What's so special about .ogg?

[YourSurrogateGod]

Ok, I don't want to start a flame-war, but what's so great about the .ogg file format? I've heard a number of people talk about it and I don't understand what's the big deal. .mp3 is fine...

[erikpiper]

I may be wrong, but mp3 is a closed format. ($$$$) Oog is open and free- no liscensing.

[Wolki]

Ok, I don't want to start a flame-war, but what's so great about the .ogg file format? I've heard a number of people talk about it and I don't understand what's the big deal. .mp3 is fine...

1. It's free and not patent-encumbered. This is true for all ogg media, not only Vorbis but also Theora, Speex and FLAC. (especially FLAC is becoming very popular)
2. It (meaning Vorbis) is about as good as mp3. Some people will argue it's better and you need less bitrate for the same quality, others say it's not; but it's at least comparable.

[poofyhairguy]

Ok, I don't want to start a flame-war, but what's so great about the .ogg file format? I've heard a number of people talk about it and I don't understand what's the big deal. .mp3 is fine...


You don't have to pay money to use oggs. For Ubuntu to have a legal MP3 player, it would cost $60,000. Thats why oggs are better.

[primeirocrime]

I may be mad, but I find ogg to be better in quality if we compare similar bitrates. Well in my Studiophile speakers I can tell the diference, in regular desktop speakers it amounts to nothing the diference.

And yeah it's open format, no licence schemes here.

the same doubt could be placed in why the *.odt and *.abw formats and not keep using *.doc or *.rtf? They are closed, and we are for FOSS. [me and my imaginary friends]

[drogoh]

http://www.xiph.org/about/

Xiph explains a good bit there, check it out.

[drogoh]

I may be mad, but I find ogg to be better in quality if we compare similar bitrates. Well in my Studiophile speakers I can tell the diference, in regular desktop speakers it amounts to nothing the diference.


Well I've noticed a big difference in bitrates when it comes to streaming. I used to listen to a chemlab.org stream (if anyone remembers it) and they originally were using MP3. Well bandwidth skyrocketed so they switched to Ogg for the sake of keeping their prices down. A side effect was that they could effectively reduce the bitrate farther than the MP3 streams and still retain a superior sound.

[BWF89]

An OGG file is smaller than an MP3 file of the same song.

[darkmatter]

An OGG file is smaller than an MP3 file of the same song.

Yes it is. A LOT smaller.

The fact that it is an open standard combined with it's superior compression is why many users (like myself) prefer .ogg

[primeirocrime]

well, there you go. I'm not going mad after all. It's just like cheesecake.

[GazaM]

I have recently done a few ogg vorbis - mp3 comparisons... I first got flac (lossless) versions of a few songs and then encoded them to ogg vorbis at 64kbps and mp3 at 64kbps (using vbr which made it more equal as vorbis automatically uses vbr) and I noticed a huge difference in quality, ogg vorbis is the clear winner at low bitrates and I could hardly tell the difference between the ogg at 64kbps and the original flac. Although when you get to bitrates of 128kbps and higher the difference between vorbis and mp3 is indistinguishible... but the fact that vorbis is Open Source makes it a clear winner in my books in any case.

[YourSurrogateGod]

You don't have to pay money to use oggs. For Ubuntu to have a legal MP3 player, it would cost $60,000. Thats why oggs are better.
Thanks.

[Buffalo Soldier]

Refering to "Harvey Danger is releasing their album for free (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=73242)" thread.

You can dowload the album in both MP3 and OGG formats.
http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

[Ibuntu_52]

I prefer ogg too mp3 just because it's open source.

This is my favorite audio codec:http://www.m4a.com/

The quality and compression is better than mp3 and it's open-sourced.

[Wolki]

This is my favorite audio codec:http://www.m4a.com/

The quality and compression is better than mp3 and it's open-sourced.

