I was just wondering why there is no one recommended setting for Vorbis anymore and where these advanced options came from? Are these advanced options an atempt from Xiph.org to merge third party tunings? Are there options that can resonably approximate the version of aoTuV used in the last multiformat test? And/or settings that can do the same for the last version of Megamix?

Thanks
-Tyler

I just subscribed to Jetaudio 6 plus to enter the FLAC world (highest processing -8), and own MMJB as well (previously used for MP3pro VBR 100% ripping from CD). Winamp does not allow registration in SA for some reason. Are all these switches and settings applicable with these applications, or will I be getting things like microattack?
Comments / guidance appreciated.

The higher the profile, the more 'relaxed' block switching is.



Ah ok. I recently heard reports that using a higher ITP can cause quality problems in some cases.

So ITP should be used only if there is a noise problem and you want to try and fix it. But you shouldn't use or expect ITP to improve the quality of your music in general. It is a noise problem fixer, not a general-purpose quality improver In 95% of the cases, ITP on default is recommended. I need to rethink whether I should even mention ITP in a thread about recommendations.

INT (impulse_noisetune) however seems safe to use in general and I haven't heard reports of INT causing quality problems (yet).



Looks like I need to do some more editing. Thanks

Thanks again, QK, for all the info..! It's really helping me dial in my settings...



~esa

@QuantumKnot:
From main post:
So does this mean that the recommended setting for INT is -5?
You might want to specify this a bit incase everyone starts using -5 while they shouldn't
I, for one, wouldn't know which value I should use though I do think it's important to set this option. What would be the best value to use in general for all encodings?

It depends really. Usually you don't have to use INT in most cases. But if you are sensitive to pre-echo and can hear it in some music, INT will be useful here. But if you can't hear pre-echo at default settings (like me, I rarely am able to hear pre-echo unless it is really sharp stuff like castanets or harpsichord), then there is no need to set INT to anything. I usually set it to -5 for safe measure, even though I won't be able to tell the difference most of the time.

I suggest you take a sample that is representative of the music you listen to most, do some blind listening tests to see if pre-echo is an issue....then gradually increase INT (or more like decrease since its negative) until you feel the pre-echo is gone. Then if the bitrate jumps are acceptable, then you can use that.

If this can be considered off-topic, I apologize in advance.

I was just reading some comments by Aoyumi on 1.1 at his website.

He regrets that he wasn't taking a close look at the official Vorbis as his code was being incorporated into it by Monty, and expressed a slight degree of concern regarding the quality of 1.1 as compared to AoTuV b2.

He suspects that it is technically possible that some parts of AoTuV b2 tuning may have been broken when Monty fixed the code of AoTuV b2 and incorporated it into the official Vorbis, because Aoyumi, when tuning AoTuV, had also been taking into account whatever Monty fixed.

So despite many people's assumption, the audio quality of 1.1 is not automatically the same as that of AoTuV b2.

@QK: higher ITP are normally used with higher quality levels, why would they cause problems? (i can see that lowering could be bad, but why is raising them?)

Nobody knows, at present. There was one report of it hurting quality but that's the only one. It's not enough to be conclusive but it's better to be safe for now until it is proven/disproven.

Besides, I made ITP to fix microattack problems rather than to improve quality in general use.

As we know ITP uses short blocks more frequently, maby this suffers the frequency resolution?

Hi, i am very happy with the sound quality of this new version of vorbis 1.1.0 encoder; I tested with many samples for my music archive quality backups. My favorite setting is -q7 (around 224kbps average) the sound is very clean and good taste for my ears ; and not differences with the original wav file... I tested the setting -q0 for radio stream use, and the quality is good too. I am using the oddcast plugin dsp_oddcast_02262003; the question is: How i can change the old vorbis encoder of this oddcast plugin for the new version 1.1.0?

Other problem for me is the new version of oggdropXPd (1.7.11-1.1.0) ; i am running windows 95; and my system completely crash with this version of oggdropXPd.
I am using Oggifier frontend with the oggenc.exe (1.1.0) without problems , but; Is this oggenc.exe the same encoder in the oggdropXPd combination?

I am very appreciated some feedback and help

Yes, oggenc is the same encoder as oggdropXPd. That is, they produce the same version of Vorbis files.

Thanks QK

vorbis 1.1.0 -q7 great quality, transparent to my ears. just for kicks i tried q0, great quality for its bitrate. (used placebo - days before you came) - largest distortion was the muddled guitars - lol, im glad i use q7

I mentioned the setting -q0 only for radio internet broadcast; not for high fidelity.

