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!"

Comments

Re:Ogg Vorbis Quality

[zerocool^]

someone mod my parent up. funniest comment i've seen in days.

Re:Why would I want to give up MP3s?

[rhizome]

What is going to motivate anyone but idealogically motivated open source advocates to switch to Ogg Vorbis?

Well, there are any number of reasons which would be best researched on oggvorbis' website/FAQ, but your point seems to be that "people" need to use Ogg in order for it to "win out". This is a silly and narrowminded premise that valorizes dominance and...monopolies.

There is no need for there to be one encoding format any more than there needs to be only one OS. Choice is something that can be preserved by supporting alternative formats (even if they're of better quality ;). This support can come in many forms, and the most effective forms of support that I can think of are availability and usability.

People who are tech-friendly and willing to be early adopters are in a crucial position to get set up for encoding Ogg, dealing with plugins, etc. This is important because it *makes .ogg files available". There won't be any reason to listen to .ogg files if there aren't any to listen to. "People" aren't going to be able to listen to these .ogg files if it's too complicated to go get a plugin or set up MIME types or something, so player support is important to make it easy for Joe Random Lamer to listen. Keep in mind that JRL has no concept of file formats. If there's a file that his default player (thinking "Windows") doesn't play, they'll just go on to something else. If the player supports .ogg (among others), then the person can listen to a file without having to deal with the complications.
So, on the face of it you've got a problem with .ogg not being ubiquitous. Same here. But the problem of .ogg becoming a prevalent format is easy to solve: start making .ogg files! Nobody has to "switch" to .ogg except for people doing the encoding, which is just as easy in *nix as in Windows as it is for MP3's. If you think MP3 is a better-sounding or faster or whatever format than .ogg, then that's fine. But what are you going to do as the major companies start clamping down on MP3 in favor of DRM formats? Certainly none of this matters to someone who encodes CDs (or whatever) they bought and are not going to be trading MP3s, but every time these files trade hands or are posted for public consumption it's an opportunity to let someone know there are other (better sounding ;) choices out there. It's time for people to stop allowing themselves to be scandalized by the MP3 hysteria and just move on. Ideological? Sure, in the sense that maintaining a range of choice is an ideal.