First off, let me just say that I totally respect all the developers of OGG Vorbis. They have created an amazing codec. It just seems to me that it's hook is disapearing faster than support is being added. I'll explain: Vorbis can encode very nicely at < 100 bitrates. The best, actually. The benifit of this was always that you could put a lot of great-souding music on a 32-meg player. The problem is, when that was really needed there was no support. Now support is very slowly coming in, but it's becoming a moot point just as fast. It seems like by the time Vorbis will be widly supported, 512-meg players will be the only players you can buy. Then what's the point? But I guess the focus is being turned to higher bitrates now, right? So I'm probably not the first to think about this.

I personally wouldn't worry about high compression ratios becoming a moot point - with 96kbps Vorbis you usually have very nice quality and would put a lot of songs on a 512MB player.. why use higher bitrates than 128kbps (with the newer codecs), when you use tiny in-ear headphones ?

Personally I don't wanna have to have two different mp3s of the same tune, one high bitrate for my computer and another low bitrate for my portable. I really think Torok has a point there -- now when the portables come with larger memories/harddrives you really don't need to squeeze down the file size below <100 kbps.

This is the most silly thing I have ever heard.

People always want to fit as much as possible in a given space.(excluding audiophiles of course) So even on 40Gb portable jukeboxes there will still be a demand for high quality low bitrate codecs. Why store 400 albums when you could store 4000 with very little degredation in quality.

Speaking of portables and quality I think it is time to address another issue. Portables will never be able to deliver the quality of a proper home system. Never. You could store uncompressed PCM on it but you might not be able to hear the difference between it and 128Kbps MP3 so what is the point in higher bitrates? In terms of the average person that is. Not the golden ears with 400 dollar headphones.

When it comes to MP3 you are always going to have to keep the original around to make MP3 to fit your needs or keep at least two versions of every tune on hand. With Vorbis you encode to a setting that is transparent to you. And then upload it to a portable peeling off unneeded bitrate(Yes this is still in the future. But it would still be invaluable.).

I don't care if you respect the developers for their efforts. But if you think it is to late for the codec then you have no real idea what these efforts were put forth for. Vorbis was not meant as a codec strictly for portable players. It was also meant to be streamed over networks. And more importantly it is meant to replace proprietary license encumbered formats. So it will never be to late for Vorbis. The question is why was it not done sooner!

Oh and there are people here who are tuning Vorbis for high bitrates if you just have to have them. And it is 100% compatable. The future of Vorbis is still brilliant. Game developers are using it more and more. Every month there is some new device portable or otherwise supporting or beginning support of it. It is unbeatable for streaming radio. It has done in 2 years what it took MP3 almost 15 to do. Not at all shabby.

What's so bad about keeping a high bitrate and a low bitrate for two completely separate situations?

Just because something is "good enough" is an illogical argument. Why do we continue to develop car technology? Because we desire more power, flexibility, and efficiency from our vehicles. The same is true of most technologies. Good enough for what? For portable use? There are many other factors that determine "good". Space efficiency is a huge point not just in the portable space.

Another use is that bands and other music oriented websites pay a pretty penny for their bandwidth and space. When you cut the storage required to archive music, you will save money on both hosting space required and bandwidth needed.

The only capital required is for the development of decoding hardware other than this, vorbis will be very economical in the long run.

I take it, you're not often hearing silly things?
Tom.

No. I follow many anti-war threads so I hear silly things on a regular basis. But this is the silliest in a while. Granted all anyone has heard about lately was portables. But Vorbis etc is soooooooooo much more than portables.

I don't like the argument that you need less quality in a portable. Most people listen to their portables with very nice headphones. Good headphones usually sound better than most stereo systems.

And it's all about the killer app. That's all I'm saying. Didn't mean to piss people off.

Good headphones can help. But how many people have "good" headphones and how many have the ones the player came with and the ones from Walmart or Kamrt? And I still have to question if a 400 dollar set of headphones make a 200 dollar player sound like a 300 dollar sterio and then if it was all worth it in the end. Point is that most people don't and really could not care. And that honestly is who Vorbis and friends is made for. Most people. It is not currently aimed at but could eventually be tuned for audiophile persuits. But audiophiles are not most people. So the question "Is it to late for vorbis" is silly. A real question will be will the audiophiles have any significant adoption of the format.

