What is Ogg Vorbis?
See my list of software that will play Ogg Vorbis Audio.I can almost hear some of you saying now, "why don't you just make mp3 files, they're the standard format?" and "what the heck is Ogg Vorbis?".
Well, MP3 isn't the be all and end all of music encoding. The MP3 format is weighed down in patents, restrictive licences, royalties, court cases etc etc. On top of that, it's old technology, yesterday's news.
Ogg Vorbis is a new high tech replacement for MP3; and it's Free. No patents, no restrictive licences, anyone can use it and you will always be able to play the audio files. You are free to use the audio codec in any way you like.
That's why it is natural for me to offer my recordings in Ogg Vorbis format. Anyone will be able to play them without having to pay for expensive software, agree to restrictive licences or be told by some company or patent holder what they are allowed to do with my music.
Like MP3, Ogg Vorbis is a lossy format. This means that some of the music information in the file is lost when it is compressed. However, compared to other codecs such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis does this very well.
