ogg vorbis

[possumpuss]

what's so great about ogg vorbis? i've been reading a lot about it... are a lot of people using it instead of mp3?

[carwyn]

I think the main advantage is that its a fully open format unlike mp3 which commands royalties etc..

Also its constantly under development and is already producing excellent results. Already I think it produces better results than mp3, after making comparisons with several tracks.

I won't be converting my mp3s yet tho, mainly because it produces slightly bigger files (compared to 128kbps mp3 files) and I just don't have the space at the moment.

[carwyn]

Just to update that, after messing around encoding a few different files Ogg does generally produce smaller, better sounding files than mp3 ( comparing oggenc output at 128 kbps with lame at 128kbps using the -h option ).

[Rob 'Feztaa' Park]

In my situation, here are the advantages and disadvantages of mp3 and ogg:

advantages of mp3:
-easy to find online, legally or not
-poorly written ID3 tags are easy to change with XMMS

disadvantages of mp3:
-I can't find a working encoder, so I can't rip mp3 files from my CDs.

advantages of oggvorbis:
-I have a working ogg encoder that lets me rip my CDs to ogg

disadvantages to ogg:
-I can't, for the life of me, change the ogg equivalent of the ID3 tag. Even Hex-editing the Ogg files will corrupt the entire file, even if I only change the artist, title info, and keep everything the same byte-length. If there's a spelling error in the CDDB entry, I'm completely SOL for fixing that when i rip the CD...

[carwyn]

About mp3 encoders have you tried using Lame with grip?

Also doesn't oggenc have command line options to set tag values when you encode a file?