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The Future of Ogg Vorbis
Brett writes "The author of MAD, the fixed point MP3 decoder comments on what is wrong with Ogg Vorbis, with a response from jack, one of the founders of the format.
"Ogg Vorbis may be the holy grail of patent-free audio compression, but there are some serious issues blocking its path to widespread acceptance. Unfortunately most of us are powerless to correct the situation; the problems must be addressed by Vorbis' creators. "
The rest of the of the story is currently running on K5." And Jack's response is enlightening as well.
So, the problem is that there is no specification
of Ogg Vorbis. There we go, whole problem in one line.
what strikes me most in the article is the sheer arrogance with wich the author tries to discredit the xiph.org people. the author immediately assumes the worst from them (the xiph.org people). especially the argument where he states that (i quote)"In effect, Xiph.Org presently has a monopoly on the only viable implementations of Vorbis."
come one, it's open source, and it's in development. the author of the k5 story is clearly a coder, so start to work on it. help them write the specs, help build a version of the libvorbis that doesn't require a platform that should natively support floating-point calculations, etc etc.
the vorbis people would welcome the guy, but instead of coding, he complains. now that's what i call constructive feedback... not!
As a consumer, it's more important that the standard that are adopted for me don't interfer with my daily life. Using Mp3 or OV or just plain WAV isn't going to be my decisions anyway. I can only vote with my dollars, but I won't be paying for any of these system regardless. This is one decision the slashdot crowd should not make. Do some consumer or gallop polls.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Fixed point MP3 decoder? Is that like Fractint on the PC, which was much faster than anything else because it used integer operations?
What is the fastest MP3 decoder (assuming output quality is moderately important, but not everything)?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
to go with his whine.
In his article he states:
Unfortunately it is neither highly optimized nor well-suited for all platforms, particularly embedded systems and other hardware lacking native floating-point support.
'Tremor' is the name of a fixed-point implementation optimized for certain embedded systems. Xiph.Org has recently begun to commercially license this implementation, but it is not otherwise freely available.
I suppose he has a legitamate complaint that the specs aren't complete...but that's really up to the author. They're providing a drop in library that's free. Try getting that from Freuhoffer.
His other point seems silly to me. Honestly...what kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player in it? Your microwave? A candy dispenser? I mean honestly... if you're going to make a player for music, you really should have the hardware support. (They don't rip the computers out of a microwave and try to adapt them to portable MP3 players.
From the Vorbis guy's response it's clear what the problem is: The idea is great, the plan is good, but the deliverables just take time to materialize. Nothing bad about that, it's true for practically every piece of software (or related, like the Ogg Vorbis specification.)
Regardless of whether the author of the K5 piece is right about the points he discusses, the Ogg Vorbis creators should take his criticism to heart instead of dismissing it. It's not about whether all those points are valid, so trying to prove that they are not doesn't accomplish anything. They should understand that apparantly they have a problem communicating their plans to their possible supporters from the development community and that what they are doing apparantly makes a strange impression.
They should be glad someone took the time to actually write this down and complain instead of just forgetting about their project and doing something else.
I can see one main way for Ogg to gain widespread acceptance quickly - as the sound track of your run-of-the-mill, MPAA-angering DiVX. MP3 soundtracks only allow for 2 channels, whereas Ogg will allow for n. The main thing that pisses me off about DiVX is the lack of 5.1.
Imagine how widespread Ogg would be if it was the favored soundtrack of the DiVX generation.
Sorry to say it, but I cannot use it on my iPod and with iTunes. I ripped my 125+ audio-cds to MP3 as when I got my iPod.
I hate it when people comes up with this kind of reasons for not switching to a free format and making the world a better place... but now I do it myself. It is a pity. It is a shame.
But maybe I am wrong? Has anyone installed Ogg in iTunes, and is there any chans to hack the iPod?
license fees don't matter in commercial software
They don't? I would assume the fees do matter because they raise the price of commercial software. I don't know any more than the average person about the commercial software industry, so please explain. I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious.
Developers: We can use your help.
