The Future of MP3 and Surround 409
An anonymous reader writes "Wired is running an article discussing the future of the MP3 format with the amount of competition out there, especially from the surround sound scene. Thompson, the entity that licenses the MP3 format, released the MP3 Surround format to try to combat this but will it be enough? From the article: 'It may seem as if the venerable MP3 standard is here to stay, but it faces attack from a number of angles. First, it doesn't sound as good, byte-for-byte, as files purchased from iTunes Music Store (in the AAC format) or any of the Microsoft-compliant stores. Second, the CD rippers/encoders that most people use -- iTunes and Windows Media Player -- have encouraged users to rip to AAC and WMA over the years. Third, only one major online music store, eMusic, proffers songs in the MP3 format, and it lacks most major releases. Fourth, geeks who love MP3 for its wide compatibility can now choose from preferable open-source alternatives such as Ogg Vorbis.'"
Support to open formats (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Support to open formats (Score:2, Informative)
There is no comparison... MP3 plays on anything (almost) right out of the box with no configuration, yet OGG only plays on a few devices, or software players.
I know that you can get OGG to work in many players (both hardware and software), but MP3 just does.
Re:Support to open formats (Score:2)
OK. Then remind me what is wrong with flac that out of the box today supports up to 8 channels of sound and up to 32bit bit depth and up to 65,5350 (k)Hz sample rate? (Their FAQ must be wrong, because it says flac can only handle 65,5350 Hz rate, and I have 96 kHz files already).
Its what I use exclusively for my m
Re:Support to open formats (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Support to open formats (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Support to open formats (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with flac (in particular on devices) is that it uses lossless compression. While it's a fantastic format for archiving data, if storage space is a factor it's just not efficient use of space. Nobody can hear the difference between a sufficiently-high-bitrate lossy file and a lossless one, although there is obviously data loss there.
Using flac (or some other lossless format) for a storage format on a main computer system (where storage space is typically effectively unlimited) then transcoding to a lossy format to put on a mobile device would be fine. But when space is a concern, lossless isn't the way to go.
Re:Support to open formats (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yes, that was my point. For archiving, FLAC is great. But on a mobile device? Unless you're transporting your archive somewhere via the device, what possible use is taking up all of that space on imperceptible change?
Not everyone is interested in holding a lossless music archive on their system. For many, there's simply no benefit.
Re:Support to open formats (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Support to open formats (Score:4, Informative)
Windows only and still not Free (Score:3, Informative)
MAC is faster to rip, slightly smaller files and is also now open source. (Did not used to be.)
Only downloads that work on Microsoft Windows, a proprietary operating system published by a U.S. company, are available. Even the FAQ is in a Windows proprietary format (.chm). It may be faster if you're already on Windows, but is it faster than native FLAC on Wine? And is it faster inside a Virtual PC than FLAC is natively on a Mac?
Monkey's Audio itself is also not free software for the same reasons as ol
Re:Support to open formats (Score:3, Funny)
Check the positioning of your thousand separator
655350 Hz > 96 kHz
Re:Support to open formats (Score:3, Interesting)
As for your 20khz ears, it's true and not true. If it's about what you hear, 20khz is sufficient for most of us, but it still creates a harsh Nyquist curve.
As for when you hear it, our ears are quite sensitive to the timing of sounds and their reflections. This is how you can hear a sound from all around you (via reverberations off other surfaces) and still know how far away and in which direction the original source is located. Sample rates higher than 20Khz are required for accurate timing of spatial d
Re:Support to open formats (Score:2, Interesting)
A few examples:
I bought a Kiss DVD player because it plays Oggs, however a few percent of my Ogg files makes the player hang. Since you can fit 800 songs on a DVD, it just doesn't work. Sometimes re-encoding them fixes this. I'v been in contact with the manufacturer but got no help there.
I got an Ogg-player for Palm Tungsten, however it doesn't allow you to delete files, so I have to re-format the MMC every time I want to change
Re:Support to open formats (Score:3, Informative)
Vorbis had trouble from the beginning, largely because there wasn't originally a non-floating point decoder for the format (and even the one that now exists is pretty resource-consuming compared to those for other formats). I'm always hoping for more widespread acceptance of Vorbis, but it seems that many companies have decided there just isn't a demand. Even most of iRiver's newer players don't play them.
Re:Support to open formats (Score:2)
Nowadays, I buy everything in OGG (from a very nice russian store if you ask me) and I am very happy. From the CD's I buy I rip them to Ogg too.
I am sure you must have transcoded from mp3 to
Re:Support to open formats (Score:3, Informative)
Links:
Latest Hydrogen audio listening test [hydrogenaudio.org]
Old but respectable: German computer magazine c't listening test [infoanarchy.org]
Re:Support to open formats (Score:2)
1. You don't set the bitrate in OGG,you only set the quality, that alone marks you as a troll
2. Every single blind test out there at every possible quality against mp3 files of equivalent bitrates (both CBR and VBR) concludes otherwise.
"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, today's faster connections and more capacious hard drives have audiophiles turning to lossless codecs such as FLAC and those offered by Apple Computer and Microsoft.
Anyone who has mastery of the word "capacious" knows a little somethin about somethin.
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Funny)
"...they have one great redeeming feature -- their wallets.
More capacious than an elephant's scrotum, and just as difficult
to get your hands on"
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:2)
Well that's definately something to look forward to for the future, which is, after all, the focus of the article, but right now MP3 is king for anyone who wants portability. Though there are now two iPods in my family, there's also a Windows smartphone. I refuse to lock myself out of future hardware purchas
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:2)
* Actually I don't remember a single player w/ AAC, but some
** Censored to avoid Apple fanboy flame
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:3, Informative)
More equating market share and/or popularity with quality?
I think anyone
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:2)
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:3, Informative)
You are mistaken in thinking that AAC is an Apple-only format. AAC is part of the MPEG4 standards, and e.g. most phones with music playing capabilities nowadays support AAC.
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:3, Informative)
MPEG4 is a collection of audio and video encoding standards.
But, saying that AAC is a part of the MPEG4 standard is false.
AAC is indeed part of [vialicensing.com] MPEG4, Part 3 [wikipedia.org]. That probably does not prevent you from integrating another audio codec.
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:2)
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really a matter of hardware/software support, at the end of the day. For most end-users, mp3's compression:quality ratio is good enough that they can store their music in what they feel to be a reasonably small amount of space, and what matters most is the support. If they can't play, say, Ogg Vorbis files on their media players then why should they encode/buy music in that format? And likewise, if no-one's encoding or buying Ogg Vorbis music, why should manufacturers include support for it in their devices? It's the old chicken-and-egg story that Linux advocates will know and, err, love...
That said, if there are better formats, they'll have a tendancy to surface. FLAC [sourceforge.net], for example, is lossless which immediately gives it a USP over most other codecs out there (including, IIRC, all the 'popular' ones). And of course, it's free and open like Vorbis. The major barrier to these codecs taking their rightful place, though, is Microsoft and Apple pushing their own formats; why should Joe User worry about some strange-sounding hacker codec ("what's a codec?") when WMA sounds great, is smaller than mp3(wow!) and works flawlessly with WMP11 out of the box?
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:2)
I'm not saying that rockbox is a bad thing, it's just not something for Joe Consumer.
le me get this straight (Score:2)
Or, I can buy an ipod, spending quite a bit more than a roughly-equivalent no-name mp3 player, and have it work like a no-name bulk-storage device player?
If you don't want to use iTunes, why not save some cash and get something like an iRiver?
Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
So, why should I use MP3-Surround? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So, why should I use MP3-Surround? (Score:2)
Simple (Score:2)
You'd be surprised at the narrow scope of many patents.
