A highly cool feature found in Ogg Vorbis format (though the support in tools is not yet that visible).

Bitrate peeling means that you can take a high-bitrate stream, and reduce it to lower-bitrate stream very quickly without need to re-encode the stream.

For example, you can make a 256kbps stream for desktop usage, 128kbps stream for portable player device and 64kbps/56kbps stream for streaming on Internet radio (with dynamic bitrate adaptation!) with same effort...

A technique currently only employed in the heads (and hearts) of ogg vorbis developers. This technique will allow a user to create, for example a 64 kBit/s vorbis stream from a 128 kBit/s stream, without re-encoding (de-encoding to wav and encoding to ogg vorbis again) the file.

Bitrate peeling will be of greatest use to those with a portable ogg player (there is no such beast yet): You keep a high-quality file on your hard disk and one with a lower bitrate in the player, where space is a greater issue.