On Friday the newest version of the Ogg Vorbis music compression format was released. Unlike mp3, Ogg Vorbis is completely open source with source and binaries available for Linux and Windows right now. Ogg Vorbis was created because, although it has become the format of choice for exchanging music online, the mp3 format is not truly free; a royalty fee must be paid to the Fraunhofer Institute of Germany and Thomson Multimedia for all encoding and decoding software. The principle and algorithm of mp3 are not open source.
Ogg Vorbis should be a valuable tool for the on-line exchange of grassroots radio programming and independent music–such as the A-Info Radio Project–which for many years was hampered by the absence of free mp3 encoders. Now mp3 encoders like Music Match Jukebox are freely available, but they are not truly free, since the software company is footing the bill for the royalties in the hope they can sell full versions of the software. Ogg Vorbis should also make it easier for hackers and open source programmers to create their own audio applications, and also allow for improvements to the fidelity of its algorithm. Frankly, mp3 has needed an update for quite some time, which is evident by the fact that RealAudio8, for instance, achieves similar fidelity to mp3 at half the bitrate, using Sony’s ATRAC compression algorithm, which was devloped for minidisc.
Overall, OV creator Christopher Montgomery should be congratulated and thanked for this important addition to the free software universe.
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