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Music Media

Who'll Be Using Ogg Vorbis Instead Of MP3? 731

Posted by timothy from the every-man-and-his-monkey dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "Ogg Vorbis is hitting stable and hopefully will release 1.0 soon. But I'm wondering, who is going to use it? MP3 is very popular on the net and beyond, but it's based on patents. Software patents aren't legal in Europe, but are in other parts of the world. Is Ogg Vorbis making a chance to become the next music-standard for the net and beyond. This mainly because there are no patents broken by this standard. Will it be a standard for the world or one for the books?"

Never having bothered to do it before with MP3, I've recently started ripping my CD collection to .ogg files, and the quality is good to my (tin) ears. Someone with an entrepreneurial bent needs to sell a dedicated hardware player that takes CD-Rs, so I can play back 10 hours of books on tape from a single disk. I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?
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Who'll be using Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3? More

Who'll be using Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3?

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  • Help advocate Ogg Vorbis (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Eloquence ( 144160 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:23PM (#2110192)
    There is a dedicated Ogg Vorbis advocacy mailing list [xiph.org] if you would like to help getting this patent-free format into mainstream usage. What can "normal" OGG users do? To quote myself [xiph.org], we can do lots of stuff:

    • spread the word about Ogg to our friends and family -- this is something that can obviously only be done on a very individual level.
    • spread OGG files! :-) How about copyright-free speeches and other archive material?
    • write tutorials and FAQs for newbies (check existing ones first).
    • ask creators of cd burning software, cd-rippers, encoders etc. to support/include OGG
    • ask creators of video codecs to include OGG for audio encoding
    • ask creators of video games to use OGG for their soundtracks
    • ask streaming media services to use OGG instead of MP3 or other formats
    • ask radio stations to release archival material in OGG
    • ask the media to include OGG on bundled CD-ROMs instead of MP3s
    • encourage artists to spread their work in OGG / help them spread their work if they use OGG
    • ask universities to release speeches and audiostreams in OGG
    • etc. etc. etc.

    If you want to help, why not join the discussion and make some suggestions on how to actively promote OGG? You could be part of an important grass-roots movement here.

  • The Name SUCKS (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kenshin ( 43036 ) <kenshin@lunarworks . c a> on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:27PM (#2111841) Homepage
    I'm gonna be brutally honest here, but if you're gonna get people to use Ogg, you've gotta change the name. From a marketing standpoint, it's abyssmal.

    Think about it: you're a teenager, you want to share music with your friends. Which name is going to get you called a nerd and beat up? Which sounds cooler? (In a teen way, not geek way.)

    A) "Hey! I got some new tunes! Want some MP3s?"
    B) "Hey! I got some new tunes! Want some Ogg Vorbis files?"

    Process that, and then wonder why people aren't using the format that is "the choice of nerds everywhere..."

  • Quality (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Logic Bomb ( 122875 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:50PM (#2113046)
    It's sorta obvious, but someone should say it: QUALITY MATTERS. I think that will be the most important determiner. If the quality/size tradeoff is better than MP3, people who matter will have an incentive to switch. The other issue will probably be inclusion of a codec in a very popular player program. This will not happen if "people who matter", i.e. netheads, don't adopt. When this happens, Ogg Vorbis has a shot at hitting the mainstream.
    • yeah, they'd use shorten. lossless audio compression for the masses. easy to use tools for windows and the various unices. winamp and xmms plugins.

      they're about 1/2 the size of .wav files, but you get all of the original audio data.

    • Re:Quality almost never matters (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Speare ( 84249 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:25PM (#2136061) Homepage Journal

      Sad to say, but quality does NOT matter to 90% of the market. Only the experts care.

      If quality mattered, people would use CAV laserdisc in all cases, but the majority uses CLV to put twice the content on each side of the disc.

      If quality mattered, people would use uncompressed laserdisc over dvd, but the majority prefer the small discs at the expense of image integrity.

      If quality mattered, people would use raw or lossless compression on images, but the majority prefer JPG at crappy levels.

      If quality mattered, everyone would record MP3 at 192Kbps, even if it meant two songs fit into your old Rio, but the majority back off the quality to squeeze more music into their player.

      If quality mattered, everyone would buy the best high-performance tires, spark plugs and other car parts, but the majority go for average or no-name automotive suppliers to stretch the paycheck a little farther.

      If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.

      • I buy CAV laserdiscs. I write all images from my digital camera as TGA, even though i can then fit only 10 of them on a 64 meg card. I bought Dunlop DP-5000s and NJK plugs and nothing but Mobil-1 will ever touch my engine.

        But I will *NOT* use ogg. Partly because of quality: it sounds similar, if not more washed out than, mp3 at the bitrates I encode my mp3s (archival VBR from Lame, iTunes and AudioCatalyst). Mostly, however, it's a conceptual thing. I consider it the difference between mini discs and CDs. Mini disc is slightly nicer sounding than CD in most cases, you can fit a little bit more data, it's smaller, it's more convenient, longer lasting (due to the covered case) and has less of a chance of skipping. And, let's face it, mini-discs are pretty cool. But when faced with the task of taking my 1000+ CDs and recording them to MD, buying a nice sounding home player to add wo my already cramped receiver, a new head for the car stereo, a new sound card, &tc...it turns MD into this huge investment of time and worry that isn't worth the meager gains.

        With OGG, it's even worse. There are no home players to replace my Harmon-Kardon Progressive Scan DVD & MP3 player. There is no add-on for my Rio Volt or Cassiopeia to play OGG files. Furthurmore, I'd have to ditch ALL of my software for encoding, learn new software and keep on top of the weekly enhancements to OGG and so forth. And for what? Because a company that came up with a great sounding format would like other companies getting rich off that format to hook them up with a little dough? OGG is a format based in a something-for-nothing desire loosely wrapped with patriotic pleadings about open standards. It is a cumbersome format that has no hardware support, no commercial software support (yet, I know, Nullsoft is on it, but they also wrote a plugin for MOD files...ain't nobody uses tracked music anymore!) and a team of Fraunhoffer lawyers on their ass for concepts they might have stolen. Not exactly the sort of overhead baggage I'm looking for when I want to compress my copy of the Screaming Trees SST Anthology.

      • If quality mattered, we'd have MENSA MEMBERS and ETHICS SPECIALISTS in our elected offices, and we'd pay attention to the legislation that they offered.

        The overwhelming majority of Slashdot readers are smart enough to be in Mensa [mensa.org]. Do you want the world run by Anonymous Coward? ;-)

  • Has anyone else been sharing their files in the .ogg format or is it just me? It just seems like very few people are bothering to either convert or re-encode their files into .ogg since MP3 works and lets face it, do most people really care if it's proprietary?
  • ...Marketing.

