Category: Ogg Normalizer

Ogg Vorbis. The sound of the future

We all know that MP3 is the standard in audio compression, but there is a solution on the market with a future Ogg format, which unlike the rest has no use limit and its developers do not charge anyone for its use and much less do they impose their patent. In this article you are going to immerse yourself in the new revolution of sound for computers.

” A little history

We all know the MP3 music format which allows you to take music on the Internet with a quality similar to that of music CDs, exchange it with others, store it on your computer, save music CDs on your hard drive, listen to music on a small portable device no moving parts.

The future of MP3 is at stake. And now they are not the lawyers, it turns out that the format itself is patented from the beginning and they will ask for a commission for use shortly, so for a long time the one that will be the most advanced successor is being perfected: the OGG.

Programmers have used MP3 freely without problems since it was born, but the fact is that the institute has the intellectual property of the format.

In September 1998, Fraunhofer began sending letters to software developers saying that they plan to start charging for licenses to use MP3. Fraunhofer and the other members of the MPEG Consortium claim that it is impossible to create an mp3 encoder without infringing on their patents.

Ogg Vorbis is a high-quality, general-purpose compressed audio format (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit and polyphonic, supporting up to 255 independent audio channels), putting Vorbis in the same category as MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC.

To create or use an encoder, the law says that royalties must be paid both to the institute and to other members of the consortium. In other words, you can listen to MP3, but you cannot contribute by recording anything to mp3.

It is a problem, the patent can limit the growth and make that only those who can afford it use the mp3. They say that there is no problem without solution and OGG Vorbis is the technological solution to the MP3 patent challenge.

In fact we can talk about Ogg Vorbis as an MPEG-4 compressor, which is trying to lead the rest of the competitors that exist in this format, specifically we are talking about AAC and TwinVQ.

Ogg Vorbis format files have the ogg extension and are just the beginning of a family of multimedia products that OggSquish is developing as part of the Xiphophorus project.

»OGG Vorbis the solution to the problem

It is an open format, that is, without an owner and without the possibility of being patented, created by volunteers in the style of free software and, therefore, more technologically advanced when receiving contributions and ideas from a huge community of programmers.

It supports high quality audio, in variable bitrates, several channels and for now up to 128kb / channel. This puts OGG on the same footing currently as MP3, MP4 (AAC, and TwhinVQ), and PAC.

The leader of the project is Christopher Montgomery and he started coding ogg from the moment he received the news of the patent collection threats from the German institute. Since then, many volunteers have joined Montgomery while contributing ideas and lines of code, making OGG files 25% smaller on average than mp3s of the same quality.

OGG Vorbis has been designed to be used in a final way, that is, you can encode everything in OGG without paying patents and never have to go back to MP3, so you can also share the OGG format on P2P networks. The most popular players already support OGG with or without extensions, as well as many reprogrammable hardware players.

The license is the GPL, it is the seed of the entire free software movement, and which allows no one to take advantage of and take ownership of the code that volunteers selflessly provide.

The fact that it is an open format ensures that OGG grows and improves. MP3 is defined from the first moment, and will never have more quality than it corresponds to nor will it be smaller or more compressed, because it is closed.

OGG however will benefit from the improvements that research brings and gradually it will be more compressed, more optimized and will sound better than it already sounds.

Live audio streaming is an important component of Vorbis. The format has been designed to be easily transmitted live.

The designers of Vorbis are working hand in hand with the creators of Icecast (a program for live broadcasts) to make Icecast compatible with Vorbis.

Likewise, they are working on a player that supports live ogg files. In addition, soon from the ogg website these components will be available as accessories for current players. This will be when Vorbis version 1.0 comes out.

What is the OGG format? All about OGG

We will explain what the OGG format is and how you can open it in Windows 10. It is a free alternative to MP3 that is used to play compressed music, and in addition to being used by applications like Spotify you can also choose to use it when you go to digitize the CDs you have at home.

Let’s start by explaining in the most understandable way possible what exactly this file is and what makes it different. And then, we will end by telling you briefly how you can play it in Windows 10 very easily.

ogg

What is the OGG format?

