I’m new to working with ‘ogg’. I’m trying to get away from Flash and render audio for my projects for html5.
The default settings (VBR) seem to create good sound quality but -very- large file sizes. For example, an MP3 of one song I had was 5mb with Fraunhoefer 320k, but with the standard ogg is 11mb.
Do you have any suggestions (documents?) on settings for ogg rendering that give smaller sizes while retaining decent quality?
Sorry for the broad question, but it took me a long while to get predictable results with MP3 and ogg seems a bit different.
As with all ‘lossy’ encoding schemes…the ear is with the beholder…
My 2c - systematically experiment with greater file reduction while carefully analysing /listening to the end results. One empirical study may not be worth referencing…
Taken from Vorbis.com
What does the “Quality” setting mean?
Vorbis’ audio quality is not best measured in kilobits per second, but on a scale from -1 to 10 called “quality”. This change in terminology was brought about by a tuning of the variable-bitrate algorithm that produces better sound quality for a given average bitrate, but which does not adhere as strictly to that average as a target.
This new scale of measurement is not tied to a quantifiable characteristic of the stream, like bitrate, so it’s a fairly subjective metric, but provides a more stable basis of comparison to other codecs and is relatively future-proof. As Segher Boessenkool explained, “if you upgrade to a new vorbis encoder, and you keep the same quality setting, you will get smaller files which sound the same. If you keep the same nominal bitrate, you get about the same size files, which sound somewhat better.” The former behavior is the aim of the quality metric, so encoding to a target bitrate is now officially deprecated for all uses except streaming over bandwidth-critical connections.
For now, quality 0 is roughly equivalent to 64kbps average, 5 is roughly 160kbps, and 10 gives about 400kbps. Most people seeking very-near-CD-quality audio encode at a quality of 5 or, for lossless stereo coupling, 6. The default setting is quality 3, which at approximately 110kbps gives a smaller filesize and significantly better fidelity than .mp3 compression at 128kbps.
As always, if you need CD-quality sound, neither Vorbis nor MP3 (nor any other lossy audio codec) can provide exact reproduction; instead, consider using a lossless audio compression scheme like FLAC.
Thanks. I read their docs. I was hoping that PG… or some other very large brain could provide some sort of confirmation/alternate insight. I can’t hear the difference between a 320k mp3 and the 'default ogg generated by WL. And yet the ogg is MUCH larger. Was hoping for similar results (size/quality).
Of course, I posted this so long ago without reply, I kinda forgot about it.
More to the point, the WaveLab ogg file is much larger than that produced by any other ogg encoder, when, as far as I can tell, the quality settings are the same. (For an effectively equivalent level of quality, ogg should typically come out somewhat smaller than mp3.)
