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Non-MP3 Codecs? 544

Posted by Cliff from the those-other-audio-codecs dept.
Vanth Dreadstar asks: "While MP3 is okay, I have begun researching other codecs that would be suitable for my home music use. Lossy codecs such as Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and MPC all seem to have promise, not to mention the lossless codecs such as Shorten (otherwise known as .SHN), LPAC, and FLAC. I would like to know what non-MP3 codecs people are using out there, and why."
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Non-MP3 Codecs? More

Non-MP3 Codecs?

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  • Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)

    by kkirk007 ( 304967 )
    Ogg Vorbis over MP3 because obviously Ogg is free while MP3 is locked up in patents, and if you're one of the golden-ears that can tell the difference, FLAC for high quality (and still free).

    • Re:Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)

      by jamesidm ( 244299 )
      I agree with the principle, but since my mp3 CD player does not support ogg I am stuck with mp3 (and it's a lot easier to get mp3 than ogg). FLAC I use for things that require some compression but not lossless. I use it mainly for trading concerts, though the standard seems to be shorten (shn), I personally prefer the open flac (and if you look at the comparison [sourceforge.net] you will see that FLAC is more efficient.

      FWIW, I get a concert down to about 320MB for 18 tracks using FLAC.

      • Re:Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)

        by Ardax ( 46430 )
        Well, depending on your hardware, Ogg Vorbis may be coming soon to player near you.

        Iomega's Hip Zip already has support, but he firmware isn't available to the general public.

        The IRiver (nearly identical to the Rio Volts) has announced support for Vorbis in an upcoming firmware update.

        Why not use FLAC for lossless? That's what it is. Or was that a typo?

    • Re:Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)

      by segvio ( 540235 )
      It's also important to note that Ogg/Vorbis provides VBR (Variable Bitrate) encoding (although MP3s can do this too), which optimizes sound quality and file size.

  • I'm using .nap (Score:4, Funny)

    by jerw134 ( 409531 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:40PM (#2878811)
    I'm using .nap because Napster is going to come back! Just you wait!

  • .cda? (Score:3, Funny)

    by badfish2 ( 316297 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:41PM (#2878823) Homepage
    Whatever it is that comes on these shiny round things I get from the music store...that's the one I use.

    • Re:.cda? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Karpe ( 1147 )


      Whatever it is that comes on these shiny round things I get from the music store...that's the one I use.


      Are you sure you don't mean "used to come on these shiny round things"? I, for one, don't know what they are selling on the CD stores these days, but I am sure many of these round things are not "Compact Disc Digital Audio"

      • Actually, they are. The copy protection is mostly still in the "test marketing" stage to see if people will swallow it. Plus I doubt the large libraries of existing CDs will be converted ever, mostly because it wouldn't be worth the money.
      • He doesn't say it's .cda,
        He said it's whatever comes on the shiny round things.. which whatever it is, even if it changes, still IS on shiny round things.

    • Re:.cda? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Xunker ( 6905 )
      That actually /does/ have a name, too. Generally speaking, "uncompressed", Phillips-standard CD Audio is usually know as PCM, or "Pulse Coded Modulation".

  • my personal solution (Score:2, Redundant)

    by macsox ( 236590 )
    i use a non-lossy format known as the Audio Interchange File Format, or AIFF, to store my audio files. They can be burned to CDs very easily -- you can't fit as many on one CD as MP3, but the CDs will play in every CD player I've come across, and the sound is CD-quality.

  • Ogg Vorbis (Score:4, Informative)

    by Koim-Do ( 552500 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:42PM (#2878826)
    I use Ogg becuase:

    1. it seems to give better sound quality for the same quantity of bytes.
    2. encoding to Ogg is legal, unlike encoding to MP3 when using ISO-code based encoder (pretty much any encoder i know. enlighten me if im wrong).
    3. "Ogg" sounds cooler than "MP3"
    • "3. "Ogg" sounds cooler than "MP3""

      To a geek. :) "MP3" has that "modern-day acronym sound" to it, like PDA, IM or IPO. Ogg just sounds like a character from Lord of the Rings (which, last I checked, very few "mainstream" people found "cool" -- just "majestic").

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Well, when I saw the Subaru MP3 or whatever they call their latest model with a factory mp3 player at the North American International Autoshow I wondered - MP3 has a mindshare that people equate to digital audio.

        When I asked if there was going to be a Subaru OGG, the guy looked at me funny.

        This is the kind of barrier that ogg needs to get around.

      • Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Insightful)

        by John Whitley ( 6067 )
        <dons evil marketing hat> Easily solved. For, say, the 1.3 point release of Ogg Vorbis, pull a Sun and dub it "Og3". Heck, just call it that right now. Positions it nicely as a competitor to the known format. <doffs evil marketing hat>

    • 4. Flexible variable bitrate encoding.
      5. Bitrate management - great for streaming + quality.
      6. Flexible design for future improvements.
      7. Headers that can actually store some info; I learn to hate ID3 tags.

      Disadvantages so far:
      1. No 1.0 version yet, RC3.
      2. No hardware support; need to have an Ogg Player.

      On a different note, some commercial game makers were interested in Vorbis, no idea where that stands.
      • Several game companies have already shipped games using Vorbis or are in progress with games that use it. See Brian Hook's email to vorbis-dev [xiph.org] about Candy Cruncher. Papyrus Racing Games will also use it in their next product.

  • Ogg Vorbis (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Paladin128 ( 203968 ) <aaron&traas,org> on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:43PM (#2878840) Homepage
    I'm using Ogg Vorbis for a number of reason. The reference encoder, while not perfect, is certainly not bad. The vast majority of the time, .ogg's sound noticeably better than MP3's of the same bitrate.

    More importantly, Ogg Vorbis is free of any patents or any other restrictions. I could make a commercial hardware player if I wanted to, and not have to pay any royalties to anyone.

    Finally, it integrates nicely with Konqueror's audioCD IO slave. You can simply type "audiocd:/ogg/" in Konq's location bar, and it shows you a list of .ogg files with the track names grabbed from FreeDB. To actually encode, one symply drags the .ogg file to another directory, and the IO slave works its magic.

    • Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2, Interesting)

      by resonator ( 151559 )
      Speaking of commercial audio players, that's one thing that will keep mp3's around for years to come. The format has had so much market penetration, it won't be easily replaced... plus with all these new-fangled hardware mp3 players (iPod), the infrastructure has kinda been set in stone, no?

      • Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sahala ( 105682 )
        The format has had so much market penetration, it won't be easily replaced...

        Yeah tell me about it...I produce my own tracks (mostly house music), I have a hard time sending out anything but .mp3 files. What's even worse is when people ask for stuff in RealAudio or WMA for streaming purposes. I lose so much quality (especially hi-hat loops and some portions of the basslines) that I have to re-do some of my tracks so you can actually hear certain portions.

    • I dont mean to be picky but there is a kio slave for mp3 also that works just as well as the ogg one (for those of you who want to use the more widely supported format)
      • yes there is. If you browse a CD using audiodlave, you see both an mp3 and ogg folder. You set the settings in the K control panel (or whatever its called), and never have to mess with it again.

        If you do both the ogg and mp3 directories, its a good way to compare both of the formats head to head.

  • Vorbis and flac (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:44PM (#2878846)
    I'm writing a new application and I have chosen the supported audio formats based on practical concerns: license, patent status, and API. MP3 is nice but technically you need to a license from the patent holder to make an encoder. Vorbis has no such limitation so I use it. I use flac for the same reason. Its license agrees with mine.

    Another consideration is the straightforwardness of the API for the library you intend to use. Vorbis has a somewhat reasonble API with a liberal addition of quirks. Also you can easily add metadata to Vorbis files. Ever tried adding metadata to an MP3 file? ID3v1.1 is trivial but ID3v2 has a 95,000 line reference implementation. Uh? UH?

    Any application has to support PCM audio also, since most music collections are primarily on CD.

  • Audio compression - ZAP (Score:4, Informative)

    by Steve Cowan ( 525271 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:48PM (#2878863) Journal
    I use ZAP by emagic [emagic.de]. Emagic is popular among pro audio types for their integrated audio/MIDI app "Logic Audio".

    ZAP (an acronym for "Zero-loss Audio Packer") is, as its name implies, lossless, and the ZAP app has the ability to play back audio from a compressed archive.

    The ZAP application compresses raw audio files to about 40-to-70% of their original size. This is much better smaller than typical .zip or .sit compression on audio files.

    Archives can be made self-extracting. I find this useful if I do an audio project for which the files total about a gig in size but want to back it up to a single CDR.

    Interestingly, I just looked at emagic's web site, and they do not have a link for ZAP. Maybe their site is incomplete, or maybe they have discontinued the product.

    • I find it ironic, since Logic and all the higher end DAW apps support 24-32 bit audio and 2 to 4 times the sample rates that CD audio does.

