AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3 843
asv108 writes "Yesterday, Apple unveiled their new music service claiming that the AAC format "combines sound quality that rivals CD." Here is a little comparison of lossy music codecs, comparing an Apple ripped AAC file with the commonly used MP3 codec and the increasingly popular OGG codec. Spectrum analysis was used to see which format did the best job of maintaining the shape of the original waveform." Wish they had WMAs in there too. And for the spoilage, it looks like OGG comes out on top.
Hard To Tell Difference (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
They chose AAC because it's already in QuickTime (Score:5, Informative)
Their encoder is not particularly good, and AAC is covered by a ton of patents, so there probably are other reasons why they chose it.
For anyone else but Apple I see no reason to use AAC when you can have Ogg Vorbis.
PS: Shameless plug: I wrote a vorbis patch to add SSE support [www.fefe.de] for enhanced encoder and decoder speed. It also contains some 3dnow! optimization for you K6 users, decoder only.
Mirrors (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MP3 Pro is better than OGG in some cases (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PhatAudio is on Ogg's dick (Score:4, Informative)
Tubes and transistors are different though. With Ogg vs whatever, it may be more subjective, who knows. But at least with tubes there is a known difference between how they amplify and how transistors amplify. Tubes produce more even order distortion, which to our ears sounds warm and pleasing. Transistors produce more odd order distortion, which tends to sound harsh and stressing.
Subtle difference? Perhaps, but it's there.
Re:Hard To Tell Difference (Score:5, Informative)
Then, you have to do a blind test with all of them. You also need to use a variety of source material, because different genres of music compress better under some encoders.
It's Vorbis, not Ogg. (Score:5, Informative)
The audio format you're babbling about is Vorbis. Usually
Hell, it's not just a silly name problem, it's an entire naming convention issue.
what about the stereo field? (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Hard To Tell Difference (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Spectrum analysis is useless (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anyone seen real specs for Apple's format? (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding the AAC->CD->MP3, I burned a couple of Music Store tracks to CD, then re-ripped them (using iTunes, no less) using VBR High, and they sounded indistinguishable from the original Music Store files (albeit being significantly higher average bitrates).
Regarding DRM, it appears that your Music Store file is locked to your Apple ID, and you have to Register up to three computers that you want to be able to play songs associated with your Apple ID. If you sell a computer, you have to unregister it before you can register a replacement computer. This appears to be the only restriction on usage -- you can still burn the songs to as many CDs as you want, copy them to as many iPods as you want, and streamthem to as many other Macs (and TiVo) as you want using Rendezvous.
About audio compression, CD-MP3 guide (Score:5, Informative)
I have also written a guide on ripping high-quality MP3s using CDex [iprimus.com.au], aimed towards beginners. If you know people who use Musicmatch, help them switch to a decent, easy-to-use CD ripper [sourceforge.net].
Cheers,
CD
Anybody checked out Neuros? (Score:5, Informative)
Check out the highlights.
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
Re:I'm an audio analyst... (Score:3, Informative)
I've found that 64khz OGG (3MB) ~= 128khz WMP (3MB) ~= 128khz MP3 (4MB). Admittedly the WMP is *slightly* better, but I thought that's only because of the extra sampling rate...
Also for some reason when ripping from CD to ogg there's very little difference between 64khz and 128khz, but then 44khz is utterly unlistenable.
> If someone would like to come up with a different format that can actually compete, I'd be happen to lend you my expertise and objectively analyze it for you.
Why not just help improve ogg? Are there any major problems that would need a total rewrite to get past them?
Re:To be fair... (Score:2, Informative)
Cheers, Paul
Re:Anyone seen real specs for Apple's format? (Score:3, Informative)
I suppose that someone will get around to writing a wrapper to do this on Macs... it's a shame that TiVo didn't just release the source to the TiVoServer (for both Windows and Mac) so people could just hack support into it directly.
Re:PhatAudio is on Ogg's dick (Score:4, Informative)
your ogg pod is here (Score:4, Informative)
MP3's dont have to mean low sound quality (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Anybody checked out Neuros? (Score:3, Informative)
Expansion is via backpacks, so as technology changes you only need to buy new backpacks instead of an entire new unit.
