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Music Media

'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary 306

Posted by timothy from the instant-nostalgia dept.
Sachin Garg writes "The Data Compression News Blog reports that on July 14th 2005, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary. On this day back in 1995, the researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987, in 1992 it was considered far ahead of its times, then MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3" and no other coding method so far (2005) could uncrown MP3 as the popular standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet."
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'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary More

'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary

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  • Patent Issues? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gbulmash ( 688770 ) * <semi_famous&yahoo,com> on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:51PM (#13057810) Homepage Journal
    Recently, a friend got a spam about MP3's patent issues and a software package backed by some lawyer and programmer to convert your MP3s into a non-patented format. Stupid, because Microsoft has claimed WMA is free (and just about every portable player and PC jukebox supports it), and if you don't trust Microsoft, you can always go with OGG. Why buy anything from these spammers?

    They make some vague claims, such as "we believe [the patent owners] are serving papers right now." Note the fact that they have no concrete examples of this happening. They just believe it is. Then: "it's believed that one Website Owner has recently settled out of court for several millions." Once again, no concrete example. Just a belief that this has happened.

    But great scams always include a grain of truth, this one being that MP3's patent is owned by Thomson, and they have set licensing terms [mp3licensing.com].

    So my question is, does anyone KNOW of Thomson actually suing anyone or gearing up for a rash of suits as the spammers claim? And this is not "I believe they are" or "a friend knows a guy whose sister's boyfriend's cousin's hairdresser's uncle got sued by Thomson while removing a gerbil from Richard Gere's butt." Does anyone have any concrete info on Thomson enforcing their patents?

    - Greg

    • They make some vague claims, such as "we believe [the patent owners] are serving papers right now." Note the fact that they have no concrete examples of this happening.

      Heh, maybe Bruce Perens and OSTG can start selling them MP3 insurance...

    • Re:Patent Issues? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:02PM (#13057889) Homepage Journal
      I don't know about lawsuits, but this article [davefancella.com] touches upon the cease and desist letters they sent out. Such a move *could* have killed MP3s, except that Thomson's licensing is very reasonable.

      For one, you don't need a license for "private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00."

      Beyond that, their royalty rates are as little as $0.75 [mp3licensing.com] per copy, or a one time fee of $50-60K.
    • I don't see how MP3 can be both patented and an ISO standard at the same time... if it's use is restricted, it's not a standard damn it... :::cough::ogg [vorbis.com]::cough:::

    • Re:Patent Issues? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by donutz ( 195717 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:03PM (#13057906) Homepage Journal
      Microsoft has claimed WMA is free (and just about every portable player and PC jukebox supports it)

      Well except that every iPod does not support it...and that's a significant number of portable players...
    • I think it only covers software and hardware players and also the encoders. The files themselves don't require buying the patent rights.

      I would generally ignore any and all claims made in spam, and I do the same to forwards of nearly any kind. I am surprised that the spam in question used so many weasel words rather than just outright lying. That said, saying "unspecified people believe A to be true" might be enough to stay out of legal trouble even if it is a lie, because some body probably does believ

  • .bit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:51PM (#13057811) Homepage
    this is the overwhelming result of our poll: everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3! As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me :-)

    I wonder what is the reason for not using .bit? Does it sound too short?

    • Re:.bit (Score:2)

      by eln ( 21727 )
      Because it's too ambiguous? I don't know if that was their reasoning, but it makes sense to me.

  • MP2's (Score:3)

    by Ossifer ( 703813 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:51PM (#13057815)
    I still have a handfull of .mp2 files actually provided for free from the record companies...

  • Somewhere... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:52PM (#13057816)
    ... a record executive weeps.

  • Raise your hand... (Score:4, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:52PM (#13057820) Homepage Journal
    ...if you remember using WinPlay3 [sonicspot.com] back in the day!

    If you don't, well, maybe you were too young back then. ;-)
    • Although that UI rings a bell, I'm still not 100% sure I recall that one, but I did use a DOS mp2 player that caused regular sound "pops" in the music as my computer was on the border of being fast enough to decode the music in real-time. :-)

    • Re:Raise your hand... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )
      And who remembers typing in all the arcane command line options to the only encoder that was generally available... l3enc and l3dec? This was if you didn't compile the ISO encoder...