Open sourced code may exist, but it does for mp3 as well. m4a with aac is certainly not Free: http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/license.terms.html

[izmaelis]

OGG Vorbis is better and cheaper then mp3, but most of portable audio players (Muvo, iPod etc.) support only mp3 and wma. Why is that?

[Luke Redpath]

Because only a small minority use ogg.

[graabein]

OGG Vorbis is better and cheaper then mp3, but most of portable audio players (Muvo, iPod etc.) support only mp3 and wma. Why is that?

Beats me but that's why I'm still using mp3...

[tom-ubuntu]

MP3 is an old format which is very popular and spread everywhere. Normal average user just no the term "MP3" for digitalformated music, they have no clue about the codec itself; they are also not interested in it. They don't care about licence, as long as they can play it on their ipod or whatever.

My favorite to archive my albums is definiteally FLAC. I reencoded everything to this. All the lossy content will be deleted, except a few rarities (?) like live mixes which are not available in another format anymore. And also taperips, wich are not worth in storing in FLAC codec.

[GeneralZod]

Because only a small minority use ogg.

This, plus .ogg is apparently more computationally intensive to decode than MP3, leading to reduced battery life.

Or at least, so I've heard :)

[Declan]

Does anyone use *.shn at all?
There's a lot of stuff in *.shn that I like to listen to, but so far only xmms has a *.shn plugin.

(For those who don't know, *.shn is a lossless compression format. I don't think it's open source, but it is free inasmuch as you don't pay for it.).

Declan

[tom-ubuntu]

Does anyone use *.shn at all?
There's a lot of stuff in *.shn that I like to listen to, but so far only xmms has a *.shn plugin.

(For those who don't know, *.shn is a lossless compression format. I don't think it's open source, but it is free inasmuch as you don't pay for it.).

Declan
Never used or even saw this format on stuff I am interested in. But heared about it. I just know Monkeys Ape Codec (or whatever it is called correctly) and FLAC as lossless format. I convert everything to FLAC anyway. Don't like to have a lot of different codecs.

[Stormy Eyes]

Ok, I don't want to start a flame-war, but what's so great about the .ogg file format? I've heard a number of people talk about it and I don't understand what's the big deal. .mp3 is fine...

ID3 tags in MP3 stink. They have limits on length, and don't support heavy metal umlauts. And they only seem to support English, too. With Ogg Vorbis, if I have a track whose title is rendered in both English and Japanese (like tracks from The Black Mages), I can have them both in my Ogg file. MP3 can't handle that.

/is picky about his music file tags.

[gflores]

You don't have to pay money to use oggs. For Ubuntu to have a legal MP3 player, it would cost $60,000. Thats why oggs are better.

Is that $60,000 per year, per developer or what? If it didn't cost anything, would it still be in Ubuntu, considering it's not free (as in speech)?

[BWF89]

Is that $60,000 per year, per developer or what? If it didn't cost anything, would it still be in Ubuntu, considering it's not free (as in speech)?
The licence to have a media player that can decode MP3's is 0.70 US Dollars.

[Sirin]

OGG Vorbis is better and cheaper then mp3, but most of portable audio players (Muvo, iPod etc.) support only mp3 and wma. Why is that?

iPod definitely can't play WMA, but it can play MP4-AAC. :D

[Wolki]

Is that $60,000 per year, per developer or what? If it didn't cost anything, would it still be in Ubuntu, considering it's not free (as in speech)?

look here:
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

[polo_step]

This, plus .ogg is apparently more computationally intensive to decode than MP3, leading to reduced battery life.

Or at least, so I've heard :)
That's really interesting.

If you see something for sure about that anywhere, be sure to pass along the link.

I was downloading something in .ogg format and had a terrible time getting a player to work with it, but after trying a few hopeless tinker-traps, I finally got one that worked right the first time (the essential Linux experience).

I was curious why there was a need for this format, so I learned something here today.

That's good. :)

[gflores]

look here:
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

Wow, that's a lot. Those mp3 guys must be rich.

[mravik]

An OGG file is smaller than an MP3 file of the same song.