Its not arrogance. We all want Ogg to be in wider use and to appear in portable players. From this discussion it is very clear that Ogg Vorbis is still very much in development and needs to be much more stable before anyone starts making software and hardware Ogg players. An incomplete specification and a reference implementation is not sufficient.
I use madplay and I'd like to see a version for Ogg, but at this stage it doesn't seem like Xiph are ready for developers. As they say, wait for 1.0 final and the promised complete documentation.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
What kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player? How about a car stereo? Like, say.. an empeg? Which doesn't have a much in the way of CPU, including the fine lack of a floating point processor?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
..because I could correct the idiot who moderated this Interesting. Is there a "Misinformative" rating?
Anyway, not to interrupt a fun GPL thread, but Ogg Vorbis is BSD-licensed precisely to encourage adoption.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Near the very end of Jack's reply, he says something to the effect of, "If you'd like us to get the spec done sooner, here's where you can send money."
I'm not too sure how throwing money at the problem will solve it, as it seems to me that time is the real issue. Of course everyone says that time==money, but perhaps in this case not for all reasonable values of "time"?
-Peter
As open source Ogg Vorbis is released under the GPL/LGPL. However doesn't this prevent companies to integrate the sources into their software ?
Except... Ogg Vorbis isn't released under the GPL/LGPL. The license is basically BSD in form, but different wording.
To quote Jack, which wouldn't be necessary if you had read the linked message:
It's actually Free-er than most Free Software in some ways, siince we chose to prioritize adoption rather than require everyone buy into the LGPL. In essence by giving up a few freedoms with the more lax license, we are preserving freedom because the world will adopt Ogg, the only audio codec right now of it's kind that can be freely implemented.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Not really, divx only specifies the video format. You can plug in any sound codec you want to, including AC3. Here's a nice guide
As open source Ogg Vorbis is released under the GPL/LGPL. However doesn't this prevent companies to integrate the sources into their software ?
This is wrong.
The spec is public domain-- it's not well documented, evidently, but the format itself is public domain.
The utilities are GPLed, so you have to distribute the source to anything that encompases them.
The libraries themselves, however, are under BSD.
See The Ogg Vorbis FAQ.
-Rob
Honestly...what kind of embedded system would have an Ogg player in it? Your microwave? A candy dispenser?
Seems silly now, but what if someone makes a talking microwave, or a talking candy dispenser. Compressing the audio files, even if it is just a voice, would save space.
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
Where did you hear that Ogg Vorbis [by which I assume you mean the reference implementation libraries] was released under the GPL/LGPL?
The sample tools are GPL - but the libraries are under a license similar to the 3-clause [ie old] BSD. This is specifically to encourage widespread adoption of the standard. Think about it: if you want to add Ogg Vorbis support to your application or embedded box, you won't be borrowing the command-line tools, just the libraries.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
His browser is running under X.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
For example, I am not aware of any flash portable pocket player that has an FPU. That's because it's entirely possible to do MP3/WMA in integer. Nobody is going to fit an expensive and battery draining processor into their product just to support an extreme minority codec.
By using floating point for the algorithms, libvorbis is ruled out from nearly all embedded devices. At the moment it pretty much only runs (in real time) on PC/Mac systems.
The entire point in this statement/response is setting expectations. The programmers expects to recieve the same support about the format that he got when he was developing MAD... the format developers, not being commercially funded, spend their time working on the tangible aspects of the application (bugs, libs, etc) and not the supplemental portions (specs). They expect that people would rather have the software to use over some dry RFC...
I'm didn't write the post you are responding to but generally speaking software licenses are quite cheap compare to the total cost of a project.
:)
Lets say you have 20 people developing a game for two years (graphics artists+programmers).Lets say they have a medium salary of, say, $50 000 a year (salaries is a bit lower in the game sector than other developer businesses). This gives a total cost of 2 million dollars just for the pure developer labour + no exras.
Now, anyone who have run a business knows that it's a hell of a lot more expensive than just salaries for the programmers and artist. I would suspect around 3 million US dollars would be needed just to make it.
Now, I don't remember what midas (for example) costs but it might be around $5 000 USD or so per project.
