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Music Media

Ogg Vorbis RC3 Released 321

Posted by timothy from the need-more-hardware-players dept.
xercist writes: "Let's start 2002 off with some good news! The long awaited RC3 release of the Ogg project's Vorbis codec is now out. Major changes include much improvement in the quality to bitrate ratio, ability to specify a hard bitrate min/max to the encoder (good for streaming), and an entirely new bitrate management engine which can emulate CBR, do constrained bitrates, and will accept quality settings via the -q flag from 0 through 10 in .00000001 increments (currently only tuned for 44.1 KHz modes). Vorbis has kicked MP3's, WMA's, and Real's asses for a long time now, hopefully this release will change the minds of anyone yet undecided. Download RC3, then show your appreciation for all their hard work and dedication by making a donation to support the project."
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Ogg Vorbis RC3 Released More

Ogg Vorbis RC3 Released

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  • I'm looking forward to getting and testing this. The last few releases have been very good, and another high quality release will really help people change their minds about mp3, etc.

  • Hardware Support... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cryptnotic ( 154382 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:02AM (#2769923)
    We really need support for OGG on products like the Phatbox [phatnoise.com].

    Cryptnotic
    • Really, it's not been all that long since there wasn't hardware support for MP3. Use OGG, and they (the hardware manufacturers) will come. Had it not been for MP3's popularity, you'd not see devices like the Rio line and others.

  • Double Blind Listening Tests... Where ??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:07AM (#2769930)
    I'm still waiting for those properly conducted and documented double blind listening tests.... you know, like the ones that've been done in the past which shows that only the very best listeners only sometimes could tell 128 kbps MP3 (FgH encoder, not Xing, Blade, etc) apart from the original material. At least two of these types of properly conducted double blind tests have been done for MP3, WMA and others.

    So where are these tests for Vorbis?

    That is what it will take to convince me. A long laundry list of impressive sounding (in techno-speak) features does not necessarily make for an impressive sounding codec. True double blind listening tests with a statistically valid sample size, both in terms on the number of musical selections and listeners (who can even reliably tell the difference at all) are the only way to really know.

    Of course, it's all a moot point for the majority of people who can't really tell the differences... but it makes for better conversation eg, my codec can beat up your codec.....

    • Re:Double Blind Listening Tests... Where ??? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How about ff123's 128kbit double blind test [ff123.net]. It's using RC2 as a basis, and the quality improvements since then have been quite substantial.

      ff123 is planning more tests at such bitrates - it's difficult to organise a test, gather results and publish findings on the same day as an RC.

    • Re:Double Blind Listening Tests... Here! (Score:5, Informative)

      by xiphmont ( 80732 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:24AM (#2769957) Homepage
      ff123 from the r3mix.net/hydrogenaudio.org forums is conducting automated ABX double blind tests comparing Vorbis, mp3 (several encoders), AAC, WMA and MPC. The best part of this is... everyone can participate.

      If you want to take the listening test yourself, read the instructions and jump in. [ff123.net] For now, there's also a page of interim results [ff123.net], but to quote ff123, "Major conclusion: I need more listeners!"

      Monty

    • Re:Double Blind Listening Tests... Where ??? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:31AM (#2769968) Homepage
      We're getting there. RC3 has only been released for about an hour :)


      The best tests we have at the moment were conducted by
      ff123 [ff123.net] at 128kpbs. There have been two so far (the second is technically still underway, although it's now based on outdated encoders, so I imagine a third will start fairly soon). The
      first listening test [ff123.net] compared RC2 Ogg Vorbis, LAME MP3, Xing MP3, Liquifier AAC, MPC, and WMA8. The formal analysis showed that, on the file compared, the encoders could be divided with 95% confidence into three groups (from best to worst):

      1. MPC and AAC
      2. WMA8 and LAME and OGG
      3. XING
      .
      The second test [ff123.net] used a CVS version of OGG from about a month and a half ago. This time there are three test samples which participants can choose to evaluate. While technically still underway,
      the interim results can be found here [ff123.net]. Of the three test samples, the first can't discriminate between the encoders, the second looks like it will but needs more listeners (and the results so far look interesting), and the third discriminates well, to the extent that it shows that Xing and WMA8 are statistically much worse on that clip than all the others.


      Now all we need is a third test with the latest updates of all the encoders - since we now have a new stable version both of Ogg Vorbis (RC3) and LAME (3.91).

      • It's great to see a site like this. I only have two objections to ff123's tests:

        1. He shouldn't decode MP3s with a decoder known for its inaccuracy. If he insists on Winamp, I recomend the mpg123 plugin.

        2. Results at 128 kpbs are of absolutely no interest to me. I know everything will sound crappy at this bitrate. I guess it's easier to for ordinary listeners to hear defects at this bitrate, and one can guess that the best sounding codec at 128 will have a leg up for the higher bitrates--so it's not entirely beside the point... . Still, I would never consider encoding at anything below 160, and try to get VBR to average about 190.

    • shows that only the very best listeners only sometimes could tell 128 kbps MP3 (FgH encoder, not Xing, Blade, etc) apart from the original material.

      It's not 128 Kbps MP3, it's 256 Kbps MP3. I can consistently tell 128 Kbps MP3 from the original rip, even on cheap $15 multimedia speakers (although I have to hold them right up to my ears). And I'm no audiophile.

