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."
But does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do we get the word out? How do we start the revolution? Open-Source hardware?
mp3 still defacto standard (Score:5, Insightful)
This might be of interest to musicians but the proverbial "jane doe" will keep using mp3 for quite a while
The Big Marketing Push (Score:5, Insightful)
This does give more fuel to Apple. Although I'm not complaining about them having fuel over Microsoft.
Re:FLAC? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Is it really a codec? Seems to me it is a compression method for media, like
2) It should sound exactly like the original. LOSSLESS = no loss. No point in comparing it to lossy codecs, unless it's not truly lossless.
3) The stored file sizes although smaller than the raw music are still way to big to be portable IMO.
Re:But does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Big Marketing Push (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see why not, I hardly notice what the extention is when I play music files.
Since Ogg is open source though I encode only in that format. If more people were to do this it would catch on.
How much of this is just OGG fans voting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared with radio (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Big Marketing Push (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FLAC? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Codec" means "coder-decoder". FLAC sounds encoded to me, if you need a FLAC library to enable a piece of music-playing software to read it, then I'd say the FLAC library is a codec.
2) It should sound exactly like the original. LOSSLESS = no loss. No point in comparing it to lossy codecs, unless it's not truly lossless.
Actually, it's interesting to compare lossless and lossy compressions because, these days, there's a fair chance that very good lossy compression sound so good it's almost impossible to tell the difference with the lossless compression.
3) The stored file sizes although smaller than the raw music are still way to big to be portable IMO.
Depends how much smaller. I'd say anything that doesn't produce at least 5x compression is worthless in any music player. You can zip a wav file and despite being much smaller than the original, it will still feel worthless to you in a compactflash card in terms of size.
Re:mp3 still defacto standard (Score:2, Insightful)
More vorbis content is needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FLAC? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FLAC? (Score:1, Insightful)
Glad to hear it. But i sure don't want to have saved a small (think future with me) amount of space at the cost of crappy audio. Your call.
Control (Score:3, Insightful)
Blind testing? And "Best sound" or "Accuracy"? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, the best way to test is to provide an uncompressed source and a variety of compressed files, and ask "which most closely matches the uncompressed source" -- and NOT "which sounds best."
Years ago, I did an a/b switch test with a high-end audio engineer between a CD and a 128kbit/s MP3. Though we could both clearly hear a difference, he actually guessed wrong.
My point is: the test needs to be blind, and the test should be looking for compressed files that most closely sound like the uncompressed original -- and not the ones that "sound best."
Expensive earbuds and MP3 players (Score:4, Insightful)
MP3 players got *heavily* marketed after Napster and friends got press and serious college use. "MP3" became associated with "free music". They took off.
The iPod, a decent but not earth-shattering MP3 player, sold *much* better than other MP3 players out there. Why? Marketing. Lots of ads -- the only significant difference to cause such a change.
Vorbis doesn't have a lot of ad money behind it pushing it.
I'd also like to point out that:
* People still use CBR MP3s. CBR was designed for exactly one reason -- allowing constant-rate streaming. It's *stupid* to use CBR for locally stored files -- it gets significantly worse quality for the size -- I've generally found that on the music I listen to, using VBR is equivalent to at least a 30% increase in bitrate in terms of my ability to distinguish between a master an an MP3. If people cared about quality, CBR MP3s would not exist. They wouldn't even have to switch their hardware/software around, since it's the same format, but they won't even go that far.
I *really* get a kick out of it when people buy an MP3 player and a pair of high-end earbuds. It's just plain inane. They just purchased a low-quality audio playback device and then spent a huge amount of money on an expensive pair of earbuds that don't let them hear the now missing nuances of the audio. It's the ultimate in trendiness -- like buying Nike or Banana Republic clothing. iPod + expensive earbuds is not "the ultimate in sound reproduction" even if you really, honestly gave a lot of retailers a whole lot of money for the combo.
It's called a "control"... (Score:5, Insightful)
That would provide useful information: either the listeners weren't up to the job or the lossy codecs at ~128 kbps were truly indistinguishable from the source material.