      I seriously have a difficult time believing they can achieve that level of compression in a lossless manner... mainly because as you say, .zip and .sat provide very little compression... in fact the only real use of zipping is to be able to send multiple files at once (which doesn't make too much sense when dealing with large audio files).

      With hard drives so inexpensive....? Anything wrong with .wav files?
  • I would like to know what non-MP3 codecs people are using out there

    I'd like to know if they are using them.

  • Of a good old wav. Except maybe for pure vinal, but is that a codec?

  • Ogg Vorbis (Score:5, Informative)

    by xercist ( 161422 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:51PM (#2878890) Homepage
    is the *best* lossy audio codec I've yet seen. At -q 3 (ends up being around 112 kb/s average) most is transparent to me, and at -q 4.99 pretty much everything. (I don't use -q 5 because it jumps up to lossless coupling which makes the bitrate jump quite a bit).

    Aside from sounding great, it's 100% free (open source, patent-free) for everyone, and I can always annoy people on #vorbis (opn IRC network) with technical questions.

    If you're looking for lossless compression, wait for the people currently working on vorbis to write Ogg Squish, which will be their lossless codec, and should kick ass as well.

    I'm also looking anxiously forward to Ogg Tarkin, the currently-in-the-works lossy video codec, which is using new technology (wavelets) to encode video. I believe it shows a lot of promise.

    • Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Informative)

      by Trepidity ( 597 )
      At low bitrates Ogg is indeed the best (well, AAC might be better, but it's enormously expensive). Depending on your ears, this may be good enough. However, for many people, higher bitrates are needed for transparent encoding, and in this category I don't think you can say Ogg is the best lossy audio codec. It's certainly better than MP3, but it cannot beat MPC at high bitrates, especially for people who are sensitive to transient smearing (MPC's design as a subband codec gives it an inherent advantage over transform codecs like MP3 and Ogg in this respect).

  • Oh, of course I use .wma... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dperkins ( 63220 ) <davidrperkins&gmail,com> on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:54PM (#2878908) Homepage
    Because I have to quit this filthy .mp3 habit. I need the music industry to help me overcome my addiction to free music, so with digital content controls I won't be tempted to download gigabyte upon gigabyte of free music. I won't have to continue working this extra part-time job to support my purchases of extra hard drive space.

  • If you have a G4... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 90XDoubleSide ( 522791 ) <ninetyxdoublesid ... minus herbivore> on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:59PM (#2878941)
    Sticking with MP3s is a no brainer unless you have to use open software for moral reasons, since Apple has enhanced MP3 encoding/decoding for AltiVec, and this is an area where those gigaFlops do wonders at quick, high-quality encodes and freeing up more CPU for your work (or the visualizer :) during playback.

  • ogg...but what we really need (Score:4, Interesting)

    by crystalplague ( 547876 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @06:59PM (#2878948)
    is a ftp database and crawler similar to audiogalaxy only for ogg. it would catch on in no time.
  • Doesn't have to be "free". I use WMF on the Windows side (I have enough room to encode my files in both WMF and MP3 on my home server). It offers, what I think, is superior audio quality at a much lower space.

    For most distributed applications (music player in my living room) I use the MP3 side. If push came to shove, I'd find some way to delete the MP3's and play the WMF's on other devices, just because they're so space-conscious.

  • I use MP3. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dog and Pony ( 521538 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:01PM (#2878958)
    Because the few songs I have ripped are in that format, and the few songs I get from friends now and then, are also mp3.

    I don't really play "clog the modem", so I guess I am the wrong person to answer that.

    But I am not going to play the elitist game of switching to Ogg because it has better compression (cheap HD, cheap bandwidth) or because it preserves some frequencies more (come on, you can't hear it either).

    I could think to switch just because of the licensing and the patent issues, I am like that sometimes... but right now it is too much trouble to make a point noone will notice (as I share my music as much as I DC for new - almost never).

    I do personally hope that for those that this really matters to, that something like Ogg will come and take over, so we can see AOL buy that too. Just kidding. :)

  • Subject says all. Has it just not hit mainstream, or is it getting steamrollered by Ogg, WMA, and any of the other popular formats?
    • MP3Pro is mostly a marketing ploy. It has a 10 kHz lowpass filter, and then tries to reconstruct the upper frequencies based on harmonic extrapolation of the lower frequencies. This may be somewhat useful for low bitrates (say, under 80 kbps, for use in portable players). But the irreversible loss of audio quality makes this an inappropriate codec for the kinds of uses that I (at least) prefer: namely, files sitting on my hard drive on my desktop computer.