      Go to http://www.r3mix.net/ [r3mix.net] and click on the "Quality" link for some links to the MP3 tests.

    • I'm still waiting for those properly conducted and documented double blind listening tests....

      Don't you mean double deaf listening tests...?
    • Well, such tests are more a test of the listener's ability to not get ear fatigue than anything else. That said, this guy [pcabx.com] has PC software to do this with, plus a lot of files to compare, including one (a test of 'articulation') that uses lossy-encoded files vs. an uncompressed version. He also has a link to a Mac version now, because I coded it for him.

      When I did that, I also tried some of his tests to see what kind of listener I was. I can barely hear background noise at all, but was able to pick out the original from 256K mp3 encoding 11 out of 14 times, which is proof to ABXers. This was Arny's 'articulation' test at 'probably impossible' level... I am a mastering engineer who writes DSP software and I was using my studio reference system. He tells me there was one other person once who was able to ace that test, and he's considering toning down the language and not calling it 'impossible' anymore if people can get it 11 out of 14 and so on- but to most people it is impossible. Again, that's 256K mp3, and not Xing either.

      I'm sure I could tell Ogg Vorbis too, but you have to know what to listen for when the bit rate gets luxurious. There was no real tonal change to listen for, it's just that the 256K file was recognizably characterless, sort of like 'pod people' of audio. Hardly surprising as this is just what I work to avoid in full-resolution CD audio- that too can be rather bland and characterless if you're not careful!

      (My own audio work is at www.airwindows.com/dithering/ [airwindows.com], GPLed, recently added some mid/side stereo features and a GUI Knob class that worked out quite well)

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:07AM (#2769932)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • They know how to rip their CDs into mp3s, they know how to play mp3s, they know how to download mp3s, etc.

      Soon they will also know how to feed them to an MP3-to-Ogg converter so the thought-police don't ding them a royalty for every audio file on their disks.

      • Re:Convert or die! (Score:3, Informative)

        by macinslak ( 41252 )
        Two thoughts:
        1. NEVER EVER CONVERT BETWEEN LOSSY FORMATS, it will add unnesessary artifacts and ruin the audio quality.

        2. I wasn't aware that the thought police would be any more able to charge money for posession of MP3's than Ogg's .
        • it's not that the thought police can charge you directly for the posession of mp3's. the mp3 standard is patented by the fraunhofer folks [mp3.com]. this means that when someone like rio wants to add mp3 decoding ability to their devices they have to pay fraunhofer royalties. also if you want to do any encoding the person who make the encoder has to pay them royalties.

          so if you want to listen to mp3's on a commercial player these costs get transferred to you the user. also people who have developed free encoders (like bladeenc) have been threatened by the mp3 thought police for giving away the encoder without paying the mp3 hordes.

    • Re:This won't change much... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @07:12AM (#2770010) Homepage Journal
      Maybe some slashdotters will use this, but really, will anyone else?

      Depends on how badly Microsoft and other major players fumble the ball, and forget who's actually buying their software. If they keep going in the current direction, I can see Ogg Vorbis becoming a standard almost overnight.

      A few months ago a friend of mine, a staunch Microsoft supporter, converted his entire collection of MP3's (about 150 CD's—he'd ripped his whole library) to WMA format. The quality was fine, the files were smaller, and off he toddled. A few weeks later he upgraded his operating system, and WMA's Rights Management kicked in and told him he couldn't play any of those files anymore. Ouch! Weeks later, he'd re-ripped his collection to MP3—and ripped a friend's as well. Needless to say, he's not as staunch a supporter as he once was.

      If WMA continues apace, and MP3 becomes co-opted, Ogg Vorbis may well step in. The name is odd, but who cares? The MP in MP3 stands for "Motion Picture" after all! I can see it getting abbreviated to "OVA" for "Ogg Vorbis Audio" and spawning a multitude of egg-shaped players [riohome.com]. I can even see the slogans:
      Finally, it's safe to put all your eggs in one basket.
      OVA.
      In the interim, and in the grand tradition of hacker jargon [tuxedo.org], I'd like to propose the following terms:
      • Ovum: (Ogg Vorbis Unit of Media) An Ogg Vorbis audio file. "I have an ovum of the EFF speech that I can send you."
      • Ova: (Ogg Vorbis Audio) Any number of Ogg Vorbis audio files, or a quantity of Ogg Vorbis audio. "Do you have any classical ova with you?"
      • Oval: Of or relating to the Ogg Vorbis format. "Does your oval player have a spectrum analyzer?"
      • Ovulation: The process of converting audio to Ogg Vorbis format. "Just a few more minutes of ovulation, and I'll be MP3-free!"
      • Ovangelism: The process of converting audiophiles to Ogg Vorbis format. "I let him borrow my oval Walkman and a couple gigs of jazz ova, and he traded in his Rio the next day. Big ovangelism win!"
      I'm not very clever at 5AM (or at noon, for that matter), so I hope this makes some sense.

