Who'll Be Using Ogg Vorbis Instead Of MP3?

An anonymous reader asks: "Ogg Vorbis is hitting stable and hopefully will release 1.0 soon. But I'm wondering, who is going to use it? MP3 is very popular on the net and beyond, but it's based on patents. Software patents aren't legal in Europe, but are in other parts of the world. Is Ogg Vorbis making a chance to become the next music-standard for the net and beyond. This mainly because there are no patents broken by this standard. Will it be a standard for the world or one for the books?"

Never having bothered to do it before with MP3, I've recently started ripping my CD collection to .ogg files, and the quality is good to my (tin) ears. Someone with an entrepreneurial bent needs to sell a dedicated hardware player that takes CD-Rs, so I can play back 10 hours of books on tape from a single disk. I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?

Help advocate Ogg Vorbis

There is a dedicated Ogg Vorbis advocacy mailing list [xiph.org] if you would like to help getting this patent-free format into mainstream usage. What can "normal" OGG users do? To quote myself [xiph.org], we can do lots of stuff:

• spread the word about Ogg to our friends and family -- this is something that can obviously only be done on a very individual level.
• spread OGG files! :-) How about copyright-free speeches and other archive material?
• write tutorials and FAQs for newbies (check existing ones first).
• ask creators of cd burning software, cd-rippers, encoders etc. to support/include OGG
• ask creators of video codecs to include OGG for audio encoding
• ask creators of video games to use OGG for their soundtracks
• ask streaming media services to use OGG instead of MP3 or other formats
• ask radio stations to release archival material in OGG
• ask the media to include OGG on bundled CD-ROMs instead of MP3s
• encourage artists to spread their work in OGG / help them spread their work if they use OGG
• ask universities to release speeches and audiostreams in OGG
• etc. etc. etc.

If you want to help, why not join the discussion and make some suggestions on how to actively promote OGG? You could be part of an important grass-roots movement here.

The Name SUCKS

I'm gonna be brutally honest here, but if you're gonna get people to use Ogg, you've gotta change the name. From a marketing standpoint, it's abyssmal.

Think about it: you're a teenager, you want to share music with your friends. Which name is going to get you called a nerd and beat up? Which sounds cooler? (In a teen way, not geek way.)

A) "Hey! I got some new tunes! Want some MP3s?"
B) "Hey! I got some new tunes! Want some Ogg Vorbis files?"

Process that, and then wonder why people aren't using the format that is "the choice of nerds everywhere..."

Re:The Name SUCKS

hey, listen to me nice new oggies!

geez.. at least ogg is slightly pronouncable..

//rdj

Quality

It's sorta obvious, but someone should say it: QUALITY MATTERS. I think that will be the most important determiner. If the quality/size tradeoff is better than MP3, people who matter will have an incentive to switch. The other issue will probably be inclusion of a codec in a very popular player program. This will not happen if "people who matter", i.e. netheads, don't adopt. When this happens, Ogg Vorbis has a shot at hitting the mainstream.

Re:Quality almost never matters

Sad to say, but quality does NOT matter to 90% of the market. Only the experts care.

If quality mattered, people would use CAV laserdisc in all cases, but the majority uses CLV to put twice the content on each side of the disc.

If quality mattered, people would use uncompressed laserdisc over dvd, but the majority prefer the small discs at the expense of image integrity.

If quality mattered, people would use raw or lossless compression on images, but the majority prefer JPG at crappy levels.

If quality mattered, everyone would record MP3 at 192Kbps, even if it meant two songs fit into your old Rio, but the majority back off the quality to squeeze more music into their player.

If quality mattered, everyone would buy the best high-performance tires, spark plugs and other car parts, but the majority go for average or no-name automotive suppliers to stretch the paycheck a little farther.

If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.

MP3 Standard for Today

Well, I remember back in 96 when mp3's were starting to get extreamly popular. People at that time were trading WAV files across the net and in news groups. MP3's were kinda' hard to come by. You had to goto someone's warez/mp3 site and links were usually broken, etc. But they gained more and more audiance every day. But sadly enough it didn't become the 'standard' until microsoft included it in the next release of windows.

