[vorbis] music e-commerce using vorbis

[Michael Smith]

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

It's absolutely ready for production use. It's not "1.0" yet, but it's
very stable, the bitstream spec isn't moving, etc. You can certainly
start using it now. 

> 
> Has any hardware manufacturer announced support for Ogg? I believe almost
> all software players have or will include support for Ogg. This is
> important for us.

Most of the software players have vorbis support (many built-in). The
only significant exception is WMP. There's one hardware player with
vorbis support (though the firmware isn't yet public - it will be soon,
I understand) - iomega's hipzip.

> 
> 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? :)

Not really. If there's some specific feature you want, then waiting for
1.0 might be neccesary,  but if the codec does what you want now (and it
most likely does), it's fine for serious production use

> 
> 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?

The last beta (beta3) included some old broken example code for
manipulating metadata. The upcoming beta4 release will have a (somewhat
limited in functionality, but usable) comment editor. There are also
people implementing simpler-to-use gui editors on top of it. I believe
there's a standard copyright header, too, so you don't even have to make
one up. You can also get this tool from cvs or the nightly snapshots. 

Michael

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