Re:The only problem with Ogg (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hard To Tell Difference (Score:5, Informative)
One, your headphones suck. Bose sells overpriced junk. People think it is good because it is well marketed. If you compare Bose speakers with equally priced speakers from any quality manufacturer, the difference is amazing.
Bose is a scam, and the fact that they are so popular shows how easy it is to run a massive deception against the American people.
Re:Anyone seen real specs for Apple's format? (Score:5, Informative)
A coworker recorded a few songs to CD last night. This morning, I ripped them to q7 Ogg Vorbis, and downconverted those Ogg files to MP3 (VBR, 160 to 256 kbps).
Listening to them (on decent speakers, but still computer speakers nonetheless, and also through headphones), they all sound pretty good. I'm listening mostly for "bad artifacts" -- pumping, popping, clicking, phasing/flanging, stereo movement, etc. I can't hear anything of the sort, even on the MP3.
So, we've got WAV -> 128 AAC -> q7 Ogg -> 160+ MP3, and it's still quite listenable. Certainly, it's not studio quality, but for listening at home, on a typical system with typical speakers, it's pretty good, to my ears.
I'm still sort of annoyed, philosophically, at not being able to get a full-bandwidth
Can anyone suggest a good 'test pattern' file? Something with lots of dynamic range, easy-to-identify instruments (especially with lots of layers of detail), variations in note types / waveforms, etc.? Basically, an Indian Head for audio. Because it'd be great to be able to say "download this
Anyway, I'm satisfied with the quality, at least on the minimal sample set I've heard.
Re:It's Vorbis, not Ogg. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:That's all very well but (Score:5, Informative)
From a musician's viewpoint, one of the real frustrations with just about anything published about sound quality is that it's always written from the engineer's viewpoint. But what I want to know is which gadgets do a good job of reproducing the music. They never seem to tell you that.
Re:Bose??? Buahahaha (Score:3, Informative)
Bose IS crap soundwise, they pumpt tons of bass into the sound in order to "fill the room" and drown out anything else.
The Cubes are pouplar with a lot of people because they are "neat" but there is only so much sound you can squeeze out of a small can. Turn the sub off on your Bose and tell me again how well it sounds.
Don't believe me? Go to a high end store in your area and listen to some speakers that cost the same as the Bose (and if you're "lucky" they sell Bose as well) and compare them. You'll be amazed, unless of course you belong to the group of people who think that all you need is bass.
Re:I'm an audio analyst... (Score:2, Informative)
WMA7 was a joke, sure, but WMA9 *is* very nice. Granted, you can't play it on anything but windows, but it sounds damn good even at 128kbps. I do need to spend more time with it on "tough" material (orchestral, opera, etc.).
I've also been playing with their latest video codec at HD resolutions, and frankly, it's wiping DIVX and XVID's butt at everything except encoding speed. Damn, they've actually done something almost right (the encoder app sucks, however).
Re:Two Words (Score:2, Informative)
As a matter of fact, I can [apple.com].
Signal to Noise (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I'm an audio analyst... (Score:1, Informative)
You can also play WMA9 on things other than windows PCs, there are audio players, DVD players, car stereo players, etc which will easily do WMA9 / WMVideo 9. Microsoft licenses the codec - you can even get decent DSPS with built in ops for WM9 decoding/encoding.
AAC (AKA Mpeg4 for audio) is also licensed. AAC players have to pay a licensing fee just like MPEG4 and WM9 players have to pay a licensing fee. The only difference is WM9 license fees are a LOT CHEAPER than AAC / MPEG4 fees, and I mean a LOT cheaper.
Hey, guess what (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two Words (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hard To Tell Difference (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could just use ABX [pcavtech.com]. That's actually the de facto standard for comparing audio compression. (See HydrogenAudio [hydrogenaudio.org].)
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
AIFF is a rather more involved format [swin.edu.au]. One of those formats is 16 bit, 44.1 KHz audio.
The only benefit I could see to encoding directly from masters is that it is possible that the "master" could be less prone to jitter. It is concievable that higher resloution masters would be available (96Khz/24 bit) and the encoding process could take advantage of this extra data somehow.
Re:Two Words (Score:2, Informative)
See the similar argument for ogg being a wapper format : OGG supports Vorbis (audio), Theora (video), Speex (speech audio), and FLAC (lossless audio, though I don't think its 100% integrated just yet).
Windows Media player support (Score:3, Informative)
It's an easy install which the average Windows user would perform if so directed.