      Also, distributing pirated keys to WinPlay and l3enc/dec because both would only do 30 seconds otherwise?

      • Re:Raise your hand... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:05PM (#13057929) Homepage Journal
        And who remembers typing in all the arcane command line options to the only encoder that was generally available... l3enc and l3dec?

        Ahhh, l3enc. That program was like magic in a bottle. Put a 50-100MB WAV in one end, and a 3MB MP3 would pop out the other. Considering the piss poor excuse for sound editing and ripping tools we had back then, it was amazing that I ever found anything to encode! (IIRC, I pulled music from CDs to play with the encoding.)
      • And let's not forget the magical search for the "superior" version of L3Enc, the stupendous version 2.0, which had two advantages over the more common later versions:

        a) Whereas 128kb/sec (the standard of the day) was a registered-version-only switch in later versions of L3enc, it was in the free and clear in earlier versions.

        b) L3Enc 2.0 is one of the few encoders I've *ever* seen that supports dual-channel encoding, in which both channels of the stereo spectrum are dealt with entirely separately. As join
    • Yes, I remember WinPlay3, though I was probably a bit behind the times when I got it. Then when I saw Winamp, my eyes exploded, and I never looked back. Reminds me of downloading Rage Against the Machine songs on the original Napster.

    • Re:Raise your hand... (Score:4, Funny)

      by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:03PM (#13057896)
      Oh fantastic! I'd forgot about that one!

      I remember running it on my overclocked 486, half sample rate and mono to get it to play - and only just. It took up most of the CPU and to play the MP3 without skipping I'd have to pause it at the start and let it buffer up a bit.

      8.3 filenames, no ID3 or streaming. Good days ;-)

      • Re:Raise your hand... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by drix ( 4602 )
        Hah-I remember that. I actually did research into buying/creating an offboard MP3 decoder card so I could free up the CPU to play Quake. Em were the days...

    • I used it... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Animaether ( 411575 )
      ...and it was great! Downloaded from a BBS, had a vague description. It was like reading one of those claims about sticking a feature-length TV-res movie in only 100MB now. Couldn't believe it. Had to try anyway. Was an eye-opener, and I knew the future of music would change right there and then.

      That said.. it immediately made me look for other solutions, as nobody else could play back MP3s, and ended up using a-law and mu-law codecs from Microsoft. Smaller files than plain WAVs, not bad quality %)

      Note: I

      • Re:I used it... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) *
        Downloaded from a BBS, had a vague description. It was like reading one of those claims about sticking a feature-length TV-res movie in only 100MB now.

        It was the same for me. I found it on a website somewhere, but there was no files available to plug into it. I completely forgot about it until a friend excitedly called me up and asked if I had WinPlay3. He shot me a file or two, and I was absolutely amazed. Up until then, I'd thought MOD files were the height of computer music. ;-)
        • Up until then, I'd thought MOD files were the height of computer music. ;-)

          Remember that one really amazing guitar mod? That's still pretty impressive to hear today.
        • Up until then, I'd thought MOD files were the height of computer music. ;-)

          Trackers are still a great way to make music, particularly when combined with other tools. MP3 is just a storage method for the finalized song.

      • For me, I found the MP3 file first. It was the song "Always Forever" by Donna Summers, a pop song that was popular at the time.

        When I saw a whole song claiming to fit in 3MB, I downloaded it and immediately scrambled for the player, WinPlay3. My 486 could barely handle it, but it did, and I was amazed at the sound quality from that 3MB file! I immediately thought.. "Wow.. I bet the record labels aren't gonna like this..." Annoyingly, Winplay3 was crippleware and had a 30 second limit, so I had to find a cr
        • "Always Forever" by Donna Summers
          I love you, always forever
          Near and far, we'll be together
          Everywhere, I will be with you
          Everything, I am before you
          ...
          Do you know how hard it was to convert that from a tape recording into an MP3? ;-)
    • I didn't use winplay because I didn't have a Windows machine back then. I do, however, remember using the Telos Audioactive player on OS 7.6 to listen and using the swa export plugin for SoundEdit 16 to make mp3s (encapsulated as shockwave audio).

