iRiver ogg support?

Feb 18, 2003 at 11:15 PM Post #2 of 9
i 'v read bad reviews on iRiver 's customer servics on cnet.com, just thought u would like to know
 
Feb 19, 2003 at 2:28 AM Post #4 of 9
Ogg Vorbis is another lossy compression format (like mp3, wma etc.), but it was designed to be an open format. Meaning that there are no patents associated with its use, therefore you can encode / decode it for free. It's based on same psychoacoustics research as everything else (division of audio range into bands, using masking tones, quanitizing what's left) but presumably has its own proprietary way of encoding. Psychoacoustics is well known and was described by medical doctors as late back as 50's (I might be a bit off mark here) but the actual encoding algorithm for mp3 is of course patented by Fraunhofer institute. So these guys came out with their own. Software is freely available in source code (or pre-compiled) for multiple OSes.
 
Feb 19, 2003 at 3:07 AM Post #5 of 9
So which is better? MP3 or ogg?

"Q. Do the iMP series CD players support Ogg Vorbis and/or MP3Pro?
A. At this time, time iMP series CD players do not support Ogg Vorbis and/or MP3Pro. Our Research and Development team has these codecs under consideration to support in the future."
Source
 
Feb 19, 2003 at 4:02 AM Post #6 of 9
ogg is a much newer compression format and has the potential to be much better than mp3. I am not sure how much better it is as of this point. Ogg supports multi-channel audio encoding just like AAC.

I will switch to ogg the moment Apple comes out with ogg support for the iPod (which I don't think will be likely anytime soon). I'm still using mp3 just for compatibility.
 
Feb 19, 2003 at 4:50 AM Post #7 of 9
i did some research into .ogg when 1.0 was released and those guys did an excellent job. They have, or used to, a comparison page with snippets encoded in .ogg, .mp3 and .wma and others and the .ogg stood out as better quality to my ears, which arn't very good anyway. bottom line is you could get near CD sound in less space then MP3. and it's open source, which everyone likes. we need players to support it so more poeple will acutally encode music in .ogg. That's what's holding me back from using it is that I have no way to take that music with me.
 
Feb 20, 2003 at 6:12 PM Post #8 of 9
Hey Aus,

I'd like to expand on your findings if I may...

I did a little testing with Ogg yesterday, as it was also the first time I've had the pleasure of listening to an Ogg file at all. The first song I tested out was a track I ripped from the album "Coltranes Sound" entitled "Body and Soul"
I Used audiograbber.The newest retail version, which by the way is great.The new version is able to rip copy protected cd's (which is interesting because Jackie, the author of Audiograbber wants you to pay for the full version of AG..I just found that slightly ironic)

Anyway, Ripped the tune with the Lame 3.92 .dll (still don't want to convert to .93) at 320 Kbps...best quality. THEN, I encoded with the newest Ogg .dll (1.82 I think?) with the quality set at 8,(out of 10) which is the numerical equivelant to 234 Kbps.

I must say.... WOW! First of all, the highest quality setting for Ogg is 10. I used Q8 and it clearly bested MP3 @ 320 Kbps..easily. The first thing I noticed was that there was much better stereo seperation. The notes were less muffles, and all the instruments were more defined...clearer. On top of this..and this is a huge plus, that I don't hear many people mentioning...is that seeing as how @ quality 8, a song is better than mp3 @320 kbps, the file size is significantly smaller to boot ! Body and Soul MP3 is 13Mb while the Ogg is 10 MB This can really add up if you think about it.

This is very important for people who have music set up accross a network. Talk about space conservation ! Also, Ogg supports 24 bit playback and supports 5.1 channels natively. Aside from these wonderful things, as we all know, the codec is rights free ! You really couldn't ask for anything more. I turely believe that as soon as Ogg gets the hardware support that it so desperately needs, MP3 will slowly fade away. I think the process has begun anyway. But I must stress that with out the HW support, this is all irrelevant..what a bummer. I have already begun to re-encode my stuff with Ogg...anyone who hasn't tried it really should, you'll be amzed as I was.

Take care,
Sweet Spot.
 
Feb 21, 2003 at 4:30 AM Post #9 of 9
I switched to ogg a while ago and haven't even considered going back to mp3. At first I used a quality of 6, but just for the hell of it one day I encoded some stuff using q1. It sounded no different from the original wav. Of course, it's probably due to my crappy computer audio setup (I only have a SoundBlaster PCI128). I'll be interested when ogg support comes out for iRiver players so I can see how it sounds then (music generally sounds better on my ChromeX than it does on my computer).
 
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