      • Re:This won't change much... (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I would like to make a bulleted list of stupid sounding software names:
        • Grep: Honey would you grep me breakfast?
        • /usr/bin: Oh, where did I put my Playboy? Oh yeah, /usr/bin/
        • Perl: I lft te kys n te cr.
        • Gnome: So your telling me there is a little person pounding out the pixels in my monitor? I hope he isn't mean like larry the Lawn Gnome...

      • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • "A few weeks later he upgraded his operating system, and WMA's Rights Management kicked in and told him he couldn't play any of those files anymore. "

        That would explain why I turn of Digital Rights Management in Windows Media Player.

        I believe Microsoft also now provides a backup system for the DRM stuff. Haven't tried that, again because none of my music uses DRM.
    • Hmmm. Maybe some Slashdotters? I don't know... I've been listening to BBC Radio 1 via Ogg Vorbis stream for several days-- in fact caught their New Year's festivities live from Donegall Square in Belfast over it last night. I'd say they are exactly a group who wouldn't switch just for the hell of it, and they're exploring Ogg Vorbis.

      What Ogg Vorbis really needs is some hardware supported devices. Soon. If I can buy a CD player that also plays mp3s, that is a clear win for the mp3 format-- those players are quite a bit cheaper than the no-disc players, and offer me some versatility. And as far as I know, there isn't any device (CD-based or Flash based) that runs even a beta Ogg Vorbis codec.
    • Maybe some slashdotters will use this, but really, will anyone else?

      I guess some slashdotters will convert their mp3s to ogg and put it on opennap.

      Now imagine the average Windows-user finding a file he's been searching for weeks. Yes I guess he will download ogg.

  • Wonderful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Krellan ( 107440 ) <krellan@NOspAm.krellan.com> on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:12AM (#2769939) Homepage Journal

    This is wonderful. The ability to operate at specific bitrates, especially low bitrates, is critical for streaming.

    Having a flexible range, with definable minimum and maximum bounds, is a very good way to go. You get the bandwidth efficency during silence and other easily compressible sounds, without the unpredictable bitrate spiking of unbounded VBR.

    Ogg Vorbis is a step well taken in resurrecting online music and radio streaming. After the losses in 2001 (RIAA fees, AFTRA fees, MP3 patent fees, increasing bandwidth costs, copyright concerns), we need all the help we can get....

    I listen to Dr. Demento online and keep track of what stations remain: http://krellan.com/demento/ [krellan.com]

  • ogg and portable devices, a badly need marriage (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:13AM (#2769941)
    i'd so love to use ogg, but the problem for me is that i use a rio volt, which is a portable mp3 cd player. A lot of the existing hardware out there only works with mp3 or wma. I hope that the different vendors (HELLO RIO!) will get a clue and release firmware updates that give ogg support to their devices. Once this happens, i'll never touch mp3 again. Btw, do the different vendors of mp3 hardware devices have to pay a royality to fraunhofer? If so, wouldnt ogg support make sense financially ?

  • Now THAT's an open standards site! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:14AM (#2769943) Homepage Journal
    They even use PNG [libpng.org]-format images, instead of the notoriously closed GIF format [slashdot.org] so often seen on our own beloved Slashdot.

    I only hope that Ogg Vorbis will work on my CPRM-enabled [theregister.co.uk] ATA drive...
    • A website I created recently used PNG for about three days until clients started complaining that the graphics wouldn't display. Being a corporate site, telling them to get a newer browser wouldn't work. They'd sooner go to our competitors pages.

      LEXX
      • I had a piece of PHP lying around I used to embed my images that chose PNG or GIF appropriately on a per-browser basis. I ditched it eventually in the hopes of making a more webcache friendly site, but it did work well ... JavaScript was the other option but I hate adding to download times.
    • I used to use PNGs on my site, until I found that they wouldn't properly display colour - or rather, they WOULD.

      PNGs have tons of neato features, like gamma settings and so on. When used properly, it can ensure that the colour you see on your monitor is exactly the same as the colour displayed on another monitor - the image is adjusted so that the output remains the same, even on different hardware.

      This is a problem when you consider the following:

      1. PNG transparency support is not properly supported in a lot of still-popular browsers, so if you want images to blend in properly with the background, you must actually have a background colour
      2. HTML cannot be colour-corrected in the ways that PNGs are, which causes background colours of web pages to change from machine to machine - sometimes subtly, sometimes not.
      3. The GIMP does not have (that I could find) an option to disable this feature of PNG images when saving as PNG. I haven't checked to see if Photoshop does, but even if it does, that leaves a few options


      Either I can use a closed-source app (Photoshop) on a closed-source OS (MacOS or Windows) and maybe have my graphics work out, I can use an open-sourced app (GIMP) on an open- or closed-source OS and have my site look like wang to anyone who isn't using the same hardware and software that I'm using, or I can make GIFs on any OS with any software and have my site look the way I want it to.

      The choice, for me, is a simple one.

      --Dan
      • * The GIMP does not have (that I could find) an option to disable this feature of PNG images when saving as PNG.

        You must be blind. When you Save As PNG in the GIMP, you get a dialog box that, among other options, has a checkbox labeled "Save gamma" . If you don't save gamma, you don't have to worry about gamma correction.

        Also, almost every browser that supports PNG supports PNG transparency. It's just that some browsers don't support the full 256 bits of transparency, they just support 1 bit (off/on) just like GIFs.

