OGG
Ogg Vorbis is similar to MP3 or AAC compression formats, but with one important difference. It is completely free, unpatented, and open-source. There are actually two terms here: Ogg is the file container that should one day contain both audio and video, while Vorbis is the actual audio compression designed to be contained within it. The .ogg container may embed other formats, though, like FLAC or Speex. This is important because the Vorbis compression scheme is optimized for music and general-purpose audio, not low-bit rate speech compression, and it has no lossless compression option. Vorbis supports 6-channel (5.1) audio, and is fairly well supported by software but almost unseen in the hardware player market. It's royalty-free nature has made it popular with some game developers, though. It is used several PC games including Unreal Tournament 2003, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, to name a few.
Ogg Vorbis is currently the third best format for datarates above ~160 kpbs, the second best format for datarates of ~96 to ~160, but it is also the greatest quality format for bitrates below ~96 kbps. Ogg Vorbis is 100% free and open source (it will never have a cover charge) and it appears development will never cease. At a beta stage, Ogg Vorbis is already among the leaders of lossy audio compression and improvements are occurring steadily. Ogg Vorbis has it's greatest user base within the open-source community and among Linux users - many of whom would not use any format besides Ogg Vorbis due to legalities and a proprietary nature. It is believed that Ogg Vorbis will have hardware support in the near future.
You can convert any audio format to Ogg Vorbis. However, converting from one lossy format, like MP3, to another lossy format, like Vorbis, is generally a bad idea. Both MP3 and Vorbis encoders achieve high compression ratios by throwing away parts of the audio waveform that you probably won't hear. However, the MP3 and Vorbis codecs are very different, so they each will throw away different parts of the audio, although there certainly is some overlap. Converting a MP3 to Vorbis involves decoding the MP3 file back to an uncompressed format, like WAV, and recompressing it using the Ogg Vorbis encoder. The decoded MP3 will be missing the parts of the original audio that the MP3 encoder chose to discard. The Ogg Vorbis encoder will then discard other audio components when it compresses the data. At best, the result will be an Ogg file that sounds the same as your original MP3, but it is most likely that the resulting file will sound worse than your original MP3. In no case you will get a file that sounds better than the original MP3.
Since many music players can play both MP3 and Ogg files, there is no reason that you should have to switch all of your files to one format or the other. If you like Ogg Vorbis, then we would encourage you to use it when you encode from original, lossless audio sources (like CDs). When encoding from originals, you will find that you can make Ogg files that are smaller or of better quality (or both) than your MP3s. |
