Vorbis And Musepack Win 128kbps Multiformat Test 272
technology is sexy writes "After 11 days of collecting results Roberto Amorim today announced the results of his 2nd Multi-Format listening test: Vorbis fork AoTuV scored the highest and ranks as the winner together with open source contender Musepack closely followed by Apple's AAC implementation and LAME MP3, which improved markably since last year thanks to further tunings of its VBR model done by Gabriel Bouvigne. Sony's ATRAC3 format ranks last after WMA on the third place. The suprising success of AoTuV (compared to last year's performance of Xiph.org's reference implementation) shows the potential of Vorbis and possible room for further tuning and improvments. Take a look at the detailed results and their discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org."
Re:FLAC? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FLAC? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FLAC? (Score:1, Informative)
Umm... technically, by definition, yes it is a codec. enCOder/DECoder. It encodes a WAV file into something else, which happens to shrink the file size, and can then decode the something else back into a WAV file, restoring the WAV file losslessly.
Re:How much of this is just OGG fans voting? (Score:5, Informative)
In addition to being double blind results were also encrypted so manipulation is very unlikely.
Re:Inaccurate test, big bitrate differences (Score:1, Informative)
iTunes: 128
MPC: 136
Vorbis: 135
Lame: 134
WMA: 128
Atrac3: 132
Re:Inaccurate test, big bitrate differences (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Compared with radio (Score:3, Informative)
But I wonder if there is anywhere else in the developed world where music stations target FM, if nit for licence/economic reasons?
BTW, Radio 4 is the **only** UK station on LW, and is also available on FM, the LW 198KHz band is mainly kept active for the marine weather forcasts as so a low band is recievable quite a way offshore. Nor does it have music.
Radio's 1, 2 & 3 are maintained on AM, but they are also available on FM, digital, and satelite.
Similar story with commercial radio, but more bias to FM.
So what do people **actually** use to listen to music in the UK?
Aotuv vorbis enconder for Debian (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Striving for innovation (Score:4, Informative)
WMA brought clearly worse quality than (good old) MP3 at 128kbps
itunes AAC brought clearly better quality than WMA at 128kbps
so why should anyone even a minute consider buying crap quality wma encodes at napster, coca-cola, walmart or however the wma-based music stores are called?
on the legal way -> itunes is better
on the illegal way -> even old mp3 (next to vorbis or aac) is better
Re:best vs popular (Score:3, Informative)
I do remember a few years ago listening to really crappy implementations of mp3 codecs and hearing seriously awful artifacts. Considering that most samples scored far above 4, with 5 being imperceptible and 4 being perceptible but not annoying I think the results of this test mean that your choice of codec doesn't make much difference. Don't choose WMA or Altrac3 and you'll likely never notice a difference, or the slight differences aren't annoying. The worst score among the decent codecs was lame mp3 for Kraftwerk, and even that scored a 3.32 where 3 is slightly annoying.
Re:FLAC? (Score:4, Informative)
Compressers are encoders of a particular variety. They just choose a different data representation as an encoder does, but make an effort to take advantage of specific known characteristics of the data they are compressing to get a smaller, reasonable representation..
ZIP and gzip (tar does not do compression, just file joining) do very poorly at compressing audio. They do things like look for patterns of repeating (or at least commonly seen) sequences of data, and simply say something like "every time you see "z1", I really mean ";lt&a href="". This approach often works very well in computer-generated files.
However, it's very unlikely that you will get exactly the same sequence of bits in an audio recording, so
FLAC is indeed lossless.
What it means for Vorbis (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Inaccurate test, big bitrate differences (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Blind testing? And "Best sound" or "Accuracy"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Expensive earbuds and MP3 players (Score:5, Informative)
The DAC in the iPod is fairly high quality. It is not unreasonable for someone to simply encode their CDs using Apple's lossless codec and put them on the iPod. With a 40G model around 60 albums (assuming an average size of 650M) could be stored losslessy in WAV; a few more using Apple's lossless encoder. It would be like turning your 40G iPod into a 5G iPod and swapping music around but such is life.
It becomes more realistic when you have 80G and 100G drives in your player; in a few months the Neuros [neurosaudio.com] is supposed to have 80G backpacks available (right now up to 40G are available and a few online stores are advertising the availability of the 80G model early) and you can order an 80G backpack right now from Cool4u2View [cool4u2view.com]. The Neuros doesn't support any lossless codecs except for WAV right now (although there is support for WMA I have never used it and do not know if it supports WMA lossless or even if WMA lossless is anything more than tagged WAV). 80G is still around 110 albums. The Neuros IIRC uses the same DAC as the iPod so the quality of the sound would be excellent.
For me -b 160kbps Vorbis files are good enough; I plan to re-encode my collection to FLAC when I get a larger HD for music (right now it is a poor little 20G that only has 4G free) as well as Vorbis (abcde makes it easy to encode to more than one format and put them in different directories) -q5 (for my Neuros).
So your last comment still applies to most people. Not everyone though.
For Debian Users (Score:1, Informative)
libvorbis-aotuv-0_0.b2-1_i386.deb [soniccompression.com]
libvorbisenc-aotuv-2_0.b2-1_i386.deb [soniccompression.com]
libvorbis-aotuv-0_0.b2-1_i386.deb [soniccompression.com]
libvorbisfile-aotuv-3_0.b2-1_i386.deb [soniccompression.com]
oggenc-aotuv_1.0.1+aotuv-2_i386.deb [soniccompression.com]
You don't even need to uninstall your existing vorbis packages.
