Ask Slashdot: Does Anyone Still Use Ogg Vorbis Format? (slashdot.org) 148
23 years ago, Slashdot interviewed Chris Montgomery about his team's new Ogg Vorbis audio format.
But Slashdot reader joshuark admits when he first heard the name, it reminded him of the mushroom underworld in The Secret World of Og. I've downloaded videos from the Internet Archive, and one format is the OGG or Ogg Vorbis player format. I just was wondering with other formats, is Ogg still used anymore after approximately 20-years?
I'm not commenting on good/bad/whatever about the format, just is it still in use, relevant anymore?
The nonprofit Xiph.Org Foundation (which develops Orbis Vogg) started work in 2007 on the high-quality/low-delay format Opus, which their FAQ argues "theoretically" makes other lossy codecs obsolete. "From technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates...) it can replace both Vorbis and Speex, and the common proprietary codecs too."
But elsewhere Xiph.org points out that "The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis." So how is that playing out in 2024? Share your own thoughts in the comments.
Does anyone still use Ogg Vorbis format?
But Slashdot reader joshuark admits when he first heard the name, it reminded him of the mushroom underworld in The Secret World of Og. I've downloaded videos from the Internet Archive, and one format is the OGG or Ogg Vorbis player format. I just was wondering with other formats, is Ogg still used anymore after approximately 20-years?
I'm not commenting on good/bad/whatever about the format, just is it still in use, relevant anymore?
The nonprofit Xiph.Org Foundation (which develops Orbis Vogg) started work in 2007 on the high-quality/low-delay format Opus, which their FAQ argues "theoretically" makes other lossy codecs obsolete. "From technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates...) it can replace both Vorbis and Speex, and the common proprietary codecs too."
But elsewhere Xiph.org points out that "The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis." So how is that playing out in 2024? Share your own thoughts in the comments.
Does anyone still use Ogg Vorbis format?
Ogg who? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope.
I don't even use mp3.
For music I care about, that requires just listening and doing nothing else, FLAC is my goto - for everything else, streaming.
Re: (Score:3)
"Streaming" means you're getting AAC usually.
Re:Ogg who? (Score:4, Informative)
I rip everything to FLAC
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Real users store the raw bytestream.
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Then pipe the bits to /dev/dsp.
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Video games FTW (Score:5, Informative)
Video games use it a lot, given its open source nature. If you go pokeing around the game files you see some Ogg
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One example: Bohemia Interactive used it in the earlier Arma games, but I've seen no sign of ogg in the newer Arma Reforger (future Arma 4 platform). But I'm not keeping up to well with it anymore.
Re:Video games FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I was gonna mention this too. Lots of the games on Steam use it, because it's smaller than mp3 at the same quality and not patent encumbered, and by modern standards no longer considered CPU intensive to decode.
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It also is multi-channel, and can loop seamlessly.
Unity's Preferred Format (Score:5, Informative)
As a game developer, yeah. If I get an audio asset in the game, I'm gonna make it ogg if it isn't because that's what Unity likes the most.
Re:Video games FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
Came here to say that. Speaking as a game developer, it's patent free and well supported. And if your tool setup doesn't support it already, the standard decoder is BSD licensed and it's only about an afternoon's worth of work to get it working on a game console.
CPU usage is negligible too - it was unnoticeable when I used it on the 3DS with it's 266 MHz ARM chip. Any modern gaming device is going to be at least an order of magnitude faster than that.
Basically nails the sweet spot unless you really want uncompressed audio.
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That was because they were idiots. It wouldnt have used more than 1% of one core to decode audio. It is close to free compared to dealing with the extra bandwidth of uncompressed
Re: Video games FTW (Score:2)
UT2004 soundtrack was on Ogg. Still jam to it upon occasion.
Codecs (Score:5, Interesting)
AAC and Opus have pretty much obsoleted Vorbis except for highly CPU constrained systems. And if you're constrained enough, MP3 decodes faster than Vorbis (Realtime on 33Mhz ARM), and is no longer patented.
