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.'"
"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:5, Insightful)
huh? (Score:5, 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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
But its the base that everything can play (Score:1, Insightful)
Still Alive & Kicking (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.'
MP3s are obsolete. The future is Lossless (Score:1, Insightful)
AllOfMP3.Com (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
Re:No point for surround music (Score:2, Insightful)
Music is not produced from point sources. The interaction of the hall, or stage, or wherever you're performing in is an important part, and these echoes come from all over the place. If you ever go to a good church organ concert, where the sounds will reverbate for over 5 seconds, try closing your eyes. It's actually very hard to tell where the organ actually is. Mere stereo speakers cannot simulate that.
This is ignoring the fact that many artists would probably want to use the surround sound to "place" instruments differently. Don't tell artists what they can and cannot do.
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 standard CSS because everyone, including IE, adheres to standards.
The simple fact of the matter is we buy the shiny things marketing departments tell us to buy.
If we were smart, we would hold out, and use only Ogg Vorbis now. When the mainstream takes a stand, manufacturers listen... In theory anyway, since so far all the mainstream has done is bent over.
Imagine if we waited until slavery was abolished in the US to take a stand against slavery... Or stood against hitler years after his death? This doesn't make sense to wait until there is no reason for change to elicit change.
If you want something better, and it exists, then use it. If you are content with the way things are now, then don't bother. Just remember that the fewer open standards we implement, the more we are locked into specific vendors, and the easier it is for large corporations to tell us how to use technology, instead of the other way around.
And no, I'm not a hippie. I just like choice, and want people to realize all of the issues with the RIAA, MPAA, etc. are caused by tolerating closed standards/ideals such as CSS-encrypted DVDs, the proprietary MP3 format, and copy-protected music downloads.
Of course, then again, maybe if we stopped abusing digital media formats, the recording industry wouldn't feel compelled to use proprietary formats and DRM, nor would they have the need to trample our Fair Use rights either.
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:lossless compression (Score:2, Insightful)
In the real world, most people still use 56k.
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 technology evolves backwards is DRM: the kind of technology that works against its own progress. It took so much effort to create a technological utopia where everyone could access any information freely -- and then the media industries are working hard with new technologies that effectively reverse this development.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:"I'm not dead!" - "You soon will be" (Score:3, Insightful)