This is about 0.16% of the total costs, not that critical if I may say so
Open source developers have this possession about low costs, nothing should cost anything.
Thats not neaded, people DO pay for good stuff like midas.
(Midas is a popular soundsystem for games)
most ppl talking like this should get a life, and if this bunch of OSS-programmers are not able to coordinate the production of software so that users in fact can use it then say hello to microsoft-linux. its over.
most end-user tools where in fact programmed by at least two people, who could coordinate their efforts. (gimp for example) but as soon as more cooks come in the stuff gets buggy, everyone has different targets, and people think they have to express themselves in producin l33t-stuff that in fact no one needs or can use, other then step back and do nothing. if you dont have people that get money for their work on the product the quality decreases.
I know this is going to sound petty, but I have a problem with the name. I mean, mp3 is short, catchy, easy to remember, and doesn't sound dumb to people that aren't techie. Imagine saying "Look at my new portable Ogg Vorbis player I got for my birthday" to your non techie spouse. "Ogg what!?!"
_______
2B1ASK1
I love these losers who seem to think that all developers exist to serve them.
It reminds me of the people who show up on the Hurd lists and say that "if you had Sound support, I'd dig in and be a kernel hacker". If he's so keen on a spec, he could always join the team and help write one.
But he's too lazy.
Talk is cheap. Sure vorbis isn't perfect. It's Free and I use it though. Cheers to the xiph folks for bringing it to us.
Tks,
Jeff Bailey
I would hope that if I were the engineer of a car stereo that was designed to play Ogg/MP3, I would include hardware that would make it a decent player. We're talking stereo here. I'm sure most engineers in the audio field try for quality when they're designing a system, even a low end one. Do you think Apple uses a 6502 as the heart of the iPod? Or Diamond(SonicBlue) at the heart of their Rio players? If you're designing something for a particular task, I assume you would try to build in hardware that was suited for the task. A car stereo would be one place I would think they would try incorporate decent audio decompression hardware...
For embedded, you want as cheap as possible while still able to do the job. The CPUs commonly used in embedded designs often don't have floating point capabilities - too much silicon, too little need. Complexity means not only unit cost but power usage and cooling requirements.
Sure, you can ship a machine with a 486DX instead of an ARM, but the optimal solution is to figure out how to use fixed point. Software-emulated floating point won't cut it either - too inefficient. In the embedded world, "inefficient" doesn't mean "oh well, just so long as the CPU is fast enough to handle it", it means "unit cost is higher than necessary since we should have been able to get away with a slower CPU".
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Shameless plug... For some who might be interested in compression voice for VoIP, there's also the Speex voice codec. For voice (not music) it provides good quality at lower bit-stream than Vorbis.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The problem with OV is that it doesn't make enough of a jump in compression from its predecessor, the MP3 format.
MP3s will continue to rein supreme, Iron Chef style, until someone releases a new compression algorythm that saves at least 10x more space. It is too much work to convince MOST people to use other forms of music compression when there is negligable savings (in quality and size) for the average user.
------
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And what does 'Audio Decompression Hardware' mean to you? You rezlize that any such hardware would be format-specific, right? You realize that only very large corps can really afford to get ASICs fab'd, right? And you realize that it's likely much more cost effective, as well as much more *flexible*, to shove the latest-generation embedded CPU (which is probably $20 in quantity) into the machine, and do your audio decomp in software? Well, obviously you don't realize one of those or you wouldn't have asked the question...
--Z
Sorry if I sound like I'm trolling. I'm not. I'm just being honest.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
The Ogg reply says that the only two standards bodies they know about are IETF and W3C. Well, what about IEEE? What about SMPTE? Those are technical bodies that deal with these kinds of standards all the time.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I really don't think 10x better compression would be a huge selling point. Maybe for streaming media. But as more people adopt broadband they'll continue to stick with MP3.
::)
As far as portable players go, you can get a 10gig or 20gig Nomad that will hold more CD's than the average person will ever own.
Am I wrong?
-- taking over the world, we are.