If you want things libre, your choices are Opus, Vorbis, and MP3. Usually Opus does best, but Opus sometimes has artifacts that don't happen in other codecs. Vorbis does a better job than MP3.
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I don't think AAC obsoleted Vorbis: it was always comparable in quality.
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I don't think AAC obsoleted Vorbis: it was always comparable in quality.
It was comparable on release. Unlike Vorbis which largely stood still, AAC has been developed a lot over the years with many new and somewhat compatibility breaking releases over time along with drastic changes to encoders as well. These days Vorbis is somewhat subpar compared to standard AAC but well and truly blown away by more modern HE-AAC implementations which itself also has multiple improvements over various iterations.
Re: Codecs (Score:4, Informative)
To add, Opus obsoleted Vorbis, and Matroska obsoleted ogg/ogm (webm is a subset of Matroska)
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AAC is the new MP3, it needs licenses and payments to use in commercial products.
Anybody who isn't forced to use it, doesn't.
Vorbis will live forever in video games, etc.
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Vorbis will live forever in video games, etc.
That is a given only because people don't care about audio compression for games anymore. When a typical AAA title comes in at 80GB plus, saving a few hundred MB with a more efficient codec is pointless.
If audio compression were important or relevant then people would have migrated to Opus which is also royalty free.
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AAC-LC decoder patents should also be close to or past expiration as well. That spec was written in 1997, around half a decade after MP3. And the patents for that expired 6 years ago.
Or course not. (Score:3)
Why would you.
If I use something myself today (or 15 years ago), it is going to be flac, space is no longer a consideration for audio.
Also mp3 got much better at higher bitrate and a quick goole says something called "opus" was t4he successor to ogg and I have only just heard about it today becuase well, flac.
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I've come to find that audiophiles get really attached to formats. It's like guys from the 60s and 70s with their Ampex tape decks arguing about audio quality vs. LP albums. Vorbis and Ogg are still supported, well as of about 4 years ago they were.
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Anything above 128 kbps is going to be fairly high quality to peoples ears. While Vorbis still beat .mp3 at these bit rates it's not really noticeable. Above 200kbps plus... might as well use a lossless format, of which FLAC is quite popular.
Medium bit rates is where .ogg had a good use case, 48,64,96 kbps sort of rates. However Opus is better, and has lower latency at these bit rates, and can tolerate the occasional UDP packet loss.
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I would say for mp3, VBR changed that. Back when I moved back from ogg I started to use 256 VBR mp3 and they were fine size wise. Of course not all devices liked VBR back then.
But hey coming from the amiga where is was of a low quality 8 bit sample for the songs (and yess I still wanted computerised music back then), anything was better!
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My audio library is 267 GiB of FLAC, and the ~95% I want to put on my phone is 37 GiB of Opus. Storage space on my phone is not so abundant and convenient that I want to give up 230 GiB of it for lossless compression.
That's why I compress audio files.
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I feel no need to ever have more than 30 tracks on my phone. I probably have more but not a lot.
I could always stream from cloud anyway I guess (data is unlimited), I doubt I will.
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Really? Tell that to my phone. I have 10 GB of MP3's on my phone. If they were uncompressed PCM my phone would be overwhelmed. Also, I have 115 GB of MP3's on my iMac, mostly classical music. You think that's going to all fit on the SSD? Nope! 'Nuf said.
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Yes I get it, some people want a lot on their phone. Go right ahead.
Should I ever want to I can re-eocode for the phone (into whatever).
The files on the phone are throw away, it's not a backup.
You are still keeping flac as the master file. I rememebr they days of re-encoding video for the phone (or pda), you would not say the 320*200 re-eoncode was your keeper would you? Just temporary fluff.
I disagree (Score:2)
Space is not unlimited on my phone. Larger files take more time to transmit or back up. All of this costs me money.
Space is always a consideration, arguably just not as much as in the past.