You are wrong!

An ogg-file and mp3-file with the same bitrate (CBR) have almost the same size. Minor differences may result, if you encode them with VBR what means that the file is encoded with an "average bitrate".

The main differences between mp3 and ogg are the following:

mp3: closed source, very good hardware support
ogg: open source, compared to mp3 much better quality at lower bitrates!

If you are looking for quality, go for FLAC. Its a lossless codec. The main disadvantage for a lot of users is the file size. Its just about 50% of a wav-file.

The "best" lossy codec for music is Musepack (http://musepack.net/), if you want your music to be as close to the original as possible. Better than ogg and mp3 and open source, too! It works extremely well with standard presets that will give you bitrates around 160-190kbps.

...and with EasyTag one may tag everything that is taggable. ;-)

For further information check www.hydrogenaudio.com (engl.) or www.audiohq.de (german only)

[FISHERMAN]

The "best" lossy codec for music is Musepack (http://musepack.net/), if you want your music to be as close to the original as possible. Better than ogg and mp3 and open source, too! It works extremely well with standard presets that will give you bitrates around 160-190kbps.
I don't know much about musepack, but I'm pretty sure it's support from MP3-players will be even worse than ogg vorbis.

[mravik]

I don't know much about musepack, but I'm pretty sure it's support from MP3-players will be even worse than ogg vorbis.

Thats right. But you could choose one device that is supported by Rockbox. www.rockbox.org

[aamukahvi]

The fluendo plugins are in Dapper repos. They're legal to use everywhere (yes, even in the States). Methinks they're in Universe, can't be bothered to check it tho.


user@computer:~$ sudo apt-cache search fluendo
Password:
flumotion - Fluendo Streaming Server - manager, worker and admin metapackage
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 - Fluendo mp3 decoder GStreamer plugin
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mpegdemux - Fluendo GStreamer plugin for MPEG2 demuxing

[mostwanted]

To everyone calling Ogg open source and Mp3 closed source, find out exactly what that means first; neither are programs, they're data formats and both have open source decoders. The term you're looking for is open format and proprietary format.

The difference between an open format is that open formats have no usage restrictions and the specs are freely available to anyone, while proprietary formats typically have restrictions by a patent holder or licenser and the specs are rarely freely available.

[steevc]

I use OGG because it's free/open and is widely agreed to have better quality than MP3 for the same bit rate. I generally use Q6, which is about 190kb/s, and it sounds okay to me.

For mobile listening I use Aeroplayer on my Palm or an iRiver flash player. It seems you have to pay a premium on some players to get OGG. When I bought the iRiver I could have got a much cheaper MP3/WMA player, but there were other features besides OGG it had that I wanted.

I know lossless would be technically better, but my laptop has limited space. I can always get the CD off the shelf if I want the best quality.

If any site offers a choice of MP3 or OGG I will take the latter, e.g. on LUGRadio, but this will probably not register with the masses who have never heard of OGG.

[graigsmith]

Vorbis has way better sound at low bitrates. way better than mp3. and even better than WMA.

[airtonix]

Beats me but that's why I'm still using mp3...

Not me, I have put rockbox on my Ipod 5g....now i can listen to ogg and mp3 and a few other formats....plussss i dont need itunes at all....rockbox has software that does this on the ipod.

[NoTiG]

This, plus .ogg is apparently more computationally intensive to decode than MP3, leading to reduced battery life.

Or at least, so I've heard :)

I heard this same thing. I wonder if this is true and how much the actual difference is ? I also wonder, since a Lossless codec like Flac then isnt compresed much at all if its even less cpu intensive than mp3 (but takes up more space )

[Luggy]

2. It (meaning Vorbis) is about as good as mp3. Some people will argue it's better and you need less bitrate for the same quality, others say it's not; but it's at least comparable.

Ogg Vorbis is lossey compression, just like mp3. This means that when you sample a .wav file from a CD some of the data ( the data you probably wouldn't be able to notice ) is removed. Ogg, however removes less data then mp3 removes when it compresses the .wav file.