    Magazine covers Napster, Metallica, Dr. Dre and every website in the world have all made the word "mp3" part of everyday language. It's like Microsoft -- People trust it because they've heard of it.

  • No Napster for this (Score:2, Insightful)

    by makapuf ( 412290 )
    I think that what really got MP3 popular was Napster. As there is no Napster for .ogg, I'm not sure that ogg will be popular on the net. Look PNG. Without good support in standard browser and players (winamp, MS player), it doesn't have a single chance to succeed Besides, of course, if we get a killer app for this file format. Music creation may be one, because you'll need a free, good quality format to use, or in the embedded world (patent free), for answering machines, digital dictaphones, digital recording machines, "MP3 walkmans".

  • Why? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by corky6921 ( 240602 )

    Perhaps this can be considered a naive post, but why use Ogg Vorbis? I understand the ideological reasons behind using something completely free as opposed to patented, but does Ogg offer anything more than that? Where is the superior encoding? Where are the smaller files? This I don't see.

    Let's face it. Most of us don't pay for ANYTHING related to MP3s. Napster (now WinMX [winmx.com] -- free. Programs to rip MP3s from a CD -- free. Players -- free. Okay, so if we're not paying anything outrageous to do ANYTHING associated with MP3s, why are we so concerned about something that is ideologically free?

    The thing that was great about the Napster era was that EVERYONE had it. You could find everything from the most obscure song to the latest Top 40 crap, all in one place and all in one format. All your friends were on Napster, so you could browse hard drives and download the songs you liked from them. This was as good as it got; the high times of music sharing... controversial, but it opened up so many avenues for hearing what really good music was, and instituted a revivial of sorts of older but great classic music.

    Now the market has been split among different Napster "clones" -- WinMX, Audiogalaxy, BearShare, Gnutella, Morpheus, etc. Now you have to sign on to at least one of those to find what you want, and it's often low-quality. However, at least you don't have to download 15 different players to get it all.

    Standard formats are part of the computer industry, like it or not. (Just try sending a StarOffice file to your coworkers; you'll get the idea quickly enough.) MP3 is the standard for audio, and honestly, 99.99999% of the people using it find nothing wrong with it. We're not paying for anything associated with MP3; the convenience is that everyone else also has it; and the quality is pretty good, especially at 192k or above. I'm sorry, but I just don't see any reason to switch to something more obscure that just puts up one more barrier to me trading great music with my friends. More to the point, I GUARANTEE you that almost every computer user feels the same way.

  • Right now, my MP3 archive is a bit over 90 CD-Rs. (More then 95% at either 192CBR or Lame VBR 1). I'm willing to slowly switch over to OGG once my 2 listening enviornments support it. That would be on a computer (taken care of), or on my empeg-car. As someone else noted, a decent ARM decoder needs to come out soon.

  • MP3 Standard for Today (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ryanw ( 131814 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:50PM (#2116002)
    Well, I remember back in 96 when mp3's were starting to get extreamly popular. People at that time were trading WAV files across the net and in news groups. MP3's were kinda' hard to come by. You had to goto someone's warez/mp3 site and links were usually broken, etc. But they gained more and more audiance every day. But sadly enough it didn't become the 'standard' until microsoft included it in the next release of windows.

    Windows 98 had mp3 playing built into it. Thats when it completely became the standard. MP3's had made it extreamily far and were used by unix admins and warez puppies all over the world.. but was unknown to the every day user. Windows 98 and napster brough mp3's to the masses.

    The world isn't crying for a new format like it was crying for mp3's. Unless this new format is smaller and sounds better, I don't think it stands a chance. Plus I don't imagine microsoft including Open Source code into their media player ... kinda' like DivX ...

    I dunno, guess we'll see.. ???

    • Plus I don't imagine microsoft including Open Source code into their media player ...

      I'm pretty sure ogg vorbis source is under the BSD license (to encourage adoption). Remember: Microsoft only has a problem with the GPL (unless its talking to the mainstream press ;-) ).

    • If anything.. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PYves ( 449297 )
      I see a bigger chance of windows media files to keep growing in importance.

      When I first got WinME with windows media player on it, I was happy to see a "copy to disk" function that looked like it was copying mp3s. Of course, now I have a bunch of *.wma files (luckily winamp can read them).

      I'm not the only person I know that uses media player to copy music to my computer. I see this as more likely than Ogg vorbis overtaking mp3s.

      -PYves
  • Could you rephrase that in something more closely resembling English??

  • Same problem .wma has: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rimbo ( 139781 ) <rimbosity@sbcglo[ ].net ['bal' in gap]> on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:58PM (#2117331) Homepage Journal
    MP3 is -the- format.

    The guy who posted about GIF has a good point. It doesn't matter that the technology behind it has patents; it is the de facto standard. It has oodles of hardware and software support. And most importantly, it's the standard that -customers- want.

    Geeks maybe want Ogg Vorbis. Corporations want .wma, .ram, and other formats with strict support for licensing. But the people with wallets full of green notes and good credit ratings want MP3.

    What's preventing Ogg from taking over MP3 is that Ogg's place in the market is already taken up by MP3. Being first-mover is a strong advantage. Ogg's a long ways behind MP3, and there's really no advantage to it from a consumer's point of view. That's the reason why strictly-controlled music formats aren't competing well with MP3 as well: There is no advantage for the consumer.

    I can acquire, make, and listen to MP3's for free. No cost. There are free encoders, free players, and free MP3's of all kinds everywhere. Why do I need Ogg?

    • Why do I need Ogg?

      You don't. Hardware manufacturers, though, will find it appealing because (A) it's royalty-free; and (B) the codec is already written for them. As portable digital music players become more popular with the mainstream, these factors will make Vorbis more and more attractive to hardware developers looking to compete on price. I realize MP3 has "mind-share", but consumers are flighty. Already, MP3 is showing signs of its age, and MP3Pro had to be trotted out, so it is assumed that users will eventually switch to something else. Why not Ogg Vorbis?

      • "Already, MP3 is showing signs of its age, and MP3Pro had to be trotted out, so it is assumed that users will eventually switch to something else."

        MP3Pro? Never heard of it.

        Really.

        It's true that Ogg Vorbis will have an appeal to hardware manufacturers -- but they will still have to spend the time and resources developing that hardware, and they won't bother doing it if they don't already see a market. MP3 had been a very popular format for several years before even the first hardware came out to play them. It takes time to bring a product to market, and before you can do that, you have to show that people are out there willing to pay for it.