Windows 98 had mp3 playing built into it. Thats when it completely became the standard. MP3's had made it extreamily far and were used by unix admins and warez puppies all over the world.. but was unknown to the every day user. Windows 98 and napster brough mp3's to the masses.

The world isn't crying for a new format like it was crying for mp3's. Unless this new format is smaller and sounds better, I don't think it stands a chance. Plus I don't imagine microsoft including Open Source code into their media player ... kinda' like DivX ...

I dunno, guess we'll see.. ???

Same problem .wma has:

MP3 is -the- format.

The guy who posted about GIF has a good point. It doesn't matter that the technology behind it has patents; it is the de facto standard. It has oodles of hardware and software support. And most importantly, it's the standard that -customers- want.

Geeks maybe want Ogg Vorbis. Corporations want .wma, .ram, and other formats with strict support for licensing. But the people with wallets full of green notes and good credit ratings want MP3.

What's preventing Ogg from taking over MP3 is that Ogg's place in the market is already taken up by MP3. Being first-mover is a strong advantage. Ogg's a long ways behind MP3, and there's really no advantage to it from a consumer's point of view. That's the reason why strictly-controlled music formats aren't competing well with MP3 as well: There is no advantage for the consumer.

I can acquire, make, and listen to MP3's for free. No cost. There are free encoders, free players, and free MP3's of all kinds everywhere. Why do I need Ogg?

GIF formatted images

Enough said?

Okay, maybe not... maybe I have to spell it out. GIF is a format we're all mostly familiar with. It's out there, it's common and there is an important patent associated with it. PNG was created as the GIF alternative. It's superior in every way to GIF. Where are we now? How old is PNG? How accepted it is? How many rhetorical questions will I ask in this message? Dare I ask?

Re:GIF formatted images

I don't think that's true at all. MP3 was huge even when the only players where winplay and mp3dec. MP3 took off because it made sending high-quality audio across the Internet practical.

Re:GIF formatted images

internet explorer views png. I think that takes care of a HUGE chunk of the population, no?

Need hardware players and conversion tools

I have been heavily into mp3 for the last 4 years. I have a couple gig of files and just last weekend ripped my first .ogg. I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality. There are already several software players that support ogg like freeamp and xmms. There are two things missing that will hold ogg back:

1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.

2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg. This is 5 times slower than modern CD to mp3 rippers. And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg. Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.

One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.

Re:Need hardware players and conversion tools

Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.

Yes, this is a problem if you use portable MP3 players (which I don't). However, the specs for the Vorbis 1.0 decoder weren't finalized until a few weeks ago (and the sample decoder still has some memory usage issues), so you can't really expect any companies to have implemented decoding yet.

AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg.

Well, you're wrong. Anything that can do MP3 encoding on the fly should be able to do it with Vorbis as well. As an example, have a look at CDex, the best Windows ripper/encoder [n3.net]. Most Linux encoders I've seen (for MP3 as well as Vorbis) seem to use the 2 step process, but this should be seamless to the outside user, and not much slower -- you're probably noticing a slow copy because the ripping (with Grip at least) uses CDParanoia, which is quite slow but very accurate.

And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg.

Please don't do this. Transcoding almost always leads to very low quality files -- and will lead people who listen to them to assume that all the artifacts are due to OGG, and not to the transcoding process. MP3 encoding creates certain artifacts. Vorbis creates others. By encoding to MP3, and then Vorbis, you are getting 2 sets of artifacts, plus the Vorbis coder has to waste bits encoding the MP3-created artifacts. MP3 players aren't going to go away, so please don't transcode: re-rip instead.

I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality

Note that all the encoders kicking around are of (at best) the beta 4 release, which, amongst other issues, has no channel coupling. You can expect at least a 10% reduction in file-size in the final release compared with beta 4, and more if you let it try lossy channel coupling (akin to joint stereo in the MP3 world). Beta 4 at 128 kbps already sounds better than 128 kbps MP3s - the final release will sound the same at 112 kpbs.

One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.

Damn right.

Re:It will fail

>Good point. How does 'ogg' compare to mp3pro?

Current ogg's have lesser quality than mp3pro
*AT 64KBPS*. At higher bitrates it is the other
way around.

Since 64kbp sounds quite atrocious even with
mp3pro, and higher bitrate mp3pro is not freely
available (and pointless even), this is a no-
brainer.

--
GCP

New MP3 and Ogg HOWTO

Hi All,

I've not 100% finished the updated howto, but you can have a look at what's finished:

http://www.plus24.com/mp3-howto/mp3-howto.html [plus24.com]

Get Ogg'ing :)

Phil

Why I Encoded 700+ CD's with Ogg Vorbis

from a 6 year mp3 warrior.

I'm no super audiophile with a golden ear, but I do have a better than your average PC speakers connected to sound card setup. I have a 12 year old Pioneer Amp/Receiver and 12 Year old Acoustic Research speakers with subwoofer (since replaced the drivers), and a Soundblaster 64AWE with gold coated analog outputs to the receiver. Whole thing, minus PC and soundcard, cost $1000 back in 1989.

What I notice is that at the office on some cheap ALTEC PC speakers with subwoofer, NONE of the differences show through. Pretty much all CODEC's from the various years sound the same... pretty good, artifacts seem to magically go away... and hey that's not bad for the office.

But for home, it's got to be ogg and a non PC dedicated system sound system.

First piece I encoded to OGG was a rendition of Igor Stravinky's Ballet Petrouska... full ballet mind you, none of this condensed suite business *G*. I marveled at how airy it sounded and how percussive the base was, thumping, rumbling tightly on my subwoofer.

No, this was different, the high end was definitely there... but something else too, "stereo separation." Now this is something new. Mp3 makes some of its best gains through the use of cleverly comparing left and right channels and optimizing where they are very similar. Good in theory, but what you end up with is a lost stereo separation. It's cool for rock/pop, but classical absolutely needs stereo separation. In fact, encode some classical music (any classical music) in mp3 and then in ogg. You'll never go back.

You COULD put it in stereo encoding mode, but then mp3 doesn't shine at relatively low bitrates

You might also say that ogg has to do extra work in each channel individually and how the hell could it possibly sound better. It's got to consider each channel independently, encode them AND it sounds better than the industry standard at the same bitrate? She can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan?

Can this truly be the case?

Hell yes.

I don't understand the deep wizardry of OGG, nor its team's fanatical devotion to one thing: quality and duty. Two! Two things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency. Three! Three things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency and quality. Bah, I'll come in again.

One thing is clear: OGG's codec is next generation. Mp3 is definitely suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Great for 1996, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is an inferior codec RIGHT NOW. Mp3's tradeoffs and optimizations where great for 1996, but there was room for improvement. Nothing but OGG has stepped up to fill the void.

If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have encoded 700+ CDs into this format, occupying around 40 gigabytes of space. Took me a couple of months, but now that it's done, I breathe a sigh of relief (as I create a disk mirror for backup) that it is now forever free and libre...

... a CODEC to grow old with.

Reading Rainbow

If all goes well, when the PBS Kids: Reading Rainbow site goes live in a month or so, the theme song will be there in Ogg Vorbis. (There's a preview site [pbskids.org] up there currently.)

But, it'll also be there as MP3, RealAudio, and *gasp* Windows Media. As a practical matter, I don't really expect many people to download the Ogg file (I'm not really sure I expect many people to download any of the files, really.) We're putting it up there as Ogg Vorbis for 2 reasons. First of all, it's a matter of choice. Looking at the end user, we want people to be able to get the data they want, in the format they want it, with a minimum of fuss and muss. Secondly, and unofficially, it's a small show of support for free and open standards; a very minor political statement, if you will.

Which, to be quite honest, doesn't really bode well for the format. I'm not sure I can think of many technologies that overtook marketplace momentum because they were ideologically appealing.

I think not

Let's compare this to the old VCR battle
Both Beta and V2000 were quite a lot better than VHS, but in the end VHS won it. Why? as far as V2000 is concerned you were able to get pr0n on VHS.

Pretty much the same here (although no pr0n). Joe Sixpack doesn't care about formats, and he doesn't care about money (really) as almost every home user gets his software illegally. But even if he did have to pay for it: Nowadays you can get MP3-walkmans, photocamera's etc etc. Nothing is there for Ogg Vorbis.
To make OV popular, you'll need to give it an advantage over MP3, that can be understood by Joe. Patents and 'free (as in speech) software' are no such things.
At the moment MP3 has all the advantages, and there's no reason why OV will take over.

