[TriLUG] Ogg vs. mp3

[al johson]

Actually, according to various sound experts, as long as you sample MP3
files at 160-180 most experts really can't detect the difference between MP3
files and Wav files.
While a Wav file clearly has more data, you must remember that there is
sampling taking place simply in the conversion between analog to digital and
back again, when even wav files are played. There was a math professor at
the University of Pittsburgh who used to play a trick on her students to
teach them about sampling. She would go to the CD store and buy the newest
and most popular album available. She would take it to her math class, but
before she would play it she would put some bad scratches on it. The class
really payed attention to that, but when she played the CD there was no
trace of the scratches, because she hadn't scratched it enough for it to
become audible. She then explained to the students why CD's don't act the
same as 33 records. This was a story that was told to me in the Pitt alumni
magazine (I did my graduate work there).
    So as long as you sample at a sufficiently high enough rate there is no
audible difference between sound when it is sampled or not. Hence the magic
numbers I've given above.--Al Johnson
======================
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Hedemark" <chrish at trilug.org>
To: <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Ogg vs. mp3


>
> On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 11:10 AM, Mark Turner wrote:
>
> > I think Ogg's sound better, especially the lower frequencies. They also
> > tend to be smaller in size.
> >
> > And, yeah. There's that patent-free part, too. :)
>
> Commercial vendors hadn't really been supporting ogg for awhile.  They
> may have been afraid of reading GPL code to figure it out or something,
> I don't know.  But earlier this month I got an RFC announcement
> pointing to ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3533.txt which should
> describe the ogg format.  I haven't read it yet, but the summary for
> the RFC claims:
>
> > This document describes the Ogg bitstream format version 0, which is a
> > general, freely-available encapsulation format for media streams.  It
> > is able to encapsulate any kind and number of video and audio encoding
> > formats as well as other data streams in a single bitstream.
>
> The version number might scare off commercial vendors who wish to
> support ogg in their proprietary products, since it would seem to imply
> that ogg is not yet stabilized in a way that lends itself to lower code
> maintenance.
>
> For now I continue to use MP3 because:
> 1) Just about everyone out there can handle it.  Promotes sharing.
> 2) If I want to get a hardware MP3 player at some point, I don't want
> to have to re-rip all my CD's to have a file format the player
> understands.
> 3) I don't have the auditory acuity anymore to tell the difference
> between ogg & mp3 quality (must have been that Iron Maiden concert back
> in 1988... killed my hearing)
>
> --
>
> Chris Hedemark
> UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X / Windows consulting available.  No job
> too small!
>
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