        Even if you provide an easy means for people to use the Ogg Vorbis format with your player, you're talking about people who have already spent countless hours encoding their CD libraries and downloading MP3's from places like MP3.com -- why should they make the effort to re-encode all of this to MP3 all over again?

        I don't buy the assumption that people will move on to something else. It's not just "mindshare" that MP3 owns. Individual consumers, the users of the format, have made an investment in MP3. Not a financial investment, but a time and hard disk space investment. If you listen to music, if you own a fairly modern computer, you have MP3's.

        The only thing that will keep folks from listening to MP3 is if a change is FORCED on them. MP3 will have to be declared either illegal or "unsupported" by everyone. As it stands now, if you're a powerful corporation and choose not to support MP3 -- it's your future that will be affected. Not that of the MP3 format.

  • GIF formatted images (Score:5, Informative)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:48PM (#2117372) Homepage
    Enough said?

    Okay, maybe not... maybe I have to spell it out. GIF is a format we're all mostly familiar with. It's out there, it's common and there is an important patent associated with it. PNG was created as the GIF alternative. It's superior in every way to GIF. Where are we now? How old is PNG? How accepted it is? How many rhetorical questions will I ask in this message? Dare I ask?
    • One of the problems with PNG's is the size and availability of viewers for the format. If an alternative format is created that's superior, and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available, then it has a chance of being adopted.

      I remember first hearing about MP3's as an alternative to WAV files. While the differences are even more vast than those between PNG and GIF, I still maintain that it was the availability of viewers that helped MP3 to become the standard.

      We live in a different world than the world that the PNG was introduced to. With more bandwidth, more users on the net, who knows how the PNG would have fared in the modern world with plenty of viewers.
    • I don't know about others but all of my website's graphics are in PNG format. They have been for nearly 2 years. Sure, at first some browsers couldn't display them - but I at that time I had text-only alternates. Eventually, the people who complained they couldn't see the graphics did as I suggested and upgraded to a new browser that supported PNG. I don't know of any browser that can't display them now.

    • Yes, and instead of suing each individual user of GIF, Unisys sued the people who make the programs that encode into GIF, much like how Fraunhoffer (sp?) Institute is screwing over comapnies who create products that encode/decode MP3. Your "payment" for this may be transparent to you, but you're still paying for it. MP3 is not exactly "free as in beer". Every time you buy something MP3 related, some of that money is going off to Fraunhofer's MP3 monopoly. Ogg Vorbis isn't susceptible to that.
    • The only reason PNG started to gain significant acceptance was legal pressure from the GIF format's owners (I forget who it was at the time, Compuserve, Digital, Compaq, whoever). Now, there has been pressure in the past related to MP3, but it's generally free (as in $0) and easy to create/use for virtually anyone. There are tons of $0 players and encoders across platforms, and it's already an accepted standard. I suspect the same thing would happen if they tried to clamp down on MP3 - OGG would suddenly surge, showing that if they choked off MP3, a large segment of the population would merely abandon it, and MP3 would be essentially free again.

      I don't know all the legal wranglings related to MP3, and they may constrain who can make a player or encoder, but as long as those are available at no cost to the general population, they're not going to care whether it's free, or open source, or whatever. They just get to rock for free! Rockanroll!

    • See this [securityspace.com] for some stats on PNG usage. It looks very low, but one should also keep in mind the shape of the technology adoption curve, it has a long run-in time, but once it hits the upward slope it climbs quickly.

      Also, GIF has been around a lot longer than PNG - wait until PNG is as old as GIF is now, I think you'll see a lot less one-sided picture then.

      Keep in mind that viewers for most platforms have only really become widely available in the past year or two. So in the next year or two we'll start to see an upswing in PNG usage. GIF and JPEG both have their place (jpeg files are still smaller for, uh, "natural" images where a certain amount of loss is acceptable to most people) and will no doubt be around a looong time, but I think in three or four years those securityspace figures will probably be looking more like 40/40/20 for GIF/JPG/PNG. If you look at the general trend there over the past eight months, PNG has been slowly climbing, while GIF slowly dropping. I don't see PNG replacing jpeg though as the dominant format for, uh, "natural" photographic type images anytime in the next five years - not until bandwidth and disk space really become "non-issues", at which time people might start looking for a bit more quality. I doubt it though, people have shown time and again that they don't give a crap for quality (just look at the popularity of Windows, boyzone, TV sitcoms, MacDonalds etc). Depressing, but thats the way it is.

  • Well I'll be a good little slashdotter and add my probably redundant reply to the pile.

    All karma-whoring aside, however, I've been playing around with mp3's for as long as anyone but haven't bothered to rip my entire collection. The only time I ripped my own CDs where to make compilations for other people. After I was done I needed the hard drive space to install my Nth operating system and wiped the mp3's. I used bladenc for a long time and then switched to lame when it was more supported and higher quality.

    Now I'm finally getting around to ripping my large CD collection and yes, I'm using ogg. I encode at 256kbps, and ogg does VBR. It sounds good to me on my vanilla stereo equipment, and it's a hell of a lot better than ANY of the poor quality MP3's that I've downloaded. This isn't a slam against the MP3 format, just about the morons who gave it a bad name by encoding at 128bit with awful encoders.

    No, I'm not expecting to walk into Best Buy and pick up a portable ogg players, but that's not an issue for me. I believe in the ogg project because they are doing the right thing with regards to their licensing. It's as simple as that. Everyone should be using their product. These people deserve your support, and supporting free software is more important than your music collection anyway, in the long run.

    I'll buy hardware that supports the ogg format, and if I need to I'll build my own. With all the linux PDA's around, it won't be that hard.

  • Change the name ... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tapiwa ( 52055 )
    By the way, I also think that a change in the name is in order.

    Ogg Vorbis sounds cool in a geeky kind of way, but I rather think that mp3 has a nicer ring to it, and has more street cred.

    mp7 any one????

    If you think a name does not mean much, think of it this way. Imagine our names were songs.

    Now how much different would you be if your name was "I feel good ... James Brown" than if it was "Bed of Roses ... Bon Jovi"

  • Seriously, it doesn't matter. I use minidisc for much of my personal recording. Does it bother me that my neighbor doesn't use it? No. If .ogg works for you, then it has done its job. In addition, you got what you paid for. Who cares if someone else still uses mp3. It is irrelevant as long as you can play back *your* audio.

    Of course, if what you really want is for the world to pirate their music and download it, that is another issue entirely.

