'joint stereo'. Vorbis does not use intensity stereo.
Obviously, this is less than optimal
It certainly would be, unfortunately--- *GASP* ---it's not true!
While Vorbis supports true stereo encoding, it fakes 5.1-channel audio using a "joint-joint-stereo" method, where the left-back/left-front and right-back/right-front channels and joined together into the two stereo tracks in a similar fashion. Not very good at all.
Bzzzt. Go read the spec again Bucky. You could do what's described above, yes, but that's not 'the way Vorbis does it'.
The way that Vorbis compresses its audio accelerates speaker degradation
Actually using the speakers accellerates degredation too. They last alot longer when you leave them in the box they came in and don't plug them in.
It breaks sound up into an evenly-spaced array of harmonics which approximate the original waveform
Those are not 'harmonics', and Vorbis's compression pays no particualr attention to sinusoidal harmonics. Perhaps you'd like to wait until college and get some signal processing lectures under your belt before coming back.
"Big deal", you say, "that's how all lossy encoding schemes work!"
[sigh] No, no it's not.
But if we assume, for a second, that you said, 'Vorbis is a transform-domain codec', which is what you meant, no, not all lossy audio compression formats are transform based.
But the way that Vorbis does it causes a noticeable amount of harmonic resonance in speaker systems, stressing their driver system and accelerating the rate at which they decay.
The problem Sir is that you have a surplus of Zackthorp particles coming from your warp core, a well known source of wear and tear on cheap speakers. Make sure your speakers are rated for greater than warp 4 before trying to use them so close to a Gammagorp Modulator and your worries are over!
I listened to the result, and believe me, it's true! Because I said so.
If you know the story of the first Tacoma Narrows bridge [carleton.ca], this is the same principle, working at a smaller and more gradual pace.
Given Xiph's poor track record with Vorbis
OK, let's stop here. Everyone gather around, point and laugh!
Monty
[sheesh]
The original target for Tremor was a 74MHz Cirrus Maverick (ARM 7 TDMI core).
Monty
The mail archives didn't disappear; they were never there. I made a permissions error in the archive spool after fixing a log rotation bug :-( None of May was logged.
The previous non-Xiph fixed-point decoder releases are derived from a flawed 'good enough for now' port of Vorbis to the HipZip originally done by iObjects/Fullplay. This port was a quick integerization of beta 3 done in late 2000 and has signal depth problems. It does not decode later-than-beta-4 files. Even if updated to full 1.0, it will still have dynamic range problems when playing 1.0 and later bitstreams.
Tremor was originally done as a report to ARM at the request of Fullplay after determining that starting from scratch was easier than repairing the existing beta-3-derived code. Fullplay opted not to purchase the new port, and eventually released their own beta-3 port under GPL on SourceForge. Those who then derived their own versions from the SourceForge project were generally aware that this was an incomplete 'good enough for now' version and that the code would eventually hit bitstreams that it couldn't play well or at all.
Now that Tremor is BSD, there's no reason to keep using derivations of this old beta-3 port.
Nothing strange about it. You can go back to chasing government UFO conspiracies now....
Monty
Start here: Hydrogen Audio
No, that's not us (Although we like them as they're likely the least bullshit-laden codec comparison and development bulletin board out there. These guys were *very* harsh about Vorbis's quality the first few years. That feedback was invaluable for making the codec as good as it is today.)
c't has also run tests including Vorbis, and will have a big test run on several thousand listeners to offer here sometime soon. It's basically a much larger version of the tests ff123 has run on Hydrogen Audio. We're not privy to any of the current results, but I expect we'll do just fine ;-)
As for 'cranking it out', Ogg development started in 1993.
Monty
> Uh, no, seeing is that I haven't heard of Vorbis until now.
Mmm, this begs one of a few responses:
1) "Gee, you don't care. That's nice. You must be talking to hear yourself talk, then."
2) "Really? I'll tell you what Ogg is if you explain to me why I was supposed to get all excited about Jessica Simpson."
3) "[rolls eyes] Not need respond to rhetorical question, Grog."
4) "Quick! There's another parade to rain on over there! Hurry up, you'll miss it!"
Monty
"All in good fun until someone loses an eye. Then we're talking serious fun."
Strictly speaking, this isn't 'fixed-point' although it is all integer. It uses primarily fixed point, but in the deep S/N vector paths, it uses integerized movable point in a way that most embedded architectures can do the shifts for free during ALU load (eg, look at the ARM assembly for the shift/multiplies). Have a look at the Vorbis codec spec on xiph.org if you want to know why this is necessary.