Re:So, why should I use MP3-Surround? (Score:2)
the answer is in the article: (Score:2, Interesting)
So mp3 might survive, if only for the many "mp3" players that are arround. People wi
Re:the answer is in the article: (Score:2)
Are you kidding? Did I miss something over the Napster lawsuit? MP3's have had lots of major-label content. That's what the sue a bunch of music lovers each month is all about.
Smile
allofmp3 (Score:5, Informative)
allows you to pick what format you like including lossless, aac, vorb, mp3.
I imagine most people pick mp3 because although it may not be the best... it's
by far the most wildly supported. Conversion tools between "better" codecs usually
mean worse sound quality than getting it in a format that pretty much every
player can handle.
And at 192bps MP3 is pretty darn good.
Re:allofmp3 (Score:2)
I don't doubt you, but why wouldn't most people pick a lossless format? They can always change it to anothor lossless format without data loss (by definition), put it on CD sounding as good as an original CD, or put encode a second copy on the lossy format o
Re:allofmp3 (Score:2)
2) Download time.
3) Lack of storage space.
Lots of compelling reason for buying a CD in compressed format, even when a lossless version is available at the same time.
Re:allofmp3 (Score:2)
On average, most modern lossless compressors yield a 50% file size reduction, a 500Mb CD would yield a 250Mb archive.
Even though I rip my albums to FLAC files, my weaboo animu folder still takes the bulk of my data archives.
Re:allofmp3 (Score:2)
Lossless formats don't store the data unpacked. Typically it compresses down to 1/3 or 1/2 of the original size. Or compared to MP3s it's about 3-5 times larger than "standard" bitrate. (This is based on MP3s compressing down to about 1/10th of the original size.)
Re:allofmp3 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:allofmp3 (Score:3, Funny)
huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
According to the MP3Surround home page [fraunhofer.de], MP3surround includes a technology for 'virtual surround': Ensonido [fraunhofer.de].
With this technology, the two channels are manipulated to provide the illusion of surround sound. This isn't new technology, techniques like SRS WOW are supposed to do this as well. They involve things like shifting the phase of one channel vs. the other.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
http://www.holophonic.ch/archivio/testaudio/Ceren
In all headphones I've listened to that stuff with, it sounds really convincing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Provided you upmix to 5.1
Like the other guy in this thread, I call bullshit.
You can't "upmix" a signal to have MORE information than you are already given. Speaking as someone who has helped mixed and mastered a few CDs, the damn things are recorded in "LEFT" and "RIGHT". There's no other information to be had (and that's the way it should be).
Things like "Pro Logic" take a 2 channel sound and say "Well, this sounds like it's in the range of human voices", and puts it in the center; then it says "Everything below 90 Hz goes to the subwoofer"; then "These sounds are muted, they sound like background noise" and sends that to the rear speakers. But it's all faked. In that sense, you can "Upmix" to 5.1, but you're just shifting sounds to where they don't belong. Studio engineers spend HOURS per track on a CD putting the sounds exactly where they should go (for instance, so that when the drummer does a roll across all the toms, it goes from left to right in the ears). Messing with this doesn't gain you anything.
I mean, would you take a 64 color GIF weighing in at 12k, and "upconvert" it to a TIFF file at 5MB, and say "wow, now it's a better quality!"? It's just not possible. You can't create more than you're given to work with. Stereo sound is not more than the sum of its parts. It is exactly the sum of its parts.
~Will
Re:huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vorbis compatible? Whaat?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Compatibility and Ogg Vorbis? What's going on here? Just because a format is open doesn't mean it's compatible. It needs implementations in various hardware for that. If it was true that Ogg Vorbis was an mp3 alternative with wide compatiblity, I wouldn't hesitate to use it though.
Re:Vorbis compatible? Whaat?? (Score:3, Insightful)
If it was true that Ogg Vorbis was an mp3 alternative with wide compatiblity, I wouldn't hesitate to use it though.
I find it funny that we are even talking about this anymore, as we as consumers have proved time and time again, feed us what works, we don't care about the details.