  • for home audio... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:03PM (#2878973) Homepage
    If you're looking to compress files for home audio use, then you may as well go ahead and use one of the lossless compression formats, as adding storage space to a home audio system is trivial and you'll be able to hear comparatively more garbage from lossy compression on your home system (rather than on an earpiece headset or cheapie speakers.)

    Bear in mind that the ~4x compression rate listed for lossless compression schemes is heavily reliant on the input. Don't be surprised if you get 1.5-2.5 compression a lot of the time, and remember that there's a good chance you'll get 1:1 (or worse) compression results with a 'random' enough song file.

  • I was going to submit this to "Ask Slashdot", but this seems like a good place to ask.

    JPEG users have available to them some command line utilities that permit simple alteration of images without loss of quality, for example, rotation and flipping. Are there any similar utilities available for any of the major audio compression formats?

    The reason I ask is that I have ripped a number of CDs and the volume levels vary noticibly. I like to listen to MP3s as I work, with the volume turned down far enough that I can hear the music, but any one that I'm on the phone with won't. Unfortuately, there doesn't seem to be a single setting for everything that I've ripped. While I could go back and re-rip, I'd much rather have a toolbox of useful batch utilities. Ideally, it would allow me to write, say, a Perl script that generates a histogram, checks the average and peak volume, and then tweaks a single number in the file header to force it in line with the rest of my collection.

    Is this sort of thing possible?

    • Your specific example: Ogg has ReplayGain (Score:5, Informative)

      by xiphmont ( 80732 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:27PM (#2879156) Homepage
      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).

      There's a batch Ogg replaygain tool at: http://sjeng.org/ftp/vorbis/ [sjeng.org]

      ReplayGain tself is explained at: http://www.replaygain.org [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

    • ReplayGain [replaygain.org] is actually a system designed to deal with this. It stores some info in the music file so that you can normalize the volumes of all of your files on playback.

      I'm not familiar with the state of MP3 tools which support ReplayGain, but I know that Gian-Carlo Pascutto just wrote a tool [sjeng.org] to add ReplayGain information to Ogg Vorbis files. There is an XMMS [xmms.org] support in CVS which uses the information, and I just got done adding support for ReplayGain to ogg123 (it will be about a week before it goes into the xiph.org CVS pending the approval of some other changes). Winamp also supports ReplayGain using Peter's Vorbis plugin [blorp.com]

    • Another one to try is Normalize [columbia.edu] It alows you to adjust volumes across different types of input files (.wav, mp3, etc...)

    • what you suffer from is lack of normalization. many many CD's are poorly mastered (in fact 90% of all Cd's today are very poorly mastered, it is very rare that anyone takes the time to properly master a CD anymore.) what you are getting is that the mixdown mastering was set at an arbitrary level by the studio staff. they just picked a level and spun off a master without running a calibration on the equipment. They usually calibrate every morning, but many places assume that the calibration was good from yeaterday, and the equipment wasn't touched or turned off so just fire away.... they have 300 albums to master today... this usually leaves you with CD's that have a horrible noise floor because the audio program is too low and not using the entire abilities of the CD. (NOTE there are some that are messed up the other direction.... Nutral-milk-hotel comes to mind.. clipping on the cd because it was not normalized.)

      so you need to normalize up. basically use a program that looks at the entire song and then brings the higest peak up to 99% or 98% of max. the program will look at either each track, or all tracks from an album, find the highest peak from that album and then normalize all to that peak. either eay works great, I prefer each song getting normalized.

      Now... you can do this to mp3's you have already. problem is that you need to decode-normalize-reencode which adds more loss and noise artifacts.

      I would start over, grab your cd collection and start from step one again. (lame has awesome encode now... it's improved massively)

      • it is very rare that anyone takes the time to properly master a CD anymore.

        That's because if you master it well on the first try, you only get to sell the CD to the fans once.

      • Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation (Score:4, Informative)

        by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:18PM (#2879964) Homepage Journal
        Whoa- wild misconceptions here :D

        What's really going on is this: using aggressive, fast-release peak limiting, musicians can get mastering engineers to push the volume of their CDs past zero. Actually, one popular technique is in fact clipping and then taking the overall volume down 0.2 db or so (to get rid of digital full scale values that can cause problems glass mastering, and with D/A converters)

        Mastering engineers have been trapped in a jam comparable to clueful sysadmins being ordered to standardize on W2K/IIS: what's driving it is A&R reps and radio. Briefly, there are a lot of fools out there who figure their CD will sell better and get on the radio better if only it is louder than the next guy's. Sometimes that's even true as some of the radio program directors are also idiots who love horrible distortion and blasting loudness...

