MP3 vs. Ogg

[Redeeman]

hi, i have spend hours of googling on this subject, alot sites say that ogg is just better, but that isnt enough for me, as i am really interrested in audio, and i clearly can hear diffrence between cd and mp3, i would like if someone here could tell me exactly what mp3 did, and ogg did

and i would like if someone could recommend me a cd ripper that can make ogg with variable bitrate, joint sterio 320kbps, as i hate use cd's prefarebly using gtk2

thanks!

[neilhwatson]

Mp3 uses patented algorythms to compress audio. Vorbis Ogg files use algorythms that are open and free (see www.vorbis.com. While this doesn't have much affect on you now it means that in the future the owner of the Mp3 algorythms could demand royalties from you for using them.

As for riping, I like the program called ripit (search www.freshmeat.net. Be warned its interface is command line only.

[Redeeman]

yeah, i like the thing with open stuff!!!!!!! but i would like to know exactly what stuff the diffrent algorithms cuts of and such

[superjaded]

First, a little nitpicking -- "ogg" is not an audio format. Ogg is just a transport layer of sorts, rather like AVI if you will, a medium that can hold audio or video. As neilwatson said, Ogg/Vorbis is actually what you're listening to.

As far as ogg/vorbis v. MP3, before we get into the subjective aspects of audio codecs, let's compare what we can objectively:

Tagging format
MP3 uses the ID3 tag system. As far as I know, neither v1 nor v2 has any free form tagging support. v1 is very limited, and while v2 is not quite limited, it's largely considered a hack.
The Windows player foobar2000 recommends using APEv2 tags for MP3s instead of tags from the ID3 standard. But, unfortunately, it's the only program I know of that knows how to handle APEv2 tags in MP3s.
Ogg/Vorbis utilizes vorbiscomments, which are stored as UTF8 and allow free form tagging. Very neat. Also don't have to worry about support (like the APEv2 thing).

Encoding
MP3 is inherently CBR. There is a "VBR" mode to MP3, but it's fairly obvious that it's not much more than a hack, and an easily broken one at that.
Ogg/Vorbis is inherently VBR. There is a "CBR mode" (done via bitrate management), but it's largely recommended to use "quality settings," which give the encoder more room to move and arrange the bits how it sees fit.

Politics
MP3 is for all intents and purposes, free. As far as I know, LAME is considered one of the best MP3 encoders out there, especially with its --alt-presets. But as another person mentioned, it's not Free, which puts the future of MP3 into question.
Ogg/Vorbis is both free and Free. It can be modified, used and abused however a given person wants it to be. Without it being Free, we wouldn't have people like Garf, who tuned Vorbis for it to handle higher bitrates better.

So, from a purely implmentational, political and theoretical standpoint, Vorbis should be the be-all-end-all in comparison, right?

Not necessarily. MP3 has the sole honor of being "the first," first and foremost. It's as common as mud. It has better "MP3 player support" -- heck, it's the reason we have things besides optical media based players around.

However, that point is becoming less of an issue, because there are ogg/vorbis players on the horizon, if there aren't players out there on the market already.

The biggest issue, however, is the hardest question to answer, because it's purely subjective. What sounds great to one guy might not necessarily sound great to another.

That being said, you can only be sure which codec to pick by testing the codecs out yourself and making a decision for yourself.

And as far as rippers go, I prefer grip, or abcde is pretty good as well, if you want CLI stuff.

[Redeeman]

wow! you just made me believe 100% in that i need ogg as my format!

[Herodot]

and i clearly can hear diffrence between cd and mp3

If you can tell a 320 kbs mp3 from a CD, then you've really got golden ears! Or something is wrong with your hardware.

but i would like to know exactly what stuff the diffrent algorithms cuts of and such

You need to know a lot about signal analysis and psycho acoustics before that information means anything. But hey, maybe you do!

I usually go for a high bitrate VBR, mp3 or vorbis. Once the bitrate is high enough, I can't tell the difference. For political and practical reasons I usually choose vorbis.