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Just use an SD card for storage and transferring files. They're cheap and just work
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Iphone users: Crying
Re: I disagree (Score:2)
My 250Gb music collection wants a word with you.
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-3 Mentioned phone again as if that is your only copy rather than temprary fluff.
(It's a poor argument as per my other replies).
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space is no longer a consideration for audio.
I take it you have a PC? With a typical mobile phone releasing with 128/256GB of storage most of which taken up by a system, if you want to carry music with you on a modern device you will likely still be using something other than FLAC.
I have a quick shortcut to transcode my FLACs to AAC for copying to my phone. Because who the **** cares about sound quality when you're on a bus (begging the question if anyone can even tell the difference off said bus).
Why AAC? Because my car also supports AAC on memory st
I use it (Score:2)
A lot of my music is stored in ogg format. It's all legit and paid for, but I have maintained my music files for a long time and ogg works well with some of the players and there is no funny business with ripping tools spying on you like they do with MP3. Ask windows to rip music for you and it will start snooping in your files and suggesting other music based on what's there. I don't want external entities snooping my files. Anything unencrypted I keep in the cloud, I am ok with being at risk of being snoo
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Ask windows to rip music for you and it will start snooping in your files and suggesting other music based on what's there.
sorry?
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Ask windows to rip music for you and it will start snooping in your files and suggesting other music based on what's there.
Well that is your first mistake in using Windows to rip and encode. Tools like ffmpeg exists on all platforms and in different formats like mp3 and aac. The problem with ogg is that it is not as universally accepted as mp3 or aac.
Ogg was fashionable ... (Score:3)
... with the FOSS crowd a decade or so back. If was the time when software giants all were total dickheads about proprietary audio formats and "the best format" was an academic discussing among nerds. Not using Ogg was considered massively uncool. I converted my CDs to Ogg quite a bit when "ripping" was a thing.
These days I don't really care if it's mp3 or Ogg or even FLAC. Looking into this l00ny vinyl fad that has been popping up in recent years made me aware of how unbelievably shoddy analog record technology was/is in comparison with even the cheapest of digital audio setups today.
Ogg is still at the top of audio formats for me, but with mp3 I'm more compatible with players and generic software, so I tend to use mp3 more when ripping. It's a little easier on the cpu and it's not that I can year any difference anyway.
Re: Ogg was fashionable ... (Score:5, Informative)
Mp3, ogg, and Vorbis are all pointless to use for new encodes.
Opus is pretty much the gold standard for lossy compression, with aac favored by apple, but not really any difference in quality, but aac is more complicated licensing wise. For whatever reason, the Bluetooth SIG ignored all of this and declared a new codec to be the standard, LC3. Most analysis concludes LC3 is worse than both aac and opus. However I guess some companies in the SIG wanted some sweet patent royalty income.
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And just to be clear, Opus, like vorbis, is from xiph.org.
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People like vinyl because of the loudness war. CDs and streaming can and usually are clipped to hell, everything louder than everything else.
Vinyl limits loudness because if it's too ridiculous the needle will jump out of the groove or get damaged. So the vinyl release has to be properly mastered.
Yeah, you get clicks and pops, and a bit of noise. But at least it doesn't try to assault your ears. Drums have actual impact, guitars are more than just fuzz.
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Exactly. Initially CD was limited by poor DACs. The first CD players in the 1980 used 14-bit DACs, and early 16-bit non- or low-oversampling DACs had still quite bad noise and distortion performance. Then by the second half of the 1990s when actual decent DACs became widely avaialble for consumer-grade devices, CD:s were deep into the loudness war and soon after the copy protection shenanigans. Vinyl sidestepped all of this, and was available used for little money at the time. As a student in the 90s I pick
For older stuff (Score:2)
I have a bunch of .ogg's from back in the early 2000's. Since then, I switched to flac, but the idea of re-encoding the .ogg files was unpleasant.
