Why Ogg?

Mp3 is the ubiquitous de-facto standard and wma works nearly as well as ogg, so why do I use ogg vorbis? The first reason is that it is the best from a technical point of view--for the amount of quality I require, I can compress to 10% of the original using ogg. I can encode with Lame and get the same quality in an mp3, but it will be much larger. Wma is technically better than mp3, but it is a Microsoft proprietary format designed to promote Microsoft's interests, which often are not the same as your interests. Linux and Mac are badly supported, and that is reason enough not to use it.

Microsoft, incidentally, has a piece of bigbrotherware called Windows Media Player. Do not use this program! I call it bigbrotherware as it is spyware and crippleware designed to make you think wma is the only real format, and that Microsoft rules. WinAmp is what actually rules; if you are on a Windows system I suggest you download and install it, and if you have an older version you should update to a newer one. Click the link to download it.

home