This results in two things:
1) Ogg will have better quality at the same file size as mp3.
or
2) Ogg can have the same quality with a smaller file size then mp3.

[M7S]

I heard this same thing. I wonder if this is true and how much the actual difference is ? I also wonder, since a Lossless codec like Flac then isnt compresed much at all if its even less cpu intensive than mp3 (but takes up more space )
Lossless comression is very compressed, considering the fact that no information is lost. I would guess that flac is at least as cpu intense as ogg vorbis.

Edit: Perhaps vorbis could be more cpu intensive still, when I think about it. Because of the loss in data there are probably some interpolation and/or extrapolation that could take up some cpu. I better stop guessing now and leave this to people with real knowlegde about this stuff.

[arghh2d2]

ogg tastes great AND is less filling!

[Dimitriid]

Id switch everything to ogg if I was able to find a j2me ogg player for my cellphone. Actually I havent tried that I might find one.

[bobbocanfly]

AS soon as 1Tb+ hard drives become easily affordable lossy compression codecs will become obsolete, whone you have Terabytes of space there is no real reason not to use a lossless codec (My money is on Flac due to its popularity on OiNKS Piglets and support from Xiph). Im currently trying to replace all my MP3s with V0 MP3 or Lossless Flac.

The real thing holding Ogg back is piracy. Its the one part of piracy i dont agree with. If scene rippers started using Ogg, the piracy world would change for it. But cant see it happening, at least, if a change does happen, it wont be to Ogg, more likely Flac.

[koleoptero]

OGG is a very nice format but very few portable players support it. It doesn't produce better quality than mp3. I've tested all the formats on a pc with audigy 2 (decent soundcard) connected to a high end system (nakamichi pre-amplifier, quad amplifier, jbl control speakers and sub), and with various types of music and bitrates. Ogg sounds better than mp3 in pop, rnb, hip hop, and electronic music but not in music that has natural instruments (jazz, rock etc) in high bitrates (it tends to produce really spiky high frequencies). If you want low bitrates it's better though, I agree, sounding "ok" when mp3 sucks. Also ogg is better than wma in low bitrates but far worse than HE-AAC. (aacplus) But I like my music collection in good quality so I don't care about low bitrates.

But if you want excellent quality musepack is the choice. I could tell no difference at all from the original cd and the filesizes are four times smaller than lossless formats. The only problem is that musepack is not supported by any protable players (not that I know of).

Also I've noticed too that ogg is more intensive computationally both decoding and encoding (just saw the rise in the cpu time the programs that play music use, and the time it takes to compress a cd).

Concerning the tags indeed mp3's id3v1 and v2 tags suck (lousy utf support).

But what I've come to realize is that even though a lot of formats are better than mp3, only for mp3 you can have support everywhere (portable players, cell phones, dvd players, car systems, etc etc) and since the difference between mp3 and ogg (or any other format) is not that great I choose mp3.

Of course all these things are a bit off topic :lolflag: but I wanted to share what I have come to know since I'm a bit of an obsessed audiophile and I've tested everything.

[Polygon]

ogg takes a bit more cpu power to decode (play) because it uses floating point decimal operations, which is one reasons many players dont support it as the cpus dont support floating point decimals

but there is some project out there (i forget the name) that is essentially ogg, but it doesnt require floating point decimal capable cpu to decode, therefore it uses a lot less power (good for portable music players)

[n3tfury]

OGG is a very nice format but very few portable players support it. It doesn't produce better quality than mp3. I've tested all the formats on a pc with audigy 2 (decent soundcard) connected to a high end system (nakamichi pre-amplifier, quad amplifier, jbl control speakers and sub), and with various types of music and bitrates. Ogg sounds better than mp3 in pop, rnb, hip hop, and electronic music but not in music that has natural instruments (jazz, rock etc) in high bitrates (it tends to produce really spiky high frequencies). If you want low bitrates it's better though, I agree, sounding "ok" when mp3 sucks. Also ogg is better than wma in low bitrates but far worse than HE-AAC. (aacplus) But I like my music collection in good quality so I don't care about low bitrates.

