what is ogg?

i've had soo many people tell me that ogg is better than mp3, how? i know ogg is opensource, but as long as the bit rate's the same does it really matter in terms of quality? or does the differnce matter in size ?

Less lossy compression, better quality at a given size.

It uses lossy compression algorithms that are superior to that of MPEG layer 3.  At the same bitrate, OGGs sound better than MP3s.

>>3 said it better

ogg is over

>>1
OGG Vorbis is something similar to MP3, only much better. For the same space, it sounds better, or, for the same sound quality, it takes less space. When compressing your music, you'll want to use the free OGG Vorbis encoder, as you'll be getting more. OGG Vorbis is free and you may use and make money with it freely.

>>5
No. Shut up.

OGG Vorbis is something similar to MP3, only much better.

I guess this seperates the people who know what they're talking about, and those that don't. You don't.

Stock Vorbis has issues. 1.0 was clearly inferior to LAME at high bitrates, and some of these problems continue in 1.1. This was partly due to LAME having a better tuned psymodel, amongst other things.

At this moment, Vorbis does significanty better than LAME at high bitrates, with the following caveats: you need to use the AoTuV beta4 patches, and we can only be (somewhat) confident about Classic samples. As far as I know, there have been no major ABX comparisons of other musical types.

Until there are, "only much better" is horseshit and wishful thinking.

Mmmm, FLAC.

http://www.vorbis.com/faq/

>>10 read "http://www.vorbis.com/faq"; as "http://www.vorbis.com/fag";.

>>10
me 2!

What program is good for burning ogg's?

aoTuV is superior

I'd like to start ripping to ogg too, but nothing definitive seems to be out there?

I need a GUI and a CD>OGG ripper.. Not lossless>OGG. Any painless solutions? This aoTuV thing seems like some college project and doesn't even have an official site in English- it doesn't do CDs either.

As long as it doesn't play out ot the box on iTunes/OS X and my iPod, ogg isn't relevant to my life as far as I am concerned.

>>14
I couldn't quite understand what you meant by "Not lossless>OGG"; FYI OGG Vorbis is not lossless, and OGG Flac is lossless, and OGG is not actually the codec but a frame format like RIFF or AVI.

>>15
Fag

>>14

aoTuV is one guy's project to tune Ogg Vorbis's encoder (not "OGG"). It has an official site in English somewhere, but not very good english because the one guy is Japanese.

>>16
I prefer consumer whore, but why should I care about your fantasy codec? Big words like freedom can't do shit against the convenience that is iTunes. I will switch if you  tell  me of something ogg-enabled that can support all the shit iTunes support that will still work in 5 years without me ever having to edit an 6MB XML file because some kid decided his open-source media player wasn't fun anymore.

>>14
I'd like to point out that much (most?) of Vorbis 1.1 was originally aoTuV work. Guess what will go into Vorbis 1.2?

>>16
Not lossless means WAV or FLAC. The aoTuV requires you to have actual files to convert, you can't use CDs, as far as I know.

I'm not ripping twice, I only have so many days to live.

>>19
>>17
This doesn't resolve the fact that I would be converting my entire music collection to a beta encoder hosted on a geocities website without a GUI.

It comes down to convenience, that's THE BASIS OF AN MP3, that it's convenient! Convenient storage, access and management. I agree with >18, and I don't use DRM and my player supports OGG.

as much as i hate to say it, "convenience is king."  one thing that i believe could help ogg is a true marketing strategy (think Firefox and friends).  talk outside of technical circles and no one knows or gives a shit about ogg.  artists could do wonders by allowing them to FREEly encode their songs along with bringing greater usership from their fans. 

i also believe that if ppl started saturating p2p networks with their ogg files that a greater awareness would surface, but who really has the original context (ie. cds, vinyl, wav, etc.) to encode and put out?  there could be a movement, but movements aren't "convenient" in peoples' minds.

>>1
ogg is:

GAY

>>20
I think you need to visit rarewares a bit more.