[Stevey_Hudz]

and i would like if someone could recommend me a cd ripper that can make ogg with variable bitrate, joint sterio 320kbps, as i hate use cd's prefarebly using gtk2

thanks!

Hi, you might like to try abcde. It's command line and it's in portage. It's really great once you have it setup (encoder, bitrate, file location), just put in a cd, run abcde

Steve

[cayenne]

wow! you just made me believe 100% in that i need ogg as my format!

If you have the room for it...and you want lossless compression, look in to using FLAC.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/

I do believe it is being supported now by the same people doing ogg vorbis...I'm ripping all my cd's at home for home use to flac on my newly build gentoo media computer. I'll rip them to ogg for use in my car or portable for the gym. I figure those are two of the worst listening environments available...and the lossy ogg vorbis would be just fine for those.

I could only shoot for an Audigy2 card for the media computer at this time...will upgrade that in the future...but, playing this through my pre-amp/ SET tube amp to Klipshorn speakers...really, REALLY rocks!!!

My $0.02,

cayenne

[mmealman]

OGG rocks and definately sounds better than mp3. VBR is just better than CBR.

Grip is a really good ripper/encoder program and it supports mp3, ogg and even flac.

You best bet is to just try all the formats out and decide which you like the best.

[Malakin]

Here are some recent listening tests:
http://audio.samharris.us/test/64test/results.html
They are all done in 64kbit except for the mp3 which is 128kbit. Looking at this a little speculation would say that an ogg vorbis at 128kbit should sound better then an mp3 at 192kbit.

[brainlock]

No question... if you want a good ripper using gtk2, try sound-juicer.

[TheWart]

Here are some recent listening tests:
http://audio.samharris.us/test/64test/results.html
They are all done in 64kbit except for the mp3 which is 128kbit. Looking at this a little speculation would say that an ogg vorbis at 128kbit should sound better then an mp3 at 192kbit.

I don't think this is neccessariy true. At the lower bitrates, the difference is substantial, but as you move past 128kpbs, it becomes very minimal. I rip my mp3's with lame (through abcde) with the 'preset extreme' option, which makes mp3's ranging in bitrate from 192-250kbs. While I am no audiophile, they sound just as good as a cd to me.

Either way, I don't think you can go wrong. In the past, I stayed away from ogg because if I wanted to let my friends play them, their media player usually did not support it. Now, as winamp et al do support it, it is a noniusse now. However, out of habit, i just use mp3's.

[bssteph]

This is sheerly on the other end of the spectrum, but food for thought when comparing encoders.
http://users.pandora.be/sjeng/floggy.html - Vorbis @ 4kbps

For Internet radio and low filesize needs, Vorbis simply rocks.

[TheWart]

This is sheerly on the other end of the spectrum, but food for thought when comparing encoders.
http://users.pandora.be/sjeng/floggy.html - Vorbis @ 4kbps

For Internet radio and low filesize needs, Vorbis simply rocks.

I do agree here.

Hands down, I would say that Vorbis is by far the best when the kbs is low.

[GenKreton]

how do the file sizes compare when we are tlaking about 128 kbps, 192, and flac?

Since it is VBR it should be different I'm assuming...

Quality is an issue but so is space for me.

I currently have about 12.8 gb of mp3's most at 192 kbps some at 128. But I really like the idea of Free.

[Malakin]

I don't think this is neccessariy true. At the lower bitrates, the difference is substantial, but as you move past 128kpbs, it becomes very minimal. I rip my mp3's with lame (through abcde) with the 'preset extreme' option, which makes mp3's ranging in bitrate from 192-250kbs. While I am no audiophile, they sound just as good as a cd to me.

I agree with what you're saying. Don't really see what you're saying isn't true with my statements though.

I usually rip my mp3's at 192kbit cbr as I've found problems with any vbr ripper so far. For some reason mp3'ing cello music with vbr it always uses a really low bitrate and sounds like crap. 192kbit is very hard to distinguish from the original CD and it's close enough for me but 128kbit mp3 is definitely not.