But if you want excellent quality musepack is the choice. I could tell no difference at all from the original cd and the filesizes are four times smaller than lossless formats. The only problem is that musepack is not supported by any protable players (not that I know of).

Also I've noticed too that ogg is more intensive computationally both decoding and encoding (just saw the rise in the cpu time the programs that play music use, and the time it takes to compress a cd).

Concerning the tags indeed mp3's id3v1 and v2 tags suck (lousy utf support).

But what I've come to realize is that even though a lot of formats are better than mp3, only for mp3 you can have support everywhere (portable players, cell phones, dvd players, car systems, etc etc) and since the difference between mp3 and ogg (or any other format) is not that great I choose mp3.

Of course all these things are a bit off topic :lolflag: but I wanted to share what I have come to know since I'm a bit of an obsessed audiophile and I've tested everything.

out of curiosity, have you done a/b/x or blind/double blind tests?

[koleoptero]

I've done parallel tests, like when I noticed something that didn't sound right in a song I compared the same spot with other formats 5-6 times till I could hear exactly what the difference was. I didn't do blind tests, didn't think about it actually, but don't worry I am impartial (too impartial sometimes).:)

EDIT: I also must note that the audio files were reproduced flat, i.e. no enhancements like equalizers from any program.

[Christmas]

I love OGG. My entire music collection is made up by FLAC and OGG files. You can add any tags you want, any size and any name, good quality (192kbps sounds awesome, at least to me). MP3 on Linux always caused trouble for me, like no good recognition of track duration, two versions of ID3 tags (heck, the first version was a very bad idea, the name lengths are limited). I strongly dislike the fact that Winamp for example includes no support for editing the OGG tags (or at least it didn't when I used to use it almost two years ago -- or maybe was just the "lite" version), so, whenever I can, I promote OGG.

[n3tfury]

yeah, i don't use equalization of any sort at home. have you been to hydrogenaudio.org? also, i'm a huge fan of FLAC and nero AAC, have you tried nero's before?

[koleoptero]

yeah, i don't use equalization of any sort at home. have you been to hydrogenaudio.org? also, i'm a huge fan of FLAC and nero AAC, have you tried nero's before?

No I didn't know about hydrogenaudio.org, I'll check it out :D

I like flac too, but some cds were coming out too large (opeth's blackwater park was nearly 500mbyte) and it's kinda scary. But I have used flac for some cds that are really worth it (like Juno Reactor's Shango - amazing sound quality).

I tried nero aac and especially he-aac and I am very impressed by what it could do at low bitrates (64k sounded like 112 mp3) but since very few programs supported it I didn't use it.

[n3tfury]

yeah, definitely check it out. i've been a lurker there for awhile. some GREAT stuff there. i don't file sizes with FLAC at all with storage being so damn cheap nowadays. it's not an excuse anymore. yeah, the nero AAC is incredible at those bitrates, which is why i use them on my SE phone/walkman

[Knyven]

If im to rip my CD library to ogg, what is the best bitrate?

128kbps
or 160kbps?

I heard 160 is the way to go, I want good quality minus Disk space.

[Frak]

If im to rip my CD library to ogg, what is the best bitrate?

128kbps
or 160kbps?

I heard 160 is the way to go, I want good quality minus Disk space.
160, but remember, if you go straight from .mp3 (lossy format) to .ogg (again, lossy format) you end up with a .ogg (with super lossy format)

This is why many use FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)

[n3tfury]

If im to rip my CD library to ogg, what is the best bitrate?

128kbps
or 160kbps?

I heard 160 is the way to go, I want good quality minus Disk space.

160. just don't convert mp3's (or any lossy format) to another lossy format. transcoding this way worsens audio quality.

