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Music Businesses Media Apple

Ogg Support For iTunes 276

Posted by timothy from the rollin'-rollin'-rollin' dept.
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."
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Ogg Support For iTunes More

Ogg Support For iTunes

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  • About damn time! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Shuh ( 13578 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:13PM (#4590440) Journal
    So when is Ogg coming to the iPod?

    • Re:About damn time! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cygnus ( 17101 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:21PM (#4590857) Homepage
      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! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tuffy ( 10202 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @08:24PM (#4591443) Homepage Journal
        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.

  • Finally (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RebelTycoon ( 584591 )
    Enough said!

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

  • Sounds more like a bugtraq issue (Score:5, Funny)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:17PM (#4590463) Journal
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:17PM (#4590467)
    Does this mean it'll play BOTH of my OGG tunes perfectly?

    AWESOME!

    • No... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:55PM (#4590686)
      ...just the first one.

    • You have two?

      Timothy and his fan club aside, does anyone actually USE ogg?

      -Bill
      • Everytime there's a discussion on mp3s here it always turns into a "i like ogg better waaaaa" "i like mp3 better waaaa" bitchfest.

        I dont give a flying fuck if ogg is better personally, I already have way too much time (encoding 100s of cds) and money ($400 ipod) invested in mp3's. Besides, both LAME and iTunes encode mp3's that sound VERY nice at 192kbps... lots of mp3s you get from the internet sound like crap because they're encoded by Little Billy (age 7) or smoeone really stupid who doesnt know how to change the default settings in their crappy encoder. These are the mp3's everyone hears and says "oh mp3 sucks!".. but the ones I encode, I can't tell apart from the CD.

        I have no problems with people liking or using OGG, it's just that there is absolutely zero reason for me to switch.
      • Timothy and his fan club aside, does anyone actually USE ogg?

        Yes. Every day. I've got over five hundred of them and won't be going back to mp3s for encoding, ever.

      • I have 533 tracks all ripped from my own collection to OGG format.

  • Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:19PM (#4590476) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • CD Burning works! (Score:4, Informative)

    by plazman30 ( 531348 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:21PM (#4590491) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:22PM (#4590499) Homepage
    ... 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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by Scooby Snacks ( 516469 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:31PM (#4590547)
      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 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @08:56PM (#4591571) Homepage Journal

        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mosch ( 204 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:34PM (#4590559) Homepage
      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.

      • Just look at a device that sais: "holds 1000 songs" [of 128kbps .mp3] and then look at the device right beside that sais: "holds 2000 songs" [of 64 kbps .ogg which sound better than 128kbps according to listening tests]

        Now you tell me the general public won't care?

        • They won't really. For one, most of the general public is well aware of and uses MP3. Secondly, remember that a person's attention span is short. That disclaimer about .ogg sounding better than MP3s according to [subjective] listening tests, for 90% of the people (and most of them can't tell the difference) won't matter. So they'll ask the sales guy what it means, and he'll say

          "well basicaly if you already have .ogg files or you want to make new ones, it's more songs on the player"

          customer> "Well what about my MP3s?"

          sales kid> "It'll hold the same as all the others.
      • where do you get your statistics that ogg people are cheap?

        I happen to like ogg because the encoder is open, it compresses very well, it sounds great to my ears.

        by saying ogg people are cheap are you saying that mp3 people are not cheap? That sounds a little ridiculous.

        Soon as someone makes a portable ogg player I will get it. that simple.

      • Re:This is great (Score:2, Insightful)

        by andrewski ( 113600 )
        95% of the Ogg fanboys are cheap.

        I would LOVE to see you try to quantify that statement. I would guess that most Ogg fanboys are actually the dudes who had iPods (or another mp3 player) LONG before J-Lo and Tony Hawk and all your other standard consumers did. You know, the early adopters. The people who spend MORE money on gadgets than anyone else.

        Try again.
    • OGG has been making some rather good headway in games. A number of new games that have come out (UT2003) or are comming out soon use OGG for music. Most of the popular music plugins like FMOD support it and developers are finding that it rules on account of having good compression and no liscencing hassles.

      That indirectly helps OGG adoption generally as it increases awarness since people to like to listen to music from video games and with OGG they can just play it straight in Winamp or the like.

    • Re:This is great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rseuhs ( 322520 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:44PM (#4590990)
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

        by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @07:16PM (#4591163)
        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.

  • to repeat a post from macslash (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Knife_Edge ( 582068 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:23PM (#4590503)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by puck01 ( 207782 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:34PM (#4590558)
      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
    • Licensing and sound quality. Simple. Still, that's not going to be enough for quite a long while. If you're happy w/mp3s (as I am) stick with it.
      • Licensing really isn't an issue for a lot of people. P2P junkies don't often care about licence schemes because they don't see it. As for sound quality, again, talk about most people and it doesn't matter, most of them can't tell the difference cause they're using crappy quality dollar store headphones anyways.
    • What, are you new here?

  • ahhh grasshoppers... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:26PM (#4590521) Journal
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by erik umenhofer ( 782 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:29PM (#4590535) Homepage
    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.

