Note: I copied (and added a couple of things to) this post by me across to this forum from the fb2k forum. It's more relevant here apparently. Sorry for any inconvenience...

I'm new to this forum but I've been reading bits and pieces about musepack, aac and ogg vorbis for a little while and all the information available is a bit.. well, muddy and widespread. I've probably not found the right place to look yet and that's my fault, but I thought some clarification on the pros and cons of the three aforementioned codecs and any other high quality lossy codecs would be welcomed by all, especially consolidating it all into one concise thread.

I've been using vorbis for a few years and its gradually got better and better. I encode at 128kbps because, with my speaker setup, i can't tell the difference between the vorbis file and the cd. Others may well be able to, that's why I'm posting this thread. I've also found that the ogg tags work very well and the support, while still not massive, is growing and has come a long way. Basically I think vorbis is pretty darn good. There are plenty of implementations of it, it's easy to use (even the cli encoder). Tagging works flawlessly. It seems to be all there.

I've been playing with aac and musepack for a few weeks and have found little to no reason to swap. This may be because of my speaker setup, or the awkwardness (so I've found) of the encoders themselves. Anyway, here goes. Bear in mind this is at my personal target bitrate of 128kbps. I may be swayed up to 160kbps if someone comes up with a good enough argument.

Ogg Vorbis
Pros:

-Quite widely supported in cd rippers nowadays. (CDex is very good, fast, has normalisation and everything. LameFE is faster, but no normalisation and it's a bit young if you ask me, needs to mature. EAC is excellent for quality, bit slow when you use the non-burst modes but that's the price you have to pay... )
-Tagging works flawlessly
-No discernible (to me through my speakers, if i had a better set up i may notice something) difference between vorbis and the cd at 128kbps (quality .4)
-Encodes quite quickly now (used to be quite slow)

Cons:
-Not supported throughout, but it's supported by winamp (2.9 is good, 3 is bad), foobar2000 (yey! ), CDex, easy enough to setup in EAC and a whole load of other software.

I can't think of much else, feel free to add to this.

Musepack (used to be mp3pro or mpegplus or something)
Pros:

-Supposed very high quality at 128kbps+ but I can't really comment.
-Reasonably quick encoding

Cons:

-I've found the tagging using the cli in CDex and EAC to be awkward and doesn't always fill out the entire name, i.e. if I try to set the title to "Dream Theater" it will only set it as "Dream" I think this may be a problem with me not using quotes or something. The spaces might screw it up.

Could someone tell me their "optimal quality settings" and explain how to get the tagging working properly please? Then i might switch.

AAC
Pros:

-Again supposedly high quality, especially at lower bitrates (which made me think it may be the codec of choice for me)

Cons:

-Very awkward to use
-I've tried and tried and I cannot get tagging to work at all
-Not very accessible, if you want to try some of the command line encoders, search for "rarewares" on google. (not, that is NOT a warez site) They have the psytel aac encoders and faac as well.
-Slow encoding using certain quality settings. (mpeg 4 LTP is the slow option, or so i've discovered)

Again if someone can tell me how to sort out the tagging and tell me their optimal quality settings (command line or whatever) I would be most grateful.

Sorry for the long post. Thank you very much for your time. I hope this thread is of use to many people. Please add more information about any other codecs and the ones mentioned above so that everyone can benefit from your knowledge and experiences.

Bye for now B)

Please use Search function and read sticky threads, it's all there...

- if the target bitrate is 128kbit/s then vorbis is the one.
- mppenc is very fast.
- normalisation is not a feature that you should look for (search the forums for 'why')


eac@mpc
user defined encoder, ...

command line options example:
MPC@EAC:
--quality 5 --xlevel --ape2 --artist "%a" --title "%t" --album "%g" --releasedate "%y" --track "%n" --genre "%m" --comment "This is a comment" %s %d

uncheck any 'add id3 tags'

thanks smok3. I'll try it out. and thanks for your input too mikeson. I'll have a look through the stickys.

I dunno... I would suggest AAC at 128. But I'll bet they are both transparent to ya anyway, so it's not a big deal.

Well, Ogg Vorbis is transparent to me at Q3/112k in all cases, and in 90% of the cases at Q1/80k.

The FAQ too may feature relevant topics.

Thanks again to all who have had input (pio2001, madizone, torok)

My main concerns are that if I change my speaker setup (which I intend to in the not too distant future) the quality will still be indistinguishable (or very near) to the original CD. Speed isn't too much of a factor I guess. But I now think that musepack is faster than any other encoders i've seen, to my knowledge.

torok: what settings do you use/recommend for aac at 128kbps, which encoder and what settings for tags? Oh and do you have a preferred method of making aacs into mp4s (i use foobar).

One thing i have noticed about making aacs into mp4s is that it makes the file a tiny bit smaller. This puzzled me somewhat as I thought it would add some additional stream information to the file thus making it larger.

That's my piece for the moment.
Thanks again to all.

please never say something like that. MP3pro is 3v|l, just like WMA.

but you are right, MPC was once called mp+.

heh heh, sorry. i was more sure of it being mpegplus as opposed to mp3pro. i remember that was the commercial thing by.... thomson? not that commercial is bad if it's a good product, just when you can get better for free...

check this thread:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=13&t=4735

Lo super

My opinion is that around 128kb/s the 3 formats you are talking about are reasonably similar, with my ears and speakers I can't tell a blind bit of difference between them.

My problem with AAC is the free (Psytel) encoder isn't worked on as far as I know, as the author now works for Ahead improving his codec for them - which now costs the money I don't have! And my problem with MPC is the support is even smaller than for OGG, and I got put off it by ppl's attitudes OGG (Vorbis) isn't going anywhere fast at the moment as the team are busy with more important things, but Garf is doing some interesting work on improving the high bitrates (>160kbs or something) so you might want to look up his work which is just starting

Don't target bitrate, target quality. A proper -q setting will do.
Constant BitRate = Variable Quality.
Constant Quality = Variable BitRate.
Average BitRate = Average Quality.

hello again all,

artemis: i've used the -q settings since they were started i like them. As you say, constant quality = variable bitrate. And I would like to add, what's the point in giving silence 128kbps?

Mac: I'll look up garf in a bit, see what i can find.

Thanks