MP3 is good enough for "most people" already. If anything will replace mp3 it will be mp4, which is superior to vorbis anyway. A $200 headphone can sound as good as if not better than a $1,000+ home system easily, by the way. I really feel that that vorbis lacks a niche, maybe except for the open source zealots.

*coughs*

er, it's barely been around 10 years. my oldest MP3s date back to 96, so i'd peg that around 94, 95 was when i was playing around with the beta of L3Enc/L3Dec someone sent me to convert some anime tunes from MP3 to WAV. 93 at the earliest.

heh ... cute nabeshin avatar

I feel it lacks a niche in this forum, definately. But its a big wide world out there.


Mr. Cliche

So, it's trying to replace MP3 only for those people out there who don't care and for whom MP3 is just fine?

And besides, most people who can't tell, want to THINK they can tell. That's why people buy $300 computer speakers. They can't hear any difference, but they like the idea that there should be a difference. The same thing could become true of MPC or AAC. Maybe people won't hear the quality, but if it's marketed as high quality, people will prefer it anyway.

There's another thing too. I don't know about you guys, but I don't really like having every song I own on a portable. I'd much rather just have a hundred or so, hand picked. Then in a month, throw on a different subset. Maybe I'm the only one who does this, though.

No, you're not the only one. My entire collection would not fit on ANY portable, so it's pointless to even try.

I have probably half of my collection encoded and stored on an IDE RAID setup. From that, I copy what I want to listen to that week to a couple of flash cards. I also have the MP3/CDR thingy in my car.

Yes, that sounds about right. I also started with l3enc/l3dec but several years later in Jan. 1997. That said, a few words on the thread topic. Because it was the first to popularize internet audio, mp3 keeps a firm grip on its position as the audio format of choice. Nevertheless, if you take this site as an example, there will always be a market for competing codecs. So, don't count ogg, or any of the others, out just yet.

Later.

I see so Vorbis is no good at helping to reduce development and licensing costs for game development. Just as it is somehow crap for low bandwidth internet radio and relieving MP3 royalty dues. Please don't be so blind. There are many things that Vorbis has and can do that no current format and even those in the near future can do. Vorbis is not a one trick pony as many of you want it to be. Get that clear. It is not just for portables. Also I don't know where you get MP4 being superior to Vorbis either. MP4 is a container format and Vorbis is an auidio codec. So how is it better? If you meant AAC then you are wrong. AAC performs better than MP3 at the same bitrates. But even now for the lower end 96Kbps IMHO Vorbis is a good deal better. IIRC in ff123's test even if it is a bit outdated shows AAC at low bitrates scored even lower than WMA8!!!!!!! AAC+ has a possibility of being as good and maybe better. But IIRC there are no AAC+ codecs currently in userspace and most definately no portables. If you want to argue about the official vorbis's encoder's high frequency high bitrate problems then you have to look no further than that audio guru Garf and his GT3 version.

Vorbis is licensing and royalty free. Avalible to anyone who wants to use it at no cost under a BSD license. There is no other similar audio codec period that can say that. It performs excelently at low bitrates. It's right up there with the big boys. It has a massive amount of room for more tuning and it is already fairly well tuned. It has a well documented flexible tagging system. Not some MP3 ID3 fud. You can easily keep a whole album as a single OGG file yet skip back and forth in the track list as if it were multiple files. Name one other format that has that in the specs or can do it natively. It also will support peeling. Which means that you only need to encode it once and you can spit out a version of it at any bitrate you require that is lower than the files bitrate itself with out needing to re-encode.

Gimme specifics. How is it to late for Vorbis and what do you think it is lacking?

I was speaking more of MPEG1. Yes you are correct that MP3 was aproximatly 92/93. That was when I first started playing with it. MPEG1 though was easily mid/late 80's. Still Vorbis's adoption is light years faster than MP3. You might say that MP3 paved they way which is partly true. But that still does not detract from the impressive speed at which vorbis has spread.