Also, aoTuV gets beaten upon by Hydrogenaudio during testing. Enough said.

>>21
artists could do wonders by allowing them to FREEly encode their songs along with bringing greater usership from their fans. 


Artists that aren't talentless or completely obscure who give away song downloads are very rare and don't care about the MP3 vs. OGG issue. How would you convince them to use OGG?

i also believe that if ppl started saturating p2p networks with their ogg files that a greater awareness would surface

RIAA-sponsored crapflooding of p2p has made the networks more resistant to flooding than before.

Basically, all your strategy is annoying people into using new software.


Look, I have currently in iTunes 3000 songs already imported, and 4000 more on my filesystem waiting to be imported. All the songs I have imported have all their metadata filled: Track names, artist names, albums, number of CDs, track number, album artwork, year, genre, lyrics, album artwork, and often a rating. Unlike every other player, that relies on the filesystem and manual playlists, iTunes is a library, a database.
When I plug my iPod, all the highest-rated songs and a manual selection are automatically copied, and changing the rating on the iPod updates iTunes. All that shit is automated.

There are a lot of people like me. How are you going to convince us that OGG is good enough to overshadow all the benefits of iTunes+iPod?

(see also this nice article from another perspective: http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2005/june/thecatch22of )

>>20
Not lossless means WAV or FLAC.
Check your words. Loss means it loses. Less means without. Lossless means it doesn't lose. Not lossless means it loses. Vorbis and MP3 are not lossless. WAV and FLAC are lossless, or not lossy.


How are you going to convince us that OGG is good enough to overshadow all the benefits of iTunes+iPod?
Apple uses gay formats, and wants you to convert your files encoded in your choice of format to their gay formats. Most multimedia products Apple did sucked from a technical point of view. QuickTime was always slow and had the worst media players ever. AAC is a bad choice for a musical format. Etc.

>>24
Artists that aren't talentless or completely obscure who give away song downloads are very rare and don't care about the MP3 vs. OGG issue. How would you convince them to use OGG?

OGG is patent-free and non-proprietary. Thus, I would tell these hypothetical musicians that using an open format removes the possibility of someone suing them for patent infringement or being placed at the mercy of some company that decides to break backwards-compatibility, stop supporting the format, impose DRM, or another Bad Thing.

The issue of open, Free standards and software vs. proprietary standards and software is relevant to anyone who uses technology in any form. It only seems like pointless geekery to the majority of the population because they don't understand modern technology, and because companies have convinced them that the open-technology advocates are a bunch of smelly, wild-eyed Communists that want to bring down the benevolent technology companies.

>>25
I don't have any AAC on my computer and agree that I shouldn't trust the format.
I don't care if iTunes sucks from a "technical point of view". It is the only player that allows me to find one song out of thousands in 4 seconds and it never ever skips.
Is your experience only based on the Windows versions or on what people told you?

>>26
First paragraph: FUD. None of this is gonna happen because of the financial interests the companies have in MP3. And serious musicians already own gear, which includes a computer and professional software that includes a licence for MP3.

I agree that open formats are importants. But you know what? You lost the MP3 battle. It is much more important to fight for things that are not hopeless, like against DRM, than to get OGG to prevail.
If you can't get nerds like me to care about OGG, you just can't win, because it means NOBODY cares.

>>27
who's fighting? open-source in general is about coexisting with other software, and contributing to eachother's solutions to a problem. I download mp3s off the internet, but rip all my own music to ogg. I don't really care what other people say about it, as it's my data, not theirs.

AAC is a bad choice for a musical format.

What? AAC is a perfectly fine format, especially since there aren't really any well-tuned encoders yet. Apple are doing pretty badly with it since they don't have real ABR or HE-AAC (which beats Vorbis at low bitrates), though.

>>27
It is the only player that allows me to find one song out of thousands in 4 seconds and it never ever skips.
If iTunes is the only player you've been able to do this with, then you need to try more players, get a PC, or install Windows 2000.