  • vorbis does rock..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:15AM (#2769945) Homepage
    I use Vorbis alot .... but man, these RC candidates might be harmful more than anything else.

    Sure, I know the Ogg team wants to release a good quality codec, but the longer Ogg Vorbis sits in pre-1.0, the harder a time it will face in a market flooded by codecs. I can go out right now and grab a stereo for my car that will play MP3s, but not Ogg Vorbis ... you're running out of time, ship the thing, or we'll all be stuck in WMA/MP3 hell ...

    more and more products are shipping, and they are not smart enough to have upgradeable hardware ... ship it now and tweak later!

    • Re:vorbis does rock..... (Score:4, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:45AM (#2769981) Homepage
      There are plans afoot.

      The Ogg Vorbis *decoder* has been stable since RC1, and will be able to play any Vorbis stream produced by RC2, RC3, 1.0, or whatever. There are slight problems in that the reference decoder is floating point, which doesn't fit well with the ARM chips a lot of hardware players use, but that'll be sorted eventually.

      • Re:vorbis does rock..... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        There are slight problems in that the reference decoder is floating point

        This is not a slight problem, this is the problem for ogg on hardware players. You will never see ogg on anything other than your pc until this gets done.

    • > ship it now and tweak later!
      Yes.. thats the reasoning that keeps me from running RedHat or Windows9x/Me.
    • Harmful or not, it bugs me the way they use the term "Release Candidate". I don't know about the rest of you, but on every project I've ever worked on, once you start calling things Release Candidates, you stop adding features and just fix bugs until you get the actual release version nailed. Generally speaking, your first RC should be something you think has a shot at becoming the actual release, otherwise why are you calling it a candidate? This is obviously not the case with Vorbis, as they keep adding new stuff with every candidate.

      Now, having said that, there's two things I'll point out. First, I can't find anywhere where they actually spell out "Release Candidate" so maybe RC actually stands for something else. Second, this post (mine, not the one I'm responding to) boils down pointless nitpicking over semantics. They can call it whatever makes 'em happy. But following the same conventions as the rest of the world makes it easier to figure out what they really mean. In the meantime, I will just mentally replace "RC" with "Beta" when reading about Ogg Vorbis.

  • just my $.01 worth (depreciated accordingly) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jstockdale ( 258118 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:28AM (#2769963) Homepage Journal
    the main problem ogg vorbis seems to be not the quality of the format, or the encoding/decoding engines, but rather in the inherient problems of accepting a new format.

    people changed from wav to mp3 because wav was unusable due to its massive size, while mp3 was not noticably different in quality (to save the flames yes some people with studio quality gear can hear a difference) while resulting in a 10 fold plus savings in space. entire albums could now be stored in less space than one wav file. this in a time where pressure on any audio/video content was high due to shortages in storage capability was a breakthrough, bringing media to the people, and they embraced it. several years later the industry realized that since it was so widespread, they might as well latch on, and so beginning roughly two years ago, we saw the emergence of mp3 players for all uses, personal, car, home. this all based on two factors, compatability, and acceptance. once people accept something, they stick with it until it is blindingly obvious that the rewards of change are greater than the inherient risks.

    fast forward to current times. storage capability has exploded. right now i have 100 gigs at my disposal on this box alone, and this quantity is not anything special anymore. do 5 600 meg wav files bother me anymore? no, in fact i don't even notice them except when i realize i should really archive them because that project is done. do mp3's bother me? not at all, in fact storage is so cheap that i can't even be bothered going through my collection to eliminate duplicates or outdated material. what i'm trying to say with this, is that space is no longer a limiting factor, nor is size of the file, therefore the savings accorded by any new format including ogg is not a selling point especially in the face of change.

    so the only real selling points are quality or features. features are great, who wouldn't like to beable to pull up realtime lyrics, band info, pics, links, etc. all from within the music file, or spread throughout the files of a album. however, dvd has the video equivalent of these features and they have failed to be implemented to a major degree because of the time problems which accompany putting so much content into a basic product. so just to put features to the side temporarily, lets just say that features could be a selling point that would bring about a new format if the changed required to mp3 would be impractical or impossible to equal such support.

    this leaves us with quality. therefore quality alone will be required to convince consumers and companys to abandon mp3 and change to something else like ogg. now quality is subjective to a great degree, but anyone i know can distinguish the difference in video quality from mpeg-1 to mpeg-2 (dvd), they can distinguish the difference between 800x600 and 1600x1200 screen res, but very few on a blind test can distinguish the difference between mp3 at 128 and 192, none, unless i pull out my dj headphones in wich case a very few, can tell the difference between a cd burned from a original, and from mp3s (which is a more accurate comparison because the hardware used to produce the sound is the same). ogg has nothing better to grab than the cd stream, and while a few hardcore fans will tell you that the audio quality is better, the filesize is smaller, and support will eventually come. right now i can not see how these arguments justify the switch from the widely compatable mp3 format, with my collection which can be expanded easily from an uncomprehensiably large supply, is supported wherever i go, and is having money thrown at it by manufacturers to deliver better and better products.

    there are far too few pressures to make the change in the area that counts the most, the mind and wallet of the consumer.

