Dear Log,
"I'm bitter!"
My Ogg Statement
pudge on 2002-02-19T19:09:02
Ogg doesn't have nearly the same support that MP3 does. I don't have a pure Perl module to handle tags and other info; I don't have a good audio player for it on Mac OS; I don't have a good encoder for it on Mac OS. My many custom command-line tools don't know Ogg. And most people I give audio too can't use Ogg at this time. It took me 20 minutes to play an Ogg file from an Ogg developer site, and I am relatively clued about this kind of thing.
Ogg is nice. But MP3 suits my needs perfectly (well, rather, Ogg has no real advantages over MP3 for my needs). It's a better format, but I don't need "better": I cannot distinguish between SoundJam/iTunes at 160 kbps (with all the filtering turned off) and CDs on any speakers or headphones I try, and HDs are cheap. So those people who ask me to use Ogg are asking me to greatly decrease my ability to use the audio files -- at best lowering my efficiency significantly, at worst taking away functionality I have now -- for no real gain.
Oh, but this nebulous "freedom" is the gain. But as already noted, I use Mac OS, so I don't buy into that religion.
And then there's the idea that Ogg can be updated as I go along or somesuch; nice, but that's a future benefit, not a current one, and by the time I care, maybe I'll already have switched to Ogg (or something better).
