This might be one of those lame questions but has had me puzzled many times .

Mp3 , Ogg Vorbis , MPC , AAC , Vqf , ........these all are different formats .
I have seen many encoders for MP3 , AAC, Vqf .
Now isnt it possible that we have somebody coming with a different encoder for Vorbis .
Say OAVE ( OAVE aint a Vorbis encoder )
I think it wud probably be a better idea to contribute the code to Monty .
But isnt it possible .

I think i might be a lot confused on this issue so you might consider enlightening me .

That's one of the advantages of open source - if you (or somebody) thinks you can do better, then they're free to take the code and add their improvements, so long as they disclose those improvements as specified by whatever licence is applicable for that software. I could take the Vorbis code, make some changes, and release it as a Vorbis encoder to "compete" with Xiph's Vorbis encoder. However, partially because of the license and partially because of how the open source community generally operates, most developers with something to add to a project just offer their ideas/suggestions/code to the main project instead of "branching" the code to their own. This helps ensure a high quality product and maximizes developer resources. Branching projects isn't always bad, however - many great projects have started with "somebody else's" code - it just requires extra organization and resources.

Yes, it's quite possible for someone to develop their own vorbis encoder. due to the liberal licencing of the vorbis libraries, this encoder doesn't even have to be open source (and indeed, Xiph were trying to generate money for a while from Tremor, which is a vorbis encoder which only uses integer arithmetic). Garf, on this board, has also developed some tunings of his own -- most recently the 'floppy quality' 4kbit/s modes.

I hope that ball will NEVER start rolling with Vorbis. You'd get Vorbis encoders that sacrifice quality for speed, the Vorbis version of Xing (Xorbis ), or evil shareware encoders that promise you enhanced quality, etc. Because of the BSD license, all that is possible.

I kind of doubt you'll start to see a lot of different Vorbis encoders that serve the same purpose. Quality vs Quality for example, probably wouldn't happent. Speed vs. Quality might though.

The reason I don't think there'd be a lot of different encoders for quality purposes is simply because there aren't enough people that understand psychoacoustics in the code well enough to create a significantly better alternative. Most of the very few people who could do this, would almost certainly be more inclined to offer their improvements to the main encoder first.. it would save them significant amounts of effort in not having to recreate the base encoder from scratch.

Has he finally released it? That´s not the only special Vorbis encoder, there is also Vorbis gt1 and Vorbis gt2. There are still many people claiming that gt2 sounds better than Vorbis 1.0 at higher bitrates (160kBit/s ore more), also it´s based on Vorbis RC2. I couldn´t hear a difference.

I completly agree, I think it´s also good that there are not so many switches allowing you to destroy quality like with lame (-k).

If I remember correctly there is also yust one vqf-encoder, but I could be wrong, I never used vqf. AAC is actually the worst of all: different encoders creating files which are all called MPEG 4 AAC or MPEG 2 AAC and all producing output which is incompatible to other encoders output (ADIF or ADTS header, Astrid/Quartex AAC....).