Vampyromaniac

Hmm... I tried getting your reference .WAV file, but I think the .RAR is corrupted; it wouldn't extract.

But I compared the 3 compressed files.
To me, the .WMA sounds noticeably inferior to the other 2; quite tinny and relatively stifled.
And the .OGG sounds a bit better than the .MP3; the latter relatively tinny and the former seeming to have a bit better stereo separation.
I choose .OGG, but then again, I didn't hear the reference .WAV.

This is on a computer with a TBS Montego II card, and (brand new, woo-hoo!! ) Klipsch PM 2.1 speakers.
. . . and a listener with fairly good ears.



And for Necro:
heh heh

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Necrosis

I will upload the file again as a zip. I'm not sure how much space I have on Earthlink.

reno

These files are all read as 44khz in Playcenter and Winamp3, are you sure you didn't encode them as such?

Anyway...tested using my Triport headphones, Logitech z560s, Audigy, Winamp 3,
Playcenter 3 and Soundforge. All files (except the .wav) were decompressed to .wav format to make sure that the compressed media decoders didn't affect sound quality. (I never liked winamp's mp3 decoder...just sounds mushier than playcenter and windows media player. Luckily winamp3 uses windows media audio v2 (8))

Ogg: Generally equal in quality to .wma, according to soundforge .8dB higher ambient noise level than .wma, .12dB lower ambient noise level than .mp3.

General-Audio artifacting (wsh wsh sound associated with highs in compressed media) present in right channel during the guitar wah, medium volume.

Playcenter-CMSS mode, minor artifacting in all 10khz plus rear channel "ambience" effects noticable at medium to high volume.

Winamp-Same as general.

Wma: Lowest ambient noise out of three compressed formats.

General-Audio artifacting on trailing edge of cymbal hits present in right channel during guitar wah, high volume.

Playcenter-CMSS mode, minor artifacting in all 10khz plus rear channel "ambience" effects noticable at high volume.

Winamp-Same as general

Mp3: Highest ambient noise out of compressed formats.

General-Severe audio artifacting at medium to high volumes on cymbals and electric guitar distortion (not distortion as in bad quality, as in how electric guitars sound the way they do).

Playcenter-CMSS mode, artifacting same as .wma & .ogg, present at all volumes.

Winamp3- Same as playcenter.

===============

One thing I do have to say is that, unless that opening sequence in the .wav was meant to be noisy and gritty like it is, that's a very mediocre quality .wav/song.

Really, I guess it's a matter of taste between .ogg and .wma. .wma is slightly larger at comparative bitrates than .ogg, but artifacting isn't as noticable at medium volumes. I guess I will conceed that .ogg sounds about as good as .wma, but... wma is a much more supported file format, and with windows media audio codec v2 (8) decodes (and encodes faster) than Ogg Vorbis, a LOT faster.

I stick with .wma. Maybe I'll post some files that really show off .wma...like some 160kbps action. Although I don't really want to post up a multi-megabyte file for download on my website. Who knows.

===============

Vampyromaniac, do you have windows media audio codec v2 (8) installed? .wma is backwards compatible with wma codec v1 (7), which is vastly inferior to v2 (8).

Necrosis

The WAV file is the only file I am certain that is 48K.

I haven't encoded a file below 320kbps in almost two years. Currently I use 500K for my ogg files. The wav is made off a CD from 1994; I am unsure of the source equipment from which the CD was matered. So it could be an issue of analog equipment.

Vampyromaniac

I used WinAmp to play back all the files, v2.80.
If I use WiMP 6.4, the "codec in use" is indeed "Windows Media Audio v8."

One question though . . . why did you convert to .wav "to make sure that the compressed media decoders didn't affect sound quality?" Isn't that one of the issues we're discussing here? And how did you convert them to .wav, didn't you use a decoder?
Do you normally convert all your songs to .wav before you listen to them?

Oh, and what are all of these little 3, 4, 5-letter subject titles you put in your posts? (aer, ert, wert, stfdy, sdf, ...) Do they mean anything? Or are you just randomly hitting keys with your left hand?

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Vampyromaniac

Necro . . . Since you're such a fan of the high bitrates, you should check this out: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/
I haven't tried it yet, though. A bit higher than yours at I guess around 700-750K, try it out if you're up for it!

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crescent_hawk

How come I'm logged in as crescent_hawk? I'm reno...what the...

reno

ARGH! THIS FORUM DOESN'T WORK!

This is the third time I've tried to write a reply, and it always has an error of some sort!

Necrosis

I might try it this weekend. I've also am going to try FLAC as well.

Necrosis

For those of you that do not know what FLAC is.....

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. The FLAC project consists of:

• the stream format
• libFLAC, a library of reference encoders and decoders, and a metadata interface
• libFLAC++, an object wrapper around libFLAC
• flac, a command-line wrapper around libFLAC to encode and decode .flac files
• metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for .flac files
• input plugins for various music players (Winamp, XMMS, and more in the works)

"Free" means that the specification of the stream format is in the public domain (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any patent. It also means that the sources for libFLAC and libFLAC++ are available under the LGPL and the sources for flac, metaflac, and the plugins are available under the GPL. FLAC compiles on many platforms: most Unixes (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X), Windows, BeOS, and OS/2. There are build systems for autoconf/automake, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.

