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The good people of Ogg Vorbis have a new beta release out (number 4) for which they claim better compression, nicer sound, fewer bugs and more protein than the last. While that's nice enough, that's not the only news on the Vorbis front: probably more important in the long run is that the guys behind Vorbis have formed a non-profit called Xiph.org to replace the S-class corporation they've been developing as for a while, Xiphophorous. Emmett of BinaryFreedom had a cool chat with Vorbis developers Christopher Montgomery and Jack Moffit about the new release,foundation, encoding, and hardware capable of playing back the Vorbis format -- well worth reading. Plus, you can download the new beta (and some sample tunes), too. Oh, yes, and there's the little matter of moving from the GPL ^[?] to BSD license ^[?] , with what they say is RMS' blessing. You will have to read to find out why, though;)

The good people of Ogg Vorbis have a new beta release out (number 4) for which they claim better compression, nicer sound, fewer bugs and more protein than the last. While that's nice enough, that's not the only news on the Vorbis front: probably more important in the long run is that the guys behind Vorbis have formed a non-profit called Xiph.org to replace the S-class corporation they've been developing as for a while, Xiphophorous. Emmett of BinaryFreedom had a cool chat with Vorbis developers Christopher Montgomery and Jack Moffit about the new release,foundation, encoding, and hardware capable of playing back the Vorbis format -- well worth reading. Plus, you can download the new beta (and some sample tunes), too. Oh, yes, and there's the little matter of moving from the GPL ^[?] to BSD license ^[?] , with what they say is RMS' blessing. You will have to read to find out why, though;)

3.1415926535 writes: "In this article on C|Net, Thompson Multimedia's vice president of new business Henri Linde openly threatens the Vorbis project. The quote is, 'We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property. We think it is likely they are infringing.'" Considering Ogg Vorbis is GPL, you'd think they'd already know.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to an article on CNET.com, a group of programmers at iCast have created a free alternative to MP3, named Vorbis. According to the article, they're planning on showing a beta of Vorbis "at next week's MP3.com summit in San Diego," that it will be released without IP restrictions, and that it will provide equal or better quality than MP3. Gotta love free software!"

mental666 writes: "Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free general purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC. It sounds great; I've tried it and while the file size is slightly larger than mp3, the quality is there. There's also an xmms plugin in the cvs module. For details check out The Xiph Web site."

mental666 writes: "Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free general purpose compressed audio format for high quality (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same class as audio representations including MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC. It sounds great; I've tried it and while the file size is slightly larger than mp3, the quality is there. There's also an xmms plugin in the cvs module. For details check out The Xiph Web site."