[GenKreton]

[edit out stupid problem]

OGG's sound great so far. Going to have to try other files though. Doesn't seem to be a huge difference really.

[bssteph]

Well, here's some numbers as a quick and dirty comparison.

Ayumi Hamasaki "Rainbow" CBR MP3 @ 192kbps - length 1:17:08 is 98.7 MB
Ayumi Hamasaki "I am..." Vorbis @ quality 7 (average rate 190~210 for each file) - length 1:10:53 is 103.6 MB

(as you can tell I use quality 7, although I'm not too sure if this is overkill)

Malakin: I have a Yo-Yo Ma cello suite album that I encoded in ogg (I forget the quality, it was a while ago) and the VBR is ~180 kbps.

[TheWart]

Hmm, I have not run into that problem with Cello music (I have quite a bit....Starker, Ma, etc).

Unfortunately, I am no audiphile, so I can't really suggest what might be wrong.

[AresTheImpaler]

This is sheerly on the other end of the spectrum, but food for thought when comparing encoders.
http://users.pandora.be/sjeng/floggy.html - Vorbis @ 4kbps

For Internet radio and low filesize needs, Vorbis simply rocks.

wow, those Vorbis @ 4kbps are so good it's scary.

Anyways, I must say that vorbis is much better IMO than mp3. They are better when the music has very high or low tones. sometimes in mp3 low tones will breing some echos into the mp3 and the high tones will sometimes disappear.. may be I dont have good ears... But since I found ogg, havent look back

[kerrick]

Off topic but...

v1 is very limited, and while v2 is not quite limited, it's largely considered a hack.

You take that back.
v1 was a definite hack. It was a 128 byte block of chars the end of a file containing fields of fixed lengths.
ID3v2, esp v2.3 and 2.4, is a truely ingenous specification which kicks the **** out of vorbiscomments.
It handles compression (zlib), encoding, stream syncing, data grouping, readonly data, and destroy on change data. It has predefined fields for everything under the sun < http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt > (Relative volume adjustment anyone?), And it has extensible fields for text, URLs, binary data, and proprietary data. (It also supports Unicode via UTF16, UTF16LE, (and UTF8 as of 2.4).
You can call ID3 a lot of things, but calling it a hack is ****ing ignorant.

Now lets look at the other two:
APEv2 : I can't even find specs for this. Why should a non-standard system be used when a universally accepted non-proprietary standard is already used by CD players, MP3 players, PDAs, and every media player known to man?
vorbiscomments : Does freeform mean "no identifiers"? You have 15 univerally accepted identifiers. Albiet, they are the most commonly used, but what if someone wanted to keep highly detailed information on all his music (like me)? artist biographies, synced lyrics, Album descriptions, Album covers, etc and share them with the rest of the world? Everyone else would have to use that person's ogg/vorbis player in order to read the rest of the tags. Thats worse than being proprietary. Thats trapping people with ignorant specs.

Looking at these three tagging formats, you can tell which one has had the most thought and care put into it, and which one shall live the longest (regardless of the format its attached to).

Go to http://www.id3.org/develop.html , read the spec from beginning to end, and if you aren't drooling at the potential when you're done reading it, you have my pity.

[Malakin]

Malakin: I have a Yo-Yo Ma cello suite album that I encoded in ogg (I forget the quality, it was a while ago) and the VBR is ~180 kbps.

That's the same one I was referring to. My current car cd player just plays mp3's, once I can buy one that plays ogg vorbis from a DVD I'll probably rerip all my CD's. With 128kbit ogg vorbis's that would be around 90 albums worth on one DVD :)

[superjaded]

You can call ID3 a lot of things, but calling it a hack is ****ing ignorant.

I stand corrected.
I'm a very impatient person, so my info is mostly grokked from reading forums such as hydrogenaudio rather than reading actual specs, admittedly. I reread some threads at HA and yes, they didn't call it a hack; they just called it everything BUT. Buggy, exploitable.. and looking over the specs, it strikes me as rather bloaty.

