ogg is just a container, the actual contents can be audio (usually opus, but other audio codecs are supported) or video (theora, plus some obscure ones)
You can put basically anything in Ogg. I toyed with the idea of putting logs in it - A log file is append-only, same as encoding a video. It has a field for timestamps already. You can use Ogg's binary seeking to quickly find positions / ranges within a log file without building up an index. It's got checksums too, I think.
I once made a custom Ogg stream for a simple multimedia document format [1]. The idea was that I wanted to have AV streams in the same file as basic vector graphics slides, and back in 2008 it was Ogg that had some open source momentum.
It worked, but my experience was that Ogg isn't really a well-designed container at all. Even QuickTime / MPEG-4 with its 1990s warts is more flexible and efficient. I would definitely pick Matroska today if I really wanted to torture myself with this kind of document format again.
Somebody else wrote more eloquently about Ogg's bizarre design choices:
"The variable overhead in the Ogg format comes from the page headers, mostly from the segment_table field. This field uses a most peculiar encoding, somewhat reminiscent of Roman numerals. In Roman times, numbers were written as a sequence of symbols, each representing a value, the combined value being the sum of the constituent values.
"The segment_table field lists the sizes of all packets in the page. Each value in the list is coded as a number of bytes equal to 255 followed by a final byte with a smaller value. The packet size is simply the sum of all these bytes. Any strictly additive encoding, such as this, has the distinct drawback of coded length being linearly proportional to the encoded value. A value of 5000, a reasonable packet size for video of moderate bitrate, requires no less than 20 bytes to encode."
Usually Opus-encoded audio uses .opus as a file extension, though it's not unheard of to use .ogg. Most of the time you will find Vorbis audio in .ogg files instead.
My entire music collection is encoded as ogg/vorbis (16k+ tracks).
Just about everything I own can play them. Including rockbox on my sansa clip+.
Writing about ogg vorbis as if it is a historical format is silly. Sure, it wasn't adopted by streamers, but everything on Bandcamp (for example) is available as ogg/vorbis.
I did have a little sansa clip+ with rockbox a few years back, great little machine.
I think I thought of it more as a historical format because Xiph have said that Opus supersedes it.
I mostly stopped caring because of streaming some years ago now. I have my 'old' collection as a mix of mp3 and some ogg vorbis, dating from before the streaming era. These days I buy some CDs from bands I want to support, but listen to everything by streaming.
I get the whole "<Streamer of choice> pays nothing to the artists!" argument. OTOH most the stuff I stream I also own, I'm just using streaming services to save me the hassle of ripping and hosting somewhere for access by all my devices.
Just FYI, Apple Music supports automatic iCloud syncing of your personal music files that you drag into your library. Most of what I listen to is on streaming, but I can have non-streaming music, bootlegs, vinyl rips, Bandcamp purchases, and music only available on SoundCloud or YouTube (via yt-dlp) seamlessly alongside the streaming stuff.
I’ve tried to explain how limiting any other streaming service is to friends, but I’ve mostly been met with blank stares at the mere concept of wanting to listen to off-streaming music or even where one would come across actual music files these days.
That's pretty cool, especially as my collection has a bunch of 90s-00s goth and indie bits and pieces which just aren't present on the streaming services.
This was something google play music was supposed to do as well, though that's dead now!
Yeah, I’m big into ‘90s UK hardcore where a lot of the classics were only released on some cassette or vinyl at a show back then so being able to include the obscure stuff I’ve procured is a hard requirement for me.
It makes sense that Google Play Music offered this, as it seems like adding a whole cloud-storage stack would be prohibitively complex and expensive for a company that isn’t running their own datacenters and/or already maintaining cloud storage as part of their business. Spotify supports local files and (apparently) lets you sync them iPod-style to your phone, but that’s where I draw the line in terms of music-collection-anachronism.
Random note: you do have to convert FLAC to ALAC if you want to add lossless files to Apple Music, but that’s an easy ffmpeg one-liner.
Uh, Firefox? Chromium? Did everyone else but me give up on Vorbis? It works great. Opus is nicer for bitrate but for a long time Vorbis used way less CPU to decode than Opus.
All my music is Vorbis, Opus, or ripped m4as, and browsers take it all fine.
The first version of WebM actually used Vorbis. It's the newer ones that are Opus.
The website is so unremittingly awful I didn't even spin up a Windows VM to try it. Massive, all bitmaps, almost no text, no actual info at all, mentions blockchain.
It has always existed. The final release from years ago still works, and whoever owns it now has been updating it under version 5.9 fairly recently. There is a "Winamp 6" on the way supposedly...
It's like if source tarballs didn't include the compression algorithm in the extension but just used .tar for .tar.bz2, .tar.gz, etc. and just left the extractor to figure it out (which they can do).
It's more like .zip (which technically supports more compression algorithms and not just deflate) as the outer container format is the same for both Vorbis in .ogg and OPUS in .ogg (more commonly with the .opus extension) unlike tarballs where the archive format is wrapped by the compression format so a .tar.bz2 and a .tar.gz look nothing alike until you remove the compression.