  • If you keep MP3s on your hard drive at work, you may lose your job! [yahoo.com] Better to put a bunch of ".ogg" files out there, that nobody will be searching for, than to have hundreds of ".mp3" files on your disk.

  • Need hardware players and conversion tools (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lessthan0 ( 176618 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:49PM (#2120984)
    I have been heavily into mp3 for the last 4 years. I have a couple gig of files and just last weekend ripped my first .ogg. I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality. There are already several software players that support ogg like freeamp and xmms. There are two things missing that will hold ogg back:

    1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.

    2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg. This is 5 times slower than modern CD to mp3 rippers. And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg. Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.

    One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.

    • ...I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg.

      No you wouldn't. MP3 and Ogg are both lossy formats. Converting from one to the other would result in noticeable distortions in the files. Your best bet for quality Oggs is to re-rip from the CDs.

    • >1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the
      >players on the market today support mp3 and wma,
      >but none play ogg. This is a problem.

      Iomega HipZip does, others are comming...

      --
      GCP
    • 2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg. This is 5 times slower than modern CD to mp3 rippers. And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg. Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.

      AFAIK it's the same for mp3s. If any cd rippers skip that step then the same can be done with .ogg. But I do know for _sure_ that grip rips to wav and then encodes as mp3.

      As a matter of fact, mp3 is a compression scheme for wav format. So it _must_ be converted from wav. Any cd ripper that skips that probably does it as an illusion. For example: rips a 32k buffer, converts to wav while in memory and then to mp3 without saving the entire song as a wav on disk first.

      --
      Garett

    • Re:Need hardware players and conversion tools (Score:5, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:17PM (#2128420) Homepage
      Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.

      Yes, this is a problem if you use portable MP3 players (which I don't). However, the specs for the Vorbis 1.0 decoder weren't finalized until a few weeks ago (and the sample decoder still has some memory usage issues), so you can't really expect any companies to have implemented decoding yet.

      AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg.

      Well, you're wrong. Anything that can do MP3 encoding on the fly should be able to do it with Vorbis as well. As an example, have a look at CDex, the best Windows ripper/encoder [n3.net]. Most Linux encoders I've seen (for MP3 as well as Vorbis) seem to use the 2 step process, but this should be seamless to the outside user, and not much slower -- you're probably noticing a slow copy because the ripping (with Grip at least) uses CDParanoia, which is quite slow but very accurate.

      And with my massive mp3s sitting there, I'd like to have a program that could convert from mp3 to ogg.

      Please don't do this. Transcoding almost always leads to very low quality files -- and will lead people who listen to them to assume that all the artifacts are due to OGG, and not to the transcoding process. MP3 encoding creates certain artifacts. Vorbis creates others. By encoding to MP3, and then Vorbis, you are getting 2 sets of artifacts, plus the Vorbis coder has to waste bits encoding the MP3-created artifacts. MP3 players aren't going to go away, so please don't transcode: re-rip instead.

      I could not tell a difference between ogg and mp3 sound quality

      Note that all the encoders kicking around are of (at best) the beta 4 release, which, amongst other issues, has no channel coupling. You can expect at least a 10% reduction in file-size in the final release compared with beta 4, and more if you let it try lossy channel coupling (akin to joint stereo in the MP3 world). Beta 4 at 128 kbps already sounds better than 128 kbps MP3s - the final release will sound the same at 112 kpbs.

      One thing is certain, I'll never use the wma format.

      Damn right.

  • New MP3 and Ogg HOWTO (Score:4, Informative)

    by philkerr ( 180450 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:28PM (#2122983) Homepage
    Hi All,

    I've not 100% finished the updated howto, but you can have a look at what's finished:

    http://www.plus24.com/mp3-howto/mp3-howto.html [plus24.com]

    Get Ogg'ing :)

    Phil

  • Why I Encoded 700+ CD's with Ogg Vorbis (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Uggy ( 99326 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:56PM (#2123028) Homepage
    from a 6 year mp3 warrior.

    I'm no super audiophile with a golden ear, but I do have a better than your average PC speakers connected to sound card setup. I have a 12 year old Pioneer Amp/Receiver and 12 Year old Acoustic Research speakers with subwoofer (since replaced the drivers), and a Soundblaster 64AWE with gold coated analog outputs to the receiver. Whole thing, minus PC and soundcard, cost $1000 back in 1989.

    What I notice is that at the office on some cheap ALTEC PC speakers with subwoofer, NONE of the differences show through. Pretty much all CODEC's from the various years sound the same... pretty good, artifacts seem to magically go away... and hey that's not bad for the office.

    But for home, it's got to be ogg and a non PC dedicated system sound system.

    First piece I encoded to OGG was a rendition of Igor Stravinky's Ballet Petrouska... full ballet mind you, none of this condensed suite business *G*. I marveled at how airy it sounded and how percussive the base was, thumping, rumbling tightly on my subwoofer.

    No, this was different, the high end was definitely there... but something else too, "stereo separation." Now this is something new. Mp3 makes some of its best gains through the use of cleverly comparing left and right channels and optimizing where they are very similar. Good in theory, but what you end up with is a lost stereo separation. It's cool for rock/pop, but classical absolutely needs stereo separation. In fact, encode some classical music (any classical music) in mp3 and then in ogg. You'll never go back.

    You COULD put it in stereo encoding mode, but then mp3 doesn't shine at relatively low bitrates

    You might also say that ogg has to do extra work in each channel individually and how the hell could it possibly sound better. It's got to consider each channel independently, encode them AND it sounds better than the industry standard at the same bitrate? She can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan?

    Can this truly be the case?

    Hell yes.

    I don't understand the deep wizardry of OGG, nor its team's fanatical devotion to one thing: quality and duty. Two! Two things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency. Three! Three things, quality, duty and a ruthless efficiency and quality. Bah, I'll come in again.

    One thing is clear: OGG's codec is next generation. Mp3 is definitely suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Great for 1996, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is an inferior codec RIGHT NOW. Mp3's tradeoffs and optimizations where great for 1996, but there was room for improvement. Nothing but OGG has stepped up to fill the void.

    If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have encoded 700+ CDs into this format, occupying around 40 gigabytes of space. Took me a couple of months, but now that it's done, I breathe a sigh of relief (as I create a disk mirror for backup) that it is now forever free and libre...

    ... a CODEC to grow old with.