Now lets look at the other two:
APEv2 : I can't even find specs for this.

APEv2 is currently only officially used in Musepack, I believe.
APE tags were, if you couldn't guess, originally built for Monkey's Audio, but I believe the (official?) version is still using APEv1, or something like that.

You can find the specs for both APEv2 and v1 here. Although it won't take near as much reading as the id3v2 spec, I bet. People also recommend reading the Monkey's Audio SDK when asked about APE tags.

Why should a non-standard system be used when a universally accepted non-proprietary standard is already used by CD players, MP3 players, PDAs, and every media player known to man?

Why not?

Of course you're free to use what you want to use as I am free to use what I want. You have a point though -- I don't have too many APEv2 tags in my MP3s since I'm primarily using Musik as my player lately, instead of foobar2000.

vorbiscomments : Does freeform mean "no identifiers"? You have 15 univerally accepted identifiers.

Free form means that there's no explicit set of tags I'm forced to abide by in order to comply with the standard. I most certainly may be wrong, but there's no real way to be able to stick arbituary tags into your mp3 with id3v2.

One little bit that is a somewhat "unofficial standard" of stuff using vorbiscomments (and most likely APE tags as well) is something called ReplayGain (horribly out of date site, but it's useful for what info it has, I guess), which duplicates, if I'm interpreting it correctly, the "relative volume adjustment" thing.

I guess that just goes to show how we interpret things differently -- I prefer not to be explicitly locked into a set number of tags, as I've rather become accustomed to adding in some silly ones like "ENCODEDBY" and such like that. But it's thanks to the flexibility that vorbiscomments let's the end-user has that makes stuff like ReplayGain possible.

Of course, you would argue that that should be in the spec in the first place. But ah well, nobody can think of everything, I'm sure.

Albiet, they are the most commonly used, but what if someone wanted to keep highly detailed information on all his music (like me)? artist biographies, synced lyrics, Album descriptions, Album covers, etc and share them with the rest of the world? Everyone else would have to use that person's ogg/vorbis player in order to read the rest of the tags. Thats worse than being proprietary. Thats trapping people with ignorant specs.

While it's true that I've never even thought about keeping "highly detailed info" in my files, I can't even think of a tagging program I've tagged with or a MP3 player I've used that was real obvious about its support for such things, so chances are, it'll be about as useful in those id3v2 tags as it would be in my vorbiscomments.

Out of curiosity, what programs would I look for if I wanted album covers and such in my mp3s, and be able to play them back with those covers displayed?

Looking at these three tagging formats, you can tell which one has had the most thought and care put into it, and which one shall live the longest (regardless of the format its attached to).

You think?

id3 is used for what else besides MP3? Nothing that I know of.
APE tags are used for what else besides Monkey's Audio? Musepack.
vorbiscomments are used for what besides Vorbis? FLAC (and most likely any later Xiph-based audio projects ).

Considering that MP3 itself is on somewhat shifty ground because of the patent and licensing issues, I'd say unless some other codecs see the light and start using id3v2, I'd say that id3v2 is, looking at it statistically, the least likely tagging format to "live the longest."

Of course, only time will tell which passes the test, so to speak.

Go to http://www.id3.org/develop.html , read the spec from beginning to end, and if you aren't drooling at the potential when you're done reading it, you have my pity.

As I said, I'm rather impatient, and I can't say that being able to stick PNGs and such into my mp3s really gets my blood flowing. I more cringe about the thought of being able to stick arbituary binary data into the metadata; the people of the p2p world aren't the kindest souls, you know.

[pilla]

You can call ID3 a lot of things, but calling it a hack is ****ing ignorant.
....
Go to http://www.id3.org/develop.html , read the spec from beginning to end, and if you aren't drooling at the potential when you're done reading it, you have my pity.

Go to the Forum Guidelines, read it from beginning to end, and if you aren't ashamed of yourself when you're done reading it, you have my pity.

[daha]

im amazed;-]