Ogg Vorbis in The Guardian (UK) Options

[Tomb]

I, like many, use the ogg vorbis encoder. This article in today's Guardian (UK) may be of interest. In summary the writer states that ogg is a music file format without support or hope. Any thoughts?

[Remedial Sound]

I also don't agree with the quote (millions of users of atrac & real? ), but I don't agree that vorbis is on its way up either.

MP3 is going to be around for a long while thanks to its foothold, and there probably will be a gradual increase in the prevalence of AAC & AAC-compatable players with the advent of non-DRM iTunes.

Where does this leave vorbis? What exactly does vorbis have going for it that'll increase its popularity/usage? That it's free and open source? The general public is oblivious to this, as MP3 and AAC are effectively "free" to the end user anyway. The aoTuv builds perform great, particularly at lower bitrates, but nobody outside of HA knows/cares how well it did in a 128kbps listening test.

I'm not bashing vorbis, in fact I quite like it. It just looks to me like it'll eventually go the way of musepack.

This post has been edited by Remedial Sound: Apr 19 2007, 19:21

[Nick E]

Where does this leave vorbis? What exactly does vorbis have going for it that'll increase its popularity/usage? That it's free and open source?

What you mean that the software that uses the format is open source?

So is LAME, for example:

http://lame.sourceforge.net/license.txt

Not that it makes much difference to anyone who doesn't want to modify the code, or doesn't like to compile from source for whatever reason, anyway. But insofar as anyone would want that some software using MP3 is distributed under open source licences, too.