The -q0 switch is in average 64 kbps, and the sound quality is better than 128kbps mp3 radio internet broadcast for the half of the bandwidth .

It's the ideal solution for internet radio broadcasters, and not paid for license, because vorbis is patent free.

Actually -q-1 sounds better than mp3 128 to me... I wonder why people don't use it for streaming, and why you can't do custom bitrates, like 24/32/whatever. Are there technical limitations?

i realize this, i was just testing it out for the sake of testing, i'm not THAT low on space . i was just commenting on the suprising quality, as the previous user said, "q-1 sounds better than mp3 128" - in some cases.

OK

erm... don't shout on me please...
i seriously doubt if i could abx even q4, but can one emulate gt3b2 with these advanced options? what should they be set to get something similar to gt3b2 at q6?

It is rather difficult at q 4 since GT3b2 was only tuned for q 5 and above.

no no, i've meant:
gt3b2 at quality 6 - can a combination of the advanced options present in the recommended encore reproduce that tuning?
edit: the allnew rewritten from scratch version 2.0 of my post

I'd say oggenc -q 6 --advanced-encode-option impulse_trigger_profile=5 would be equivalent, although not bit identical, since GT3b2 does not include aotuvb2's tunings, as 1.1 does.

Sorry, I misread it.

I've compared the critical values between 1.1 and GT3b2 and I think these settings should be close enough for q 6:

I just built an AMD64 system and was updating my software. I tried both of the ICL compiles (P3/AMD & P4) and found that the P4 version was consistently around 2x faster. (*Not double speed)



So should you use the P4 compile if you have AMD64 or should you still use the P3 version?

......the bitrate is similar, 167kbps, so they are bit identical.......why bother, go for the faster compile

i think the P4 means SSE2 optimised, P3 means SSE optimised, nothing important

If you can run the P4 compile, that means AMD64 supports SSE2

That's interesting, when considering that AMD32's only support SSE. I should test out oggenc on our AMD64's, which are running 64-bit linux

Mimicking GT3b2 with 1.1


I've read several post about mimicking GT3b2 with 1.1, but i'm not so understand it(i'm stupid ),
I assume that :
-q 6 --advanced-encode-option impulse_noisetune=-10 --advanced-encode-option impulse_trigger_profile=5.2
is same as GT3b2 q6?

Please correct me if i'm wrong.
Thanks!

Yes, it is a good approximation of it, though not exactly the same. Try comparing this setting with GT3b1 on some files. I haven't tried this setting myself but only derived it by looking at the psychoacoustic values of both.

@QuantumKnot:
Thanks for the reply, but why try comparing the setting with GT3b1, not the GT3b2?

Mainly because GT3b1 is essentially the same as GT3b2, except that the former was based on Vorbis 1.0 while the latter was based on Vorbis 1.0.1. But the important tunings are the same. So you can compare with either of them.

is there a special oggenc version (with P4 optimization) to include in foobar?
I just copied the aotuv dlls in my foobar directory and use the standart oggenc, because oggenc2 does not work.

Hi there,

I've been off this site for about a year.
I've already read many threads and after reading this sticky, I'm really confused.

QuantumKnot is recommending "Xiph.Org's Vorbis 1.1" at all quality levels.
His post was edited last time Nov 23 2004.

Many people on this board like the aoTuV-builds.
I'm interesting in -q5 to -q7 ... which way should I go?

Best regards,
Tobias

Welcome to Hydrogenaudio Tobias.

The reason why Vorbis 1.1 is recommended over any of the aoTuV builds is that, for all intents and purposes, it is aoTuV beta2 with a few extra bugfixes. Very few reliable tests have been conducted so far between aoTuV beta 3 and beta 2/Vorbis 1.1; thus Vorbis 1.1 is still the recommended version, but if even a few reliable tests come back in favor of aoTuV beta3 I think that QuantumKnot will probably change it.

Vorbis 1.1 is based on aoTuV beta 2. The recent aoTuV beta 3 is currently experimental and there haven't been any substantial listening tests done to show that it is better than Vorbis 1.1 in most genres (yet).

For the q range you are interested in, I suspect there isn't much difference. But you should do your own listening test with the music you listen to the most to verify.

thanks for your fast and professional help!
According to this, I've got another question:
I'm using "Cool Edit Pro 1.2" for editing my music.
Is"Cool Vorbis Filter using libVorbis v1.1.0" from RareWares the recommended build?

