Apple should have gone with Ogg Vorbis

[swhite]

Using a frequency analysis program (Spectrogram), as well as my own ears, I've discovered that Ogg Vorbis sounds far better than AAC and also has way more treble. AAC at 128kbps has a sharp cutoff at 15.8KHz; absolutely NOTHING comes through above that point. Ogg Vorbis has a sharp cutoff at 20.7KHz, but that's still plenty high enough to sound really good. 112kbps Ogg has a cutoff at 17.9KHz, but that's still better than AAC!

Shayne

[Alltaken]

i think lossy formats should be banned LOL

Alltaken

[Jay]

[moved to GD as it has really nothing to do with winamp]

[Drunken Master]

wma is really the only way to go.

[taylormemer]

Originally posted by Alltaken
i think lossy formats should be banned LOL

Alltaken

In some ways yes but no I don't think so.

[Drunken Master]

Now that I've thought about it, mp3pro is really the best format available.

[DJ Egg]

nah, Real Audio rocks!

[Drunken Master]

DJ Egg has a good point.

[Jay]

you guys suck, da best is and always will be midi.

[Drunken Master]

Sure midi is great..... if you like porno music.

[anubis2003]

ah hell no - old Nintendo game formats had the best sounding music. Super Mario Brothers for instance. Dr. Mario is my personal favorite.

[InvisableMan]

apple sucks and is dying as a whole, the ipod cannot save them.

[DJ Egg]

DSP Group TrueSpeech (8 kHz, 1-bit, Mono, 1 kbps)

[ScorLibran]

You're all wrong. Yamaha VQF is teh 1337n3ss 4udi0 f0rm4t.




(BTW...the lead post in this thread is *so* getting posted on Hydrogenaudio. It's outstanding! This is the very kind of humor they'd appreciate. )

[taylormemer]

I have heaps of stuff in VQF, intresting, I didn't know it was to l33t.

[DJ Egg]

*cough* Seriously though, yeah Ogg is probably the best compressed lossy format, close call with Musepack MPC maybe? But, to be honest, I couldn't give a damn about what Apple does/uses/says/(anything). Though I'm certainly glad they didn't choose ogg, that's for sure (not that they could/would've anyway). Hmm, Ogg Vorbis audio in an MP4 container . . . most ponderous.

When most people have got 500Gb hard drives or something, from an audiophile point of view, this will be the way to go.
Hmm, a 10 Terrabyte HD please, yeah, the Western Digital 512mb cache, 57600rpm one please. Thank you.

I did say "seriously" didn't I ?
Oh yeah, I did . . . heh

Then again, I guess by then that you'll be able to carry your pc around with you, like a wristwatch or something, heyhey.

Ok, fun's over, time for me to get back to some serious tech support . . .

[ScorLibran]

Disclaimer...My apologies of anyone took my last post seriously. It was intended humorously.

For the results of double-blind sound quality tests, check out this 128kbps Listening Test conducted late last year.

These four are statistically tied for first place, but...
MPC > AAC > WMA Pro (not normal WMA) > Vorbis

LAME MP3 came in second, behind the formats above, then Blade MP3 was the low anchor.

Neither VQF nor RA are seriously considered high-end encoding formats for reaching transparency (sound quality = to source) at similar bitrates.

Hope this clarifies things.

[Cognition]

Pure wave format. .wav is lossless, especially if you remember to select "Telephone Quality" when recording (using sndrec32 of course).

[ScorLibran]

"Telephone quality" PCM WAV...

Nice!

[taylormemer]

Intresting.

[penvzilaa]

Originally posted by swhite
Using a frequency analysis program (Spectrogram), as well as my own ears, I've discovered that Ogg Vorbis sounds far better than AAC and also has way more treble. AAC at 128kbps has a sharp cutoff at 15.8KHz; absolutely NOTHING comes through above that point. Ogg Vorbis has a sharp cutoff at 20.7KHz, but that's still plenty high enough to sound really good. 112kbps Ogg has a cutoff at 17.9KHz, but that's still better than AAC!

Shayne

!!!!!

The 20.7kHz cutoff is probably where the engineers lowpassed the master recording for CD production! Either that or it's just the highest frequency that you'll find distortion at.

... and now I see it was a joke. lol

[xzxzzx]

Originally posted by ScorLibran
Disclaimer...My apologies of anyone took my last post seriously. It was intended humorously.

For the results of double-blind sound quality tests, check out this 128kbps Listening Test conducted late last year.

These four are statistically tied for first place, but...
MPC > AAC > WMA Pro (not normal WMA) > Vorbis

Well, this is true, but there are two qualifiers to that: Vorbis may be worse at 128K, but that doesn't mean it's worse at 192 or any other bitrate.

Furthermore, from my lurking over at hydrogenaudio, it seems there is some concensus that Vorbis tends to get lower scores because more people are familiar with the format, and have, in a sense, "trained" their ears to hear vorbis's artifacts/distortions.

[ScorLibran]

You're first point is true indeed. A format that does well at 128 may or may not compare as well with other formats at higher (or lower) bitrates. Another listening test would have to be done at the target bitrate to know.

(Also, keep in mind that those four formats are statistically tied for first place...they are essentially *equal* in sound quality, as their ANOVA error margins overlap.)