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, I'm probably going to buy a RIO Karma to play my FLAC library on the road.
Re:Inaccurate test, big bitrate differences (Score:1, Insightful)
How can you compare 128 kbps to 136 kbps and be surprised that the 136 kbps encoding sounds better?
Re:Inaccurate test, big bitrate differences (Score:5, Insightful)
Vorbis is not a CBR codec like WMA. It's almost impossible to get it directly on the nose. The encoder doesn't easily allow that kind of control without seriously damaging the quality of the finished file. I'm not sure that the 14% difference really matters as much as you insist.
To be fair though, WMA does perform reasonably well for a CBR format. However, that's not what the test is about. It's about getting the best sound out of a similar amount of space.
I don't doubt that Vorbis would still beat WMA if the bitrates were 100% even, to be honest with you. It's just not that simple to get it directly on the nose. It would have been interesting to see the results of Vorbis on a quality level that is a notch lower, so that we could see how much variance there is between each level.
Why would you care about accuracy? (Score:4, Insightful)
When dealing with sound equipment, from pre-amps to encoders, the tone of the introduced distortion is very important. Everything introduces distortion, in some way or another. You just want it to make the sound better, not worse.
Re:mp3 still defacto standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah - because piracy and hackers didn't have a hand in making MP3 popular.
Zilch
Re:FLAC? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lossless is a more viable solution as we get larger hard drives and faster Internet connections.
I guess that if you are like many people and you have a ridiculous collection of pirated songs though, FLAC may not be a good solution.
Re:Blind testing? And "Best sound" or "Accuracy"? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not saying that it needs to be a computer-based accuracy check (that's fairly easy -- you just: 1) compress, 2) uncompress, 3) compare that to the uncompressed source).
People are fine, if not even better -- but, I do think that the question "which of these sounds most like the original" is a better question than "which of these sound best" when it comes to deciding what codec works best.
Reason 2 is bogus. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are way off here.
Firstly, a number of portable players support Ogg Vorbis. There is a list of four here [wikipedia.org], I'm sure the number will increase.
Secondly, I'd doubt that many of the public know about Ogg Vorbis, let alone consider it to "reek[s] of piracy and hackers".
Furthermore, the "success" of P2P music sharing indicates that the public are the last group of people to have morals about the source or the format of the music they listen to.
Ogg isn't as widely used by the public, because it is not known by the public, it is as simple as that. That will change, as more and more players support it, and the public find out that it is a DRM free alternative to the flexibility restricted formats such as AAC.
What's wrong with Ogg Vorbis? (Score:1, Insightful)
But this is the day and age of the Internet, where WinAmp took off like a rocket and made its author very rich. "Ad money" shouldn't be a factor.
There is something inherently wrong with Ogg Vorbis. Think about it: Despite being free, none of the major manufacturers (Panasonic, Sony, Phillips) are embedding it in their electronics, so you get also-rans -- "iRiver"? "Rio"? Not exactly household names.
Possible problems:
1. Firmware instability. The list at http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware says stuff like "firmware 1.41 out, fixes some problems with Vorbis files", "iRiver flash players support Vorbis with firmware update. ", "Note that firmware versions prior to 1.25 cause stability problems for some people", and "There are reportedly problems with some versions of the firmware...". Is that a result of the algorithm? Why are they having so many problems writing stable firmware? I read a review of a Rio player where the reviewer complained about lockups and warned readers not to buy it.
2. Floating point format , ie Ogg Vorbis mainpulates everthing in floating point format. While this is no problem for a standalone computer, this is an additional expense for a portable battery operated device, because you have to have an additional floating-point coprocessor. This extra chip
eats up the battery more quickly
adds to the expense of the device.
Alternatively, you convert everything to fixed point, and thereby lose the fidelity of the original Ogg Vorbis result. Indeed, is it possible that the internal floating point is the reason that Ogg Vorbis has a better sound fidelity than MP3 simply because the error quantization is less in floating point numbers than integer discretization?