Ogg Vorbis for OS X

[elektro80]

This link shows a listing of various OggVorbis players/encoders/tools for OS X.
click here

[elektro80]

http://www.airwindows.com/encoders/index.html

[mosc]

This probably isn't the place to discuss encoders/decoders. That said, this fellow is very thorough, but I take issue with his approach. In a fromer life, I worked very closely with the lo bit rate audio researchers at Bell Labs. They would work on the algorhythms and our group worked on the circuits.

Anyway, these encoders are based on psychoacoustics - they exploit how we hear and perceive. A good set of ears is much better than a spectral graph. Also, these encoders are designed to encode speech and music, not test tones and noise bursts. This author prefers to keep things objective, something you can't do with this stuff. It is by definition subjective.

I have encoded my music with all of these encoders and listened very closely to the results. I draw different conclusions. Vorbis is very good at low bit rates. I've compared it to the Fraunhaufer (which I actually paid for) and Vorbis performs better.

I'm reluctant to even bring this up. It's like analog/digital, Apple/Microsoft, and religion.

I do have an interesting story. I was on a visit with Bell Labs researchers to Dolby Labs in San Fransisco in maybe 1990. They were there to convince Ray Dolby that they had a superior audio compression technology to Dolby's. At the time, I was the Lab's technical program manager for the HDTV development. Anyway, even though Dolby has a spectacular facility with plush seats and expensive wood panels, we go back into a little lab and listen to the two systems. Some samples sound better on the Bell Labs' encoders and some sound better on Dolby's. After a lot of this jousting - these were very smart guys but it was still an old fashoned fight - Ray Dolby says, "Well, it looks like this will have to come down to the triangle test." The Bell Labs guys were very happy because they knew their system would do a triangle wave very nicely. Well Dolby pulls out a file, not of a triangle wave, but of a very clean recording of a single orchestral triangle playing one solitary bare naked "ding". It turns out that this is very difficult sound for audio compression to do without detectable artifacts.

Dolby's system did very well on the triangle test, he knew it would.

Of course, this really proved nothing. A system that does a great job on the triangle test may really suck on a vocalist or trumbone. Dolby was savey to wait untill all this back and forth testing was proving to be inconclusive, and people were getting tired. As the session progressed he was able to size up his competition; each test giving him another clue of the Bell Labs system's strengths and weaknesses. I'm sure he had other tests he could have pulled out at the last minute, but he knew the triangle would do the job.

Ray Dolby had a very mild-mannered gentle personna, but he was very schrewd and intimidating.

[paul e.]

great story, mosc

[seraph]

[mosc]

That says it all.