I seemed to have missed the part in his response were he said "Xiph.org has not applied for nor has any patents that it intends to use later for commercial gain". Can anyone provide a link to any reference to them saying that if they did have any patents or pat. pending related to Ogg that they would provide them on a royalty free basis to the OSS/FS community?
prisoner# msce18xxxxx. Currently planning my escape.
..., released yesterday, now supports Ogg Vorbis files as well. That should help the .ogg format to be more widely accepted, shouldn't it?
"Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
Personally I thought the news that Ogg Vorbis is now shipped with Winamp 2.80 was the news of they day. Any guess as to how many times over this will double the installed base of computers capable of playing Vorbis-files?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
This is somewhat besides the point, but in case noone had noticed, the latest Winamp 2.80 ships with Vorbis support by default.
:)
This is very nice because:
a) no more explaining how to install plugins to less-literate users
b) it seems that the legal team of AOL considers Vorbis to be patent-safe (they looked into the matter, which is why this lasted so long)
c) some of the WinAmp developers have become Vorbis freaks
--
GCP
"the average Joe could care less about Free or Open Source software"
Free? The average Joe shares his installation CD's like he shares his mp3's.
Free is what software is to the average Joe.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.
I totally agree. As the hardware developer on a portable mp3 player I can tell you that unless you want to use a hardware decoder (the MAS... chip) and get locked into a particular format (MP3) you're need an software implementation sans floating point. While it is possible to get embedded proc's with floating point capability, the price is simply not worth it in most cases. For instance an EP7312 with no floating point costs about $20, an EP9312 with floating point costs more like $50. Which is why small companies with a low budget like mine choose the cheaper proc's. We are totally open to supporting Ogg, but our first release will support MP3 only because we do have a free library that runs on our proc and runs on it well (well we pay 25 cents per player to Fraunhoffer, but I think that's entirely reasonable)
sorry for the boldness. looks like i forgot to close a tag. Preview damnit preview!
They are decent processors - you can do MP3/WMA/Whatever without an FPU. Hell, you can play Quake on them at a reasonable speed. Same goes for Vorbis - it "just" needs an integer implementation, which is rather a large task that nobody in the public domain wants to take on, and no business wants to spend development time on.
The empeg contains a 200MHz StrongARM. Recent Rio portables contain ARM7s (not sure how fast, I'd guess ~40MHz). They play WMAs and MP3s because there are decent fixed-point software decoders for those formats. Nobody is going to put an FPU in a Walkman form factor (battery life, remember); nor is it a good idea to use a hardware codec which can't be field-upgraded in software.
Peter
Cost of portable mp3 player ~$100US
Cost of licensing decoder $0.25US
What the hell do I care if my costs go up down 25 cents per player?
Then only problem with Ogg is that it is the flavor of the month and can only dilute the mp3 music scene, drawing off the most technically capable users. Mp3 as imperfect as it is, is the de facto standard of online p2p.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
"Ogg" doesn't bother me, but I've heard enough people complain about the name that I will propose and alternate, yet compatible name.
OVA (Ogg Vorbis Audio codec)
"Ova"....mmm...a collection of audio eggs from which will sprout new sonic life...
It would also help to lobby people like Winamp, LimeWire, WinMX etc. to include Ogg as a recognized format by default making it easier to locate and play music.
What I'm going to say is what software engineers already know.
The specifications for software are much, much more important than your implementation. If the specifications are written completely and well, the design of said software project will "fall" from the specifications, and the implementation will "fall" from the design. "Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact; at best, you will have an incomplete specs document (because of developers who incompletely document their own code), and at worst you will have WRONG specs (because a developer makes an innocent typo that doesn't get caught).
Sure, the ogg stream format and the vorbis audio format have been frozen for a year; however, code is not self-documenting. One of my wisest professors said that the only man he has known that writes self-documenting code is Knuth, and you might be a good hacker, but you are NOT Knuth. Every mortal man needs specifications and design documents to be able to make ANYTHING out of ANY piece of code; hell, I have some relatively simple Java apps I hacked together six months ago that would read like Greek if I didn't have my specs and my design documents.
How can anyone expect to reasonably use an undocumented format?