    • It's really hard to follow this one up with anything but an, "I agree." Perhaps this is a useless post, but to add to the show of hands and answer the question, all the music I rip from CD goes to OGG. MP3's just don't sound as good. There are sounds that you can hear in the CD recording and the OGG encording that you cannot hear in an MP3. Sorry, MP3 fans.
    • Ew! You play your music off a 16 bit Sound Blaster? Those things have the WORST transient signals I have ever heard come out of a DAC! All the gold coated cables in the world won't eliminate the hiss from your fans and the snap every time the memory bus is called!

      Switch to a nice digital output card (you can get coaxial digital from the old Aureal SQ1500 for $9, or optical digital out of the old SuperQuad 2500 for around $35) and deliver your sound cleanly to the card, and you'll have much, much better results. Since the DAC involved with digital out is the one on your receiver, you don't have ANY transient signals at all...no hiss means clean treble and no ambient rumbling from your bass!
    • I intend to listen to my collection primarily on a home stereo system - not my PC. For this, I intend to use an above average sound card, an above average amplifier, with above average speakers.

      I performed a blind comparison of LAME-encoded MP3s and Ogg Vorbis-encoded music at varying bit rates. The bottom line is at bitrates at or below 192 Kb, I can hear (or sense) compression artifacts. My reason for using Vorbis is that it provides the best bang for the byte. The fact that it is free (speech) is a nice bonus.

      Whether Vorbis takes hold in the market in a significant way is a good question. The GIF vs. PNG analogy (mentioned in another thread) seems like a good model. PNG didn't usurp GIF's "market share" overnight, and perhaps never will. This could hold true for Vorbis as well.

      On the other hand, we're already seeing new codecs being added to hardware and software, including Windows Media. I think the biggest hurdle that Vorbis will need to overcome is its floating point requirements. Most consumer equipment, as I understand it, is integer-based. If an integer-based Vorbis codec were available, I think it could easily become an option in a number of products.
      • If an integer-based Vorbis codec were available, I think it could easily become an option in a number of products.

        Don't worry; in short order, integer-only code will be written. Floating point makes some computations more convenient, but you can always re-write so that floating point is not necessary. That will happen with Ogg Vorbis.

        steveha

  • Reading Rainbow (Score:3, Informative)

    by ObligatoryUserName ( 126027 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:23PM (#2123703) Journal
    If all goes well, when the PBS Kids: Reading Rainbow site goes live in a month or so, the theme song will be there in Ogg Vorbis. (There's a preview site [pbskids.org] up there currently.)

    But, it'll also be there as MP3, RealAudio, and *gasp* Windows Media. As a practical matter, I don't really expect many people to download the Ogg file (I'm not really sure I expect many people to download any of the files, really.) We're putting it up there as Ogg Vorbis for 2 reasons. First of all, it's a matter of choice. Looking at the end user, we want people to be able to get the data they want, in the format they want it, with a minimum of fuss and muss. Secondly, and unofficially, it's a small show of support for free and open standards; a very minor political statement, if you will.

    Which, to be quite honest, doesn't really bode well for the format. I'm not sure I can think of many technologies that overtook marketplace momentum because they were ideologically appealing.

  • I took a Mac port of LAME (DropMP3) and Codewarrior and hacked it, ensuring that I had not only frequency limit and slope controls but also an ATH suppress threshold control- I understand this is now in LAME but when I did it it was a new trick. The reason is, I do digital audio mastering and consider mp3 another mastering stage. You've got to do fairly significant work to get it to seriously reflect the original master- usually you completely lose all soundstage depth, and the tonal balance goes out the window, with highs either vanishing or wildly exaggerated.

    I've been in an endless-remastering phase getting together equipment and software- and I figure I'm going to be whipping out the ol' hacked DropMP3 again, and not using Ogg Vorbis. Why? Partly encoder/decoder availability (try supporting older MacOSes such as you'd find in a dedicated DAW with specific picky hardware! We don't _upgrade_ on a whim, stuff can break), and partly because I suspect I'd have to do all the hacking over again, and I'm lucky I got the LAME sharedlib to work at all- I am _no_ programmer. I am not confident I'd be able to work the magic trick twice...

    And the point is, my needs are different from consumer needs. When I was first looking at MP3, I hopped up and down and stamped my tiny feet and demanded a whole bank of controls over the parameters of encoding, to be able to do mastering to mp3 properly. Nobody listened, nobody cared. LAME is open source- I downloaded software, spent far too much on Codewarrior (standard environment for Mac programming, very nice, but priced accordingly), and I did end up able to put in the controls I needed.

    Now I have what I needed from MP3, and a copy of the source code, and here's Ogg Vorbis. I love what Ogg Vorbis _means_, but I don't know if I have it in me to do another feat of stumbling, barely-capable hacking on it to get what I need- and the people doing it are not in the least interested in catering to my every whim. I swear, I would drop everything to help them if they wanted to be helped- but they don't. It's their baby, and not my business to tell them how to do it or what platforms (inc. archaic ones) to support.

    So fine- I'll keep an eye out for if anything happens, and FWIW the stuff _I_ code (poorly, by programmer standards) is mostly audio these days and all GPLed. So if they want to take anything I do and incorporate it into the standard Vorbis encoder, they're free to do so. I could picture a bit of sidechain compression to bring up detail that the encoding will tend to cut back again, something like that based on what lossy encoding tends to do... but that's as may be.

    I won't be using Ogg Vorbis in the _immediate_ future. I have a pet sound player, 'SoundApp', which is a wonderful and free tool (not my own doing), and if that starts supporting Ogg Vorbis I'll take more of an interest. I have personally written the author of SoundApp inquiring about future support for Ogg Vorbis. No reply, but maybe it will come someday. There's a kludge of an encoder that is the only non-commercial Ogg encoder out there for Mac: it crashes on OS8.1. And so it goes...

  • Lets face it, the MP3 populatity is due in great part to Napster and other services like it.
    And, I don't think this patented stuff has anything to do in this game. If that were true, PNG would be the standard for net images (GIF and JPEG still holds their places).
    For what I have seen of this format, it looks pretty good, but for it to became a de facto standard the way MP3 is today, using a patent free algoritm is not enough. Most users don't care about it.

    I, for once, don't see many people using it in any forseeable future, unless something else give it a push and make it interesting for people to use it.

  • I think not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ubi_NL ( 313657 ) <joris.benschop@g ... Ecom minus punct> on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:52PM (#2126302) Journal
    Let's compare this to the old VCR battle
    Both Beta and V2000 were quite a lot better than VHS, but in the end VHS won it. Why? as far as V2000 is concerned you were able to get pr0n on VHS.

