iCAST Develops Open Source MP3 Codec

Although the MP3 codec is an international standard, it still suffers from licensing and royalty issues that can cost webcasters lots of money. A new codec, codenamed Project Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com), hopes to change that. Developers of iCAST ( http://www.icast.com) released the Beta release of Vorbis, an open source audio codec to provide royalty free alternative to MP3 and other audio compression formats.

It already has support from some music software and download companies like EMusic, Sonique, Napster and XMMS.

The codec was lead-developed by iCAST Vice President of technology Jack Moffitt, one of the creators of the open-source Icecast streaming media server.

The codec is said to be similar to MP3, but allows anyone to freely encode audio content and make it available in a downloadable format.

"This is a breakthrough development for companies that are seeking an alternative to the stringent patent protection and royalty fees enforced by the patent holders of the popular MP3 file format," said Moffitt.

The developers claim that Vorbis has excellent sound quality and can scale to multiple bitrates. Vorbis due date is another month, approximately. Currently plug-ins are available for WinAmp, Sonique and XMMS music players. Encoding software is available for Windows 95/98/NT, BeOS, Linux, Solaris, and BSD platforms.