If we cared about the details, DVDs would be playable on all Operating Systems (legally) and we could make backups. All portable music players would play only Open Sourced formats, making them cheaper, all websites could use s
Re:Vorbis compatible? Whaat?? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MP3 is dead, long live MP3? (Score:5, Interesting)
Higher number of channels. IIRC, Vorbis has a limit of 256 channels and FLAC has 8. If you need more channels, you can multiplex several Vorbis/FLAC streams in a single Ogg container file.
IMHO, one great thing about these formats is that they don't assume too much. Today's consumer level surround means 5.1 but these formats don't get stuck on it, they just give you channels without assigning them to anything particular (like front, rear, subwoofer). Therefore they can be used for future formats as well.
For a similar reason I encode everything to FLAC these days. It doesn't assume anything about psychoacoustics, which is different for each individual listener. Plus I'll probably have much better equipment and more experienced ears in the future.
Re:MP3 is dead, long live MP3? (Score:3, Funny)
Now that I'm getting older, I would rather have less experienced ears to hear clearly with.
Re:MP3 is dead, long live MP3? (Score:2)
Even though hearing gets worse with age, you can learn to use your hearing better. When you listen to a song many many times, you learn to discern new details about it. This kind of musical ability also affects your way of listening to new music. It helps a lot if you play some music yourself.
For example, a lot of classical music i
MP3 is dying? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
MP3 does not sound "noticeably worse"; all codecs have their artifacts at low bitrates. A well-tuned MP3 encoder like LAME [sourceforge.net] in ~128kbps VBR mode will give very comparable results [hydrogenaudio.org] to AAC, with no statistical difference in a double-blind listening test. Hell, in an earlier test LAME beat WMA Standard [hydrogenaudio.org] (the most common version of the codec). And LAME in "--preset standard" mode gives nearly transparent results at around 180-200kbps.
AAC, WMA and OGG all have their advantages, but MP3 is truly a "jack of all trades". You want your audio to play in any player or portable you choose, like iTunes/iPod, WMP, Winamp, foobar2000, AmaroK, etc. etc.? You encode to MP3. Heck, both iTunes and WMP both ship with MP3 encoders now. Like JPEG, MP3 simply isn't bad enough to forsake compatibility for a superior codec.
Secondly, the author clearly doesn't have a solid background in audio technology. I am mystified as to why s/he thought he'd need "full-sized headphones" compared to Shure canalphones to hear the "benefits" of surround sound, when the fact is that with any stereo headphones more than 2 source channels of audio is essentially pointless!
As for surround sound systems, AC3 in the 384kbps+ bitrate is already the standard there. I can't see why MP3 surround will displace it; MP3 surround isn't, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the current or next-gen DVD specs.
Re:MP3 is dying? Really? (Score:2)
As for surround sound systems, AC3 in the 384kbps+ bitrate is already the standard there. I can't see why MP3 surround will displace it; MP3 surround isn't, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the current or next-gen DVD specs.
Actually, this is not true, There are "full sized" style headphones where each headphone does not have only one speaker, but three, each at different positions around the ear canal - and none of them directly in the canal. These headphones support dolby digital surround via some s
Still Alive & Kicking (Score:5, Insightful)
I Still Cling to My 8-Track Tapes, Too (Score:2)
Audiophile geeks are clearly the people to ask about The Next Big Trend, but maybe -- just maybe -- we're not the best people to check in on to determine when that trend has passed...
Deja Vu (Score:3, Insightful)
Phonograph records sounded the best, but they're fragile and non-portable. Casettes are portable, but they sound horrible. CDs are more portable than records and sound better than casettes, though not quite as good as records under optimal conditions. CDs won, though it's notable that you couldn't create your own CD when that victory was achieved.
What this would predict is that ultimately convenience wins out, even trumping sound quality, unless the sound quality is much, much worse, viz. detectable by a non-audiophile over cheap equipment. That would predict that formats like FLAC and OGG and WMA and AAC will never trump MP3 unless the industry has sufficient leverage to make that happen. Which is entirely possible.