It's a big plug-in cos it also enables support for Monkeys, ASI and MJPEG. Enjoy.
Re:PhatAudio is on Ogg's dick (Score:3, Informative)
I have measured output of some tube amplifiers, and you can easily hear the difference in a simple sine wave signal, which show up easily by looking at the waveforms or power spectra.
Also, when distorting, there is far more than the "even/odd harmonics" theory affecting the relative sounds of different amplifiers.
(*) There are still real differences. Valve amplifiers typically have output impedances of a couple ohms, while transistor amplifiers usually have nearly 0 output impedance. This makes a big difference in damping, which contributes to what audiophiles people call "warm" vs. "tight" in a way that depends heavily on the speaker driver and enclosure. Valves also have inherently higher THD figures than transistors (commonly
problem with sennheisers is... (Score:2, Informative)
sony-600's fer me babeeee - avoid the 700's, as they will damage your ears.
Bozo Audio (Score:3, Informative)
I don't consider myself a real audiophile
Yep, I'd agree, if you think Bose = nice headphones. You bought crap headphones with an cheap EQ to make 'em sound decent. It's all Bose ever does- buy shit for speakers, dress it up with simple EQ circuits and the like.
If you want a set of affordable, really nice headphones, check out Grado; the base model open headset, is about $60-ish, and they have a variety of models depending upon how fat your wallet feels. All the audio magazines loved 'em, said they were as good sounding as headphones much, much more expensive.
Re:Anyone seen real specs for Apple's format? (Score:3, Informative)
If I were you I would just stick with one format change if possible. Go from AAC to OGG or AAC to MP3.
Re:AAC is pretty weak, no marketing can change tha (Score:2, Informative)
That said, the fact the the "expert test" yielded better results for AAC isn't surprising.
AAC, at least the encoder that ships with QuickTime 6.2 (and iTunes 4 by connection) does a very good job. Ripping from a source disc or even down converting from a 320kbps MP3 into 128kbps AAC yielded a very listenable file in my opinion... more then enough to please me in a decent pair of headphones or through my car stereo.
Re:PNG (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's all very well but (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, of course, but there's a different interpretation of this. It's not unusual for musicians to intentionally use low-quality equipment in order to make the music clearer. They aren't overcoming the limitations of the poor equipment; they are using it as a tool.
As an extreme example, I've known a number of musicians who have recordings of harpsichord music, but don't like the instrument itself. The reason is simple: They have good high-frequency hearing, and a live harpsichord is just a loud high-pitched buzz with barely-audible music in the background. But with a recording, especially on low-quality playback equipment, you can wipe out the high frequencies. This makes the music audible.
There are a fair number of people who have a similar reaction to violins. Although it's not as bad as a harpsichord, a violin has strong high-frequency harmonics that are often badly out of tune. If you clip off everything above 15 kHz or so, you eliminate this distracting noise and the music comes through.
I've made a lot of "very live" recordings of dance bands with a room full of dancers. One of the tricks that I've learned is to use fairly cheap mikes that don't hear the low or high frequencies. Then I don't have to do as much processing to get a good sound.
An interesting thing about this: I've occasionally made two recordings, one with good mikes and one with poor mikes that fall off around 12 or 14 kHz. When I play them for listeners who were there, they inevitably say that the "poor" recording sounds more live than the "good" one. What seems to be going on is that the human brain is fairly good at compensating for the low- and high-frequency noise in such situations. Participants don't hear all the background noise. But in a quiet room with the noise coming from a speaker, people do hear it.
This is similar to the phenomenon that photographers will tell you about: The human eye/brain system is very good at correcting for color cast. Cameras record the true color (within the bounds of the film type and latitude), so the cast is visible in the photo when it wasn't in the original scene. But photographers learn to see the full color and can't ignore a color cast, just a musicians learn to hear all the sound and can't easily ignore background noise.
(Similarly, after playing around with a polarizing filter for a few months, I found that I could "see" polarization. And now I can't turn it off.
It's all very complicted.
Re:Bose??? Buahahaha (Score:3, Informative)
If I put a subwoofer in a corner, pump 40 Hz through it, and stand blindfolded in the room with it, I can point it out. The omnidirectional nature of low frequency transducers is well documented, but the source point is very distinguishable.
