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!"
That's all well and good, but I've already ripped/encoded/downloaded/burned around 90 gigs of 160/192 mp3's, and many friends of mine have mp3 collections ranging from 5-100 gigs. Why would we want to let all that time and effort go to waste just to take advantage of differences that will mainly appeal to audiophiles, and not casual listeners looking for free music? But I suppose I should just stop downloading MP3's and toss my 135 odd MP3 cds in the trash because OGG would let me choose how stereo coupling is done!
I also know a lot of people who own portable MP3 players and built car MP3 players. I guess they would be ready and willing to return their $200 MP3 players and take apart those silly car rigs they spent so much money and effort on, because, after all, OGG lets you strip away parts of the files to make lower bitrate streams - without re-coding!
And I'm sure as a serious music connoisseur you would know about all the big mp3 groups that operate on IRC. I guess you should go tell EGO and KSI that they can have more than 2 audio channels with OGG (GASP!) and they will see the error of their ways and delete all their old MP3 release archives, disband, and reform as OGG distributors!
And let's not forget how much of a phenomena MP3 has become. Napster became an international celebrity, every major entertainment company has hopped on the MP3 bandwagon, and the general public has embraced MP3. But they obviously would be willing to abandon their MP3 obsession if they knew OGG was open sourced! (Oh wait, the average person doesn't know or care at all that MP3 is officially a proprietary format).
Maybe OGG has some minor quality differences that might make it sound a little better than MP3 in general. Maybe I would tell if I were actually able to find a reasonable selection of OGG or if I actually cared enough to make some myself, which I don't. After all , I already have my 90 gigs of MP3's, and I can find good quality MP3's of any song I want readily. Why would anyone want to start from scratch when they can already get everything they want without any trouble? MP3 is here to stay. Nobody knows the name "OGG," and if they did, they'd probably just ask, "What the hell kind of dumbass name is that?"
Like most Slashdot arguments, OGG makes sense from a technical standpoint, but fails to have any practicality whatsoever.
UniSys, GIF, Patent
Nice neat compression algorithm. Lossless. People liked it. Poularity hit critical mass. Lawsuit was filed. Now you can't create a GIF unless you license the tech. Think about that next time you imagine MP3 sounds all that much better. Do you really want ogg to be at PNG-status when the lawsuit is filed? Let's hope not.
Hope this isn't redundant, as I haven't followed this issue that closely. Then again, it seems like it doesn't sink in until repetition 367 or so around here some times.