Re:Deja Vu (Score:3, Informative)
ADD described a process, where the letters meant "Recorded in","Mixed in" and "Mastered in"
So a purely digital recording would be DDD, a direct transfer of an old Vinyl record from a pressing master (or from the vinyl would be AAD.
Sorry to be picky - but this IS
QUICK ADDITION: from wikipedia
Three-Letter Codes
* DDD: digital tape recorder used during
Re:Deja Vu (Score:2)
Actually, it meant Analog-Digital-Digital. This told you how the disk was recorded (first letter) and mastered (second letter). It told nothing about the disk's audio quality, btw.
(/pedant)
The MusicMatch Jukebox Store (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that there are loads of mp3 players on the market, so I don't see it going away. The commercial market always seems to linger behind for a while - mp3 players are relatively new. They'll keep it alive.
Although I do protest naive ipod users being locked into a manufacturers format - when DRM becomes mandatory, they'll be wondering what's going on. Some people just trust the manufacturer default settings (it's not their fault, they assume it's the best - non-geeks have mp3 players now). Personally I'm going to switch to flac format (I just discovered it) for ripping my favourite albums - I wouldn't use alac (although I'm sure many ipod users do) because it's closed, and can see the DRM restriction problem become an issue in the future for closed source media.
MP3 Is Firmly Entrenched (Score:5, Insightful)
Mp3 is ubiquitous. Despite Fraunhofer and Thomson's patents, portable music players will almost certainly support the standard, as will every single ripping application, somewhere in the background. Naturally, every sound player under the sun can play mp3 files, sometimes even when they can't play pcm or wav files.
Mp3 is here to stay, like; txt, html, avi, csv, vi and ascii. The quality might not be as good, but you can rely on the fact that it will play on virtually everything. Encoders like LAME will help keep it alive too. It will be surpassed yes, but never usurped. It might be the lowest common denominator, but sometimes that's exactly what you reach for.
Bitrates, surround sound, sample rates, quality, size, etc, etc. These are important to audiophiles, but the simple fact is; to most of the population, 128kbps stereo mp3 files encoded with something as good as LAME sound perfect as far as they are concerned.
Hardly anyone I know even uses surround sound to listen to their music anyway. That's for TV. I have two ears, and one channel in each is plenty. Unless humans evolve three more ears , no one realistically needs 5.1 on their iPods.
As to bitrate, quality, etc. Again, few people actually care, and even when they do, storage space is dirt cheap. I can buy 200GB for less than $100, so why waste my time encoding to a lower bitrate on a superior format? I don't know a single person who's ever filled up an iPod with greater than 40GB capacity. Lossless formats like FLAC will become popular long before people demand better quality mp3 sound.
Even id3 tags will probably stand the test of time. id3v2 is a flexible standard, and can keep growing while maintaining backwards compatability. There's also potential for a huge amount of data in there, and again most people won't really care. What they need is simply ripping applications that enter information for them, and they're done.
Mp3 isn't going anywhere. Its future is as the most used, listened to, encoded to and supported compressed sound format. It's competitors are more likely to bow out before mp3 hangs up its hat. The moral of todays story is; 'Sometimes, "Good Enough", is all it takes.'
Re:MP3 Is Firmly Entrenched (Score:2, Funny)
Hello. Nice to meet you.
Re:MP3 Is Firmly Entrenched (Score:2)
You correctly said that P3 could never be usurped and has attained the status of txt, csv, etc.
Re:MP3 Is Firmly Entrenched (Score:2)
I'm (im)patiently waiting for that day to come.
It pisses me off that I have to incrementally take about 1 hour of a time of music into my car (an audio CD) out of the 2200+ hours of CD+ quality flac soundfiles that I have.
Although, I might break down and get one of these [cowonamerica.com] but even then, I still have to walk the stupid thing upstairs instead of using my WAP from my driveway.