    Pretty much the same here (although no pr0n). Joe Sixpack doesn't care about formats, and he doesn't care about money (really) as almost every home user gets his software illegally. But even if he did have to pay for it: Nowadays you can get MP3-walkmans, photocamera's etc etc. Nothing is there for Ogg Vorbis.
    To make OV popular, you'll need to give it an advantage over MP3, that can be understood by Joe. Patents and 'free (as in speech) software' are no such things.
    At the moment MP3 has all the advantages, and there's no reason why OV will take over.

    • Re:I think not (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JWhitlock ( 201845 )
      Pretty much the same here (although no pr0n). Joe Sixpack doesn't care about formats, and he doesn't care about money (really) as almost every home user gets his software illegally. But even if he did have to pay for it: Nowadays you can get MP3-walkmans, photocamera's etc etc. Nothing is there for Ogg Vorbis.
      To make OV popular, you'll need to give it an advantage over MP3, that can be understood by Joe. Patents and 'free (as in speech) software' are no such things.
      At the moment MP3 has all the advantages, and there's no reason why OV will take over.

      I think MP3/OGG is a bit different than Beta vs. VHS. For one thing, availibility isn't limited to what the movie studios and Blockbuster decide to carry - it is as easy to rip a CD to MP3 as it is to OGG, and as easy to download, if both are availible. So, the only thing limiting acceptance is availibility, and hardware support.

      Personally, I think stand-alone MP3 players are still a niche market, still in the first generation. The digital audio enthusiasts are buying huge hard drives and ripping their CD collections, 40 gig at a time, and playing them over some computer-to-stereo setup. The consumer electronics are too primitive to not have a computer at the center of your digital audio setup.

      As I said, these enthusiasts are ripping their entire CD collections, and, when possible, making them availible on Napster or Napster clones. If you want the "universal jukebox" effect, it's not the 14-yr-old Spears fans who support it, but these enthusiasts, who aren't afraid to admit they bought a dozen albums from eighties hair bands.

      If you can convince these folks that you have a better format, one that isn't controlled by record companies or patents, which sounds better on their systems, then they will take the time to re-encode their stuff. It will be availible through the usual suspects, and people will learn that, if you want obscure stuff, go Ogg.

      Like the original MP3 revolution, this one won't be led by Joe Six-Pack. This one will be led by the audiophiles and the pioneers.

    • "almost every home user gets his software illegally."

      Umm...no. MOst of the non-techies I know are terrified at the idea of "pirating" software. "My god, what happens if I get caught?" They don't understand that getting caught is very rare, and they don't know where to find pirated software anyway. You are unfairly maligning the average user, my friend.

  • I don't really care whether Vorbis becomes really popular or not. I think Vorbis files have superior sound quality -- certainly they handle the `ssss' sounds much better. I haven't compared against VBR MP3s, though (dunno why they aren't more popular).

    I also usually listen to my music through some very nice headphones (I don't want to bother other people with my music), which really tests the strength of any encoding technology.

    I hope it gets supported by portable devices sometime soon, but I'm not going to worry about that until they finally get to be as cheap as CD players.
  • My mother has got some really old audio tapes, and becuase cassette players tend to chew tapes every now and then, she asked if I could make a backup, and I said I could encode them with Vorbis and put them on the computer, and she liked that idea.

    It's a Pentium PRO 180 with win95, this computer, and there isn't a lot of space on the disk, and when I last tried, it had 32 megs of RAM. Recently, I got another 64 megs for it.

    I ripped to WAVs, but had to settle for 8 bits, mono 11 kHz, that's all my software could do. So, I've got a bunch of large WAVs, but I haven't been able to encode it to Ogg Vorbis.

    It seems the best thing to do, is to encode directly from tape, while it is playing, through the sound card to Ogg Vorbis. Anybody know about Win95-software that can do this....?

  • No one cares about patent laws. Most people using mp3s are downloading them without paying for them, do you think they care about breaking some patent laws when they steal their mp3 encoder? No way.

    Ogg Vorbis is most useful for streaming media servers. Get the decoder into a lot of the client software people are already using (winamp, wimp, and real), and the free streaming server will "sell" like hotcakes, if it's any good.

    • > No one cares about patent laws. Most people using mp3s are downloading them without paying for them, do you think they care about breaking some patent laws when they steal their mp3 encoder? No way.

      I think you've got it.

      I saw a lot of posts today about geeks who say they're about to rip their 300-700 CDs into .ogg format. Hey, if you have the CDs, that's a great idea.

      But lossy-compressed-music didn't catch on just because you could stick ten albums onto a CD-R, it caught on because you could have a Pretty Damn Good copy of the music for free - as in "beer" - without owning the CD.

      If you've got 700 CDs' worth of MP3z, you're not gonna convert 'em to .ogg, because the second lossy compression (MP3 -> OGG) is going to destroy the quality of your recordings, and you won't do it. (And you probably shouldn't!)

      MP3 got its first-mover advantage because allowed for distribution of music on an unparallelled scale. For every copy of some rare or out-of-print CD or vinyl recording that can be re-ripped to .ogg, there will be several dozen, perhaps hundreds, of MP3 copies that can't, because the owners of the copies of the MP3s have no access to the original recording.

      With the audio universe populated almost entirely with MP3s, and with transcoding not being a viable option, why would anyone go through the trouble of trying to simultaneously support archives in two formats? (It's hard enough to find MP3-playing consumer electronics that correctly handle all the variations of MP3, let alone one that properly supports two formats.)

      As cool as Ogg is, I'm afraid it's destined for a niche market.

      > Ogg Vorbis is most useful for streaming media servers.

      Niche, however, isn't that bad a thing. This is a particularly good niche to be in.

      > Get the decoder into a lot of the client software people are already using (winamp, wimp, and real), and the free streaming server will "sell" like hotcakes, if it's any good.

      In fact, I think that Ogg, if it went into the streaming audio niche, could really whip some serious llama ass.

      For streaming audio, the end user probably isn't archiving the content, so the format doesn't matter. Streaming audio also includes live broadcasts, and having access to the "original CD" doesn't matter -- the "original" is the DJ's voice speaking into a mic.

      Besides, wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where aspiring webcasters no longer had to fork over $BIGNUM to RealMedia for .rm streams or MSFT for .wma streams?

  • Proliferation of this standard will require 4 things. Ogg will have to be of equal or better sound quality than mp3. Ogg will have to use comperable or less space than mp3. There will have to be numerous players available for the format, or at least it will need to be supported by all the popular players. And it will need to be used. Personally, if all else is equal, ogg and mp3 can mix on my HD without any problems and other people will see it the same way.

