What are the origins of Winamp? - WHAT IS OGG?

Winamp is one of the most famous media players ever made. Developed by Nullsoft, it plays various formats of multimedia: audio and video. First released by Justin Frankel in 1997 as freeware, it later became shareware when Nullsoft was taken over by Time Warner. Frankel started Nullsoft; while in college he named the programs he wrote as Nullsoft. The fi rst version of Winamp was freeware. Frankel was frustrated that there weren’t any good media players available that could deliver a good audio experience. He thus began creating his own media player: one that was simple to use and free. The first version had a windowless interface. With only a simple menubar that had a few pause, play and such buttons, this early version of Winamp was simple to the point of austerity. MP3 decoding was performed by the AMP decoding engine by Tomislav Uzelac, which was free for non-commercial use. The “AMP” in WinAMP stood for “Advanced Multimedia Products”. Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev integrated this engine with their user interface.

OGG:- 

Ogg Vorbis or Ogg as it is commonly known is a free audio codec developed by the Xiph.Org foundation. Ogg, by itself is actually a container format that contains a range of codecs for audio, video and text and metadata for virtually any kind of data. Previously, the .ogg file extension was used for any content distributed within Ogg, but as of 2007, the Xiph.Org Foundation requests that .ogg be used only for Vorbis due to backward compatibility concerns. Though lossy, Ogg is popular among those who espouse the cause of free software. It was intended to be a replacement for the MP3 codec, but when the codec was finally made available to the general public, the MP3 standard was too firmly entrenched; MP3 has been widely used since the late-1990s and remains popular to this day. Ogg Vorbis’ development began in late 1998, when reports began to arise of the Fraunhofer Society planning to charge licensing fees for the MP3 format. Tests performed have concluded that Ogg Vorbis, though lossy, performs better than MP3 at a range of bitrates. Which means that for the same bitrate, an Ogg file sounds better than an MP3 file, while having a much smaller size.

---Article by-- Mayureshete