An open Thank-You letter from OGG Vorbis developers to Thompson Multimedia

AWESOME. JUST, PLAIN, FREEKIN' AWESOME! This post is *very* Emmett Plant-ish. Actually, Emmett is a very fine gentleman who takes the time to answer his most urgent forum posts. (I wouldn't want to cross swords with him though; he can be quite 'feisty'). Ogg Vorbis is gonna *rule*, Lasse, I can feel it. I've felt it ever since I discovered it and explored other formats along with it, right here in these forums with you and our own members. I simply adore the increasingly large collection of vorbis data discs I have made, and will make a financial committment (if not too grievous) to obtain a vorbis-capable dvd standalone player when (not 'if') it comes out. I truly believe the writing is on the wall now. I *want* the ogg logo to replace the 'mp3' one on all new hardware devices. Vorbis is no longer beta. LOOK OUT !!! :-) I'm proud of what Chris Montgomery, Emmett Plant et all have created and accomplished. With perfectly-composed tongue-in-cheek letters like the one above, ogg (and vorbis) can't fail. If Emmett sounds a little 'cock-sure' above, well, he *should* be! Xiph has earned it. Everything he stated is true. Now...... I'm not a musician (alas), but if I *were*, I would probably be hounding you, asking if it would be 'ok' for me to upload oggs instead of mp3s to mp3Lizard. *Thank You* for keeping us right up to snuff on these important developments! -- Klingy --

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Now...... I'm not a musician (alas), but if I *were*, I would probably be hounding you, asking if it would be 'ok' for me to upload oggs instead of mp3s to mp3Lizard.

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Just changed the rules and we allow OGG Vorbis files now as well ;-) Not that no one had cared earlier either, we already had like 200 Vorbis files in our system even before changing the rules -- we're not too restrictive/obsessed in that area. I personally am waiting with interest how several small players in digital music biz will take it -- who has the courage to dump MP3 support altogether, since that kind of a move _WILL_ alienate Joe Average's from using the player. Joe Averages of this world don't really care what's the reasoning behind the decision to drop MP3 support, they only care about the fact that they either can or can't play their files downloaded from "kazza" (<- seems to be official way to typ-o the p2p tool nowadays, among newbies anyway :-). Sad, but true.

I so far haven't downloaded a single OGG file while searching for music on the net, but when ever I purchase an Album, I encode it into Vorbis at 128kbps average. It will be pretty interesting to see if people start sharing OGG encoded music as I'm fed up downloading poorly encoded MP3 tracks. I've roughly 1,700 OGG tracks and 1,100 MP3 tracks on my PC. All the OGG tracks are ripped from Albums I have and are encoded in Vorbis 1.0.

dRD: That's *terrific* news! And thanx for admitting that (some) folks had already uploaded (200!!) oggs! They (and you/mp3Lizard) will be under NO obligation to pay *any* fees w-h-a-t-s-o-e-v-e-r for it's use! And yes, providing ogg-only playback capability in hand-held portable music playback devices would indeed make joe schmoe average-user scratch his head in bewilderment. Frankly, maybe a *better* way to go would be for the manufacturers to include both formats, at least for a while, so that Mr. Schmoe would realize there was now a *choice*. The smaller filesize and higher quality would likely make him switch over, all by himself. Certainly too, ogg-file availability from mp3Lizard and elsewhere certainly won't hurt either! seanbyrne: Vorbis 1.0 128 (or even RC4 beta!) will certainly beat the pants off what you're generally going to find floating around the net in similar mp3 bitrate files, and particularly from P to P file-sharing systems. (I was dumbfounded at how many 128 kbps .mp3 cbr files -- or at least abr -- people have stored on their HDDs, when using Grokster). If you have (or plan to get) an inexpensive cdr burner, you can free up a _lot_ of hdd space by burning some ogg data discs. At 128 kbps, you can store a whack of them on a single disc. (Please keep your eyes peeled for ogg hardware devices - I know * I * am !! -- Mike --