Re:But does it matter? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blind testing? And "Best sound" or "Accuracy"? (Score:3, Informative)
Only if it exactly matches, which it doesn't in this case (these are lossy codecs). It's possible for codec A to be match almost perfectly, but in such a way that the difference is easily audible. It's also possible for codec B to produce a markedly different spectrum that still sounds very close to the human ear.
People, not computers, listen to these compressed files. So the only sensible way to judge compression is by using people.
Re:Blind testing? And "Best sound" or "Accuracy"? (Score:3, Informative)
Correct!
A psycho-acoustic difference is not necessarily the same as numeric data difference.
Some minor numeric differences can be perceived as substantial psycho-acoustical differences -- and conversely, some substantial numerical differences be perceived as minor psycho-acoustical differences
Re:Expensive earbuds and MP3 players (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Inaccurate test, big bitrate differences (Score:2, Informative)
"The unusual quality settings for MPC and Vorbis were chosen after testing [rjamorim.com] several qualities over a wide range of albums and styles, and picking the setting that generated results closer to 128kbps."
Also, as already been said, those numbers are not the average birates of all the samples.
The tests are blind. (Score:3, Informative)
The way it works is, you listen to a given music clip. You have three streams to choose from. One is the uncompressed .wav, and is labeled as such. The other two are not identified, and consist of the compressed source and the original source. You then rate the two unidentified sources based on how closely they approximate the original. Then you repeat the process five times for each of the codecs. When you're performing the experiment, you don't even know which codec you're testing at any given time.
Re:Blind testing? And "Best sound" or "Accuracy"? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But does it matter? (Score:4, Informative)
I was one of those nincompoops who rushed out and bought one the moment I read the words "iRiver" and "Ogg" in the same sentence, but when I updated its firmware the latest version with Ogg Vorbis support, I found that many of my files wouldn't play.
It turns out that most of the iRiver players with Ogg support added have a half-baked implementation and support only a limited range of bit-rates and frequencies. The iFP-300 series, to which my player belongs, only supports 96Kbps - 360Kbps (if it's a VBR file and the bitrate drops above or below that, distortion occurs), and also has trouble with files encoded in less commonly used frequences (i.e. lower than 44.1KHz).
In case anyone like me thought iRiver was committed to improving their Ogg support, their latest iFP series players are even more limited, supporting only 96Kbps - 225Kbps at 44.1KHz. Their new iDP series doesn't support Ogg at all. And owners of the iMP have been waiting months for Ogg support which still has not materialised.
Only the H series supports a decent range of Ogg Vorbis bitrates, but even it only officially supports one frequency (44.1KHz).
Re:Expensive earbuds and MP3 players (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Striving for innovation (Score:3, Informative)
on the illegal way -> even old mp3 (next to vorbis or aac) is better
Illegal?? How is ripping my own CD's to MP3 illegal?
I have ripped all of my CD's to 320k max VBR MP3's using LAME (with EAC as a front-end). There's nothing illegal about this, and based on this listening test I'm quite confident that all of my music sounds at least as good, and probably better (in some cases probably significantly better) than if I'd re-purchased those same songs through iTunes (or ripped them to 128k AAC). And I have max compatibility among devices, with no DRM.
If this test proved anything, it's that Apple's and MS's claims that their codecs sound better than MP3's recorded at twice the bitrate is a load of bunk. All the codecs are at least comparable at the same bitrate, but a few are a little bit better than the others. In the end, for me it comes down to compatibility. I have no idea if the next player I buy will be an iPod, so why would I want to tie myself down to that player, especially when other codecs sound just as good, bit for bit?
btw, I tried taking this test, and honestly, I gave up because most of the time I could not even tell which was the original and which was the compressed version of the song. In my opinion any of these codecs yields more than acceptable sound quality. I see in a few cases one or another codec was significantly worse than the others on specific tracks (I probably just didn't get that far) but in most cases the high scores here (in the high 4's for the most part) show that all of these codecs do a good job at producing compressions nearly indistinguishable from the original even at 128k. Given a higher bitrate, they'd do just that much better.
Why keep calling AoTuV a fork? (Score:5, Informative)
Fork seems to imply that they're trying to make something incompatible or doing it without our blessing. Neither is true! We never wanted to have *the* only encoder. Nor did we want to be the only people trying to improve Vorbis's encoding.
AoTuV is a 100% real Vorbis encoder and the results of the test speak for themselves. Aoyumi and crew deserve kudos, and I'm glad to see them working on improving Vorbis encoding.
Monty
JACK, Jack, jack & the ripper (Score:4, Informative)
Also, cdparanoia (III) was finished long ago. It has not bitrotted. As new kernels came out, we+others kept it up to date. The distribution maintainers have added whatever fixes have been necessary for their distros. Nothing that worked in 1999 is broken today.
In summary... paranoia does 100% of what *I* need it to. I write software that I need. I don't have to keep releasing 'improved' versions of software that already works as an ego-trip or to placate a marketing department desperate to sell you the same thing in a new box every six months.
Others have expressed interest in doing new things with paranoia, but no one has followed through... at least not yet. Paranoia isn't all that complicated to use or hack. That speaks to a pretty damned low demand for new versions.
The website: yah, OK, I'm lousy at writing HTML updates. My diary hasn't been updated in three years. There is certainly a website attention span problem
Theora: I'm not one of the primary coders today, I only did the initial code import. Also, the Helix project has required relatively little time; Real has done nearly all the heavy lifting on integration there.But, if 'Theora is dead', why does CIA show 500 commits in the past two months?
DirectShow issues can be summed up as 'ugh, what an awful system'. But we'll make it work. The discussion about mux was proposed changes to spec. Voluminous discussion reveals what we have now is still the best option, as designed five years ago.
Monty
Re:But does it matter? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:cdparanoia updates? (Score:3, Informative)
Monty