umm, just because someone makes a claim does not make it true no matter how large the corperation. goto the website (vorbis.com) and listen to the samples they have there. wmas are nothing special.

i do realzie you mean all flavors of OSs. i use linux for describtion since its the biggest alternative OS. its easier then type all of them out. i dont use X either. in fact i rarly even physically use my linux system instead i ssh into it. so i dont have much use for audio on it at all.

also its niave to think players dont support vbr mp3s. those that dont are not following the mpeg layer 3 specifcations. its that simple. mp3 from the start allowed vbr, some ppl were lazy and did not implement proper support for it since they did not see many mp3s using it. in fact mp3 can allow changes in not only bitrate per frame, but the sample rate as well. each frame is considered pretty much independent since its a stream. you should be able to take all your mp3s, remove the tags, and concatenate them. no matter teh bitrate or smaple rate the decoder should play the sound back correctly. dont blame faulty decoders by lazy ppl. sure mnay linux players all use the same decoder since its the "best" one for linux and they dont want to write their own decoder. so they have to deal with it not fully supporting the spec.

you apparently believe the MS hype, yet think they are evil. maybe i got better speakers, but i dont hear wma sounding better then ogg by any measure. though i guess real tests like classical music are not what you are using. if the original piece does not have a large dynamic range then the compressed version wont either thus you ownt notice the difference.

there is no point in comparing CBR since VBR allows better compression ratios. i know wma suports vbr (if not, yet another reason why its no better then ogg).

the problem with starting such a thread is that most ppl dont ahve the sound setup nor the hearing to judge the quality accuratly. also with ppl having some baisis (ir you with wma) they wont hear the difference if its close (i never said wma was far worse in quality, i merely said that the quality was no better or slightly worse then ogg). the main difference i hear is that the wma is slightly "softer" sounding (like vqfs) then ogg. ogg seems to have better response to attacks and notes are sharper. in some music this dont matter, in classical it does.

if you can defintivly say that wma is vastly superior then ogg then you did not really compare them. there is very little difference. i agree mp3 is far worse vs wma, vqf, and ogg. however wma is not vastly superior to ogg or vqf.

sure wine is a bad way to handle things. though its currently the only viable method beyond reversing the format yourslef and implementing a decoder hoping you did not miss a quirk in the format.

Sound and Vision magazine did a non-biased study on wma, mp3 and real player file formats. basically what turned up was that wma does sound better at the same bitrate and is smaller in size, but not by the 50% margin that MS advertises as another poster mentioned. it was about 15-30% better depending on the type of sound. so if you can use any of the 3, use wma since it is the best.

quote:Original post by mediamaster40
Sound and Vision magazine did a non-biased study on wma, mp3 and real player file formats. basically what turned up was that wma does sound better at the same bitrate and is smaller in size, but not by the 50% margin that MS advertises as another poster mentioned. it was about 15-30% better depending on the type of sound. so if you can use any of the 3, use wma since it is the best.

That makes no mention of Ogg at all. It's not in dispute that MP3 isn't as nice as the competition. The real battle is between Ogg and WMA. Judge for yourself.

[edited by - Alimonster on July 25, 2002 8:37:47 PM]

I''ve had a listen to those samples on the web page and compared them with the wav

Ogg with VBR : slight distortion on the ride like the WMA format

Ogg managed : slight distortion on the ride like the WMA format
MP3Pro : even flatter than the MP3Enc
WMA8 : slight distortion on the ride cymbol (sp?), much nicer treble
MP3Enc31 : missing alot of treble, sounds very flat

Based on my own ears, my SBLive running via the stereo and my wireless Technnics headphones I can detect no difference between the ogg and WMA samples, the managed ogg file was even slightly smaller than the WMA and vbr ogg files (go figure)

Based on that, I''d use ogg, because althought its sound reproduction was no better, one file was slightly smaller and another was only about 20k bigger and gave the same results as WMA, however as ogg is open and WMA is very much closed the advantage goes to ogg.
gg.

Sorry to bring this back from the dead, but here are the results of a recently finished low bitrate test: http://ff123.net/64test/results.html

See the slashdot comments too. Browse at 4 to get rid of the noise...

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/30/0328223.shtml?tid=141