Used to be required on Wikipedia... (Score:3)
I recorded some media back in 2010 that was good enough to upload to Wikipedia for a notable page. Back then Wikipedia required both the video and an audio stream to be in .ogg format. PITA...
Ogg is container, Vorbis is the codec. (Score:5, Informative)
When you say Format, you're talking about Vorbis. Ogg is the container mechanism, i.e., like Matroska, AVI, or MP4...
Vorbis I'd say from a lossy codec is somewhat obsolete. The cool kids really use AAC mainly for streaming and the widest device support. If you want lossless, go FLAC especially for the best quality and for things like audio libraries.
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The cool kids really use AAC
The cool kids use formats that are open and free.
Actually, the cool kids don't give a rats ass about coolness.
Re: Ogg is container, Vorbis is the codec. (Score:3)
I more commonly see opus used in ripping, which is a direct successor to Vorbis.
On container format, Matroska is commonly used, or it's stripped down variant found in webm.
Games, especially Unity (Score:3)
.ogg is one of the formats natively supported by the Unity 3D engine [unity3d.com]. It can also use it as a compressed storage format if you give it uncompressed (e.g. WAV) files as input.
If you play games, you probably have a bunch of ogg files on your HDD right now without even knowing it.
Youtube... (Score:3)
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YouTube has been sending Opus for years. I **think** only older videos originally uploaded before the switch to Opus still offer Vorbis.
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Youtube uses it behind the scenes. yt-dlp is your friend...
No it doesn't, and it hasn't for a long time. If you're ending up with Vorbis files when downloading then your audio is being transcoded or you're digging back through some really long forgotten youtube archives.
Youtube uses HE-AAC, AAC (LC), or Opus depending on the quality of the stream and the device capabilities of the playing device. Bottom line, if you're being streamed a WebM stream you're getting Opus if you're getting an MPEG stream it's one of the AAC depending on bitrate or number of channels.
Why not (Score:2)
I have a few .ogg and .mp3 and even a couple AIFF, WAV and mp2 files from very long ago. I don't have good enough ears to even wonder if i could use a loseless format. ^^
Define "use" (Score:2)
Niche format (Score:2)
I've never used Ogg much (if at all), though I'm certainly aware of it.
I'm currently doing some mobile application development. Android will have a go at playing just about anything as a ringtone or notification sound, but since the system sounds are all in Ogg (maybe this is a Samsung thing?), I've included our custom alert sounds as Ogg in the app.
...laura
FLAC has simply replaced Vorbis (Score:5, Insightful)
With storage costs being as low as they are, and with FLAC being truly lossless, FOSS, and space-efficient, and with streaming taking over the rest of the market, it's just very difficult to recommend Vorbis over FLAC for audio these days. There would have to be a very storage and/or bandwidth-constrained environment to choose Vorbis over FLAC these days.
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Vorbis was in a bad place from the start because its only benefit was that it was free. Great, so now my underpowered device with constrained resources has to support yet another format, and it did nothing to get more or better quality music on the device, and couldn't replace the existing libraries of MP3s because what sort of lunatic would sit around and transcode all their music for religious purposes? The device maker paid their $0.25 for an MP3 license and just going.
FLAC, on the other hand, was a step
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Vorbis was significantly better quality than MP3 and roughly on par with WMA and AAC. But yeah everything but MP3 had an uphill battle, and without a big company to push it, vorbis only ever had limited support on portable players.
FLAC was completely uncompetitive for portable players at the time because it uses like 5-10x the space than high quality AAC or Vorbis encoding that could not be distinguished in side-by-side listening tests with high quality audio equipment. FLAC was a good format for CD rips an
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With storage costs being as low as they are, and with FLAC being truly lossless
I can't spend any more on storage to make my phone larger and no one gives a shit about lossless audio while on a bus / train. FLAC is great for archiving or a PC, but there's an entire world of restricted storage where popular phones on the market are still 128GB with most of that taken up by systems / apps / video.
Vorbis is obsolete, but Opus and AAC still have plenty of market applications.
