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by Nursie 969 days ago
I still have a few Ogg Vorbis audio files from many years ago too. Wonder if I can still play them on anything...
3 comments

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.

I believe Spotify still uses Vorbis in at least some circumstances?
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.

Probably VLC
Winamp, foobar2000
Winamp still exists? I thought it was resold twenty times to various shady entities.
Relaunched about a year ago.

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.

https://www.winamp.com/

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...
There’s a modernized fork of it: https://getwacup.com/

The official one is still around, but last I checked it had a crash bug in the media library plugin.