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Credits to Machinae Supremacy for using the Ogg Vorbis format to release free retro music and remixes! (and of course for being swedes like me ;) )

Awesome Gianna Sisters Remix
(you know -- that Super Mario clone for Amiga)

Sidology Episode I - Sid Evolution
(mix of great ogged C64 SID music)

Sidology Episode III - Apex Ultima
(more of the same!)

Maybe I don't want to use the free Ogg library. I want to write my own Ogg player library for a commecial product (I don't want to rely on Xiph for updates and support for example). The specification for Ogg Vorbis is always behind the library implementation. The library is not something you can just reverse engineer and expect to beable to decode future Ogg files. I'm just disappointed by the whole sketchiness of the specification

a) Saying "inertia slows acceleration" doesn't exactly demonstrate good knowledge of physics. Inertia is no force, and thus it cannot "slow acceleration" in any way. It's just how stuff works when force translates to acceleration and not speed.

b) According to Emmett (CEO of Xiph.org), the Xiph.org team is working with Frontier Labs to investigate the possibility of Vorbis playback on the NEX II and NEX IIe series of portable players. In addition, PhatNoise has already released alpha firmware for Vorbis playback in the PhatBox and Kenwood Music Keg for in-car Vorbis listening. (Yes, the nexII thing is official. I'm quoting him directly here ;-) ) In other words, there is acceleration.

/* Steinar */

I sent requests for the iPod (listed above) and iTunes (not listed above) so I can trade Ogg's with my Mac friend.

I just visited the websites for Philips, Apple (iPod), Samsung, Archos, and Creative, found their "Contact Us" page, and asked each of them to include Ogg Vorbis support in their portable digital music (i.e. "MP3") players. Please join me in doing the same. Perhaps if they get enough input from the buying public, they'll build Ogg support into their product lines.

Don't forget to include a link to xiph.org.

BTW, please don't grumble about the lack of links in this post. The webpages are easy to find. I don't have time to pamper you. ;-)

Chris "Monty" Montgomery the mastermind behind Ogg Vorbis and cdparanoia.

Chris "Monty" Montgomery the mastermind behind Ogg Vorbis and cdparanoia.

Hey, this guy has my vote! At the very minimun, it helped this nice guy get a boost ;)

Does anyone else think that this release was timed especially well, especially with the release of the much published MP3 "negative" and unfounded press? Right on the heels of that article the sarcastic response.

Exceptionally paranoid or well played media match set?

I've got a full mail archive of vorbis (8520 mails) and vorbis-dev (5506 mails) since aug 25 2000 in my mailbox.

Interested to fix your archive?

Well, anyone keeping an archive usually wants it to be complete, so he'd probably be interested -- why don't you email Monty directly at monty@xiph.org with your offer? (He might not notice your offer here...)

On May 04, Nicolas Pitre released a free (GPL) fixed point vorbis decoder and announced it on Vorbis Developement list.

But this important contribution was kept in silence. Even all posts from May 2002 had mysteriously dissapeared from Vorbis-dev archive.

Fortunately a copy of Nicolas announcement could be find here.

Now Xiph.org anounces that its fixed-point implementation is available for free under BSD style license.

This seems very strange to me.

On May 04, Nicolas Pitre released a free (GPL) fixed point vorbis decoder and announced it on Vorbis Developement list.

But this important contribution was kept in silence. Even all posts from May 2002 had mysteriously dissapeared from Vorbis-dev archive.

Fortunately a copy of Nicolas announcement could be find here.

Now Xiph.org anounces that its fixed-point implementation is available for free under BSD style license.

This seems very strange to me.

By "they still haven't released a complete specification for the file format, or the audio format", I assume you meant, "Back when Vorbis hit 1.0, I read the full specification and stopped spreading FUD", right?

From the Register article:

A Thomson spokesman told NewsForge's Robin Miller that it was a ruse by Ogg Vorbis advocates to get publicity.

Translation: "We changed our license terms, Xiph.org released an open letter showing us how silly this move was, and since we don't exactly love them we would like to use this opportunity to dismiss this letter as childish propaganda AND use it as a smokescreen to avoid tricky questions and move on to easier questions." =)

There's a Cirrus chip model CS7410 available that supposedly can decode OGGs.

Note: The purpose of the chip is not specifically for decoding OGGs - it just seems to have the right silicon in it to do the job.

Ogg streams are supposedly better than wma at the same bitrate. You can test for yourself here.

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

Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented.

Theora is the name of the open source multimedia project that will combine the Vorbis audio codec and the vp3 video codec from On2 Technologies into one package.

Tarkin is essentially a proof-of-concept wavelet-based codec. Its experimental nature means it will not be ready for general use for some time.

Since it is part of the Ogg project, Vorbis files have the extension .ogg.

Get CDex to encode!

Regarding (3), if you were to follow the links at the very K5 article that you linked to, you would find that the Vorbis specification is complete and available now. In fact, the Xiph team finished the spec in time for the Vorbis 1.0 release, so the linked K5 article has been obsolete for quite some time now.

