Hello all:

I was want to compare the merits between using .ogg and .mp3. mp3 offers good compression but it's expensive to license. Does ogg measure up to mp3? I'm on a tight budget. Thanks.

OGG is completely free, and offers roughly 2x the performance of standard MP3 (in other words, half the size for the same quality of sound). It sounds too good to be true, but amazingly, it is true.

Cas :)

I agree with Cas (that alone already deserves a post!), ogg is the way to go. Part of the "magic" of ogg is the use of variable bitrate, which means different parts of the soundtrack are compressed more or less lossly while maintaining the same perceived quality.

I third the sentiment - ogg compares to mp3 so very favourably, that there's really nothing to decide. Always use ogg, never touch mp3.

Wow, I get to do a "me, too!" post!

I just recently went through that decision-making process myself. There are some comparisons you can do yourself online. After hearing the quality of the samples, I was fairly convinced. The kicker was listening to the quality of Unreal Tournament 2003's music. I'm used to MP3s of similar quality going at 1 megabyte per minute, and these were 500K per minute. The sound quality is great, there are plenty of librararies and support from the community, and best of all, it's FREE.

Really tough to beat that combo. The only thing I can't speak on is the CPU utilization - I haven't been able to determine exactly how hard a hit it might have on your machine. But on my box, it seems minimal. My machine was not quite bleeding edge 18 months ago, so I'm guessing that most games would be safe to go that route by now.

Thank you all for your replies!

Ogg seems great and best of all, it's free! I only recently found out about it. Good thing, because I was about to pay $2,000 for MP3 license fee, which would have been a bummer for someone on a shoestring budget.

I must thank you all for passing these tidbits of info that help each other out. Thx!

I suggest you convert a few of your MP3's to OGG and listen for differences. You won't find many except for the smaller file size and no licensing fees. Once you've seen the difference personally it becomes a very easy choice.

Don't, of course, actually convert your MP3s to WAV and then back to OGG again :) (Reminds me when they tried to show us what Hi Definition TV looked like on Tomorrow's World, arf arf)

Cas :)

I haven't actually TRIED doing that, but the rumors I hear say that the result of an MP3 re-converted into OGG (and vice-versa) are horrible.

I predict that it won't be too long before the popularity (and reduced size) of OGG files start filtering into the mainstream, possibly overtaking MP3 as the file type of choice.

Gee, ya think maybe I've become a happy convert?

Converting MP3 to OGG or OGG to MP3 should be avoided if possible. Go back to the original uncompressed sound data and encode that, rather than encoding one compressed format to the other.

The reason for this is quite simple: both OGG and MP3 are lossy formats, they discard data that their psychoacoustical models determine can't be heard by most people. However, their models are different and combining the two will often result in dropping data that can in fact be noticed by most people because the errors introduced by the data drop accumulate. The end result is that the sound becomes kind of muffled and "tinny".

In the end you might actually get away with this in many cases since everyone's hearing is different and most people might not even notice, but you should always strive for the best sound quality you can get because it really adds to a good psychological impression, even if it is somewhat of a subconscious one.

Ever have a problem with the sound on your TV set so everytime something bright white is on the screen, you hear some buzz? Not enough to actually stop you from hearing/understanding, but just enough to drive you batty? Well the same thing applies here, even if the problem is barely perceptible it will still be a psychological strike against people enjoying your game!


To answer the original question, I agree with those suggesting that you use Ogg. The only real reason to ever use MP3 for a game is if you wanted to allow users to import their own tracks easily (since most keep their digital tracks as MP3). Other than that one case, Ogg is a much better choice in all situations: free, good quality (as good or better), tends to be smaller. mp3pro does a pretty good job of evening up with Ogg in terms of quality vs size, but it costs even more than regular mp3 to license so Ogg is still really a no-brainer.

Yes, don't reconvert MP3 to ogg if you can help it; it's a bit like loading a jpeg and saving it out again as a jpeg... double artifacting!