Is your experience only based on the Windows versions or on what people told you?
Windows version and what people told me.

>>29
AAC is a perfectly fine format, especially since there aren't really any well-tuned encoders yet.
AAC is not very "musical". It's amazing on the paper, yet, for some reason, it doesn't get to perform as good as it was supposed to.

Besides, the fact Apple wants you to reencode your stuff sucks dick. Reencode my ass. I'm tired of Apple and their media stupidity; they think they're the most important company of the universe and you're willing to throw your computer, girlfriend, dogs and cats away for it.

If iTunes is the only player you've been able to do this with, then you need to try more players, get a PC, or install Windows 2000.

I have a PC that is more powerful than my mac but I don't use it.
PC Players make it a pain to correctly fill in the metadata, therefore it is generally easier not to bother to have a clean, well-organized collection.

Windows version and what people told me.
iTunes on OS X is a much nicer experience than on PC, of course.

Besides, the fact Apple wants you to reencode your stuff sucks dick. Reencode my ass.
Why do you say they want you to re-encode? MP3 is perfectly supported, and all my collection is in MP3 format. Please look at this screenshot of the iTunes preferences I made 2 minutes ago:
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/3199/itunespref3vq.jpg

PC Players make it a pain to correctly fill in the metadata, therefore it is generally easier not to bother to have a clean, well-organized collection.

My favorite media library is my filesystem. I use a bloatless, instant open media player - Media Player Classic, which has all the features I need and more (alternative splitters and codecs, channel remapping, web server for remote control, custom keys, etc.), and none of that bloat. It's not smart to be tied to a particular program, it has gotchas - they go commercial or change something and once you have to update something (codecs, OS, etc.) and your old player won't work, you're fucked. I could change player tomorrow, and keep my clean, well-organized collection where it is. Besides, playing music is a background task. I don't want 20+ MB shit on my system. Perhaps this is why everyone says their computers are slow/unresponsive/bloated/infested and they need so many upgrades so often.

>>31
I think it used to force you to reencode, or was it WMA and OGG files only? (Even so, I'd have to reencode some. I want a system that will play all of my files.)

Nice interface BTW. But when I'm listening to music, I want almost no interface, as music is to listen, not to see, and when I watch a vid, or run a visualization on the music, I want to watch that vid, not a nice player with cute buttons. My idea of a player is just a black window, which plays files, and I control with keys.

>>32
iTunes is an acceptable lock-in for a few reasons:
- If Apple does something retarded with it, it will piss off enough people to create smooth transition paths to other apps
- If I leave iTunes, I still get to keep the clean directory structure and the metadata
- RAM is cheap.
- Organizing music is a foreground task, and you need a database, not a file system to do it.


>>33
The interface is much better than you think.
- Clicking the zoom (green) button toggles mini-mode which is a very small window, that you can have staying on top of the other windows. It is smaller than the Winamp control window for pretty much the same functionality.

- Right-clicking the dock icon gives you the name of the track, artist, album, and the three important controls (Previous track, next track, play/pause), so you can control iTunes even with its window closed

- You can use third-party apps to have things like controls in the menu bar or keyboard shortcuts. For example, I've set up Previous, Pause and Next respectively to ⌘F13, ⌥F13 and ^F13 using Quicksilver, a free nice app.

I believe both OGG and WMA are unsopported, though. Maybe installing Windows Media Player for OS X installs some WMA support, and I know that some (buggy and instable) ogg support can be hacked into iTunes.

There is a Vorbis codec available from I forget where for iTunes. There's also a WMA codec from flip4mac, but I haven't tested it to see if it allows iTunes to support it.

I expect that the reason they don't support decoding is that the engineering costs for it and on the iPod would be more than the number of people who would use it. And they certainly wouldn't support the encoder, since they're marketing AAC.

>>35
I expect that the reason they don't support decoding is that the engineering costs for it and on the iPod would be more than the number of people who would use it.
Tell that to tiny Chinese developers supporting all formats.