Gene Heskett wrote on 21/01/2005 08:28:
I made some comparison files from some of my disks, both with a commercial shareware encoder for making mp3's and with the ogg method. To me the obvious winner at any comparable bit rate was ogg, and at quality level 6, its very very difficult to tell the ogg from the original, at Q7 there is no discernable difference, and I can listen to it all night with no fatigue whatsoever. I don't have more than 20 megs of mp3's in my own collection of about 2.5 gigs. and it sure beats lugging a 20+ pound cd holder around and getting it stolen.I'd second that. I've had both a minidisc player which uses WMA? and an MP3 player. I now have an iriver H320 player which uses oggs. To say oggs sound better than MP3s is a understatement. Being a bit of a hi-fi nut I used to laugh at people who thought MP3 bore any relation to the original sound but oggs are massively better than MP3s - (I think i use quality 7 as I recall). MP3s just seemed to remove all the sublties and upset the timing - making them tiresome to listen to as you say (and boring)
I'm really very happy with my iriver and it works fine with Linux - in fact when I plugged into a windows machine here at work it didn't work cos I didn't have the drivers!
Native oggs are definitely the way to go!
Rob
