Ogg Vorbis Backgrounder

with the recent creation of a Free Music category, I thought I would provide a backgrounder story on the Ogg Vorbis open free sound file format, that competes with MP3 and MP4.

from the official project web site:

Ogg Vorbis is a fully Open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC.

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/

Slashdot article on Ogg Vorbis at:

http://slashdot.org/features/00/08/14/1034209.shtml

LinuxJournal article at:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4416

What's Wrong with MP3?

http://www.mondodesigno.com/music/ogg.html

Players

Don’t have a player that plays Ogg Vorbis? try one of these:

• Winamp 2 Standard or Full (good metadata and Icecast support)
• Winamp 3 (looks pretty, has poor metadata and no Icecast support)
• foobar2000 (very spartan interface, streams from Icecast, has best-of-breed comment editing and masstagging capabilities)
• Zinf (is open source)

Encoders & Jukeboxes

Use the following software to make your own Ogg Vorbis files.

Oggdrop

Simple drag and drop GUI encoder; no nonsense, just works

OggdropXPd

More powerful, more complex drag and drop GUI encoder

vorbis-tools

command line utilities including oggenc, ogginfo, vorbiscomment, vcut, and oggdec

Other Windows Third Party Software is available from:

http://www.vorbis.com/software.psp?pid=2

Tutorial on Ogg Vorbis is found at:

http://www.angrycoffee.com/tutorials/vorbis/

Streamed Content Via Icecast

Icecast is an audio broadcasting system that streams music in the Ogg Vorbis format, and is available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

http://www.icecast.org

RealNetworks embraces Ogg Vorbis, see the ZiffNet article at:

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-946520.html

Content:

The BBC uses this file format, so you can try it out with some of their content, try this link:

http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/

http://www.audiofind.com/alt/binaries/sounds/ogg

© Copyright 2003 Ted Ritzer. Last update: 5/15/2003; 7:21:43 PM.