Ogg Support For iTunes

bdesham writes "Mac OS X Hints has a story about a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."

About damn time!

So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?

Re:About damn time!

So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?

it probably isn't... once apple works out some licensing stuff, it'll probably support AAC.

AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance. and a lot of people pooh pooh it because the head to head tests always show ogg coming out on top. but this is largely because they're all done at like 64kbit, where ogg shines. AAC shines at 128kbit, where it reportedly is acoustically transparent when encoded with CD-quality source.

ideally, they'd provide functionality for both formats, but i doubt they will, because they're already wedded to AAC with Quicktime's MPEG-4 capabilities.

Re:About damn time!

AAC doesn't have the open source buzzword compliance.

Is the AAC spec patent-free? And if not, why should I bother encoding my purchased music to a format that I don't have control over? Especially since Fraunhofer seems hell-bent on making it fully "Digital Restrictions Management" compliant, according to this [dolby.com] press release.

I'll stick with an open format, personally.

Re:About damn time!

99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.

But 100% of what I rip myself is ogg. And that's what I want to take with me. Not some crap riped with poor hardware at low bitrate by Joe Blow in MP3 format.

Re:About damn time!

99.99999% of music is traded via MP3. Get over it.

So?

When I rip a CD (yes, there are still people who buy CDs) I rip it to ogg becuase I can get better quality on less disk space.

What is wrong with that?

Finally

Enough said!

Now people can shut the hell up with the "but does it support ORG" posts... Nearly annoying as bewolfs!

finally? not really...

we now know that Apple supports "OGG"....
but does it support "ORG"? who knows...

nbfn
and btw...
imagine a beowulf of these things....

Sounds more like a bugtraq issue

Ok, I know this is cheap but...the wording in the article makes the useful plugin [illadvised.com] sound more like a security problem :))

a plugin for QuickTime and iTunes that enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive

Does this mean...

Does this mean it'll play BOTH of my OGG tunes perfectly?

AWESOME!

No...

...just the first one.

Re:Don't read slashdot much, do you?

I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.

Oh, imagine the new Apple commercials:

I was ripping my songs in MP3, and in the middle of the song, it was like, "beep beep beep beep," and my song was ruined, and I had to rip it again, and it wasn't as good, because it was at a lower bitrate.

Uh...

It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.

Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.

Bzzt, wrong

Vorbis decode currently requires more memory to decode than mp3/WMA (about 120kB using Tremor; we plan to reduce that to about 30-40kB).

It does not require more CPU.

Monty

"You sounded pretty authoritative for being dead wrong."

I think ogg should have been named ...

orgy. My $0.02.

If I have a sig, replace it with this blip of text that I manually typed in instead because I don't remember what the sig says (if it exists) and it may not be representative of my current beliefs.

Re:I think ogg should have been named ...

I think it should've been named "og3" (oh-gee-three) to associated itself a bit more with em-pee-three.

The non geek probably ignores "Xiph Ogg Vorbis" but might pay attention to "og3" and understand what the hell it might be.

Plus ogg is a generic container format and will be used for other Xiph codecs, including video. So calling a Vorbis music file Ogg is shortsighted.

CD Burning works!

Just tested CD burining of ogg files and it worked flawlessly. Since I don't have a portable MP3 player, I can safely say I will never make another MP3 file again.

Soon as ANYONE makes a hardware Ogg player, they'll get my money.

This is great

... but Ogg isn't going to make any major headway until the embedded decoder vendors (Crystal, Micronas, ST) start supporting it. Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation, and two, the DSP vendors need to be convinced that it's worth the precious ROM space to fit another codec in there.

Ogg just came to the party WAY too late. It is up against a massive chicken-and-egg problem if it wants to supplant MP3. Nobody's using Ogg because it's not supported, and nobody's supporting it because nobody wants it. The advantages of Ogg (slightly better quality, free) are massively outweighed by the ubiquity of MP3. Like 'em of not, Fraunhofer did a fantastic job with the original codec, and it's going to take something with a massive improvement in quality/compression/cost to supplant it. Ogg is better, but not "better enough".

