Techreview.com has an intresting article on Ogg Vorbis. This open source technology to encode audio should be almost the same quality as the new introduced MP3 Pro technology but as said, it's open source. In this case it means that software producers who want to create a player using this technology don't have to pay a cent.
In this article more about Ogg Vorbis but also some facts and the history of MP3.
Seeking an alternative to MP3 and proprietary formats like Apple's Quicktime and Microsoft's Windows Media, a group of software developers has been working on Ogg Vorbis for nearly 33 months. In a 1999 statement, lead programmer Chris Montgomery wrote that "the Ogg project works to put the foundation standards of Internet audio into the public domain, where all Internet standards belong." |
The preliminary release, available from the Vorbis Web site, is the first version of the codec (encoder/decoder) with all features fully implemented. While not an MP3 product, it achieves comparable performance, backers claim, by attaining "CD quality" at a bit rate of 128 kilobits per second. Next month's official release of Vorbis 1.0 should achieve CD quality in the 80-kilobit-per-second range, comparable to the newly released MP3Pro.
If I'm right some of you are already using this format (I've seen some people noticing it in some reactions), so tell us, does it sound OK ? And don't you think we should better stick to one format, cause with every new format there also comes a new encoder/decoder.
Source: Techreview.com
