Non-MP3 Codecs? 544
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."
Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)
FWIW, I get a concert down to about 320MB for 18 tracks using FLAC.
Re:Free Codecs (Score:2, Informative)
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)
I'm using .nap (Score:4, Funny)
.cda? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:.cda? (Score:2, Insightful)
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"
Re:.cda? (Score:2)
Re:.cda? (Score:2)
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)
my personal solution (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:my personal solution (Score:2, Informative)
Ogg Vorbis (Score:4, Informative)
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"
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Funny)
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").
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2)
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)
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2)
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.
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2)
There's no integer decoder (Score:5, Insightful)
since then most of [MP3 encoding] happens on cirrus logic processors or TI DSPs.
However, the TI DSPs that handle floating-point arithmetic are much more expensive. Nobody (except Iomega, and even that's not officially released) has made a portable Ogg decoder because the Vorbis reference decoder from xiph.org uses extensive floating-point rather than fixed-point arithmetic.
If you write a Free integer decoder (or fund writing one), they will come.
Ogg Vorbis (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2)
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:2)
If you do both the ogg and mp3 directories, its a good way to compare both of the formats head to head.
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, it depends what your ear hears. If you're particularly sensitive to pre-echo and other transient-related problems, MPC is without a doubt the best encoder, at any reasonably high (>200 kbps) bitrate.
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Troll)
Umm... you are completely wrong. 256kbps is far from perfect CD quality. Hell, CD-audio sucks ass. It's just the best mass-market standard we have. Listen to some freshly recorded music on a high-end, high-bandwidth analog tape, with Dolby-SR Analog noise reduction (adds another 3dB to your floor and cieling), on a high-end amp and pre-amp and a pair of B&W Nautilus 801 speakers... and tell me 256kbps is perfect.
Re:Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, don't forget the solid platinum, gold coated, $200/ft., sextuple-shielded, interconnects with hand-woven wombat hair sheathing.
Vorbis and flac (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:Audio compression - ZAP (Score:2)
I seriously have a difficult time believing they can achieve that level of compression in a lossless manner... mainly because as you say,
With hard drives so inexpensive....? Anything wrong with
you phrased it the wrong way pal (Score:2, Funny)
I'd like to know if they are using them.
Nothing beats the quality (Score:2)
Re:Nothing beats the quality (Score:2)
Ogg Vorbis (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Oh, of course I use .wma... (Score:4, Funny)
If you have a G4... (Score:4, Interesting)
ogg...but what we really need (Score:4, Interesting)
WMF, on the Windows side (Score:2)
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)
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.
What happened to the MP3 Pro spec? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:What happened to the MP3 Pro spec? (Score:3, Informative)
for home audio... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Which formats support simple batch manipulation? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation (Score:2)
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]
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation (Score:2, Informative)
Another one to try is Normalize [columbia.edu] It alows you to adjust volumes across different types of input files (.wav, mp3, etc...)
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation (Score:2)
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)
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'm not an audiophile. (Score:2)
-Restil
What kind of speakers do you have? (Score:3, Insightful)
midi (Score:2, Funny)
in the mean time - I can't stand mp3s, ogg might be the way for me to go now.
The other reason Ogg hasn't caught on... (Score:2)
Re:The other reason Ogg hasn't caught on... (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:I'm bored, let's rant... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I like ogg. (Score:2)
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)
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.
I'd like to say that free is the way to go... (Score:2)
Compatibility and quality come first. (Score:2)
I don't really care about the size of the file (Score:2, Insightful)
Ogg Vorbis clearly wins (Score:5, Informative)
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?
So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?
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
MP3, WMA, and whatever else I need (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Looney /audiophiles (Score:2)
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)
Re:SHN benefits (Score:3, Insightful)
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 "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)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Vorbis below 160kbps, MPC above 160kbps (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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
(Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here [mailto]
.
;-)
Ogg Vorbis (Score:4, Informative)
Re:.ogg (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WMA is about 2x as compact as MP3.... (Score:2)
And none of the lossless formats are even as compact as 320k MP3. So MP3 still fills a useful niche in that regard.
(yes, I'm aware that since LAME isn't licensed, its technically illegal, but my, and I suspect your, primary use of it is pirating copyrighted music, so its not as though using a patent-free codec would make what we do any more legal.)
Well, you could *check*.... (Score:2)
Ogg has had high bitrate from the beginning. It will happily take you up to just under what the lossless codecs will give. in rc3 stereo, -q10 will do ~400-600kbps, and -q0 will give you ~48-80kbps depending on material.
Monty
Re:Windows Media Format... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Windows Media Format... (Score:4, Informative)
It's useful to note that any production WMA decoder/encoder is either Microsoft's code, or if otherwise, must pass Microsoft certification. I.e. even in those rare cases that someone outside of MS gets to mess with that code/format, MS makes sure the result is vetted before it may be deployed in a product. Likewise, all products deploying WMA (e.g. digital audio players) must undergo certification independently of whatever WMA code is used in them. This helps to ensure interoperability and sound quality for ports and embedded implementations.
