Ogg Vorbis, the new MP3?

There's a big stink in the online music industry over Thompson Multimedia and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the MP3 patent holders, decision to charge for personal use decoders to the tune of 75 cents per decoder. Previously, the patent holders only demanded royalties on commercial decoders and all encoder products that use MP3 technology. Now they want money for any piece of software that can play an MP3, including the freebies and open source products. In reaction, Red Hat allegedly has taken out all MP3 playback modules out of hits Rawhide development version, according to a post on Slashdot.

What's out there for a free alternative? The open source Ogg Vorbis by xiph.org seems to be getting the most press. The project gives away the encoder and decoder technology for anyone that wants to use it. It also claims to have a better encoding algorithm than the older MP3 standard, meaning an Ogg file encoded at the same data rate as an MP3 should sound better and potentiall have smaller file sizes.

Here at Fusion HQ, we gave the new format a shot. Using a Windows 2000 box, we downloaded the OggDropXPd drag-and-drop encoder then used it to encode Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" at 128K. We first had to convert the CD audio file into a WAV file because OggDrop does not currently support encoding direct from a CD. I originally tried to use OggDrop on my Windows XP Pro machine at home, but it didn't work. We also encoded the WAV file into MP3 using Sonic Foundry's SoundForge and into Windows Media Audio using the Windows Media Encoder. All took about the same amount of time to encode to the 2:47 song at a datarate of 128K bit/sec. The original 28.4mb WAV file was compressed down to a 2.59mb Windows Media file, 2.57mb MP3 file and a 2.56mb Ogg file. All three file formats were played back using Winamp version 3.

Now, I am not a trained musician and my wife thinks I am going deaf, but the Ogg Vorbis version seemed to have sound better with less muffled background music.

While there are plenty of software clients out there that support the new format, the one problem I see for the Ogg Vorbis is portable device support. All portable digital music devices support the MP3 format and some are starting to get behind Windows Media (thanks to Microsoft's deep pockets, no doubt.) It will take devices such as the Archos Jukebox Studio 20 -- a Fusion favorite -- supporting the format to make it as or more successful than MP3.