[vorbis] Re: Vorbis decoding from scratch and the old MP3->.OGG story (new thread, was: Please confirm your message)

[Glendon Gross]

gtgbr at gmx.net wrote:

> > I just used oggasm to convert my entire .MP3 collection to ogg-vorbis.
>
> I hope you are aware that by doing so, you created suboptimal .ogg files
> - they won't sound better than your MP3s, maybe even worse. Vorbis can't
> magically recreate the audio information that got lost during the
> encoding to MP3. Vorbis will even waste bits on trying hard to sound as
> close to the source MP3 as possible, with all possible problems, quirks,
> blurbs, swirls, etc.
>
> Good advice would be to leave the MP3s as they are and re-rip your music
> to Ogg Vorbis, i.e. "simply don't make MP3s anymore".

Although I was aware of this, my informal audio tests caused me to be quite impressed
with
the results from oggenc at default (~128k) settings.  Maybe it's just psychological,
but many of my homemade .ogg
files sounded better to me using ogg123 to play them than the original .MP3 files
did.  In other words, I liked the sound of
the Ogg Vorbis files.  So the margin of error, i.e. the lost information, was not
critical to me.

Although I am a professional musician, I am not an audio purist.  My current equipment
does have limitations, although it
sounds good to me.  But I was literally amazed at my perception of the quality per
bandwidth ratio I subjectively experienced with
ogg123 and xmms.   Many of my original .MP3 files were encoded at 384k because I found
128k .MP3's to be somewhat limiting.
Yet when I listen to those files after they have been converted to .ogg format, they
sound just great to me even at ~128k. I noticed
quite a bit of variation in the bitrate of the output stream, and found that I was
able to enjoy even the converted .MP3's that were
originally encoded at only 128k.  So my conclusion was that in my case, it is a moot
point.  I didn't delete my .MP3's , but I generated
a full tree of .ogg files from the .MP3 source tree and was actually surprised to be
satisfied with the result.

Thanks for your informative response to my initial post.

<p>Regards,

Glendon Gross

>
>
> Moritz

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