OGG Vorbis vs. MP3
I just ripped some of my CD’s to MP3, but I was just curious what OGG would do for me. I had never actually compared the two encoding formats, side-by-side, but today, I was simply stunned.
A song compressed with MP3 (VBR 128Kbps Normal Quality) was around 5.1 – 5.8 MB. It sounded good, but ‘clearly’ inferior to the actual CD Quality sound.
The OGG rip (VBR 128Kbps), on the other hand knocked my socks off! It was around 3.0 – 3.1 MB and sounded ‘nearly’ as good as the original CD!
I hesitated, at first, to rip them all to MP3, in case I wanted to share them (!gasp!) with others. However, now that I can see a 17% – 20% compression gain using OGG over MP3, I no longer feel that way. I wholeheartedly endorse the use of OGG Vorbis for ALL compressed lossy compression.
Most [good] audio/multimedia players already support OGG (except, MS programs, obviously!) so you should have no problem listening to them.
If you have a portable media player (PMP) without native OGG support there are two options
- Contact the manuafaturer and demand (request?) that they support OGG in future versions of their players
- Ask them to create a firmware update to include OGG support on currently supported players
- Install Rockbox: a Linux-based GNU open-source free software suite which allows many major PMP’s to play a huge variety of free and proprietary (i.e. non-free, patented, or otherwise ‘encumbered’) formats, such as OGG. It also allows you to play wide variety of video formats, as well. It included a bunch of interesting features such as backlight dimming, battery-saving features, audio enhancement features, and plenty of games (plays DOOM too!)