Hey,

I have a question which is keeping me busy for a couple of days now.
At the moment I'm encoding all my wavs to mp3 with lame and the "alt-preset extreme" option. But I'm planning to switch to another format that would give me more quality. The things I'm concerned about is that the new format will, as I said, give higher quality and a high degree of compatibility (futurewise that is).

I now have structured all my music in the following way :

drive:artistname - albumnameartistname - tracknr - songtitle.mp3

I've tagged all my files with ID3v1 and ID3v2 (I know this bothers alot of you guys but I like the info ) so I would like my new format to have the same tagging abilities.

I was seriously thinking about OGG or MPC.

But what do you guys think about it?? I just want to let the switchover to be as smooth as possible.

Thanx for reading this and I hope you guys can give me some advice so I make the right decision.

mpc will probably never gain much hardware support if any.
You can add id3 tags though.

Ogg will probably have hardware support in the not so distant future, but uses it's own tagging system.

So I'm beginning to see (from reading the forum) that most of you guys are choosing OGG. The use of another taggingsytem doesn't really bother me as long as I can get the same info in the ogg files.

The problem for me is that I burn everything to cd-r's so I can't get all the info in the filename. I even had to rename some titles from my previous mp3's because the filenames were to long.

The Ogg tagging system is quite vertasile. You can name your own tags and do multi-line tagging. Your favourite recipes for Piña (was that the right one?) Coladas can easily be added in each file without any hassles.

And now qualitywise is ogg really better then lets say Lame(extreme) when you encode with q6 or something?

Does it have issues like mp3 has with clips like fatboy??

What actually is a good q setting to encode at??

Thanks for the responses btw

as far as I understand the ogg tagging system has character limitations and no [new line] function.


And you can't add pictures nor other none text things.

Yeah, that's right.

It seems this guy is obsessed with this cocktail...
What did you drink last night, sonny?

Whee. Now to test my pronounciation of Banana Daiquiri.

It's simple. Since I read that a medical study had concluded a moderate alcohol intake (1-3 drinks pr. day) should have a beneficial long-term effect on heart and mind, I decided to try incorporating it as a healthy habit. And because I'm a very Pratchettian "feminine" drinker, I tend to like sweet drinks with colours and umbrellas. I'm not into beer. And this evening I made the "mistake" of drinking two of them on an empty stomach. So they hit me pretty fast

Not sure about tagging capabilities, but quality wise at the high bitrates you are using, MPC should sound better than Ogg Vorbis. However if you are very happy with --apx, you should be very happy with Vorbis -q 8

Ogg tagging definetely can handle foreign characters and newlines. Perhaps some tagging tools can't, though.

--
GCP

Thanx for the replies. But I now was wondering, since I'm happy with alt extreme (sounds totally transparent to me), will it actually be a benefit to change. I'm asking this because I already have about 20 MP3 cd's in my collection and it still is weird if suddenly there is another format. (It would not be weird to me but since I'm making this collection for the future so that others could also listen to it I think it would be a little strange to them)

Now from yet another point of view, will ogg ever take over the lead from mp3?? I know a lot of guys are saying : Yes it will. But for the largest group of users out there Xing 160 sounds perfect, I mean I'm already having hard enough trouble convincing people that they'd use Lame. imagine the trouble it would be to convince them to use a totally new format.

I hope you guys know what I mean

Hey guyz... really boring thread:

Captain, if you need quality switch to loseless...
if you're looking for seomething that will be a "standard" switch to OGG (encoding at -q8 is a nonsense !)

Unless you're using lossless compression, new formats will always be coming along. Think back ten years, to the sort of formats that were being used then - now imagine what will be happening ten years from now.

In 5 years time, there won't be any point in most people compressing music in order to store it on their computers for playback (200 CDs at 400 MB per CD is around 80 GB). Of course, the recording industries are hoping to introduce new 'super CDs' which would be much larger (and have the useful side effect of making us buy all our music again). Compression will still need to be used for transportation, both over the internet and via portable players, and I would be surprised if the format used was unchanged MP3. I would be less surprised if some future version of .ogg was used... or parts of it, purely because the ogg licensing requirements are very liberal.

As far as I know, Ogg Vorbis tags doesn't support multiline tags.
Here's a cite from the v-comment description (http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html)

"Content vector format
A case-insensitive field name that may consist of ASCII 0x20 through 0x7D, 0x3D ('=') excluded. ASCII 0x41 through 0x5A inclusive (A-Z) is to be considered equivalent to ASCII 0x61 through 0x7A inclusive (a-z).
The field name is immediately followed by ASCII 0x3D ('='); this equals sign is used to terminate the field name.
0x3D is followed by 8 bit clean UTF-8 field contents to the end of the field. "

Newline characters is 0x0A, 0x0D or both, which doesn't fit into the valid interval. Or... Hmm.. If the rest (not the unique ID) of the text can be in UTF-8, that must mean that Newlines are allowed..

:confused:

Regards,
Mikael Stalvik

So what terminates the stuff after the = ? Is it the FFEF thing?

I don't know about the code and stuff, but in my experience Ogg's tagging system seems to support multi-line entries for individual tags. The winamp plugin supports this sort of tagging, as does WinVorbis (formerly WinVC). I assume that multi-line refers to hitting "enter" or "return" while still in the same tag, and beginning another line. Example of a tag:
COMMENT=
* * * * * * *
bass - Jan Eric
drum - Aaron Smith
keyboard - Mark Tootle
second clip (main song) of track 7 on the cd
* * * * * * * *

A tag entered this way in WinVorbis shows up with the line breaks when checked in Winamp, and vice versa.

If I remembered right, the strings are NULL separated. 0xFFFE is a so called Unicode BOM, I think. It's used to terminte 16-bit (UTF-16) unicode strings.