Spotify (Score:2)
Spotify uses OGG (as well as AAC, depending on your client)
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/audio-file-formats/
Not really (Score:3)
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There's a good chance your car supports Ogg Vorbis, actually. It got added to tons of libraries used by both commercial and non-commercial systems. Why not? It's free, after all.
But in practice, mostly nobody cares. For most people music is all streamed, or at least downloaded from streaming services. That's certainly the case for me. The only thing my car needs to support is Bluetooth; my phone is my music player, and it gets everything from YouTube Music (or Spotify, or iTunes, or... insert service of
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Home Library (Score:2)
My home library is almost 100% Ogg, but like many I haven't purchased many CD since around 2005. I think the last time I purchased a physical CD was 2017 when I signed up for a kickstarted to crowd fund my favorite childhood band making a new album post children and marriage. :) I ripped and encoded that immediately, but haven't since.
So yes I still use it.
But also I don't use it.
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This.
I have a large music collection too. I don'tlike to depend on the stream-willingness of companies I don't care about. 20 years ago, when I bought most of my CDs, I encoded most of it to Ogg.
I could re-encode to FLAC, but some of my CDs are no longer readable, some are lost... So, I'd be forced to decode and re-encode. As long as there is media player support, there's no benefit for doing so.
Opus Sampling Rate (Score:2)
For me the biggest problem with Opus is that the only supported sampling rate is 48kHz.
So if you rip a CD to Opus, the encoding involves a resampling from 44.1kHz to 48kHz.
Want higher sampling rates like 96kHz or 192kHz? Not possible with Opus.
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So what? For "finished" audio, 48 KHz is not a problem unless you're a dog. Resampling is a non-issue. Even 16-bit resolution is a non-issue for human listening.
Audio editors should use lossless compression and probably should work at those higher sample rates and bit depths, but those things do not actually help for playback of the final audio.
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So what? For "finished" audio, 48 KHz is not a problem unless you're a dog.
It is a problem if you need to play back the audio at a different sampling rate, e.g. because the device you're playing back on doesn't support 48kHz playback, or because you want to mix the audio content with other audio that is at a different sampling rate.
You could resample the decoded 48kHz Ogg audio "on the fly", of course, but that eats a significant amount of CPU (especially when playing back many tracks at once), so it's more efficient to have the audio stored already at the sample-rate you want to
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I've written code to generate arbitrary resamplers on the fly. Unless you want extreme precision, it's not that computationally intensive. A few dozen multiply-accumulates per output sample gets you something like 30 to 50 dB of spurious free output. Can your device afford 2 million stupidly parallel MACs per second? It's a matrix multiply, so hardware tends to be optimized well for it. If you're really mixing the audio with an asynchronous stream, you can even cheap out and make it a lot less expensiv
I store my music that way (Score:2)
Most of my music has been ripped for a long time and the format works on everything I want it to work on. I have one program that wanted to encode in some other ogg format I can't recall. It was great on a few things, tighter encoding, but not everything can play it so I stick with Vorbis.
Until compatibility improves on random devices I see no reason to change.
Now that's a blast from the past. (Score:2)
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I don't think that .ogg files were ever all that popular. Everything in my music collection was either an MP3 file or AAC format for those rare occasions I bought it from iTunes.
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Ogg/Opus is Vorbis' successor (Score:5, Informative)
The Ogg container format is extremely versatile. Just look at what it can do with metadata compared to any other format.
The Opus codec supports up to 255 channels and sounds very good at lower bitrates compared to others.
And it's all F/OSS. I don't think there's anything else out there today that can claim all of these things at the same time.
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Supporting different metadata doesn't make something versatile. The MP4 container is far more versatile with a far larger support for different codecs to say nothing of far wider support in consumer devices.
Ogg is good at what it does though, especially for its day.
We need public codecs (Score:2)
Onto the Q (Score:2)
What does it mean to "use"? To encode (lossless) audio in Ogg Vorbis? I stopped doing that over a decade ago. To have and listen to audio files encoded using Vorbis? I have those but I've long switched to AAC as my primary lossy audio codec.
