[vorbis] Vorbis native Ripper-decoder-encoder

[Craig Dickson]

ndrw mchl grnbrg wrote:

> Personally, I can hear the difference using a 10-year-old sound blaster 16
> through a pair of $10 Creative Labs speakers, but I suppose not everyone
> has well-trained ears.

Yes, I think that's really the issue here. The point is not that poor
equipment renders artifacts inaudible, but that some people don't know
what to listen for. I remember when CDs first came out in the early
'80s, some audio critics really thought they sounded great, because the
LP noises they were used to hearing weren't there. It took them a while
to realize that a bad CD mastering has a whole different set of problems
that they had to learn to recognize. Similarly, when I first starting
listening to MP3s, I actually believed (briefly, since it was presented
as fact) that a well-encoded 128k MP3 was CD-quality. Before long, I
started noticing odd little problems, like swooshy-sounding cymbals,
rolled-off highs, pre-echo, and general loss of detail, and realized
that 128k was nowhere near CD quality. These days, I won't listen to any
MP3 below 160k, and I strongly prefer at least 192k (preferably
LAME-encoded VBR).

For someone with less-critical ears and storage limitations, if an MP3
file is too big and the original, non-encoded source is not available,
re-encoding it to a lower-bitrate MP3 is probably preferable to
transcoding to Vorbis, assuming that a decent-quality MP3 encoder is
used.

Craig

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