[macogw]

2. It (meaning Vorbis) is about as good as mp3. Some people will argue it's better and you need less bitrate for the same quality, others say it's not; but it's at least comparable.

Way I've heard it, mp3 is just kinda crap. Windows Media Audio and Ogg Vorbis are both able to do higher quality than .mp3 at the same bitrate.

[n3tfury]

Way I've heard it, mp3 is just kinda crap. Windows Media Audio and Ogg Vorbis are both able to do higher quality than .mp3 at the same bitrate.

that REALLY depends on how you encode an mp3 and what switches are used. if you're comparing the quality of most mp3's that people upload, well, that's your first problem. test doing your own encoding from the original source.

[Christmas]

Space is cheap indeed but I noticed that editing tags for FLAC files lasts maybe 5 times longer than editing them for OGG. For example editing 15 normal 4 minutes FLAC files in Amarok 1.4.7 with a Core 2 Duo E4300 and 1GB RAM lasts more than 10 seconds. For OGG it is done in ~ 3 seconds.

[koleoptero]

Space is cheap indeed but I noticed that editing tags for FLAC files lasts maybe 5 times longer than editing them for OGG. For example editing 15 normal 4 minutes FLAC files in Amarok 1.4.7 with a Core 2 Duo E4300 and 1GB RAM lasts more than 10 seconds. For OGG it is done in ~ 3 seconds.

That's because most (if not all) programs rewrite the entire file for some tags (mp3s id3v1 don't need that) so with flac files being larger it will take longer.

[n3tfury]

Space is cheap indeed but I noticed that editing tags for FLAC files lasts maybe 5 times longer than editing them for OGG. For example editing 15 normal 4 minutes FLAC files in Amarok 1.4.7 with a Core 2 Duo E4300 and 1GB RAM lasts more than 10 seconds. For OGG it is done in ~ 3 seconds.

it's also dependent on what software you're using. foobar in windows much quicker than anything else i've tried in Linux.

[jethro10]

If I can give my take on it that suits me.

EVERYTHING can play MP3 so it gets +1, I can swap with friends, play stuff anywhere etc.

This bitrate and quality comparison is history as storage is so cheap now so it doesn't matter.

any more compressed music file uses more battery power on portables to decode, with ogg having an extra hit using floating decimals. So MP3 uses less power +1

Looks like I've talked myself into MP3, who do I give my $1.75 too so I can be legal?

Unfortunatley ogg is sorta pointless now, no matter what it's technical or legal benefits i'm afraid.

J

[Christmas]

That's because most (if not all) programs rewrite the entire file for some tags (mp3s id3v1 don't need that) so with flac files being larger it will take longer.
I didn't know that, thanks.

[daynah]

So I now am enlightened. Ogg is better.

What do I do with my entire collection that is mp3? Wouldn't converting it again, by virture of that process, make it lose quality? And I'm not transfering it that often, just when I back it up. So would turning a mp3 into ogg be worth it being open source?

And where do I get these magical oggs? The last CD I bought was... snap, when backstreet boys were popular. I was raised on P2P. So where do I DL this? Right now, I just grab my friends mp3 players (hehe) and steal what's on there, most assuredly mp3s. (Mine can handle ogg, not to fear!)

[Christmas]

Yeah actually this is a question I am trying to find an answer for some time now. Say I have an OGG file converted from a FLAC, and I convert it back to FLAC. The FLAC obtained will of course have the quality of the OGG. And now my question is, if I convert the FLAC back to OGG, same bitrate, will the new OGG have the same sound quality as the first one? (Thinking that there are no more sounds to remove anymore?). Or he will be worse than the first one as quality?