Problems begin to arise with very high frequencies in a reflective environment. If I take a HF horn, pump 12k through it, and stand blindfolded in the middle of a metal or glass room, I'd have a much harder time distinguishing the location.
In both cases, if you use a pulse instead of a constant sine wave, the ability to locate the sound is greatly enhanced.
Having worked on a contract for Neumann about 10 years ago or so developing the kunstkopf, I can tell you from personal experience and exhaustive testing, these observations are well documented, but never referenced by people using the satellite systems.
Additionally, your statement about 80Hz being nondirectional can be easily debunked. Meyer has developed a subwoofer system which creates a cardiod pattern from a subwoofer. Also, placing two direct firing subwoofers in proximity to cause coupling, will exhibit lobing thereby becoming more directional. As a monitor engineer who has to stand close to the stack, I appreciate this phenomenon.
Let's not even get on the horn loaded bass cabinet here. That's very directional although huge (the size being one reason for multiple cabinets or the Meyer rig).
Re:Ogg (Score:2, Informative)
Tell that to the guys that received this letter [chillingeffects.org]
Re:AAC is pretty weak, no marketing can change tha (Score:2, Informative)
"Ogg Vorbis files were found to be the closest to the reference file by 25% of online testers (as compared to the uncompressed wave file, which was correctly identified as closest to the reference file by 41% of testers)."
This says two things... firstly, that 3000 people didn't actually say "Ogg at 64kbps and CD is identical". It means that of the test group, only 750 people actually thought so. Compare that to the 1500 that weren't deaf and/or retarded and managed to notice the WAV file.
Also, the test itself is completely skewed and clearly biased.
To quote:
"Note that Ogg Vorbis is a variable bitrate format. You can tell it to create files with a certain average bitrate, though. In the test, c't made sure that the different codecs created files of about the same size to give no format an advantage. "
This is a major problem with the test itself. Any VBR file is going to yield better results then it's CBR counterparts when using the same "base bit rate". The fact that they "tried to create files of the same size" demonstrates total misunderstanding of the concept of CBR vs. VBR and nullifies the their "ogg is better" conclusion. I'm not saying OGG isn't a great encoding scheme... but it's not CD-quality-at-64-kbps-great like you've tried to assert.
Re:Hard To Tell Difference (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you plan to spend more than a couple hundred, do yourself a favour and get some Grados.
http://www.gradolabs.com/
I found that in the $100-$300 range, Grados are the clear choice. They're ugly as hell, but sound is amazing.
Is the iPod fixed yet? (Score:2, Informative)
I confirmed this with several different iPods on different computers, and several listeners. I even got a demo in a Mac store - and even the salesman was surprised.
(I have some sound samples, if anyone wants to offer a mirror for them.)
Richard
P.S. My saga ended up after 6 weeks of technical "support" from Apple concluding that:
1)There is a bug in the iPod - the processor is too slow - and it throws away data it cannot decode.
2)Apple *hate* their customers
3)I got a refund.
Sound Quality (Score:1, Informative)
Secondly, if you read the manual accomapnying your soundcard, it is highly probable that the total harmonic distortion rating is so high that it greatly increases dificulty of distinguishing the formats.
It is as much a question of quality of cables, soundcard, speakers, etc. as it is of the codec.
Personaly I mainly use DVD Audio and SACD discs, which are like night and day compared to any other format. What one simply has to acknowledge is that downloaded music is enternatinment, it is not music for the sake of art, or the experience of music, and that there are very many measures one can take to improve sound quality when it is output from a pc in the first place before the codec is the absolute limit.
Most decent amplifiers also have linear interpolation systems to improove sound, which also greatly improove sound from compact discs and other low resolution sounces, another way to improve the psychological experience.
Ultimately what it boils down to is that both MP3, OGG Vorbis, AAC, etc. etc. will do the job more than good enough for the average home user, and the targeted customer for any of these services. And if you have paid the money for a system that allows you to push these codecs to their limits (not happening anywhere below $5000 for amps and speakers only) you probably wont mind paying full price for your music either...
Re:Bose??? Buahahaha (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, if you want to play with the sound---pump up the bass, effectively remix the music, go for it, but it's a whole lot easier if your hi-fi is uncritically passing the sound through rather than 'helping' at various stages by adding treble or damping extremes.
found an OGG vs. MP3 vs. WMA vs. RA comparison (Score:4, Informative)