    -Restil

  • Ogg is not for me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:45PM (#2129356) Homepage Journal
    I archive all of my CDs to MP3, and I'll be sticking to MP3 for the foreseeable future. My MP3 encoder is faster than any current Ogg encoder, and IMHO, a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg file anyway. I'm also planning to get an MP3 CD player in the future for my car. If I had a lot of OGG files, I'd need to decode them and re-encode to MP3 just to put them onto CDR. Not much use. Ogg Vorbis seems to be a good format, but it wasn't first. The fact that there are few strings attached to it is extremely good, and I think Ogg will be very useful for programmers and games developers. But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first, MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS versus Betamax.
    • agree with you fully...but bad analogy: BetaMax was here first, and they lost. Hmmm, that gets me thinking: Maybe we should get the porn industry to distrbute sound clips in Ogg format.

      (If you have no clue what I'm talking about [ie: history of VHS] ignore the joke)
      • Or at least not entirely. Two reasons: One, porn is a multimedia product. Sound alone just won't cut it. Two, it's not enough to just get people listening to OGG. We need them encoding in it, and not just porn.

        In addition, with the way congress is not-thinking these days, we might end up getting Vorbis banned as a "purely pornographic and immoral medium", or some such crap.

        The concept is sound, though. The porn industry certainly has done a lot of pioneering work with multimedia formats. Come to think of it, maybe someone should talk to playboy, see what they think...

    • Why isn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TWX_the_Linux_Zealot ( 227666 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:04PM (#2122286) Journal
      I'd not go that far, the thing with Ogg is that they're trying to make it relatively easy to convert, the XMMS plugin exists, and it should be transparent to the user to play ogg files. Granted, people do need to start encoding to make the codec survive, but I'll admit that I'm willing to give it a chance, especially if it means that I don't have to worry about my music encoder ceasing to release newer, better versions because it got it's ass sued into the ground for being patented...

    • Re:Ogg is not for me (Score:5, Informative)

      by hearingaid ( 216439 ) <redvision@geocities.com> on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:54PM (#2127027) Homepage

      interesting little post, except for one thing.

      Betamax was there first. VHS overtook it. Sony marketed Betamax VCRs in the US before RCA marketed VHS. (Which is why Universal Studios sued Sony, not RCA, to stop VCRs from being distributed in the US.)

      The reason VHS won is simple: people liked being able to tape six hours of crappy NTSC on one tape. Sony thought they'd care more about quality. JVC had already caved a little by suggesting maybe a 4-hour format would be useful sometimes. RCA pressured them into providing the 6-hour format.

      RCA was right. 6 hours makes timeshifting much more practical. Broadcast TV is crap quality anyway, we don't need high-quality formats to preserve its defects for the future.

      Anyway, the point is that that comparison has really nothing to do with OGG/MP3. Where .ogg stands to gain is if some of the major media player writers support it. It has no chance of support from MS, but if RealNetworks, Nullsoft and/or Apple add it to RealPlayer/Jukebox, Winamp and iTunes, then we might see a momentum shift.

      • Just for the record, the dramatic quality difference between VHS and Beta is a well documented myth [utdallas.edu] (although, the question is a little more complicated than that, as usual). You are right, however that VHS killed Beta primarily because of the recording length issue.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • To close the "Beta is much better than VHS myth" here are some documented stats:

          - VHS: 240 Lines, 3.4 Mhz bandwidth
          - Beta: 250 Lines, 3.5 Mhz bandwidth

          That's a whole 4% better horizonal resolution. 4% is not worth all this argument.

          The proof is availiable here (scroll down): http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/vcr/ vcr.htm (remove the slashdot impregnated space)

          Searches for other sites will also show the same results. Remember folks, we're talking 1970's beta formats, not the super duper new stuff on the market.

          I'm sorry Beta lovers, the numbers can't lie. If you can tell the difference then I guess your eyes are 4% better than mine.
        • This is straying off topic a bit, but I think it is worth mentioning:

          First off, if you've ever worked with profesional video recording equipment, you will know that Beta has much better sound and picture quality than VHS. Of course, half inch tape is better than beta and that is where you will find your broadcast programs stored.

          Second, I've always heard that it was Sony's licensing problems that killed Beta. Anyone could license the VHS format and produce tapes, players and recorders. Sony kept a tight grip on the Beta format until it was too late.

          Sony seems to suffer from this pretty often. Just look at the memory stick and the Sony PDA. Both good products that are incompatable with everything else. Maybe someday they will learn...
      • Don't forget that Sony was demeanding a liscense fee from the movie companies to use tyhere tapes, and they were going to force the companies making of Beta tapes for consumer sales('blank' tapes) to pay a liscensing feee as well. I would suggets that, ultimatly, its was the liscensing demands that killed beta for the consumer market.
        FYI beta is still used in the movie industry.
      • In fact, the word from Nullsoft is that they have an Ogg Vorbis plugin that will be included in Winamp 2.77.
    • >a Lame VBR mp3 is higher quality than an Ogg
      >file anyway.

      This is debatable...certainly _not_ for equal
      average resulting bitrates.

      >But in the consumer market, MP3 was there first,
      >MP3 is already popular.. and it's another VHS
      >versus Betamax.

      That would be good. VHS won because it was more
      usable and was a more open format. Vorbis has all
      this and better quality.

      --
      GCP

  • The real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:50PM (#2134247) Homepage
    ...why would anyone use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, aside from just being part of groupthink?

    Have the software patents affected anyone here personally?
    • Because without standards in the public domain, it's practically the end of free expression.

      Think about it: The licensor can make any conditions they want. So, they can tell you not to critizise them, or their partners, or whoever pays them money. There's nothing you can do about it. We haven't really seen bad license conditions up to now. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.

      It is if somebody would own all the paper in the world, and you would have to sign a license agreement to publish anything on paper, or even write something on paper. Obviously, you wouldn't have free expression if that was the case.

      Now, I emphasize practically, because, obviously, you can still talk, and you can still write on paper. But that's only because it is what audio might not be: it's free as in speech. If the only way you can be heard, is by communicating with audio files, paper is obsolete (which may happen), then the public domain standard is very valuable.

      Besides, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the ability to communicate in any medium, when talking about free expression.

      Ogg Vorbis is a way to ensure free expression, and a much more important one than free software too.

    • Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Informative)

      by OverCode@work ( 196386 ) <.overcode. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:04PM (#2115998) Homepage
      Aside from the issue of patents (mainly annoying if you're trying to do something commercial with MP3), there are several good reasons to use Ogg:

      -Performance. On certain types of audio, Ogg spins circles around MP3. I'm sure MP3 has its own best cases, but I've yet to find them. In the general case, Ogg holds its own against MP3, usually producing slightly smaller streams at comparable quality.

