Vorbis is *very*alpha* en/de-coder for new, patent-free stream audio format .ogg It will be generally comparable to .mp3 (usually 10% smaller files, similar quality), as soon as CPU usage will be significantly reduced (it's way too high now), all bugs will be found and fixed and coding math from spec will be completed. Vorbis is GPL. http://www.xiph.org/ogg/ for details. I'm not a maintainer (yet), so I'm need a sponsor for it.