I can't figure out if technology progre
Re:ID3v2 backwards compatible? (Score:2)
Surround my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Surround with only 15 bits per second of data?
10 bucks says its just audio steering a'la Dolby Pro Logic [wikipedia.org]
Re:Surround my ass (Score:5, Informative)
From the FAQ [fraunhofer.de]:
Are MP3 Surround files much bigger than regular MP3 files?
No, fortunately not. The algorithm used in MP3 Surround employs psychoacoustics to recreate the surround image out of very compact spatial information. By adding surround information, MP3 file sizes increase by just about 10 percent.
10% still isn't a lot to encode four additional channels, though.
Error in the article (Score:3, Informative)
From the FAQ:
Ten percent of 128 kb/s is a heck of a lot more than 15 b/s. Maybe he meant to say 15 additional kilobits per second.
AlpineR
AllOfMP3.Com (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AllOfMP3.Com (Score:2)
To whom is it fair? It offers almost nothing in royalties to the copyright owners due to a loophole in Russian copyright law.
Just because the prices are attractive to the customer does not make it fair.
On the other hand the record companies are asking for too much money for music. £0.79 for ONE song is ludicrous.
Surround is a red herring (Score:5, Informative)
Not many everyday users care about surround-sound. It's meaningless for personal listening (earbuds, cans), and only a tiny minority of living rooms are set up for 5.1 or whatever.
Me, I'm encoding everything as MP3 because I know it will play on everything for the forseeable future. I'm also using Flac 'cos I like lossless.
Support for MP3 and Flac is why I like Robert Fripp's music download store [itwriting.com].
Typical marketing FUD technique (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple wants AAC, Micro$oft wants WMA, Sony wants ATRAC... Everyone wants their own format to live, maybe because of royalties, or maybe just to take others away from the marketing. The fact is: most bad MP3 are actually caused by bad ripping.
People don't know (or just forget) that all those parameters you have while encoding are somewhat critical. It's not only a matter of setting it to the highest bit-rate you can, but checking the bandwidth and audio itself to avoid aliasing, sound damping, etc. MP3 files I encode for listening on my car stereo are undistinguishable from the ones on the original CDs.
I think I will create the RGC format and get rich, by saying MP3, Ogg, AAC and WMA sucks!
Live in your living room? (Score:3, Informative)
OK, so surround sound is a technological advance, and will help with certain applications - but for the main market of plain ol' music, is it going to make any difference? Is anyone really rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of being able to hear their favourite bands in surround sound?
I might be missing something here, but to me surround sound is more Training Day than Green Day...
MP3 will win (Score:2)
lossless compression (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously there is room above lossless compression to improve quality - higher sample rates, multi-channel sound as this article says. Nevertheless, I'm just surprised there isn't more demand for audio that hasn't been poluted by compression.
Re:lossless compression (Score:3, Insightful)
As a technology trend, however, it is weird because technology tends to evolve by improvement. Lossy compression is a step backward from CD quality, no matter how small the perceived difference actually is.
Another way in which t
Terrible math (Score:3, Informative)
Take it from an "old" hand... (Score:3, Insightful)
Audio cassette was lower quality than anything else at the time, but it was convenient and durable and most important of all offered longer playtime than anything else.
I currently have 100+ gigs of mp3's.
Yes, theoretically the sound quality isn't all it could be, no matter, perhaps as many as 0.1% of music listeners have both the equipment (eg amp stage and speakers) and enviornment (eg anechoic audio only "music" room) to spot the difference with any degree or reliability or repeatability, and they won't be touching digital anyway...
mp3 is not going anywhere, and probably won't for several more years...
imagine, a new codec that offers DOUBLE the file size compression with no extra degradation, ooh wow, I'll save a whole 50 bucks worth of hard disk space, and I still won't use it unless everyone and everything I can touch supports it, just like mp3 today.
Why do people still use jpeg, there are "better" ways out there, provided you exclude universal transparency and platform independence from your definition of "better"
I went/lived through reel to reel, LP vinyl, 8 track, audio cassette and red book CD, and mp3 blows everything else away.
