"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- May 14, 2008 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has marked a milestone in their PlayOgg.org campaign with the announcement that National Public Radio (NPR) news station WBUR Boston has begun worldwide webcasting in the free audio format Ogg Vorbis..."

"The Free Software Foundation has started a new campaign to convince people to support Ogg Vorbis with PlayOgg.org. Other formats (such as MP3, AAC, and many others) are patent-encumbered or only available with proprietary software. You shouldn’t have to lose your freedom to control your computer just to play audio and video..."

Over the past month I have made it my goal to stop using the proprietary MP3 format for audio in favor of the free, open standard Ogg Vorbis format.

From today, users will be able to download and install free software to play and encode the new WebM format. WebM is based on the Matroska container format -- replacing Ogg -- and the VP8 video codec which replaces Theora. Crucially, the Vorbis audio codec is part of the new WebM specification.

"Hi everyone, This Wednesday, August 26 at 11am, the Free Software Foundation will be launching its Windows7sins.org public awareness campaign, drawing attention to the threats posed by the adoption of Microsoft's proprietary operating system.

"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."

"I like to listen to music while I work. In support of the Play Ogg! movement, I converted some of my audio collection into the patent-unencumbered audio file format, Ogg Vorbis.

To convert my audio CDs to Ogg, I use the friendly abcde package..."

One thing I should state immediately is that I think that Ogg Vorbis is great: it's cool technology doing all the right things in the right way. So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems.

APE is an open-source, free lossless audio format, just like FLAC or WAV. APE is also known as Monkey's Audio. To convert it to either Ogg Vorbis or MP3, you will first need to install several packages...