        The trick is, there is NO one volume level that is 'the loudest' you can get out of digital. It's simply a tradeoff- how much distortion and grunge can you tolerate? It can be like putting a CD into a distortion box almost: look at modern music in a sound editor and you'll see a black ribbon because every sound is slammed to digital full scale. Look closer and it looks like the peaks get planed off with a surface planer. Sometimes this sounds like flat-out distortion, sometimes it doesn't, but it all more or less damages the richness of the sound.

        At least with modern CDs, I'm not aware of ANY studios that put out CDs with peaks only going to part of digital full scale. The problem is in the other extreme- they pretty much all cover digital full scale peak to peak, but push beyond that in wildly varying amounts, which affects the RMS level. Some of the greatest albums in history were recorded with crest factor (amount peak is higher than RMS level) of 20 db and up, as much as 24 db sometimes (the Boston debut album). Some of your modern albums have a mere 6 db crest factor, or even less. If you put them on after the older album, they blast out your speakers and you have to turn it down (as the original poster said). Once you've turned it down, it's the same volume only sounds much lamer and weaker.

        Which is all just a lot of information, no doubt, except that it is also the reason why your advice will totally NOT WORK in the slightest. Now, if you were talking about a 'normalize' function that looked at RMS volume it might be different...

  • I can't really tell much of a difference between 128kbps mp3 and the original cd. Maybe others can, but mp3 is plenty good enough for me. As is ogg. To me, it doesn't really matter about the format as long as its convienent. And considering the 200+ cd's of mp3's are full of mp3's and no other format... and the effort required to convert them would outweigh the slight gain by converting to another format.

    -Restil
    • I can hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and the original CD (192kbps CBR or 160kbps VBR are good enough for me), however the difference isn't nearly so great as the difference between playing the music on $30 vs. $100 speakers. You can get decent computer speakers today (if you're not an audiophile and don't need very high volume) for as little as $60, but the prevalence of 128kbps recordings on the internet suggests to me that most of these people are still listening to music on the little white buzzers that came with their computer.

  • midi (Score:2, Funny)

    by ayeco ( 301053 )
    I like midi. But I've heard on this new thing called mod, it takes samples and tone shifts them to recreate the song! Pretty cool, like midi but better!

    in the mean time - I can't stand mp3s, ogg might be the way for me to go now.
  • besides the fact that it's hard to go up against an established standard and the fact that there is no hardware support, is that storage is so cheap now. If I can get a 60GB drive for under $100, 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.
    • The thing keeping Vorbis from becoming supported by most hardware players is that the reference decoder requires a FPU. It is certainly possible to decode vorbis without floading point, but thus far no one has written the software to do so. As soon as this is done (and evnetually, it *will* be done), vorbis support for the hardware players will come pouring in.

      Iomega has promised vorbis support for their HipZip player after 1.0 is released, but they have released beta firmware which does it already.

    • I'm bored, let's rant... (Score:4, Informative)

      by xiphmont ( 80732 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:56PM (#2879353) Homepage
      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 [slashdot.org])

      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

      • > 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.

        Counter-rant: So what if "research" has been abandoned on MP3. I don't need that research, 'cuz there are great MP3 encoders already out there. The work has been done.

        For archive quality (as opposed to streaming audio), what do .WMA, MP3Pro, Real, and ATRAC offer over 192/256/320k MP3s? Nothing.

        They all support various copy-control schemes, which make for revenue opportunities, which might cause their respective proponents to funnel R&D bucks into them. Some sound better at low bitrates, which is fine for streaming audio, but most folks in the streaming audio are - once again - just trying to make a buck selling pay-per-listen or pay-for-subscription streams.

        That's the other reason nobody's researching MP3 -- not only is it "good enough" as it stands, there's no money to be made, even if it could be improved.

        Talking about the lack of "cutting-edge research" MP3 as a death knell is like talking about the lack of cutting-edge UNIX text editors as the death knell for vi and emacs.

        I don't need Microsoft or Real or Sony to put a million bucks into researching the latest WMA codec, because I know it'll be DRM-crippled and useless to me. The research into other codecs is, for me, wasted. I couldn't care less.