MP3 on the other hand, is something of a free-for-all w.r.t. the available decoders., and no one (esp. not Fraunhofer or Thompson) has a certification process to validate the quality of the generated bitstream. (c.f. another poster's comments about the merits of VBR LAME vs. WMA).
Re:.wav (Score:3, Informative)
Re:.wav (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A small question (Score:4, Informative)
Good answer (Score:2)
Re:A small question (Score:2)
Try grip [nostatic.org]. Configure it to rip to any format you want - all it needs is the path to the executable. It will do the freedb lookup and name the files in your favorite style too.
Since ogg vorbis [xiph.org] is a free codec (as in beer; as in speech) this is really the best way to go. Note that US Linux users who rip to MP3 with free-as-in-beer software are probably in violation of one or more laws. Since XMMS [xmms.org] plays OGG as well as MP3 you can mix and match MP3's from your favorite P2P community with OGG's of your own collection.
as you probably know there is a sparse few number of them available to download...
So what are you waiting for? Get oggenc and do your part!
-Renard
Re:A small question (Score:2)
it is command line, but I at least feel it is quite easy to use, and it is faster then alot of them, because as soon as it finishes ripping a song, it forks an encoder, then goes on to rip the next.
anyway: it's called the One Ripper, and it is at:
http://www.evilsoft.org/Software.
it requires a linux system with perl 5, and it has links to some perl libraries you need.
Enjoy.
Re:A small question (Score:2, Informative)
1) CDex [n3.net]. Has an Ogg encoder (RC2 version) embedded, and you can use the command line RC3 version with it very easily. The latest betas use the 'cdparanoia' libraries to rip. This would be nice choice once it's been updated to RC3.
2) EAC [exactaudiocopy.de]. This is the benchmark for quality ripping in Windows. It's slightly harder to set up, and doesn't integrate as nicely with passing metadata to the external ogg encoder, but it's the best Windows ripper bar none. Both pieces of software are free. CDex is also open source (useful if you happen to have a copy of VC++ floating around).
Re:A small question (Score:2)
Very simple:
Step 1: Insert CD
Step 2a: Type "audiocd:/ogg" into Konqueror's URL bar and save it as a bookmark.
or Step 2b: If you already have saved a bookmark, get it.
Step 3: Drag the .ogg files to your music folder, they will be compressed on the fly.
Can't become easier than that.
Re:WMA 8 is the way (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't though, so it doesn't matter. I'm not a musician by any means, nor can I detect the difference between 160 and 192 mp3 compression. So I'll continue using my inferior, yet cross platform, non-license restricted, used-everwhere, mp3 format.
Re:WMA 8 is the way (Score:5, Informative)
* Picture perfect at 128 kbit/s
And what is this comment based on? These results have been pointed out in comments for previous articles, but I'd like to mention them again. ff123 has been conducting double blind tests comparing various audio codecs, and the results are here. [ff123.net]
The following is from the page:
Comparisons in red below are true as a group with 95% confidence.
ogg is better than wma8
mpc is better than wma8
ogg is better than xing
mpc is better than xing
aac is better than wma8
aac is better than xing
lame is better than wma8
lame is better than xing
Looks to me like WMA8 got beat by pretty much everything... But hey, what good is statistical analysis anyways...
Re:WMA 8 is the way (Score:5, Informative)
If you compare a good mp3 encoding (say with LAME and the right arguments) to a WMA8 encoding of the same bit-rate and with the volume levels matched, mp3 will win out, or at least tie, everytime and Ogg will usually do the same with 25% less bits.
Re:WMA 8 is the way (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't realize WMA8 was compressing levels, but once levels have been compressed, it won't be possible to "match volume levels" and compare with original source or an MP3 as you suggest. (ie, either loud passages won't match or soft passages won't match)
Re:WMA 8 is the way (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about the rest of you, but to my ears, NOTHING is "picture perfect" at 128kbps. 192 is minimum for any lossy compression.
Re:WMA 8 is the way (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing you should know is that i make embedded digital audio players for a living. I have been doing this for years. I have personally worked with every codec except mp3pro, and i doubt mp3pro will ever mature to market viability. i have seen and ported the wma decoder source, in addition to a variety of other minor things i could mention to provide credibility here.
* Much better than OGG and MP3
This is quantitative; most listening tests i have read about state that high quality mp3 encoders (such as lame) and the ogg reference encoder produce better quality output than WMA or AAC. I would guess that this trend will continue; Microsoft makes fast, low quality encoders for their desktop applications so as to provide an enhanced initial user experience. This is evidenced with how WMP behaves - it encodes as fast as possible, but generates low quality (notable artifacts) output, even at bitrates of 96kbps and 128kbps. This definitely refutes the claim that WMAv7 64kbps sounds "as good" as MP3 128kbps.
* Picture perfect at 128 kbit/s
No offense, but are you in the marketing department at MS? My response has to be "I'll believe it when i see it." I dont have the golden ears, but i can still tell 128kbps from cd audio, and i dont see this as changing.
