[vorbis] How to make Vorbis popular

[Kai Gallasch]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:11:12 +1100
MARK JAMES HETHERINGTON <mark.hetherington at studentmail.newcastle.edu.au>
wrote:

> I figure the best way to make it popular, is to use it! I just rip all
> my music to OGGs now, and download as many as I can. If I find an mp3
> file that has problems with sync when I try to burn it, I transcode it
> to OGG, where I would previously have re-encoded it to mp3. I make the
> OGG winamp plugin available prominantly on my web site via a big fat
> link. etc etc. 
> 
> I'm still very dissapointed the decoder is not included in winamp! is
> this going to happen soon?
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Hongl Lai <hongli at telekabel.nl>
> Date: Friday, January 11, 2002 7:32 am
> Subject: [vorbis] How to make Vorbis popular
> 
> > Ogg Vorbis is still not known by the mainstream and not widely used
> > these days.

Some people stay away because they think Vorbis makes no sense for them
until there is an official release version 1. That's also the main argument
for most manufacturers of mp3-players to not offer vorbis-support.

<p>> > I've been thinking about this... MP3 is so popular because people can
> > download music for free (and thus pirating music).
> > I recommend Vorbis to everybody I know, but most of them refuse to 
> > eventry it because it's not popular (or because they are hardcore MP3
> > zealots), which results in a circle (little people use it because it's
> > not popular, but it will not get popular because little people use 
> > it).

> > Is the only way for Vorbis to become popular to promote it as a 
> > tool for
> > music piracy?

I strongly disagree with this. For the public the term "piracy" has a
strong negative tone - and promoting the use of Vorbis in this context 
would damage the reputation of "Vorbis" and "Ogg" as superior audio
format. Do you really think Iomega - or who ever - would support the
"music piracy first choice audio format" for their players?

When I tell people about .ogg I always point out

- that Vorbis is free (as in freedom - not as in free beer) and
  that mp3 is not free.
- the superior sound-quality compared to mp3
- the smaller size of .ogg files (diskspace savings)
- there is no Digital Rights Management and tell them about
  M$ WMA-Audio - and what I don't like about it.

When somebody complains: "Yes, but encoding to ogg is so slow.." - 
        I tell them that the higher sound quality of Ogg is the
        result of much more complex calculations compared to
        mp3 encoding. You wait a bit longer but the better
        sound is worth the wait.

The most simple answers to simple questions should be part of
a "vorbis advocacy FAQ" coexisting with the normal FAQ.

Too bad that there are so many players for the Windows platform that
do not have plugins to support .ogg - or which don't update their
support for .ogg, so some people that you send .oggs to complain
that the files are corrupt. (A friend of mine uses freeamp with
windows, which a few weeks ago did not like playing RC2 files)

<p><p>
-- 
..your fortune-cookie for today:
Nirvana?  Thats the place where the powers that be and their friends
hang out.
		-- Zonker Harris


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