Well, for one, no one I know in RL knows about vorbis, yet is there anyone who doesn't know about mp3? I saw ogg files in a few games, I don't think that's something big to be excited about. It might be good at lower bitrates, but I haven't seen any decent radios using vorbis yet, as opposed to the thousands of radios using shoutcast. I choose a radio to listen according to what they play, not what codec they use. The problem is vorbis doesn't do anything well enough for people to change. MP3 may be outdated, but it is not bad at all and good enough for most cases. I use MPC for home use as it is simply the best sounding and fastest codec and I use mp3 if I want to send a song to a friend.

There's no mp3 licensing fee as far as most people are concerned. This might only be a problem for game developers.

Vorbis is too late because none of the qualities of vorbis are THAT better than mp3 to warrant a change. MPC, for example has a very clear cut niche and even if it has a very low number of users it is still highly useful for those who use it. MP3 has 99.999% of the market share and I don't see this changing anytime in the next 10+ years.. Maybe vorbis might spread in the net radio community, but that's it I guess.

Vorbis is of course better than mp3 (like most everything is..) yet not so much better that everybody will want to change.. I think we are approaching (or already there) a point in audio coding where we get diminishing returns for all the extra efforts. Unless a major breakthrough is made (i.e. mpc --standard quality at 64-96kbps), all that is done is fine tuning for now.

Personally I could give a rats ass about what's popular or what the bandwagon is. I live by what is best. And in the low bitrate encoding market, vorbis wins. Some electronica music even scales lower than 64kbit with barely noticable perceivable loss (Aphex Twin - Weathered Stone comes to mind). You people can live with 128 CBR mp3 if you like, i'm not one to stop you, but i'll live just fine with more efficient use of my space. Don't forget my above post concerning internet bandwidth and webhosting.

I agree with you 100% except ogg Vorbis is patent free which means it's 100% free for users, & artist which I think was what it's aim was.
This is what I think of for each format ,
-ogg, free
-mpc, quality
-mp3, popularity which means compatibility, software, hardware, file trading

Thats one song! Granted, it probably does, but on the whole, AFX will bloat the bitrate of any codec, and with good reason

9 out of 10 people I deal with on any given day don't know what MP3 is and either don't own a computer or know so little they almost may as well not. That is very true for most people. Some may have heard of MP3 in the Media but they would be hard pressed to tell you exactly what it is. But they will tell you it is causing the recording industry to loose billions a year.



Why not? The average game development cycle is about two years. The fact that several games were released that used Vorbis before it reached 1.0 speaks volumes. That means these guys had their eyes on vorbis for over two years and long before the first viable encoders were released!!! That is borderline obsessed if I ever heard it. Why not just do the 22Khz Mono MP3 as is traditionally done and forget Vorbis? The current games that Use Vorbis are too numerous to count on both hands. Throw in your toes and I think you might still run out. All this and 1.0 is not quite a year old! WOW! And if recent game developer conferences are any indication the future number of games using Vorbis will be nothing to sneeze at and may even soon outnumber those using MP3 and others! What's not to get excited about?



Just because you have not really looked does not mean they don't exist. I have found many many of them.



Fair enough. But you forgot a very important figure. The quality of the stream. It's a fact. With Vorbis you can easily have a much higher quality streem with the same bandwidth as MP3.



R-O-T-F-L-M-A-O-!-!-!-!-!-!-!-!-! Ok it is now quite obvious you have not been paying attention after all.



MP3 can be adequate. And it panders to compatability nuts who are obsessed with the current defacto. But why do good enough when you could do quite a bit better?



Please it hurts make it stop! Must stop laughing! MUST STOP! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Seriously now. Have you really looked or are you blind guessing. The fact is that if what you said was anything other than a blind uneducated guess then you missinformation campaign could be seen as dispicable. There is a fee for every encoder produced. If the company which you *cough* bought your MP3 encoder from did not pay the royalties and neither did you then you have broken the law. If the company you got you MP3 decoder from did not pay licensing fees and neither did you again you have broken the law. There is also a fee per track encoded IIRC and does not discriminate between artist and home user. In other words you are breaking the law. There is also a fee for every song streamed in the format. Even if it is home made music all those shoutcasters are breaking the law.



