Last week’s feature about the possible future of audio file formats attracted much feedback — which is odd, because most people don’t really care which ones they use, and may not even know what they are.
But it turns out there’s a handful of open-source evangelists who think you should use Ogg or Ogg Vorbis, because it’s free in both senses (as in speech; as in beer).
That’s fine with me. I don’t use Ogg myself, but I often recommend Flac (free lossless audio codec), which is also open source and free. What isn’t fine with me is the idea that Ogg represents the future of audio file formats. It has less chance than AAC, MP3 and WMA (Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio), which were the ones I had space to cover. Indeed, Ogg is still a long way behind other formats I left out, such as Real Audio and Sony’s Atrac. These have millions of users, but now look doomed.
If you look at the top-10 reviews list of portable audio players, 10 out of 10 play MP3 files out of the box, nine play WMA and only one plays Ogg: the Cowan iAudio X5. (The iRiver H10 has dropped Ogg support.) Of course, only two of these devices play AAC files, but one of those is the Apple iPod, which has the majority of the market.
If you look at the top music libraries, it’s a similar story. Most use WMA, including Napster/AOL, Microsoft MSN, MTV’s Urge, Yahoo!/MusicMatch and Wal-Mart. Real’s Rhapsody uses several formats including WMA, Sony Connect uses Atrac and eMusic uses MP3. It’s tough finding sources of Ogg downloads beyond the Russian AllOfMP3.com, which majors on MP3 and is fighting for its life. Again, there is only one library that focuses on AAC, but it’s the iTunes Music Store, the market leader.
If you look at peer-to-peer file sharing systems, the overwhelming majority of files are in MP3 format. I asked a young DJ (my son), who is heavily into this sort of thing, if he’d ever seen an Ogg file and he said not. “But if I had, I’d probably have ignored it, because I wouldn’t even know what it was.”
How you get from a low user base to roughly a billion users is another matter, but I don’t hold out much hope for Ogg. Most of the suppliers in the music market don’t do things from scratch. They build on the established industry infrastructure for quick and convenient access to hardware, software and data (that is, songs). Even Apple went to PortalPlayer for the basics of the iPod, while Microsoft went to Toshiba for the Gigabeat design on which it based the Zune.
Today, the infrastructure supports MP3, WMA and, to a lesser but growing extent, AAC. There is relatively little support for Real Audio and Atrac, and much less for Ogg. Industry giants such as Microsoft, Apple or Sony could, of course, drive support for Ogg, but why would they bother? What’s the profit margin on free?
Ogg has more chance when it comes to smaller companies with more modest ambitions. However, it still carries potential risks, because there is no guarantee that it doesn’t infringe someone’s patents.
The recent MP3 lawsuit illustrates the problem. Microsoft thought it was safe because, like Apple and others, it had licensed MP3 from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. Along came Alcatel-Lucent, the telecoms equipment giant, with some patent claims, and Microsoft was fined $1,52-billion by a United States court.
Well, Alcatel-Lucent didn’t actually sue Microsoft; it sued Dell and Gateway. Microsoft stepped in because the infringing software was part of Windows. If a device manufacturer is sued over Ogg, who is going take on the burden of fighting the case and paying any fines? A handful of open-source hackers?
And if a correctly licensed MP3 isn’t safe, how safe is Ogg? It has never been tested in court. I am and always have been strongly in favour of open file formats, so I wish Ogg well. But, sadly, the reality is that it doesn’t have the support or the supporting infrastructure needed to make it. Basically, Apple killed its chances when it adopted a different open standard, AAC. — Guardian Unlimited Â