    • Re:Raise your hand... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That sounds familiar, and I also remember spanning an mp3 across 2 floppies and wondering who in their right mind would ever do something as nutty as put a CD track on 2 floppies. Little was I to know...

      For the record the track was 'Made of Stone' by the Stone Roses - still a classic!
    • Wow, this must be it! I was just replying to another post about the first MP3 I played, but I'd forgotten the name of the program used. On my 486-33 laptop you had to downsample to 22.5 kHz mono to play in realtime.. and we liked it ;)
    • Oh, I definitely remember that. How fun it was when you couldn't even seek through the song.

      My first MP3s were played on a P133 with 8MB of RAM. Couldn't do much else simultaneously, but it didn't stutter or lag due to lack of CPU time. Once I upgraded that machine to 16MB RAM I could actually do stuff while listening to music.

  • 10th anniversary for mp3? (Score:5, Funny)

    by FerretFrottage ( 714136 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:53PM (#13057828)
    I thought based on its compression ratio this would just be the 1st anniversary for mp3. Granted some things in those 10 years are lost, but we can't remember everything can we?

    • I thought based on its compression ratio this would just be the 1st anniversary for mp3.

      This only happens for software patents, which travel near the speed of stupid. My hope is that 10 years old means only seven years left to public domain.

      In the mean time, I'm using OGG and layer 2 for those cheap portable devices. It's strange makers of devices that retail for less than $100 would rather pay royalties on MP3 than have free players that use OGG. To make things "work for sure" for M$ users, they can

  • it was considered? Unless you were at a university on their lines running network cards, I severely doubt your 2400 baud or even mindblowing 14.4kbps could handle 5 megs. Even the solid type storage formats couldn't handle much more thna a meg. considered. hmph. (walks away muttering old men phrases)

    • Re:considered? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by turtled ( 845180 )
      I remember in 1996 I had a Metallica site (Yes, Metallica) with MP3s. They were small, encoded at 56k / 22khz mono, maybe about 1~1.5MB per song. I had people download hard to find B-sides. At that time is when I found out what bandwidth was. I had them served on my free 20MB web space at enteract.com. I had over 10,000 visitors in 4 months. They shut me down because I had to purchase more bandwidth. I thought it was free web space...

    • Re:considered? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dougmc ( 70836 )

      I severely doubt your 2400 baud or even mindblowing 14.4kbps could handle 5 meg

      A 14.4 Kbps modem can download 5 MB of data in about an hour, ignoring compression. (mp3 files can't be compressed much anyways.)

      That is certainly well within the capabilities of a modem to download. I recall downloading the SLS Linux distribution at about 30 1.4 MB floppy images, and I think I only had a 9600 bps modem. It took a while, but I got it.

      Even the solid type storage formats couldn't handle much more

      • A 14.4 Kbps modem can download 5 MB of data in about an hour, ignoring compression. (mp3 files can't be compressed much anyways.)

        That is certainly well within the capabilities of a modem to download. I recall downloading the SLS Linux distribution at about 30 1.4 MB floppy images, and I think I only had a 9600 bps modem. It took a while, but I got it.

        Mark my words: One day kid will be whining, "There's no way you could have downloaded those Linux Distributions on DSL/Cable. Lines back then only had 700K
    • A 14.4 modem can handle a terabyte easily, given enough time.

      Of course, that terabyte would take 6,944 days to transfer, so you better hope you have a good UPS and that the telco switch isn't rebooted in those 20 years. }:)

      -Z
  • Does anyone know? (Encoding and decoding...)

    Mike

  • Evil Bit set by 1998 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:59PM (#13057863) Homepage Journal
    The article is only about the dawn of .mp3, but within less than three years, the RIAA & co. had configured themselves to set the Evil Bit whenever they saw the .mp3 extension. Or at least, that was my experience.

    In 1998, I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years. As part of the site, I included some low-quality .mp3's of the group's orignal sound, from some out-of-print indie albums. But before you could say "infringement", I got a Cease And Desist letter from the group's lawyers. I capitulated, but the affair proved the perfect grist for a story in the local alternative newsweekly [dallasobserver.com] -- they saw the group as having sold out to Nashville, with the C&D just further proof.