Please tell me when your standup act comes to my town. I have not had such a good laugh in a looooong looooong while. If MPC has a very "clear" "niche" then Vorbis sure as hell does. MPC is definitively better than MP3 at about 160Kbps and up. Vorbis is pretty much always better than MP3 for the most part and is generally better than MPC from 160kbps and below. What defines a "niche" to you? Only codecs which you like for no good reason are the only ones who deserve "niche" status and everything else is just crap eh?



Dude it is already changing and will continue to do so. And just so you know your "niche" codec MPC has next to no chance of making it to any commercial portable platform let alone several. On the other hand that non "niche" codec vorbis not only has but is continuing to be added to portables and being developed for more still.



Just like a 1080P Plasma HDTV and digital HDTV broadcasts are not worth upgrading to if you are nuts. Frankly I would love to have them. But two things stop me and one of them is MP3's only lifeline. I don't have any 1080p material and in fact I just recently bought a new 480i system. So you would also agree that people desperatly clinging to VHS do so simply because DVD is in reality no better than VHS. Right? People who just bought an MP3 portable are not going to do much upgrading for a few years. Otherwise what was the use and real value of their purchase. Vorbis is difinitively better than MP3. It's only going to take another year or so before MP3 aught to start fealing the pinch on it's market share. MP3 will be replaced before 5 years is up let alone 10.

You have no set rules as to what is required to have "niche" status other than you like it. In the end Vorbis has a very clear "niche". The fact that you ignore it will not make it go away. Seriously look at all the efforts underway to use Vorbis and friends in a myriad of ways. Then ask yourself why not that many people are scrambling to develop for MP3

Nobody has declined that Vorbis is much superior to MP3 technically. But what gives Vorbis a hard time is the fact that the general public doesn't know a thing about all this, or just doesn't care - 64kbps WMA streaming is fine for most people, 128kbps MP3 is fine for them to store their music, and since they don't have to pay for LAME or MusicMatch or <insert mainstream ripper/encoder app here>, they're happy. Probably <1% of all MP3 users are aware of the fact that the format is not "free".

BTW, Thorns was also speaking of the general public - you might have realised that he himself does actually know about the licensing issues etc. There was absolutely no need to take such an arrogant approach to his post.


Oh, another thing:



Bitrate peeling is not intended for reducing the bitrate by a large amount. There's an interesting explanation of this by Frank Klemm on Benjamin's website - unfortunately, it's German and I'm too lazy to translate it ATM (the thought of creeping into bed in 10 minutes is too appealing ). Basically, it states that a typical application of bitrate peeling could be realtime "stripping" of the bitrate by small amounts in online broadcasting, to match certain connection speeds or to compensate for instable connections. For example, if you're targetting a 128kbps connection, you encode at 112kbps and broadcast various streams peeled down to 96 and 80kbps.

What mystifies me about vorbis is this:

Why when they set out to make vorbis didn't hey aim for a codec which
will be superior to mp3 everywhere, I mean both at low and high bitrates?
Surely it does extremely well at 64~160 kbps which makes it ideal for
streaming, portables and low bitrate files, but what about archiving?
If I used vorbis I'd go for -q 6 where the lossless stereo coupling sets in,
but at those bitrates mp3 (perhaps) and mpc (definitely) are better choices
so what's the point? Of course someone might say "Hey man, if u don't care
about streaming or portables buzz off!", but nonetheless I would like to know
why the developers of vorbis didn't make a codec which would whip mp3's ass
at any bitrate...

I've seen that to not be true.

I don't know if it is true or not, Vorbis not being as good as MP3 at higher bitrates, but Vorbis has done better for me at high bitrates than MP3. On my music it's unnoticeable in most cases, just the few parts of some songs where MP3 doesn't satisfy me. Yet Ogg Vorbis does(-q8, even lower in many cases). On test clips, where it's easier, worst case scenarios for Ogg Vorbis, did better on Vorbis than MP3, and a few beat 320k MP3s in terms of closest to the WAV at -q7(c44).

