Streaming services are expensive. I enjoy and collect music in both physical and digital formats. I own CDs, LPs, DualDiscs, DVD-As, and SACDs. I’ve even written about physical media formats extensively in the past. If you spend as much time as I do thinking about different audio formats, you might remember something called Vorbis (or Ogg Vorbis), a music format that doesn’t get the attention it deserves nowadays.
In the early 2000s, MP3s might have been all the rage thanks to our old internet pal, Napster, but there was another, better compressed audio format that often gets overlooked today.
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The Ogg Vorbis Origin Story
Ogg Vorbis was born out of complications with MP3
In the late 90s, MP3 was popping up everywhere, despite its lossy quality. That wasn’t the only problem, though. MP3 was patented and subject to licensing fees. Ogg Vorbis is in the public domain, so it’s 100% free. The creators intended it that way. In 1998, when Fraunhofer (the creator of MP3s) decided to start enforcing licensing fees, people needed a free alternative. That’s when the Xiph Foundation stepped in to create something that wouldn’t cost users anything.
Xiph’s Chris Montgomery started working on the format that later became Ogg Vorbis as a free audio encoder before 1998, but started developing it more intensively after Fraunhofer began enforcing licensing requirements to MP3 developers. Montgomery later told Slashdot that they’re “a little too friendly with the RIAA.” So, he kept working on the format as his team grew and founded the Xiph.org Foundation, which not only maintains Ogg but also does some fantastic work in the open-source space, including another great audio format, FLAC.
In May 2000, the Xiph.org Foundation froze the Vorbis format, and it still works the same as it ever did.
So what’s up with the name, and why are there two of them? Well, the simple answer is Ogg is a media container and Vorbis is, as Xiph puts it, “a payload format for audio.” Ogg is just the container. Think of it like a candy bar. Vorbis is the delicious chocolate with nougat in the center. Ogg is the shiny, secure wrapper that it comes in.
The funny-sounding name comes from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Vorbis is the name of a character in Small Gods (a great book; highly recommended). Ogg doesn’t come from Nanny Ogg in Witches Abroad. It’s actually based on the term “ogging,” which just means to “do something forcefully without a future drain on resources.”
That sums up the story and value of Ogg Vorbis well. Granted, MP3 patents expired in 2017, but it’s amazing how many people still use it for hobbies and professional work.
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Ogg Vorbis has a surprising number of modern users
From game devs to hobbyists, the format lives on
While I’d take a CD over an LP (and definitely over a cassette) any day, I have always had a blast experimenting with different audio formats. It was AIFF, WAV, and Real Audio all the way until MP3s hit the scene. After that, I made it a habit/routine to back up all of my physical media into digital formats. MP3s were my go-to until Ogg Vorbis and FLAC came along. After its release, I used the Ogg Vorbis format for a lot of my backups. I still do sometimes. I might be unique here, but there are plenty of other use cases for Ogg Vorbis, even in 2026.
Unless you’re as obsessed with audio formats as I am, you probably don’t queue up a song on a streaming service and wonder what format they’re using too often. Believe it or not, some of them use Ogg Vorbis. Spotify is one of them. They use it on their web app, probably because it’s royalty-free and open-source (a fact that can be helpful because of the platform’s size).
Their Ogg Vorbis files contain proprietary metadata, though, so they’re not exactly like the typical ones you’d make or find. The format is also all over the Internet Archive. Regular Archive users might recognize the format because it appears on everything from archive radio broadcasts and podcasts to recordings of obscure live bands who’ve decided to make their music available on the site.
When users purchase music, Bandcamp offers the format as an option for downloads. When you look at any given album’s download options, you’ll immediately notice that the Ogg Vorbis format is often (although, not always) smaller than the MP3s for some albums (like the King Gizzard album in the gallery),. The open LibriVox project is a godsend for anyone wanting to easily listen to public domain audiobooks. Although many files are MP3 now, some books (like Walt Whitman’s A Noiseless Patient Spider) are still available as Ogg Vorbis downloads.
The place where Ogg Vorbis seems to crop up the most is game development. Plenty of video games like Eve Online, Minecraft, Doom 3, and Diablo III use the format for their soundtracks. GTA: San Andreas uses it for audio storage, and there are plenty of other games out there that use Ogg Vorbis to their advantage.
While examples of the format can be found in all the places we mentioned, you can make them yourself in just a few simple steps.
How to playback your own Ogg Vorbis files
Using the format is surprisingly easy with the right open-source tools
So, you’ve got your Ogg Vorbis files now, and you’re ready to listen to them. How do you do it? Just get yourself a media player that handles them. VLC Media Player is a solid choice for most media files, and Linux Mint’s built-in media player, Celluloid handles them just fine. The web media player codec for Windows Media Player will also let you play them, if you want to go that route. For the nostalgia lovers out there, dBPoweramp is still a thing.
The Xiph Foundation Wiki has a list of other players that support the format, but it hasn’t been updated in some time, and you should use caution before using new software. If you want to convert your existing files, just follow our VLC Media Player guide for conversion. I tested it out with my own files, and it works perfectly.
Ogg Vorbis is still just kind of…there, and it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon
Ogg Vorbis was never all that successful, but some people still think it’s pretty neat. It managed to carve out a niche. Game Devs rely on it, while audio lovers can appreciate its quality and smaller file sizes. As a format, it really demonstrates the power of open-source. In a world dominated by mp3 files and streaming, Ogg Vorbis just goes to show that sometimes a technically superior format (i.e., MP3 vs Ogg, which is a tale for another time) may not always come out on top, but it won’t disappear either.
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