An Overview Of Present, Future of Music Technology 148
prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum magazine is running a feature article on the state of music and current digital formats. They point to an interesting phenomenon in the digital music world that Steve Jobs emphasized as well: for the first time in music history, the next big format was not about better quality (SACD and such) but about better portability (MP3). 'It was only five years ago that the music industry was facing a civil war over the next-generation disc-based music format -- the successor to the wildly successful CD. At that time, hardly anybody doubted that the music would be encoded optically on a round plastic disc the size of a CD.'"
Make no mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
All the future formats will be about replacing CDDA with "DRM".
Oh, it will be marketed as being about increased audio-fidelity, but it's all about getting rid of those horrible "insecure" CDs.
only that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
cd is good enough for store sold, holds an unit of music riaa is willing to sell and on just about any consumer system cd itself isn't at fault but the crappy speaker/amplifier used to play it.
it's going to be hard to convince people to switch to a 'better' format when cd really sounds good enough, is already widely spread, and people have cd players everywhere.
What about cassettes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... Wasn't that the point of cassette tapes? They were a dominant format for a while and the reason they replaced vinyl was their portability and robustness (maybe play-time, too.) Certainly it wasn't about sound quality.
On another note, why does MP3 have to replace CD? For my money, I really don't think that there's any likelihood that'll happen. CDs are simple to use, store enough data, are lossless, and come with pretty packaging. All good things. I can't see why there can't be two parallel distribution systems.
Re:only that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Portability... And security (Score:3, Insightful)
MP3 vs the rest: Is file size really an issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
Filesize: But when a new computer comes with a 200Gb harddrive do most people these days even care that MP3 maybe isn't the most effective compression algorithm? I mean, you've got plenty for space so who cares if the typical music collection is 5Gb or 10Gb?
Quality: Most people are happy with CD quality. 192Kb MP3 pretty much gives you that quality. Most people are more than happy with MP3, especially on a portable device where listen conditions are 'suboptimal' shall we say.
Portablity vs DRM: This is the killer feature of digital music. The music industry wants to stop it, for everyone else it is all about being able to move music around. This is the one 'feature' that people do not want to see go.
What I've trying to say here is that people are more than happy with MP3 and the 'problems' with MP3 really aren't an issue for the majority of people, while these replacement formats kill the one feature that people really care about.
Good luck marketing your new formats, music industry. You'll need it!
--
Simon
Re:What about cassettes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not a sound engineer, but LP's were pretty noisy and had much less dynamic range than cd's. Different types of loss, but still a loss. Think of the sound you would hear as the needle rode in the groove before the music started. That sound was always there. There were many other quality issues with LP's, so I gladly switched to cd. It was a night and day difference in sound and convenience.
I know there are LP zealots out there who love the warm rich tones of vinyl, but I for one welcome our cd overlords. LP's sucked.
Bullshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SACD vs MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Some people want portability, and that's fine, but what I want is a high quality update of the CD; with it's quality, maybe with more channels, and with the ability to scale it down *myself* if I want to take it with me on an iPod or such. Give me high quality, no DRM, and I'll work out what I want to do with, thanks very much. Oh, and I will pay for it, if it's DRM free, because that means it's portable to me (as well as being high quality). I have a rack of about 500 CDs sitting here beside me as a testament to that.
And this isn't about digital files. Digital files could be great, if they were decent quality. I'd buy lossless versions of the digital masters by the truckload if I could... but not versions that are worse than the CDs I can already buy (128kbps typical online music store vs CDs 1411kbps).
Anyway, I think the main reason that the MP3 is popular is not because it's just portable, but because of that portability it's easy to pirate. Listening to music on portable music devices is fine, but when you stick a 128kB MP3 on a decent hi-fi, or in a car, it sounds like crap. Until they provide us with something more compelling than free (but crap quality), they're going to have a big piracy problem (as opposed to a small one).
But the record companies are going to learn one way or another. If what they put out costs the same, but in every other regard is a backwards step, there are going to be a lot of people throw up their hands in disgust and look for something better. Or at least different.