Edit; I would like to hear some more on that, it confuses me.

Did you miss where I said that the general public does not even know about MP3? Because they don't. I deal with these people quite often and I can not quote you the number of times I have been in electronics stores etc and seen people looking at DVD players saying things like "What is MP3", "What is S/VCD". People still cling to VHS here. I hear complaints that almost no one is carying audio cassets either. This ain't la la land and it sure as heck is not silicone valley/alley. We are talking honest to god general public. Perhaps even back woods general public. Y'know I would like to see a comprehensive studdy done on this. Because people really over estimate the general public and really underestimate those who are more than casual computer users.




Who is he? How does he know about licensing issues and not know of -> http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/index.html Granted they really are not enforced to the extent they could be. And let me tell you there is no way to get a legal lame binary outside of MMJB IIRC and compiling your own. The lame dev crew DO NOT pay the required fees. And IIRC neither does the EAC dev, CDeX dev, or <insert mainstream ripper/encoder app here>. Ignorance may be bliss but that is one thing I would at least rather know and so should the public. Because they do pay for it in the end.



Well I did not make a claim at bitrates and did say this was a future option. But roughly a 30% drop in file size is still nothing to sneeze at. If that range held true for all then it is a 32kbps drop which is still significant. Still an interesting link though. I will have to give it a read.

Well almost anybody on the internet knows about mp3. Just ask the millions of users using Kazaa et al. Damn, even my father knows about them. Your analogy with HDTV is simply wrong, where the quality difference is quite apparent. Nobody cares about sound quality except audio enthusiasts, which represents a very small percentage.

The only way I see it gaining acceptance is through radio streams, because in that bitrate range there is quite a bit of a noticable difference. BTW I'm not saying ogg is worthless, I already said it is superior to MP3, but I remember a lot of superior technologies that went nowhere.. I wish the net radio I listen would switch to ogg, but it doesn't seem that it will happen anytime soon. I just think there is no way it can succeed/replace MP3.

Sure but what is your alternative then.....you tell me what the market wants. Saying vorbis is redundant because new players are coming out seems a little premature to me. Still does a helluva job on a streaming server. I wonder what you think might be the new and almightier codec then for your philosophy?

*sigh*. I know that, and so does Thorns. All I/we were saying was that the general public doesn't know anything about those licensing issues - consequently, Vorbis being Free isn't much of an advantage for them, and one heavy argument less for them to switch to Vorbis.




It should, but I can assure you 99% of the people out there do not.




Bollocks. FhG no longer is after MP3 unlicensed encoder binaries, as the LAME devs have pointed out several times. Theoretically they could sue anyone using or distributing them, but MP3 just isn't important enough to them any longer for that to be feasable. (It's a completely different story with AAC though, ask Roberto )

It's a pity, actually. I really wish they tried to pull stunts like that, or something like this MP3 decoder license fee that was in the news a few months ago, which unfortunately turned out to be a hoax - that would make sure lots of people realized Vorbis' "big strength".


I think you're both exaggerating a little, Neo Neko and Thorns. The truth, as always, probably is somewhere in the middle - right now, Vorbis does indeed stand little a chance of being widely accepted by the general public (or even a small part of that), but as soon as hardware support proliferates, that will change gradually. The situation isn't as bad as Thorns describes it, but not as bright as Neo Neko wants us to believe, either.

Aaaah yes and the several million people on the internet world wide are a large percentage of the sveral billion people in the world how? Hell even if all of them were in the US alone wold that be a significan't part of the US population? And please don't get me started on what i think of Kazaa and it's users. Especially those that use the official Kazaa installer.




You honestly expect me to believe that? I can think of a great many 128Kbps MP3 that even a 5 year old could ABX form the original. And at the same bitrate on them Vorbis does quite a bit better IMO. And in several other's oppinions as well. So you are saying there is no noticable diference as in HDTV? I'll give you the difference is not as great. But it is most definatly there for anyone who cares to hear it. Not just audiophiles.