  • any good P2P progs to find ogg... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dfj225 ( 587560 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:30PM (#4590540) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Internet Relay Chat. There are currently two major Ogg Vorbis-only releasing groups and several minor (one-person) "groups" which often have their own IRC channels with iroffer XDCC's and private FTP's. I'm not going to mention their channels and IRC network which they reside on for security reasons, but here's a hint: Team Inaniation Network and Ogg Ripping Network. I'll leave you to find their location.
    • i've found that about half of the music on giFT [sourceforge.net] is ogg.
      It's still cvs only, but its getting better every day.
    • a possible reason you might not find ogg files on p2p apps is that possibly the people encoding in ogg are not interested in sharing their tunes as they have enough already. also, one more item. For those that use the argument that p2p is good cause it introduces you to new music you wouldn't get anywhere on the radio might I suggest you turn off clearchannel and turn on NPR. My two local public radio stations in southeastern virginia have intorduced me to some of the best music ever made. Give rollie radio a try. 7-9 I think. You can listen online at whro [whro.org]
  • 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? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SexyKellyOsbourne ( 606860 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:35PM (#4590569) Journal
    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.
    • With proprietary software (i.e. MP3 encoders like iTunes has) there may have been all kinds of backroom deals we may never know about. For example Apple may have gotten a super cut-rate deal on the encoder license in exchange for promising thomson to not include Ogg support for encoding or playback.

      I could be blowing smoke out my ass too and apple is just really slow to respond to new formats and the next version will include Ogg support.
    • If it's so trivial why haven't you done it already? Integer only MP3 decoders are all over the places and MP3 decoding using only integer math is well understood. MP3 is also standardized such that anyone with the specs can write a decoding algorithm for them if they desire to. The Tremor codec has just recently been released which means there's still a bit of development time before you see it adapted to handhelds like the Rio and iPod. Even if you've got a strong processor, which most MP3 handhelds don't have, you need to get your decoder on a MIPS diet so your chip isn't running full bore and sucking power out of the batteries like an electricty vampire. Integer only MPEG decoding is a well understood practice while Ogg is still relatively new even though it shares many concepts. Decoding algorithms are one thing, decoding algorithms that don't require 100+ MIPS are another.

  • Or you could use (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jerrytcow ( 66962 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:45PM (#4590622) Homepage
    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%.

    • 7-10% Are you serious? Winamp never gets above 3% on my AXP 2000. Can anyone offer an explanation as to why this is?
      • Sure I could. Assuming that the person posting the information was using a 600 Mhz iBook. 7% would have been roughly 42 Mhz. 42 Mhz on an Athlon 2000 (IIRC that's roughly 1.7 Ghz) comes out to 2.5%. So it seems to be nothing more than a difference in CPU cycles.
  • but how many portable players actually support it?

  • Mac OGG Problem... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Shuh ( 13578 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @05:51PM (#4590660) Journal
    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? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by toothfish ( 596936 )
    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.
    • Man, I think I caused the poor guy to be /.'ed by posting information on his plugin on MacOSXHints. According to the author of the plugin (Jordan):

      "The binary I put up was just a bug fix and a small performance enhancement. I posted the bug fix to sourceforge and mailed the author Steve Nicolai, but he was pretty busy and said he wouldn't get to it for some time. I put up the binary in the mean time."

      Great job Jordan!!

      The plugin is working well for me, aside from a brief delay on starting the playback of Ogg files (about 0.5 -1 sec, depending on CPU load. Due to switching to Quick Time internally to playback?) it is working flawlessly.

      iTunes also can successfully read some of the information Tags embedded in the Ogg files as written by Ogg Drop (Track Name, Artist, Album, Genre) and thus organizes the Ogg files properly into your music collection. iTunes lists the file as a Quicktime Movie file rather than a Ogg Vorbis file and is unable to tell the bitrate of the file. Also, during playback, iTunes is unable to sample the sound output of the Ogg file so unfortunately no visualizations.

      Hey, I'm happy, it was free after all. Maybe it is time to pull down the patch from Sourceforge and see if we can get the visualizaitons working?

      DaveC

  • finally, decoding ogg... (Score:4, Informative)

    by fishboy ( 81833 ) <.ac.rekkolb. .ta. .reteip.> on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:12PM (#4590784) Homepage

    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? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BigumD ( 219816 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:24PM (#4590867) Homepage
    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.
  • ...if you can't find them on p2p sites.

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

  • Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Rhetoric... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by loply ( 571615 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:34PM (#4590935) Homepage
    "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.
    • Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I wish the posters here would find a bit of INDEPENDENCE.



      Yeah, me too! I'm SICK to DEATH of Slashdot posters just COMPLAINING! I mean these losers have nothing better to do but bitch and moan about other people's nasal, annoying posts and... oops, damn!

      Monty
      "Tee-Hee!"

  • So.... (Score:3)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:34PM (#4590943) Journal
    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.

    • Yes. (Score:3, Informative)

      by xiphmont ( 80732 )
      The DirectShow filters at vorbis.com add Ogg support to WMP and all Win apps that use DirectShow, including DiVX apps.

      Monty

  • Common sense, people (Score:2, Interesting)

    by acoustiq ( 543261 )
    ...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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tokerat ( 150341 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @08:23PM (#4591435) Journal
      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? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cappadocius ( 555740 ) <cappadocius@vamp ... e r a d e . c om> on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:45PM (#4590997)
    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.

    • Re:Tag Support? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by luphus ( 201537 )
      Yep - they should. I keep my tunage on a readonly nfs mount and my dynamic playlists, ratings, and playcounts work just fine. I think all that wonderful metadata is stored in the iTunes prefs somewhere.

      That said, I'm having trouble to get the plugin to work (either that or the encoder on that site). Not sure what's going on yet...

      -nwp

  • another project (Score:4, Informative)

    by elohim ( 512193 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @06:59PM (#4591068)
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mitchell_pgh ( 536538 ) on Sunday November 03, 2002 @07:08PM (#4591128)
    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.
  • 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. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xiphmont ( 80732 ) on Monday November 04, 2002 @04:37AM (#4593140) Homepage
      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

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