In recent months, I’ve taken to ripping my CDs into Ogg Virbis format, as opposed to MP3 format. OGGs supposedly offer a better sound quality than the equivalent bitrate MP3, and it’s an open source format.
However, there’s no hardware Ogg Vorbis players. Should I bother with the OGGs, or should I just stick with MP3s?
Well, my first qestion is what bitrate are they encoded at? OGGs are spectacular for lower bitrates, but there are better choices for higher ones.
Secondly, where do you see yourself using them the most? If you listen to them on your computer, I’d say OGG. If you have an EXISTING player, then go with MP3 for now. If you don’t have one, but plan to get one, I’d just wait a few months, I do believe some will come out.
Typically, I rip 'em at Q6 … 192kbps VBR. I play most of 'em on my computer, but see playing them in the car, and creating a wireless home network to play 'em on my home stereo system (NAD with Dahlquist speakers).
Hardware players? You mean like OGG-on-a-chip, like some of the MP3 decoders, or just a general term like a COTS player you could get at Worst Buy?
There are a (admittedly limited) few handheld players out there, most notably the Sharp Zaurus 5500, IIRC. There are more coming. The big holdup was that OGG used floating point math, which made it tougher to build a cheap player for.
Anyways, I create all OGGs* for my listening pleasure. It boils down to libre. OGG is free, without all the patent encumerances that haunt MP3s… No one can every take your OGG ability away. Ever.
Seeing the bitrate that you use, I’d actually not reccomend OGG at all. Instead, why not try encoding them as MPC? I do agree with Unixrat if you have space to burn that you should rip it in a really large format, so you can convert it later to whenever you want for portability.
**
Calling the Sharp Zaurus an ‘ogg player’ is like calling a Mercedes a ‘pack donkey’. It’s a fully fledged linus-running PDA, and as such it is indeed possible to decode ogg-vorbis.
**
That was indeed a problem, even for the Zaurus. (It uses a StrongARM processor, without FPU). There is however an ‘integer-only’ vorbis-decoded, called Tremor, which works fine with the Zaurus.
You’re ahead of me here. What’s FLAC?
FLAC is free lossless audio compression, available for download somewhere.Compresses about 4 x using very simple method.LICENCE FREE!Genuinely lossless.IMO players which only play mp3, not upgradeable for other types of compression, are cac.I like MD, but it has this fault too.
I encoded my entire CD collection (40+ discs) to Ogg Vorbis using level 4 (about 128kbps) using variable bit rate, and I am quit happy with the results. I then burnt all the files to 5 CD-R’s so when I travel I can take my CD collection without logging around a massive collection.
FLAC, for the unitiated, is a lossless comression scheme (mp3, ogg lose data when they compress). It can roughly halve the size of a file (although this varies from file to file), so a 3 minute song, usually about 50MB WAV file will be about 25MB FLAC file. FLAC is popular amongst the live concert trading crowd. The nice thing about it is that it’s audio is perfectly preserved, but at an increased data size. Another popular lossless format is Shorten, which is part of the Vorbis project as well.
FLAC [http://flac.sourceforge.net/].
Heck, I think that OGG -1 (64k) gives FM quality sound and that’s just fine with me. I’ve got terrible headphones anyways - I don’t really notice the quality loss, but I do notice the space savings. 8^)
How about Monkey’s Audio for lossless ?
It’s free, source code available, and “non-restrictive” licensing according to their homepage.
Geeze, at such a high bitrate why not just stick with WAV files?
At this point, MP3 is a lot more useful - good luck finding a car or set-top Ogg player.