    -john
    • No, audiophiles are the main problem. Mind you, the good thing about audiophiles is that they don't matter to anyone else.
    • fast forward to current times. storage capability has exploded. right now i have 100 gigs at my disposal on this box alone, and this quantity is not anything special anymore. do 5 600 meg wav files bother me anymore? no, in fact i don't even notice them except when i realize i should really archive them because that project is done. do mp3's bother me? not at all, in fact storage is so cheap that i can't even be bothered going through my collection to eliminate duplicates or outdated material. what i'm trying to say with this, is that space is no longer a limiting factor, nor is size of the file, therefore the savings accorded by any new format including ogg is not a selling point especially in the face of change.

      I agree that storage is cheap and pretty irrelevant.

      However, bandwidth is not. While harddisk-sizes exploded, most people are still hooked up the net with a modem.

      If .ogg means you get your file off opennap one minute earlier, I think a lot people will go for it.

    • Just the company's .01$ (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @09:47AM (#2770126) Homepage
      Consumers have a large library of MP3's that are currently free to encode, use, and share. They access the free CDDB to get information for ripping their CD's, and they share them for free on Kazaa, Napster, et. al. Life is perfect.

      How many more of these conditions do you see surviving the next two years? Let's be realistic. MP3's eventually won't be free. Period. There will come a time once it has become an entrenched standard in the commercial world that group behind the MPEG codec start behaving in the way best fitting their stockholders. We've seen it with CDDB, we've seen it with GIF, we'll see it with MP3s. Ogg Vorbis, on the other hand, is a freely available alternative for streaming or downloading audio. While the idea of a non-recordable Ogg Vorbis stream may be as palatable to most slashdotters as having to pay Microsoft every time someone wants to print from word (don't get any ideas now), such a proposition could serve as a very appealing alternative to many broadcasters. If the end-to-end solution is in place, who cares what format it comes over? It can find a home there, especially if it can reduce both software and bandwidth costs.

      Let's not forget that if you can reduce file size by 30% for the same audio quality, you can reduce your data costs by 30%. This will be a non-negligable issue to most large providers, and may become a non-negligable one to the average user as broadband companys start enforcing bandwidth caps.

      There is no reason to go through your music collection and delete all of the WMA files you may find. There is no reason to convert all the GIF's on your website into JPG's. There is no reason that OVA's have to entirely supplant MP3's. There's no reason it has to happen right away.

      Being open-source *should* also make it easier to build audio applications around it, though we all know how that can go.

      The mind and wallet of the consumer is *not* the most important place to make changes. The mind and wallet of providers is (In the case of Gnutella, that is also the consumer. Que sera.) We don't need everyone to come on board for Ogg to survive, we just need some forward-thinking companies that realize the bottom line they should care about is theirs.

      P.S. the majority of people on Gnutella are still dialup. Tell them that 30% faster transfers are unimportant.
    • You've too highly equated a savings in bitrate with storage space savings. While its true that the Ogg file may be smaller than the MP3 file, what's more important (to me at least) is that it will _stream_ at a lower bitrate as well. That means I can stream more Ogg Vorbis audio streams with the same amount of bandwidth than MP3s. I'm sure places like MP3.com are happy about that (or anyone else doing audio streaming). Bandwidth bits still get expensive in large numbers.

    • Licensing costs (Score:3, Informative)

      by cduffy ( 652 )
      One thing to remember -- vendors of embedded hardware doing audio recording and playback, commercial software with need for an audio format (ie. games w/ theme music) and the like need a good audio codec they can use without dealing with licenses or patents.

      MP3 isn't this.
      Vorbis is.
    • Perhaps another way to get people to start using Ogg Vorbis would be a better way to rip CDs into .ogg files. I've helped a few friends who aren't as into computers get Exact Audio Copy and LAME working together, and its not exactly the easiest process - people don't want to have to configure things for 10 minutes before they can start using the program, not to mention having to search for precompiled LAME binaries and then even after it's set up, having to tie up most of their computer's resources for the next 10 minutes while they rip/encode the cd. If Ogg had a very fast and easy all-in-one way for novices to do this (perhaps along the lines of iTunes, from what I've been hearing) more mainstream computer users might start encoding files that way.
    • Regard the DVD format. Essentially, it offers us nothing that wasn't achievable with the old laservision format, and consumers were perfectly happy with VHS tapes (you may not have been, but any number of studies showed it was true as a generality), but DVD was pushed on us by both movie studios and electronics manufacturers. It has the so-called "copyright protection" technology that causes any amount of inconvenience. It forces us to watch ads and obnoxious threats about copyright law before we get to see our videos, and doesn't allow us to fast forward through it. It costs more. Yet, it has caught on, not because it's better than the previous technology in any way consumers especially care about, but because it has been heavily advertised and everything is coming out in the format now. Indeed, I have friends who don't have DVD and they're complaining that it's starting to get difficult to find what they want in VHS.

      Ogg Vorbis doesn't excite the consumer, in general. I've compared it to MP3 and prefer OV, but most consumers just want to "suck their music into the computer" and don't understand or much care how that happens. Even most of my slashdotter-type friends don't give a damn and say that mp3 is good enough. However, I reiterate that it's not consumers who will make this decision, it's industry.