        (Likewise, the lack of "research" into cutting-edge text editors doesn't seem to have made vi or emacs go away...)

        As for Ogg, as good as Ogg is, I see the odds of it replacing MP3 in terms of the .GIF vs. .PNG debate -- most places that could use .PNGs still use .GIFs, despite GIF's patent issues, because .GIF was "good enough" and widely-distributed before PNG came about.

  • It's free, as in beer.

    You can stream it! And a little app called abcde works great with it.

    It's slowly becoming a new standard are more software players are supporting it.

    Too bad there is no hardware support. I think we should start off with a DC port. What do ya' think?

  • OGG file format features (Score:4, Informative)

    by loshwomp ( 468955 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:18PM (#2879075)
    The .ogg file format has loads of features that are really important for industrial applications.

    Editing with 1-sample resolution, for example. This allows you to cut your live music into tracks without that silly gap introduced by mp3.

    Support for 256 channels, channel coupling, etc, are also extremely important for streaming applications.

  • ...however, I don't see a format shift happening too soon, since the majority of computer users (the "dumb masses", I like to call them) are being spoon-fed by the OEMs, and we all know what they're using in place of strained peas. Not even Winamp support is enough; nowadays, every Compaq/HP/Dell/eMachines/craputer is pre-configured with Windows Media Player or RealOne, and they don't support OGG or the others (mostly because no one can profit from them).
  • I'm not interested in some "super small" music file - disk space is cheap and MP3 is already small enough for transfering over the Internet. I'm more interested in audio quality and hardware compatibility. MP3 and WMA sound great (moreso the latter), and are both commonly supported by cool [tomshardware.com] hardware [nomadworld.com]. I don't see the point in all these other media formats. I like to listen to my music on something other then my computer.
  • I will probably continue to use mp3 format files, because it is basically the standard that everyone on the internet goes by. If you have broadband and a decent hard drive, size/bitrate should not be a deciding factor. Unless you're one of those that hear like a dog, mp3s should be sufficient for everyone to use.

  • Ogg Vorbis clearly wins (Score:5, Informative)

    by Teach ( 29386 ) <graham@grahammitchel l . c om> on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:25PM (#2879139) Homepage

    I teach Computer Science at the high school level at a largish school near Austin, Texas. For the past several years there's been a "jukebox" in my room where students could vote for albums to hear during programming lab time, and random tracks off the winning albums play over the speakers in the classroom.

    Over Christmas break I changed the "player" portion of the system to play Ogg Vorbis files instead of mp3s.

    Why not mp3?

    • The sound quality is lower than many current alternatives (AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA).
    • The patent situation is scary and I fear a recurrence of the whole Unisys/GIF fiasco.
    • Saying I have a hard-drive full of mp3s just sounds shady, even though they're all legal.

    So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?

    • Sound quality vs. file size is very nice. Most folks consider a 112 kbps VBR (quality 3) ogg file to sound about as good as a 160 kbps CBR mp3, but it's 25-30% smaller. That's nothing to sneeze at.
    • Patent-free algorithms and open-source license mean The Man can never take my oggs from me.
    • Oggs are peelable, meaning that I can encode a file at, say, 160 kbps for listening at home, and peel the file down to 96 kbps later for listening on my portable. The peeling produces a file that has the same quality as if I'd encoded the original source directly to 96 kbps. This is also a big win for streaming folks because you only have to encode one bitrate and can peel to others as needed.
    • The mailing list is quite active and you can get advice and help in a hurry. Plus there's a bugzilla, so you can easily report any errors you find.

    By the way, if you haven't listened to Ogg since 1.0-rc3 came out (on New Year's Day), try it again. The sound quality has been much improved. Note that you should not use the "-b" option to encode as it uses CBR and thus produces larger files at lower quality. Default is quality 3, which is 112 kbps but sounds as good as 160 kbps to most. If you really can tell the difference, quality 4 averages 128 kbps and sounds much better (and is maybe 3% smaller) than an mp3 at that rate. You've got to experiment to find your own sweet spot.

    The biggest downside is that whole ubiquity thing. There's been an official Winamp plug-in for quite some time, but Nullsoft have yet to install it by default (rumor has it that it is AOL 's legal department which is holding this up). I'm also pretty sure there's a Windows Media Player codec, but don't quote me on that.

    Also the only hardware player that supports Ogg Vorbis is the HipZip (via a firmware upgrade). Other units that support it are coming soon, but not yet available.

    Since I don't own a hardware player (yet) and don't download my mp3s, the ubiquity factor isn't an issue for me, however.

