"The RC2 version of Ogg Vorbis was released today on
the vorbis.com website. An MP3 competitor, Ogg was created to offer
a patent free open source file compression format.
Thompson electronics and the Fraunhofer institute jointly own
the patents of the MP3 format and are in the process of charging
licensing fees from companies that use the encoder/decoder in their
products. Some in Net music's underbelly see the era of the free
MP3 software player will come to an eventual close and so these
independent developers have banded together to create a free and
open format. RC2 is the latest fruits of their labors.
Ogg Vorbis is a more modern format than MP3 with several
advantages. For example, Ogg Vorbis can handle more than 2 audio
channels while MP3 can't. If you are serving audio streams, you can
actually strip away parts of the files to make lower bitrate
streams--without re-coding. MP3 can't. The most important of the
many changes in the latest version is channel coupling, which means
that Vorbis can now encode bitsteams at a much lower bitrate than
before."
