aac and ogg playback

[da_grudge]

I'm thinking encoding all my stuff to ogg since nero aac at 256 kpbs did n't work, as there were too many skipping. Does anyone know if ogg at q7 or q8 works without any skipping probs?
Thank you

[saratoga]

I don't think Ogg will skip regardless of settings.  The ogg decoder is supposed to be pretty fast.

[atlas]

All my entire collection of music is encoded in OGG Q7 and i have NO problem

Works pretty well

[michael.conner]

I had a single Ogg Q8 file skip on my G5 iPod -- but that was with crossfeed on. I turned off crossfeed and it didn't skip. 

The skipping was repeatable if I put crossfeed back on -- same exact place in the track, too.

[JonathanHull]

I regularly play q8 files, and a few q9 on mine. No skips.

Anyone have any experience using q10 files?

[ryran]

Not the point, I know, but why anyone would use q9 or [especially] q10.. is beyond me. Blows my mind.

Obviously it makes no difference to me how others encode their music, but when I run into people using [what I consider] excessive encoding settings, I have to wonder if they've ever done a single blind listening test in their life.

[ts-x]

Does anyone know if ogg at q7 or q8 works without any skipping probs?
Thank you

It depends on the specific player, target type (ARM v. Coldfire), and the options that are enabled (eq, crossfeed, peak meters in WPS, complicated WPS, etc).  On my iRiver H340 (no eq, no crossfeed), q9's do not skip at all with a non-graphically intensive WPS.  When using an album art based WPS, ~1% of them will skip.

You should probably run some serious listening tests to see if you really need to go as high as q8.  I would think most people could probably get away with q6 or q7.  To be honest, if I could do it all over again I would probably drop back to that level.  IMHO the differences beyond that point are negligible at best, and it takes a serious audio setup and a keen ear to notice them.

[ryran]

Funny..there was just a discussion over at HA about high bitrate ogg... well, I suppose there always is.

[Deano]

Well, this is as usual when it comes to people's opinions on audio formats. A lot of people seem to "over-encode" their music, namely due to the fact they *think* they can tell the difference.

However, sometimes people just plain don't have time to sit there and thoroughly ABX themselves on music. I know I sure don't, namely why I use -V 2 --vbr-new. It's probably overkill, but gives me the results without me *ever* having to worry about those ABX tests.

Some people just need quick solutions because they don't have time to find their own.

[ryran]

Indeed.
I do it too. Suppose I'm just [stupidly] balking at what I perceive as undoubtedly unnecessary wastefulness, vs the somewhat wasteful over-caution that I engage in. Meh. I guess we're all pretty much the same.

Well. Except that ogg -v10 really is stupid. I'm not budging on that one.

[JonathanHull]

Yeah. I can't really tell the difference past about 6 or 7, but I just rip everything at q8 anyway, just because I want to. I only have 1 album in q9. Now when it comes to q10 you might as well be using FLAC (which I admit I have a few albums in FLAC).

[Deano]

Well. Except that ogg -v10 really is stupid. I'm not budging on that one.

I totally agree, q10 ogg is wasting huge amounts of file system space, I would rather have something lossless.

I do think there are good arguments for a Lossless collection (ie, you have a lot of hard drive space and/or want a lossless backup of your music for transcoding or future CD difficulties). But that is going way off the topic by now.

[bk]

All my Q8 rips play fine on iRiver 1xx and iaudio X5. No skipping whatsoever.

Yes, Q8 is overkill (Q6 and higher is totally transparent to me) but since I want these rips to last a while without having to re-encode I go a little extra just in case I get better audio equipment down the line that might reveal artifacts I can't hear now.

[madcow]

All my +Q3 Ogg's play fine but when I'm playing at low bitrate (35/45kbps) my X5 has a hard time.
Pcm Buffering is a problem (fully boosted at 100% all the time) and reading from the harddrive causes skipping/gaps and to fill the codec buffer can sometimes take more than a minute.
When playing higher (lets say around 60/80kbps) the cpu acts normal and the skipping is gone.

[Davide-NYC]

Why not run some tests on your platform and find out what codec work for your platform and how well?
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CodecPerformanceComparison
Oh yeah, please post your results when done.