[vorbis] Compression Artifacts at -q 5. Help!

[Lawrence Wade]

    Hi Everyone,

    My first posting to the list. Longtime Ogg fan, have created many 
.oggs, but this is the first time needing help.

    I've been transferring CDs to Ogg files using crip. I've been in the 
process of setting up a bunch of mules to transfer my music collection to 
electronic format, but I've found an oddity:

>bash$ oggenc -q 5 oddity.wav
>Opening with wav module: WAV file reader
>Encoding "oddity.wav" to
>          "oddity.ogg"
>at quality 5.00
>         [  7.9%] [ 3m52s remaining] \
...
>Done encoding file "oddity.ogg"
>
>         File length:  2m 03.0s
>         Elapsed time: 4m 17.1s
>         Rate:         0.4798
>         Average bitrate: 149.6 kb/s

<p>    You can see what I mean by grabbing oddity.ogg at

    http://www.glowingplate.com/oddity.ogg

    (about 2.2 megs)

    The artifacts are utterly intolerable, and seem to be most obvious 
during quiet passages. (That and the pun are the reasons for the choice in 
song...)

    It's definitely the compression process. The ripped wav is 
indistinguishable from the CD, even with a pair of sexy old Acoustic 
Research AR-4x speakers.

    My configuration? Junker machines ranging from a 486DX-33 to a Pentium 
166 (no MMX). Generic hardware, etc.

    Common to all of them:

    - Red Hat 6.2 - because it's quick and easy to install, and doesn't 
balk about the 16 megs of 30 pin RAM on the 486...

    - No X.

    - Samba server allowing me to conveniently test the files in situ, then 
drag and drop 'em to my fileserver.

    - crip and associated requirements.

>bash$ cat /proc/version
>Linux version 2.2.14-5.0 (root at porky.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 
>egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)) #1 Tue Mar 7 20:53:41 
>EST 2000

    In each machine, I've compiled from source available at 
http://www.vorbis.com/download_unix.psp .

    In order of compilation:

    libao 0.8.3
    libogg 1.0
    libvorbis 1.0
    vorbis-tools 1.0.

    Compiling according to the INSTALL file, using "./configure && make && 
make install" in each case. Made ldconfig changes where required. Waited 
until one had compiled happily before proceeding to the next.

    I've surfed the 'Net looking for info, but so far have had no luck.

    What's going on here? Any ideas?

    Thanks,

    Lawrence

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