[vorbis] Vorbis newbie questions

[Monty]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 02:35:26PM -0500, Dave Phillips wrote:
> Greetings:
> 
>   I'm writing an article for the O'Reilly Network, and the focus is on
> streaming audio with Linux. I would like to include material concerning
> Vorbis, but I need some information:
> 
>     1) What's up with www.vorbis.com and www.icecast.org ? Can anyone
> say when they'll be back on-line ?

Those machines are on an SDSL line that got caught in the middle of a
contract dispute between DSLnetworks and Covad (it seems DSLnetworks
hasn't been paying all its bills, and Covad cut them off-- and all
their customers).  Whatever we end up having to do, it'll be back as
soon as we can manage it.  It's been 'any day now' for almost two
weeks, not helped by the fact that DSLnetworks has been lying through
their teeth.

>     2) Where should I go to get the latest Vorbis sources ?

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/ (ogg.org points there too)

xiph.org is unaffected byt he outage.

>     3) What players, encoders, etc currently support Vorbis ?

We stopped tracking when we lost count.  If you look at all the apps
out there, more support Vorbis than don't at this point.  The biggest
news right now is that all the major Mac players have bought in, and
the next versions of the Sonic Foundry products all support Ogg Vorbis
(Sound Forge will have full Ogg support in 5.0, Siren Jukebox already
has support).

>     4) What extra software exists for Vorbis ? (I'm thinking of things
> like the VCE I read about on this list).

We'd have to spend a few days tracking down all the products at this
point.  Can you limit the scope of the question a bit? :-) Maybe jack
has been maintaining a list all along and didn;t tell me...

>     5) Say I want to listen to a Vorbis stream: where can I go to
> connect to one on the net ? What player should I use ? If I use
> Netscape, how do I configure it ? Is there an Ogg Vorbis MIME type ?

I'll assume you're on UNIX for the moment.  That's what I'm most
familiar with.

Icecast 2.0 is running and streaming Ogg, but hasn't seen official
release yet (the biggest reason is the afrementioned SDSL issue; the
main icecast.org server is on the affected line.  Even moving
somewhere else would take time...)

To just grab Vorbis files from the net, play on any of the unix
players (freeamp, xmms, ogg123, kmpg).

XMMS has decent Ogg streaming support at this point, although you'd
need to grab/build XMMS from CVS (there's been no official release
since streaming was added.)  Of course, that'll be a standard included
feature in the next XMMS release.

At that point, connecting to a vorbis stream is identical to
connecting to an mp3 stream.  The user wouldn't see any difference.

>     6) What's up with Icecast 2.0 and Vorbis ?

Icecast 2.0 exists, and if the icecast.org line was up, you could
fetch it from the icecast.org BitKeeper repository.

Icecast 2.0 streams Ogg natively.  

>   I know, it's a lot of questions, sorry about that. In my defense, I've
> become very curious about Vorbis after doing my research on MP3...  ;)
> 
>   Vast appreciation in advance...

Feel free to ask for elaboration on any of the above.  I defaulted to
'short answers' to help narrow things down without too much work :-)

Also a heads-up: Vorbis beta 4 will be released officially as soon as the
bandwidth woes are handled.

Monty

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