This was news to me. It may also be news to you:

MP3 is NOT free to use if you are an online editor. BUT, let me be clear, there are some opt-outs. It looks like you don’t have to pay any license fees if:

It is for personal use or for non-commercial reasons (not generating income). OR – if your business revenue is below $100,000 a year.

Now, these rules could change, of course. Be sure to check them out for yourself and make sure you’re up to date by visiting mp3licensing.com for all the details.

However, when there are alternatives, I don’t see why anyone publishing audio online would want or should publish in MP3 format.

So what is the best alternative? Well, it’s all about OGG.

Okay, a bit of an odd name. Here are the facts:

OGG is as high quality as MP3.

OGG is as fast to download as MP3.

OGG is open source, which means you never have to pay fees (for full details on OGG, visit vorbis.com).

The only current drawback of OGG is that it is not as compatible with audio players as MP3.

OBJECTIVE – I am convinced that this will change. As more and more online publishers say “No!” To pay high and unnecessary license fees, more and more audio will be published online in OGG format, which means more and more audio players will support OGG.

So if you currently publish audio online in MP3 format, what does this mean for you?

Well, my advice is to convert your audio from MP3 format to OGG format, without any delay.

Now, I admit it may take a bit of time, but once it’s done, it’s done. And would you rather put in a little effort to convert your audio or pay license fees year after year?

So how to convert MP3 to OGG? Easy: use an audio converter. You’ll find plenty of high-quality freeware by searching download.com and also sourceforge.net. My personal favorite is WinLAME (horrible name, great software) from winlame.sourceforge.net.

So use WinLAME to convert your MP3 to OGG. Be careful to keep the MP3 and OGG files the same size (in fact, I’ve found OGG files to be quite a bit smaller). And then compare the audio quality. I would be surprised if you can find any difference between them.

Now this conversion process can take a while. For about six hours of audio, my computer took at least a couple of hours of processing time. But I just left the computer and came back when it was over. You can even let this process run overnight if you have a lot of audio to convert.

Now, here’s an additional snippet you should pay attention to:

Some OGG audios have “Tags”. Tags are additional information within the audio file that often includes the name of the song, for example.

Right now (this will probably change) some audio players have problems playing OGG with “Tag” information in them. So remove the information from the tag. It’s easy and doesn’t affect the audio in any way. This is how you do it:

Download “MP3Tag” from mp3tag.de/en/. Install the software and launch it. Then simply choose “Remove All Tags” from your OGG files. This process literally takes two minutes, but it is very important.

Now, after you’ve converted and untagged the OGG audio, you’ll need to upload it to your server, of course.

Then you will have to change all your download links. This is complicated, but it has to be done. For example, you would need to change all your bindings from:

[http://www.domain.com/folder/audio.mp3]

A:

[http://www.domain.com/folder/audio.ogg]

Then test each download link to make sure it works properly.

Important note: don’t forget about the audio you have in the Zip files as well. You will need to recreate those Zip files with OGG audio instead of MP3 audio and upload them again.

If you’re not sure where all the MP3 and Zip files are on your websites, here’s an easy way to list them:

Now, this only works on Unix-based servers (which covers Linux servers, FreeBSD…etc, ask your web host if you’re not sure)…

This is pretty advanced, so don’t do it if you’re not comfortable with the process. Or ask your web host to do it for you if they are willing to:

You need to Telnet to your server and then type the following:

find . | grep mp3 > all mp3

Then type:

find . | grep zip > allzip

This will give you two files on your server: allmp3 and allzip

Download these files and view them in a text editor. They will show you the path of every MP3 and Zip file on their server so you can quickly and easily find which files you need to convert to OGG. Dead by hand

Okay, after converting and uploading the audio, you’ll need to change the text around the download links. You will need to remove any mention of “MP3” from your website.

I don’t suggest replacing it with “OGG” on a sales page, for example, as it will probably confuse people. Just replace “MP3” with “downloadable audio” or “high quality downloadable audio”.

And then on your download pages, mention that the audio is in OGG format, which is the same quality as MP3 and just as fast to download. Then connect to a couple of audio players that you know for sure support OGG.

The audio players I personally mention are Winamp from winamp.com and Quintessential Player from quinnware.com.

Important note about Winamp: As I write this, only the full version (not the Lite version) of Winamp supports OGG successfully. So make sure you tell your visitors to download and install that version. It’s still free though, so your visitors won’t have to spend extra money just to listen to your audio.

And those are pretty much all the steps required to convert your published audio from MP3 to OGG, which can save you a small fortune in license fees without compromising audio quality or download speed.