Monday, October 7, 2002		Feature

MP3 evolves to Ogg Vorbis
Vipul Mahajan

MP3 has revolutionised digital music. It offers near CD quality at a small size. But very few know about its real purpose. MP3 was actually developed by Farunhoffer as a larger digital video and audio broadcasting program and was never intended to be used for everyday music. Nobody could ever have imagined the magnitude of its success.

An MP3 encoder uses a format called lossy format. In lossy format a sound file is checked for sounds that are unperceived by human ear. The encoder removes these sounds. That gives a compressed MP3 file with a near CD quality. But here the same old algorithms of MP3 compression are used and here is where open source comes up with Ogg Vorbis a complete alternative to MP3. It came up with a program that uses superior acoustic models to enhance the quality of compression that results in the same quality with less size.

Still in the developing stage, its first version has been released and can be downloaded from www.vorbis.com. The program is easy to use with simple drag and drop interface. To make things easy read it. Currently many encoders compress a wave file to 128 KBPS. This is thought to be of near CD quality but actually it is not. Actual CD quality is compressed at 192 KBPS nearly. This means sacrifice of space and here ogg vorbis comes handy. What it does is that it compresses the music with its new enhanced algorithms and produces a much better quality at 128 KBPS with less space and at 25 per cent reduction. Also it has support for multi-channels. So you can get enhanced surround sound if you have a multi-channel soundcard. A typical soundcard has two channels popularly known as stereo).

Its interface is simple drag and drop and instead of complex bit rates and frequency value sliders, present in most MP3 compression programs, it has a quality slider simply. You can adjust any quality setting (4 is OK at 128 KBPS). To compress any file in Ogg format just drag and drop it on the main window and the compression starts. Above all, this program is free. All you need is a CD ripper that rips files from an audio CD and compresses them by vorbis.

One may now ask what a CD ripper is. Vorbis does not rip off the audio files from the CD. Instead they have to be present on the hard drive as wave files to be compressed. This is not a big problem and what one can do is download any CD ripper. There are many free CD rippers available on the Net and one can rip as many files as he needs and then just convert them to .ogg files. Even for MP3 compression first the files are to be ripped and then compressed.

Ogg Vorbis is an easy-to-use free program with no limits to the number of files to be compressed and can be downloaded from www.vorbis.com. A really cool thing is that Winamp’s new version 2.80 has full support for playback of vorbis files. Many new MP3 playback programs are having full support for vorbis. ID3 tags and bit rate scaling are also supported. That makes it easy to e-mail MP3 to friend. A quality setting of 4 (128 KBPS) is recommended for good quality and of course the size will still be less 4.60 MB. One can also convert his MP3 to vorbis file. This reduces some space but quality is not enhanced. See www.freshmeat.net for more details in this case

Currently many software are available that fully support Ogg Vorbis like Winamp for Windows freeamp for Linux. Many hardware devices are also coming in near future that will have support for Ogg Vorbis files. Ogg Vorbis CDs with 150-175 songs will become a normal thing in near future.

As Ogg Vorbis is an open source project, its free and can be downloaded easily. Its size is 200 KB and has full GUI and drag and drop support. It can run on many platforms like Win95/98/2k/Me/XP/NT and Linux. Users can also download Ogg Drop XP (recommended) that has all features given above. It can do both encoding and decoding. Developers can also try their hand in developing this software. So enjoy the world beyond MP3.