I've been trying to decide recently whether to encode my 162 cd collection using ogg or mpc. The only reservation I have about using ogg is sound transparency. I listen too electronic,rock,ambient, and occasionally rap. My audio equipment right now is total crap(sblive), but I plan to upgrade my sound card and speakers. So, to get to the point is there any ogg q setting which offers near transparency(like --standard mpc)?

-q6 should be the ideal setting for you. MPC is still superior to Ogg Vorbis when it comes to transparency at medium bit rates, though.

if by "near transparency like --standard mpc" you mean sound quality and not the bitrate, i think most would agree that -q6 should fit your needs.

Edit: I need to work on my response time.

-q 6 is enough for me personally, but according to several board members, there are still samples (noise samples IIRC) that cause problems with this setting.

And using bitrates much higher than that - also according to other members - doesn't make much sense, because Vorbis is hardly tuned for those. You don't get much of a quality improvement, you just bloat the file sizes.

Transparancy is totally subjective. Best answer is test it for yourself and see what you think transparent is. Some will tell you -q3 some will tell you -q10. The only ears you should really trust on this should be yours. We may be able to point you in the general direction here but you could hear things quite different from us.

Im not trying to be funny here or anything, but with the crappy audio hardware I have, I am unable to tell the difference between anything above -q3. Maybe its the type of music I listed to?

I personally use -q4, but I know vorbis can't really compete with MPC at higher bitrates, so you can save a great deal of space using -q4 (seems like this setting was tuned considerably). If you compared vorbis at -q4 to an Mp3 encoded at 128kbps CBR, you'd probably be able to hear an obvious difference. As Neo Neko said, it really depends on your hearing ability, and you should use whatever setting sounds best to you

B)

I use Q1, and my amp is a PowerMate 600 - 300 watt stereo amplifier w/ two 300 watt EV speakers, I don't know much since, I've borrowed them from my brother.
I'm using my soundblaster live, and to me transperancy is Q1, though I use Q2 every once in a while, if I encounter music that has artifacts to me at Q1.

I'm 18 years old and danish.

I use q6 for all my cds also.

thanks for the responses, I guess I'll be using q6

i would suggest to use -q8.. but that's just me.

i noticed that in some types of music/cds you can notice the difference between -q6 and the wav even if ur deaf.

the only bitrate i couldnt find the problem in some cds is -q8.

I use q=8 too.

I couldn't find fault at q=7, and set it 1 higher to overcome the you're-kidding-yourself factor.

I've found tracks at this setting (q=8) have recorded at quite a varied average bit rate (especially for sound samples) :

174kb/s (Wind Chimes sound sample) and 427 kb/s (Rock Water sound sample)

- so, it looks like Vorbis is clever enuf to deal with the actual compression rate itself.

I personally like OGG at -q4.2. It doesn't meet my definition of transparency (I'd say 5 or maybe 6 is transparent for me). But hey, it encodes very close to 128kbps. Very good for management purposes because I burn most music I encode to CD-R's.

I think that if you are using anything > q=6 then you should be using MPC rather than Ogg Vorbis. q=8 is very wasteful, deep with the realm of diminishing returns. MPC standard would likely meet it or beat it, while using about 30% less space.

I think Vorbis's sweetspot is somewhere in the 2.5-4.0 range. Not exactly artifact-free but it produces some of the nicest overall sound for the bitrate required.

I had all my (liked) tunes encoded to Q4 a little while ago. Then one day my brother (another audiophile) came to visit and we started talking about some of the latest news in music enocoding. Somewhere along in the conversation I said something like... "At Q 4 I'd bet you can't ABX the real wav from an ogg *on stereo equipment*".

And there layed the guantlet.

So later in the conversation surround sound came into the light. And the question was poised... "Can Q4 accurately reproduce the sound coming out of those other channels?"

Well, after about 6 hours of ABX testing with ogg (various qualities) against the original s, we discovered that you can easily ABX Q6 on a hi-fidelity surround setup. We finally decided to settle on Q7 for our quality settings. We couldn't "casually" ABX a wav and a Q7 ogg. With some training one probably could.

Here is the rub... If you can't hear the difference at Q4, why go higher? We plan to buy DVD players that can play OGG files as soon as they become available. These players will be used on hi-fi systems with surround setups. We don't want to have to re-encode at that time all over again.

As I said, I had mine all nicely encoded at Q4... He was just starting his adventure into encoding his collection. So he is starting out fresh. I'm now having to re-encode all my CDs to ogg at Q7 now. I'm about half way through a 533 CD collection. His collection has over 750 CDs (just for the curios). We also decided to encode the entire album instead of just the liked tracks. This way we can "grow on" those other tracks that seem to sound better with time. We also use a custom made catalog player program to manage these collection.

But the point is... You may decide that you will need the quality at a later time.

We decided to use OGG because it should show hardware players before MPC AAC and other proprietary formats.

AAC already has hardware players. Plus, Mpeg-4 mainstream DVD players (with AAC audio) will probably be available quite a bit before you'd ever see a mainstream DVD player supporting Vorbis.

Really, if you're going for hardware support, AAC probably is the better bet. It's industry standard also, and not proprietery. To most commercial manufacturers, it'd be Vorbis which would be considered as a more proprietery codec (despite being Open Source).

Of course, this isn't to convince people not to use Vorbis, but I think maybe your expectations of wide scale hardware support happening for Vorbis before even AAC are unrealistic.

In my educated guess, those players are battery operated devices that use integer decoders. This is done to save power to increase batter life and to reduce manufacturing costs. If it were possible to get the same quality output from an integer decoder as a floating point decoder, then Vorbis.com wouldn't have recommended using the floating point decoder in all PC type software decoders. The integer decoder was made for that walkman type player.

Now, a stand-alone DVD player for your home theater system doesn't need to sacrifice quality for saving power. And since, DVD requires a processor capable of moving some bytes around, they could probably use the high quality floating point decoder very easily and without any additional costs.

I didn't see any AAC capable DVD players the last time I was shopping for new gadgets... Which was about 2 weeks ago. Maybe Best Buy was just out of em at the moment.

My bet is still "gonna see a DVD player with OGG before any other format besides MP3 and WMA."

the point is that mpeg-4 devices are inevitable - and thus AAC support is as well. ogg, OTOH, will have to do some serious bargaining to get support, especially with dvd drives.

That's wrong.

A practical example: MAD is a 100% integer MP3 decoder. And there are lots of people in this board ready to swear that it's quality is better than floating decoders. It's accuracy is considered faultless as well, according to this and this test.

FAAD2 is available in integer mode as well. There are (were?) still some quality issues, but, according to Menno, these are because of bugs. Integerization isn't yet ready, and, when ready, it will comply with MPEG's accuracy standards - I.E: will work as well as floating point FAAD.

Regards;

Roberto.