My problem with Ogg is sound quality. Now don't get me wrong, i'm not saying it's worse than mp3, but i don't think it's any better (i know there are "expert" polls that say otherwise, but i've also seen "expert" polls that agree as well). Either way however, it doesn't sound as good as mp3pro (imo, and i'm something of an expert myself), and the files are larger! I realize Ogg is much more widespread than mp3pro, but i doubt that will last long.
I do understand that there are situations where you need a "free" codec; and in that case i say go Ogg. But, for the rest of the time, i say go mp3pro!
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
How about: "Ogg Vorbis. It whips Freuhoffer's ass."
I just recorded it and played it back over the company intercom. Damn, it sure is funny to hear it outloud. Only one problem -- what does a squealing Freuhoffer sound like? I substituted a squealing pig blended with polka music. That should be close...
Yeah, GIF got blown away, it's now scrapped and we use JP(E)G for everything.
... unless you need a graphic to be transparent.
... or want it to animate
... or if you're building template/navigation elements that you don't want marred by artifacts
... or if you're displaying cartoons, technical drawings or anything else that doesn't have many colours but needs to be sharp
This "JPEG is better than GIF so it replaced it" stuff is crazy, you might as well claim "forks are better than knives" or "spanners are better than hammers".
They're complimentary formats, unlike ARJ vs ZIP or MP3 vs Ogg Vorbis. JPEG vs GIF is more like MP3 vs MIDI. (actually that's a reasonable analogy)
I love ogg vorbis, it sounds great, and it being free makes it even better. I will be sooo happy when I can flash upgrade my iRiver Slim X and my wifes iPod to play them, but that may be awhile. The one aspect of Ogg that seems to be the killer app for me is the automatic bitrate reduction. I rip all of my stuff at 320 mp3 for use on my desktop machine, but when I'm jogging, the Slim X has a tendency to skip when playing files of that bitrate. I long for the day when I can downsample the file automatically to 128 for skip protection. Its part of the implementation of ogg vorbis from the beginning, but noone has made an app to do that. For me that would be Ogg Vorbis's killer app, and something that would get me to re rip my cd's into ogg.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
For an open source project?
Hahahahahhahahaha...
The fact that you should never document anything is practicly part of the OSI definition... Documentation is something real engineers do (and do first), not silly coders.
There is floating point in a codec that they wanted in embedded devices? What the heck were they thinking anyway.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I was looking at doing some audio hacks with a compressed format. I was trying hard to find an Ogg Vorbis specification but couldn't find any. Eventually, I gave up and used MP3. Even if I had reverse-engineered the Ogg Vorbis en/decoder, without an official specification, there would have been no guarantee that things would have remained compatible or that I wouldn't have missed some important subtlety.
I had a discussion on /. with Emmett Plant from xiph.org about the fixed point decoder a couple of weeks ago, thought it might be relevant, you can find it here. He makes some interesting, but sometimes short-sighted points about the fixed point decoder.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Hey, at my school they just built a new dorm last year that has apartment-like rooms in it. When I moved in I was suprised to find my microwave telling me I had a message. I thought WTF? Why is my microwave telling me I have a message? So I hit the message button like it told me to, and I got to hear half a conversation about hardware that the guy who was installing it must have been having.
Anyway, talking microwaves exist now. Why? I have no idea.
Anything else is masturbation, which can be fun, but doesn't produce much. Sometimes that's a good thing, but this is not one of those times.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Enjoy!
I think you mean Fraunhofer.
/ScumBag
"Specification" isn't something you can do after-the-fact;
But it happens all the time in real life. C, C++, Fortran and Pascal were all specified after the fact.
Part of the advantage is that when those were being specified, it wasn't just a specification in search of users, they knew that people would use it. Do the implementation first to attract user, and then specify, and there's less of chance you're wasting time.
Secondly, Algol 60 was specified first, then implemented. Algol 60 had call by name, one of the most complex and painful of means of calling arguments, only because they specified first and then discoved what they had specified. Implementation first means that you can find some of the stupid mistakes first, before you write the implementation.
Hahahaha! I think Malda just found a new tagline to replace "News for nerds, stuff that matters"
The lack of a spec makes it hard to do an integer implementation.
