Ogg has been out for awhile, about 3 or 4 years if i'm not mistaken and still its funny that is has not replaced the mp3 and that it is not widely available on portable devices. My question is is this format dying because people found something better or that it never really had a chance? When you think about it other than this site you cant find any other pages on it readily available, or that isen't a year old.

I have been using ogg vorbis on my PDA for some time now. I even use it with DivX to create ogm files so I can watch top quality movies on my PDA

It doesn't really matter if it has or hasn't taken off, for me, it is simply the best way to encode at low bit rates for portable use!

Many people do seem to use it and appreciate it but mp3 is the common demoninator. Plus ogg tends to shine in the low bitrates compared to mp3, but if you aren't as worried about space (20gb portable hard drive devices anyone?) you might be seeking quality. Already there are some crazy people (I mean that in the kindest most possible way) who seek to have portable lossless encoding for better quality. I personally want to see an iPod with MPC. I'd buy one a heartbeat instant later if there was any way to that.


mmmm MPC playing IPod....*drool*

I think most people see no advantage to Ogg. Given the choice of MP3 or Ogg, both sound about the same at the same bitrates to most people (to everyone I've played stuff for, Ogg -q5 and MP3 --alt-preset standard -Y are both completely transparent, and even lower bitrates are transparent to a lot of people). The added features Ogg has are things mostly audiophiles care about, not your average person. So basically, it's a tossup between Ogg and Mp3 format-wise, so people choose Mp3 since it has wider support and name-recognition. It's not that people don't like Ogg, they just see no reason to switch to it.

If portable support gets better, it'll be possible to try to push it more. At the moment I can't really push it amongst my friends because they see it as an inherently inferior format: "you mean this sounds the same as MP3, only I can't play it on my mp3 player... so why would I want it instead of an mp3?"

There's at least one real advantage of ogg vorbis compared with mp3 - it's capable of truly gapless playback.

For someone this may be neglectable but for me it was primary reason to switch to mpc/vorbis for PC encodings and the last reason I'm still holding my breath and waiting for portable with vorbis support. There's no way I'll ever encode or listen to music with software that puts unintended silence in between some mixed tracks

Yeah, this is something I like as well, but it does depend a bit on the playback environment. If my system is under heavy load, playing Ogg back is sometimes not gapless, because there's a pause as the player has to open the next file on disk and start playing it (XMMS's Vorbis plugin doesn't pre-buffer the next track as far as I can tell).

Also, it's probably not of interest to most people; most people I know don't listen to full albums on their computer, just singles they download off filesharing services (or have sent to them by friends). Most of them even listen with Shuffle/Random turned on in their player, in which case a small gap might actually be preferable to gapless.

OGG-Vorbis 1.0 has been out for less than a year IIRC. It is not even anywhere near being close to have being out for 2 years. Sure there were alpha, beta, and release candidates out for up to 2 years before. And Monty and others had the idea in their noggins long before that. But IMHO it is gross missrepresentation to say that it was in a form that any portable company could have used or would have wanted to for over 3 or 4 years. Remember if it is not 1.x or better they are not interested. All that said Vorbis is still farther along at this point in it's life than MP3 was at the same point. You have to give these things some time. But I would say that intrest even luke warm from companies like Iriver an Philips is nothing to sneez at.

You can configure XMMS's crossfade plugin to just play gapless (it buffers a configurable amount of the next track before the current one has finished playing).

How could Ogg be more used without proper support on Windows ? The Xiph team should throw their Windows-disliking over board and start to get developers on board that create native DirectShow support for Vorbis .... not everybody has winamp installed ....

Imho Ogg is here and will stay. its flourishing now with the divx community as the audio codec of choise for the .ogm container format and gaining a slow but sturdy support in the industry.

Personally,i love Ogg and use it for radio/speech captures at super low bitrates and .mpc > .ogg transcoding@64k for playing music on desktops/laptops with low quality speakers.



note.

A warm greeting to all the fine people here at Dibroms place whose deep knowledge and understanding
have helped me countless times in the past as an anonymous lurker at hydrogenaudio.org .

given that it just got support in Easy CD/DVD 6 (the would most popular CD software), and soon official from nero, it should really take off

Christian:

Yes, of course.
DS filters. Current version 0.9.9.5 (last modified 06.10.2002)
And do you want cut ogg and ogm files?
Ogg Vorbis Cutter