Should We All Move to Ogg Vorbis?

To what?!?! OK, first let me explain what Ogg Vorbis is:

Wikipedia Ogg Vorbis format entry

“Vorbis is an open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and intended to serve as a replacement for MP3. It is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container and is then called Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis development began following a September 1998 letter from Fraunhofer Gesellschaft announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. Soon after, founder Christopher ‘Monty’ Montgomery commenced work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers. They continued refining the source code until a stable version 1.0 of the codec was released on July 19, 2002.”

Why do we care? Well, the fact that Alcatel-Lucent won their case against Microsoft (that I mentioned earlier in the Blog) may soon spell “the end” of our enjoyment of MP3. It is encumbered by patents. And, I don’t want to pay for using a file format! So, what if we all switched to Ogg Vorbis… which is TOTALLY FREE and OPEN SOURCE? Do we have the “guts” to do so? Should I use Ogg Vorbis for my Podcast? What about Naomi? (An obscure reference to an old “Electric Company” routine.) Let me know!

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