Ogg Vorbis FAQ Part 2
Ogg Vorbis
0. Introduction
The other day, I presented ogg using this material at a regular kmlug meeting, but recently, it seems that ogg-related sites are inaccessible for some reason. So I put it here so that I can only use the binary I got earlier, so use it when the following site is not available.
1. What is Ogg Vorbis?
(Excerpt from http://homepage2.nifty.com/eangel/Mizuno/Software/ogg/)
Ogg Vorbis has the same music / audio file format as “.mid”, “.wav” and “.mp3”. I’ll abbreviate it as Ogg below, but we’re going to touch on the background behind the birth of this format.
First of all, as a music format, there is the mp3 which has become so famous that no one knows about it now, so why is it Ogg now? The answer is simple, because mp3s are no longer free.
Below is an excerpt from the ZDNET news.
Last September, Fraunhofer IIS-A began collecting royalties. This cost is considerable, to say the least. Fraunhofer IIS-A requires $ 5 for an encoder like MusicMatch, plus 1 cent per song for every MP3 downloaded or streamed, or 1% of total sales.
Fraunhofer IIS-A is a German laboratory that created the mp3 format. The short answer is that making an mp3 encoder or distributing a song costs money.
In this way, abroad, there is now a big problem regarding copyright related to online distribution of music files. The result was the open Ogg Vorbis, which has no copyright, patent or property rights.
Ogg Vorbis complains about MP3 and better sound quality, smaller file sizes, and avoidance of the aforementioned copyright issues. And it is constantly moving towards reality. But it is important to note that Ogg is not yet a complete format. As of September 2000, it appears to have the functions that MP3 has at the moment.
Let’s examine two important points.
First of all, regarding file size, Ogg basically uses a variable bitrate. Variable Bit Rate (VBR) is a high bit rate when high sound quality is required and a low bit rate when high sound quality is not required. If the bit rate is low, the sound quality will be low, but the file size will also be small. By making good use of this, the file size is smaller with the same sound quality as MP3. (By the way, MP3 also has VBR). Generally, 128 kbps is said to be enough for MP3 to get satisfactory quality, but Ogg has a sound quality of 160 kbps, which is a higher range, and the file size is roughly the same.
The next thing is the sound quality.
First of all, the default bit rate of the Ogg encoder is 160 kbps, which shows that sound quality is important.
Additionally, MP3 like LAME and BladeEnc have announced that popular encoders will also support Ogg.
In fact, I made MP3 files and Ogg files from my CD and listened to them. At the same bit rate, the file size was naturally smaller for Ogg, but the sound quality didn’t seem to be much different from MP3.
So I increased the Ogg bitrate by a range and checked the sound quality with almost the same file size. When I added another Wav file extracted from CD to the comparison target and listened to it over and over again, I came to the conclusion that the Wav file had the clearest sound quality, followed by Ogg and MP3.