Also, this code's been around for a while... we're releasing it for free now as commercial code has a short shelf life. It ran through it's commercial usefulness, and now we want it to be commodity code.
Monty
The only serious problem with using Ogg in iTunes and having it work 'out of the box' is that iTunes, believe it or not, would *only* use Quicktime playback for certain extentions.
....but ogg was not one of those extentions.
.mov, they play. Naturally, this is a royal pain in the ass and we don't seriously expect anyone to do this.
Ogg works with quicktime.
If you install the Ogg Quicktime components, and rename all your Ogg files to
We have high hopes that iTunes 3 solves this problem. The Mac hackers are on it now.
As for the iPod, we have all the code needed to make it work. Actually using it can't happen without a blessing from Apple, however.
Monty
xiph.org
Oh... um... yeah, we forgot to mention that in the press release. About 50-60% faster when using -q. We're aiming for greater than a full factor of two over rc3 by next release.
Monty
xiph.org
We *are* comparing against LAME.
The first sample on the demo page is encoded using MP3Enc, because that demo is actually drawn from a larger test being done by an independent party. It also shows Ogg competing against a commercial encoder.
All other MP3 samples on the demo page (the 'Heavy Hitters' section) were encoded using LAME. If you check the auxiliary data in the samples you'll see that.
I'll go mark the samples as such to avoid furhter confusion.
Monty
xiph.org
Open Source's strength is in making commodity software, the software people actually *need* and *care about*, free and open... part of the infrastructure of democracy if you will. There was no truly free audio before Vorbis, because only about six users in the world had computers that could play decent audio in 1993 (when the work on Ogg began). And by decent, I don't mean FM synth or mono 22kHz.
Similarly, there was no need for Open Source video until now because... no one used computer video in any great numbers until now. Yes, yes, Quicktime has been around for a while. I'm personally not excited about the 80x60 black and white 4 frames per second stuff from 1990, and neither is anyone else.
Real and Apple pushed proprietary standards at a time when it was not at all clear that many people cared about 'multimedia', and those that did could afford to shell out big money, or buy into a single vendor. That time is quickly passing. I use both audio and video on my own boxen every day, and Mom in Ohio is likely only a few years behind me on that front, so it's time to get ready.
(Nor was Quicktime 'first', you've simply forgotten its predecessors. That has nothing to do with my point above.)
Monty
xiph.org
The HipZip, unfortunately, never officially supported Ogg and the firmware for HipZip that plays oggs only handles up to beta 4 files. It may well never be updated at this point due to an unfortunate pissing match involving the company that supplied the firmware for HipZip (iObjects/Fullplay).
So, yes, it can certainly be argued HipZip was first. HipZip certainly proved that an embedded processor had the necessary power (the early beta files were even more expensive to decode than current Vorbis files). However, Iomega never officially acknowledged Ogg support.
In terms of official company support, theKompany/Zaurus are definately the first handheld, and the first handheld to play all current/future OggVorbis I files.
Monty
theKompany released their Ogg player for the Zaurus today. Oh, right, and it plays those legacy mp3s too ;-)
Another reason to get a Zaurus!
Monty
xiph.org
Undeniably true. But established standards die enventually. MP3 R&D has been mostly abandoned. It will be around for a very long time yet, but it's being attacked from all technological sides. Microsoft wants to kill it for WMA, Tompson wants to kill it in favor of MP3 pro, FhG wants to kill it for AAC, Real wants us to use Real--ermm, sorry, ATRAC3, etc. MP3's been superceeded and abandoned by cutting edge research.
MP3 the king is a mighty warrior, but he's showing new wounds. Ogg is the successor to the throne, and the only codec individuals are going to have ready, unrestricted access to once MP3 eventually falls. It's not happening this year, but it's happening.
and the fact that there is no hardware support
A mostly fair thing to point out. Ask again in a year; the FPU-less codec exists (he says, hacking on ARM7 assembly), now it's mostly the business distribution arrangement that's up in the air. Commodity hardware designs can't quite live in the same open framework as software.
is that storage is so cheap now
Most of the big Geek music collections of friends around me are each over a Terabyte of music. That's still alot of money.
If I can get a 60GB drive for under $100
If quality is not a concern, you can get a cheap turntable for much less than that and it never runs out of space.
why would I want to sacrifice a big chunk of processing power to make my music 1/3 smaller? Only if I absolutely wanted to use something open.