How the hell are the Xiph.org people building a codec without a spec? I understand why a spec is desired by the audio gurus that want to implement their own encoders/decoders for Ogg Vorbis but what are Ogg's inventors working off of? Isn't it kind of like trying to build a house or a car with no blueprint for the end product? Seems to me thats a really good way to end up with a lot of uneeded garbage in the codec.
The 9312 isn't released yet, so i dont know where you came up with $50 for it. Also i wasn't aware it had floating point. If you are paying $20 for a 7312 you are paying too much (or ordering in very very small quantities), you can get a strongarm for that price. Lastly i'm fairly certain that the cost on the 7312 includes the cost for the ARM integerized mp3 decoder, you should talk to your cirrus rep about that.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
Did anybody else try setting their comment mode in that K5 story to "dynamic threaded" or "dynamic minimal"? That's really fucking kewl! Why doesn't Slashdot do anything like that? :-(
what strikes me most in the article is the sheer arrogance with wich the author tries to discredit the xiph.org people.
I agree. Acusing xiph.org of being monopolists is beyond asinine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
I am programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
I apologise - the ep9312 is $43.46 (single chip) not $50 - check insight electronics. As for the 20 bucks, you're right, 20 bucks is for low low volumes. it does get way cheaper for more. You're also right about the cost of the decoder being included - but i believe the 25 cents from each chip goes top fraunhoffer as royalty. i could be wrong though. Lastly - the 9312 includes the maverick crunch engine which afaik does floating point.
Come off it. Perl's got specs, you COMMUNIST!!
Sell 100000 players, make EXTRA profit of $25000.
mp3: l33t term for empty.
a: You would too if your head was covered with pubic hair!
(c) slipping roofies into kathleen fent's drinks and selling her skank ass for $25 to half of michigan.
I don't know anything about shoving a cucumber up your own asshole, but I have masturbated while taking a shot. It added an extra sensual feeling, but for me at least, sitting down is my least-favorite jack off position -- at least when I'm doing the pecker pulling :)
...just so you don't have to take your hand off the mouse.
That's for cmd.exe in Windows 2000, BTW.
C, C++, Fortran, and Pascal may have been specified after the fact. However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.
A document describing the grammar of the language + the source code for the implementation of the language (a compiler) is much more descriptive than the implementation (the compiler) alone.
There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar. The notion that you could conceviably write a useful compiler for a language that you only have knowledge of in an informal manner (i.e. me trying to write a Java compiler from just my knowledge of how the Java language works and not from design documents like grammars) is insanity.
Also, you mention Algol 60 being specified and then implemented. Two points:
1. Call-by-name is bizarre, but useful in some cases. Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?
2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.
Implementation before specification = bugfest.
However, if you had studied programming languages you would know that to be able to implement a language you also have to implement a grammar.
To implement any program that reads a file, you have to implement a structure for the file. That's the easy part. It's the semantics - what the bytes mean, instead of how they are ordered, that's the hard part.
There is no way that you could write a compiler without said language grammar.
But it's been done. It's not that hard to discover from studying sample code. The tricky stuff is getting the semantics right, and that wasn't clearly specified in C, C++ or Fortran prior to the standards.
Can you provide proof that the designers of Algol 60 considered the call-by-name parameter passing scheme implemented in that language a fault?
Besides the fact that the designer's own implemenation didn't handle it correctly, because it was too much work? Between call by name, and integer labels, I don't believe there ever has been a complete implementation of Algol 60.
2. The whole point of having a series of steps before you get to implementation is because faults you catch in the requirements, specification, or design stages of development are much cheaper to correct than if you caught that same fault as you were implementing / after the product is already complete.
The point that you're missing, is that people miss problems in specifications all the time. If you implement first, then you are guarenteed to catch anything that's unimplementable or unusable; if you standardize first, then there's a chance they will pass you by.
Implementation before specification = bugfest.
Argument by assertion! How profound. I guess you couldn't find any examples to back up your case, then.
One simple reason - it's called ogg. Call me weird, but I'd rather have a lot of files called .mp3 sitting on my computer than having weird sounding .ogg files.