And where do I get these magical oggs? The last CD I bought was... snap, when backstreet boys were popular. I was raised on P2P. So where do I DL this? Right now, I just grab my friends mp3 players (hehe) and steal what's on there, most assuredly mp3s. (Mine can handle ogg, not to fear!)
Legal music can be downloaded as either OGG or MP3 from http://www.jamendo.com/en/. Check the Harvey Danger (http://www.harveydanger.com/) site. I really enjoyed his "Wine, Women and Song" melody and "What You Live By". Of course you can always fire up KTorrent (BitTorrent client) and search for some good legal FLAC albums...

[the_darkside_986]

For me, I saved lots of memory stick space by encoding my music into vorbis instead of mp3. But my PSP can't play ogg vorbis so I had to find a homebrew media player that could.

What I wish for is a small radio that plays CD's and open formats only, like ogg vorbis, and not able to play restricted formats such as mp3 or wma. Even microsoft was sued over mp3's, and the patent-holders won money from them. If M$ is not safe from software-patent claim rampages, then how does the average customer stand a chance...

I transcode all my media into ogg formats, except for video because I can't get that to work correctly.

[hugmenot]

Yeah actually this is a question I am trying to find an answer for some time now. Say I have an OGG file converted from a FLAC, and I convert it back to FLAC. The FLAC obtained will of course have the quality of the OGG. And now my question is, if I convert the FLAC back to OGG, same bitrate, will the new OGG have the same sound quality as the first one? (Thinking that there are no more sounds to remove anymore?). Or he will be worse than the first one as quality?
Yes, worse. Lossy encoding doesn't work like a sieve where you filter out the same sounds every time around. This is the same with JPG, generation loss.

[hugmenot]

So I now am enlightened. Ogg is better.

What do I do with my entire collection that is mp3? Wouldn't converting it again, by virture of that process, make it lose quality? And I'm not transfering it that often, just when I back it up. So would turning a mp3 into ogg be worth it being open source?

No, totally not. The patents for MP3 will expire soonish (2-3years?), then vorbis will have a difficult stand. BTW, xiph is currently working on a successor for vorbis called Ghost, which they describe as "levelling up" wrt technology.

[handzmonkey]

I tried to convert all my music to ogg format but then realized that you usually have to modify your mp3 players firmware in order to use the codec. At least for an Ipod u do, and even though rockbox is decent it just doesn't work as well as apple prop software. But if you aren't using your music on a portable player like the ipod i would choose ogg as my standard format.

[Sef]

The patents for MP3 will expire soonish (2-3years?)

They will expire between 2011 and 2015 (http://lwn.net/Articles/166250/).

[Polygon]

They will expire between 2011 and 2015 (http://lwn.net/Articles/166250/).

then whoever owns the patents, cant they just renew it?

[Christmas]

Yes, worse. Lossy encoding doesn't work like a sieve where you filter out the same sounds every time around. This is the same with JPG, generation loss.
OK, thanks a lot for clearing up this for me.

[Dimitriid]

If you go mp3 > FLAC to keep the quality how big would the FLAC files be? The FLAC files I downloaded in the past were only full albums and were several hundred mbs and I don't have the hdd space right now but I think those were straight cd to FLAC conversion.

[bobbocanfly]

If you go mp3 > FLAC to keep the quality how big would the FLAC files be? The FLAC files I downloaded in the past were only full albums and were several hundred mbs and I don't have the hdd space right now but I think those were straight cd to FLAC conversion.

Its generally around 5 - 10mb per minute. An album is normally in the 250mb to 350mb range, though for bigger albums its not unheard of to hit 450mb. All the songs i have are around 10mb to 30mb which is 3 to 4 times larger than MP3, but then again the bitrate is about 3x better than MP3 (320kbps cbr, obviously).

Also judging from your post you want to convert MP3 to FLAC? AFAIK its not worth it. MP3 strips data to save space, while Flac doesnt. That is the only reason Flac is so good. This is why most private music trackers will not allow any Lossy to Lossless transcodes, as essentially the file will still be lossy. The only way to get the benefit of Flac (i think) is to rip from CD or download Flac CD Rips.

[Frak]

then whoever owns the patents, cant they just renew it?
Nope, becomes Public Domain.

