ogg & moode

[Phil35]

Thank you @Falco !
I will test.
Phil

[Tim Curtis]

Yes, as @Falco mentioned definitely use FLAC format.

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Phil35

Well, you're starting with old vinyl (good on you, BTW) so you might try just transcoding the ogg files you already have.  I suspect you won't notice any difference in result than if you make FLAC files directly from the vinyl. (Those 'pops' I hear aren't going to go away!).

Since moOde comes with ffmpeg baked in, you can even do this conversion from the command line. In the following I let ffmpeg infer the input and output encodings from the filename extensions I used but you can also force this explicitly. As well, there's many other options possible---ffmpeg is the Swiss Army knife of the A/V world.

Code:

pi@m82p3a:~ $ ffmpeg -hide_banner -i "Many rivers to cross - face A.ogg" "Many rivers to cross - face A.flac"
Input #0, ogg, from 'Many rivers to cross - face A.ogg':
 Duration: 00:03:04.21, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 167 kb/s
   Stream #0:0: Audio: vorbis, 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 160 kb/s
   Metadata:
     DATE            : 1975
     track           : 1
     ALBUM           : Many rivers to cross
     TITLE           : Many rivers to cross
     ARTIST          : Jimmy Cliff
Stream mapping:
 Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (vorbis (native) -> flac (native))
Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
[flac @ 0x120c0b0] encoding as 24 bits-per-sample
Output #0, flac, to 'Many rivers to cross - face A.flac':
 Metadata:
   encoder         : Lavf58.45.100
   Stream #0:0: Audio: flac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s32 (24 bit), 128 kb/s
   Metadata:
     DATE            : 1975
     track           : 1
     ALBUM           : Many rivers to cross
     TITLE           : Many rivers to cross
     ARTIST          : Jimmy Cliff
     encoder         : Lavc58.91.100 flac
size=   34054kB time=00:03:04.22 bitrate=1514.3kbits/s speed=28.6x    
video:0kB audio:34046kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 0.023773%

The resulting FLAC file plays very nicely over my RPi -> (internal BT) -> JBL speaker with no changes to default audio/mpd settings.

I very much like my Creative Technology BT-W2 adapter for various reasons:

• it provided bluetooth output to the RPi 2B I was first using with moOde
  
• it presents to Linux/ALSA/moOde as an audio output device so no futzing with the Bluetooth renderer is necessary.
  
• it does the audio -> bluetooth conversion in firmware which offloaded some computation from those early RPi models.
  
• it also implements aptX in firmware which was important for me because my headphones accept aptX encoded audio. (This might not be so important now that one can compile aptX into Bluez-alsa, although Tim cannot distribute it since it's not FOSS.)
  
• even with an RPi with an internal BT transceiver, using the BT-W2 puts the antenna outside the metal case I like using.
  

Of course, pairing and connecting with a BT speaker is different with this device, as described in CreativeTech docs. My old BT-W2 works well but the BT-W4 looks even better on paper. I might have to move up.

YMMV.


Regards,
Kent

[Phil35]

Hi @TheOldPresbyope ,

Thank you so much for your valuable answer.
I have now some work to do (conversion to flac), buy an USB bluetooth audio adapter (you convinced me).
and read some posts in this forum, to learn more.

flac file size is bigger!   x9

Code:

 3859028 sept. 26 16:36 'Many rivers to cross - face A.ogg'
 3780608 sept. 26 16:41 'Many rivers to cross - face B.ogg'
34871087 oct.   1 09:33 'Many rivers to cross - face A.flac'
38070659 oct.   1 09:33 'Many rivers to cross - face B.flac'

Thanks again to you all  @Tim Curtis @TheOldPresbyope @Falco @Nutul
King regards
Phil

[Sehnsucht]

Hi @Tim Curtis  & Hi @TheOldPresbyope ,

First thank you for your time, I really appreciate.
and for the tips found, I will test on monday, I cannot test before / sorry.

The overall configuration is:
[ Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 ] -> [ bluetooth of the raspberry ] --> [ WTX-700 (see https://www.cobra.fr/advance-wtx700-p-47299)  ] [ connected to hi-fi system ]

What do you think about, what is your suggestion about:  
buy an USB bluethooth device like "Creative Tech USB-W2" or still use the bluetooth from the raspberry ?
(for example I found W3 and W4 : https://us.creative.com/wfh/#fix-your-audio,  W2 is no more available now)

Yes the song is great ... 1969 however but still so good.
I am recording old old vinyl disks  45t and 33t :-) .  I guest ogg was better than mp3, but may be I wrong.

Kind regards
Phil

I second the argument for using flac for your rips but if you're going to be listening on a device with limited storage I'd recommend 160kbps opus files as a reasonable quality/size compromise.  (Having said that, I have a few files which behave as .flac but which cause mpd to hang as .opus).

[TheOldPresbyope]

...
flac file size is bigger!   x9
...

Yeah, about that. FLAC files are not small.

The FLAC encoder does include the ability to compress losslessly (compression levels ranging from 0 - 8). AFAIK it is nearly impossible to determine by inspection after the fact what level of compression was used in creating any given FLAC file. As best as I could determine by experiment, the default ffmpeg command I suggested uses level-5 compression: the resulting file size is nearly identical to the one I got by forcing level-5 compression explicitly. 

In truth, I saw only a modest change in resulting FLAC file size between the extremes of zero compression (0) and max compression (8) when I applied the command to your OGG file. Conjecture: this may be the result of starting with a track which had already been subjected to a lossy encoding process or perhaps it's due to the limited bandwidth/dynamic range of the original capture from vinyl.

The proof of the pudding, though, is in the eating. Are you satisfied with how the resulting FLAC file sounds? If not, then you may want to re-"rip" the vinyl. Course, if your process begins by digitizing the analog signal to WAV *and* you happened to save the WAV files from the first go-around then you could run some tool like ffmpeg to transcode the WAV files to FLAC. 

Regards,
Kent