Ogg Vorbis beats MP3 and other formats in hearing test
Posted on 09/09/02 14:52 by Jan Willem                             
Ogg Vorbis beats MP3 and other formats in hearing test

The German website Heise reports that Ogg Vorbis has beaten MP3, MP3 Pro, AAC, Real Audio Surround and Windows Media in a recent hearing test performed by the website. Over 6.000 people performed the testing, and especially when it comes to files encoded with a low bit-rate, Ogg Vorbis was cleary beating the other formats.

Ogg Vorbis is an open source project and it's goal are to create a license free open source lossy audio compression format. Besides gaining more and more populairy because it's license free, also people who want quality music are starting to discover the format.


Badly translated from German with BabelFish:

Also over 6000 on-line delivered evaluations (of it scarce 3300 for the Samples coded with 64 kBit/s), it concerns one of the largest hearing tests for lossy compression procedures at all. Here again a cordial thank-beautifully to all participants!

In particular with 64 kBit/s Ogg Vorbis could convince and left the entire prominent competition behind itself. Starting from 128 kBit/s the perceptible differences between the formats fail clearly smaller, so that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3 for most ears only with difficulty were to be differentiated.


If you would like to read the entiry story in German, go here. If you would like more information on Ogg Vorbis go here. And remember, some people have to be the first to make something populair. MP3 is the mainstream format now, Ogg Vorbis could be the next!

Source: Heise

Reactions
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By Wizard13, Monday 09 September 2002 16:20
Wizard13Well, anyone suprised? Stick Out Tongue
By TBZ, Monday 09 September 2002 18:06
TBZNope, not shocked at all. However, I was shocked when I first got Ogg 1.0 and tried to encode at quality 1 (0 being lowest) and got in return audio quality that's indistinguishable from 320 kbps mp3s! Oggs that were about 1 to 2 MBs that were just as good or better than mp3s that were 8-10 MBs. Embarrassment biggrin Embarrassment biggrin
By DoMiN8ToR, Monday 09 September 2002 18:12
DoMiN8ToRI'll just wait for the reaction of fb- :4
By Wizard13, Monday 09 September 2002 18:13
Wizard13TBZ, I'm a great fan of OGG, but comparing "-q 1" to 320kbps MP3... well, I don't think so Stick Out Tongue Wink And "-q 0" is not the lowest, "-q -1" is :8
By Wizard13, Monday 09 September 2002 18:16
Wizard13@DoMiN8ToR: LOL, excellent post, dude!!! Not that I care so much for fb-'s reaction... Stick Out Tongue :7 devil
By TBZ, Monday 09 September 2002 18:24
TBZYeah you're right, -1 is the lowest, I always forget about that one. As for q1 vs. 320, I'm just saying that *I* can't tell the difference. Smilie /me is also waiting for fb-'s comments. :8
By JLP, Monday 09 September 2002 19:22
No surprise here at all. I started using Ogg Vorbis long ago and that is the only audio format I encode my CDs into. We just need more portable player makers to support it as it costs them nothing (in fees). Ogg Vorbis is then ready to rule the world Smilie
By thegreat682, Monday 09 September 2002 21:44
any way i can get OGG files to work on a Nomad Jukebox 3? If so, I'll get one TONIGHT... screw this iPod b.s.
By Guest, Monday 09 September 2002 23:01
Well, here's some backing to what a lot of us have known all along: OGG Vorbis owns all. But people don't seem to be ripping CDs and sharing OGG files...c'mon people, let's rip those CDs, encode them, and make OGG Vorbis the success it deserves to be! Smilie
By Mastakilla, Monday 09 September 2002 23:25
i wonder what ogg bitrate would equal lame --alt-preset standard settings? can anyone tell (tested with good equipment and trustable Stick Out Tongue)
By Redneck, Tuesday 10 September 2002 00:05
Redneckdifferences at lower bitrated and differences go away at 128kbs and higher, so it doesn't matter what to use at 192kbps, but i'll stick with mp3 for compatibility issues for now, we'll see what the future brings
By satrianez, Tuesday 10 September 2002 10:49
Mastakilla! Check dis out: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/oggvslame/ devil By the way.... don't be scared about high frequencies being cut off, and try to test your ears first with frequency generator. I stop hearing sound around 16300Hz, a friend of mine stops at 17200Hz and another one (older man :4) at 12600Hz.... So I guess that anything properly encoded until 17kHz should suit most people... unless you care about what your DOG listens to... clown Good review though!
By Travis, Tuesday 10 September 2002 15:38
I could hear upto 18,000hz (my generator went it 1,000 steps so I don't have an exact number). And I have tested and use OGG religously but cannot hear a diff between 120kbit (Quality 3) and 160kbit (Quality 4) even tho there is suspose to be a big diff in the higher freqs. The reason being music is rather complicate with too many signals to distract you. So I use 128kbit (Quality 3) because on average my OGG's are almost half the size of my 192kbit MP3s
By Seán, Tuesday 10 September 2002 16:27
SeánI use OGG myself at 128kbps to be on the safe side even though I cannot tell a 96kbps OGG from the original on the majority of songs. On MP3, I need to go to at least 192kbps (using LAME) before I can no longer distinguish it from the original, so I've currently encoded over 1,700 songs in OGG 1.0. My hearing cuts off at about 18,000Hz peak and 20Hz base (using headphones). Wink
By Guest, Tuesday 10 September 2002 19:11
Yawn. Open Source zealot site loves Ogg. What a newsflash. Here's a newsflash from me. 95% of music traders don't know or care about ogg. They don't care about royalties paid by software developers.. they don't care about open source. All they know and care about is that they have mp3s, mp3s are what they get on KaZaA and mp3s work in their portable players. Ogg is just a tiny niche player for open source fanatics. Heck, if even that.. over 75% of /. readers don't even have an ogg file in their music collection.
By XtC4UaLL, Tuesday 10 September 2002 20:22
http://www01.heise.de/english/newsticker/data/anw-09.09.02-002/ <- for the englsh ppl
By Wizard13, Tuesday 10 September 2002 23:36
Wizard13A lot of users care about gapless playback, and a lot will care about multichannel playback in the very near future. Check out new in_vorbis plugin for Winamp with multichannel support http://www.blorp.com/~peter/zips/in_vorbis.exe
By Guest, Wednesday 11 September 2002 04:00
Ogg Vorbis is great quality, but isn't much good if it doesn't work in a media player. I can't get Ogg Vorbis to work in Winamp. It just crashes. I've tried about 8 different codecs with no luck.
By JLP, Wednesday 11 September 2002 14:19
Kafoopsy: Forget abou WMP. It's one of the worst and most bloted players anyway. If you wan't to get Ogg Vorbis playback just install the newsest Winamp Classic 2.81. It has Ogg Vorbis decoder included by default and it works great.
By Guest, Friday 13 September 2002 02:31
Too bad for them to leave out the best lossy audio compressor... That is Musepack, of course (AKA MP+).
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