Burning Ogg Vorbis tracks to audio CD

I would decode them to WAV files with Foobar's converter and burn them with EAC. Both are, of course, free.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Spikey

But in addition, it's also always better to use Nero to burn audio CD's directly from the OGG files, rather than converting a lossy format like OGG back to WAV and then burning (converting from lossy formats loses audio quality put simply).

I don't believe that's really true (as the others have said), though if you have something concrete that confirms it, I'd like to read it. Whether it's Nero converting the Ogg file or Foobar, the file has to be converted to a CDDA-friendly format, such as a PCM WAV file before it can be burned to an audio CD.

A similar process occurs when you play the Ogg via your favorite software player--it decodes the Ogg file to PCM data which is sent to your soundcard. That's what makes me think that you may be misinformed. Now, certainly, re-encoding a WAV file that was decoded from an Ogg file would result in a loss of quality, but it's the re-encoding part that does that, not the decoding.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

It's not that Nero has super fast algorithms or anything. Since MP3 isn't actually a free standard (like Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC, etc.), Ahead most likely licensed the Fraunhofer decompression algorithm for use in Nero. The reason you don't see a difference is that Ahead assumes your computer doesn't suck, so it just does the decompression in the background at the same time as it's writing to the CD. It's always going to take longer to write data to a CD than to decompress the data from a compressed format--such is the nature of the CD-R media. So there's no real difference in the time it takes to complete the write process.

For the most part, the various codecs for audio and video out there today are designed for optimum decompression efficiency (in terms of consumption of processor cycles) so that you can fast forward, rewind, or jump straight to a certain time with as little delay as possible.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Spikey

Yeah, I got that in theory, but why wouldn't converting from one format to another, regardless of lossy->lossless or vice versa make a difference? Surely it's bad quality-wise either way.

I think I get it though, Niki. Gotta bust these myths in my head sometime. Thanks as always.

- Spike

To answer that, you need an understanding of how lossy codecs work. Put very simply, when you encode a WAV file to MP3, the way it becomes smaller is by removing parts at the very high and very low ends of the frequency range. We're talking stuff that dogs and bats and such can hear, but we can't. Humans, relatively speaking, have very limited hearing capacity, so there's a lot of audio data in any recording that is completely extraneous for the average person. MP3 encoders cut out some of that, and pack the remaining audible stuff into tidy digital containers, reducing the filesize dramatically.

That's how lossy encoding works, so surely you can see that if you encode something that's already been encoded, the only thing that could be chopped out is data that DIDN'T get chopped out the first time--meaning it's probably audible. Hence the quality loss due to re-encoding.

On the other hand, decoding a lossy-compressed file results in no additional quality loss. PCM WAV files consist of nothing but raw, uncompressed audio data, that digitally represents an analog waveform. You can't have any of the tidy digital containers I mentioned before with WAV, so you have to toss them and expand the MP3 out to get it to conform with the PCM standard. That's all that decoding does. It may help you to grasp the concept if you think of decoding not as converting to another format but as expanding what's already there.

As for lossless codecs, the encoding process doesn't actually remove any of the audio data, it just compresses it. Think of zip files, for example. FLAC, Monkey's Audio, etc. use a more complicated compression method than the zip method, but it's the same concept--zip is a lossless compression algorithm. You can zip and unzip stuff without losing any of the data in the files, right? Same deal with lossless.

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Originally Posted by Spikey

I mean, it sounds like you're almost saying decoding a MP3 to WAV improves the quality.

I honestly don't see how you could have gotten that out of what I said, particularly after the explanation of how lossy codecs work.

It sounds like you've got the idea though.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Yeah, just sheer ubiquity is what's keeping MP3 around. Musepack is currently my favorite, but support for it is pretty sparse. Ogg is growing on me, due in no small part to the overwhelming Linux support it has. A lot of portables, my own included, play Ogg out of the box now too.

I'd like to see something open like Ogg or Musepack overtake MP3, but I don't really see it happening.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by jaraph

Wow, thanks for all the advice, guys.

Personally, I chose to go with Ogg because it was the only open format my portable would play out of the box.

You mean thanks for completely derailing your topic?

Yeah, that's usually the case. My portable also has FLAC support, but I really don't need lossless when I'm using a $50 pair of headphones. There's Rockbox firmware for Cowon's X5 players now, which would add Musepack support and a slew of other nifty things, but I don't have $250 for an X5 right now.

FELIPE NO

Well, when I started using Musepack more on my FTP server, people kind of freaked out. Change is scary and I think that even here, audiophiles are still in the minority. And even the ones we do have would probably get laughed at by the really crazy ones. OggDrop is a perfectly good little program (and the command-line oggenc is really great--it has built in wildcard support which mppenc lacks), but if you've never heard of it, you can't know that.

And yeah, listen tests still indicate that Musepack provides better sound at higher bitrates than both MP3 and Ogg. But at higher bitrates, the difference is negligible to the point where it doesn't matter for a large majority of listeners.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Rimo

I've already stated my reasons (MP3 is not "perfect", but it still has very good quality and is the most practical format so far), so I won't continue to make my fingers go around it, but what I'd like to hear about is how you would compare OGG vs. MPC, since MPC is superior from what I know and I don't see why you would favor OGG over it.

I'm in the Musepack camp, but I think part of the reason that Musepack isn't plowing past Ogg is just that there's too damn many different formats out there. Musepack may be technically superior to Ogg, but I believe Ogg has been around longer. On top of that, to be able to tell the difference, you'd have to have some really serious equipment and something bordering bat hearing. As far as I'm concerned though, the two are interchangeable right now--I wouldn't be any more likely to turn down a q 6.0 Ogg file than I would be to turn down a Standard Musepack file. To be perfectly honest, the two sound the same to me, and my playback equipment is quite good.

Jaraph, you're a member of the vast majority of people who use a digital audio format. The majority rules, as it usually does, and so MP3 is still alive and kicking. I'm pretty much okay with Lame VBR MP3s though, so I'm not really complaining.

This is sort of veering away from what I've been saying so far, but another benefit over MP3s aside from psychoacoustics and filesize for both Ogg and Musepack is the fact that they don't use the ID3v2 metadata standard, which is starting to show its age. I may be more obsessive-compulsive than some of you, but metadata is pretty important to me, and ID3v2 takes friggin' forever to apply compared to APEv2.

I'm rambling, though, so that's it for me for now.

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I believe the listening test in question is this one.

There's also a newer one over at soundexpert.info, but the way they rated that one seems strange to me. They did it on a point scale where anything over 5 points is, beyond all reasonable doubt, transparent. You would think that going any higher than 5 points would serve no purpose as far as recommending one codec over another goes. I don't know where those higher numbers are even coming from really, but the way they explained it doesn't account for anything over 5.

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