Slashdot Mirror
Ogg The Conqueror? RC2 Is Out
jonathan_ingram writes: "There has been a lot of discussion recently in Slashdot about sound compression formats. Much has been focused on
Ogg Vorbis, but the most recent version available has been a beta released in Feburary.
Today, RC2 of Vorbis
has been released. The most important of the
many changes
is
channel coupling,
which means that Vorbis can now encode bitsteams at a much lower
bitrate than before.
Try it out today!"
Vorbis developer Nick D'Amato has a working Quicktime component that lets Quicktime Player, the Quicktime plugin, iTunes, and any other QT app play vorbis files. See this thread from vorbis-dev for details, and download the plugin to help test it out.
Our "The Name Sucks!"/"The name Rulez!" mail ratio is about 50/50. Some of you have threatened to kill us if we change the name, some of you have threatened to kill us if we don't. So you're gonna hear what I think about it. I'm not going to waste the opportunity my minor fame gives me for a healthy round of peer-mockery.
<tongue-in-cheek>
<neeneer-neener>
I Like The Name. I Wrote the Software. The Name Stays. </neener-neener>
But there's more to this story than 'nyah nyah'. The 'rename Ogg!' forces have provided me with some of my favorite mail ever. I recall fondly the guy who went on, in great detail, why 'Ogg Vorbis' sucks, and that I must adopt 'a cutting edge, truly kick-ass name like "FreeMP3"!!!!!'
As for 'Ogg Vorbis', I hadn't really meant the 'Vorbis' part to get tacked on. The name of the format is Ogg. Just Ogg. Vorbis happens to be the first codec. Had 'Vorbis' been perhaps one more syllable (like, say 'Sorensen'), we wouldn't have this problem. People would just call it 'Ogg' like God (that's me) intended. Of course, particularly obsessive people *do* occasionally say 'QuickTime Sorensen', but they don't get invited to parties much, and when invited, they are shunned. 'Course they're usually just arguing with the punch bowl so shunning is easy.
I don't want my users to be shunned at parties, so I'm gonna help you out here. Just call it 'Ogg'. Ogg is a good, simple, very satisfying word.
It makes a good noun, a better verb and can even be used effectively in a curse. It is a real word and contains no numbers. It has only two unique characters, making it simpler than mp3. It is only one syllable, making it shorter to say than mp3. If you still can't handle it, try reboot-reinstall.
</tongue-in-cheek>
Monty
xiph.org
In most cases, a 60kbps OGG file sounds as good as an 128k mp3. An 80k OGG is as good as 160k mp3 and half the size.
If you are serving audio streams, you can actually strip away parts of the files to make lower bitrate streams--without re-coding. (wow!) MP3 can't.
You can have more than 2 audio channels. MP3 can't.
The comment fields are well defined and you can have whatever attributes you want, with strings as long as necessary. ID3 for mp3s is a hack; string lengths are limited and you can't add easily add your own fields.
If you have a portable player, you would appreciate the smaller size with high quality.
In the future, you can select how you want stereo coupling done (not in this release). (Mp3 can.)
If you make computer games, you have a high quality free way of adding a lot of music to your games. (possibly patents for mp3)
You can do 44.1khz and 48 khz audio.
You can concatenate multiple streams together to make one file, and it will play correctly. You can also cut portions out and paste them together without re-encoding.
Ogg's are exactly the same length as the original WAVs--something MP3 lacks--so that when you make recordings of live shows, gaps don't appear in you r audio.
The encoder sounds good by default, so music traded on file sharing systems sounds good (unlike all those terrible 128k mp3s encoded by anything that isn't LAME).
Got friends?