I'm really confused about the sorting on RareWares :-)

Yep, since it uses libvorbis 1.1

I think they need to clean up their page at Rarewares

hmmm... AO; aoTuV b2 [20040420] (based on Xiph.Org's 1.0.1) => aoTuV beta 2

Thats what I'm using with a foobar2000 encoder. I'm noticing something though. Using -q 5 which Im told is the min for transparency with this encoder, the bitrates seem to be lower than I get with 3.90.3 LAME's APS. I also did MPC for fun and found those to tend to be somewhere between OGG and MP3 at its stand setting.

Anyways, Ive tried to ABX a few tracks and I seem to not be able to tell that q5 sounds bad at all compared to the original. I used alot of tracks off FF123's problem sample FLACs and a few random wav's I had on my pc (mostly pop and urban style music). Its extremely hard for me to even hear any differences.

Im very excited about the lower bitrates but good quality still. But I don't wanna get my hopes up really fast just yet.

I have a few more questions about OGG as a format compared to mp3:

1) do u *have* to compare only pure bitrates i.e 192 ogg vs mp3 192. I'd really like to think OGG is giving me higher/equal(probably more accurate) quality at lower bitrates. Generally, speaking of course.

2) could one say q5 (ogg) = lame-aps (mp3) in terms of quality?

3) since ogg doesn't have alot of the same limitations mp3 has. I assume its encoding even the high freq content fine?

4) any GUI (like encospot) apps for OGG?

EDIT: moved from previous thread

Transparency is subjective and is different to different people. I find it hard to hear artifacts at q 4 most of the time while some people can hear the the faintest of artifacts at q 7 or more. So it is dependent on your equipment as well as your hearing.



This has been the bone of contention for a while....how to compare VBR codecs. The usual practice has been to compare codecs which have similar average bitrates on most genres of music. So what that means is gathering lots and lots of music of different genres, and twiddling the VBR settings of both codecs until they achieve the same average bitrate (adding up all the bitrates and taking an average) on this material.



Only a listening test can answer that, and it will be dependent on different people. Have a search around the forums to see if someone has done a test comparing q 5 ogg vorbis with lame aps.



Theoretically, ogg vorbis was designed to overcome the limitations of mp3. But whether it has been tuned optimally is the important question. IMO, ogg vorbis has a lot of potential and the current encoder is not as well tuned as say, LAME.



You could try OggDropXPd. There are quite a few.

btw. Ogg is a file container that can contain video and audio. The actual audio codec is called Vorbis.

i find ogg's great in a komputer stg game
only ogg q4 128k/bps,but soundz amazing
than i become a true ogg fans,q4 is enough for the quality u want.
if wanna more safety ,go q5

Great topic! Answered almost all my questions in one swoop. Anyways, EAC+OGG... I notice the maximum bitrate is 320 KBp/s... will it encode higher? What do I do? Also, will EAC+OGG encode a DTS SACD? Lastly, is EAC still better than CDex, or has CDex outpaced it? I've been outta the loop a while

I think EAC is still the best ripper for detecting errors, though I find CDex's paranoia ripper to be quite good at 'fixing' scratched CDs. But if you have a CD drive that caches data, then CDex won't be able to detect the errors, so best go with EAC. Luckily, my DVD drive doesn't cache data (according to EAC)

Yeah, but will EAC encode my OGG Vorbis files at 500KBp/s, or will the highest it go be 320?

If you tell it to call oggenc and encode at -q 10 it'll encode at -q 10. I don't think Ogg Vorbis has an upper ceiling for bitrate but I could be wrong.

The bit rate drop-down does not tell the encoder what bit rate to use. I believe it is only used to estimate the compressed file size that is shown in the main window.

It seems new Qk test build is recommended encoder because it based on Vorbis 1.1
and include only the new block switching algorithm.

It is much too early to be recommending that. More testing is required to determine any special cases. While it can't do any worse than 1.1 in terms of quality, it can explode and give very high bitrates on some types of music though. I found one particular sample today so I went and fixed it, only to break it for another sample. So yeah, still early days. Plus we got some new aoTuV releases too

Isn't the Oggenc2.4 serie (IMPULSE_TRIGGER_PROFILE, aoTuVb3, etc) recommended yet? It's not updated in this thread but the 2.3 serie isn't even listed on RareWares anymore.

Thanks for pointing it out. I've updated the links.

I have an amd64 processor and i was curious to find out if i was still supposed to use the p3/amd version or if i was supposed to use the p4 version. i've noticed that with other projects with different version that sse2 was the only difference between the two. is this true in this case?

The best way to find out is to actually run the P4 version and see if it works. If it was specifically compiled for P4, you'll get an error message saying this is incompatible. If it works, then that means there aren't any P4-specific instructions used. But yeah, amd64 supports SSE2.