Yesterday I was looking through the list of all the music files that I've collected and kept over the years. It aren't many, about 150 songs I'd say. As opposed to my friends I'm the only one who isn't addicted to the collecting delusion.

Recently I got about 1000 songs from one of them - dancefloor music only. Apart from that I in most cases don't like this music there was one thing which aroused my interest - they were all encoded in Vorbis.

Of course I've heard of it before, everybody has I think. In fact I'd only have Vorbis encoded music if there weren't 2 little problems:

1. You don't find a lot OGG files to download.
2. My MP3-Player doesn't support it yet (iRiver will release a firmware upgrade for OGG support in December, though)

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Looking at the Ogg Vorbis website one can find some of the reasons that make it so great:

"Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented."

Ogg Vorbis has been designed to completely replace all proprietary, patented audio formats. That means that you can encode all your music or audio content in Vorbis and never look back.

For a given file size, Vorbis sounds better than MP3. This means:
- You can keep your music collection at about the same quality level, but it'll take up less space.
- or you can have your music collection take up about the same amount of space, but have it sound better.

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They also have some music examples showing the Vorbis quality, Lepidoptera by Epoq is quite nice, try it out!