Re:This is great

Two things need to happen: one, the Vorbis folks need to get the codec to run on these smaller DSPs with a free reference implementation

Well, the first part is already taken care of [xiph.org] with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.

Why Tremor won't always help

Well, [decoding Vorbis on DSP chips] is already taken care of with the release of the BSD-licensed "Tremor" integer decoder.

Three reasons why it may not help:

1. Some players decode MP3 audio with an ASIC that isn't LBA-complete[1]; they take MP3 on one pin and produce WAV on the other, and they cannot be reconfigured for any other audio format.

2. Though the iPod player, uses a pair of ARM processors for decoding the audio and running the menus, and those ARM processors can be upgraded in firmware, the flash chip may not have enough storage to hold both the MP3 decoder and the Ogg decoder.

3. What if the player maker got a sweeter unit royalty deal with RCA, the U.S. sublicensor of the MP3 patent [mp3licensing.com], for pledging to keep the device MP3-only?

[1] "LBA-complete" denotes a machine that can run any algorithm that fits into RAM, that is, a general purpose computing device. It's a weaker form of Turing-completeness which cannot be achieved because it requires infinite storage; a Linear Bounded Automaton restricts the available memory to a multiple of the size of the input.

Re:This is great

That's an excellent point, but there's another more important one. 95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap. They're not going to pay an extra $50 or $100 for an ogg-enabled iPod, and the general public doesn't give a fuck (flying or otherwise) about ogg, so they won't pay anything extra for ogg support.

So why would anybody support it? Until the costs of implementing ogg are damned near close to $0, nobody's going to spend the time and money implementing the code, integrating it all, testing it and supporting it.

Re:This is great

Ogg is not "slightly" better than mp3, it's massively better. In listening tests from heise.de, 64kbps oggs were closer to the original (or better) than 128kbps mp3s. (And it was the best codec of all, better than WMA, AAC and MP3pro.)

So if the hardware manufacturers support ogg, they can say that their device holds 2*x songs instead of x. If you buy such a device would you go for the one that holds 1000 songs or the other that holds 2000 songs if they cost the same?

Also, the hardware vendors sure don't want to pay for mp3 forever so it's in their interest that another format replaces it. (Even if it takes a long time - like a decade or even longer.)

So I'd say ogg is "better enough".

Re:This is great

For the hardware vendors though it is a question of space. Can an Ogg codec fit into the same ROM space as an MP3 codec and only use the same resources as said MP3 codec? If not they will not use Ogg codecs. Nor will they use Ogg codecs if it halves the battery life of the device, if the Ogg needs so much processing muscle it uses twice the wattage as the MP3 encoder they can't really sell that to people. Who cares if the device holds twice as many songs if the battery life is only half of what it would be otherwise. If playing an Ogg made my iPod only last 5 hours there's no way in hell I'd ever use them better quality or not. I routinely run my iPod for 8-10 hour stretches any period of time less than that is unacceptable for me personally.

Work on Ogg is going to continue and some intepid soul or souls are going to make a super cool Ogg decoder that can run on a paper clip taped to a Dorito but until then MP3 and WMP are going to dominate because they fit on the existing hardware.

Patent evergreening can delay generics even longer

In a bit more than a decade, the mp3 patent will have expired

It won't matter if Fraunhofer manages to "evergreen" the patent. Patent evergreening [iirusa.com], which involves patenting a minor variation, intermediate product, or process used to produce a product, is common in the pharmaceutical industry. Often, when a drug's patent is about to expire, a pharma company will patent a new version of a drug and then lobby the FDA to label the original version no longer "safe and effective" and make it a controlled substance. It happened to Seldane [everything2.com]. I see no reason why an analogous technique (patenting minor variations on MP3, or slamming MP3 as a "music piracy tool" in favor of mp3PRO) could not be applied to codec patents as well.

to repeat a post from macslash

Someone on macslash (first post I believe) question why anyone would care about ogg. I think that question bears repeating. What is so great about ogg that would make people want to use it instead of mp3?