The .ogg files are those that use the Ogg Vorbis compressed audio format, a free and open container that is developed and maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The OGG has no restrictions for software patents, and has been designed to provide more efficient and high quality sound broadcasting.

You can think of the OGG as an alternative to other audio formats such as MP3, and in fact you will almost always find it in audio files with sizes similar to MP3. This means that just as there are files that can be called song.mp3, there will also be some that are called song.ogg.

ogg

Between both formats there are notable differences, such as that the compression of the OGG is lower than that of the MP3, which means that the audio quality will be better. To give you an idea, an MP3 file can have a maximum of 320 kbps, while the OGG can reach up to 500 kbps.

Files that use this audio format may also include other metadata related to the music inside, such as the track number or the name of the artist that appears on it.

The word “Vorbis” refers to the coding scheme provided by the developers of the OGG format. However, there are also OGG files that are not considered Vorbis. In these cases, you can find them using other types of audio compression such as FLAC and Speex, or using different file extensions such as .OGA.

There are also times when the OGG is used as a multimedia container, the Vorbis Multiplexed Media OGGs that use the OGX format, can have videos and can be opened with programs such as VLC or Windows Media Player. We also have the OGM extension for OGG Media files where you can find videos, although in this case it is not a format supported by Xiph.org.

However, in the vast majority of cases you don’t have to worry about that, since you will only find .ogg files to be used to play music as an alternative to MP3. In principle, it can give you the impression that the OGG is a secondary format almost unused, but keep in mind that Spotify uses this format with a quality of 320 kpps.

How to play OGG files in Windows

Fortunately, it is now very easy to play this file on Windows 10. For example, you can use it with the default music player that comes in the operating system and is called Groove Music. Simply double click on it when you have configured that application to be used by default.

You can also use some of the most popular free music playback applications. For example, the VLC player that is possibly one of the most used includes support. And if you are going to download another player, look in its features to see if it also includes support, because it is very possible that it does.

What is the best audio format? MP3? ¿OGG?

We have always used the lifelong MP3 format to store and share music, at least the vast majority. MP3 as we all know in a lossy audio compression format that saves a lot of space compared to uncompressed PCM audio (As in audio CDs).

But MP3 is not the only one, in fact, it is I think, the oldest format that is currently used today, as good audio formats with loss.

Other formats that came out later are:
* .WMA, * .AAC and * .OGG.

Recently the team xiph.org creator of OGG Vorbis has developed another audio format that I will also briefly talk about: * .OPUS

MP3 was developed by the MPEG foundation in 1994, and the biggest problem it presented was that this format had a patent for which MPEG should be paid for its use (or something like that). This was the reason why for example later the Xiph.org Foundation created the OGG Vorbis open audio format.

Today, the problem of MP3 is no longer the patent (Nowadays people use MP3 with total freedom) but since it is the oldest audio format of those in the comparison, it is the one that generally has the lowest effectiveness.

The effectiveness of one format or another also depends on bitrate among others. For example. The AAC format that uses iTunes at 192 kbps is the best compression format at this bitrate, above MP3 and OGG, but only from this bitrate.

ogg

In general, and in my opinion, at 128 kbps which is the most used bit rate and below, the best format is OGG.

The advantage of AAC (In addition to its effectiveness from 192 kbps) for what it uses itunes, is the possibility of including copyright data protection (copying).
However, at low bitrates it can be even worse than MP3.

MP3 and WMA, are in general and for my taste the worst. WMA, which seems to be a little better than MP3, was the second most used audio format in the previous decade (2000-2009). Many discmans and MP3 players were compatible with WMA, today this format is almost never used, it could be said that it has been replaced by AAC (Thanks to the popularity of Itunes).

OGG Vorbis, despite its very low popularity among people, is a very good compression format, and best of all, it is open.
Its high compression quality and open format makes it one of the favorite formats in video game developers, for example: OGG is the format chosen for the music of the GTA videogame saga, including GTA San Andreas.
OGG is also the audio format used in Spotify.

