[vorbis] Few questions concerning clipping

[Aleksandar Dovnikovic]

"Patrick Masters" <pmasters at fuse.net> wrote:

>      This is my first post to the group. I have been using Media Jukebox
> 6+ to re-encode all of my mp3s to .ogg. I received some hell from
> others for doing this but the way I see it, I am making sure there is
> more out there in the audio format wars. I am just afraid that only
> new music will end up being encoded in ogg and the older harder to
> find things will be left in .mp3 format.

Re-encoding from mp3 to ogg is certainly something I wouldn't
recommend, because your ogg files will only be lower quality.
Just leave your mp3s as they are, and encode new stuff in ogg.
Ogg Vorbis is not coming to eradicate mp3, but ogg popularity
will continue to grow. So mp3 will still be around for quite some
time - that's why I don't see the point in re-encoding mp3 to ogg
- if you can't find the 'older, harder to find things', then leave them
in mp3. But this is my opinion - if you like to have all your music
in one format and you can't hear the difference after re-encoding
then do it. :-)

> I did notice some very intersting things between encoding with
> Media Jukebox and Sound Forge 5. Seems that when I use 128Kbit
> for both programs, that Media Jukebox comes out smaller than
> Sound Forge's yet appear to have the same quality. Weird.
> Ill take the smaller version any day of the week. Though I have
> noticed with Media Jukebox when batch encoding, it takes
> up 100% of system resources. This bothers me a bit.

This difference between MJ and SF5 is because they are probably using
different versions of ogg vorbis encoder. As for the system resources
this is probably related to Media Jukebox and how much resources does
this program allow ogg vorbis encoder to use.

>     I am a running Win2K on an Athlon 800Mhz w/ 128MB ram, 27GB
> Western Digital HD and a 40GB Maxtor HD. Is ogg encoding that
> much more CPU intensive than .mp3? Seems when using Media Jukebox,
> the system hiccups alot when playing back another track. I am going to
> try re-creating the problem while encoding w/ Sound Forge 5 and see
> it if it is the format or just the encoding programs.

The way things are now (ogg vorbis beta4), ogg encoding is as fast as
mp3 encoding is (if you compare it with LAME mp3 encoder using VBR).
As for the decoding, I don't have the exact numbers, but using the winamp
plug-in (with latest ogg vorbis decoder), decoding mp3 takes less CPU
then ogg but the difference is rather small (and will probably get smaller
in the future).

> Another question I have is will .ogg support being burned to audio cd
> on the fly like .mp3? Not that big of a problem, but it is an extra 10-15
> steps to put together a comp cd.

Well this doesn't depend on ogg format, it depends on whether the
programs that can do this with mp3 will start supporting ogg vorbis.

> Last, how can I help the Vorbis Ogg community other they word of
> mouth? I have absolutely no programming experience though I am
> enrolling in classes starting in March.

Apart from 'spreading the word', the best thing you can do to support
Ogg Vorbis is to use it. :-)

> I have heard others in the group talk about new features
> being released with each beta release, but I really dont see how many more
> features can be implemented that arent already there. I know, I am showing
> my ignorance. Please don't flame but rather enlighten an uniformed soul.

There are a couple of important features that are missing like
joint stereo - that will improve quality at lower bitrates (160kbps and
lower) and bitrate peeling (very useful for streaming). And of course
there's still a bit of quality tweaking to be done to please the people
that are anal when it comes to quality. :-)

Greetings,
Aleksandar

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