Tag: what is ogg vorbis audio format

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Ogg Vorbis, ADVANTAGES Part 2

Why Ogg Vorbis?

Today, in addition to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, the main players in the field of audio formats are WMA and AAC. Why do we consider Ogg Vorbis to be the best option? To get started, we suggest taking a look at the results of the most recent hearing tests conducted by members of the most authoritative resource in this area, Hydrogen Audio.

Encoder test results in classical music at 80 kbps bit rate Encoder test results in classical music at 180 kbps bit rate
Test results at 80 and 180 kbps bit rates
An unconditional win at the most in-demand bit rates of 80 and 180 kbps is a very significant indicator. If you want, you can check the test details: 80 kbps and 180 kbps (in English). High quality is not the only advantage of the format. Ogg Vorbis is much more sophisticated in terms of technical implementation. In addition, among all those considered, it is the only free and open source alternative.

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Knowing the format in practice
If you want to experience the quality of Ogg Vorbis compression, then the proposed experiment will interest you. It won’t take more than 15 minutes, but you should be happy with the result. The essence of the experiment is simple: we will compress a high-quality audio file into MP3 and Ogg Vorbis at a low bit rate (48 kbps), so that even a person without special hearing can hear the difference.

NOTE
If you don’t feel like wasting time, we suggest uploading ready-to-use files to compare in the rich beginning of O Fortuna’s composition: a high-quality version (477Kb) or the original in FLAC format (2.8Mb), whatever that is more convenient for you; MP3 compressed at 48 kbps (132 Kb) and OGG at 48 kbps (136 Kb).

To work, you will need a file of a special version of the foobar2000 program (3.2MB), configured to work with Ogg Vorbis and other additional features that may be useful to you. Before starting work, unpack the program in a convenient place for you. The experiment also requires working material. If possible, take the original WAV file and transfer it to a separate directory. On it we will mount our simple experiment.

NOTE
If you don’t have the original file on hand, it doesn’t matter. For our experiment, a WAV file obtained from a high-quality MP3 will suffice. Conversion is easy with the foobar2000 program. To do this, open the selected file, right-click on the open file in the list, select Convert-> Run Conversion from the drop-down menu, then WAV (PCM, Fixed Point), and click OK. When the decoding process is finished, in the same directory where the selected file was, its duplicate decoded in WAV format will appear. Transfer this file to a separate directory for testing.

Open the original WAV file using the foobar2000 program, in the context menu go to Convert-> Run Conversion-> CmdEnc: Ogg Vorbis (Quality-1, ~ 48kbps) -> OK. As a result, you will get a snippet encoded in Ogg Vorbis format with a bit rate of only 48 kbps. Now repeat this operation, just select MP3 LAME 48kbps instead of Ogg Vorbis (Quality-1, ~ 48kbps). As you may have guessed, you will have an MP3 piece with a 48kbps bit rate.

Now open the original and compressed versions of your melody, compare the sound quality. Ogg Vorbis has almost not lost its color and it is impossible to listen to MP3, right? Now take a look at the sizes of the received files; they should be roughly the same. Basically, that’s the whole experiment. Make your own conclusions.

Practical use
As you already know, the format is compatible with all currently known platforms. The variety of software is impressive in its number. This is not surprising: any programmer can migrate the source code to new platforms and write their programs with the support of Ogg Vorbis.

Listen on a computer
Most likely, one of the first questions from all potential users of the format is: “What shows can listen to this format?” The answer is simple, almost any. In fact, most players have been shipped with native Ogg Vorbis support for a long time. But sometimes, the policy of the player developers does not allow them to add support for the default format; all kinds of plugins come to the rescue here. Let’s consider the most popular options.

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Ogg Vorbis, ADVANTAGES

How many MP3 files do you have on your hard drive? 100, 500, 1000?

No wonder if even 15,000! We all love music and we are probably all familiar with MP3. Nice old format, time tested … But the light didn’t converge on MP3, did it? It was developed as one of the first of its kind, which gave it a huge boost in popularity. Could the developers have taken into account all the nuances of lossy music encoding? Could you have planned all the options to use this format to make it the most versatile? Of course not!

Throughout the format’s existence, there have been many would-be replacements. But the benefits, in fact, have not always been tangible enough to move to new formats. But then Ogg Vorbis appeared …

Ogg Vorbis
New breath of compressed digital audio
Ogg Vorbis is a relatively new universal audio compression format that was officially released in the summer of 2002. It belongs to the same type of format as MP3, AAC, VQF and WMA, that is, lossy compression formats. The psychoacoustic model used in Ogg Vorbis is similar in principle to MP3 and similar ones, but only that the mathematical processing and practical implementation of this model are fundamentally different, allowing the authors to declare its format completely independent of all predecessors.

The main undeniable advantage of the Ogg Vorbis format is its total openness and freedom. In addition, it uses the latest and highest quality psychoacoustic model, so the bitrate / quality ratio is significantly lower than other formats. As a result, the sound quality is better, but the file size is smaller.

The format has many advantages. For example, the Ogg Vorbis format does not restrict the user to only two channels of audio (stereo: left and right). Supports up to 225 individual channels at sample rates up to 192 kHz and up to 32 bits (which no lossy compression format does), making Ogg Vorbis ideal for encoding 6-channel DVD-Audio. Additionally, the OGG Vorbis format has sample accuracy. This ensures that the audio data before encoding and after decoding will not have offsets or extra / missing samples to each other. This is easy to appreciate when you are encoding music non-stop (where one track gradually fades into another); in the end, the integrity of the sound will be preserved.

You won’t surprise anyone with streaming now, but this format has built it from the ground up. This gives the format a rather useful side effect: multiple songs can be stored in a single file with their own tags. When loading such a file into the player, all songs should appear as if they were loaded from several different files.

A fairly flexible labeling system is worth mentioning separately. The tag header can easily be expanded to include lyrics of any length and complexity (eg song lyrics) interspersed with images (eg album cover photo). Text labels are stored in UTF-8, which allows writing in all languages ​​at the same time and eliminates potential problems with encodings. This is much more convenient than various tricks like id3 tags.

Ogg Vorbis uses a variable bitrate by default, while the latter is not limited to hard values ​​and can vary even by 1 kbps. It should be noted that the format does not strictly limit the maximum bit rate and, with the maximum encoding setting, it can range from 400 kbps to 700 kbps. The sample rate has the same flexibility: users can choose between 2000 Hz and 192000 Hz.

Ogg Vorbis was developed by the Xiphophorus community to replace all paid proprietary audio formats. Despite this being the youngest format of all MP3 competitors, Ogg Vorbis has full support on all known platforms (Windows, PocketPC, Symbian, DOS, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, BeOS, etc.), as well as a large number of hardware implementations … The current popularity far exceeds all alternative solutions.