On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 14:10, Ross Werner wrote: > a) is the quality really that better? can I really tell a difference? Or > is it simply a matter of file size?
Definitely. Both size and quality. In many cases 64-kbs ogg sounds as good as 128-kbs mp3 (although 128 kbs mp3's really sound terrible). ~128 kbs oggs sound about like 192 kbs mp3. Ogg no longer encodes at set bitrates. Since it's variable, oggs are now encoded using a quality scale of 1 to 5. I believe 1 is about 64 kbs, 2 is about 128. Something like that. Play around. > > b) I know that compatiblity is still an issue. Do you ogg users ever run > into problems trying to burn a CD for an mp3 player, or put music on a > portable player, and end up having to convert your oggs to mp3s? My music player lately has my zaurus with a 1 gb flash card. This handles ogg of course. Hardware support for CD players is forth coming. In the meantime, my computer is part of my stereo system, so I haven't worried about cd players yet. When I have to, I just transcode my oggs to mp3 for the car. Car audio has such crappy quality and terrible acoustics anyway, that you can't tell the difference. > > c) I keep worrying that since ogg is/was kind of "new", that it will > change and then I'll have to go and reconvert all my CDs again with the > "newer, better!" ogg version. Has ogg actually changed versions? How do > the versions compare? If you had old stuff encoded with the original > version of the encoder, does the newer stuff sound any better? I guess I'm > just kind of clueless about how this codec stuff works in general. The ogg encoder is always improving, but the decoder will always work, so you don't need to worry about losing the ability to play old ogg files. I can play oggs I made back in the early beta days. As ogg progress, your newer ogg files will simply sound better than your old ones. I believe that newer ogg encoded files can even play just fine on the old ogg decoder. > > > Anybody care to tell their "conversion story" from mp3 to ogg? mp3 is just > so nice and comfortable and familiar ... comfortable good, change bad ... Ogg is so nice and comfortable and familiar. The variable bit-rate data makes the music files smaller and sound better. The meta data in the ogg files are more flexible (album name, artist, etc). Michael > > ~ ross > > > -- > > This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. > > On 6 Oct 2003, Corey Edwards wrote: > > > On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 08:47, Mark Gardner wrote: > > > Seeing how this is a list for discovery and learning. What is ogg? > > > > It's a multimedia container similar to avi. What people mostly use is > > Ogg Vorbis which is the audio codec, much like MP3. It is better than > > mp3 for many reasons. > > > > First, it's free of silly patents. The specification is in the public > > domain, the floating point implementation is under a BSD license and the > > utilities are GPL. > > > > Second, it uses much better acoustical models than the older original > > mp3 (mp3 pro, aac, and other newer codecs compare very well with > > vorbis). > > > > Thirdly, it is variable bit rate (VBR) so you don't waste bits encoding > > blank space and it can bump but the bit rate when a really complex > > section presents itself. Overall it uses less space for better quality > > than mp3. > > > > Fourthly, it can be "peeled", meaning you can stream multiple bit rate > > streams from the same high rate source. For example, you run an internet > > radio station with 128k, 64k, 32k, and 16k streams. With mp3, you must > > encode 4 different streams from the same source. But with vorbis, you > > can encode the 128 and peel the extra bits off the stream for each of > > the lower rate streams. Saves tons of CPU time. > > > > Find more at www.vorbis.com > > > > Corey > > > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list -- Michael L Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
