Time for some benchmarking. I love benchmarking.
Pearl Jam - Ten (new european version) / Track 11: Release / Length: 543.426 seconds
System: Athlon XP 3200 (MMX, 3DNow+, SSE) - 1GB DDR400 - NForce2
Vorbis encoder: OggEnc 2.83 Lancer 20060616(SSE) based on aoTuV b4b
Vorbis decoder: OggDec 1.92 Lancer 20060616(SSE)
musepack encoder: mppenc 1.15v --Alpha--
musepack decoder: mppdec 1.95e 3DNow/SSE
mp3 encoder: Lame 3.97 beta 2, Dec 22 2005
mp3 decoder: mpg123 0.59r 1999/Jun/15
format | enc. speed | dec. speed | dec. speed (fb2k) | bitrate
------------|------------|------------|-------------------|-------------
vorbis | 37.85x | 228.81x | 174.81x | 125.3
musepack | 26.05x | 440.38x | 289.66x | 133.9
mp3 | 19.81x | 175.70x | 154.81x | 138.5
Commandlines used for encoding and decoding:
timethis "start /realtime /b /wait oggenc2 -Q -q 4 test.wav -o NUL:"
timethis "start /realtime /b /wait oggdec test.ogg -o > NUL:"
timethis "start /realtime /b /wait mppenc --silent --radio test.wav - > NUL:"
timethis "start /realtime /b /wait mppdec --silent test.mpc /dev/null"
timethis "start /realtime /b /wait lame -V5 --vbr-new --silent test.wav NUL:"
timethis "start /realtime /b /wait mpg123 -w NUL: test.mp3"
Tests were done four times, fastest run counts. Speeds are rounded and computed from track length and time taken as reported by timethis.exe
Spread between runs was small, less than 0.1s.
Decoding speed for Foobar was measured with Foobar2000 0.9.1, 10 passes, no dsp, high priority, buffer in memory.
Vorbis encodes very fast 45% faster than musepack, but musepack is still the king of decoding speed. I really have no idea which MP3 decoder is fastest, so please let me know and i'll add the result. For now it seems that MP3 is quite slow despite it's age and tremendous development effort.
edit: mpg123 result added for mp3 decoding speed, despite being over 7 years old now (!) it outperforms foobar by 13%. Wasn't foobar's decoder based on mpg123 in the first place? Still, there have to be faster encoders out there, right?
I have no experience with the wiki but if anyone wants to add this please be my guest.
My take on Muspack: It's a good format, but i prefer vorbis, because of:- Faster encoding
- Better hardware support
- Better performance at low bitrates (<128)
I think Vorbis is an all-round winner, decoding performance is not important to me at all because it's all very fast anyway.