Ogg Vorbis means MP3 isn't the last word in digital music
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist, 8/26/2002
It's a measure of our national geekification that the term MP3 has entered our common speech. Millions of us collect legal or illegal music files, encoded in the MP3 digital format and then burned onto compact disks or distributed over the Internet.
But MP3 isn't the last word in digital music, far from it. It's actually a fairly old technology, and more expensive than most people realize. That's why we may soon add a new and even geekier term to our technical vocabulary: Ogg Vorbis.
Emmett Plant, CEO of the nonprofit Xiph.Org Foundation (www.xiph.org), which created Ogg Vorbis, says it's a vastly better digital format than MP3. ''From a purely technical standpoint ... we simply outperform them.'' Plant says Ogg files sound better than MP3s, but that's a judgment call. There's no doubt, however, that Ogg files are smaller than their MP3 equivalents, so more of them will fit onto hard drives and digital music players.
If you hang out at science fiction conventions, you might know what the words Ogg Vorbis mean. If you don't, visit the www.vorbis.com Web site and find out. You'll also find instructions on how to get Ogg software. The latest WinAmp music player (available at www.winamp.com) will play back Ogg files. Creating your own Oggs is a bit harder, but a free program called OggDrop gives good results.
In one of our tests, an Ogg file came out 20 percent smaller than the same music encoded in MP3 and 17 percent smaller than WMA format, another MP3 rival developed by Microsoft Inc. And this journalist's untrained ear couldn't hear a difference in quality.
But the key difference between Ogg and MP3 is a matter of money. Ogg technology is free to all; MP3 isn't. This comes as news to many people, accustomed to downloading free MP3-compatible programs like WinAmp and RealNetworks Inc.'s RealOne. But behind the scenes, somebody's been paying for our pleasure.
MP3 is a global standard for digital sound. But MP3 is different from a lot of technical standards, like the HTML Web page language, or e-mail protocols like POP3. These Internet standards belong to the public. Anybody can write a POP3-compatible mail program, without having to pay a dime in royalties or licensing fees.
Not so with MP3, which is based on patented data-compression techniques owned by the Fraunhofer Institute, a German think tank, and by Thomson Multimedia of France. In 1998, just as MP3 was becoming popular with consumers, Fraunhofer and Thomson began enforcing their patent rights.
RealOne is free to you but not to Real Networks. The company had to pay a $60,000 flat fee for the right to distribute MP3 players - not bad, considering how many millions of RealOnes are out there. But RealOne also includes the software for ''ripping'' standard CDs into MP3 files, and the royalty here is much stiffer: between $2.50 and $5 per download.
And what if you run one of those Internet radio stations that stream MP3 music to listeners over the Net? Your station owes Fraunhofer and Thomson 2 percent of its revenues.
The Oggsters hold out an enticing alternative. They built their product under the kind of open-source rules used to create the popular BSD Unix operating system. There's not a trace of patented code inside. It's like the e-mail protocol - anybody can use it without paying a cent. That includes businesses, which can incorporate Ogg playback and ripping into their products on a royalty-free basis. And Internet broadcasters can stream out Ogg files to their heart's content; again, there's no charge.
The Ogg team, made up of programmers scattered around the world, spent seven years on developing this technology, without the slightest interest in profiting from it. ''We specialize in free lunches,'' says Plant.
But these days, most technology companies don't feel so generous. They want to lock down their control of key Internet technologies, and wring every penny of profit from them. Consider Forgent Networks Inc., the Austin, Texas, company that recently claimed control of JPEG, the most popular digital photo format. If its patent claim holds up, every image software company on earth will owe Forgent money.
In an even more extreme case, British Telecom went to court claiming to have invented the hyperlink, the point-and-click feature found on billions of Web pages. Fortunately, a US federal judge threw out the case last week.
''You should absolutely make money from your work,'' says Plant. But he adds: ''The Internet wouldn't be where it is today if it all started with a closed-up patented system.''
And the continued progress of the Net depends on networks of dedicated geeks, serving up powerful new technology free of charge, just because they can.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
This story ran on page E3 of the Boston Globe on 8/26/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
