J. Kerfoot
MUMT 621
September 24, 2009

Ogg Vorbis: Annotated Bibliography and Links

Xiph.org resources:

Bibliography:

Chen, H, and Yu, T.L. 2005. Comparison of psychoacoustic principles and genetic algorithms in audio compression. International Conference on Systems Engineering. 270-275. Accessed Sept. 23, 2009 at http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICSENG.2005.28 .

Audio samples compressed using a psychoacoustic model similar to Ogg are compared with audio samples compressed using algorithms developed around a "genetic" model analogous to Darwinian theory, whereby a large set of audio files are analysed to build a solution that will remove chunks of data likely to contain irrelevant sound from any audio file, as opposed to the psychoacoustic-based process, which analyses each sgnal indvidually to identify irrelevant data. The article includes useful overviews of psychoacoustic principles used in lossy encoding.

Kosaka A, Okuhata F, Onoye T, and Shirakawa I. 2005. Design of Ogg Vorbis decoder system for embedded platform. Ieice Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences E88A (8): 2124-2130.

A research report presenting an ARM-based "system on a chip" architecture for Ogg Vorbis decoder, designed to improve the speed of realtime decoding of Ogg Vorbis files in embedded processors. As background information, the article provides a relatively techinical summary of the Ogg Vorbis encoding and decoding process.

McCannell, S. 2000. Ogg Vorbis vs. mp3 stage is set: could Ogg Vorbis Replace mp3? O'Reilly Digital Media Blog. Accessed Sept. 23 2009 at: http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/10/13/vorbis.html

A succint news-style article in which the author remarks on turmoil in "the mp3 world" and speculates on the future success of Ogg Vorbis as an alternative file format, predicting its popularity in internet radio and its challenges in competing with mp3 as a popular standard for downloading and listening in digital media players.

Products of Interest. 2001. Computer Music Journal. 25 (2): 89-98.

A brief article announcing the availability of the beta version of the Vorbis standard, giving a very rough overview of the technology, and drawing attention to the availability of an unlicenced "public domain" software developers toolkit.

Selasky, H.P.S. 2006. Evaluation of perceptual sound compression with regard to perceived quality and compression methods. Master's Thesis, Agder University College. Accessed Sept 23, 2009 at: http://turbocat.net/~hselasky/math/vorbis/files/ogg_vorbis_report.pdf

An analysis of Ogg Vorbis compression technology, a presentation of the results of Selasky's own experiments in programming improvements and additions, along with some personal remarks on sound quality. Of interest is his observation of problems with S-consonant sounds in very low bitrate samples containing a voice. He proposes incorporating an FIR filter.

Svitek, J. 2006. Ogg Vorbis: Subjective assessment of sound quality at very low bit rates. CESNET technical reports. 27 (2006).

A technical report on an experiment in which approximately 30 people gave subjective assessments of the sound quality of several low-bitrate audio samples encoded in Ogg Vorbis, mp3, wma, and aac formats. On 32-bit samples, Ogg Vorbis was assessed as considerably superior to all other options, and mp3 almost always inferior to other options, failing completely on musically "complex" samples. With 64 kbps samples, all options were assessed as roughly similar in quality.

Other links of interest: