OGG, all about ogg
How many MP3 files do you have on your hard drive? 100, 500, 1000? No wonder even 15,000! We all love music and we are probably all familiar with MP3. The good old format, time tested … But the light did not converge on MP3, right? It was developed as one of the first of its kind, which gave it a huge boost in popularity. Could the developers have taken into account all the nuances of lossy music encoding? Could you imagine all the options to use this format to make it the most versatile? Of course, no!
Throughout the existence of the format, there were many applicants for its replacement. But in fact, the benefits have not always been tangible enough to make the transition to new formats. But then Ogg Vorbis appeared …
Ogg Vorbis
A new breath of compressed digital audio
Ogg Vorbis is a relatively new universal audio compression format that was officially released in the summer of 2002. It belongs to the same type of format as MP3, AAC, VQF and WMA, that is, lossy compression formats. The psychoacoustic model used in Ogg Vorbis is similar in principle to MP3 and similar ones, but only that the mathematical processing and practical implementation of this model are fundamentally different, allowing the authors to declare its format completely independent of all predecessors.
The main undeniable advantage of the Ogg Vorbis format is its total openness and freedom. In addition, it uses the latest and highest quality psychoacoustic model, so the bitrate / quality ratio is significantly lower than other formats. As a result, the sound quality is better, but the file size is smaller.
The format has many advantages. For example, the Ogg Vorbis format does not restrict the user to only two channels of audio (stereo: left and right). Supports up to 225 individual channels at sample rates up to 192 kHz and up to 32 bits (which no lossy compression format does), making Ogg Vorbis ideal for encoding 6-channel DVD-Audio. Additionally, the OGG Vorbis format has sample accuracy. This ensures that the audio data before encoding and after decoding will not have offsets or extra / missing samples to each other. This is easy to appreciate when you are encoding music endlessly (where one track gradually fades into another); in the end, the integrity of the sound will be preserved.
Streaming capacity is nowhere to be found, but this format has built it from the ground up. This gives the format a rather useful side effect: multiple songs can be stored in one file with their own tags. When loading such a file into the player, all songs should be displayed as having been loaded from several different files.
We should also mention a fairly flexible labeling system. The tag header can easily be expanded to include lyrics of any length and complexity (eg song lyrics) interspersed with images (eg album cover photo). Text labels are stored in UTF-8, allowing you to type in all languages at the same time and eliminating potential problems with encodings. This is much more convenient than various tricks like id3 tags.
Ogg Vorbis uses a variable bitrate by default, while the latter is not limited to hard values and can vary even by 1 kbps. It should be noted that the format does not strictly limit the maximum bit rate and with the maximum encoding setting it can range from 400 kbps to 700 kbps. The sample rate has the same flexibility: users can choose between 2000 Hz and 192000 Hz.
Ogg Vorbis was developed by the Xiphophorus community to replace all paid proprietary audio formats. Even though this is the youngest format of all MP3 competitors, Ogg Vorbis has full support on all known platforms (Windows, PocketPC, Symbian, DOS, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, BeOS, etc.), as well as a large number of hardware implementations. … The current popularity far exceeds all alternative solutions.
It is worth noting that Ogg Vorbis is only a small part of the Ogg Squish multimedia project, which also includes free encoders: Speex – for voice compression; FLAC: for lossless audio compression; Theora: for video compression.
