Bye Bye MP3! Hello Ogg Vorbis!

[Quadophile]

CDR Info has a very interesting new article stating that Ogg Vorbis may be the future of digital music and MP3 is on its way out!

Ogg Vorbis is attracting much attention to the digital music world as a "license and royalty free" compression format. Ogg Vorbis is also known as its higher quality, higher compression ratio compared to MP3, current standard of the compression music format.

Only time will tell what the poor consumers will do with all the MP3 players which are selling by millions and may just become obsolete if Ogg Vorbis takes over.

Read full story here

 

[floppybootstomp]

I don't doubt Ogg Vorbis is a superior compression system, but mp3 is out there already, in use by countless thousands of people across the Globe.

I feel that, just like the old Betamax vs VHS video saga, it's the system that's most popular with the public that will win out, and as history tells us, that isn't always the best one.

If Ogg Vorbis is pushed by various factions to be the dominant format, I reckon they'll have an uphill struggle.

Talking of which, I remember in the late seventies, in an effort to improve the sound of audio cassettes, Sony introduced a deck that played cassettes literally twice the size of the conventional ones at twice the speed.

It died a death.

A fella I know actually bought one of these, it's still going strong to this day and it's sound quality is comparable to the reel to reel recorders of that time.

Double size cassettes no longer available though, unfortunately for him

 

[Quadophile]

Flops,

You summed it up very well. I agree with ya 100%.

All computer users are not audio freaks who really bother if there is any difference , for them it is not important.

Lesser equipment also cannot reveal the minutest details so for the majority it does not matter.

In my case, when I am watching a concert at home on the DVD I am more concerned with how it sounds rather than how it looks - me not a videophile. Video takes second place for me. Yet there are folks who are keen on the video quality and sound quality takes second priority - to each his own.

 

[Eric Portelance]

While I do agree that OGG is a superior format (I have encoded a few of my CDs in OGG to test it out), I think that MP3 IS getting better. If you use the right settings, you can still get good quality out of MP3, but the compression ratio won't be as high.

I personally always encode my MP3s in VBR using Lame's -r3mix preset (VBR 112-228 ). I find it always yields good results.

I think it's too late for OGG to become standard, but maybe it could push for certain sectors where MP3 is not king yet. Think of voice recordings and whatnot.

I'm planning on buying an iPod next week. Thankfully, it only requires a firmware update to get it to play OGG Vorbis (and the same is possible on ALL firmware upgradable players), so I don't think those will be obsolete soon.