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The OGG Debate
Okay. OGG works great for certain types of music. But only for certain types. OGG clips tons of highs.
I had a friend who was an OGG zealot. Ripped all his stuff into OGG. He was ripping a soundtrack to some movie (orchestral score stuff). He messaged me, "HOLY CRAP LISTEN TO THIS FILE". The OGG compression screwed up some of the violin work so badly that the song was just completely unlistenable. He went out and made sure he had the latest version and tried re-ripping it in different ways, etc etc, but several of the songs on that soundtrack were just plain unlistenable. It happens a lot with classical music as far as I can tell.
If you've compared tracks of the types of music you listen to in both MP3 and OGG, and you think OGG was better, well then good for you. My guess would be you didn't do a good job of encoding the MP3 file. Maybe you didn't try the newer VBR format. I say the "default" VBR ripping can probably be beat out by OGG, but if you set the parameters yourself (as I do), then OGG doesn't come close to matching quality.
If you look at the technology, it's quite plain and simple to know that OGG cuts out more audio than MP3. Is it very logical that a format that is lossier than another format would be higher quality?
I was being a bit harsh, as OGG isn't *that* bad. At the moment MP3 is much older and much more mature than OGG, and that may actually be the only thing keeping it ahead of OGG right now.
What OGG really needs before I can consider it a worthwhile audio format is some freaking encoding options. Sure, there are a few, but look how many options MP3 has. Some OGGers will argue that MP3 has too many, but I for one take advantage of most of the options, not to mention that the default of all the fancy options can usually be left alone anyway.
In a couple more years OGG might be a lot better, but for now, I'll stick with my MP3s.
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