.ogg audio compression

[Phantom Noodler]

I'm having trouble with choosing what bitrate to compress my music cd's to. The one thing that i must have is the exact same quality on the .ogg's as i would have on the cd's themselves. I thought the lowest compression (500kbps) would be the way to go, but I cannot tell the difference between a 192kbps .ogg and a 500kbps.ogg.

Why is this? Which bit rate is better? Should I just stick to 320kbps .mp3's instead?

[Telexen]

It's compressed music, you'll never have the same quality in a compressed file as you do a CD

There is a sound difference, your speakers/sound setup just may not be able to show it. I you don't really care since you can't hear the difference then you should probably just go with whatever makes the smallest file.

Personally I haven't and never will waste my time with OGG

[JohnE.]

The only audio compression scheme that'll get you perfect CD sound is lossless, such as Monkeys Audio, Shorten, FLAC, etc. Lossless files are smaller than the original wavs but still considerably larger than either ogg or mp3 and thus not well suited for archiving mass albums to cd-r.

In the Usenet mp3/ogg trading groups the preferred acceptable standard for either is 192 kbps, Variable Bitrate. This provides a good balance between sound quality and file size. There was some misinformation floating around a few years ago that 320 CBR was the best but that has been since debunked. VBR is the way to go, at either 192 or 256. Anything higher than that is a waste of disk space, imo.

JohnE.

[ben-the-slacker]

I tried ogg compression once. File turned out larger than mp3. Guess I'll be staying with mp3.

[Telexen]

I rip my music at 256kbps VBR...file sizes aren't huge and it sounds great.