We all know that MP3 is the standard in audio compression, but there is a solution on the market with a future Ogg format, which unlike the rest has no use limit and its developers do not charge anyone for its use and much less do they impose their patent. In this article you are going to immerse yourself in the new revolution of sound for computers.
” A little history
We all know the MP3 music format which allows you to take music on the Internet with a quality similar to that of music CDs, exchange it with others, store it on your computer, save music CDs on your hard drive, listen to music on a small portable device no moving parts.
The future of MP3 is at stake. And now they are not the lawyers, it turns out that the format itself is patented from the beginning and they will ask for a commission for use shortly, so for a long time the one that will be the most advanced successor is being perfected: the OGG.
Programmers have used MP3 freely without problems since it was born, but the fact is that the institute has the intellectual property of the format.
In September 1998, Fraunhofer began sending letters to software developers saying that they plan to start charging for licenses to use MP3. Fraunhofer and the other members of the MPEG Consortium claim that it is impossible to create an mp3 encoder without infringing on their patents.
Ogg Vorbis is a high-quality, general-purpose compressed audio format (44.1-48.0kHz, 16+ bit and polyphonic, supporting up to 255 independent audio channels), putting Vorbis in the same category as MPEG-1 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (AAC and TwinVQ), and PAC.
To create or use an encoder, the law says that royalties must be paid both to the institute and to other members of the consortium. In other words, you can listen to MP3, but you cannot contribute by recording anything to mp3.
It is a problem, the patent can limit the growth and make that only those who can afford it use the mp3. They say that there is no problem without solution and OGG Vorbis is the technological solution to the MP3 patent challenge.
In fact we can talk about Ogg Vorbis as an MPEG-4 compressor, which is trying to lead the rest of the competitors that exist in this format, specifically we are talking about AAC and TwinVQ.
Ogg Vorbis format files have the ogg extension and are just the beginning of a family of multimedia products that OggSquish is developing as part of the Xiphophorus project.
»OGG Vorbis the solution to the problem
It is an open format, that is, without an owner and without the possibility of being patented, created by volunteers in the style of free software and, therefore, more technologically advanced when receiving contributions and ideas from a huge community of programmers.
It supports high quality audio, in variable bitrates, several channels and for now up to 128kb / channel. This puts OGG on the same footing currently as MP3, MP4 (AAC, and TwhinVQ), and PAC.
The leader of the project is Christopher Montgomery and he started coding ogg from the moment he received the news of the patent collection threats from the German institute. Since then, many volunteers have joined Montgomery while contributing ideas and lines of code, making OGG files 25% smaller on average than mp3s of the same quality.
OGG Vorbis has been designed to be used in a final way, that is, you can encode everything in OGG without paying patents and never have to go back to MP3, so you can also share the OGG format on P2P networks. The most popular players already support OGG with or without extensions, as well as many reprogrammable hardware players.
The license is the GPL, it is the seed of the entire free software movement, and which allows no one to take advantage of and take ownership of the code that volunteers selflessly provide.
The fact that it is an open format ensures that OGG grows and improves. MP3 is defined from the first moment, and will never have more quality than it corresponds to nor will it be smaller or more compressed, because it is closed.
OGG however will benefit from the improvements that research brings and gradually it will be more compressed, more optimized and will sound better than it already sounds.
Live audio streaming is an important component of Vorbis. The format has been designed to be easily transmitted live.
The designers of Vorbis are working hand in hand with the creators of Icecast (a program for live broadcasts) to make Icecast compatible with Vorbis.
Likewise, they are working on a player that supports live ogg files. In addition, soon from the ogg website these components will be available as accessories for current players. This will be when Vorbis version 1.0 comes out.