What with the ever increasing storage density of hard disk (solid state or otherwise) media, I really cannot see or concieve of ANYTHING on the horizon that is about to dent mp3.
To all intents and purposes mp3 is free, is open, is universal, and is good enough, prtability is an issue for people like me with 0.1 TB of mp3's, but that is coming, I can fit it all on a new 2.5" laptop hard disk
The ONLY POSSIBLE reason I can see for mp3 being supplanted for audio is people wanting 24/7 indexable and searchable records of their lives as an audio stream, a new codec and file format optimised for that purpose would beat mp3, for that purpose.
Sorry, that's a lot of business plans, planned obsolescence and pet projects dead in the uterus, tough.
One important factor (Score:3, Insightful)
MP3 as a format is not going to die out very quickly. The main reason is that many individuals already have vast libraries of their music in MP3 format. The fact that new/store music is not MP3 has only a minimal effect, as most people who keep compressed/digital music are getting a majority of their new music via pirated sources (a.k.a torrents, Gnutella etc).
There are also many like me who purchase CDs and immediate rip them to the computer for listening, while keeping the CDs safely tucked away. For most of us, the preferred format is MP3, the only reason being wide compatibility.
MP3 WILL die as a format, just not anytime soon.
just compare (Score:2)
MP3 is here to say in my house. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've currently got 35,000 + mp3s on my home server; a good 80%+ of which I've ripped from my own CD collection with the remainder mostly coming from mates CDs. All of these are encoded with lame using the VBR --alt-preset-extreme setting and amount to about 150 Gb of fully IDV tagged data. Playback is handled in three rooms via Slim MP3 players.
To make sure these stay with me I've got the lot backed up onto external hard drives. One is used for a weekly backup. One is used for a monthly back up and which spends the remainder of its time "hidden" in my loft. One is a copy of the loft drive which is backed up every two or three months and is then taken to a friends house; at which point I take one of her removables back to my loft.
I've also taken the step of stocking up on some "cheap & cheerful", reasonable sound quality, DRM free, flash based mp3 players and have one 512Mb and two 1Gb units stored in various places. That way when my current 512Mb player gives up the ghost/gets lost/stolen etc. I have backup hardware.
Thanks to the latest Sony rootkit fiasco though I've now stopped buying CDs altogether. If I want any new music I intend to get it from "the source that must not be named"
So I for one..
1 Will not have any DRM crippled device in the house.
2 Am not interested in transcoding my collection to some other format as one lossy encoding is quite enough.
3 Couldn't give a shit about surround sound audio etc.
4 Am quite happy with mp3 for either playing off my PC or playing in my portable.
You may of course choose to follow the new "best ever" format of the day but me, I couln't care less. Non DRM mp3 works for me and I'm sticking with it.
P.S. And in case you're wondering why yes I do share my files. On a private FTP network and by occassional post to the "the source that must not be named"
MP3's future is safe as houses (Score:2)
A couple of major reasons why mp3 won't be going anywhere soon:-
1. AFAIK anywayz, it doesn't have DRM attached at all, unlike the proprietary formats. The corps can crow about better sound fidelity all they want; as long as they keep DRM, mp3 will stay. This is one instance where freedom is something people do care about.
2. Encoding software is free. (as in beer, and pos
iRiver and Ogg (Score:2)
byte for byte? (Score:2)
The fact is that an mp3 file can have the same quality as a wma or an aac file. It just uses more memory. Memory is cheap and gets cheaper every day.
This gives me two choices:
1. Have my music in a non-standardized format like wma... and then buy a new music player when I realize that everything but the iPod sucks... or vice-versa.