    On the plate for rc4 is sound quality tuning for the low (a.k.a streaming) bitrates. Then a coat of polish and it'll be called 1.0

  • I use MP3s because they're much like Interet currency.

    I convert MP3s to WMAs when I want to squish music onto my PocketPC.

    If I bought an OGG car player (if there is/was such a beast), I'd convert my MP3s.

    The point: When in Rome, I do as the Romans. It's a simple life, really. :)
  • Just wait for the looney audiophiles who will claim that they can hear the difference between 'lossless' compression and no compression.

    The more I talk to (to be acurate the more I am talked at by) audiophiles the more I get the feeling that its a geek weenie measuring contest and has nothing to do with what stuff sounds like. One guy I know told me at great length how his $2,000 cd player was superior to the cheapie Philips unit it shares its main circuit board with because of the accuracy and freedom from wow/flutter of the CD drive mechanism.

    So when I hear about golden ears and such I tend to think Bovine Excrement.

    I would much prefer to use Ogg or Windows Media Player than MP3 because they are better compression formats and allow more tracks to fit on my Archos device. Problem is that the Archos won't play them to the better compression is moot.

    I am not that much interested in the Napster/Gnutella scene any more than I am aware of any other WareZ scene so use of the codec by others is not that interesting to me. However if someone came along with a 6Gb Hard Drive of 'stuff' I could well imagine preferring to do swapsies than encoding the stuff myself. Ripping off tracks one at a time over Napster while being spamvertised is not my idea of fun.

  • SHN benefits (Score:4, Informative)

    by moron0 ( 13503 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @08:11PM (#2879439) Homepage
    The reason the live music trading community (most notably etree.org [etree.org]) uses the shorten format is because there was not a way to widely distribute exact copies of, say, master DATs. Now, assuming the person transferring the DAT, did a reasonably good job, every person after that who receives the SHN files can create an exact copy of that DAT. This is crucial because of the way shows are distributed. One person gets a copy from his friend, and he passes it on to his friends. If there was a lossy step involved in the middle of the chain, each copy would be worse than the one before. Note tape trading. Copying a cassette is lossy, so someone who got such with a 4th or 5th generation tape was stuck with all of the artifacts that were introduced in each generation above. Even copying CD audio is not perfect: programs that do digital audio extraction need to do a good job reading the data without any error correction. Shorten makes 100% sure that every copy is just like the original.

    • Re:SHN benefits (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 )
      The reason the live music trading community (most notably etree.org [etree.org]) uses the shorten format is because there was not a way to widely distribute exact copies of, say, master DATs. Now, assuming the person transferring the DAT, did a reasonably good job, every person after that who receives the SHN files can create an exact copy of that DAT. This is crucial because of the way shows are distributed. One person gets a copy from his friend, and he passes it on to his friends. If there was a lossy step involved in the middle of the chain, each copy would be worse than the one before. Note tape trading. Copying a...

      Hmm... but you're making an assumption here that, for some reason, every person in the chain would re-encode the audio data into said lossy format before sending it to the next person in the tape tree, which would (hopefully) not be true, in general. For example, I try to keep an archive of all the compressed audio files I download, even if I burn them to CD. In fact, often times, I just make a multisession disk with the compressed audio on the data portion. Then again, there's no telling what an uneducated trader might do. :)

      I guess what I'm driving at here is that, if the traders were bright enough not to re-encode all the time, and just pass around the original files, a compressed format could make trading a LOT easier for those with reduced bandwidth. Frankly, I think the community chose Shorten for the same reason some audiophiles prefer vinyl... they think it sounds better (and, IMHO, given the quality of your average taped show, a compressed format probably wouldn't affect quality that much. :)

      • Re:SHN benefits (Score:3, Insightful)

        by moron0 ( 13503 )
        With a traditional cassette tree, yes, every member in the chain is adding a lossy generation to the next tape in the chain. That can't be helped with cassettes.

        By "original files" what do you mean? Do you mean the original wav files? The original shn files? Or maybe the person transferring the master made some mp3s? Also by "compressed format" are you talking lossy or lossless?

        The traders are bright enough to not re-encode all the time, they're passing around original shn files that match an md5sum hash in an established database. That way everyone is guaranteed a good copy; at least they're guaranteed the same quality as the master! The people in this community have a different solution for those with reduced bandwidth: USPS. Mailing around CDs filled with SHNs is still very prevalent.