OPUS is the new audio format developed by Xiph.org as a format designed for streaming audio. It is an audio format that combines SILK (skype) codecs for spoken audio and CELT for music (CELT was the audio codec that Xiph.org was developing as a successor to Vorbis). This format is barely a couple of years old, and although it has great efficiency, it is totally focused on streaming and low latency. A great disadvantage of this format despite its effectiveness, is that the sample rate is fixed at 48000 Hz, making if for example we want to convert an audio file to 44100 hz (As in an audio CD and most MP3s) at this new frequency rate, it would have to be rescaled.

I know that it is very difficult to distinguish the quality in songs at 128 kbps, so as proof to compare the effectiveness of the different formats, I attach the song of Bon Jovi – Living on a prayer at 64 kbps in MP3, AAC, OGG formats and OPUS. All occupy almost the same, about 1.80 Mb.
To do this I will convert an original MP3 file at 160 kbps also attached, so the final quality if we converted directly from CD would be a little better maybe.
You can see the comparison yourself. In my opinion the best formats to this bitrate are in order: OPUS, OGG, MP3, AAC. Download at the top.
Did you expect this sound quality from OGG and OPUS in a file of only 1.80 mb?

Advantages and disadvantages of the ogg format compared to mp3

 

Among the users of free software, there are many occasions when talking about the ogg format. In addition, a fairly recurring question is:

What audio format is better? Mp3 or ogg?

After a little research and testing I have concluded that the ogg format is technically superior to mp3.

In addition, .ogg files are capable of providing superior audio quality with a smaller size.

However, both file formats have advantages and disadvantages that we will detail below.

ogg

OGG FORMAT TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES REGARDING MP3

Some of the advantages of the ogg format with respect to mp3 are the following:

Store more audio channels

The mp3 audio files only allow 2 audio channels to be stored. In return, the ogg files allow up to 255 channels to be used.

Thus, the .mp3 format does not allow storing surround sound of the Stereo 5.1 type (6 channels), while a .ogg file does.

The .ogg container allows you to store audio and video

The .ogg container format is capable of storing both audio and video. On the other hand, the .mp3 container can only store audio.

However, in 2007, Xiph.org created the .ogv container and the Theora codec, both specific for video. Since then .ogg containers are only recommended for storing audio.

With equal file size the quality of the ogg format is superior

The Ogg Vorbis compression format is better than the mp3 because it is capable of obtaining audio qualities equal to or greater than an mp3, with a lower file weight.

Some of the reasons that justify what I have just commented are the following:

Ogg Vorbis is a more current audio compression format than mp3.
Ogg vorbis is free and open so that the community can continue improving it continuously.
The quality of a .ogg file can be much higher than that of an mp3

ogg format

In the case that we care about the sound quality, it is better to use the ogg format:

After several tests I have reached the following conclusions:

A compressed audio to mp3 with lame at maximum quality offers a quality similar to a compressed audio with oggenc to quality 7 or 8.
The highest quality of the ogg format is 10. The quality 10 provides excellent sound quality with an average sampling rate of 520 kbps.
The maximum quality of an .mp3 file corresponds to a file with an approximate average sampling rate of 260 kbps.
Ogg Vorbis is open and patent free

The .ogg container and the vorbis codec are completely open, free and without patents.

In contrast, the .mp3 compression format is proprietary. If someone decides to encode audio files in mp3 for example to include them in a software, they must pay royalties to the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

The labeling system is better in ogg

The ogg Vorbis tagging system is better and more flexible than the mp3 tagging system.

Thus, for example, the Vorbis labeling system allows us to:

Edit the tags at the same time we compress the audio files.
We can duplicate labels. In this way, if we have more than one artist, we can have 2 artist labels.
Like ID3v2 we can create custom tags. Therefore they allow to add practically all the information that we want.
Use a virtually unlimited number of tags.
We can use a virtually unlimited number of characters to describe each of the tags.