[bruce89]

Meaning to nitpick, OGG is a container format which can have audio and video data in it. For instance, FLAC and Speex can be put in an ogg container, not just Vorbis.

This thread should be titled "What's so special about Vorbis?"

I've noticed a Xiph specification (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/MIME_Types_and_File_Extensions), which would allocate an extension of .oga to audio only ogg files (not Vorbis though thanks to too much hardware support).

[NightCrawler03X]

Most people here don't seem to understand what ogg actually is at all :) .

OGG itself is not an audio format, but rather, a compression algorithm acting as a container for other formats.

For example, there's OGG Flac, OGG Vorbis, etc.

This way, rather than having many different formats using different file extensions, you have a uniform file extension.

I could bore you all to death with the details, but unfortunately for me (and maybe very fortunate to you guys), I'm too lazy to do so:
Go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg for a basic explanation of the OGG format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_format_%28digital%29 and here for an explanation of what container formats are.

EDIT EDIT EDIT
Bruce89 above got to flaming you guys before me, damn :)

[bruce89]

EDIT EDIT EDIT
Bruce89 above got to flaming you guys before me, damn :)

Thank Molly (my rabbit), I'm not the only one.

The more flamers the better.


If im to rip my CD library to ogg, what is the best bitrate?

128kbps
or 160kbps?

I heard 160 is the way to go, I want good quality minus Disk space.

There are no bitrates in Vorbis, there are quality levels from -1 to 10. 5 is the one you'll want to use.

[daynah]

No, totally not. The patents for MP3 will expire soonish (2-3years?), then vorbis will have a difficult stand. BTW, xiph is currently working on a successor for vorbis called Ghost, which they describe as "levelling up" wrt technology.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood. Does that mean that mp3 will become public domain (and will probably be on the live cd) and then the ogg algorithm will need something really special to get ahead, because it will have lost that free-like-beer edge?

About the we should be talking about Vorbis thing... I don't know diddly about Vorbis. I knew mp3 and ogg were algorithms to make your music smaller, and lower the quality in a way that (hopefully) is not noticable. So what is a Vorbis?

[kopinux]

i like soundjuicer makes oggvorbis, they just make a standard cd quality lossy (160kbps). and thats it, standard, solve the inconsistent mp3 bitrate average users make.

so if mp3 will be ours in a few years, looks like oggvorbis will suffer the same fate of .mng (similar case .gif vs. .mng).
one advantage i see on oggvorbis is if people will standardized the 160kbps quality.

[hugmenot]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood. Does that mean that mp3 will become public domain (and will probably be on the live cd) and then the ogg algorithm will need something really special to get ahead, because it will have lost that free-like-beer edge?


The edge is has, or the real-world reach, is limited now already. MP3 is the standard, but the problem it poses is the IP in it, which is completely only due to patents. People fail to grasp this. The LAME codec to encode to MP3 on Linux, and a really high-quality one at that, is totally open-source, LGPL-licensed. In fact, it’s so open-source, that you weren't able to download the program, only the source. This was because you had to pay patent royalties per distributed decoder to Thomson/Fraunhofer Institut. The GPL kind of (or actually not sure) forbids that. But it didn't matter beause the LAME devs couldn't afford to churn out royalties per download (or Linux distros per ISO).
At the point when the patent expires, MP3 is fair game. Like GIF.

About Ogg Vorbis, it’s performance when comparing highly tuned implementations is better than MP3, because it was developed several years later, when more of the peculiarities of audio coding were understood. MP3 still incorporates some design elements that limits its efficiency.



About the we should be talking about Vorbis thing... I don't know diddly about Vorbis. I knew mp3 and ogg were algorithms to make your music smaller, and lower the quality in a way that (hopefully) is not noticable. So what is a Vorbis?

The audio codec is called Ogg Vorbis (or vorbis for short), there’s also Ogg Speex, Ogg Flac, Ogg Theora, etc. Ogg alone is known as the container format.