Then start your own. I have been doing it off and mostly on for the larger part of 4 years. I jumped on OGG as soon as there was something viable.



With fans like you Vorbis does not need nay sayers. Something is gonna succeed MP3. It's a fact. And what would you rather it be? An open format that caters to the users needs and wants. Or a closed proprietary format that caters to a companies bottom line. You better believe me when I say that once they have you by the you know what their negotiations with you are over. With Vorbis Monty and the guys may not get around to addressing what you feal needs to be addressed in what you considder a timely manner. But since the format is out there you can address it. When was the last time someone not working at Microsoft or one of their partners made a tuning adjustment to WMA to compensate for it's flaws over the years? Never. Hell even if Vorbis was not "technically" better than MP3 I think I would still support it if only for the ideal behind it. Maybe not to the same extent. But I would still be a fan. Vorbis's only problem is that it does not have a monopoly to buy it's way everywhere or a defacto standard for everyone to comply with. Vorbis has to make it on it's own merits. As such I think it has and is earning it. All these people all over the internet you claim only know about MP3, tell them when you talk to them about Vorbis. When you swap songs with a friend slip in a Vorbis. Xiphophorus does not have the funds to put on a prime time infomercial like Microsoft did. They are counting on you. Tell people what to listen for and they "WILL" hear it. I guarontee you. Unless they are deaf or hard of hearing they will hear it. Heck turn op grandad's hearing aid just so he can hear it.

Hey ho don't get me wrong. Where did I ever claim it was all sunshine and daisys. You want the truth? It sure as hell is an uphill battle. But a battle I think is worth while.

To late for vorbis? I think not. How then would you explain the interests expressed by all those who are not Microsoft, in bed with Microsoft, or tied in someway to MP3 or MP3-PRO formats? There is definatly a market and niche for Vorbis.

Seriously, you are really too optimistic. I'm only talking about my age class here but I guess it could just as well apply to most of the "general public". When I'm at schoolmates' places and they play their artifact-ridden 128kbps MP3 stuff (the sound is often so unbelievably garbled, it just *hurts* to listen to it), I often comment on it. Here's what I get:

- most people: "What's wrong with it?" or "As long as you can still hear the music, what's wrong with it?"
- one guy: "Oh come on, there's nothing wrong with it. Your ears are too good."
- another guy: "Yeah, I know, but I don't give a shit. Who does anyway, except those 5 people in the world with weird ears like you."
- another guy: "Yeah, you're right actually. Gotta re-download that file."

The most extreme case I've ever seen was this: One girl was seriously listening to her music with *all* Winamp EQ sliders, including the Pre-Amp, turned up *full*. She did notice there was something not right, but it didn't bother her enough to try to do somthing about it. (Try it for yourself - it sounds bad enough if you turn just the EQ controls up, but also turning up the pre-amp results in just... pathetic sound.)

Or this: At a badly organised party a year ago, we had to put up with a low-powered FM/CD "kitchen radio" type unit, which had to be turned up full to achieve an acceptable volume level, and therefore distorted *horribly*. I commented on that, and one guy, among the many rocking wildly to the horrible metal music that was playing, seriously said "Why, that's cool, it's more fun that way!".

With people being as insensitive as this and sometimes even preferring totally FUBAR'ed sound (although those last two examples are hardly representative of the general public - people can't be that dumb), how are you going to convince them of something better than MP3?

I would say it is not about quality. It is more about tools and support.

I have tried several times to setup a radio station with ogg output for my own pleasure (This means, not for general public), and found it to be more complicated than an mp3 stream.
I know there is icecast, but the shoutcast winamp plugin is easier to setup. I don't know of other tools (maybe there are more for unix/linux)
Also, when targetting 56kbps modems (which usually, you want a max kbps of 32), vorbis is not that much superior (it is, but not by a big degree).

In the end, I would say that to pump the format more on the mainstream in internet, there's the need of both, users pushing their favorite radiostations to broadcast with it, AND a tutorial, or wizard-like tool to setup the streams. It is not necesarily that xiph.org does it, but someone should.

