[vorbis] music e-commerce using vorbis

[Monty]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 10:17:03PM +0100, Patrik Wallstrom wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am the CTO of an online e-commerce site selling signed underground
> music. We're just about to begin with mp3 distribution by download. I have
> looked into Ogg Vorbis, and it is interesting for us to both avoid the mp3
> patent stuff (what's the legal status of Fraunhofer looking into any
> possible patent infringements by Ogg?)

A Fraunhofer exec shot his mouth off on a subject about which he was
uninformed, and FhG publically backed down a bit in a statement a few
days later (the exact quote is in an article on www.the451.com if I
remember correctly; search their site for 'Vorbis'.)

> and WMA. However, I still don't
> think Ogg Vorbis is ready for "production use", is that a correct
> assumption?

We're not at 1.0 because we haven't implemented the complete feature
list.  The code as it stands is production ready, it's just missing a
a few bullet points. 

> Has any hardware manufacturer announced support for Ogg?

Iomega is about to do so.  I have and alpha version of a Vorbis
software update for their HipZip players.  If you have a HipZip, I'll
send it to you :-)

> I believe almost
> all software players have or will include support for Ogg.

Yes.

> The tools are there, we can begin to use Ogg any day we want, but I guess
> we will have to wait for atleast version 1.0 for production use, right? :)

Anything you produce now will work forever.  Any future developments
you'd be concerned with in downloadable content would involve quality
improvements.  If the current quality is to your liking, you have
nothing to wait for.  If you evaluate the audio quality and decide
there's waiting to do, a few more improvements will be in place by
1.0.

My own frank evaluation of Vorbis vs everything else is that right
now, Vorbis is inferior only in preecho control; this is due to
several of the really obvious good techniques being patented so that
we can't use them.  In every other respect Vorbis at beta 4 beats the
competition (especially with respect to treble and stereo image
fidelity), and I'm levelling the R&D guns at the preecho issue now.

> One more question. We will have to include copyright information in any
> digital musicfile we distribute. Does the standard Ogg package include any
> tools for manipulating the meta data?

Yes, the file can be tagged at creation time (and COPYRIGHT is one of
the 'standard' suggested tags), and the beta 4 release of
vorbiscomment can alter the tags of an already-encoded file.

Monty

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