I did some testing to proof my opinion I took my cd of one of the best bands ever, The Police, and converted one of their best songs to a 256 kbps MP3 file and a 256 kbps Ogg file. Both CBR. File size of MP3 file: 8,84 MB, size of Ogg file: 8,38 MB. It can be that the bitrate of the Ogg file is a bit lower, which would make the difference smaller. Still it is obvious that the matter of size is no option to keep using MP3. If you keep in mind that Ogg produces better quality with equal bitrates, I think it is clear we have a winner.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Manichei, good luck convincing the rest of the world, but you've convinced me on the file size, not the sound quality.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

quote:

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That's just opposite my experience with the OGG format, as the file sizes I saw were huge!

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Maybe whoever gave them to you encoded them improperly.

With Vorbis, you can fit almost an entire CD onto a floppy (~ 3-6 kbps), with the songs still sounding amazingly good.

Look at:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=10&t=2726&s=10c98b1de6df334ab4e10833d94ed78e

and get HeadAC3he from http://darkav.de.vu/ to test your own encodings.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

That's even more interesting news, however, there are currently no portable players to support this. Maybe the hardware makers will see this and jump on it. Thank you for the information!

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

quote:

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there are currently no portable players to support this. Maybe the hardware makers will see this and jump on it. Thank you for the information

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Not yet... ;-)

quote:

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Ladies and Gentlemen and other assorted interested parties:

This morning (2:28am, EDT), I received an E-mail from Y.H. Lee, the Chief Engineer of iRiver's products. He has informed me that they are currently porting the fixed-point Ogg Vorbis decoder (Tremor) to their product. We will endeavour to assist them in any way we can.

In addition to letting iRiver know that we stand behind them ready to assist with technical issues, I believe a huge thanks is in order to the people who have contacted iRiver asking them to support our format. We're indebted to all of you who have posted looking for Vorbis support on this thread, as well as all of you who have sent iRiver E-mails and called them on the telephone.

With any luck, it won't be long before iRiver starts releasing products with Ogg Vorbis support. When the day comes, I hope you'll all take a moment to congratulate yourselves, and celebrate with a portable full of music encoded in an open and free format. :)

If anyone has any questions, comments, or anything they want to talk about, please feel free to drop me an E-mail to emmett@xiph.org, or give me a call at 215-820-9583. We're an open source project, and we love hearing from people, talking about the codec, and discussing cool stuff. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you want to gripe, complain or compliment.

Thanks again for all your help, folks. We couldn't do it without you.

Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation

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(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Nice!

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Excellent, we will see how long it takes for these products to appear on the market, and how people will support them by purchasing, in the mean time, I'll stick to my MP3's.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

as an aside to the bitrate to be used in making mp3s, any arguments as to full stereo or joint stereo when using LAME? a lot of people use full stereo (probably due to the fraunhofer codec's problems with some high end frequencies in joint) but i've recently read a post which says after tests, etc., LAME doesn't have problems in joint stereo.

question: is there a preset list somewhere? i'm using LAME 3.90.2. i checked at sourceforge but only saw the normal commandline options. thanks.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Get Lame 3.93 and when you install it, use the DEFAULT preferences, then you will be able to do what you are trying to do. It works fantastic, and I have not seen any problems with it either..

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

MP3Mogul,


I keep all my Audio CD's backed up on my storage drive. I always used the Fraunhofer IIs codec @ 224kbs CBR. The mp3's sound great, but I also notice that I don't see very many people using the FH IIs codec :-/.

Is LAME really that much better ? Or do they just not want to pay for the codec ?

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Okay, I have a question I'm sure one of you can answer. Everyone is always talking about encoding using higher and higher bitrates, as high as 256 kbps as far as I can see (on this topic). However, according to my calculations, a CD can only support as much as 170.21484375 kbps.

that's 755753.90625KB of data on a mode 2 audio CD (2324*75*60*74/1024)
divided by 4,440 seconds on a 74min (standard) audio CD

so would the best possible bitrate be 192kbps??? anything higher then that would just be dead space...wouldn't it? I'm willing to believe that I could be wrong on this, especially since people claim to be able to tell the difference between 192kbps and 256kbps, but I don't understand how this can be so. can somebody explain it to me??? thanks!

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

thanks for the reply. actually, i found the preset list that i saw a little while ago. it is here in case anyone else is interested:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=15&t=203&s=3a36ff80190338f44020a0b7f6940e85


I always used the Fraunhofer IIs codec @ 224kbs CBR. The mp3's sound great, but I also notice that I don't see very many people using the FH IIs codec :-/.

Is LAME really that much better ? Or do they just not want to pay for the codec ?

i just switched recently to LAME from fraunhofer (fhg). the only test i did was when encoding in joint stereo, fhg would produce the occasional artifact on some highend frequencies (eg. new order bizarre love triangle remix). with LAME, there were no artifacts so i switched.

as far as LAME being that much better, there are a lot of tests people have done that say it is but different people have different opinions so ... some people say vinyl is better than CDs and some don't agree. one thing for sure is that LAME is faster than fhg.


dophinius: i've heard someone else mention that long ago but i think that argument must be flawed. if you rip an audio CD to .wav and do the calculations on the wave file, the bitrate is higher than an mp3 @ 320.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

Correct, the bitrate would then be 1411 kbs. That's the bitrate for the wave for recorded CD's. As for what was stated above on the 192 Bit rate? That is what I use also. My old tired ears cannot hear any difference above 192, neither can my young teenagers, and they are audio freaks. As for the encoding, I do notice a difference between using LAME and FII. The lame just sounds better to me, when I go back and play some recordings using the FII encoding. Peace.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

well, you canalways make a higher bitrate file out of a smaller bitrate file, but it doesn't change the quality of the file...

so how do you calculate the bitrate on a CD? Like I said, I can believe I'm wrong, I just don't understand how[:I][?]

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

so how do you calculate the bitrate on a CD?

i think you're getting the bytes and bits mixed up. this is a rough estimate but should give you an idea:

assume a 74min CD holds about 700MB or 700000KB of audio data.
kilobytes -> kilobits = (700000 x 8) = 5 600 000 kilobits
5600000kilobits / 4400s = 1272.7 kilobits/s

1273kbps is quite a bit off of the 1411kbps previously stated for a wave file but as noted, i'm just using a rough number for the audio CD. you can easily replace the 700MB with whatever the actual amount is and will probably get something closer to 1411.

actually, you just have multiply the figure you got from your calcultions by eight.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

ahhhh! I see where I went wrong now! [:I] it's not KBps it's Kbps!! thank you so much! okay so it's:

755753.90625 KiloBytes or 6046031.25 Kilobits in a CD
and 4,440 seconds in a CD (74min)

so the bitrate is: 6046031.25/4440 or
1361.71875Kbps!

that makes a LOT more sense! thanks guys!!!

(in reply to MP3Mogul)