thoughton:digitallife The Land of Ogg

The Land of Ogg

Until a few weeks ago I never gave the Ogg Vorbis format a second thought as a music format. I always knew it could achieve the same quality as mp3 in less space, but so what? Hard drives are bigger and cheaper than ever. Then came my awakening (cue choir breaking into song) - I got my first phone which can play real music. The limited storage on a 128MB memory card suddenly made the Ogg format rather appealing.

A bit of digging around on the Mac software sites turned up an OS X app named Ogg Drop X. This is a nicely done drag-and-drop Ogg encoder. It works well, can batch encode Oggs at a variety of bitrates and has good metadata tag support. Unfortunately the program is intended for ripping CDs to Ogg and as a result it only accepts the uncompressed music files you'd find on a CD (AIFF / WAV format). I'm reliably informed that audiophiles would recoil in horror at the thought of re-encoding an mp3 as an Ogg, which is presumably why this program doesn't offer the option. So you're stuck with creating your Oggs direct from CD, or using something like QuickTime Player to convert your mp3s back to AIFF prior to using Ogg Drop X.

Update: If you have a batch of MP3s to convert, using QuickTime Player to convert those MP3s to AIFF is a painstaking process, primarily because you have to sit and wait for each conversion to finish before starting the next one. After a few conversions I was heartily sick of it so I set off in search of a better solution. Enter the freeware app MACAST MP3 Converter. This a batch converter for MP3 to AIFF/WAV conversions.

However in the default mode, MACAST MP3 Converter's output AIFF and WAV files are not accepted by Ogg Drop X. To fix this, select AIFF in MACAST MP3 Converter's pull-down menu, click options, select Custom, click Set, and then select Compressor: 24-bit Integer. The output files will now be compatible with Ogg Drop X.

Finally, MACAST MP3 Converter isn't totally bug-free. The notable one is that it appears to consume all available CPU power, even after the conversion has finished. So don't forget to quit the program once you've finished your conversions!

Who says size doesn't matter?

As far as size is concerned, mp3s at 128kbps (generally accepted as CD quality to the untrained ear) weigh in at about 1MB per minute, or just over two hours on a 128MB memory stick duo. However an Ogg can achieve very similar quality at half the bitrate. Since space is at a premium, I have chosen to encode my Oggs at 48kbps. In my opinion the quality is still totally acceptable, and this means we can fit almost six hours of music on a 128MB MS Duo. In practice I generally only keep a couple of albums at a time on my P800, for a total size of about 40MB.

Playback on the P800

The bad news is that there isn't a lot of choice. As far as I'm aware there is only one Ogg player available for the P800, and that is OggPlay. The good news is that OggPlay is a quality piece of software! It can not only play Oggs (you'd hope so!), it can do so in both flip-open and flip-closed modes and it's clever enough to mute the music if the phone rings. It's also skinnable - there are various skins available on the developer's site.

Crappy P800 headphones

I've heard the bundled headphones that come with the P800 are less than satisfactory (I wouldn't know since my phone from eBay didn't come with them!). But since they have the pickup-hangup button on them you are kinda stuck with them if you want to receive phone calls while listening to music. All is not lost however! On a recommendation I bought this headset adapter. What can I say - this is a nifty little device. It consists of a spring-loaded retractable wire connecting the P800 to a combination microphone, pickup-hangup button and headphone miniplug adapter, and it comes with a detachable single earpiece for your handsfree conversations. The clever part is that you can unplug the single earpiece and plug your high-quality third-party headphones into the miniplug adapter, and still use the pickup-hangup button and microphone on the adapter itself.

Posted on 15 July 2004, to How To... | Mac Audio | Mac OS X | Mobile | Sony Ericsson P800