Ogg is not for me

I archive all of my CDs to MP3, and I'll be sticking to MP3 for the foreseeable future. My MP3 encoder is faster than any current Ogg encoder, and IMHO, a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg file anyway. I'm also planning to get an MP3 CD player in the future for my car. If I had a lot of OGG files, I'd need to decode them and re-encode to MP3 just to put them onto CDR. Not much use. Ogg Vorbis seems to be a good format, but it wasn't first. The fact that there are few strings attached to it is extremely good, and I think Ogg will be very useful for programmers and games developers. But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first, MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS versus Betamax.

Why isn't it?

I'd not go that far, the thing with Ogg is that they're trying to make it relatively easy to convert, the XMMS plugin exists, and it should be transparent to the user to play ogg files. Granted, people do need to start encoding to make the codec survive, but I'll admit that I'm willing to give it a chance, especially if it means that I don't have to worry about my music encoder ceasing to release newer, better versions because it got it's ass sued into the ground for being patented...

Re:Ogg is not for me

interesting little post, except for one thing.

Betamax was there first. VHS overtook it. Sony marketed Betamax VCRs in the US before RCA marketed VHS. (Which is why Universal Studios sued Sony, not RCA, to stop VCRs from being distributed in the US.)

The reason VHS won is simple: people liked being able to tape six hours of crappy NTSC on one tape. Sony thought they'd care more about quality. JVC had already caved a little by suggesting maybe a 4-hour format would be useful sometimes. RCA pressured them into providing the 6-hour format.

RCA was right. 6 hours makes timeshifting much more practical. Broadcast TV is crap quality anyway, we don't need high-quality formats to preserve its defects for the future.

Anyway, the point is that that comparison has really nothing to do with OGG/MP3. Where .ogg stands to gain is if some of the major media player writers support it. It has no chance of support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox, Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a momentum shift.

Killing the myth once again

Just for the record, the dramatic quality difference between VHS and Beta is a well documented myth [utdallas.edu] (although, the question is a little more complicated than that, as usual). You are right, however that VHS killed Beta primarily because of the recording length issue.

The real question is...

...why would anyone use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, aside from just being part of groupthink?

Have the software patents affected anyone here personally?

Re:The real question is...

Aside from the issue of patents (mainly annoying if you're trying to do something commercial with MP3), there are several good reasons to use Ogg:

-Performance. On certain types of audio, Ogg spins circles around MP3. I'm sure MP3 has its own best cases, but I've yet to find them. In the general case, Ogg holds its own against MP3, usually producing slightly smaller streams at comparable quality.

-Flexibility. Ogg streams are very easy to manipulate. To join two streams, just concatenate the files. Streaming software can arbitrarily reduce a stream's size by chopping off the ends of packets, since the less important information is stored near the end. It's also possible to store multiple logical streams of Vorbis audio in one Ogg stream.

-Quality. Older encoders did have some serious bugs, but the newer releases produce excellent results. I added the Vorbis codec to my HipZip portable player, and I use it for almost all of my music, unless it's already stored in MP3 (in practice, I usually encode my own stuff, so that's not a problem).

And no, I'm not an Ogg Vorbis developer. I've just taken an interest in the project.

-John

Worst Music Quality of the Bunch

Was'nt there a Slashdot submission a few weeks ago that rated the audio quality of all the music compression formats?

Ogg came in last, no?

Worst test of the bunch

Yeah, and it's been the only test ever that said anything bad about Ogg Vorbis, and it was the worst-administered test of them all too. Any good test will do a double-blind or at least a single-blind test (think: Pepsi Challenge-- how many people would say they preferred Pepsi if they knew it was Pepsi?). This did none of that.

yes, you're the only one

I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?

Yes, you are. Even all my non-computer-literate friends figured out what Napster was and how to use it to get mp3s about 1 1/2 years ago, and even my mom has been downloading mp3s for the past 6 months. I'm afraid you're the last one.

Rumours: BBC are experimenting with Ogg and DivX

This is just a rumour, so get your grain of salt here [basis1.com].

