[vorbis] 'Jukebox' quality?

[Aleksandar Dovnikovic]

Joe Soroka <oggustus at zxmail.com> wrote:

> So, I'm making an appeal to the audio experts here.  I want 'jukebox'
> quality, meaning ~0 artifacts while maintaining a good compression
> ratio, but not quite 'archival' (read high bitrate) as I don't mind
> hanging on to the original cds.

One thing first: there are two types of artifacts - one that can be easily
heard by most people, such as pre-echo, high-frequency distortions...
and the other type is so called grey-area: it is how the encoded file
generally sounds - is it natural, closer to the original, sharp & brittle..
- these kind of artifacts can be pretty subjective.
Currently only MP+ has the quality level you want (and myself, as well).
It will give you (using 'normal' profile) avg. bitrate between 160-192kbps
(most of the time) with great sound quality - no obvious artifacts, even
with some very hard-to-encode test tracks, and generally it gives pretty
natural sound. But it is still in development, and once it is finished it
won't be free, because the author has to pay some patents (he is using
some Philips filters), and of course because he wants to make money. :-)

> Is r3mix's recommended "lame -V1 -b128 -mj -h" good enough?  Is this guy
> and his study saying that it's *no where near* good enough as it seems?
> Is this study for real, or is it bunk?

"lame -V1 -b128 -mj -h" really gives the best quality/compression ratio in
MP3 field, but that quality is just not good enough for me - too much
pre-echo for my taste, and there are still high-frequency distortions.
Also, one of the reasons why I don't like MP3 in general is that it
adds a small amount of silence to the begging/end of the encoded file
and this is heard as a click between seamless (gapless) tracks -
live albums are a good example.

> Various stuff I've read on xiph.org seems to indicate that ogg/vorbis was
> born out of a desire for a 'free-speech' lowbitrate streaming/compression
> format, not for '~0-artifact digital jukeboxes'. Is this one of the goals
> for 1.0?

The option to encode in high bitrates is already there, in beta2 (beta3
coming out very soon), but there are still tweakings and bugfixes to be
done before Vorbis can be used for archival purposes.

> When can I completely throw out mp3 and put my cds in a timecapsule?

You can wait until Vorbis matures enough. That's what I'm doing. :-)

Greetings,
Aleksandar

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