Vorbis

Work picked up in 1998, when Fraunhofer started sending licence demands to people writing MP3 encoders. Christopher "Monty" Montgomery and Xiph.Org answered with a lossy codec of their own, built on MDCT and a psychoacoustic model much like MP3, but unencumbered by patents. Version 1.0 shipped in 2002.

At equal bitrates Vorbis beat MP3 and held its own against AAC. Games used it heavily because embedding it cost nothing, and Spotify streamed Ogg Vorbis for years. Hardware support in car stereos and portable players never really arrived, though. Its successor, Opus, now does the same job better.