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The Vorbis project started as part of the Xiphophorus company's Ogg project (also known as OggSquish multimedia project). Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format. Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation.
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