      Electronics manufacturers may start getting interested in making portable music devices that use the Ogg Vorbis format because they may find it easy enough to add, and free. It lets them claim their product supports one more format than the competition or that it's "new and improved". Software companies may decide that it's a good format that they can use for free and just go with it... look at Apple, which tends to use whatever codec seems best to them. If the right people at Apple decided that Ogg Vorbis is best, I can easily imagine it becoming the default audio codec for Quicktime.

      Look at WMA. It's not really that great, and consumers don't really care about it, but it's so widely supported (because the monopoly operating system manufacturer ships it in every system and because they've either convinced or bullied hardware manufacturers into supporting it) that it's just becoming used anyway. Ogg Vorbis could easily achieve success through the same processes.

  • more! more! (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by studboy ( 64792 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @06:29AM (#2769967) Homepage
    I dont use OGG yet, but I'd love to see a competitor to mp3 that would make my audiophile geeks switch over from raw CDs. Instead of people whining about double-blind tests, how about chipping in to continue development and/or help the developers get drunk? I just kicked in $25, which is my way of saying: you guys rock, please continue to get better!

    What do 100% of net types use, every single day? 1) base OS, 2) web browser, 3) music. Whoever makes 1-3 a better thing deserves my hard-earned cash. Today, it's $25 to Ogg Vorbis, and it's money well spent!
    • and/or help the developers get drunk?

      you know, if more people had that kind of attitude, i think OSS would be WAY farther along than it is now .... :)

      Here's to getting all those guys drunk and happy!!!

    • Re:more! more! (Score:3, Funny)

      by sheldon ( 2322 )
      "What do 100% of net types use, every single day? 1) base OS, 2) web browser, 3) music. Whoever makes 1-3 a better thing deserves my hard-earned cash."

      I just donated $300 to Microsoft for helping to improve all three.

      :-)
  • Personally, I can only barely tell the difference between a CD and a well-encoded 128kbps encoded MP3. From what I've seen, the real problem for the average listener, who does not have the super hearing of a musician or a total audiophile, isn't the quality of 128kpbs MP3s. It's finding lots of BADLY ENCODED MP3s that suck no matter what bit rate they're at in P2P services. So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have, either before or after the file is fully encoded? That's one thing that would REALLY impress me, in any music format.
    • So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have...

      Sure it does ... the kind of people that use ogg vorbis and LAME already do this ... the kind of 'barrier to entry' that all technology needs ... lest joe and his Xing encoder get to screwing things up ...
    • So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have, either before or after the file is fully encoded?

      No, but here's a great way to avoid that - stop thieving the music. I never get these problems because the only reason I ever get mp3s is to find old songs where I'm not sure which song I'm thinking of. I then find a CD with the song on it and buy it. I rip all my own mp3s. It's anecdotal evidence for sure, but the only effect Napster had on my CD buying habits was that I bought more (I realise I may be in the minority though).

      Of course, you may just download the mp3s to avoid the hassle of ripping your CD collection, but having done my own CDs, I have to say it's easier than downloading the mp3s.

      Yes, the RIAA are a bunch of tossers, and I hate what they are doing to the flexibility of digital music, but people who download a load of mp3s for free and then bitch about the poor quality of the stuff they just got for free are kind of making the RIAA's point for them.

      Interestingly, the two internet services that made me buy more CDs simply by letting me work out what music I wanted to buy (the lyrics.ch server and Napster) were both shut down by the RIAA or similar entities for fear that it would lose them money. Of course, as I mentioned, I realise I may be in the minority (buying CDs rather than just stealing music) so maybe the RIAA have a point after all. Which doesn't justify all the crap they're trying to pull, but hey ho.

      In my humble opinion :-)

      Tim

      • Thieving music?

        If it's theft, then why am I paying a surtax on every CD I purchase? I'm up in Canada, where some artists' representation organization gets something like a quarter for every data CDR/RW and a couple bucks for every audio CDR that is sold.

        Seems to me, then, that I'm paying for the right to share music.

  • Heh heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cave Dweller ( 470644 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @07:58AM (#2770047)
    ... then show your appreciation for all their hard work and dedication ...
    By Slashdotting them! Bwuahahaha!!

    [Yes, I am hung over.]

  • I've just compiled for woody/sid i386.

    deb http://wire.cadcamlab.org/debian woody/

    Of course you should never install random binaries you got from a slashdot poster. Who knows, they could be trojaned.

  • Ogg and iPod... Can I dream? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by helixblue ( 231601 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @09:25AM (#2770111) Homepage
    I'd really love to see better Ogg support tied into the iPod [apple.com] & iTunes myself.

    I ripped 150 CD's into Ogg format early in this year from my FreeBSD box, and threw myself into the Ogg format totally.. hacking up a nice multi-queue ripper/encoder, and going at it. I was unhappy with how slow the Ogg encoder was (it was 0.7 at the time I believe), and artifacts that came onto some albums (Junkie XL comes to mind). I still dealt with it happily. When it came time to move from FreeBSD to MacOS X as my desktop, I simply began to use Audion [panic.com] as my

    Then, I get an iPod. This throws my world upside down. Suddenly, everything I had ripped is useless. So, I begin re-ripping with iTunes. I don't care for iTunes for a player, but it's a DAMNED nice ripper/encoder for my albums. It's simultaneous rip/encode process means I can take a CD from insert to rip to encode to eject in 4 minutes (if I'm lucky and I score a 15X encode/rip time).. With it's auto-encode-on-insert and auto-eject-when-done modes, it makes it a real factory process.

