Talk:Vorbis

The Power of Thy Sword

The spectrum analysis of several copies of the song The Power of Thy Sword shows Vorbis and other lossy audio codecs discarding masked frequencies above ~18khz.

This spectrogram is not a good illustration of lossy compression. Another editor removed it previously. I have removed it again. The spectrograms show that Vorbis removes extreme high frequencies. It does so to avoid allocating any bits to reproducing sounds that most people are unable to hear. I beleive this is across-the-board filtering is only done with specific encode settings. Auditory masking is altogether a different process. --Kvng (talk) 17:54, 16 May 2011 (UTC) Insert non-formatted text here

Vorbis Licensing

The other implementations section in the Vorbis page describes that the reference implementation of Vorbis is dual-licensed under the BSD license and the GNU Lesser Public License. I skimmed the FAQ section at the official website of Vorbis and found that most of Ogg Vorbis utility software is release under the GNU General Public license and the libraries and the SDKs are released under a BSD like license.

I presume there is a need to make appropriate changes to "other implementations" section. I am not really sure how to re-phrase the section to comply with the real present situation, it did be nice if anyone well-informed about it can resolve this. Thank you.

R.Siddharth (talk) 17:17, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Biased language?

"Though Vorbis is technically superior, mp3 has a far higher public profile"

This sounds kind of biased... I don't know a lot of the technical details of the comparison of ogg and mp3, so I don't know how accurate this is. However, it sounds like a fan of this file format just put that there to promote it, I think specifying exactly how ogg is superior (if it even is) would be much better than just flat-out saying what amounts to "ogg is better" SarrCat ∑;3 21:57, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

It does sound biased, but I would say that Vorbis actually does fix the vast majority of [Design limitations] that made it inefficient to encode maximum fidelity in MP3, it has native gapless support, additional tools to mask artifacts at lower bitrates, and scores as well or better than the best MP3 encoder at equivalent bitrates in all codec listening tests that I'm aware of, plus it has a coherent single tagging standard, rather the fragmented variety of standards adopted in MP3. All these were among the design aims (in addition to avoiding known patents), and I think there's ample evidence they were achieved, which is not surprising, given the passage of time since MP3 was defined.

A similar situation, however, is also true for good AAC encoders (but not poor ones, which are worse than Vorbis) and the technical superiority of the AAC format itself.

However, it's also true that Vorbis has been surpassed in the lower bitrate ranges, and is now repeatedly beaten by at least a modest statistically significant margin by iTunes/Quicktime AAC encoder and the IETF's Opus in stereo music listening tests at 64 kbps and 96 kbps. At high bitrates from, say 160kbps up, statistical differences are very hard to determine as they approach transparency for most listeners and most samples when the best MP3, Vorbis, AAC, Opus etc encoders are compared.

Like Opus, Vorbis has the advantage of having no poor quality encoders widely used. MP3 and AAC both have relatively poor encoders in fairly widespread use.

Perhaps we can summarise the pros and cons versus a number of formats. Dynamicimanyd (talk) 12:42, 23 March 2015 (UTC)