The guys over at Xiph.org have posted a reply, in the form of a highly sarcastic open letter to Thompson. :)

Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation

You may not agree with lossy Ogg compression or not like it but don't spread FUD dude:

1: No integer decoder (eg: no handheld support)

http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp#fpsupport
http:// www.thekompany.com/embedded/tkcplayer/

I don't think a lot of people complain about licensing the hardware decoder which has been done by portable mp3 player manufacturers for a long time.

2: The Vorbis standard has NOT been solidified yet. So any developments made now would be useless

You mean this?

3: Patent issue: If I am correct Fraunhofer's patents are on the frequency, balancing, and general psycho-(hearing) relationships. MP3 just trims what people aren't supposed to hear. OGG uses the similar formulas too, so it could be "in violation". In my opinion, it's not a big deal (offshore server with anonymizing developer emails).

Any software program "could" or "might" be subject to one or more of the numerous software patents outstanding without anybody's knowledge. What's your point?

As a last note, FLAC is a great codec ...

This is like comparing JPEG to PNG. Sure their uses overlap, but mostly uses are different.

It's a free, open source alternative that's been out-performing mp3 for years now.

Many thanks to all of the Ogg Vorbis enthusiasts posting in this thread!

Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation

Who the fuck gives a shit?

'nuff said.

Vorbis clearly sounds far superior to real at pretty much any bitrate. I'm not going to point you to any page with pretty graphs trying to convince you of that, only actual sound samples. Yes, that means you have to actually *listen* and hear what I'm talking about.

Xiph.org's comparison for the 1.0 release

Real's codec isn't listed on the 'heavy hitters' comparison because it's generally not even considered in the same league.

With trademarks, you must actively defend what you have; otherwise a court may find that you failed to defend your mark against "dilution," and you will lose the ability to sue over another party's use of your mark. This is especially true if the mark passes into common, everyday use like Band-Aid or Kleenex.

With patents, no such obligation exists. In fact, I can think of a number of instances in which companies deliberately did not act to prevent the initial widespread adoption of their patented technology -- the idea is to get it adopted as widely as possible, preferably as an accepted standard. Once that happens, then they sue everyone in sight. This is often referred to as a "submarine patent"; two good recent examples of companies waiting for widespread adoption before suddenly starting to demand royalties from everyone are the Rambus DRAM patent nonsense in JEDEC and Fraunhofer's patents on MP3.

While it's certainly true that Open Source projects benefit from autocratic 'benevolent despots,' the simple fact is that while Robert has preached his 'philosophy' in one hand, but his actions have proven to be quite the other. If you agree with him, you're an asset to the network, but if you don't agree with him, you're told that you have 'anger-management issues' and that you're 'trolling.'

OPN/Freenode is his network, and his to do what he wishes. One part of the equation that seems to escape the current administration is that without those Open Projects hanging out on that network, that network is useless. Say what you want about projects 'using' OPN/Freenode; When people come to look for our projects online, they often go to OPN. In other words, it's our work, it's our projects, that bring people to OPN/Freenode.

We work like hell to raise money for our projects, and our code has proven quite useful to a lot of people. I suspect that our code is a lot more valuable to our userbase than the administration of OPN/Freenode. Should OPN/Freenode be free to solicit for money? Absolutely. But should people who come to that network to specifically to find us be subjected to that panhandling? I don't think so, and that's a large part of why we moved. It's hard enough keeping interest and support (two of Open Source's most valuable resources) in a project, and if we can do anything to clear anything that might clutter that, we have a responsibility to do just that.

As far as going to OFTC or SlashNet; They're both great networks run by really good people, and I would recommend both to anyone looking to find people to work on their Open Source projects. We felt it would be a good opportunity to 'strike out on our own' and try our own thing; If anyone's got a problem with our IRC server, we need look no further than ourselves, and so far, we've had very few problems. It's just one server, we're not out to start a 'network,' we just want to do our own thing, and treat our volunteers with care and respect.

The torch of 'IRC for Open Source projects' has been firmly passed to SlashNet and OFTC, and I think that's excellent. Best of luck to them in the future, and I'll continue to recommend them to people starting/running Open Source projects. If you're interested in talking about Ogg Vorbis or other Xiph projects, come visit us on irc.xiph.org! We'd love to hear from you.

Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation

You should be listening to ogg as your primary format and then transcoding to wma when transferring to your mp3 player. This is what I do ... the Nomad II MG in my bag (yep, the original MG) is full of 80 kbit wma files.

Of course when players support OGG once and for all, we will be able to have high bitrate OGG on our hard drives and then use bitrate peeling to create still-excellent-sounding low bitrate OGGs to carry around with us.

In to build Ogg Vorbis support into hardware players a decoder implementation that uses integer math is required. The current Xiph implementation uses floating point math, which most hardware decoders do not have. The main impediment to writing an integer math version of the decoder was, until recently, the lack of a good Vorbis specification. See Rob Leslie's complaint from April 2002 (commented here ).

Since the specification is now available, building an integer implementation should now be feasible and hardware implementations may be forthcoming. Is anyone working on this?

Check out this page for information on how ogg vorbis and other computer realted things were named.