    But check out what the group's manager said about the nascent format:
    Senior Management's Simon Renshaw, the band's manager, insists the only reason the band went after Brooks was that the sound bites were in MP3 form. "I will just say one thing: His site with MP3 files...is a huge red flag," Renshaw says. "And that's all I really want to say about that, quite honestly."

    And the lawyer, on the broader issue of copyrights:
    "The bottom line to me is very simple," says Beiter, whose firm was hired by Senior Management, the band's Nashville-based management company. "To me, it's just not fair. It's not fair for him to take their copyright and decide that he's unilaterally going to give it away out on the Internet. It's not fair for him to do that. He may try to cast it as David versus Goliath or Robin Hood or whatever, but it's just not fair for him to do that. He never even asked."

    In the end, I got more free publicity for my little fan site than if I'd scattered flyers all over Dallas. I'll avoid whoring for hits in this post, though... I think you can figure out where to click if you're really interested.
    • I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years.

      User homepage: http://www.dixie-chicks.com/ [dixie-chicks.com]

      I have a feeling we all know what band you're talking about. And even then, the article to which you refer talks about them as well.
    • The RIAA has a history of trying to stomp out ALL digital music distribution, legal or otherwise. I recall them filing several lawsuits against the old mp3.com which did not even host illegal RIAA music. Also, they tried to sue the makers of the first portable MP3 player (the Diamond Rio) even though it didn't even have a record function. It's not surprising that they jumped all over a music fan's website, nevermind that such a site couldn't possibly cost them sales and in fact could only promote interest i

  • MP3 in Name Only (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ndansmith ( 582590 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @04:59PM (#13057865)
    . . . and no other coding method so far (2005) could uncrown MP3 as the popular standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet.

    That is the perception, at least, on the internet. Music files will probably be "MP3" for a long time, just like Pepsi is often referred to generically as a "Coke." iTunes Music Store, for example, uses .m4a and .m4p (their AAC format) file extensions. Considering that iTunes Music Store sells so many of these files (hundreds of millions), and that iTunes (a popular cross-platform music player) rips by default to .m4a, and that .mp3 is clearly behind the curve of audio compression technology, the time may be coming soon when .mp3 is king in name only.

    • There is that threat, but the owner of every alternative codec tries very hard to maintain the branding.

      Which brings to a different reason why there won't be a nother "king", that there are several strong competitors, and none of them seem to be going away, and none can compete in usage with the real MP3. That standard is also the only thing that the portable audio file players have in common. Sony tried to make audio file players that wouldn't play those files but took a beating and rightfully so. The

  • The bad old days... (Score:5, Funny)

    by decipher_saint ( 72686 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:03PM (#13057907)
    When I was eighteen,
    I downloaded a very good CD,
    A very good CD that took the whole night to grab,
    We found it on IRC
    My handle was brian_mcgee
    We burned it at 2 times for free
    When I was eighteen...

    With apologies to Homer, 1995 seems so long ago now...

  • Sure, sure, it's 10 years old.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:04PM (#13057916) Homepage
    But this is Slashdot. All we want to know is if it supports OGG vorbis.

  • better name? (Score:2, Funny)

    by beowulfy ( 897757 )
    why didn't they just call it IS 11172-3? It just rolls off the tounge doesn't it? Then we could be all saying: "So how many IS 11172-3's do you have on your ipod?" That would be much easier.

  • Spoiled bastards... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MicroPat ( 895649 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:08PM (#13057951) Homepage
    About 7 years ago, I ripped all my CD's to MP3, amazed at how much precious HDD space I could save while accessing all my music via the same source! Now, here I am, in the hard disk gigacheap days, stuck with these lossy-format buggers while the new kids on the block rip to their slightly larger lossless formats. You lucky, spoiled bastards.
  • I first got wind of them on EFNet in late 1995. In #mp3 there were only a handful of users, and they were talking about WinPlay3 from the Fraunhofer site. The first songs I downloaded were cheeseball dance music tracks, and needed a Pentium 60 or 66 to play at full quality.
    • I believe that's where I first saw them too! There were a few DCC servers around, at which you could download MP3s at the grand speed of 2KB/sec.