DISADVANTAGES OF THE OGG AUDIO FORMAT

Technically, .ogg audio files are better than .mp3, but currently they have the following problems:

There are audio players that do not play .ogg

There are audio players that cannot play audio in the ogg format. As an example we can find the following cases:

IPods are not yet able to play files in ogg format.
Windows 10 is also not able to play .ogg audio by default. If we want to play ogg audio we must install additional codecs or download some software that is capable of playing them.
In Mac OS the situation is similar to that of Windows. The iTunes player is not able to play the .ogg file format.
There are many video players that are not able to play file formats .ogg, .ogv, .ogm, etc.
The audio CD of my car is not able to play .ogg files. If you can play .mp3 files instead.
Despite this, in many cases we can find a solution such as installing codecs or software capable of playing .ogg files.

Despite this, in many cases we can find a solution such as installing codecs or software capable of playing .ogg files.

In the following link you will find software information and codecs to play and encode .ogg files without any problem.

The battery consumption is higher

Although I have not performed any checks, the comments of several users in forums suggest that the battery consumption of our audio players is higher when we play .ogg files.

The processors of our a priori devices are more optimized to decode .mp3 files because the .mp3 files are a standard today.

 

What it is and how to perform a volume normalization on your MP3

 

What it is and how to perform a volume normalization on your MP3

Have you ever heard the term audio normalization, without being sure of what it meant? As a lover of music and technology, I also encountered such a doubt many years ago. Basically, giving a short definition, it is about the standardization of the volume, or rather, of the audio spectrum with respect to other subjects, usually of the same disc.

And that, to put it more simply, is the equalization of the volume of the different tracks on a disc. The reasons are many, and usually if the tracks are extracted from the same job they already have the same volume and gain, but what happens if we want to make a mixtape? For example, we decided to make a compilation called The Best 100 Rock Songs in History. Surely have songs from The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, and therefore from different albums. Depending on the year, type of mastering, etc. etc., we can end up with a CD that contains many different volumes, something that can be annoying when listening. That is just one of the reasons to normalize our MP3 collection.

There are add-ons for players that allow us to normalize on the fly. In fact we can say that programs like Spotify already do this by means of the option to equalize volume of all the songs, however the application that I present below allows us to permanently normalize modifying MP3 files and many other formats, both audio and Of video..

This is Mp4Gain, which stands out for its simplicity of use and is presented under an interface that is ideal to understand exactly what a normalization is and see the before and after. When we open the application we find a window in which we have a grid, which will be populated when we add files or folders, and a keypad with various options.

How do we normalize? Simply change the gain through the specific menu for this.

By pressing OK the application will start working and save our files with the same gain, so it is ideal that before doing the first tests we make a backup. It must also be taken into account that it is an operation that can take time, something that depends on the speed of our processor, the number of issues to normalize and also the size and quality of them.

The truth about audio formats and their quality

As you well know, there are three digital ways to play a song. From the original recording, through a copy with lossless compression (what we usually find when we buy a CD) or through a copy with lossy compression (which we usually download legally from the G.G internet).

The three files differ basically in the same property, which is none other than bitrate, that is, the information it contains per second. As more bitrate, more weight, so an audio file of a song without compression can quietly occupy 200mbs. In the second case (lossless understanding), the weight is reduced a lot (over 40, 50mbs), and is obtained by reducing the bitrate in those parts with silence, or with a wave oscillation in a single spectrum. To understand each other, the healthy young ear recognizes between 20Hz and 20KHz. A file with lossless compression (usually .flac files or those found on a CD) maintains this spectrum, reducing it when it is not necessary (silences). And finally there are the files with compression and loss (.mp3, .mp4, .flv, …) files that reduce this spectrum to the one that most ears recognize, leaving it around between 15Hz and 15KHz, obtaining a weight per file of song around 4mb, 5mb.
The latter has always been questioned, especially in musical circles, which assured that compression with loss greatly diminished the quality of what was reproduced, not allowing to admire the most serious or the most acute, thus losing all the completeness of the work.
As if that were not enough, mp3 files have different encodings (64, 128, 192 or 320 Kbps), with a greater or worse loss, and even constant (CBR) or variable bitrate (VBR) that is usually optimal when compressing with various bitrates Different moments of the songs.