I (we) don't just want portability, we want fidelity. MP3 and co do not provide that. They'll only get so far in the market without taking that into account.
-- james
Re:SACD vs MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
128kbps MP3s have noticible artifacts when I play them back through my Nakamichi AV-8 amp + Mordaunt-Short speakers, that simply aren't noticible when played through an iPods headphones.
Variable bit rate encoding helps a lot here.
Makes me wonder why given all the hulabuloo about 'Digital is Forever' that Valenti and his morons trumpet, they persist in offering 128kbps DRMed audio from their download sites.
I guess they simply want this distribution method to fail.
Re:Is DRM Necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
I also find it instructive, whenever a music industry lapdog or article starts lauding "copy protection" (as this article does) to mentally substitute the phrase "business model protection" because that's what it's all about (protecting rights to exclusive distribution of music). But there's no doubt in my mind that consumers have rumbled this and won't let the market players get away with it.
Re:SACD vs MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
For many people, music has become more like a "soundtrack" to their lives. Things like personal stereos, computer CD players and car cassette/cd increased the market for music because people would not have to sit down to listen, but could have it around them. However, the equipment for most people generally has low quality amplification.
In all these, cases though, portability of the musical content will be vital. I don't want to buy a CD for my audio system, another format for my car use, and another for my PC.
First time in history... (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, the phonograph record was a step down in quality from live music, but ever more portable tha a full band or orchestra.
Re: DRM just adds useless overhead (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a Slashdot story [slashdot.org] earlier about an interview [engadget.com] with MPAA's Jack Valenti, who said: "I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it". He really doesn't have a clue, does he? A consumer gets the content, has a decoder, and gets decoding keys where needed (somehow), and to prevent interception, decoding will have to be done at the endpoint, the consumers' equipment. And then you expect to be able to ensure that content never leaves the device once decoded? Get real.
Consumers are faced with extra hassle, limitations resulting from DRM features, and building those features into equipment and software makes everything more complicated and expensive. Hackers on the other hand (both black hat & white hat), will have circumvented DRM features in no-time.
The interesting point here: the barrier it presents to hackers is removed quickly, and isn't an issue after that, but all disadvantages it presents to consumers, REMAIN. If, in 10 years from now, you want to write a software DVD player, chances are at some point you'll still have to deal with region codes, CSS and other useless crap, and DVD-enabled equipment will always be more complicated and expensive than it has to be because of the included DRM features.
Concluding: DRM just adds useless overhead, extra cost, and doesn't do squat to prevent unintentional copying (aside from whether you think it should). I wrote a rant titled "CONTROL versus FREEDOM [alwinh.dds.nl]" some time ago, that isn't of much interest anymore, but its conclusion still holds. For me, it means that I won't invest any money in products that have significant DRM features built in. CD's with copy protection? Game consoles that you're not allowed to mod, or run your own software on? Stick it up your .....
Re:What about cassettes? (Score:4, Insightful)
CD's are not lossless compared with vinyl
OK, that's not what lossless means in this context. Technically every format is lossy compared to the original source because any recording is inferior to actually being next to whatever's making the original sound. Microphones aren't perfect. Headphones, speakers and even studio monitors aren't perfect. Let alone the recording formats.
In this context, lossless means that when you transfer a clip of audio (or video for that matter) from one format to another, the two versions of that clip are completely identical. As far as I know, this is impossible with all analogue formats.
If you copy a twelve track master tape of an album onto a record or a CD, it will lose some of its fidelity. If you copy a record to tape or a CD to tape, it will lose fidelity.
This is the important part: transferring one digital copy of a file to another. Encoding a CD audio track or .wav or .aiff file to .mp3 or Ogg Vorbis is lossy, because cunning trickery is used to get rid of all the parts of the sound that most human beings can't hear. FLAC and Shorten, however, are lossless because they preserve the data exactly.
For example, try this on a *nix machine:
The first line encodes a wave file losslessly. The second line decodes it. The third line compares the two. They are identical.
