Non-MP3 Codecs?

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."

I'm using .nap

I'm using .nap because Napster is going to come back! Just you wait!

Re:Windows Media Format...

I recently bought a Rio Volt MP3/WMA CD player, and compared WMA8 with VBR LAME, and LAME won hands down. Both encoders are set to come out around 128kbit, and while both of course have artifacts, the artifacts in WMA are MUCH more noticeable. I guess I'm just alot more sensitive to the type of artifacts WMA produces...

Re:Windows Media Format...

Odds are that they didn't do double blind listening tests, and didn't control for the relative bitrates and/or take care to select for their MP3 encoder and decoder quality. WMA is a slightly more recent codec design than MP3, and garners a better ratio for perceptual quality per bit/s.

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).

.cda?

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

Ogg Vorbis

I use Ogg becuase:

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

There's no integer decoder

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

I'm using Ogg Vorbis for a number of reason. The reference encoder, while not perfect, is certainly not bad. The vast majority of the time, .ogg's sound noticeably better than MP3's of the same bitrate.

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

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

Re:Ogg Vorbis

You don't seem to have been following developments lately. LAME at 256kbps is not perfect - check the ISO test samples, as well as some others people have dug up. There are people who can reliably ABX such encodes 16/16. Ogg tends to be slightly better than mp3 with many of these test samples, though I'd put the extreme high-bitrate category at a tie right now. In the "stuff most people use" category, Ogg at -q5 or -q6 is approximately the same as LAME with --alt-preset standard, and results in a lower bitrate. Ogg at -q7 is about the same as --alt-preset extreme, and Ogg at -q8 or -q9 can only be matched by LAME --alt-preset insane (320kbps CBR), but usually results in a lower bitrate.

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.

Vorbis and flac

I'm writing a new application and I have chosen the supported audio formats based on practical concerns: license, patent status, and API. MP3 is nice but technically you need to a license from the patent holder to make an encoder. Vorbis has no such limitation so I use it. I use flac for the same reason. Its license agrees with mine.

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

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

Re:like so?

> > HD's are cheap, hell save them as XML.
>
>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>

Audio compression - ZAP

I use ZAP by emagic [emagic.de]. Emagic is popular among pro audio types for their integrated audio/MIDI app "Logic Audio".

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

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

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

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

Re:A small question

Grip [nostatic.org] is a nice front end to Linux command line ripping and encoding utilities. You can choose which encoder you use and I believe it already has a preset configuration for ogg encoders.

Re:WMA 8 is the way

* Much better than OGG and MP3
* 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

Microsoft cheats with WMA8 - all they do is compress the range a little which results in an average 3 dB volume level boost. It has been repeatedly shown in multiple independent studies that even just a small increase in volume makes music "sound better" to the average listener. Often you'll get all kinds of superlatives about accuracy, openness, full-bodied, etc, etc from the people comparing the louder track to the quieter one. MS knows this which is why they play those psychoacoustical games with WMA8.

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

If you compare a good mp3 encoding ... to a WMA8 encoding of the same bit-rate and with the volume levels matched, mp3 will win out

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)

Ogg Vorbis

is the *best* lossy audio codec I've yet seen. At -q 3 (ends up being around 112 kb/s average) most is transparent to me, and at -q 4.99 pretty much everything. (I don't use -q 5 because it jumps up to lossless coupling which makes the bitrate jump quite a bit).

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

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

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

Oh, of course I use .wma...

Because I have to quit this filthy .mp3 habit. I need the music industry to help me overcome my addiction to free music, so with digital content controls I won't be tempted to download gigabyte upon gigabyte of free music. I won't have to continue working this extra part-time job to support my purchases of extra hard drive space.

If you have a G4...

Sticking with MP3s is a no brainer unless you have to use open software for moral reasons, since Apple has enhanced MP3 encoding/decoding for AltiVec, and this is an area where those gigaFlops do wonders at quick, high-quality encodes and freeing up more CPU for your work (or the visualizer :) during playback.

ogg...but what we really need

is a ftp database and crawler similar to audiogalaxy only for ogg. it would catch on in no time.

I use MP3.

Because the few songs I have ripped are in that format, and the few songs I get from friends now and then, are also mp3.

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

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

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

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

for home audio...

