Union Recordings is founded on the simple belief that music should be free. It was only a matter of time before we came across the Free Software movement and its branching adherents in the sphere of computing. And so we succumb to the sirens of open source, their sweet voices have us writhing in our ropes while lashed to the mast. The same voices will henceforth be encoded in Ogg Vorbis, the patent-free music encoding scheme that will someday, someday soon, supplant mp3.

Are we crazy? Well, yes. We firmly believe "No commerce is necessary!", and in these days of heady profit seeking, such sentiments just "don't take care of the bottom line". Patents, copyrights, royalties, and trademarks, all bedfellows of commerce, are devices employed by music monopolists to control the flow of their easily-copied products. We don't need them, and we certainly don't need to worry about them disabling our online digital distribution.

We're keeping free music free. Cough. But we're hedging.

Ogg Vorbis has arrived to the level to serve our pitiful needs. While we were patiently waiting for the codec to produce files in the 56-96 kbps range, our storage capacity increased to the extent that we no longer needed such compression. Moore's Law and the ubiquitous hardware support in $100 DVD players and car stereos have convinced us for the moment to continue offering the popular mp3 format as well. Nonetheless, we would like to state for the record that we are rooting vigorously for Ogg Vorbis to gain equal footing in these types of appliances.

Founded on a technologically superior basis, the sound quality of oggs are self-evident. I urge you to give them a try, and in doing so you will be supporting a format founded under a mindset similar to our own. Plugins are readily available for XMMS and WinAmp.