Recommended Ogg Vorbis

History

(For a highly detailed description of Vorbis historic, check out OggZealot's Ogg Vorbis Historic where Monty also adds a few more details too). Ogg Vorbis reached version 1.0 in July of 2002. It is the official Xiph.org encoder (the one you get from vorbis.com). Our member here, Garf, did his own tunings, based on version 1.0 to produce GT3b1 and GT3b2. Both show improved pre-echo handling for q values of 5 to 10. It was judged that GT3b1 was the better of the two. There was a minor bugfix update earlier this year in March which only appeared on the CVS at Xiph.org. They consisted of very minor bug fixes which do more to correct odd problems that may occur rather than improving quality. This was referred to as Post 1.0 CVS. Quality problems that mainly affected low bitrates were addressed in a new bugfix (1.0.1) that was released.

Post 1.0.1 CVS was released late December 2003 by Monty at Xiph, and includes true CBR. In order to simplify the situation where we had two encoders (1.0.1 and GT3b1), John33 merged the sources to give us GT3b2. From the Vorbis listening test and the recent 128 kbps multiformat test, Aoyumi's aoTuV Vorbis tuning was determined to be the best Vorbis encoder. After the success of aoTuV beta 2 in the listening test, Xiph.Org has merged the tunings into the official branch to produce the long-awaited Vorbis 1.1.

Recommended Vorbis Encoders

(adapted from Recommended Encoder and Settings post compiled by QuantumKnot)

Windows binaries

John33's oggenc2.8 is a special version of the Ogg Vorbis encoder. "Features include compression from lossless files (Monkeys Audio, LPAC, FLAC, OptimFROG, WavPack and Shorten - requires presence of decoders), and the ability to specify 'padding' in the headers for subsequent insertion of Tags." (from Ogg Vorbis page at rarewares)

• aoTuV beta 4.51 (MSVC compile)
• aoTuV beta 4.51 (ICL compile for P3/AMD Athlon)
• aoTuV beta 4.51 (ICL compile for P4/AMD Sempron, Athlon 64))

If you prefer a nice drag-and-drop interface, then you can try John33's OggDropXPd (Windows only). "Features include compression from lossless files (Monkeys Audio, LPAC, FLAC and OptimFROG), auto-tagging, renaming of encoded files, setting of advanced encoder parameters, use of VorbisGain tags on decode, Playlist (.m3u) creation, and others." (from Ogg Vorbis page at rarewares)

• OggDropXPd aoTuV beta 4.51 (MSVC compile)
• OggDropXPd aoTuV beta 4.51 (ICL compile for P3/AMD Athlon)
• OggDropXPd aoTuV beta 4.51 (ICL compile for P4/AMD Sempron, Athlon 64)

(work in progress, guide will be completed soon)

Linux binaries

• oggenc aoTuV beta 4.51 and libogg 1.1.3 (static gcc 4 compile) with impulse_trigger_profile

The Static GCC 4 binary was compiled by QuantumKnot.