I heard the BBC (yes, the UK one) is aiming to use OpenDivX and OGG Vorbis as their primary streaming formats some time in the future. They run Linux on most of their hardware anyway, had some quarrels with Microsoft because they refused to support Windows 2000 (with their media server) when running under VMware or something, weren't allowed to link Realplayer Plugins directly from their page by Real.com - so that's the next option.

I'd really like to know more about this, if anyone has some more insider knowledge please reply.

Nobody's really pushing Ogg Vorbis

On the other hand, MP3 is so heavily promoted, it's a wonder the phone companies haven't converted to it, yet.

=IF= you started getting CD-players from major companies, on the high-streets, which could play Ogg Vorbis-encoded files, you would see it being used. Otherwise, it's a dead duck.

Mind you, it's not helped by the crappy encoder, the heavy media publicity of MP3.com and Napster, and the somewhat poor showing in a recent comparison review.

Ogg Vorbis =should= be as good, if not better, than MP4, VQ, and other "high-quality" lossy formats. It isn't. It's about on-par, but it's just not there.

IMHO, if Ogg Vorbis is to seriously challange the other formats, it HAS to have better handling of different frequences. 5-6 bands seems fairly typical for audio, but with research suggesting that there's a LOT of sound information held in "texture", rather than actual audible sound, you might easily want to have 12-16 bands to reliably handle sound texture.

Change the name!

Ogg Vorbis has a real chance of taking MP3, but they're going to have to change the name. Part of MP3's success is its trendy name. It's a smooth name that rolls of the tounge, sounds cool, but not too technical.

Ogg Vorbis sounds like a new brand of Mr. Clean. It's funny, strange, un-sophisticated and not natural to say. Personally, since both are technically about the same, I would prefer my files with a *.mp3 than *.ogg.

It's small, but it's something consumers notice. Fashion is just as important as functionality and political freedom.

There's even a car called MP3 - Mazda MP3

look here [canadiandriver.com]

WRITE TO RIO TO SUPPORT OGG VORBIS!

Follow this link to Rio's web page and e-mail them requesting support for Ogg Vorbis. Personally this is the only thing holding me back from buying a compressed-audio cd player. The first one that comes out supporting .ogg will have me reripping all of my CDs into the supreme .ogg format and purchasing their player, regardless of cost.

http://www.riohome.com/default.asp?menu=support&su bmenu=cs&item=cs_email-form&detail=other [riohome.com]
That is a link to e-mail Rio requesting that they release an upgrade to their Roivolt to playback .ogg files. Below is the text that I sent to them. With portable support for .ogg, I think it has a great chance of overtaking mp3.


Rio,
I'm interested in buying a cd-mp3 player. I think this would be a GREAT way to backup all my cds, as well as make them easier(and funner!) to listen to. I could fit my 100cds on around 10 cds. That's awesome.
There is only one thing holding me back. MP3 is an aged format, and also requires that related software pay royalties to Frauenhoffer for the mp3 patents. Same with "mp3pro" or whatever their next mp3 is.
Ogg Vorbis is a free codec which isn't blocked by any patents whatsoever. It also sounds better than mp3, AND takes up less space. I will be ripping all of my cds into .ogg format as soon as their encoder reaches 1.0 (which will be soon). I noticed that the Roivolt has upgradable codecs. If an upgrade is released for the Roivolt to play Ogg Vorbis, the Roivolt will win the hearts of audiophiles and geeks all over.
Thanks! :)

No, the six of us don't.

Converting from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis would defeat the purpose of both the codecs - lossy compression of audio.

I, and many of my friends, encode all our new rips into Ogg Vorbis RC1 because it sounds better and is smaller. Simple fact.

However, we also keep all our old MP3s. There is no reason to either re-rip or re-encode.

Scott.

Re:I wonder...

>erm... I did this already... took about 4 days
>for my Classic P233 to convert almost 3 gigs of
>MP3 to ogg.

From quality point of view that was a very bad
decision. MP3 is lossy, converting it to OGG will
only make it sound worse.

Because of the fundamental differences between
the two codecs, the result is quite bad actually.
There was a post on the vorbis list about this
earlier today.

--
GCP