“Project Vorbis, spearheaded by developers from iCAST,
an online entertainment and majority-owned operating company of
CMGI, today announced the Beta release of Vorbis, a
high-quality open source audio compression/decompression format
(codec) that is expected to provide a royalty free alternative to
MP3 and other audio compression formats. Several leaders in
the digital audio player market have already announced support for
Vorbis, including EMusic, Sonique, Napster, Etrantrum, Panic and
XMMS.”
“Similar to the popular MP3 codec, Vorbis is designed to allow
any person or organization to freely encode audio content and make
it available in a downloadable format. Individuals or organizations
using Vorbis will be able to develop and market their own
Vorbis-based audio players and encoders, without having to pay
costly fees for the Vorbis technology.”
“Leading the development of Vorbis are iCAST Vice President of
technology Jack Moffitt, iCAST Senior Applications Developer Chris
Montgomery and an open source team that includes the creators of
the Icecast streaming media server, cdparanoia.”
“Early listening tests of Vorbis show that it provides excellent
sound quality that is comparable, if not superior, to competing
formats, and we haven’t even reached our first release,” said
Moffitt. “This is a breakthrough development for companies that are
seeking an alternative to the stringent patent protection and
royalty fees enforced by the patent holders of the popular MP3 file
format.”