[Vorbis] Poor programming support

[levein]

Thanks for all your replies! I've been trying to shrink some audio files for
a language learning software. Tried wave format first, but I can only reduce
the original 690MB to 80MB despite of a noticeable quality loss. Ogg reduced
to 60MB without quality loss...at least I can't tell, it's good enough for
online distribution. Final installation file is 31MB, it seems that ogg
leaves lots of room for compression program. Anyway, I decided to use ogg,
but I didn't expect the programming hurdle.

IMHO, ogg lacks programming overview, documentation, and a higher level
support for beginners. After three days, with lots of searching and reading,
I only figured out:
- libogg, libvorbis and libvorbisfile are what I need. A simple overview
would be very helpful.
- I can finish my work by studying oggdec's source code, I planned to
rewrite some code in C++ and use it in my project. I stopped here, though.

It's OK to have to dig deeply for advanced stuff, but If it's easier for
beginners to jump on the wagon, ogg could have been more popular. Being used
in general software (not media related) should help as well. My C++ skills
may be rusted, but I think it should be harder to add ogg support in Jave,
PHP, python, VB, etc. 'Being open' shouldn't be limited in license policy.
Nowadays, even websites such as Google and Facebook offer API, their
language support, documentation and samples are amazing.

I have turned to MP3, it reduced the files to 32MB with a similar voice
quality, final installation file is 29MB, compression program can't do much
about it. The best part is that it only took me 30 minutes to add the code.

Sorry for my intrusion, I'm definitely not attacking ogg or pissing your
guys off. More choices are always a good thing for the end users.

Have a nice day!
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