OGG Vorbis?

[soup2504]

What exactly is it?

Wow. It literally took me 8 minutes to figure out how to ask that. And I go with a question that simple... I'm terhladjghlj

[Rainbow_Rage]

Well it's a file format that can store audio data. It also seems to do this thing where it can store multiple tracks but I'm not too sure. I was actually wondering what this is used for myself so I'm glad someone asked.

[prettiestPony]

Erm, well, there's always Google and Wikipedia. Might wanna take a peek there.

Short summary is that it's a popular open source file format that is capable of compression comparable to MP3, sometimes with marginally better quality (depending on source material and quality settings).

[Anforium]

Lots of open source programs use it. There are not many reason to use it over mp3 for personal use.

[Kopachris]

It's just another audio format like mp3 or m4a. It's widely accepted as a standard in the open source world, but not in the commercial world since Windows Media Player and iTunes don't support it natively. Also, I should probably mention that Vorbis is the encoding scheme, while OGG is the container format. Vorbis supports up to 255 channels of audio and up to a 192kHz sampling rate. IIRC, mp3 only supports up to two channels and up to 48kHz.

[Captain Ironhelm]

It's a format I love but rarely actually use.

[Ed Viper]

Since it can have better quality than .mp3 files, .ogg files are sometimes used for soundclips/songs in low-budget games, where the developers want to save space.

I believe most, if not all, of the audio in Minecraft is in .ogg format, for example.