[plug] Prefered Music Format

[Cameron Patrick]

James Devenish wrote:

> on Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 08:22:49PM +0800, Michael Collard wrote:
> > While on the topic, OGGs do sound much better than most MP3s, however
> > every now and then I come across an MP3 that actually does sound pretty
> > good, even at 128K. I know its not LAME doing the encoding, I cant tell
> > that encoder's marks anywhere. Anyone know of other MP3 encoders that
> > are bit better?
> 
> I would have assumed that professional MPEG-1 encoding would not be
> perceptibly worse than OGG in general. However, from the discussions
> on this list (I have no OGG experience), it sounds like OGG is better as
> an unsupervised algorithm. (That is, by comparison, MPEG-1 would require
> manual configuration of the algorithm to achieve the best perceptual
> results. Most amateur MPEG encoding would not employ this and, by
> comparison, it sounds like is not generally necessary with OGG.)

My understanding is that the perceptual model used by the reference
Vorbis encoder is actually less sophisticated and less well tuned than
those used by common open source MP3 encoders like LAME, and that a
lot more effort has been poured into tuning commonly used (if not
capital-F Free) MP3 encoders than has Vorbis.  IIRC Monty has claimed
that the Vorbis format still has quite a lot of 'room to grow' and
have been several forks to the reference Vorbis encoder with the aim
of improved quality for specific purposes.  (I'm basing this from
having inadvertently subscribed myself to the vorbis mailing list a
few years ago and consequently reading it every now and again, rather
than any first-hand knowledge of how the two codecs work.)

I'd also like to point out that at low bitrates - lower than -q5,
nominally 160 kbit - the Vorbis 1.0 encoder from xiph.org had problems
with encoding high frequency material (making its perceived loudness
greater than in the source material).  I believe that this is supposed
to have been fixed in the latest release (1.1.0) but I can't find any
specific claim about this on the mailing list and haven't upgraded to
1.1.0 as it isn't packaged in Debian yet.

And as a final note, the correct name for the format is "Vorbis" or
"Ogg Vorbis", but not simply "Ogg" or "OGG" as the Ogg container
format can be used for other audio codecs (including FLAC and Speex)
as well as a couple of video codecs (such as Theora).

Cameron.