If you're looking to compress files for home audio use, then you may as well go ahead and use one of the lossless compression formats, as adding storage space to a home audio system is trivial and you'll be able to hear comparatively more garbage from lossy compression on your home system (rather than on an earpiece headset or cheapie speakers.)

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

Which formats support simple batch manipulation?

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

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

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

Is this sort of thing possible?

Your specific example: Ogg has ReplayGain

Ogg has ReplayGain support to directly address the problem of varying apparent music amplitude. (ie, you've noticed that both pop and classical tend to use the whole amplitude range, but pop is apparently louder due to dynamic range compression. Replaygain is a method of figuring out the 'actual' loudness).

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

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

The latest XMMS plugin already supports replaygain (as does latest Ogg123), and it should be in the Winamp plugin soon if not already. Right now it's up to individual apps to support ReplayGain, but we're deciding on an easier way to encourage/include support with core Ogg.

Monty

Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation

Whoa- wild misconceptions here :D

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

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

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

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

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

I'm bored, let's rant...

besides the fact that it's hard to go up against an established standard...

Undeniably true. But established standards die enventually. MP3 R&D has been mostly abandoned. It will be around for a very long time yet, but it's being attacked from all technological sides. Microsoft wants to kill it for WMA, Tompson wants to kill it in favor of MP3 pro, FhG wants to kill it for AAC, Real wants us to use Real--ermm, sorry, ATRAC3, etc. MP3's been superceeded and abandoned by cutting edge research.

MP3 the king is a mighty warrior, but he's showing new wounds. Ogg is the successor to the throne, and the only codec individuals are going to have ready, unrestricted access to once MP3 eventually falls. It's not happening this year, but it's happening.

and the fact that there is no hardware support

A mostly fair thing to point out. Ask again in a year; the FPU-less codec exists (he says, hacking on ARM7 assembly), now it's mostly the business distribution arrangement that's up in the air. Commodity hardware designs can't quite live in the same open framework as software.

is that storage is so cheap now

Most of the big Geek music collections of friends around me are each over a Terabyte of music. That's still alot of money.

If I can get a 60GB drive for under $100

If quality is not a concern, you can get a cheap turntable for much less than that and it never runs out of space.

why would I want to sacrifice a big chunk of processing power to make my music 1/3 smaller? Only if I absolutely wanted to use something open.

This one confuses me slightly...

Compressing from WAV->Ogg makes things ~10-20x smaller, depending on your quality tastes.

If you mean 'why would I replace my mp3 collection I already have?', in that case I agree with you. An equivalent Ogg will sound better/more consistent and be smaller, but if you're satisfied with what you've got, there's no need to replace it. Certainly don't transcode it! It could only end up sounding worse (see rant here [slashdot.org])

If you mean, "why would I encode to Ogg rather than MP3; it's not worth it", then you're just confused. You get smaller, better sounding files for no extra effort (and no extra CPU). In this case, Open Source is not a compromise; Vorbis is the best out there. All we're lacking is the portable players.

Monty

OGG file format features

The .ogg file format has loads of features that are really important for industrial applications.

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

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

Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]

1. Original VHS -> VHS -> VHS -> VHS 3 generations of lossy copying.

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. :)

Ogg Vorbis clearly wins

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

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

Why not mp3?

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

So, then, why Ogg Vorbis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

MP3, WMA, and whatever else I need

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

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

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

The point: When in Rome, I do as the Romans. It's a simple life, really. :)

SHN benefits

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

I use the MUTE codec.

It gets 99.99% compression. I think it's termed "lossy" compression.

LOSSLESS

http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/

'Tests of Shorten, MUSICompress/WaveZIP , WaveArc, Pegasus SPS (ELS-Ultra), Sonarc, LPAC , WavPack, AudioZip, Monkey, RKAU and FLAC audio compression software.'

Vorbis below 160kbps, MPC above 160kbps

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

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

Arguments for shn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.
;-)

Ogg Vorbis

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

Re:.wav

.wav files are not compressed - it's a file format for raw, uncompressed audio. This is comparable to the .bmp format for pictures.

.wav is not a codec, it's just a file format.

Re:.wav

.WAV *is* PCM. With headers that differ from the PCM files on audio CD's (.CDA). As has been pointed out elsewhere, PCM is simply a way to describe audio data using ones and zeroes. There's no compression involved.