What FLAC is:

• FLAC is patent free. The FLAC format or encoding/decoding methods are not covered by any patents.

• FLAC is lossless. The encoding of PCM data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.

• FLAC is designed to compress audio data. Technically, flac can "compress" other kinds of data losslessly (if you pass it in as a mono 8-bit raw file), but the output files tend to be bigger.

• The compression capabilities of FLAC are extendable, meaning that new methods can be added to future versions of the format without breaking older streams or decoders.

• The currently implemented compression methods in the reference encoder yield streams smaller than shorten. The encoding time is variable, but is generally between that of shorten, and that of, say, LAME. The most aggressive compression however can be quite slow. For more info see the comparison page.

• FLAC is asymmetric in favor of decode speed. Decoding requires only integer arithmetic, and is much less compute-intensive than for most perceptual codecs. Real-time decode performance is easily achievable on even modest hardare.

• FLAC is suitable for archiving, since there is no information loss. You are not locked into the format since there is no generation loss if you decide to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, flac has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch.

• FLAC is suitable for streaming. Each FLAC frame contains enough data to decode that frame. FLAC does not even rely on previous or following frames. FLAC uses sync codes and CRCs (similar to MPEG and other formats), which, along with framing, allow decoders to pick up in the middle of a stream with a minimum of delay.

• FLAC supports fast sample-accurate seeking. Not only is this useful for playback, it makes FLAC files suitable for use in editing applications.

• FLAC has an extendable metadata system. New metadata blocks can be defined and implemented in future versions of FLAC without breaking older streams or decoders. Applications can write their own APPLICATION metadata once they register an ID. ID3 and ID3V2 tags may be attached to .flac files without disrupting the decoder.

Some things that follow from the features:

• FLAC streams can be played back consecutively with no audible gaps in between, unlike say, MP3s (this is one of the minor goals). For example, you can encode a live album as individual tracks and still play them back seamlessly.

• The sample-accurate seeking allows versatile playback: a sophisticated player could do index points, complex looping, or other structured playback. This could be useful in for say DJs, or practice sessions where you want to play along through specific passages.

• Basically, you get the versatility of a WAV file in a compressed streamable format.

What FLAC is not:

• Lossy. FLAC is intended for lossless compression only, as there are many good lossy formats already, such as MP3 (see LAME for an excellent open-source implementation), and Ogg Vorbis.

• SDMI compliant, et cetera. There is no intention to support any methods of copy protection, which are, for all practical purposes, a complete waste of bits. (Another way to look at it is that since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!) Of course, we can't stop what some misguided person does with proprietary meta-data blocks, but then again, non-proprietary decoders will skip them anyway.

To learn more click the link below.

FLAC

Zardon

we are working on issues, as we have been posting this in news forum, feedback section and we are doing our best to get everything running smoothly.

we do get a tremendous amount of hits, and amongst other things we are optimising code and altering some settings, I please ask for a little patience with this. thanks.

Necrosis

I would like to add bit of gloating here; all the music is in ogg format for this game.

Appears ogg is getting around.

Vampyromaniac

Heh, way to revive an old topic So how was the FLAC?

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reno

Damnation Neocrosis! You've made me convert! With the latest version of the Vorbis .dll I've re-encoded all of my music to 192kbps .ogg files. Slightly larger than comparative .wmas and encodes much slower, but damnit if my latest kmfdm cd doesn't sound awesome! It was blind chance that I thought "ah well, this CD (Xtort) has stuff that really pushes my sound system, why not encode this song in .ogg and .wma and compare?" Sure as shit, less artifacting in M3d mode.

Damnation! I look like a retard now And do you guys know how much it SUCKS re-ripping and re-encoding over 1800 songs? Argh...

Necrosis

Works great..nice having lossless ogg files. Thank god there is a gui version!

Necrosis

Good God...how many hours did you spend doing that? I haven't even ripped/converted all my files to ogg. You don't look like a retard; we sometimes like to stick to our guns. Nothing wrong with that. However, you gave ogg some real consideration and put it thorugh it's paces. I bought an Intel processor; we sometimes have to really look into something before judging it.

BTW, Nice rigg you have there.

UberLord

Oggy Oggy Oggy !
Oi Oi Oi!

Oggy!
Oi!

Oggy Oggy Oggy !
Oi Oi Oi!

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reno

Thanks Neocrosis (bout the rig)!

And yeah, shit, it's nasty...I've been ripping CDs to .Wav for most of my "non-vital"
music that doesn't need ID3 tags and then just mass encode at night (to the tune of a few hundred files a night). Then with my "vital music" (the NIN, KMFDM, Tool, Aesma Daeva, Alice in Chains, etc.) I sit...encode on the fly, have my neato id3 tags, and play fallout 1 while I encode....ahh the beauty of current day computers!

And UberLord...my God, you constantly surprise me with your spontanaety!