2. Use a little bit more m
No point for surround music (Score:5, Insightful)
All our lives, we listen to music, even live music, coming from a single source. Whether its an individual voice or instrument, or a band, or even a symphony orchestra, we here music being radiated from essentially a point source, radiating to hit our ears. We turn to face the music, generally don't listen to live music from behind. We don't here music coming at us from all directions. Most of us have never sat in the middle of an orchestra or even in a band, so we have no point of reference to hear violins at our right, drums behind up, wind instruments off to the rear left, etc, etc. Most of us would find that cacophony of music to be distracting and distasteful. We don't need to "artificially" master music to come from multiple channels. There is no need for the vocals to come front center, the guitar to be played front right, drums rear left, bass rear right, and backup vocals off center to the left.
The only point I could see of multi-channel music is to record the reverb that actually radiates from behind us. And that would be a waste of bytes. Computer technology is capable of taking a stereo source and applying algorithms to add reverb back, so you can sound like your listening to music in a concert hall, or the intimate muted environment of a jazz club. There is no need to discretely record reverb. Recording reverb will only mess up the recorded source, as some people don't like the echo of a concert hall, so why record it and force people to hear the echo. Some people don't like the muted sounds of a jazz club, so why force them to listen to the music muted. Recording the music free of reverb and letting people fine tune playback of music using digital signal processing has succeeded in making music a popular entertainment format.
This is unlike movie soundtracks where a 2D screen is trying to record 3D reality. Having a car or helicopter roar from the background before appearing on screen overhead or an explosion off to the left is one of the ways to immerse viewers into the movie,we are expecting to hear sound coming from multiple points around the room, not just flatly projected from the front.
Multi-channel music will simply cause MP3's will become bloated, storing discrete 5.1 channels would increase file sizes by 2.5 times. For what purpose? None that I can imagine would actually make the MP3 format more popular.
MP3 also hopes to become the standard for encoding movies and games in 5.1 surround. Why? Don't we already have 2 competing standards that are more then capable of offering high quality multi-channel sound? (DTS and Dolby Digital), we don't need another format that doesn't have a chance to compete.
I would prefer if MP3 became a high fidelity format, storing music in BETTER then CD quality, storing music with higher bit and sampling rates. Storing more of the information, not just the audio range humans supposedly can only hear. These "inaudible" sounds create the ambiance that is missing from digital music, the stomach vibrating lows and the highs that interact with the environment in ways that we can FEEL rather then here. This is what is missing when digitally recording live music. I would rather MP3 files double or triple in size due to more of the original sound data being stored, rather then to store multiple channels of audio.
Multi-channel audio has failed to catch on, because it is unnatural. DVD Audio and Super CD both failed as a music format. Also, quadraphonic records back in the day didn't translate into quadraphonic CD's. Multi-channel MP3's will fail to catch on as well.
eMusic (Score:3, Insightful)
Another nice thing about eMusic is that the music isn't just MP3, it's MP3 encoded at high variable bitrate (LAME 3.90, I believe, alt-preset-standard). It's pretty much the same setting I'll use for the CDs I buy myself.
And in the end, I have a music file that sounds good and that has no restrictions against copying to my notebook, MP3 player, a CD for playing in the car or anything else. That's worth a lot to me.
Re:MP3s are obsolete. The future is Lossless (Score:2)
Re:MP3s are obsolete. The future is Lossless (Score:2)
plus, even though you *could* have it all lossless, is there any point if you know it won't make a difference with our choice of headphones/speakers?
the only people who care (gold-plate audiophiles) wouldn't have been using mp3 or other lossy codecs in the first place.
another important consideration with portable music is battery life - smaller files mean
Re:MP3 is not dead. Not by far. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll always choose players Ogg/Vorbis compatibl (Score:2)
I have a Samsung YP-U1X (512 MiB) for Vorbis. And it is a nice player (if you ignore the very faint interference from the DSP and the lanyard eyelet that's so close to the earphone socket only the supplied buds will fit).
Bless those Koreans. Come to think of it, I've bought a fair bit of Samsung gear recently: this, digital cameras, laser printer... I guess the push for Linux in South Korea is a incentive to make standards-compliant (or at least open spec) hardware that works with pretty much any operating