Loud speaker and sound wave

Well, it has been more than 50 years before a good music lover programmer named Jeff Atwood decided to see if there really is a substantial change for the human ear between the different formats. In his blog, after several entries and several weeks of study in what would be called The Great Experiment of bitrate in MP3, we have finally obtained an empirical version of this eternal question.

But let’s make a brief summary of what we have in hand.
To test his hypothesis, Atwood decided to hang five audio files from his website, one of them being the original (without any digital treatment that modifies the bitrate), and another four tablets at various bitrates between 128 and 320 Kbps. The objective was that the user entered, listened to the five, and chose which one seemed to him to have higher or lower quality. Best of all, he obtained a not insignificant opinion of 3,500 visitors, hanging the results weeks later.

And from his observations you can get some gold reefs:
No doubt people knew how to differentiate the worst of all, such as the mp3 encoded with the worst bitrate 128 Kbps CBR.

The variable bit rate coding proved to be higher than the constant.
The most positive audio obtained was that of 160Kbps VBR, even higher than 320 Kbps CBR, and paradoxically also superior to the original audio of the CD.

From all this follows a corollary:
People are unable to ensure that it has more quality above 160Kbps, so it sends lossless formats to the horn that occupy one more scumbag, and that in practice, our ear cannot discern.
So you know. That’s over 15, 20 songs for a CD. There is no excuse.

Do you differentiate between an mp3 encoded at 128 and one at 320 kbp?

 

Surely more than once you starred in or attended a dispute between people who say that you notice a lot of difference between an MP3 encoded with one or another level of compression, or between a CD and an MP3. However, there are very few people able to distinguish these nuances. That’s why at mp3ornot.com we propose this challenge:

Are you able to differentiate between an mp3 encoded at 128 kbps from another at 320 kbps? If you think you have your ear developed enough to capture that difference, I challenge you to take the test … and then tell me.

Data:

The Mp3 (MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer 3) was one of the first types of audio compression with almost imperceptible losses to the human ear. Its compression rate is measured in kbps (kilobits per second), with 128 kbps being the standard quality, in which the file size reduction is about 90%, that is, a ratio of 10: 1. That compression rate can currently reach up to 320 kbps, the maximum quality, in which the file size reduction is about 25%, that is, a ratio of 4: 1, going before 192 kbps, 256 kbps, that is, the maximum quality that can be removed in Mp3.

The lossy compression method used in the compression of the Mp3 consists in removing from the audio everything that the human ear would normally not be able to perceive, due to phenomena of masking sounds and limitations of human hearing (although people with absolute hearing can perceive such losses).

How to compress an MP3 file

Knowing that the MP3 audio format has become the most standardized and used worldwide in recent years, we have thought it pertinent to talk about the different parameters that make an MP3 file respond to one quality or another.

The first thing we have to know is the meaning of MP3, and it is nothing more than a compressed digital audio format that although by nature suffers a loss of information in the conversion process, it is not audible by the human ear, which It implies an assumable loss since we will not be able to perceive it in broad strokes.

Generally, an MP3 file is capable of reducing the size of an original audio file without altering quality. What this means is that in the conversion process for example of an audio file with CD quality, the result of the MP3 file would be practically identical to the original, leaving as standard ratio 1 minute = 1 MB.

That said, we can begin to clarify some parameters that will determine the quality of an MP3 file, which in its vast majority, depends on the bitrate or Bitrate.

Impact of Bitrate in MP3 quality
The MP3 file format allows you to select the compression ratio of the source file. The margins at the domestic level are between 8 Kbps and 340 Kbps, with 128 Kbps being the transfer rate equivalent to CD quality.

Bitrate is the unit of measure for the rate of data transfer read from an MP3 file. The higher bitrate an MP3 file has, the greater the amount of data that a player can obtain in the unit of time (Second).

