An open format family
FLAC and OGG Vorbis both come from the Xiph.Org Foundation, and both are open and royalty-free. Many people who care about open formats keep a lossless archive in FLAC and listening copies in OGG. Vorbis is efficient, sounds very good at moderate bitrates and uses the same tag system as FLAC (Vorbis comments), so metadata moves over without any translation.
Typical uses
- Listening on Android phones, Linux desktops and open-source players with less storage.
- Game soundtracks: game engines such as Godot recommend OGG for music.
- Uploading audio to Wikimedia Commons, which accepts Ogg formats.
- Web and app projects that need a royalty-free compressed format.
Quality settings
| OGG bitrate | Size per minute | Result from FLAC |
|---|---|---|
| 128 kbps | 0.96 MB | good; small loss on dense passages |
| 160 kbps | 1.2 MB | very good for phones and headphones |
| 192 kbps | 1.44 MB | near-transparent |
| 256 kbps | 1.92 MB | transparent for nearly everyone |
A 16-bit FLAC usually needs 5 to 7 MB per minute, so 192 kbps OGG is roughly four times smaller. Since the source is lossless, Vorbis works from the full signal and gives its best results.
Tags, hi-res and gapless
All text tags transfer directly, because both formats use Vorbis comments: title, artist, album, track number, date, genre and any custom fields. Cover art may not come along. Hi-res FLAC at 88.2 kHz or more is converted to a standard sample rate for Vorbis, with no audible loss. Vorbis does not add the extra silence that MP3 encoders insert, so gapless albums and game loops stay seamless.
Compatibility
OGG plays on Android, Linux, Windows with VLC or foobar2000, and in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Apple support is limited, and many car stereos do not read OGG. For an iPhone, convert FLAC to M4A instead; for a car, FLAC to MP3 is safest. If you want even smaller files at the same quality, try FLAC to OPUS, the newer codec from the same family.