This one confuses me slightly...
Compressing from WAV->Ogg makes things ~10-20x smaller, depending on your quality tastes.
If you mean 'why would I replace my mp3 collection I already have?', in that case I agree with you. An equivalent Ogg will sound better/more consistent and be smaller, but if you're satisfied with what you've got, there's no need to replace it. Certainly don't transcode it! It could only end up sounding worse (see rant here)
If you mean, "why would I encode to Ogg rather than MP3; it's not worth it", then you're just confused. You get smaller, better sounding files for no extra effort (and no extra CPU). In this case, Open Source is not a compromise; Vorbis is the best out there. All we're lacking is the portable players.
Monty
Ogg has had high bitrate from the beginning. It will happily take you up to just under what the lossless codecs will give. in rc3 stereo, -q10 will do ~400-600kbps, and -q0 will give you ~48-80kbps depending on material.
Monty
There's a batch Ogg replaygain tool at: http://sjeng.org/ftp/vorbis/
ReplayGain tself is explained at: http://www.replaygain.org
The latest XMMS plugin already supports replaygain (as does latest Ogg123), and it should be in the Winamp plugin soon if not already. Right now it's up to individual apps to support ReplayGain, but we're deciding on an easier way to encourage/include support with core Ogg.
Monty
OK, I have to ask... why do people feel the overwhelming need to pontificate/ask profoud questions when they haven't even read the manpage? I'll summarize Ogg's VBR support. You'd have learned this from the FAQ, the READMEs, the manpage a trivial search of the mailing lists, or any of the previous Slashdot stories:
Ogg is natively VBR. It always has been. It's VBR is much better than LAME's because the format *itself* is natively VBR, not supporting it as an extra-spec hack that someone saw fit to kludge in later. Ogg's VBR output is and will likely always be higher quality than its bitrate managed (ie, ABR/BBR/CBR) modes. Don't use -b, -M, -m unless you actually have a *reason* to (eg, streaming). -q will always produce better results for the same output size.
[for the record, the following bits don't apply to this gentle poster, but to other comments]
Also to those below who are complaining, "wah, I reencoded my mp3s to ogg and they got bigger and sound worse," well, think for a second about what you've done. You've taken a lossy format, full of artifacts, and full of characteristics/artifacts specific to mp3 encoding. You're then encoding them in *another* lossy format, with it's own characteristics and saying 'do a good job'. Ogg is going to waste bits trying to reproduce mp3 artifacts perfectly. And because both formats are lossy (even if Ogg is very good), you still lose a bit in the process, a bit like transferring a cassette tape to 1/4" reel-to-reel. The reel to reel is pretty sweet.... but it's still a generational loss.
It seems exceptionally important to nip a few myths here. Most of you will laugh, but there are folks out there who still take a few of these as gospel, because sombody on some website four years ago swore up and down it was true:
- Decoding your mp3 to WAV and burning a CD does *not* improve or recover the lost sound quality. Once it was in mp3, those bits are gone forever. Similarly, converting from mp3 to ogg can *only* make it worse. It will not magically restore anything lost in the sound.
- bitrate is a measure of *size*, not quality. '128kbps' means absolutely nothing about file quality, just how big the file is. If you're rencoding mp3 into ogg (like a large number of folks here are...), of *course* making 256kbps oggs from 128kbps mp3s is going to result in bigger files! The encoder is doing exactly what you told it to.
- "VBR sucks. It saves space, but it's low quality and it messes up players." No, Xing's VBR mode sucks, and since they were the first mp3 encoder to hack this little travesty into a format that can't really support it, breaking most existing players at the time, people only remember Xing. Also add to this that Xing is consistently rated as the lowest quality of all commercial mp3 encoders, people who stopped learning in 1998 remember VBR as being a bad thing.
MontyIn Ogg, VBR is not a hack, it's native. We've been designing it that way for eight years. *VBR modes always sound better. Use them.*
As for ABX: Oops, you're right. The results ff123 asks for are not ABX, they're the traditional 1-5 scale that MPEG has always used. ff123 *does* suggest using ABX to certify the results, but that's not the same thing, and you're right to point that out.
Last, parts of the tests are automated, parts aren't; if you go the ABX route, there are automated testing packages to use (linked from ff123's page). I've not added my results to this test only because it's a little too easy for me to cheat. So, I didn't go through the test process myself, I've only been watching the results.
Monty