Why OGG?

[beezee88]

can someone please explain to me why ogg is better than mp3?

[Naked Snake]

It's not neccisarily any better than mp3, it's just an alternative.

[Draconio]

Supposedly it's a "lossless" format as opposed to MP3 which is "lossy", but it really doesn't mean all that much.

And one of my IRC friends who's seriously into music says that .OGG format is crap. But he's usually full of the same, so who knows.

[beezee88]

ahh, now I see. I don't need lossless. a standard 128kbps mp3 doesn't lose too much high-end and is about 10% of a wav. like, jpgs don't look crappy until you blow them up to about 3:1 so why use bmps (for general purposes anyway)

[Naked Snake]

Draconio said:

Supposedly it's a "lossless" format as opposed to MP3 which is "lossy", but it really doesn't mean all that much.

Um...OGG is lossy too, they even tell you that on their website.

[beezee88]

shite, I'm confused again. where is someone techy?

[Amaster]

beezee88 said:

ahh, now I see. I don't need lossless. a standard 128kbps mp3 doesn't lose too much high-end and is about 10% of a wav.

128 is crap. Try listening to something with alot of trebble and it sounds like mud.

like, jpgs don't look crappy until you blow them up to about 3:1 so why use bmps (for general purposes anyway)

Even better. use png.

[Draconio]

BBG said:

Um...OGG is lossy too, they even tell you that on their website.

Hmm... in that case I don't see the point of it either. Maybe my friend is right.

[beezee88]

Assmaster said:

128 is crap. Try listening to something with alot of trebble and it sounds like mud.

I don't hear it that much, though hi-hats sound a bit... fuzzy. I'm comfortable with 128, I have Gbs of music, now all I need is a damn i-pod.

use png

does it have better compression? count me in then

[Liam]

ogg is an alternative format to mp3. it is lossy, it uses variable-bitrate encoding by default, and it is open-source.

instead of telling the ogg encoder what bitrate you want to encode to, you give it a quality value from 0 to 10 telling it relatively how close to the original piece of audio the ogg should sound.

if you really want to know it's application, the encoder tends to do a better job of preserving quality at low bitrates than mp3. so, for instance, let's say i wanted to send some songs to someone using a 56k modem; i might encode them to low-quality ogg. they'd get there faster and be of comparitive quality to a LAME-encoded mp3 of a larger filesize.

for personal archiving purposes, i've found mp3 to be an infinitely better format than the current version of ogg.

[beezee88]

well, that was refreshingly explanatory. I'll stick to mp3s, they are easy to find. Most people don't know what the hell oggs are, and they are pretty rare on Kazaa, WinMX etc

[Jonathan]

Ogg Vorbis is a totally free, open and unpatented compressed audio format. The mp3 format was created by Fraunhofer, who retain patents on it. While this doesn't mean much to people who just want to listen to mp3s, people who want to sell encoded audio, create encoders or hardware decoders are required to pay royalties to Fraunhofer.

Ogg Vorbis has better compression than mp3, resulting in smaller file sizes. At higher bitrates there is little appreciable difference in sound quality between oggs and variable-bitrate mp3s, although ogg still does tend to beat mp3 in listening tests.

The ogg/mp3 situation is similar to that of gif/png, where png was created as an alternative to gif when Unisys began leveraging its patents on the popular graphics format. The choice is more one of principles than of technical superiority.

[Linguica]

I have nothing against MP3s, I'll download them no problem, but if I'm ripping a CD I do it in Ogg. It sounds better, it's open source, and hey, it just makes me feel elite to use a non standard format.

[NiGHTMARE]

Heh, I remember when MP3 was a non-standard format...

[AndrewB]

I can't believe how simple this is, and people are missing it.

OGG is twice as good as MP3. A 64kbps OGG produces the same quality as a 128kbps MP3. Plus it's completely open-format, no intellectual property garbage. I don't know what that means, since I don't know of anyone who pays for using MP3, but it's totally free in every conceivable way.

The only thing I hate is that WinDVD doesn't support OGG format. WinDVD has great audio enrichening effects that really no other program has.

[Julian]

I am a musician and I always use ogg vorbis instead of mp3 when I compress my work in order to publish it on the web. I had been using mp3s for a long time but, even at high bitrate I always managed to spot compression artefacts in them, no matter the encoder, even at high bitrates. With ogg vorbis, all I can spot is a lack of depth and some slight changes in pannings... and that's at bitrates below 96kps.

A side note about encoding in ogg format: ogg vorbis is an average bitrate encoding so the encoder tries to comply with a given bitrate to stick with. That being said, you're not limited to quality levels, you can specify a minimum and maximum bitrate and have a good control on the average bitrate of the final product.

As to the end-user, most use winamp which is ogg vorbis friendly and linux users are usually new tech aware.

[Sharessa]

I like .ogg better because it sounds better (this coming from someone who can't tell the difference between 128 and 196kbit mp3s), it fits better on my HD (higher quality at lower bitrates means you can make smaller files), and the RIAA can't touch it. :P But I prefer real CDs to music on my HD any day.

[pritch]

Just use ogg. As with most things in life it's better than the commercial standard, especially at lower bitrates.

[Shaviro]

For RTC-3057, Julian uses OGG for regular songs and MP3 for the more ambient ones. That's all I know about OGG :P

[Fredrik]

The Merovingian said:

I had been using mp3s for a long time but, even at high bitrate I always managed to spot compression artefacts in them

Heh, I had a particular problem with a cymbal sample that would get screwed up completely in anything below 192kbps in MP3. Problem never existed after moving to Ogg.

[alexz721]

NiGHTMARE said:

Heh, I remember when MP3 was a non-standard format...

Me too.

Anyway, as a couple of others have said, ogg does compress better than mp3s and the quality is slightly better. However, I use mp3s because they're easy to find. Plus, there are programs that exist that can greatly enhance the quality of the music one listens to, such as DFX for example.

[AndrewB]

Twice as good is not "slightly" better. Slightly better would be like 10-20% better.

[Aliotroph?]

Someone should start a movement to outlaw MP3s so everyone uses OGGs. Problem solved. :)

[Fredrik]

AndrewB said:

Twice as good is not "slightly" better. Slightly better would be like 10-20% better.

Interestingly, what humans perceive as twice as good probably isn't more than like 5% of actual difference to the waveform...

[Draconio]

I couldn't tell the difference when I had both MP3 and OGG of a song.

[AndrewB]

Jeez Fred, it has nothing to do with waveform comparison. OGG uses half the space of MP3 at the same quality. That means it's twice as good. End of story.

[Fredrik]

AndrewB said:

Jeez Fred, it has nothing to do with waveform comparison. OGG uses half the space of MP3 at the same quality. That means it's twice as good. End of story.

That's exactly what I said. Waveform comparisons tell very little about how we perceive the sounds.

[Hirogen2]

Heh, you DOOM WAD sound lump makers should recognize this fine piece of software :P

encoding at ~48kbps (-q -1) maybe slightly bigger than an MP3 in 48kbps, but hell, it sounds a lot better!

[DarkWolf]

A 256 color image converted to PNG is slightly smaller than GIF. At least in the cases where I compared files. Of course PNG can go over 256 colors, while GIF will reduce the number of colors used.