Re:to repeat a post from macslash

This is a legitamite question. I'm a big fan of .ogg, but most people I know just don't care. MP3 is good enough, and all the hardware they've purchased supports it, not .ogg. This has been said many of times, because its true, and that is if .ogg is going to go somewhere it needs to be supported on hardware just as much or more that mp3. Most people have not been given an obvious reason to switch and unless mp3 starts costing consumers $$, most will never care.

Hell, its damn near impossible to find .ogg files on the p2p apps out there anyway. I tend to share hundreds of them, just to try and spread them around, but hardly anyone ever downloads them compared to any mp3s I'll share.

In any case, the more progress .ogg makes the better, even if it is small steps like this. Hopefully, we'll start seeing some huge steps in the near future with hardware.

puck

ahhh grasshoppers...

simply use Audion !
Sure it's not an iApp... but it's probably the best audio-player on the mac.
Take a look: http://www.panic.com/

DISCLAIMER: The author of this post sure as hell doesn't work for panic. Thankyouverymuch.

There are others

This program seems to have OGG support. I like iTunes but I don't think it should be the thing holding you back from listening to music on a mac. That's a little silly.

• http://www.macamp.com/addons/ [macamp.com]
  

any good P2P progs to find ogg...

Wondering if there are any P2P programs that have a lot of users w/ ogg files...I use kazaa but I'm not finding a lot of ogg files.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the greatest...

H0re of them all?

Actually, I've never done this. But on the (off) chance you guys /. his server, here's a mirror.

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~skoonce/ogg_mirror/ [usc.edu]

Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhere?

The .ogg file format is open source, portable, stable, and has no legal bindings whatsover, unlike mp3s -- what prevents hardware companies from doing a few quick source code cut n' pastes and adding a feature? ROMs are cheap enough that adding ogg support would even be trivial on the hardware end.

I and many others have over 100GB of ogg files on my hd, and I'd really like to see more support for them by hardware manufacturers -- there is no reason they can't do it.

Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe

Is there an easy way to burn ogg files in Linux?

If you're using KDE, that audiocd "ioslave" is ridiculously easy to use...

Plug in an audio cd, type "audiocd:/" in Konqueror, then drag the .ogg tracks that you want off of the "Ogg" directory to wherever you want them. KDE encodes the track when you do.

I'd be surprised if there weren't similarly easy methods outside of KDE somewhere as well...

Or you could use

a nice small program that plays both out of the box. I've been using whamb [whamb.com] today and it plays .mp3 and .ogg files just fine.

As a bonus it "only" uses 7-10% CPU on my iBook as opppsed to iTunes' 20-30%.

ogg may be great...

but how many portable players actually support it?

whamb

Whamb is a brand new MP3/Ogg Player for 10.2 that is 100% cocoa and sweeeeeeeet.

Mac OGG Problem...

Why is it that the oggenc on the Mac won't encode if you give it the path: /Volumes/Audio\ CD/Track\ 01.cdda? I get some sort of volume-is-read-only error. Of course it's read-only! It's the CD! I finally got it to encode after I copied the track from the CD to my HD. This sux. Anyone have the answer to this?

what took so long?

i have been gleefully ripping CDs and AIFs to OGG for a couple days now, and although itunes seems to choke occasionally, it hasn't been much of an issue. this has been sort of an off and on type project, actually, but this it the most painless method to coerce OGGs to play in itunes so far. oddly enough the qt components page [sourceforge.net] still claims that the component is busted under qt6. i like how the guy learned how to code on a mac on a lark over a weekend.

What about Windows Media Player?

What about Windows Media Player?

Can you play OGG in that somehow?

finally, decoding ogg...

While ripping to .ogg is fairly common, the most important thing that this plug-in provides is a means to convert .ogg files over to .aiff or .mp3, something that I haven't been able to find any software to do for the mac on either X or 9.

Thus I can play the rare .ogg files I find on my iPod, albeit via mp3.

Also, It does not require 6.0.2-- if you have 6.0 or 6.0.1 it works fine. Now I just wish I could get it for OS9.

What, are you a moron?

Yeah, I' bet there's a huge number of Apple users who rip their music to OGG when there's no available player for it on their platform.

