Vorbis - Sep 2001 - I hate myself for asking this, but...

I'm going to encode ~2000 CDs soon. All genres, but 90% of it has distorted 
guitars... Everything from punkrock to metal to industrial to goth to 
synthpop to classical to techno to whatever...

I've heard that RC2 has some hearable artifacts, even in 192/256 kbps... 
There have been quite a few "bugreports" since RC2 with people sending
samples that even I can differ from the original wavs. That makes me doubt if 
it is worth doing it now. Also I don't want to wait too long. Is RC3
anywhere
near a release? Is there a cvs-snapshot (I know that the current cvs is 
unusable) that has all known bugs fixed in the high (192/256) bitrates that I 
can use instead?

I usually don't bitch about releases, I promote the "it's done when
it's
done" and "contribute or shut up" attitudes more than most
people, but I
REALLY want to start the mass-encoding as soon as possible, because it will 
take quite a long time...  If I had the diskspace I would save them as FLAC, 
together with a description-file and encode them later, but I "only"
have
~150GB of diskspace, which is nowhere near enough for that...

Regards
Per Wigren

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At 14:45 4/09/2001 +0200, you wrote:
>I've heard that RC2 has some hearable artifacts, even in 192/256 kbps...
>There have been quite a few "bugreports" since RC2 with people
sending
>samples that even I can differ from the original wavs. That makes me doubt
if 
>it is worth doing it now. Also I don't want to wait too long. Is RC3
anywhere 
>near a release? 
Hard to tell...Monty has fixes for some of the most audible
issues but those fixes need fixes too :)

Latest update:

<xiphmont> Garf: dunno, honestly.  "Working hard till it's
done"

So I guess that doesn't make you any wiser :)
>Is there a cvs-snapshot (I know that the current cvs is 
>unusable) that has all known bugs fixed in the high (192/256) bitrates
that I 
>can use instead?
I'm afraid not...beta4 wasn't all that bad but it's missing
a lot of the new features.

Whether rc2 is better than beta4 has been subject of a lot of
debate.
>I usually don't bitch about releases, I promote the "it's done
when it's
>done" and "contribute or shut up" attitudes more than most
people, but I
>REALLY want to start the mass-encoding as soon as possible, because it will 
>take quite a long time...  If I had the diskspace I would save them as FLAC,
>together with a description-file and encode them later, but I
"only" have
>~150GB of diskspace, which is nowhere near enough for that...
:) Same situation here.

I've started with encoding part of the albums with Monkey's Audio 
(yeah, I know it's non-free but it's a great program nonetheless) and 
the 'less-important' parts got encoded with my own tweaked rc2 version.

ftp://sjeng.sourceforge.net/pub/sjeng/vorbis/tuned/

(oggdrop should be obvious, for oggenc use oggenc -b 999, no
guarantees except that it sounds pretty ok to me, unofficial,
don't complain on this list if it sucks, etc...)

I've verified that it didn't goof up on anything I encoded by 
listening to all encoded albums. In your situation that's 
pretty much impossible though I guess :(

You might also want to try standard rc2 with 256kbps or higher.
Although there are a few samples it will break on, they _are_ 
exceptions and it'll do fine with most music.

If you want certainty, you'll have to do like the rest of us:

Wait


-- 
GCP

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Hello Per,

Tuesday, 04 September, 2001, 14:45:40, you wrote:

PW> I'm going to encode ~2000 CDs soon. All genres, but 90% of it has
distorted
PW> guitars... Everything from punkrock to metal to industrial to goth to 
PW> synthpop to classical to techno to whatever...
PW> I've heard that RC2 has some hearable artifacts, even in 192/256
kbps...
PW> There have been quite a few "bugreports" since RC2 with people
sending
PW> samples that even I can differ from the original wavs. That makes me
doubt if
PW> it is worth doing it now. Also I don't want to wait too long.

I think that RC2 will do just fine at 256kbps. The only major issue at
this bitrate is pre-echo, but you will hear pre-echo very rarely IMO
(especially if you don't have some artifact-listening experience!).
IMO, RC2 is higher quality then beta4 at 256kbps - there are no bass
tunning bugs and some subtle high-frequency bugs are also gone.
I have started using RC2 for archiving at 256kbps since RC2 fixed most
problems with some of my test clips.
Even if you do come across some artifact, it won't be something that
will "jump in your face".
The trouble with lossy compression is that you can NEVER be certain
that there will be no artifact (bitrate independent). Lossless
compression is the only way to be sure everything will be OK.

PW> Is RC3 anywhere
PW> near a release? Is there a cvs-snapshot (I know that the current cvs is 
PW> unusable) that has all known bugs fixed in the high (192/256) bitrates
that I
PW> can use instead?

No one knows when RC3 will be ready, not even Monty (the boss). Also I
think most of time for RC3 will still be spent on improving lower bitrates
because that's what most people use, so there are no guaranties RC3
will fix every known test case.

So if you are planning to use 256kbps mode then I really don't see
much point in waiting. If you want to use lower bitrates, then I would
suggest you wait for RC3...


-- 
Vorbis Xtreme | http://solair.eunet.yu/~aldov/
Ogg Vorbis is the free, open source alternative to MP3

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On Wednesday 05 September 2001 00:45, you wrote:
>  I'm going to encode ~2000 CDs soon. All genres, but 90% of it has
> distorted guitars... Everything from punkrock to metal to industrial to
> goth to synthpop to classical to techno to whatever...
>
>  I've heard that RC2 has some hearable artifacts, even in 192/256
kbps...
>  There have been quite a few "bugreports" since RC2 with people
sending
>  samples that even I can differ from the original wavs. That makes me doubt
> if it is worth doing it now. Also I don't want to wait too long. Is RC3
> anywhere near a release? Is there a cvs-snapshot (I know that the current
> cvs is unusable) that has all known bugs fixed in the high (192/256)
> bitrates that I can use instead?
I figure the re-encoding problem is going to come up again and again for me, 
so I've hacked together a python script to handle the whole rip/encode/tag 
process that records the disc_id used for freedb lookups. The idea is that 
later on when I want to reencode RC2 oggs to RC3/1.0, I'll build a 
disc_id/track - > file map so the software can copy across the metadata and 
replace the file automatically. All I'll need is a trained monkey to cycle 
the CDs through the drive :-)

I have the script here if you want it. It's hackerware at the moment, but it
might be useful to you.

John

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