TheKompany: tkcOggRipper: Easy-to-use Ogg Vorbis C

GonzoJohn writes "Looks like TheKompany has released an ogg rippoer for CDs: "tkcOggRipper is a freely available (but not GPL) program for easily and conveniently ripping CDs into the Ogg Vorbis format. If you are not familiar with Ogg Vorbis, it is available from Xiph (www.xiph.org). It compresses smaller and creates higher fidelity files than MP3. Ogg Vorbis also doesn't have any license time bombs or restrictions associated with it as MP3 does. You can look here to see what we mean. MP3 royalties will cost you either directly as a producer or indirectly as a consumer. One problem with Ogg Vorbis has been a lack of easy to use tools for ripping CDs into the Ogg Vorbis format -- they were confusing or command line based. This led us to write tkcOggRipper, which couldn't be more easy to use. Pop in a CD, pick an ouput directory and select a "Quality" setting, and go. tkcOggRipper is currently available for Linux and Windows, and we hope to release a version for Mac OS X soon."

Comments

Techinically...

[Apreche]

mp3 is not free and ogg is. However, mp3 doesn't cost me anything. I use winamp and cdex. That's really all i need to fit all my mp3 needs, encoding, decoding, playing. All for free. So even though it's not technically free I don't care.
Also from an audio quality standpoint ogg does have higher quality audio at lower bitrates. Which allows you to save hard drive space and retain audio quality. But you know what? I don't care about hard drive space. I've got a 40 gigabyte drive I fill up with videos and mp3s. If I need something to be high quality I'll encode it with 128-320 VBR0 quality = best. Even better I'll just make a 320kbps mp3.

And for you crazy audiophiles. I can tell the difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a CD. It's very apparent that a lot of sound is missing. But my ears are good, and a 320kbps mp3 might as well be a CD. If you can tell the difference between the highest quality mp3 and the higest quality ogg, you deserve a medal, because you have better ears than any other human being on earth.

So unless you are a dog, bird, or superman with super hearing. Who cares if you use ogg or mp3? It all depends on whether your disk space/quality preference. I personally couldn't care less. A high bitrate mp3 is small enough. At least it's smaller than a 40MB wav.

So stop the ogg/mp3 wars. It's personal preference, give it up.