Ogg Vorbis

Ogg Vorbis (libvorbis) is a patent-free, royalty-free, non-proprietary, multiplatform and open source software project implemented in C and designed to provide a general-purpose compressed audio format, which can be used for encoding mid to high quality audio files.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for audio frequencies from 8kHz to 48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic sounds, as well as variable and fixed bitrates, from 16 to 128 kbps per channel. The libvorbis library is the core Ogg stream and Vorbis engine.

When compared with other audio codecs, Ogg Vorbis is on the same level with MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar audio representations. Therefore, its quality and performance are definitely higher than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 (MP3), WMA, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), or PAC.

Getting started with Ogg Vorbis

Installing the Ogg Vorbis tools in your GNU/Linux system is a breeze. First of all, you might want to open your graphical package manager and search for ‘ogg vorbis’. Install the package and that’s it, you now have support for writing and reading OGG audio files in your computer.

Various audio converter applications will automatically detect if the Ogg Vorbis library and tools are correctly installed on your computer, so you will be able to convert various other audio formats to Ogg using the respective apps.

Under the hood, availability and supported OSes

Looking under the hood of the Ogg Vorbis project, we can immediately notice that its source code is written in the C programming language and that it supports all mainstream operating systems, including Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

The software is only distributed as a universal sources archive, which includes the source code and all the files need to optimize it for a specific hardware architecture (32-bit and 64-bit are supported at this time) or operating system.

What is new in this release:

• This is a coordinated update of the audio libraries and tools to deploy improved surround-sound support across the libraries and toolchain.
• libao improvements:
• AO returned to active development
• Added surround channel mapping API and capability
• Updated all drivers on modern installs
• New config file options
• Driver options may be specified in config file
• Support for MacOSX updated to 10.5 and later
• Build in WMM driver rather than using dlopen()
• Added Roar Audio driver
• Added OpenBSD SNDIO driver
• Workaround for ESD non-4096 byte write bug
• Workaround aRts server crash bug
• Workaround for VIA82xx click/crackle bugs under ALSA
• Remove dead/unused drivers (solaris, alasa05, mmsound)
• Numerous patches from multiple downstreams
• libvorbis improvements:
• libVorbis 1.3.0 was briefly available as an unreleased staging snapshot. This official release bumps the version number to 1.3.1 to avoid any possible confusion.
• Optimized/coupled surround support for 5.1 encoding at 44.1/48kHz
• Added encoder control call to disable channel coupling
• Corrected an overflow bug in very low-bitrate encoding on 32 bit machines that caused inflated bitrates
• Numerous API hardening, leak and build fixes
• Correct bug in 22kHz compand setup that could cause a crash
• Correct bug in 16kHz codebooks that could cause unstable pure tones at high bitrates