* Supported by hardware (unlike ogg)
This is a flat out lie. Microsoft has ported their WMA decoder to various embedded architectures, but has no actual hardware support. The support is all in software, running on embedded processors. As was mentioned in previous posts, Ogg has been ported to embedded devices just like WMA; it's just a matter of time before it's ported to all devices.
* Next version (Corona) will sport 5.1 Dolby, 24 bit samples, 96khz sampling rate, better compression.
That's nice, except most consumer audio hardware handles 16 bit 44kHz audio, which is what CD audio is. So supporting 96kHz audio might look great on paper, but it does absolutely nothing for you in reality. In terms of 5.1 Dolby, AAC supports multiple channels and look where it's gone - nowhere. Maybe you guys should focus on the features that actually matter?
* Existing hardware will update firmware to support Corona
For the love of jesus. Let me drop you a clue:
* Existing hardware will update firmware to support OGG Vorbis 1.0
Your blind faith in WMAv8 has converted me - i am now a true believer in alternate technologies. I will devote all my spare time to the proliferation of disruptive technology.
Thank you for your support.
Re:Why wouldn't I want to give up on mp3s? (Score:3, Interesting)
In most cases, a 60kbps OGG file sounds as good as an 128k mp3. An 80k OGG is as good as 160k mp3 and half the size.
Actually, Ogg only shaves off 30-40% (still respectable, just not revolutionary)
If you have a portable player, you would appreciate the smaller size with high quality.
If you have a portable player, you almost certainly can't use Ogg's :)
If you make computer games, you have a high quality free way of adding a lot of music to your games. (possibly patents for mp3)
If you want background music in a computer game, why would you want to use a format that eats drastically more processing power?
You can do 44.1khz and 48 khz audio.
So can MP3, what's your point?
The encoder sounds good by default, so music traded on file sharing systems sounds good (unlike all those terrible 128k mp3s encoded by anything that isn't LAME).
So "The Encoder" for MP3 is bad? If there was just one encoder this would be an argument. And I do hat those 128k bastards just as much as you :) At least iTunes defaults to 160k.
Now the other points are very valid, but they probably won't get anyone to switch at this point. What we need is a format that gives at least 4x the compression of MP3 with the same quality (and reasonable CPU usage) to get people to switch. Hopefully it will be an open technology like Ogg.
Re:Abuse of the word lossy. (Score:2)
This is not exactly right. To keep in line of the rest of your examples it would have to look like this:
4. Musician with Internet only distro:
MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3 -> uncompressed format -> MP3
2 generations of lossy copying
MP3 is definitely a lossy encoding method in that every time it is decoded there is a good chance that you will not get out EXACTLY what you encoded in the first place. You will instead get something that sounds close enough that the human ear can effectively treat them as the same. The problem is that artifacts tend to crop up with each encoding and you will most likely end up with garbage after a few encoding/decoding cycles.
You are correct in that you don't need to encode/decode and then encode again to copy, however that is true of your options 2 and 3 also. Once your data is in digital form you never need to encode it again, just do a lossless digital copy and it is likely that you will never lose quality. This has nothing to do with codecs, but rather with the nature of digital data.
Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG] (Score:5, Informative)
2. Original CD -> Tape -> Tape -> Tape 3 generations of lossy copying.
3. Original JPEG -> save as JPEG -> save as JPEG
2 generations of lossy image manipulation.
Hence the term lossy
While that is an interesting way of looking at it, you are the one misusing the term "lossy".
When it comes to compression, lossy has a specific meaning - it means you can NOT recreate the original input bit-for-bit. With lossless compression, you CAN recreate the original input bit for bit. It has nothing to do with percieved quality.
In the future, please make sure you know what you are talking about before accusing others of ignorance. :)
Re:Shorten rules (Score:2)
Imagine if all porn sites would store their pictures in .gif format (or even better .bmp) and all Napster users would use .wav.
The wasted bandwidth caused by Code Red would be insignificant by comparison...
P.S. Ogg is the way to go
Re:Most of the Time (Score:2)
If you're referring to MP3Pro, I doubt it'll ever be used by anything outside of the streaming audio market.
I'll grant that an MP3Pro at 64kbps sounds better than an MP3 at 64kbps, but for purposes of archiving audio for quality (as opposed to streaming), the diskspace savings isn't enough to justify (a) not gaining freedom from Fraun's patents (Ogg wins here), and (b) losing the freedom that comes with a DRM-free codec like MP3 or OGG.
But if you're willing to put up with DRM in exchange for better sound at streaming rates, might as well go with Windows Media .WMA instead of MP3Pro.
I can't imagine anyone on /. who'd be willing to put up with a DRM-crippled codec in the presence of .ogg (if patent-freedom and low-bitrate quality matters) or .mp3 (for availability, archival quality at high bitrates, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to the patent issue).
Re:like so? (Score:5, Funny)
>
>Like So?
>1
> 0
> [8 times per sample]
No, it's even worse!
(1-2 k of headers and track metadata deleted)
<BYTE>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>1</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
<BIT>0</BIT>
</BYTE>
FLAC vs. Monkey's (Score:3, Informative)