Ogg Vorbis For Linux

Ogg Vorbis (libvorbis) is a patent-free, royalty-free, non-proprietary, multiplatform and open source software project implemented in C and designed to provide a general-purpose compressed audio format, which can be used for encoding mid to high quality audio files.

Key features include support for audio frequencies from 8kHz to 48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic sounds, as well as variable and fixed bitrates, from 16 to 128 kbps per channel. The libvorbis library is the core Ogg stream and Vorbis engine.

When compared with other audio codecs, Ogg Vorbis is on the same level with MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar audio representations. Its quality and performance are definitely higher than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 (MP3), WMA, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), or PAC.

Installing the Ogg Vorbis tools in your GNU/Linux system is a breeze. First of all, you might want to open your graphical package manager and search for ‘ogg vorbis’. Install the package and that’s it, you now have support for writing and reading OGG audio files in your computer.

Various audio converter applications will automatically detect if the Ogg Vorbis library and tools are correctly installed on your computer, so you will be able to convert various other audio formats to Ogg using the respective apps.

Looking under the hood of the Ogg Vorbis project, we can immediately notice that its source code is written in the C programming language and that it supports all mainstream operating systems, including Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

The software is only distributed as a universal sources archive, which includes the source code and all the files need to optimize it for a specific hardware architecture (32-bit and 64-bit are supported at this time) or operating system.