sound format. It is often used as an intermediate file format when
encoding audio.
Ogg-Vorbis (.ogg)—Ogg is Ubuntu’s preferred audio encoding format.
You enjoy better compression and audio playback and freedom from
lawsuits when you use this open source encoding format for your audio
files.
FLAC (.flac)—This lossless format is popular with audiophiles. The
name stands for Free Lossless Audio Format, and it is a compressed
format, like MP3, but does not suffer from any loss of quality.
NOTE
Because of patent and licensing issues, Ubuntu does not by default support
the MPEG, MPEG2, and MPEG3 (MP3) file formats. Although we cannot
offer any legal advice, it appears that individuals using MP3 software are
okay; it is just that Ubuntu cannot distribute the code because of how the
code is licensed.
You can also enable the MP3 codec within Ubuntu by downloading a plug-
in for GStreamer, the GNOME audio system. You do this by installing the
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly package, which enables the MP3
codec in all the GNOME applications. Even better, you can install the
package ubuntu-restricted-extras to enable all the major formats
you are ever likely to encounter. You can find the package in the
repositories, and, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, Ubuntu also
recommends specific packages, as needed, when you attempt to use a file
type that does not currently have an installed codec package. It really is that
easy to deal with multimedia formats in Ubuntu.Ubuntu even includes software in the repositories (such as the sox command,
used to convert between sound formats) so that you can more easily listen to
audio files provided in a wide variety of formats, such as AU (from NeXT
and Sun), AIFF (from Apple and SGI), IFF (originally from Commodore’s
Amiga), RA (from Real Audio), and VOC (from Creative Labs).
TIP
For an introduction to audio formats, check out the list of audio file formats
at www.fileinfo.com/filetypes/audio, which provides links to detailed
information for the various formats.Ubuntu also offers several utilities for converting sound files from one format
to another. Conversion utilities come in handy when you want to use a sound
in a format not accepted by your current application of choice. The easiest