I have a 256/128 ADSL, so hearing a 128 (or even 192) radiostation is not a problem for me, but sometimes I look for "hearable" 56..96kbps streams just to have more bandwidth avaiable for other purposes. In this case is where ogg would be more than welcome to me. wma is more or less doing the work, but the 64kbps stream (even the VBR counterpart!) is simply not good.

(Asside from the current discussion) you are so right Volcano!

There are actually millions of people in the world who are really sensitive to audio quality. But they are swamped by the billions who aren't!


And the peer group/marketing pressure (even with adults) shouldn't be under estimated - a lot of those who really can hear artefacts and hate them don't dare complain or speak up because most of their mates (or adverts they've read/heard) tell them that WMA @ 48kbps is CD quality - you must be a FREAK if you hear otherwise.

Welcome to the FREAK's club

Cheers,
David.

P.S. I have this argument/discussion all the time. See
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&...ting.google.com
from the second quote onwards.

Oddcast does what you are looking for. It's a DSP plugin for Winamp and now for FB2K as well (yay ).

Come to a New York public high school pal

I can't really notice a difference in 128k MP3s unless I try to or listen closely while relaxing sitting still, etc. If I don't try, I can't hear it and it doesn't bother me, and it sounds good to me. Although, I do have songs in my collection where 320k is easily ABXable up to */30, but I can't really tell, I just hear it differently, I can't exactly put my finger on what's wrong with it, yet the guitar just sounds a bit distorted. Yet my hearing specs are quite different than what MP3/Vorbis/AAC/MPC developers would consider 'normal' for choosing what's audible and inaudible, so I don't really know anymore.



This has to be an exxageration. What exactly are you listening to it on? It can't be that bad. Only 80k, 96k tops, actually hurts to listen to. Unless you switch back fast between the original and the MP3, it can't be that bad unless it's below 100k.



Exactly!

Does anyone else have an answer to this?

The aim wasn't to make the best codec, but a codec which didn't require paying licences for it. They could still make a noticeably good codec so it's not to diminish the work of the developers.

Just the other way around, there is MPC, best codec with acceptable kbps and transparency, without worrying about the technologies used.

Another thing I've thought off: Vorbis's high compression does come at a cost. Vorbis is the most intensive to decode. If space is not a problem, then you might as well use LAME in your portable and get more battery life.

Neo Neko:


I think you should leave this discussion to the adults.

P.S. Quote's busted.

Interesting discussion (even though it's the type we've seen a million times before ), thanks.




Heh. You haven't heard any *really* badly encoded 128kbps MP3s yet, I think I'll try to provide you with a sample.




You mean, does anybody else agree that high-bitrate Vorbis is not nearly always beaten by high-bitrate MP3? I do, sort of. Or put it that way, I certainly do NOT agree with the common opinion that there's no point in using high-bitrate Vorbis.

I have never tested the samples on which Vorbis supposedly is inferior to MP3 at the same bitrate, but on the music I encode, I have in most cases never had non-transparent results from either codec (using --aps with LAME and -q 6 with Vorbis 1.0). One sample comes to my mind on which Vorbis was transparent while --aps was not (taking.wav), but that's about it. They're equally good for my type of music, speaking of sound quality alone. If you take into account all the features Vorbis has but MP3 does not, Vorbis is the sure winner of course.

Hmmmmmm. And who are you to speak. Please excuse my ammusement at either their ignorance or blatant disregard for the facts. MP3 licencing does exist. Even if you choose to ignore it you are in violation. Live with it. Or at least say something more usefull. :|

The most what intensive? Vorbis uses less CPU to decode on an ARM.

Okay, so Vorbis takes a bit more memory to decode, but it shouldn't take more power overall. (The old decoder used to take a lot more RAM. Check out Tremor-lowmem-branch from CVS: Monty has put a lot of work into reducing the memory footprint of Vorbis in the last couple of weeks).

I have heard clips like c44 ping pong thing and others where it can be annoying(that vorbis did better on at every bitrate), but I was thinking actual music, I haven't heard any yet that at 128k was irritating(ABXable yes, but actually annoying? On a cheap stereo system? What is?)