      -Flexibility. Ogg streams are very easy to manipulate. To join two streams, just concatenate the files. Streaming software can arbitrarily reduce a stream's size by chopping off the ends of packets, since the less important information is stored near the end. It's also possible to store multiple logical streams of Vorbis audio in one Ogg stream.

      -Quality. Older encoders did have some serious bugs, but the newer releases produce excellent results. I added the Vorbis codec to my HipZip portable player, and I use it for almost all of my music, unless it's already stored in MP3 (in practice, I usually encode my own stuff, so that's not a problem).

      And no, I'm not an Ogg Vorbis developer. I've just taken an interest in the project.

      -John
      • I don't suppose you'd consider a HOW-TO or an FAQ on how you added the codec to your mp3 player? I certainly don't know how to do this :) Maybe a download?
        • I don't suppose you'd consider a HOW-TO or an FAQ on how you added the codec to your mp3 player? I certainly don't know how to do this :) Maybe a download?

          Sure, I use w3juke [sourceforge.net] and the author nicely added ogg support, so it "just works".

          Disclaimer#1: I'm the author, so I may have an over inflated opinion of how nice I am.

          Disclaimer#2: w3juke plays it's music by feeding a stream into an external program (mpg123, ogg123, vox, or whatever you setup in your conf file for a given MIME type, or file extension), so it was pretty easy to add ogg support.

          Disclaimer#3: the tar-ball version is pretty good, but there were some minor changes to make it compile out of the box on Linux that are only in CVS. Likely there will be another tarball soon. for now if you use Linux, check it out of the CVS tree.

          Disclaimer#4: the screenshots are old, it look better now :-)

  • Worst Music Quality of the Bunch (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:44PM (#2136306)
    Was'nt there a Slashdot submission a few weeks ago that rated the audio quality of all the music compression formats?

    Ogg came in last, no?

    • Worst test of the bunch (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bee ( 15753 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @12:49PM (#2126000) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, and it's been the only test ever that said anything bad about Ogg Vorbis, and it was the worst-administered test of them all too. Any good test will do a double-blind or at least a single-blind test (think: Pepsi Challenge-- how many people would say they preferred Pepsi if they knew it was Pepsi?). This did none of that.

  • yes, you're the only one (Score:3, Funny)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Monday August 06, 2001 @01:23PM (#2148599)
    I'm not the only one slow on the MP3 curve, basically starting from scratch with Vorbis, am I?

    Yes, you are. Even all my non-computer-literate friends figured out what Napster was and how to use it to get mp3s about 1 1/2 years ago, and even my mom has been downloading mp3s for the past 6 months. I'm afraid you're the last one.
  • This is just a rumour, so get your grain of salt here [basis1.com].

    I heard the BBC (yes, the UK one) is aiming to use OpenDivX and OGG Vorbis as their primary streaming formats some time in the future. They run Linux on most of their hardware anyway, had some quarrels with Microsoft because they refused to support Windows 2000 (with their media server) when running under VMware or something, weren't allowed to link Realplayer Plugins directly from their page by Real.com - so that's the next option.

    I'd really like to know more about this, if anyone has some more insider knowledge please reply.

  • Nobody's really pushing Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Monday August 06, 2001 @02:54PM (#2163571) Homepage Journal
    On the other hand, MP3 is so heavily promoted, it's a wonder the phone companies haven't converted to it, yet.

    =IF= you started getting CD-players from major companies, on the high-streets, which could play Ogg Vorbis-encoded files, you would see it being used. Otherwise, it's a dead duck.

    Mind you, it's not helped by the crappy encoder, the heavy media publicity of MP3.com and Napster, and the somewhat poor showing in a recent comparison review.

    Ogg Vorbis =should= be as good, if not better, than MP4, VQ, and other "high-quality" lossy formats. It isn't. It's about on-par, but it's just not there.

    IMHO, if Ogg Vorbis is to seriously challange the other formats, it HAS to have better handling of different frequences. 5-6 bands seems fairly typical for audio, but with research suggesting that there's a LOT of sound information held in "texture", rather than actual audible sound, you might easily want to have 12-16 bands to reliably handle sound texture.

  • Change the name! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hyrdra ( 260687 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @03:01PM (#2163602) Homepage Journal
    Ogg Vorbis has a real chance of taking MP3, but they're going to have to change the name. Part of MP3's success is its trendy name. It's a smooth name that rolls of the tounge, sounds cool, but not too technical.

    Ogg Vorbis sounds like a new brand of Mr. Clean. It's funny, strange, un-sophisticated and not natural to say. Personally, since both are technically about the same, I would prefer my files with a *.mp3 than *.ogg.

    It's small, but it's something consumers notice. Fashion is just as important as functionality and political freedom.

  • There's even a car called MP3 - Mazda MP3 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @03:57PM (#2163949) Homepage
    look here [canadiandriver.com]

  • WRITE TO RIO TO SUPPORT OGG VORBIS! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ukyoCE ( 106879 ) on Monday August 06, 2001 @05:25PM (#2164587) Journal
    Follow this link to Rio's web page and e-mail them requesting support for Ogg Vorbis. Personally this is the only thing holding me back from buying a compressed-audio cd player. The first one that comes out supporting .ogg will have me reripping all of my CDs into the supreme .ogg format and purchasing their player, regardless of cost.

    http://www.riohome.com/default.asp?menu=support&su bmenu=cs&item=cs_email-form&detail=other [riohome.com]
    That is a link to e-mail Rio requesting that they release an upgrade to their Roivolt to playback .ogg files. Below is the text that I sent to them. With portable support for .ogg, I think it has a great chance of overtaking mp3.


    Rio,
    I'm interested in buying a cd-mp3 player. I think this would be a GREAT way to backup all my cds, as well as make them easier(and funner!) to listen to. I could fit my 100cds on around 10 cds. That's awesome.
    There is only one thing holding me back. MP3 is an aged format, and also requires that related software pay royalties to Frauenhoffer for the mp3 patents. Same with "mp3pro" or whatever their next mp3 is.
    Ogg Vorbis is a free codec which isn't blocked by any patents whatsoever. It also sounds better than mp3, AND takes up less space. I will be ripping all of my cds into .ogg format as soon as their encoder reaches 1.0 (which will be soon). I noticed that the Roivolt has upgradable codecs. If an upgrade is released for the Roivolt to play Ogg Vorbis, the Roivolt will win the hearts of audiophiles and geeks all over.
    Thanks! :)

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