      I downloaded a couple of them to see what it was all about. The first I got was "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow, which I think was 1996? Interestingly I went on to buy all of Crow's CD albums. The next couple were by a band I'd never heard of called Reel Big Fish.. and I became a RBF fan too, but oh no.. MP3 = less revenues, of course..
      • With all the tech people here, it'd be neat to figure out the earliest sources of mp3 trading. If someone has an earlier reference, please share.

        I forget the handle of the guy that was serving there. It may have started with Anim.. It was surprising when the first portable player was announced - this mp3 "market" took off much faster than I expected.

        On a side note, it is weird when these things suddenly turn like that. Suddenly everyone was talking about mp3s so seriously and I just wanted throw some cold

  • 1996 MP3 file stamps (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:16PM (#13058007)
    I have about 3 gigs of MP3s with file stamps dating back to early 1996.

    Ah, the days of downloading MP3s from anonymous FTP sites on the newly installed LAN in my dormroom!
    • The FTP days (before Napster) were the best. Sometimes there were upload/download ratios but it was worth the price if the ratio was low, because the signal/noise ratio was very good. The files were guaranteed good quality (Ops usually kept their servers clean) and mostly full albums in their own folders.

      Like everything on the Internet, the usefullness of file sharing was indirectly proportional to the number of people using it.

  • I think mine was Mustang Sally. I remember listening to it in Windows 95 OSR2 on a Compaq Armada 1585DMT notebook (P150 MMX.
    • Voto Latino by Molotov. More interesting, I guess, is the software (which I forget) that could play it realtime when downsampled to 22.5 kHz mono, as the machine was a 33 MHz 486 (running Windows 3.1). Those were truly the days :)
    • That would have been "Born Slippy" by Underworld, some time in late 1996 (I was a late adopter!). I had to downsample it quite significantly so that my 486DX4-133 could play it without clipping!

      Interesting to note that one of the main reasons I spent a chunk of my student loan on a Pentium was so that I could play MP3s. (Quake being the other reason).

    • 'Sugar' by System of a Down was one of the first, if not the first one I got off of Napster. Yeah yeah, I was a relatively late comer. These days I rip my albums Ogg Vorbis quality 6 to a nicely organized collection, complete with album cover images.
  • Ha! My MP5 was made in 1985, that makes it TWENTY years old, and it *still* likes to rock 'n roll!
  • As the author of the first publicly demoed MP3 player (in 1996), I enjoy this anniversary immensely.

    Now for the trivia questions:
    What CD was used for the demo?
    Who demoed it?
    What two applications were used to produce the MP3's? :]
    • CD? No clue.
      Who? No clue.
      Apps? I'm gonna guess SoundEdit16 since you mention SWA in the subject line, although it could be the aforementioned l3enc.

      My first experience with mp3 audio was while working at a broadcast facility in fall of 96. We had recently bought a few Telos Zephyrs to do remote broadcasting over dual-channel ISDN. Most of what was transmitted was voice, but when they put music on it was amazing how clean and full it sounded. Amazing little boxes, those zephyrs...

      • Re:MP3? Remember SWA (Score:3, Interesting)

        by azav ( 469988 )
        CD : Exit Planet Dust by the Chemical Brothers. I had to encode them at a rate of 98 since all I had to store them on was a 100 Meg drive. Ya. Meg. It was like 200 bucks back them.

        Who demoed it : For a short time, Apple's Phil Schiller worked at Macromedia. He was the guy. Took it to some meeting, was super cool.

        And the apps: Bingo! You got 50% of it. Back then when we were working on Shockwave Audio, SWA really was MP3 - but even we didn't know it. To the best of my knowledge, Macromedia was the
  • I was at university at the time and some of the warez groups started trading mp3's. We downloaded the files and couldn't believe the quality of the encoding and how small the file was.

    When I told one of my other friends about it, he said "bullshit, can't be done. You guys are lying". My response was to shrug my shoulders.. I didn't care if he believed me or not. Of course 3 months later he comes running up to me telling me about this new compression format called mp3..

    And Chris, just in case you're re
  • Lossy compression. Resource hog. Sucks.

