Can you give me some definitive help on this? Or is it six of one, half a dozen of the other?

In theory, if the original material is encoded with comparable settings to either MP3 or OGG, the quality shouldn't differ much (although the OGG file should be slightly smaller at the same nominal bitrate). But in practice, I noticed that the OGG files at LibriVox have very often much lower nominal bitrates than the MP3 files at 128 kps. I have observed nominal bitrates at 80 and 112 kps. While the latter might be comparable to MP3, the former is definitely not, even for speech-only recordings. This sheds a bad light on an otherwise superior format, IMHO.Steampunk wrote:Keeping in mind that we're talking about pure voice recordings (usually) produced on non-professional equipment in (usually) non-studio environments. The difference between ogg and MP3, even with a few derivations one way or the other, is inconsequential.
Archive.org (where our cataloged files are hosted) does all the file derivations, including the OGGs. They require that we send them 128 kbps mp3's, then they take care of the rest. So this would be a question to ask them.strogon14 wrote:I wonder, what is the standard for encoding the OGG files (i.e. bitrate, qulity setting, etc.) and if this can be influenced in any ways by the uploader? Or is it possible by a contributor/reader to provide his/her own OGG file, which was encoded from the original recording
Here's a different view, from members of the Audio Engineering Societystrogon14 wrote:In theory, if the original material is encoded with comparable settings
to either MP3 or OGG, the quality shouldn't differ much.
Ogg Vorbis is more efficient than MP3 and is the state of the art
in audio compression technology. Used properly, recent Ogg Vorbis
encoders deliver sound quality surpassing MP3 with all possible
bitrates.
In an ideal world etc etc... we would, I am sure, love all our recordings to be lossless. However, we are dependent for our file hosting on the Internet Archive, which demands 128 kbps files. We also have to store all our 'works in progress' on our own server, which does not have limitless space, and each of us has limited time (and probably limited bandwidth) to upload our recordings.strogon14 wrote:BUT, this will only be the case, if the OGG file is created from the ORIGINAL uncompressed recording (be it in WAV, AIFF or any other lossless format), NOT from an already lossy-encoded MP3!.