[vorbis] Re: MP3 to OGG conversion

Moritz Grimm gtgbr at gmx.net
Wed Jun 26 03:19:29 PDT 2002



Robert Cole wrote:
> If someone has a collection of say 50,000 mp3's and for argument's sake
> lets say they have the sources of those mp3's too there is of course no
> current reason to convert them all to ogg even if they wanted to so said
> person keeps happily using mp3 tools and the format because as an end
> user they have no incentive. How do we address that?

We don't. Re-encoding to Vorbis from the source is the only way to move
to Ogg that I can recommend without having a really bad conscience.
Vorbis is not a religion, it's just a tool that does similar things like
MP3, but better and for free. It neither gives us world peace nor does
it let us travel faster than light.

> I will admin I haven't yet run a search thru the archives for threads
> pertaining to advocacy but I will. Even though I'm a layman when it
> comes to this stuff I've been watching ogg since it's inception, the
> good and the bad of it (bad referring to developer comments relating to
> the core library licensing issues and such). But nothing I've seen in
> the outside world (outside these mailing lists) have shown much progress
> and I think it relates to not enough user visibility.

You DO have a point here, but your solution is simply the wrong thing.
Somewhere in this mail you ask again why there is no tool for
transcoding MP3 to Ogg. As I said (and nobody corrected me), it is
mathematically impossible. The end result will ALWAYS be .ogg files that
sound worse than the original MP3, so forget that idea please. 99% of
the end-users care either about filesize or quality (which is basically
the same), and not about Vorbis' open nature. They will listen to your
bloated, bad sounding .ogg files and dislike Ogg because of that. That's
exactly the opposite of what we want.

You can't convert from MP3 to Ogg and back like from GIF to PNG.

<p>Moritz

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