Also, why is it always -q6 vs --alt preset standard? In every song I've ever encoded, --alt preset standard has been bigger than -q7, so I really see that as an unfair comparison, and when I used to RAR my albums together at best(issue with 20 GB hard drive), the --alt preset standards would be bigger than the same album in -q7.

Average people can hear flaws in 128Kbps MP3 music and unless they are just going to overdrive it to distortion at a party anyway or just thump the back of their car to pieces with bass they will care. I have converted several people to Vorbis for PC use alone pointing out things like that. The most recent was a guitar player for a local so called punk/alternative band. He brought in a CD and was playing a song they wrote off it. Something of an ode to mullets. Anyhow 20 seconds into the track I asked him if he had burned them form MP3s. He looked at me all bug eyed and said yes. Then I asked him if he had encoded the original file at 128Kbps. He was really quiet for a while till he finally said yes and asked me how the hell I knew. After I finished with the ubiquitous story about how most people who use MP3 do I told him how I knew I pointed out the swishyness on the cymbals and a bit of hissing and over bright on the guitars. I am sure there was more but I don't have golden ears. Anyhow once I pointed them out he could clearly hear them and lost a large bit of enjoyment from the CD. Needless to say he was back a week later with a CD done from the master recording and no MP3 inbetween. He was much happier and said he had tried Vorbis and was quite a bit happier at that bitrate with it. So for every person that does not care there is someone who will and even cases where those who don't will. It will only ever be to late for vorbis if we let it be. You can't ascribe to the notion that it is impossible to replace MP3. Because it is possible and it is going to happen. Pretty much everyone here agrees that Vorbis beats MP3 at any bitrate. But there is no technical reason for it to be to late for vorbis. Only it would seem political and personal reasons. Reasons which hold no real weight.

I wouldn't discount the quality of "tiny in-ear headphones". Several of the Sony Fontopia earbud models (example: MDR-EX51LP) give you 6Hz-23KHz frequency response. And they sound absolutely fantastic.

So? The portables they're used in only support 20hz to 20000KHz anyway

And Neo Neko; same here! It was some joe satriani stuff from the album surfing with the alien that I was telling the difference on. Yet I wouldn't hear crap if I didn't hear the WAV first...

6 Hz from headphones! Earbuds no less!

Another question is have we even seen half the innovation on audio hardware. Check out wired magazine, on prototype devices yet to hit the scene. We are merely in a premature stage of this technology where it seems only money is the distinguishing factor. Once people have these devices on a mass scale, the companies then need to develop products to make the consumers replace existing ones.

The big deal about it being in the video game you seen, prolly saved you a couple bucks off the sticker price. The average user really doesn't give a horse's ass what format the sound for the game is in. Now if you told that same average person it was encoded with vorbis and he saved a couple bucks, he would probably say something simple like "Right on".

This is actually where vorbis keeps evolving, and the mp3 format hits a dead end. The single thing that holds technology back is ourselves. We are not willing to drop our current routines because we couldn't be bothered. Compare vorbis to say the wheel. What good is the wheel without it being applied in conjunction with something else...ie wheelbarrow. Vorbis is flexible and it is innovative, its day in the sun is coming don't you worry about that.

Afterall we don't use steam engines in trains anymore, but holy hell they were a good stepping stone weren't they. Become a leader instead of a follower, because quite honestly a couple of people posting on this thread seem like they are being lead to the trough. If you honestly think mp3 is paving any kind of way for the future, then I encourage you to stick with the proprietary format and I will wave hello on my way by.

Well, that's true actually - but Vorbis -q 6 and --aps have both been widely accepted as the quality levels at which transparency is expected, and both settings target the same average bitrate range (~192 kbit/s). So, IMHO, it is a fair comparison after all.




Third attempt... You still don't believe me, do you. I tell you, that was a lucky case you had there. Most people aren't like that. Since I'm often asked to fix peoples' messed up PCs, I have seen loads of "MP3 collections" - 99% of them are total crap, and in 99% of all cases, people don't even notice it.