Edit: At least allow both two formats together. But I can't change the thread title now...

Since renders have a solid 10mb limit. Lots of long entries have the renders suffered in quality loss in order to make the size under the limit.

How are we going to change that? Just change from .mp3 to .ogg!

.ogg container offers a variety of advanced compressed audio formats like Vorbis or Opus, or even lossless FLAC. And it's also supported by every modern browsers and used in lots of streaming services.

Here

is the comparison between uncompressed .wav, 64kbps .mp3 and 64kbps Vorbis. You can see that even Vorbis could handle it fine. And Opus can even do it better than that! (although Opus is less supported in audio editing/playback programs)

For old renders just keep them in .mp3

If anything it should just allow both. I don't think a requirement is necessary. (Maybe on the server end BotB can convert all submitted mp3 to ogg internally? Probably too much work though.)

lets oggree to disoggree

Being able to submit both mp3 and ogg would be nice, as compability doesn't break for earlier mp3s and being able to just have ogg added.

I think there are enough javascript ogg decoders/renderers on the web to look at / implement I'd guess

so allow .ogg but only at 64kbps?

that's what I read

I would love OGG support, MP3 should die.

"Should be really easy to implement" Rate my meme :3

I've been able to render .ogg files as long ago as 2007-2008, if memory serves me correctly. I'm in support of allowing .ogg renders along with MP3s.

i made a thread about distinguishing between encoders at 128 kbps bitrates – audio encoder identification experiment - lossless / lame v4 / vorbis q4

@puke7: allow it at any bitrate. I just demonstrated the capability of it even at low bitrate.

iOS & desktop safari will never support ogg so you probably shouldn't replace mp3 with it. why not just increase upload limit to whatever you think the maximum song length on botb should be @ 128kbps

for me Longers tracks is not enough merit to allow oggs format on battles


Consider mp3 a legacy format, that will never die. Never. (never) never ever.

I absolutely completely entirely deleted all my custom oggs when I suffered hdd crashes and the only reliable way to playback music was a usb drive...that was so old that it didn't support ogg. Oh, that day I panicked and freaked out not being able to listen to bitshifter...

Of course times are different now. (unless you are in third world country and old machines are keep alive for decades, the same as phones, and browsers because it isn't as easy to upgrade...ahem)

quality wise mp3/ogg are (for synth based music) undistinguishable at 128kbps or above, at 80kbps oggs are still passable but mp3s start to suffer badly.



If anything is decided do it for newer tracks only. Let the damn old material stay as mp3. I have only seen one netlabel do releases as ogg, not even 8bp/ubiktune has bother to do a newer format. Not even rippers...

I bet people would submit longer mp3s entries instead of longer ogg entries, heh.

I feel like this was brought up because of my entry. (I don't see many other >15 minute entries around).

I doubt that anyone would write anything longer than 20 minutes (though I suppose it's possible), which to me is the hard limit before slipping in below the 10 MB limit becomes painful to the point of causing a render to be unlistenably grainy.

While I would greatly appreciate the option to upload an .ogg, I feel that the drop in accesibility and replayability would not be worth the increase in quality. Many people still use older mp3 players (myself included), and having the mp3 format available for download allows more people to listen to the songs offline.

(Besides, nothing in the rules that says we can't link to uncompressed renders stored offsite in the description, which gets around the problem entirely).

Slight edit:
I'm completely in favor of allowing the option of having .ogg files alongside .mp3s, so long as both are available for download. I'm not sure how simple this would be to implement.

kungfufurby and zebra also have some >10 minute entries (& 10 minutes is about the point where 128 kbps mp3 no longer fits under the size limit)

but i actually like that the 10 MB limit has the property of discouraging especially long entries. i think it's nice to be concise in a setting where some people (me) feel obligated to listen to and vote on every entry in a compo they enter

my main concerns are the ones coda and anewuser stated: decreased compatibility and lack of demonstrable difference in quality at the bitrates people usually use. there were a few times in the past when i was doing wildchip or allgear ohbs on windows, which i don't normally use, and i didn't have time to download/configure lame with audacity in order to render mp3. people were unhappy that i submitted ogg instead (and rendered mp3 after the battle was over)

SPAMama tells me thtis is another +10minutes entry http://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/live+edit/1651/

1mb is about 1minute of music.

OGG support could be neat. Of the major browsers, it's just Safari that won't play it in-browser. Even Edge is adding support right now.
safari also doesn't support a lot of formats that people actually use, the fact that it won't play webm natively still pisses me off

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter that much.

For longer entries... well, I did a 19 minute entry once and I'd safely consider that entirely overkill. I wouldn't ban 'em, but I wouldn't nudge any limits in favor of 'em either.

While I understand the desire to support .ogg renders, Coda brings up the very valid point that Safari and iOS do not support it. If BotB were to also host .ogg alongside .mp3 then the amount of incoming data would double. When it comes to longer entries, and I'm pretty sure I've expressed this before, I personally get annoyed when I find any track over 5 minutes long while voting on 100+ tracks for a major battle. I understand not everyone feels that way, but there's all kinds of other work that needs to be done first that doesn't include encouraging gratuitous song-length submissions.

if youre mad that theres too many entries just stop with the extensions ^v^

And if you're not sure what to host after a compo, just extend the voting period!

Not complaining about the number of entries. Complaining about long tracks amongst many entries. Your "listen only to whats written by who's already popular" idea is not friendly for newcomers and kind of gross.

Yes, I've wanted a radio where everyone hears the same thing and can make requests for 10 years now. Just never got around to it.

This would ruin my business of selling bootleg cassettes with BotB hits in the back alley

The Booming Black Market Botbusiness

we should all move to Ann Arbor and do compos in person, like we all bring our tracker files with us on thumb drives and vote in person on index cards

I've lived in Austin, TX for almost 6 years now.

But if you wanted to do something like this we might be able to work it into this Detroit party on July 20th where BotB will entertain a marching band --
http://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/18317/Botb+requested+to+perform+Fri+July+20th_+Detroit+Crash+festival/

for what it's worth, I've toyed around with the idea of a major radio in the past

I'm totally for OGG, over MP3, and i'd happily welcome support for OGG renders on BotB, except this creates a problem as to what to do with already existing entries and if we should allow both formats or just one for all the future ones. Converting everything that's already there is an awful idea (reencoding lossy to lossy? Yuck), so i'd just keep it untouched, and enforce OGG for all new uploads.

Or like Razero said, give people the choice to upload either Vorbis or Em Pee 3, just not both for each entry

Also i don't think it requires any external support for major browsers, for example Firefox and friends were capable of playing OGGs served directly for ages already

MP3 or OGG,
it doesn't really matter to me...

Both of them are

| |ı
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anyway~

results are in for my tiny experiment. if anything, people thought lame mp3 sounded more accurate than ogg vorbis at ~128 kbps, and weren't even that good at distinguishing the ~128 kbps ogg and mp3 encodings from lossless ones.

but it's only 20 songs and 4 listeners, so don't take those data too seriously

id support this but i can’t bc apple is shit and using a format everyone can actually play is more important imo

Someone once informed me that .wav files play on most operating systems.

BotB should integrate and force many web-based module players so that evil people like me can't lie about the mistakes in their module by fixing it in the mp3 render. ;)