I'd tend to agree with your second point as well, though that's pretty hard to measure conclusively. Vorbis has been tested in quite a few tests by many of the same people, so "format-specific artifact awareness" is a viable possibility. Still, since the test results are as close as they are, it's safer to say they tied than "Vorbis is worse".

The best bet to be totally sure is for each person to do their own tests, since what may sound fine to me at 160, for instance might be bad to someone else's ears. But for people with no time to ABX, using test results as at least a "general guide" would be worthwhile.

[xzxzzx]

True, true, true Scor.

[morgado]

Well, first I always used mp3, as most of people did and do ... then I started to come around in Winamp Forums, then I got a light in mey head, I started trying Ogg ... then comes FLAC !!!
FLAC RULEZ !!!!!!

[xzxzzx]

FLAC == pointless, unless you're transcoding for other stuff like an iPod.

[fwgx]

I did use ogg but then got a Nomad Zen tat doesn't like ogg so now I encode MP3's at --alt-preset insane

[ScorLibran]

Originally posted by xzxzzx
FLAC == pointless, unless you're transcoding for other stuff like an iPod.

...or for archival. That, and the need for many transcodes are my excuse. For general listening, there are definitely better options than FLAC's 800kbps+ in the realm of lossy.

MP3 hits transparency at around 200kbps or up. Vorbis, AAC and MPC do the same at around 160-180kbps. And even 128kbps is still very acceptable for most people, especially for portable players.

[xzxzzx]

Originally posted by ScorLibran
...or for archival. That, and the need for many transcodes are my excuse. For general listening, there are definitely better options than FLAC's 800kbps+ in the realm of lossy.

What's the point of perfect archival if all you're going to do is listen to it, and Ogg -q7 is transperant to you?

That having been said, I think I'm going to rerip all my music to FLAC, but I also think I'm going to get an iPod, so I have an excuse.

[ScorLibran]

Bit-perfect archival for secondary backup, plus for an accurate transcoding source. Those reasons are really one reason with two goals, I guess.

I encode to several different (lossy) formats for testing purposes (my own and to help others), so lossless is required. But I'm the exception to the rule. "Normal" people don't need FLAC unless they have mass quantities of HD space they need to fill up.

[xzxzzx]

But if they want to fill HD space, straight WAVs work even better...

Anyway, I stand behind my original statement: Transcoding is the only purpose for lossless compression.

After all, what's the point of backups, besides transcoding?

[Gobd]

Monkeys audio is the best Loseless is what everyone should be using now, everyone has plenty of harddrive space.

[xzxzzx]

That's not true. Furthermore, I want 400 CDs on my iPod, damn it.

[ScorLibran]

Among other reasons against it, lossless cannot be streamed over limited bandwidth, hence yet another need for lossy formats.

Monkey's is good, but it has 0 hardware support. My FLACs play in my car just fine. They would on the Rio Karma portable player. as well.

[whiteflip]

just because YOU have a huge hard drive space doesn't mean I do. I could have a 6gb hard drive space and need to encode in the best quality at the lowest bitrate. say 96kbps hahaha.

Which sounds better? 24kbps stereo vorbis or 24kbps stereo aac?

[xzxzzx]

24? I don't think either will encode that low.

[xzxzzx]

Yeah, but either will sound like total crap. Maybe Speex could work ok...

[QuantumKnot]

Originally posted by xzxzzx
Furthermore, from my lurking over at hydrogenaudio, it seems there is some concensus that Vorbis tends to get lower scores because more people are familiar with the format, and have, in a sense, "trained" their ears to hear vorbis's artifacts/distortions.

Definitely. Vorbis has a distinct high frequency boost at quality levels lower than 5 I believe and everyone who is familiar with it will pick it out.

Personally I think Apple should have tried to support many other codecs as well as Vorbis. Ultimately it's up to their marketing department rather than their tech one...AAC has the big word, MPEG-4, behind it while consumers tend to not know who is Frank Klemm or Xiph.Org's Monty.

[ScorLibran]

Hi QuantumKnot.

Originally posted by QuantumKnot
Definitely. Vorbis has a distinct high frequency boost at quality levels lower than 5 I believe and everyone who is familiar with it will pick it out.

Personally I think Apple should have tried to support many other codecs as well as Vorbis. Ultimately it's up to their marketing department rather than their tech one...AAC has the big word, MPEG-4, behind it while consumers tend to not know who is Frank Klemm or Xiph.Org's Monty.

All the more reason Xiph.org should put together a marketing department. I need a break sometimes.

(J/K...I'm a former Vorbis zeolot...not a current one.)

Seriously, for knowing which formats are the best at various bitrates, people should check the Listening Tests page at Hydrogenaudio. Look for the threads marked "Finished".

But I'm not aware of any double-blind 24kbps tests, though. To know which format is the best at this bitrate, try ABC/HR. You can do double-blind ABX tests and subjective ratings in one tool.

[QuantumKnot]

Originally posted by ScorLibran
Hi QuantumKnot.

Hi ScorLibran. Nice to see a familiar face here.

(J/K...I'm a former Vorbis zeolot...not a current one.)

So are you a Winamp zealot?

One other artifact of Vorbis that lots of people seem to notice is stereo separation. Though it can be fairly obvious to the ear at low bitrates (listen to some q -1 or q 0 Vorbis files), it seems there are people who are sensitive to subtle degradations in stereo and they generally listen for it.

I think it is something that Monty is going to fix. For those who don't know who Monty is, look at my previous reply. jk