  • When Fraunhofer started using other technologies in their development, in 1987, how long did patents last? 17 years [winston.com]. Why would they have had any expectation of retaining their exclusivity on their MP3 patents any longer than that? Because they were motivated to invent, even with those terms of exclusivity. The later patent law term extensions played no part whatsoever in motivating them to invent, and publish their invention under protection. They received their US patent 11/26/96 [about.com]. So they'd have about 8 ye
  • no other coding method so far (2005) could uncrown MP3 as the popular standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet.

    And since every new standard sans OGG tries to include the latest & greatest DRM, none of them will uncrown MP3 as long as players remain available.

  • Oh yeah? I remember MP1 and MP2 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @05:48PM (#13058206) Homepage
    Around the time that MP3 was getting on its feet, I remember tinkering with MP1 and MP2 files... Websites like the Internet Underground Music Archive [iuma.com] had them available for download. The thing I remember was that MP1 files played fine on a 486 50 MHz, while high-bitrate MP2 files were too choppy to play back properly. MP3s were out of the question on a 486 (until many years later when highly optimized MP3 player software emerged). I remember that even 192 kbps MP2s still had numerous audible defects in them, so 128 kbps MP3s seemed amazing in comparison. Of course, I had to decode the MP3 file to WAV before playing it. Those were the days...
    • MP3 was critized when it came out for requiring too much processing to encode and decode. Thanks to the exponential growth in CPU power that problem quickly went away. I also remember being able to play 128 kbps MP3s on my computer but not higher bitrates. I had one that was 320 kbps and my computer's MP3 player would take 4x longer to play it stopping every second while trying to decode it.

  • Why OGG Is "Better" (Score:5, Informative)

    by jcole ( 780891 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @06:21PM (#13058497)
    http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp [vorbis.com]

    * Vorbis files can compress to a smaller file size and still sound fine
    * Vorbis' better compression will cut down on bandwidth costs
    * For a given file size, Vorbis sounds better than MP3.
    * If you decide to sell your music in MP3 format, you are responsible for paying Fraunhofer a percentage of each sale because you are using their patents.
    * Vorbis is patent and license-free, so you will never need to pay anyone in order to sell, give away, or stream your own music.
    * Epic Games (the makers of Unreal Tournament, et. al.) have used Vorbis in their games ever since releasing Unreal Tournament 2003 to compress game music without having per-game license fees sap profits from every game sold.
    * Vorbis saves developers money by avoiding patent-license fees.
    * Ogg Vorbis has been designed to completely replace all proprietary, patented audio formats. That means that you can encode all your music or audio content in Vorbis and never look back.

    Need I say more?

    -Joe

    • Re:Why OGG Is "Better" (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gdulli ( 177638 )
      As a typical end user, not one of those reasons matters to me at all. Disk space is cheap. Why do I care about bandwidth, I'm not choosing a technology based on P2P service download speeds being an important factor. Even if I did, it wouldn't save me any bandwidth costs, it would save me the last 10% of a download wait. I'm never going to sell music and I don't give a crap about how Epic Games puts music in a game I don't even play. Or even in a game I do play. Games are priced at $5 increments, and there's
    • High CPU Usage means you need something beefy like a PC to play it.

    • Why OGG Is Worse (Score:5, Insightful)

      by teneighty ( 671401 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @09:45PM (#13059926)

      While Ogg is technically superior, it's never going to catch on because:

      • MP3 is "good enough" for many people.
      • Few players support it.
      • The name "Ogg Vorbis" is a huge handicap to overcome.

      As a geek, I'd love the see technical superiority win, but I don't think Ogg is well-positioned to have any chance of taking marketshare from MP3s.

      • Re:Why OGG Is Worse (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dmccarty ( 152630 )
        The name "Ogg Vorbis" isa huge handicap to overcome.

        Hear, hear!

        As a proof to that I submit the "why is it named ogg vorbis" question from vorbis.com's FAQ:

        ---
        What do all the names mean?
        Ogg
        Ogg is the name of Xiph.org's container format for audio, video, and metadata.
        Vorbis
        Vorbis is the name of a specific audio compression scheme that's designed to be contained in Ogg. Note that other formats are capable of being embedded in Ogg such as FLAC and Speex.
        ---

        What the... Was this written by

    • You don't save much disk space when you need to generate the mp3s anyway, to have something that an automotive CD/MP3 system, an iPod, and Macs running iTunes (in OS X) or XMMS (in Linux) can all handle :)

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