    Apple is making a very big deal about moving everything it can to a standards based form. [usenix.org]. While Ogg is not really a standard, it'd be really nice if a future iPod firmware update would support Ogg's, being a first for a *publically available* portable audio device supporting Ogg.. it'd be keen, wouldn't it? :) Of course, it wouldn't actually be Apple doing it, since Pixo [pixo.com] actually took care of this part of the software design I believe. A little strong-arming never hurt anyone though.

    That and then I could theoretically store more albums on my little angel. I am worried about the extra firmware bloat on the iPod though. It's very saddening for me to say I won't ever go to Ogg's till my iPod has support for it now.. but we can keep on dreaming, can't we?
    • While I can't vouch for the iPod or iTunes (sadly), I can make a comment about QuickTime: one group of developers has finally written an Ogg QT plugin [nouturn.com] that allows you to use Vorbis audio in QuickTime just like everything else. That's definitely a step in the right direction. It should allow you to play Oggs from within QT. If iTunes can play any QT-supported audio codec (and quite frankly I simply cannot remember whether or not it relies on QuickTime; sorry), then you now have the ability to play Oggs from within iTunes if you wish.
    • I don't care for iTunes for a player, but it's a DAMNED nice ripper/encoder for my albums. It's simultaneous rip/encode process means I can take a CD from insert to rip to encode to eject in 4 minutes (if I'm lucky and I score a 15X encode/rip time).. With it's auto-encode-on-insert and auto-eject-when-done modes, it makes it a real factory process.


      iTunes IS a nice app, though the simultaneous rip/encode process is something I've done with grip [nostatic.org] for years. It may not be as fancy-shmancy as iTunes but it always gets the job done, plus lets me pick from a list of encoders.

  • mirror and comments (Score:3, Informative)

    by noodlez84 ( 416138 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @10:05AM (#2770144)
    Because vorbis.com is becoming slow, I have decided to post mirrors:

    win32 binaries: vorbis-tools-1.0rc3-win32.zip [earthlink.net]

    i386 RPM libao: libao-0.8.2-1.i386.rpm [earthlink.net]

    i386 RPM libogg: libogg-1.0rc3-1.i386.rpm [earthlink.net]

    i386 RPM libvorbis: libvorbis-1.0rc3-1.i386.rpm [earthlink.net]

    i386 RPM vorbis-tools: vorbis-tools-1.0rc3-1.i386.rpm [earthlink.net]

    To encode files, you need all the above RPMs.

    There's little question that Vorbis is impressive. The question is, what is its competition? MP3 (created using LAME) is currently the most popular digital audio compression algorithm, but anyone will tell you Vorbis rocks its world. That can't be it, then... is RealAudio/WMA the true competition? How about Quicktime? Perhaps Vorbis is playing to different audience than the "big boys," mainly for the home enthusiast? Vorbis is not quite ready for streaming (e.g., not yet perfectly tuned for 22.1kHz like for 44.1kHz, not very low bitrates, etc.), so until then it seems Real will lead the pack in that arena.

    When, however, Vorbis gets these features, I feel it will even be able to replace Real and WMA.
  • It's good to hear that OGG is progressing.

    Will I convert my music collection to OGG? No. It provides no advantage for me, in fact, it's a disadvantage.

    If I'm developing an audio app, or require audio compression for my own projects, will I use OGG? Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, that's what it's all about. It's a codec, not encumbered by patents.. it's fantastic for OSS development.

    But for playing music? Unfortunately, mp3 is just more portable. I can give it to my mom, use it in a portable, etcetera.

    Also.. and I have no idea either way..
    Does OGG have something akin to VBR? Can it compete with the size:quality of, say, lame's default VBR parameters?
    • It does, in fact, have VBR capability, though for some reason, all the encoders I've tried default to encoding between 192 and 256 kbps (VBR). This is great, except that the original file I was encoding from was a 128 kbit MP3, which means that the file gained 50-100% more size, and, at BEST, stayed sounding exactly the same.

      Seems kind of silly.

      I'm trying out the dbPowerAMP mentioned a few posts up, and it's pretty nice, as far as ease-of-use and so on goes. Slow as wang, but that's probably because it's using RC2 (I think).

      --Dan
    • 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:

      1. 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.
      2. 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.
      3. "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

  • Side topic.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2002 @11:36AM (#2770271)
    I know everyone will get into a discussion about music quality... so here's another question.

    We all know (I hope) that what you hear is also limited by your listening equipment.

    I recently bought a pair of Sony MDR-V500 headphones .. they were about the same price as my old but trustworthy Sennheiser HD330s.
    I was dissapointed when I actually had them side by side; the Sony headphones are basically, well, crap. Any listener could distinguish that they are severely lacking in several areas. The sennheisers sound oh so much better.. and that's on a computer, through a cheap desktop speaker headphone jack, listening to 160Kbps mp3.
    So what's the point of arguing over compression formats, or whether something is *really* CD quality, or studio quality, when your equipment can't even come close to reproducing it?