Here is a quote from that page related to ogg vorbis

Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story. Ogg Vorbis is the current CODEC in development as part of the Ogg multimedia project, begun immediately after Fraunhofer issued its 'Letter of Infringement' to freeware MP3 encoder efforts. Vorbis is intended to go head-to-head with the two current MPEG-4 compressions, AAC and TwinVQ.

The reasoning behind all the names etc is explained
here

The difference is quite noticeable.

Have a listen. Unless you're mostly deaf you might be in for a nice surprise.

Dude, your sig should be linked to vorbis.com. Xiph is the .org.

I guess you are the geek. I have no idea what "fantasy character" OGG is named after (I believe you, it is just that you would have to be a geek to realize that it is a fantasy character).

Well, I'm geek enough to read Slashdot, which has mentioned in past articles that "Ogg Vorbis" has something to do with Terry Pratchett. I just looked up the FAQ at the Vorbis website, which pointed me to this page that confirms that Vorbis is from a character in one of his books, and Ogg is from the old game Netrek.

I know you asked for Win32, but please forgive me: I want to put in a plug for Grip, the GTK-based ripping program.

Grip includes cdparanoia, tools for reliable extraction of audio data. Another fine xiph.org product!

I like Grip enough that I do all my CD ripping from Linux now.

steveha

Ogg rules, check it for yourself: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html. Don't reply before having read the page and listened to the samples. :)

Look especially at http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp, http://www.vorbis.com/download.psp and http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/!

Here is a mirror

1994? The first slashdot article about them was from 2000; mp3s started getting popular around 1997ish; Fraunhofer started enforcing their patents (according to xiph.org in 1998...

Most web-accessible e-mails are the result of publically accessible mailing list archives. For example, Vorbis mailing list archives.

There was this product awhile back that was kind of an integrated low-level sound synth and sequencer/drum machine for the normal, 4-color gameboy. It was only available in europe, and you could make these REALLY funky tiny little techno tunes on it. Very aphexy. Does anyone remember the name of this, or have a link?

I would probably have more fun with a sequel to that, than this... but that's just me. That being said, this soundpro thing is an absolutely amazing work of engineering. I mean, LOOK at that thing.. it's tiny, it has a 512 MB upper ceiling, it's mac-compatible, and it's CHEAP. And this part really impresses me:

Besides playing songs in the standard MP3 and Windows Media Audio formats, the SongPro device will also play a proprietary SongPro Audio, or SPA, format that will use the Game Boy's screen to display lyrics and pictures.

That makes me happy.. it's always cool when people try to push a device like the Game Boy to the limit of its abilities, rather than just saying "well, we have an mp3 player in it, that's impressive enough on its own, lets stop here". -_-

I wonder how hard it would be to create a gameboy version of Vib Ribbon and then stuff it inside the SongPro II along with the mp3 player? ^_^ Eh, that's probably pushing it.

That being said, I dunno. If you just want a handheld thingy that plays mp3s and games, i still say-- i've said this on slashdot before-- it might be worth a shot to try to hack the iPod to have a first-gen gameboy emulator on it :) I still have no idea if that's POSSIBLE, but by all accounts the iPod has an ARM chip, a 4-color lcd screen and some buttons. I'm not certain that reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware would be more difficult than designing a system that stores 512 MB of mp3s in the backslot of a Game Boy :) Is this relevant? Is this? Anyway, if you could get it to work, that would be way more expensive than gameboy+songpro, but a MUCH nicer form factor than this lumpy songpro thing :)

Busterman will rise again

Hmm. I wondered about this, and found this on the dev list.

From what I read the substanitve reason seems to be potential IPR problems (Apple's clause is vague, but worrying), rather than technical issues.

hth

Hmm. I wondered about this, and found this on the dev list.

From what I read the substanitve reason seems to be potential IPR problems (Apple's clause is vague, but worrying), rather than technical issues.

hth

Oh, come on, Xiph is great at marketing! I mean, how could you forget Moaning Goat Meter?

According to someone on the Vorbis User and Discussion List, "Ogg Vorbis" is named after the "ogg tactical maneuver" in Netrek and Vorbis after the Terry Pratchett character from the book Small Gods.

What does the name "Ogg Vorbis" mean?

First, Vorbis was taken from a character of an ''exquisitor'' in the book
"Small Gods," a title in a series of Terry Pratchett fantasy novels.
Formally, Vorbis is the name for the specific audio compression scheme used
to create Ogg Vorbis files. It is ultimately part of the Ogg Vorbis CODEC
project (a branch of the overarching, open-multimedia Ogg project), which is
headed by Christopher Montgomery and his team.

According to their site, it's actually Thor. Although I agree the guy looks much more semitic than scandinavian, the far-fetched explanation they came up with is quite endearing.

later,
Jess

See http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis/200204/0300.ht ml for more information.

If one goes to the Ogg Vorbis page would show that the latest they have is RC3. Close, but no cigar. Maybe we should wait on yelling at xiph about not having a clearly defined standard before they finish writing it? In my opinion, that is why it has not yet been implemented in portably audio players.
Personally, I long ago have been using OGG and its a great format. Love the quality.

See this thread for details.