[vorbis] My Vorbis beta 2 impressions

[Aleksandar Dovnikovic]

Generally speaking, I can say that Vorbis already has pretty good quality,
better then MP3.

Mode 6 (~350kbps) - sounds great, no high-frequency artifacts and no
pre-echo in any of my 3 test cases (I use 3 tracks as pre-echo test cases:
1. castanets.wav from LAME homepage  2. drums from the begging of the song
Metallica - The Small Hours and 3. bass guitar from the begging of the song
Primus - My Name Is Mud).

Mode 5 (~256kbps) - also sounds great, no high-frequency artifacts and only
little pre-echo in my test case 2 (Metallica).

Mode 4 (~192kbps) - good quality, little high-frequency artifacts
(manifesting in usual manner, sounding like whistles or chirps) and little
pre-echo in my test cases. But quality is still better then LAME in
both of these aspects. Joint-stereo would probably help here, freeing enough
bits to clear away these artifacts.

Since I'm pretty keen on quality, I didn't spend much time testing lower
modes because I'm interested in bitrates 192-256kbps.

Also, even though the ogg files are EXACTLY the same length as the original
wav files, I can still hear a tiny <click> between songs that flow into one
another. This doesn't happen always, some files come out fine, some have
(more or less audible) clicks between them. Someone from this list said a
while ago that when you cut the signal abruptly, clicks can happen
(something about zero-crossing) and Monty said that this can be easily fixed
in decoder, so I'm guessing that this click comes from the decoder side??

I am using oggenc for windows platform and winamp plug-in.

Keep up the good work! :)

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