As for raw numbers: in my audio collection there are 356 files in Ogg Vorbis, 127 in Opus (youtube rips), 2392 in AAC, 1430 in MP3 and 1292 in FLAC.
Vorbis had it limited run as a better/open/patent-free alternative to MP3 but then most people encode for themselves, s
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Vorbis had it limited run as a better/open/patent-free alternative to MP3 but then most people encode for themselves, so in the end the best supported codec wins out, and that's AAC nowadays. Why not MP3? AAC at roughly 192Kbps is comparable to MP3 at 320Kbps. And then Apple with all its might chose it.
Yeah, that's the elephant in the room. Apple not supporting Ogg Vorbis was the nail in its coffin. Everybody wanted an iPod, and the iPod only supported MP3 (and AAC a couple of years later). I pretty much stopped paying attention to all the patent-free codecs at that point.
Ogg Frog (Score:2)
I still use Ogg Frog, now get off my lawn
Some remarks from Terry Pratchett (Score:2)
Pretty sure that the Ogg container format was named for Nanny Ogg, and Vorbis for the deacon of the Church of Om in "Small Gods" from Terry Pratchett.
I encoded my audio (LPs and CDs) into flac, but I did build some libraries and Perl scripts to cross-encode between different formats. Ogg Vorbis is one of them. MP3 is another, because of device compatibility.
I think I added Ogg Vorbis, because I liked it better for use with cmus. It's only since 2020/2021 more usage of Opus. However, the documentation sp
My thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
In it's day, Ogg/Vorbis provided better compression and didn't come with lawyers holding out their hands for scads of cash. But the bitstream format was a hot mess with packets encoding variable lengths of time and even splitting a single interval across more than one packet and packets potentially carrying data for more than one interval.
In contrast, a 128K MP3 consisted of a series of blocks each encoding exactly 50ms of audio. While some swore it could never work, I found that minor losses of synch between transmitter and receiver could be corrected by dropping or doubling single packets without re-encoding. In the case of internet radio, being able to drop a packet here and there allows you to speed up the track a bit as many stations preferred, and by doubling a few packets here and there you could make a big list of variable length tracks end exactly at the required time for a scheduled event. Perhaps an audiophile might hear it (or think they hear it), but audophiles are allergic to MP3 anyway. If you didn't need better than 50ms precision (and you often didn't), you could just splice two streams together. With Ogg/Vorbis, you had to re-package and often re-encode which could cause loss of quality and drove server load WAY up.
Here in 2024, with the MP3 patents expired, and storage and bandwidth much easier to come by, there really isn't much point to Ogg/Vorbis other than legacy support for existing data.
I still use it (Score:2)
Remember the good times (Score:2)
WOPN "Open Projects Radio" (later FNR "Freenode Radio") internet streaming radio was primarily Ogg/Vorbis and had a large library of either free-to-play or music that volunteer show hosts would choose from. You would sign up on the IRC channel to do a show and there was a hand-over in the stream so your icecast mountpoint would go live. I think maybe this was historically one of the first streaming radio projects with this distributed show host configuration and respecting music copyright by playing mostly
Yes (Score:2)
Ogg Vorbis is my default choice when buying from Bandcamp.
For audio books (where I truly don't care about perfect quality) I'll ffmpeg the mp3s I buy from LibroFM into Opus, since it does a better job with pure speech at very low resolution.
Probably comes off as odd that I'm referencing where I buy stuff, but I don't know how else to avoid the "you F/OSS nerds smell like a dirty pirates" reaction.
Exclusively for my video games (Score:2)
I use .OGG files exclusively for the video games I write.
Android can use for ringtone/notification .. (Score:2)
The ring tone I use on Android is an ogg file
MP3v0 (Score:2)
I've always preferred MP3 VBR level 0, I feel it gives the best compromise between quality and file size, while maintaining excellent compatibility with devices. I've never liked Ogg for whatever reason. Maybe it's the compatibility issues, or maybe it's just the dumb name.
