Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

frabjous · 2010-08-03 05:31:34

I had a modest (~15 GB) collection of music and other audio files on my machine, mostly in MP3 format (a few others here and there). I'm thinking of converting the whole thing over to ogg/vorbis. The advantages:

Probably a smaller total size
Open source format with relatively little fear of licensing changes down the road

But I'm nervous too; I worry about the longterm viability of the format, and also worry that I'll be making it more difficult to use my files with various devices. (I don't even have a cell phone at the moment, but may get one soon, and may want to carry music on it.) I don't want to bother converting if I'm just going to have to convert back, or save both formats.

Any thoughts?

karol · 2010-08-03 06:02:35

- Probably a smaller total size
IMHO not worth it.

- Open source format with relatively little fear of licensing changes down the road
IANAL but mp3 patents end in a couple of years. I'm in Europe BTW so there are no such patents here IIRC.

A lossy format of any kind is not really future-proof, but of course you can convert to another format that will come in a decade or so - but with a loss of quality.

d3adfool · 2010-08-03 06:54:49

lossy -> lossy is dumb if you have the wav or a flac then it would be ok.

bones · 2010-08-03 07:00:03

With regards to worrying about having to convert back to mp3 to play on other devices I have never come across that problem. All my music is in ogg and it plays fine on all the mp3 players, phones and cd players that I've tried. Not to say that some out there won't work it's just I've never come across any (fingers crossed).

ngoonee · 2010-08-03 07:20:40

You won't really save file size, you WILL lose quality (but just one conversion will probably not be noticeable depending what sort of training you have.

I'd just leave them as they are. You can always convert later on if it becomes necessary.

eDio · 2010-08-03 10:17:19

You probably will get noticeable quality loss, as voribs and mpeg use different psycoacoustic models.
Anyway, lossy>lossy is a very bad idea, as was said before.

cngn · 2010-08-03 10:26:57

you do not touch lossy stuff, it's like scratching your car

keep your music in flac all the time, it is open source, with flac you can do ogg compression today and xyz 20 years later

Last edited by cngn (2010-08-03 10:32:08)

frabjous · 2010-08-03 15:13:55

Thanks for the input everyone. I have done quite a few such conversions and have never noticed much of a quality loss, but I'm not a hyper audio-phile or "well trained" as you say.

Unfortunately I do not have any files in flac or wav. Many of the files come from ripping CDs and I do still have them, however. I can't imagine re-ripping all of them however, unless it were really necessary.

drcouzelis · 2010-08-03 16:18:17

I did something related to your question with my ~8 GB music collection.

I used gNewSense GNU/Linux for most of a year, and only used free and open source and patent un-encumbered software. I had all of my music in the Ogg Vorbis file format. I would either rip them to Ogg from the CD, download the Ogg version, or convert them from FLAC or MP3. I have an iPod, but I installed RockBox on it (free and open source ), so that played my collection just fine.

ngoonee wrote:

I'd just leave them as they are. You can always convert later on if it becomes necessary.

This is the best advice I've heard. The reasons I can see to convert your music collection to another format are for ideological reasons or if the software you use to play them is not going to be made anymore.

WARNING: Audiophiles stop reading here!

By the way, the end of the story is, not too long ago I converted my entire collection of Ogg files back to MP3 files. I started replacing them (re-ripping, re-downloading...) one by one with the original MP3 files, but I couldn't hear the difference so I stopped.

stqn · 2010-08-03 16:52:16

If you need to free space on your hard drive, you could for exemple transcode your >=192 kbps mp3 files to vorbis q3 or less with probably no loss of audible quality. I used to do that (320 kbps mp3! What a waste of disk space...)

In fact in my experience some (pop) music can be encoded in Vorbis 32 kbps with no audible difference to the original CD. This could give you quite a few GB of disk space back. It's also nice to be able to put 4 times more music on your ogg portable player .

However, if you still have plenty of disk space, don't bother. Everything that can play ogg also plays mp3, while the opposite is not true.

Runiq · 2010-08-03 17:18:53

I do this.

Themaister · 2010-08-03 19:12:36

Pointless.

Going from lossy to lossy will only lead to loss in audio quality.
Going from lossless to lossy will only lead to loss in audio quality. Disk space is cheap anyways.

frabjous · 2010-08-04 03:43:43

I guess I'll probably just leave things as is. I suppose my reason for wanting to change was at least in part ideological, but that's one of those heroic stands that will affect no one but me. To be honest, I don't really use my collection that much (I mainly listen to internet radio these days…) but I do want to make sure I have long term access to these files if I really feel like listening to some of them.

R00KIE · 2010-08-04 10:50:16

If you still have the original media and you can spare the disk space then it is not a bad idea to rip it all over again to a _lossless_ format. Maybe you can do it as you want to listen to it.

The reasons are that the media gets old, granted that originals do take a long time to degrade but they do, if you have some protected CDs then it is better to rip them now while you still have a drive that can actually rip them, drives break and you cannot be sure you will find another drive that can rip those CDs.

I guess CD readers are going to stay around for a long time but how long no one knows, this is a moot point I guess, no one uses floppy drives anymore and you can still buy the drives and media. Another thing that matters less and less is the time it will take you to transcode from lossless to whatever format you need/want to use at the time, computers are only getting faster.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-03 05:31:34

Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#2 2010-08-03 06:02:35

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#3 2010-08-03 06:54:49

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#4 2010-08-03 07:00:03

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#5 2010-08-03 07:20:40

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#6 2010-08-03 10:17:19

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#7 2010-08-03 10:26:57

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#8 2010-08-03 15:13:55

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#9 2010-08-03 16:18:17

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#10 2010-08-03 16:52:16

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#11 2010-08-03 17:18:53

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#12 2010-08-03 19:12:36

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#13 2010-08-04 03:43:43

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

#14 2010-08-04 10:50:16

Re: Should I convert to ogg/vorbis?

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