The more instrumental content or quality an MP3 audio file contains (sound effects, recorded audio tracks, high frequencies, low frequencies, etc.), the higher the transfer rate it will require to fully reproduce the information, and at this point, it is where it is defined The quality of the MP3 file, since if we compress that file, we reduce that bandwidth, we will be sacrificing some of that data, resulting in loss of information that will influence the final result of the MP3 conversion.

In summary:

If the file lasts 5 minutes and weighs 3 MB, we would be talking about a low quality MP3 file.

If the file lasts 5 minutes and weighs 9 MB, we would be talking about a high quality MP3 file.

The great experiment on MP3 quality: no, there really isn’t that much difference with CDs

 

This article was originally published in Cooking Ideas, a Vodafone blog where we collaborate weekly with the goal of creating stories that “feed the mind of ideas.”

volume booster

A programmer named Jeff Atwood said some time and several entries from his blog, the always recommended Coding Horror, to a healthy entertainment he called The Great Experiment of bitrate in MP3. Its objective: to verify empirically if for ordinary people there are really qualitative differences when listening to music in various MP3 formats compared to traditional ones.

The contestants were the traditional formats called “no loss of quality”, basically CD (Compact Disc) and FLAC versus compression formats with loss of quality: MP3 with different bitrates. The bit rate, better known by its name in English, is a key feature because it basically determines how much information is transmitted per unit of time: in this case it is the waves that define the music and become human voices and instrument notes . In the world of MP3 encodings of 64, 128, 192 or 320 Kbps (kilobits per second) are usually used.


Like everything in life, music coding is a compromise between quality and quantity: a song stored in the best possible format – for almost all experts, that is the CD – can occupy about 50 MB (megabytes), maybe 40 or 35 only using some of the lossless compressors that save some space without loss of quality (FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc.). That same song in MP3 can vary between 4, 8 and 12 MB depending on the bitrate (64, 128 and 192 Kbps). To further complicate the matter, you can also choose between a constant (CBR) or variable (VBR) bitrate that is usually optimal when compressing different moments of the songs with various bitrates.

For many users, being able to store between 5 and 10 times more music in the same space is an important saving, easy to translate if one takes into account the price of hard drives, flash memories or storage on iPods, tablets and the like. But there have always been two schools confronted: that of audiophiles who believe that nothing can equal the maximum quality of the CD and that of those who, with a more practical sense, consider the differences between an MP3 and CD ridiculous, if at all there are.

Atwood’s experimental study sought precisely to shed some light on these theories based on the basics: listening to music, quantifying its “quality” and deciding which is the best format based on the various variables. For this, he prepared five different audio files: one of them uncompressed and another four tablets at different bitrates between 128 and 320 Kbps. He put them on his server so that people could listen to them and vote (with a quality “note” of 1 to 5) without knowing which was which. And in total he got more than 3,500 people to contribute to the results – hundreds more than for many of the “quality studies” mentioned in the TV commercials.

The results were analyzed with a spreadsheet and various statistical tools, which showed trends and conclusions quite clearly:

The only sample that could really be considered very different from the rest was the MP3 at 128 Kbps CBR, the worst quality. That quality is not enough to compare with the rest. The best simply ignore it.

The MP3 at 160 Kbps VBR is the highest quality sample, even better than the MP3 at 320 Kbps CBR. This indicates that the coding with a variable bit rate is higher than the fixed one even at those values, and that 160 Kbps VBR up is impossible to improve qualitatively.
Ironically, this would indicate that there are MP3s that are heard “better” than audio CDs. Several things can happen here: that the “artifacts” created by compression seem to improve the audio or that when testing people “imagine things,” which could also happen. The truth is that the data serves to feed the theory that from 160 Kbps people no longer distinguish one quality from another, as it is deduced from the data.

The conclusion of the study confirms the hypothesis that an MP3 at 192 Kbps VBR has such quality that not even the ultrasensitive and powerful ear of a dog would notice the difference with an audio CD. Wow!
In conclusion, we already know at what rate to code and compress if we want a good saving in storage without losing quality: a MP3 of 192 Kbps VBR, the winning format of the test.