I wanted to post a little bit about using Ogg Vorbis under OS X. Vorbis is a patent-free, open format with better quality-to-size ratios than MP3. I searched the archives (thanks to Steve's recent addition of the Google search box at left) and found that it's been almost two years since Chris's thorough post. It turns out that almost everything I wanted to mention is already in that post -- meaning, disappointingly, that there has not been a lot of movement with Vorbis and OS X in the past couple years. And we still don't have Vorbis encoding in iTunes, or Vorbis playback on the iPod.

So, what is new? There are some new players (e.g. Whamb). There are iPod alternatives that do play Vorbis files, most interesting among them being Neuros. Most of the software Chris mentions has seen updates. I also recently discovered tenc, which is rough but still makes ripping CDs less work than with Ogg Drop, and good enough to get me to temporarily abandon the oggenc wrapper I was working on. I've also exchanged some e-mail with the Ogg Drop developers, who are working on an exciting-sounding expansion of that app.

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