The Future of MP3 and Surround

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.'"

allofmp3

[paulhar]

Since several people use the other "major" source - allofmp3.com - and it
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:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be"

[zalas]

Since AAC is an integral part of the MPEG4 standard, and since MPEG4 seems to be gaining momentum in standalone devices, I would think that support for AAC would be a lot more widespread in the future. Besides, AAC should be getting you better quality at the same bitrate as long as the bitrate isn't insanely high.

Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be"

[Anonymous Coward]

why should I rip my CDs in a format that locks me in to buying iPods in future?

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:Support to open formats

[TheSloth2001ca]

"MP3 for its wide compatibility can now choose from preferable open-source alternatives such as Ogg Vorbis."

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:Deja Vu

[NiteHaqr]

And there was me thinking that the A in ADD with respect to CD's was for Analogue, as in the original recording was Analogue.

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 session recording, mixing and/or editing, and mastering (transcription).
        * ADD: analog tape recorder used during session recording, digital tape recorder used during subsequent mixing and/or editing and during mastering (transcription).
        * AAD: analog tape recorder used during session recording and subsequent mixing and/or editing, digital tape recorder used during mastering (transcription).

Surround is a red herring

[onlyconnect]

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].

Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be"

[crwl]

iPod in fact now supports Ogg Vorbis (and many other formats too), with an excellent third-party open source firmware called Rockbox. The playback is also gapless and supports Replaygain data, and it doesn't force you to use iTunes or any other database tool. see: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodPor t [rockbox.org]

Re:Support to open formats

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

You should probably know that you are in a minority here -- most blind tests (actually, all I've encountered) have come to the conclusion that ogg is as good or better than mp3. Then again, if you could hear artifacts with maximum quality ogg, there was almost certainly something wrong with the setup...

Links:
Latest Hydrogen audio listening test [hydrogenaudio.org]
Old but respectable: German computer magazine c't listening test [infoanarchy.org]

Live in your living room?

[dtsazza]

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...

Re:Surround my ass

[hcdejong]

Probably not.

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.

Re:Support to open formats

[zootm]

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.

Error in the article

[AlpineR]

From the article:

"The format adds minimal overhead, consuming just 15 additional bits per second."

From the FAQ:

"MP3 file sizes increase by just about 10 percent."

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

Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be"

[geminidomino]

You can call the iPod names (you don't have one), but it is the premiere player. Obtaining that position in the marketplace in spite of its generally higher prices (from day one) is quite indicative of its superiority to those other players. Trying to rely on better specs but having poor design seems to be the biggest mistake made by other market players. Too many others try to act as a knockoff of the original, doing a poor job at it.

More equating market share and/or popularity with quality?

I think anyone who hasn't been living under a rock can see the flaw in that. How about a few examples?

Highest rated TV show last week (US) - American Idol. (Also 3rd highest rated) (Nielsen.com)
Best video game of 2005 - Madden NFL 2004 (SpikeTV VGA)
George W Bush Approval rating 02/15-02/16 - 40% (Time)[0]

Popular != good. If you want to praise its design, by all means, do so (personally, the crappy software and the extra $200 outweighed the nice design, resulting in a Zen Xtra purchase for me instead). But don't sabotage your argument by appealing to the judgement of the masses.

[0]Ok, I'll probably get modded flamebait for that, but I needed a third option without going to the old, stale Windows Desktop usage statistic. ;)

Re:Support to open formats

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS. For 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo 320 Kbits even with MP3 will be indistinguishable to the human ear. Higher bitrates are needed of course for more channels or higher frequencies.

Are these tests double blind or do you know what each one is when you listen to it? I bet if you really think you can tell the difference it is purely psychological.

Re:Support to open formats

[John Courtland]

The reason FLAC take longer on the encode step is because they were aiming for an easier decode. Monkey is, I believe, a 1:1 encode:decode whereas FLAC takes more hardware on the encode side vs the decode side to produce a 1:1 time relationship. This means you need less hardware to decode FLAC on the fly than to encode it on the fly. It probably won't matter in a few years, but there you have it.

Re:Support to open formats

[zootm]

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.

Windows only and still not Free

[tepples]

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 old versions of the Apple Public Source License. The Monkey's Audio license [monkeysaudio.com] has the same "Disrespect for privacy" and "Central control" problems mentioned in FSF's article about the old APSL [gnu.org].

Terrible math

[David Rolfe]

> I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a shift away from lossy compression algorithms to lossless compression. As more and more of the market shifts away from the 650-700MB capacity constraint of traditional CDs, file sizes for songs are becoming less of an issue. As portable players get up to 60GB+ capacity, having files that are 6MB instead of 3MB starts to have less of an impact on people's ability to have the music they want at hand - since, if my math is correct, that's still enough memory for 10,000 songs.

Maybe I misunderstood your point, but file sizes are still an important issue. 60GB will not hold 10,000 lossless songs. The average size of a lossless track in my library is 40MB.

The napkin math is something like this:

60GB = 60,000MB; 60,000MB / 40MB = 1,500 songs.

Using lossless files would be like turning a iPod video into an iPod mini without the cute form factor.

Now, when we have 500GB iPods then the 10,000 song libraries will be portable without lossy compression (or you could keep lossy compression and carry around 100,000 songs, roughly an entire year's worth of uninterrupted music). Of course for a library like that you'd need to buy like 8,000 CDs -- and at RIAA prices that's no small investment.

My entire music collection would fit in 250GB using flac or lossless m4a, so I'd still have to buy a lot more to fill the half TB.

Re:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be"

[ahillen]

MPEG4 is a video compression standard.

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.