And before you tell me that there is some obsucre player for it, reminder that your AVERAGE Mac user isn't going to know about anything that isn't made by Apple, and sure as hell isn't going to FINK something.

This isn't a step forward until it's built into iTunes.

DMCA's gotta love ogg

...if you can't find them on p2p sites.

Yes ogg is so good, it eliminates the piracy problem ;)

WHO CARES I WANT MP4/AAC

I don't care about Ogg. I want MP4 support for the iPod (tada 5 gig model goes from 1000 to 2000 songs) and support built into iTunes. MP4/AAC is the next big thing. Apple already has a decoder/encoder working and in Quicktime 6, now just implement it already!

mp3 - ogg

Anyone know of a free MS Windows program that will convert LOTS of mp3's to ogg files for me? I realy would like to convert my collection, but hand by hand converting 2000+ files is not my idea of fun.

Re:mp3 - ogg (You wouldn't want to do this...)

MP3 is a "lossy" format - so is Ogg. Conversion from MP3 to Ogg would result in double loss in comparison to the original source CD.

Re:mp3 - ogg

There is no point to doing this, unless you want to drop the bit rate, or just want ogg for political reasons.

When you encoded into MP3 (or any lossy format, for that matter) the quality went away for good. Re-encoding it will just re-encode the low quality stream, introducing the new Vorbis (OGG Audio) artifacts on top of the MP3 ones. If you re-encode your library, the audio quality will get worse, period, although the drop will me minimal, and you might squeeze a little more compression out of it.

To answer your question, though, dbPowerAmp should do the trick.

Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Rhetoric...

"enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple."

I wish people around these parts wouldnt act as if everything does is delibartely designed to harm you. That evil, evil Apple, doesnt want you to play your ogg files! All of us are lumped with tons of ogg files on your hard drives but apple wont support us! Oh no!
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.

So....

Is there a WMP plugin yet? Beacause that's what needs to be targeted first. There are a hell of a lot WMP users then there are Quicktime or ITunes.

Common sense, people

...enables the user to play all of those Ogg Vorbis files that you have sitting on your hard drive, but can't play because of lack of support from Apple.

Whose bright idea was it to download "all of those Ogg Vorbis files" that you couldn't play?

Or, for those of you who don't download...

Why did you rip all your CDs into a format you couldn't read?

Re:Common sense, people

Why can't you play your Ogg files with Audion [panic.com]?

Or Unsanity Mint Audio [unsanity.com]?

Or Macamp [macamp.com]?

They all support Ogg. And I'm sure I forgot at least a dozen more. Claiming the Mac can't play Ogg because iTunes doesn't support it is about as ridiculous as saying Linux can't do your budget because there is no spreadsheet built into the kernel.

The article poster is trolling on that last sentence, plain and simple.

Tag Support?

The following song information tags in the Ogg files are correctly recognized in iTunes: Song Title, Artist, Album and Genre

So will my ratings, play counts and last played features work with .ogg's? I find more and more that iTunes dynamic playlists are a cool thing, and most of mine rely on these tags.

"Ogg Vorbis" origin

From the Xiph FAQ: An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.
A product name that come both from Netrek AND Terry Pratchett's Discworld can only be a hit for nerds! I know it is with me!
I hope they call the memory module for a Ogg Vorbis player 'Brutha'!! (Of course you HAVE to read Pratchett's Small God to get that one)

another project

here's another attempt to use ogg with quicktime.

http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/

from the site:

This site is dedicated to open source QuickTime development for popular open source audio and video codecs. We are currently working on Ogg Vorbis, an audio codec developed by Xiphophorus, and MNG, an animation video codec.

We have just begun the project, expect many changes over the next few weeks. We will offer a site for developers, as well as one for end-users interested in using our software. At the moment, some areas of our site are not yet implemented.

The Ogg Vorbis component does not work with QuickTime 6.
It turns out that QuickTime doesn't support audio with packets of varying durations (only constant duration audio is supported.) This limitation is not in the documentation. This limitation exists in QuickTime 5 as well (and it's not in the documentation there either). But QuickTime 5 did fairly well when playing back audio with varying durations. QuickTime 6 will give you a few pops and clicks when trying to play an Ogg Vorbis file.
Ask Apple to fix this problem and some others.

