If you enjoy playing around with audio files like audiobooks, songs, podcasts from your own CD collections, digital libraries, you should be familiar with that there are kinds of different audio files like MP3, M4A, M4B, WAV, FLAC, OGG, AC3, APE and so on. And you can convert them easily as long as you get one free audio converter online which is easily to find from Google.
But you may not know the differences between the audio files. Which one has best quality and compatibility? Do I have to convert the audio before I play it on my MP3 player? To help you get a better understanding of digital audio, here I will introduce the difference between the two most popular container formats MP3 and OGG as well as how to convert OGG to MP3 from your own music collections or Spotify. 
MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. Thompson Lultimedia and Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft develop it in the later 80's. As a lossy format, it has the advantage of maintaining high audio quality while keeping small sizes, storing offline and transferring over the Internet has never been easier. That is why it has become so popular and many companies have manufactured different devices for such audio files. You can hardly find a media player which doesn't support MP3.
OGG or OGG Vorbis is developed by Xiph.org. It is another compressed audio format with higher compression rate and codec efficiency. So a same quality OGG file will be smaller than MP3 file. Although it is not as popular as MP3, it is still supported by a list of players such as Windows Media Player, VLC, Miro, MPlayer, Xion Audio Player and so on. Yet OGG is patent free. Many commercial streaming platforms such as Spotify use OGG format to store its music files.
Both are common audio formats with small sizes. I love both formats. But if I have to pick up one, I will choose MP3 for its better compatibility. Following are the main difference between OGG and MP3.
1. A file with OGG extension will be smaller than the same file in MP3 format.
2. OGG is open source while MP3 is a proprietary media encoding format constrained by patents. You can use OGG to attach any strings you want.
3. MP3 has a constant bit rate while OGG doesn't. Its bit rate varies depending on need.
4. MP3 is still more commonly used than OGG.
If you have download OGG songs which can't be played on your media players or portable devices, you don't need to worry, just convert OGG files to MP3.
Generally speaking, you can convert OGG to MP3 online free by using the free converters such as ZamZar, FileZigZag, Media.IO and so on. It requires stable and fast Internet connection to work smoothly though.
Alternatively, if you don't have a fast enough Internet connection, you can also convert OGG to MP3 on your Mac or Windows computer by downloading a free OGG to MP3 Converter. Here I will show you how to convert OGG files with VLC.
Step 1. Launch VLC player from your Mac computer.
Step 2. Click "Media" menu and then choose "Convert/Save".
Step 3. In the Open Media dialog window, you can click "Add" button and then browse to import OGG files from your computer.
Step 4. Tap "Convert/Save" button and follow the screen wizard to choose the new output format MP3, folder, profile name, codec, bitrate, channels, sample rate and so on.
Step 5. Click "Start", it will process your audio files quickly. Within a short while, all the OGG files will converted to MP3.
Note: VLC only supports to convert DRM audio files. If you have DRM OGG Vorbis, VLC will be powerless.
OGG is patent free and can be used for commercial. Because of that, the streaming pioneer and king Spotify uses it to store all its music files. For free registered users, they only have the right to stream songs online with ads. For premium users, they can download up to 10000 OGG Vorbis on 3 devices.
But no matter if you pay for it or not, you can't move the songs outside of Spotify's ecosystem due to the DRM protection.
If you'd like to move Spotify songs to any other devices such as MP3 players for playback, you'd better convert OGG Vorbis to MP3.
DRmare Spotify Music Converter for Mac is one of the outstanding OGG converters which support DRM Spotify songs. And you don't need Spotify premium membership to convert any songs from Spotify. Besides, it has a list of shining features which you surely can't find from the OGG to MP3 freeware online.
It takes you only 3 simple steps. Can't wait to find out how does it work? Follow me to do it now. You can try it out with the free trial version.
Harry Zamorski
Staff Editor
Harry Zamorski is a music enthusiast who writes a lot of reviews of hot music and helpful tips for playing Spotify music anywhere.
