Music for Nothing, and Your Codecs for Free?
Seems like everybody and their cousins are producing audio codecs these days--hardly surprising with the control of Internet music delivery up for grabs. RealNetworks, Liquid Audio, Microsoft, and others have been fighting a possibly futile battle with a surprisingly hardy opponent--J.Q. Public--for this lucrative market. Enterprising end-users got the ball rolling with MP3, and that format continues to dominate the Web music waves. Unfortunately for record companies, MP3 wasn't designed with securing music industry profits in mind -- there are no encryption keys, and no copy protection of any kind.
But the ubiquitous MP3, despite the freedom-of-speech hoopla and media fury surrounding it, isn't free. The Fraunhofer Institute, which basically developed the format, holds several patents for MP3. And in 1998, the company delivered a cease-or-pay-royalties notice to the purveyors of programs that utilized the ISO (International Standards Organization) demonstration source code for MP3 encoding. Those programs disappeared from view almost immediately. Players like MusicMatch that offer Fraunhofer's MP3 encoding technology must pay for the privilege.
This might seem like a tempest in a teapot to most users, since it's not the users who pay -- not yet, anyway. Though it might ultimately prove unenforceable, given the vast reaches of the Internet, it appears that Fraunhofer will exert whatever pressure it can to retain control over the MP3 format. Eventually, some of the costs to hardware MP3 player manufacturers and online music distributors could get passed on to end-users. Royalty-free encoding that can be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime is a much better solution for end-users in the long run. Well relax, such a beast exists, and it goes by the unlikely name of Ogg Vorbis.
Ogg!
Vorbis is the audio codec for the open source Ogg project, which is dedicated to creating royalty-free streaming media codecs. Ogg Vorbis is being developed by iCAST, the same folks that offer the icecast free streaming media server. Ogg Vorbis can convert MP3 files, as well as .wav files, to Ogg format. (In case you were wondering, Ogg is a term from the NetTrek online game that describes the dispatching of opponents via suicide runs. Vorbis is an evil character in a Terry Pratchett novel.)
At the moment, Ogg Vorbis is in pre-beta stage and exists only as a command-line tool for Windows, Linux, and BeOS, plus playback plug-ins for the WinAmp, Sonique, and XMMS MP3 players. However, support for all popular operating systems and players is in the works, and GUI front ends are only a matter of time.
If you're not quite ready to step over to a completely different format, freeware MP3 encoders are available, including LAME and BladeEnc. The self-encapsulating acronym LAME stands for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder. Alas, even if it ain't, it still produces MP3 files--the legality of which is questionable. LAME is only distributed as source code, but many programs make use of it. Information and links to programs that use LAME are available at www.sulaco.org/mp3. The latest version of LAME compression produces excellent results, which we'll get into later.
BladeEnc is very similar to LAME -- and rides in the same questionable legal boat. It's now distributed only as source code, and you may find information about it and software that utilizes it at .
Put to the Test
How good do Ogg Vorbis, LAME, and Blade files sound? To find out, I ripped the Fixx's "Saved by Zero" from CD, encoded the resulting 35MB .wav file to high-quality 128Kbps files (Ogg Vorbis's current limit) with the three encoders, and then compared the results to the original .wav file and a 128Kbps file generated by the Fraunhofer FastEnc codec included in MusicMatch. I was impressed with the results from all the encoders. I heard little variation with my admittedly aging ears, though the Fraunhofer FastEnc seemed just a touch deficient in the high-frequency ranges. I'm sure most users would probably have a difficult time telling the files apart.
Speed-wise, the Fraunhofer FastEnc engine ruled supreme on my Athlon 650-MHz test machine, encoding the entire song in only 17 seconds. LAME was next at 31 seconds, followed by Blaze at a leisurely 2 minutes, 8 seconds, with Ogg Vorbis trailing the pack at 2 minutes, 32 seconds. Ogg Vorbis is still awaiting optimization, so its performance should improve drastically in the future. All the encoders produced a file about 3.5MB in size--varying by less than 1 percent.
Most end-users will be quite satisfied with the MP3 encoders that are, at least for now, available free of charge. But Ogg Vorbis is free of any sort of patent or royalty issues, will likely be supported by all the major players, and sounds every bit as good, if not better than, MP3. However, to assuage my conscience I have to warn that it's no more legal to distribute copyrighted material in Ogg format than in MP3. Morals aside, it will be interesting to see what impact Ogg Vorbis has on an MP3 world. My guess? Have you ever seen a bar sit empty when they're advertising free beer?