Ogg Format in Linux

Ogg format

Due to the restrictions on the use of MP3 technology, Ogg Vorbis is a good way to enjoy digital music in a compressed format. Though it is associated more with the Linux and Open Source world, both Windows and Macintosh ports of the Ogg libraries are also available. This is proof of its growing popularity as a digital music format. There are even companies now using Ogg format for sound in their games. You can read the latest news on the status of the Ogg Vorbis project at their website.

Installation of the Ogg libraries

First, in order to listen to and make files in Ogg Vorbis format, you should to go over to the Ogg Vorbis website and download some packages that are needed: libao, libogg and libvorbis These are the actual libraries that do the compression and decompression of the sound. The command line software for coding and playing the *.ogg files can be found in there as well, in a package called Vorbis-Tools. Included in this last package are the programs oggenc and ogg123. These are designed to work in the same way as the packages bladeenc and mpg123 in the MP3 world. Their command line options are essentially the same.

Before you actually visit the site and start downloading, if you have bought a boxed set of a major Linux distribution recently, you should have these libraries included on the CDs and be able to install this painlessly with your distribution's installation tools. If you got your CDs from your cousin Larry with "Redhat" written on them in magic marker, then feel free to go over and download the RPMs at www.vorbis.com and install them, as you remember from our lesson on RPMs.

rpm -i libao-[whatever's current].i386.rpm

rpm -i libogg-[whatever's current].i386.rpm

rpm -i libvorbis-[whatever's current].i386.rpm

rpm -i vorbis-tools-[whatever's current].i386.rpm

Note: Don't get the source RPMs (the one with 'src' in the title). You won't need those if you're running Red Hat or any RPM based distribution (like Mandrake, KRUD etc.). Also, install in the order I have given you above and do this as the 'root' user

If you've got some other distribution like Slackware that works better with tarballs than RPMs (or if you are feeling adventurous/masochistic, then get the files ending with *.tar.gz (the tarballs). Un-zip and un-tar them and read the readme and/or install files which will instruct you how to get those packages installed and working. I took this from libogg's own README file:

./configure
make

and optionally (as root):
make install

I guess you get the idea. Now let's see what we can do with these libraries and programs to get some nice sounding *.ogg files.