Introduction

Ogg Vorbis (www.vorbis.com) is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-free (subject to speculation), and royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8khz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, multichannel) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to >256 kbps/channel. This places vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MP3, TwinVQ (VQF), WMA and PAC. Vorbis is the first of a planned family of Ogg multimedia coding formats being developed as part of Xiph.org's ogg multimedia project.

Informal listening test suggests Vorbis to be comparable to MPEG-4 AAC at most bitrates and MPC at 128 kbps. Transparency is generally reached at about 150-170 kbps (-q 5) (with some exceptions). The encoder is reasonably young and unoptimized, so further improvements can always be expected.

Unfortunately, Xiph.org has failed to improve Vorbis at a steady rate since its initial 1.0 release in July 2002 (due to other developement projects and time constraints). Since then development has been led by other coders such as Garf and Aoyumi. Aoyumi's AoTuV series of encoders was incorporated into the September 2004 release of 1.1, which brought about the first quality improvements across the board for 2 years. Currently Aoyumi is working on AoTuV Beta 4 and future releases. The latest version is AoTuV Beta 4.51, released in December 2005.

Vorbis has had success with many recent video game titles employing Vorbis as opposed to MP3 (with Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, the PC port of Microsoft's Halo and Uru being notable examples). Vorbis is also an official part of the OpenAL extension library.

Before encoding files using Ogg Vorbis, check out the Recommended Ogg Vorbis page to know what encoder to use and what settings are recommended.

Pros

Free. The Ogg Vorbis specification is in the public domain. It is completely free for commercial or noncommercial use.
Good all-round performance (>48 kbps - a leading codec at 128 kbps)
Well written specs
Several portable hardware players
Suitable for internet-streaming (via Icecast and other methods)
Fully gapless playback
High potential for further tuning
Structured to allow the design for a hybrid filterbank.

Cons

Limited official development (third-party developement is always encouraged)
Current implementations are more computationally intensive to encode/decode than MP3 (Vorbis 2.0 seeks to overcome this limitation by slimlining the encoder)
Multichannel input mappings for 5.1, Ambisonic-B, and other config have no channel coupling and aren't tuned (expect sub-optimal results until code is improved).

Technical details

Multiple block sizes for window switching including overlap (powers of two only) (128/1024, 256/2048, 512/4096)
Customly designed window function is applied similiar to the sine window. (good sidelobe rejection)

w_{k}=\sin {({\frac {\pi }{2}}\cdot sin^{2}[(\pi \div 2n\cdot (k+0.5))]}

Psychoacoustics masking is exploited via an (ATH model)
Masking curves are computed from an emperically adjusted set of Ehmer Curves
Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) is used for noise analysis.
Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used for tonal analysis.
Global masking curve is a mixture between calculated FFT+MDCT curves and ATH curves overlayed.
The noise-floor (envelope) is calculated using the global masking curve & piecewise linear approximation divided by spectrum to generate the residue (fine detail).
Noise normalization is applied to compensate for energy lost in certain frequency bands due to quantization (main cause metallic warbling in MP3)
The channels are coupled strictly by residue using (point/phase stereo and lossless).
Multistage Vector quantization is used for coding the noise-floor and residue backend using trained codebooks.
Huffman coding is used to minimize vector codeword redundancy.

Software

Encoders

Oggenc official command-line encoder (Win32/Posix)
OggdropXPd advanced drag-and-drop encoder by John33 (Win32)
foo_vorbisenc vorbis encoder library for Foobar2000 (Win32)
Lancer SSE-optimized vorbis encoder utility and libraries by BlackSword (Win32)

Decoders

Ogg123 for Unix systems (GPL), a very simple to use command-line player. (Win32/Posix)
OggDec for Windows, by John33, a very featureful command line decoder. (Win32)
QuickTime Component (Allows playback in QuickTime/iTunes) (Win32)
CoreVorbis (DirectShow) (Win32)
illiminable Ogg Directshow Filters (Also plays Speex, Theora and FLAC) (Win32)

Replay Gain

Vorbisgain to apply ReplayGain on Vorbis files.

Supported Digital Audio Players

The following list contains some players that support Vorbis playback.

Apple iPod with Rockbox firmware -- check out this still evolving HA thread
FreeMax FW-960
iAudio M3, U2, G3, X5, I5
iRiver H-Series with Rockbox firmware.
MPIO H-Series
Neuros with Rockbox firmware.
Rio Karma
Samsung
Slim Devices: Squeezebox External player
Yepp YP-T6, YP-T7, YP-C1, YP-F1, YP-53 (Firmware 1.200), other..

A longer list can be found at xiph's wiki, but this list may be outdated. There may be players out there that support Ogg Vorbis, although they are not marketed as such.

External links

The following links contain information surrounding the Ogg Vorbis codec that can be found on Hydrogenaudio and elsewhere throughout the web.