Vorbis audio compression
Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 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 MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC.
The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis.
Resources
Visit Vorbis.com to get set up to use vorbis, find music, and more. Frequently Asked Questions
A format specification and related documentation are available on this site.
The libvorbis reference implementation provides both a standard encoder and decoder under a BSD license. [Source download] [SVN trunk] The Tremor reference decoder provides an integer-only implementation of the decoder for embedded devices [SVN trunk] [low-memory branch]
