OGG to MP3
For everything that never learned to read Vorbis.
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Where OGG comes from
OGG Vorbis shows up in games, in open source software, and in older voice recording apps. It is a perfectly good codec, but consumer hardware support has always been thin, which is the usual reason to convert.
This is a lossy to lossy conversion, so encode at 192 kbps or above unless the source is speech.
Two different codecs share the extension
Ogg is a container, not a codec, and it can hold either Vorbis or Opus. This matters because the two behave differently and the filename tells you nothing. Vorbis is the older of the two and is what you almost certainly have if the file came out of a game, an open source application or a recorder from a few years ago. Opus is newer, considerably better at low bitrates, and is what browsers produce when they record audio, though those usually arrive as .webm or .opus rather than .ogg.
Both are read here without you having to say which is which. If you want to know what you actually have, media info reads the codec out of the container in a second.
Where these files come from
- Game assets. Ogg Vorbis is the default sound format for a great many engines, so extracted game audio is usually Ogg.
- Wikipedia and open media archives, which prefer patent-free formats on principle.
- Older Android voice recorders and some messaging apps.
- Linux desktop recordings, where Vorbis was the path of least resistance for years.
What all of these share is that the file works perfectly on a computer and refuses to play on a car stereo, an older iPod, a DAW, a video editor or half the hardware in a school. That is the actual reason to convert; it is rarely about quality.
Choosing a bitrate for the second encode
Because both formats are lossy, this is a second round of discarding, and the way to keep it inaudible is to give the MP3 encoder enough room that it is not forced to make hard decisions. Match or slightly exceed the source: a 160 kbps Vorbis file should go to 192 kbps MP3, not to 128. For spoken word, 96 kbps is plenty and the file is a third of the size. Going to 320 kbps from a lossy source is wasted space; it preserves the artefacts with great fidelity and adds nothing else.
Common questions
Is OGG better than MP3?
Vorbis generally beats MP3 at low bitrates. At 192 kbps and up the difference is academic.
What about Opus files with a .ogg extension?
Those work too. Opus is often carried in an Ogg container, and this reads both.