everything you ever wanted to know about audio formats but were afraid i'd tell you in a bar some night

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posted by tom / June 03, 2004 /

There's an interesting post over at Gizmodo quoting an explanation from an engineer working for Rio. In it, he explains why the iPod will likely not be releasing a software update to include support for Ogg in existing players -- at least not in the version 3, "classic" iPod (the mini might get an update). I won't bore you with the technical details -- you can follow the link if you'd like -- but the upshot is that Ogg support will have to wait for iPod v4 -- if it's ever implemented at all. (Incidentally, the v4 line is likely to be introduced in the next few months, will top out at 60GB, and will likely have an iPod mini-style click wheel. There are rumors of a color screen, but really, what would the point be?)

The news about Ogg is disappointing, but frankly I doubt the iPod will add Ogg support even after it becomes technically feasible. For those of you unfamiliar with Ogg, it's the best compressed audio format currently available. It's got a lot of things going for it: in double-blind tests it narrowly beats out Apple's AAC for sound quality. It beats MP3 badly, even at bitrates that produce smaller filesizes. Perhaps its coolest feature is this: you can strip Ogg files down to lower bitrates without recompressing them. This means that if you've got a hard drive full of high quality Ogg audio, you no longer have to waste your portable player's memory on audio fidelity that you won't be able to hear anyway through lousy headphones and background noise. Instead you can just throw away that hifi data. If you tried that with an MP3 you'd have to decompress the file, then recompress it. Not only does that take much more time, but recompressing lossy formats produces muddy vocals, cymbals that sound like they were played underwater, and frequently some truly bizarre warbling.

I should note note that Ogg probably won't be my final choice when it comes to audio codecs. That title will likely go to FLAC -- a completely lossless codec. Given a set of FLAC files, you can recreate a bit-for-bit perfect copy of a CD, while still getting a 50% compression rate. Unfortunately, that's about five times larger than Ogg or its competitors -- so FLAC is impractical for portable players. But you could always turn a FLAC into an Ogg or MP3 and use that copy.

But the technical merits of these formats aren't their most important features. Ultimately what really counts is that both FLAC and Ogg Vorbis are patent- and royalty-free. Even MP3, the vanilla ice cream of compressed audio, can't claim that -- for every piece of MP3-capable hardware or commercially distributed MP3 you download, a German firm named Fraunhofer makes between a few cents and a dollar. Ogg, FLAC and other open source codecs are and will remain free. This isn't a big deal just because you and I don't want to pay an extra nickel an album for our compressed format of choice. It's a big deal because open source formats are designed by consumers to support features they want and exclude those they don't -- and that means that Ogg and FLAC don't support Digital Rights Management.

DRM is how the media companies intend to protect their property: by restricting how you use it. DRM might prevent you from burning more than one copy of an album; it might stop you from ripping a CD you own to a compressed audio format; or, someday, it might charge you a premium to load an album onto a portable player made by a company with whom the record company doesn't have a business partnership. It's a feature no one asked for that inconveniences the consumer, and that's bad news. Even worse, this technology isn't just an inconvenience -- you'll be paying for it to be included in your computers, discmen, iPods and DVD players.

Of course, ingenious geeks continue to develop countermeasures to current DRM schemes -- DeCSS and PlayFair being the most famous examples -- but the sponsors of the DMCA and similar legislative initiatives are doing their best to put an end to that, and as integrated DRM-enabled hardware platforms are rolled out you likely won't be able to circumvent their protection systems without a soldering iron -- and even if you know how to use one, you'll be breaking the law by doing so.

This is part of a larger effort by corporations in the Information Age to put an end to private ownership in favor of licensing schemes: you won't own music, or even the player you play it on. You'll just use them with the permission of our corporate overlords, who are free to revoke or demand additional payment for that permission as they see fit. It's digital feudalism.

But we're getting off topic. The point is that Ogg is free. That means nobody's going to make money off of it, which means no business is going to push for it. So it's up to consumers. If you have the chance, use your wallet to vote for Ogg. I know it'd make a tidy excuse for me to rush out and buy myself a 4th-generation iPod.