Ogg Vorbis direct to audio CD. Amateur Hour:

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The rise of mass media in the last half of the 20th Century turned us all into "consumers" and took away much of the natural human inclination to be creators, performers, singers, musicians and storytellers.

Today, the rapid proliferation of cheap professional-quality media-making tools, paired with the drastic decrease in the cost of content distribution is leading to a quiet, but quite real revolution in the quantity and quality of "amateur" content. It's the democratization of media, the "Big Flip" as Clay Shirky calls it, and we think it's going to play an increasingly important role in how we make, share and consume media. For more, read my introduction to Amateur Hour.

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February 28, 2004

Ogg Vorbis direct to audio CD

Posted by Jonathan Peterson

Making audio CDs from ogg vorbis (and really, why would you want MP3 if you can have ogg?) is a bit of a techy proceedure if you want to do it with completely free tools. Ashampoo is a $29 extractor, burner, converter and editor that happily (and automatically) converts between audio, ogg, MP3, etc. files. Highly rated, though I haven't used it (yet).

Comments (2) | Category:

COMMENTS

1. mrG on May 24, 2004 07:21 PM writes...

Why would you want MP3 if you have Ogg? I'm surprised you need to ask: Share-ability. It's not much use to have a superior and free technology if no one else can use it -- it's the same reason OpenOffice.org could not hope to compete until they could reliably import AND export the dominant competitor's formats.

You would not believe the abuse we got for placing May's tracks (www.teledyn.com/fun/keemay) online as Ogg files. Real fierce hate mail, plus several of the download free-music sites (eg download.com) would not let us play without MP3. True, we have also gained some traffic being Ogg-based, but those referrals come from the Vorbis website, or gnomoradio or other very narrowcast special interest domains who are largely pro-Ogg first, music fans second. We get the hits because of the format, not necessarily because of the content itself, which as a songwriter or performer, is not the way you want it.

If you want to be heard, like it or not, with the status quo, it's MP3 or go play with yourself.

Nonetheless, I have chosen to release my symphony as an Ogg file (www.teledyn.com/fun/garym) because it gives me the best sound for the smallest file. When you have a work 50 min long that's unquestionably not intended for mass consumption ;) you want to make it as easy as you can to get the file out and into the soundplayers of anyone who will listen, and thus there was a strong urge to go MP3, but at 75Mb it was way beyond what any free-music site was willing to take. In Ogg, I'm hoping, overcoming the format will be an acceptable price to the fans of experimental composition, and at 35Mb, it halves the bandwidth risk should they decide they'd rather they hadn't :)

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2. mrG on May 24, 2004 07:23 PM writes...

oops ... sorry for the 404 links there:

those links should read www.teledyn.com/pub/keemay and www.teledyn.com/pub/garym