        It is a compromise though. You have to wait a long time to transfer a single show. It's a compromise most are willing to take, though, for the higher quality. Who's going to trade with you if you have a lower quality recording than the next guy? You might not be able to hear the artifacts introduced by mp3, but if the next guy can, he's going to be pissed that you traded him schwag.

        The community chose Shorten because they needed a way to guarantee quality. A commercially pressed CD has thousands of "masters". A show taped by the taping community has one, or maybe a few more if he was giving patches. To distribute an exact copy of this music from only one master is quite a feat.

        The community also chose Shorten because it DOES sound better. For example, live field recording has a ton of ambience. Lossy compression schemes such as mp3 do not encode that well.

  • I use the MUTE codec. (Score:5, Funny)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:23PM (#2879780) Homepage
    It gets 99.99% compression. I think it's termed "lossy" compression.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:39PM (#2879842)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Vorbis below 160kbps, MPC above 160kbps (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tangent3 ( 449222 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @11:09PM (#2880137)
    With the quality of the latest RC3 release, Vorbis now sits on the throne in the low to middle bitrates, easily beating out MP3Pro and WMA even in the very low bitrates of 64kbps. The best part about it is that Monty has mentioned that he's still not happy with the quality at 64kbps and will still be improving it further. At middle bitrates of 128kbps, it is at least as good as the best AAC implementation. At the high bitrates, it still hasn't matched MPC, but it is catching up really fast. Whether Vorbis (a transform coder) can ever overtake MPC (a subband coder) quality in the future in the high bitrate arena (usually ruled by subband coders where pre-echo artifacts are nearly non-existant) is very much unknown, and probably depends on Vorbis implementing a really good anti-pre-echo system better than all the current techniques being used.

    So therefore, for the best quality now, use Ogg Vorbis at bitrates of 160kbps and below. Above 160kbps, use MPC.

  • Arguments for shn (Score:5, Interesting)

    by guygee ( 453727 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2002 @02:06AM (#2880659)


    After collecting 60 Gb worth of mp3s, I switched to almost strictly shn format
    over 2 years ago. Here is my reasoning:

    1. Stick with a lossless format if you can afford the bandwidth and storage
    space. Plan for the future, when bandwidth and hd space will be much
    more plentiful.

    2. I can definitely hear the difference between lossless and any compressed
    format at 128 kb/s (that annoying wavery sound), and even at 256 kb/s (barely)
    on very delicate passages and high-end speakers.

    3. Also, if you want to reprocess the music (dehiss, dehum, equalize, normalize,
    respatialize, etc) you experience a much more noticeable degradation in the
    sound if you start with a lossy format.

    4. shn is the standard format for trading music.
    It is a lot less work to store in shn then have to decode and reencode every
    time you make a music trade.

    For lots of good links on shn format, see my trading page at [ucf.edu]
    http://www.vsl.ist.ucf.edu/groups/vtb/TradeList_ 20 01-11-25.html

    (Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here [mailto]

    .
    ;-)

  • Ogg Vorbis (Score:4, Informative)

    by DarkVein ( 5418 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2002 @03:33AM (#2880864) Journal
    • Future–proof — While nothing is future–proof, Ogg Vorbis is future–resistant.
    • Acoustic quality is so much better than MP3. I really can not stand MP3 after hearing Vorbis. I've been tempted to buy an iPod, but I always come to one point that stops me dead–cold. The iPod doesn't play Ogg Vorbis yet.
    • "Vorbis" sounds cooler than "em-pee-three"
    • The format is Open. Like HTML, HTTP, XML, ASCII, the x86 architecture(mostly), screw drivers, and the recipe for a good peanutbutter and jelly sandwitch the specification for a leading audio codec belongs in the domain of public control and examination, where it will be improved overall for public interest rather than special interest.
    • As an Open codec and format, I can put faith into the fact that in thirty years my Oggs will be usable. With MP3, there is exists the chance that Fraufenhofer will put out a legal Jihad and attempt to excorcise mp3 encoders and decoders from the planet. If that happens, it will be a pain in the butt to find a decoder for Windows, let alone for any new operating system or platform that comes out.
    • Peeling. Instead of re–encoding, bits can be dropped off to reduce the date rate without quality loss greater than a fresh encoding at the new bit rate. This is great for streaming and great for keeping high-bitrate versions of songs on disc and then moving low-bitrate versions to, say, an iPod.
    • Channels. 255 of them.
    • Ogg Vorbis files can be edited in their encoded form.
    • 20, 24, and 32-bit audio.

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