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Topic: Ogg vs AAC (Read 24389 times) previous topic - next topic
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Ogg vs AAC

A large majority of my music is in CDs ripped to FLAC.  The remainder is purchases from 7Digital in FLAC, a few HDTracks purchases in FLAC, some MP3s from Amazon and some AACs from iTunes.

I went through the effort of converting my FLACs to Ogg Vorbis at vbr q 8.0 (probably overkill) for use locally on my phone.

I'm a fan of Ogg Vorbis for it's great Linux support, the open source reference encoder and me liking Vorbis comments.

Well, the wife and kids bought me an Amazon Echo for Father's Day.  In order to use voice command to play music, I need to upload my music to Amazon's cloud.  And Amazon's cloud only accepts MP3s and AAC files.

I took some FLACs and encoded them to AAC using Foobar2000 with the QAAC plugin set at vbr q 109 (again probably overkill) and sent them off to the Amazon cloud and the Echo happily played them.

If I have achieved transparency, I assume there is no difference listening to an AAC file vs an Ogg Vorbis file.  They both support ReplayGain and Gapless playback.

I understand there are technical difference such as  ID3 Tags vs Vorbis Comments, but that kind of stuff doesn't affect my listening to music.

Am I missing anything in using AAC over Ogg Vorbis.

And, for the curious.  I contacted Amazon tech support and confirmed that Amazon does not do a "match" against what they sell.  It uploads everything and plays the exact file you upload.  So, my uploaded AAC file is not being replaced by an Amazon MP3 file.  Which is exactly what I want.

Re: Ogg vs AAC

Reply #1 –
What use is Vorbis if your device/cloud service can't play it?
What have ID3 tags got to do with AAC/Vorbis?

And given you seem to favour very high bitrates and you have lossless sources, you really can't go wrong. What was the question again?

Re: Ogg vs AAC

Reply #2 –
Well, it seems that you've got the wrong gift  :D  Me personally, don't like this kind of "high tech" junk. As far as I understand, it's a kind of portable speaker, and i'm shure the sound is "amazing". The most horrible thing, is that they force the customers to use only certain audio formats, which is kind of monopolism. By the way, my music is also in Vorbis format, but i'm using Q7 preset. I couldn't find any differences between Q7 and Q8, except the excess of file size.

Re: Ogg vs AAC

Reply #3 –
Quote from: marc2003 on
What use is Vorbis if your device/cloud service can't play it?
What have ID3 tags got to do with AAC/Vorbis?

And given you seem to favour very high bitrates and you have lossless sources, you really can't go wrong. What was the question again?

I have often wondered why so many different lossy formats exist.  Each one seems to solve a slightly different problem that doesn't affect me.

I guess you could say I favor very high bitrates.  But that's out of sheer laziness.  Most music is sold at 256K or better.  I ABXed that bitrate, achieved transparency and just went with it.  I was too lazy to try to achieve transparency at a lower bitrate.  256K is allows me to listen and enjoy my music without always wondering if it might have sounded better at some higher bitrate, since I ABXed a ton of songs at that bitrate.  And storage is cheap, so why not?

Re: Ogg vs AAC

Reply #4 –
Quote from: visaton on
Well, it seems that you've got the wrong gift  :D  Me personally, don't like this kind of "high tech" junk. As far as I understand, it's a kind of portable speaker, and i'm shure the sound is "amazing". The most horrible thing, is that they force the customers to use only certain audio formats, which is kind of monopolism. By the way, my music is also in Vorbis format, but i'm using Q7 preset. I couldn't find any differences between Q7 and Q8, except the excess of file size.

I'm liking the Echo a lot.  It's nice to walk into my room and say "Alexa, play Queen" and it just starts shuffling all my Queen songs.

The effort of converting everything to AAC really isn't an effort.  I wrote a script a while ago that will run through my music library and convert all the FLACs to ogg in a separate folder structure and if it finds AAC or MP3 files, to simply copy them over.  So, I can kick off the script and just let it run overnight.  The next morning I can dump it into Amazon's cloud.

That's one of the great things about a lossless format.  You can convert it to anything.