Format of Choice for a Legal, Free, Audio-eBook?

audioAuthor asks: "Let's say I have a recorded audio-book (no music, just speech), which I want to share with the world. What format should I use to distribute it? Main requirements would be: 'Everyone is allowed to redistribute it without any restrictions" and "Usable as widely as possible'. I have been thinking of MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Speex. MP3 would be really nice, as it's usable almost everywhere, even without a computer, but it has licensing problems which I don't quite understand. Speex is free and designed for speech, but it's not widely supported at the moment. I think that Ogg Vorbis is currently better supported than Speex, and also free, but not designed for speech and would take more space to achieve same quality. So what do you say? Which one of these should I choose, or are there other formats to consider?"

Licensing?

[general_re]

As a noncommercial end-user, MP3 licensing is not a problem for you. If you were developing software to implement MP3, either encoding or decoding, or your MP3-encoded content were part of a commercial (i.e., revenue generating) enterprise, then you would need a license. Since neither of those apply, MP3 is free for you to use.

Re:Licensing?

[general_re]

More: http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/index.html [mp3licensing.com]

Re:LAME and MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

Entirely misinformation.
(A) The (L)GPL patent clause doesn't make any distinction between commercial use or not.
(B) LAME is not Free Software in any country that respects MP3 patents -- it's actually illegal to distribute according to the LGPL licence in places like the US and Germany.
(C) If someone does illegally distribute LAME to you, Fraunhofer will still want their damn money.

FLAC

[Jebediah21]

FLAC can be converted into whatever format the user wants. Considering it's speech you should get around 50% compression from the wavs. Of course not everybody will want to download that so put it in mp3 too. I can't think of anything that plays Ogg and not mp3. Speex is not that widespread at this point, so if anybody really wants it they can convert from FLAC. And that's the beauty of FLAC too. Some new format gets popular you can convert it into that too.

Re:I'm not too sure, but...

[iangoldby]

Incidently, if you are a pure pragmatist and don't mind using a closed proprietory codec, Microsoft's Voice 9 codec (IIRC) gives very good quality at a low bit-rate, and probably over 98% of users will be able to play it back without installing any new software. (The encoder is a free download from Microsoft.)

All 3 why not...

[haplo21112]

Its all Free, your unemcumbered on the MP3 as long as you use LAME as the encoder.