    Oh.. to the unitiated.. I highly recommend a good pair of $100 headphones (Sennheiser or Grado, and yes, that means towards the lower end of their product lineups..don't let that discourage you. A low-end Grado or Sennheiser sounds fantastic compared to anything else you'll find in the store.
    And those $100 headphones will sound better than a $2000 stereo, anyday.

    So what do you guys/gals use?

    • Re:Side topic.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by sheldon ( 2322 )
      If you are going to by Sony headphones you want either the MDR-V6 or MDR-7506 sets.

      The V500 are meant for rap music, not studio work.

      I have a pair of the V6 headphones I purchased about 12 years ago, and they still sound incredible. Yes, I agree that with a good pair of headphones you can hear much more detail in the music.
      • I have to disagree with recommending the MDR-7506. I own a pair and I love them, but their fidelity isn't great. They are indestructable (well almost), fold nicely, and provide great isolation from the out side but their high end is very warped and the low end is over emphasized. The short version: they're great for live sound stuff, but if you're doing anything sensitive on them you either need to listen to them against lots of speakers (and learn where it over/under emphasizes things) or use different headphones.

        I really love them, but there are places when my HD580 really do preform better.
  • This post is probably redundant, but the more post like this, the more hope we get in seeing something sooner or later.
    Ogg Vorbis rocks. But the reason MP3 is widely used is that nowadays, *hardware* support it : cd players, portable players, handhelds, and even sound mixers.
    Making these work with Ogg Vorbis is probably very simple, moreover Ogg Vorbis source code is free. So why don't hardware manufacturers provide support for Ogg Vorbis? Should we start a petition?


  • Although Ogg Vorbis seems to be more promising than MP3, WMA, RA, or any of the other formats out there, for filesize and quality, it's lacking something. MP3 is by far the most supported format, not just in software, but in hardware. There are MP3 CD players, portable MP3 players, as well as tons of software on every platform imaginable.

    Because of this, as well as the popularity of programs such as Morpheus/Kazaa, Napster, Gnutella, and so on, that help you find MP3s, the public equates "digital music" with "MP3," and so Ogg Vorbis is already a step behind, publicity wise.

    The public opinion will be almost impossible to change, as normally, whichever company/standard/format grabs the opinion first, and is popular enough, is what stays. Regardless of quality. It's dismaying, but I don't think that we'll see, at least for another year or two, Ogg Vorbis having anywhere near the level of popularity as MP3s, as far as hardware devices.

    Gawyn
  • I might be blind, dumb, or lazy, but as much as I have searched for either an open source or at least free as in beer method for video streaming, I have been unable to do so. The only option I have found that even works for me is using realserver/realencoder to encode/broadcast live video. However, the license fees to use realserver for anything significant are so astronomical as to make it practically useless.

    This really could be a killer ap for open source. A lot of companies spend a LOT of money to do commercial video streaming, and would jump at this in a heartbeat if it was even remotely similar in quality. They money they save would more than make up for any slight deficencies. And besides, it would give some serious competition to the very few companies that provide such services.

    -Restil
  • There's finally and Ogg component [versiontracker.com] for OS X QuickTime that seems to work pretty well for a beta. Another fruit of the BSD underpinnings, I believe. OS 9 version on the way. A second version [mac.com] of the QuickTime component apparently also exists, although I could not get the page to load.

  • Trouble configuring vorbistools on .. oh, say.. Slackware? Get your libcurl [curl.haxx.se] here.

  • To encourage adoption of fr33 audio codecs, I'd like to convert my mp3's to ogg's... I'm not interested in re-ripping everything yet, and I know that quality won't be better, but when ogg's start showing up all over the net more people will catch on. So, is there a free easy tool to convert from mp3 to ogg, automaticaly?
  • I'm just experimenting with the now encoder now. My first response was "oh my lord it is FAST!!" but then I realised I moved from a PII-350 to an AthlonXP at christmas... On my Athlon XP 1700+, encoding at level 9.6 (which gets bitrates up to well over 400kbit/s) it encodes song in the in 1/5 to 1.6 of the track length. This is actually about the same speed as RC2-256kbit/s (maybe a tad faster) my new machine.

    As to quality ... RC3 sounds better. I'm not a self-proclaimed audiophile but my speakers are not cheapie (Cambridge Soundworks FPS1000 FourPointSurround) and my sound card is an SbLive Value (which is good but by no means the pinnacle of perfection.) With the new encoder, percussion sounds more focused like on the CD, and instrumental parts that are supposed to sound smooth are more so than in RC2. Pianos sound more true to the stringed instruments they are. The music sounds more alive.

    But don't ask me to quantify it. My ears simply tell me that RC3 sounds better than RC2.

    My Verdict
    RC3 is a bit faster than RC2.
    RC3 sounds noticeably better than RC2.

  • The one thing the Ogg Vorbis folks have never figured out is that they're doomed to the desktop until they have an integer decoder. Everyone wants portability, but not even the most luxurious portable players (Rio/Empeg Car, iPod) will ever be able to support Ogg until there's an integer decoder. All of the portables either use a) hardware decoders, or b) ARM or similar chips with no FPUs.

    Unless these guys do something more than say they'll "eventually get that sorted" they will never see the broad acceptance that will make Vorbis take off.

    It really is that simple.

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