FLAC is nice but let's be honest here, I've never been able to hear the difference between high-bitrate MP3 and FLAC so I feel it's just a waste of space. Unless I'm actually archiving the music, MP3v0 is what I prefer.
High bitrate MP3s (Score:3)
A few people here have mentioned high-bitrate MP3s being pretty much indistinguishable from potentially better formats. I have stuck with that as that is what I started ripping my CDs with, and it's nice to have a single, consistent format.
These days I collect mostly special release film scores from small labels like Intrada, who's only format is compact disc. When I receive the disc, I pop it into an older windows machine with a CD-Rom drive and rip it to 256K MP3 using CDex. For listening to in my car and at my computer with a generic stereo + sub logitech speaker setup, it sounds great. And I still have all the non-compressed CDs to re-rip from if I feel like stepping up the quality. I no longer have a big high end living room stereo setup so there's simply no advantage to having something higher quality at ready disposal. If I ever do something like that again I'll re-rip them to FLAC.
When OGG came along, I think I had a general feeling of "is this going to be another format that will die out and be unsupported?" and MP3 felt like no matter what happened, it was ubiquitous enough that it would always be playable, and the quality was fine for me, so I stuck with it. That was my reasoning at the time and still stands.
Re: (Score:3)
Vorbis isn't going anywhere. It became the standard for video game audio in the 2000s because MP3 was patented at the time. Inertia will keep things Vorbis unless something happens to cause Vorbis to be removed.
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256kbps MP3 is easily distinguishable if you know what to listen for. That said it is a format that is well and truly old enough to drink and vote. AAC is about as ubiquitous these days in terms of playback capability of consumer devices and software as MP3, and that is actually indistinguishable, and even then it's no the objectively most efficient codec out there.
There's no reason to use MP3 in 2024 unless you drive a 15 year old car. It's just pointlessly bad to waste quality for no reason.
Vorbis rocks (Score:2)
I use Vorbis exclusively when transcoding lossless audio tracks. For lossy tracks I tend to copy across to cut down on gen loss.
I would use Opus instead but it doesn't handle multi-channel audio. As for AAC ... why would I want to there? It's certainly no better than Vorbis and I prefer open codecs.
Spotify? (Score:2)
Spotify used to employ Ogg Vorbis, anybody knows if they moved away? I used to find their sound, and Ogg in general, warmer, richer. It just used more processing for decoding, thus drained iRiver player battery faster. Otherwise, was preferable choice to me.
Not since 2001 (Score:2)
when Shoutcast was all the rage and I was trying to find the best bitrate to stream from my ADSL line at futureassassin.com (big name parked page now) I settled on 64bit Ogg. Back in 2021 I tried to use OBS and a Icecast server to stream video using OGG/Theora but OBS had issues between Linux and Windows based versions of OBS when connecting to the Icecast server, since most of the dj/video sources were on Windows I have up. It worked from Linux to Linux.
Still? (Score:2)
>"Does Anyone Still Use Ogg Vorbis Format?
Still? I never used it. Plus I don't know anyone who has. Have only used mp3 after leaving analog. It has always done what I want and works on everything.
I like that there are alternatives, especially open ones, however. FLAC is a good one- but I never needed it, since I still have all my original external media available.
Android (Score:2)
Your android phone uses ogg for its sound subsystem.
Yup (Score:2)
Er... (Score:2)
What else would I encode to?
Ok I sometimes encode to mp3 depending on the device, for eample my car radio doesn t support vorbis.
I encode to flac when preserving a wav recording of a tape etc. Otherwise I just encode to vorbis.
I mostly use phyical media anyway and rarely play music day to day, when I do I just spin the CD, simples. My phone is not a media player, I have no use for that or BT audio beyond hands free in the car. Thats it.
I have a large ripped collection of 80's music back in the day I sued
Um, Wikipedia (Score:2)