The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Just curious what this strangely-named audio file format is for. Is it just another wav/aiff type format, is it compressed, is it compatible with outer space aliens' sound systems or something? Ogg-Vorbis... So strange.

EDIT: Okay, I did what I should have done and googled the site, read their stuff. So now what I want to know is, who here uses ogg-vorbis and what do you think of?

Ogg Vorbis is a freeware, open source sound compression format designed for music. The files are reckoned to be smaller than mp3s of a corresponding bitrate, but as with AAC, mp3 is too entrenched in the market to be shifted.

Info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis

Download here:
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/
http://www.vorbis.com/

I compared some audio from both mp3, insane codec and oggvorbis and recall not being impressed with the oggvorbis sound quality.

BUT~ I am no expert, and also can't remember the details of my "experiment". I may not have been true to the scientific method in coming to this conclusion, so...

Ogg Vorbis sounds like a character from Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Ogg vorbis rocks. From a technical standpoint, it's just cleaner than MP3. For end users, the selling points are:

1) Natively gapless. No more clicks between tracks or having to fudge it with LAME headers or --nogap options that blow the index, making the disc unqueryable via cddb or whatever.

2) The metadata spec is built in, and is highly extensible. No more bloody hacked-in ID3v2 headers. If you just download some songs, you probably don't care about metadata. But when you move your CD collection to the computer, you (should) start to care.

3) It's way faster.

4) Some people will argue it sounds better.

5) It's open source. Remember that the ISO spec for mpeg 1 layer 3 is still under patent in the US, and were it not for the very hard work on the part of the LAME folks, you'd still be paying for an encoder. That really slows down adoption.