Ogg Vorbis
I had a good time trying out Vorbis on Thursday. I recommend it all the time, so I thought I should actually find out how well it works.
I thought it worked well. I don't have a lot of experience with MP3s to compare it, but it sounds pretty good. I tried to compress a few CD tracks (remember: when CDs are all encrypted "to prevent piracy", you can't even try these experiments for yourself!) and I could hear the loss of quality, but they still sounded acceptible to me.
The compression I saw at default bitrates is better than 10:1, which is pretty cool.
The proximate cause of my trying out Vorbis was writing to Dave Farber about how it's good, in response to an instantly-infamous Wall Street Journal piece recently in which he was quoted. The piece reports that Microsoft is trying to get rid of MP3. Why? You guessed it: because MP3 doesn't include copy protection! ("You" who guessed it are anyone who reads dvd-discuss or goes to BayFF or knows Don Marti.)
The article was actually incredibly depressing, because all of these companies blatantly stated that they were going to put their own business interests ahead of consumers' interests and try to seize control of the market and such. I think more people should read the Wall Street Journal (and that's not the only reason). Dave Farber was quoted to the effect that consumers would mostly not know better and would use the software that they were given (although he wasn't happy about that).
So all of these representatives of various companies said that the whole problem with MP3 was that the format was too open!
My view, of course, is that MP3 is not open enough, and we need to get rid of MP3 as quickly as possible -- but we need to replace it with something like Vorbis, not with something like WMA! Replacing MP3 with WMA wouldn't be a step backwards, it would be a 100-yard dash backwards, tripping over one's own feet in the process.
