Vorbis

Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.

Version 1.0 of Vorbis was released in May 2000. Since 2013, the Xiph.Org Foundation has stated that the use of Vorbis should be deprecated in favor of the Opus codec, an improved and more efficient format that has also been developed by Xiph.Org.

Vorbis is named after the character Exquisitor Vorbis in the Discworld novel Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. The Ogg format is named after ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek.

Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery. Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. The Vorbis project started as part of the Xiphophorus company's Ogg project (also known as OggSquish multimedia project). Chris Montgomery began work on the project and was assisted by a growing number of other developers. They continued refining the source code until the Vorbis file format was frozen for 1.0 in May 2000. Originally licensed as LGPL, in 2001 the Vorbis license was changed to the BSD license to encourage adoption, with the endorsement of Richard Stallman. A stable version (1.0) of the reference software was released on July 19, 2002.

Since February 2013, Xiph.Org has stated that the use of Vorbis should be deprecated in favor of the Opus codec, which is also a Xiph.Org Foundation project and also free and open-source. Compared to Vorbis, Opus can simultaneously achieve higher compression efficiency—per both Xiph.Org itself and third-party listening tests—and lower encode/decode latency (in most cases, low enough for real-time applications such as internet telephony or live singing, rarely possible with Vorbis).

Vorbis faces competition from other audio formats, such as MP3. Though Vorbis is technically superior (addressing many of the limitations inherent to the MP3 design), MP3 has a far higher public profile. Because Vorbis does not have financial support from large organisations, support for the format is not as widespread, though programs such as Audacity can convert to more popular formats, and support in games has gradually improved.

The Vorbis format has proven popular among supporters of free software. They argue that its higher fidelity and completely free nature, unencumbered by patents, make it a well-suited replacement for patented and restricted formats.

Vorbis has different uses for consumer products. Many video games store in-game audio as Vorbis, including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Halo: Combat Evolved, Minecraft, and World of Warcraft, among others. Popular software players support Vorbis playback either natively or through an external plugin. A number of websites, including Wikipedia, use it. Others include Jamendo and Mindawn, as well as several national radio stations like JazzRadio, Absolute Radio, NPR, Radio New Zealand and Deutschlandradio. The Spotify audio streaming service primarily uses Vorbis as well as AAC. Also, the French music site Qobuz offers its customers the possibility to download their purchased songs in Vorbis format, as does the American music site Bandcamp.