95% of the population doesn't even know about OGG

I feel, as a well informed computer user, that there are various reasons to choose Ogg over MP3. The major issue facing Ogg is that almost nobody knows about the format and almost nobody really feels the legal/$$ issues associated with MP3. A typical Mac/iTunes user receives a free encoder and decoder with their computer system so for the end user, MP3 is essentially free (actually, Apple picks up the bill on that one -- Thanks Apple!). The argument of superior sound quality is moot then most computer users can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a raw music file (I'm saying most because their are defiantly some that can, but many don't care). I also feel that the if the MP3 people were trying to limit the availability of the encoders/decoders we would have issues, but they really aren't. There is no motivation for the end user to switch from MP3 to Ogg.

MP3, OGG, MPEG4

I have about 15,000 MP3s, a few OGG files, and tried the MPEG-4 out. I really like the MPEG-4. way smaller than MP3s, plays natively in iTunes, and sounds great. I purchased Quicktime Pro and "rip" CDs to MPEG-4 with a nice applescript from this site:

http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/itinfo/makemine mpeg4.shtml [malcolmadams.com]

Yeah, the files don't play in my iPod...and that is a cryin' shame. Otherwise, I can't find anything wrong with MPEG-4.

It has never been about what is "better"

Ideological dogma aside, success in marketplace adoption has never been about survival of the fittest. It's about being first to saturate the market.

I don't think I need to give examples, but Beta vs VHS, Windows vs. everything else, MP3 vs Ogg, blah, blah.

If Ebola were to kill everyone on the planet, would it matter if a newer, deadlier (and arguably better) virus appeared on earth?

...but your assumptions are incorrect.

First off, you look at this as if we're a corporation attempting to maximize profit, and thus Ogg can only win by being biggest, and doing it quickly.

We're a non-profit, formed to provide Free software for the public good. Money isn't the goal. That brings down your house of cards.

Instant market saturation is not the goal. I think Ogg will be big, but it doesn't need to happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after. We're not trying to please short-sighted shareholders. We'll still be here next decade without market forces deciding our fates or dictating our actions.

When we built Ogg, we did so for a single original reason: Be Better. Being Free also came naturally, as practically every piece of interoperable software in widespread use on the Net today was born of Free Software. Mp3 succeeded only because enough people thought it was free.

At this point, we've built something better, built something Free, and seen it deployed on tens of millions of computers worldwide. Secondary win condition: Fraunhofer would never be so stupid as to force royalties on mp3 software players now. (OK, maybe I'm going to far on that last one, I have no idea what guides FhG licensing these days, but we can affect them without them affecting us :-)

Monty

Unicode??? Is it too much to ask?

Man, encoding my CDs with unicode track names is turning out to be a bitch. iTunes does it well with mp3s, but oggdrop seems to unicode, and the command line tools seems to also.

I can rename the files and then name them back after encoding, but man, what a pain.

So, consider unicode #1 on my feature wish-list. Or maybe I'll quit bitching and fix it. Nah.

-Peter

whatever

I said "screw it" when a while back and decided to get fink [sourceforge.net] as all of my playlists are in m3u format - ogg just came naturally =]

XMMS is my solution

Right now, I have XDarwin running rootless with Blackbox as the window manager. I'm running XMMS, and it's playing an OGG. It's using between 2% and 5%, with ESD using up 4-5%. It's free, open-source, supports OGG, and gives me X running when I need it!

Re:Ode to Slashdot

Unless you toe the party line.

Why should your toe adhere to any particular ideology? Does it matter which particular toe?

Re:asdf

he's right!

Re:Sold Out to Apple

Just because he has TiBook doesnt mean he uses OS X exclusively or at all. I bet he installed linux on there as soon as he got one

Re:What's in a name?

you can play .mp4 files in itunes, simply drop file on itunes, ta da. you cannot however encode to mp4 from itunes, yet.

Re:The stupid thing is...

iTunes does use Quicktime to encode and decode audio files. Do you homework before you post FUD.

pfftplplplptpffplplpffft