iTunes & Ogg Vorbis

In this transcript of Apple’s iTunes conference call, Arik Hesseldahl of Forbes.com, asked “Any interest whatsoever, since in the open source Ogg Vorbis format?” to get a “We’re certainly not getting any requests from customers for it.” reply from Jobs.

If you look into your iTunes.exe file you’ll see an icon specifically designed for the Ogg Vorbis format. Which means?

Nothing. Look into the same file and you’ll see a WMA icon too. Said icon was there ever since iTunes for Windows was introduced, if I recall correctly. And what did the users get? iTunes doesn’t support WMA files, it can only transcode them to AAC (and that last one only since the arrival of iTunes v4.5).

So at the very best, you may expect future versions of iTunes to be able to transcode Ogg Vorbis files to AAC, which isn’t a big deal anyway. √ May 3rd, 2004