This is useful for several reasons. None of the reasons are how good it sounds; Ogg Vorbis quality three can probably convince most people (I know I can't tell the difference between that and the original audio). However, say you want to encode your CD collection to mp3, and then a year later you want to encode it to Ogg Vorbis instead. Transcoding (that is, transferring a file from one lossy format to another) sounds terrible. It's best to keep a lossless copy of your songs so that if you change your mind about the lossy format to listen to them in, you can automate the process.
Another, less likely, advantage is this: you can use steganography to hide data in wave files (steghide does this, for example). Losslessly compressed wave files retain this hidden data. Now you can stash your porn or ROMs where no one will think of looking, and even keep a backup on a P2P client.
Re:only that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SACD vs MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
If commercial artists don't get millions of dollars for cranking out commercial crap, that's a real heartbreaker. If I want to listen to their crap for free, well good for me. This is the liberating nature of technology. The supermarketed stars had their day. Now it's time for the people who aren't into music for the money to have a turn. If the superstars want to play, then good for them. This isn't exclusionary, this is embracing music for everyone rich and poor and that's the right thing and a good thing and you have no reason to call people names over it.
But I would agree that portablitity would most likely only be a priority to Steve Jobs since he's so heavily invested in his portable player.
Accessibility not Portability (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, increased portability is behind the success of the iPod and other portable players. However take a look around you the next time you're riding the train, taking the bus or walking down a busy street: count how many people who are actually listening to ANYTHING, be it a MP3 player or even a portable CD player (excluding cell phones). Chances are it will be less than 1 in 10 (even for here in NYC).
The portability market is finite, and it has just about reached the saturation point. People in general only listen to recorded music in 3 places: home, the office, and the car. The first two of which do not benefit from increased portability. Who cares if the listening device+media is as big as a brick or as small as a postage stamp in their home/office?
This brings me to the car. The only portability that benefits the car listener is the ease of transferring and listening to one's music (which for the overwhelming majority of the population is on CD or cassette) from the home/office to the car and vice versa in the least steps possible. Right now the simplest way is a two step process: #1:take CD from home/office unit, #2:place in car stereo. In all the different portability solutions available, none comes close to rivaling the ease of use of the CD solution.
Well actually, one solution comes close: those people that download ALL their music, place it directly to a memory card and then plug it into a car stereo that accepts that memory card/compression format. This is very unlikely to take off as it requires a fundamental shift in the physical media used to distribute recorded music to the "non-connected people" aka "the buying public". Why? Because if the original source of the music is on a CD, that automatically adds another (time-consuming) step to the process (converting from CDDA to whatever file format becomes the next big thing).
Other than the glaringly obvious advantage of getting something for free (that isn't), MP3 succeeded because it brought us greater ACCESSIBILITY to our music. Mr. Home/Office/Car Listener could now get (timely) access to exactly the music he wants without having to leave his home/office. It wasn't (and still is not) because he could carry his whole collection in a nifty little device that fits in his shirt pocket, he just burns the music (uncompressed) to CD anyway.
The majority of the public does not need increased portability (the MiniDisc fiasco should have tipped the industry off to that). We need increased ACCESSIBILITY: getting the music I want, where I want (which for most of us is just the home/office/car), when I want (which is NOW).
The compression/the device/the size/the method of transmission/the protection is insignificant to me, just MAKE IT HAPPEN in as few steps as possible. Right now their is only one ubiquitous digital device (other than the CD player) that could serve as a point of access to OUR music, and you probably already know what it is:
The cell phone.
Anyone listening?
Re:Recording Performances Separately (Score:2, Insightful)
So in order to be able to do "selective listening" as you propose, you would have to have each seperate track available. And by doing so, you of course mutliply the size of the song x the number of tracks. Basically, the only place you could fit this onto is a DVD, and a whole album with all the tracks available would not even fit on a single-sided DVD.
And then there's the problem of playing those and controlling the tracks. On a computer it is easy enough since that's how the labum was created in the first place. But you would need a whole new line of home and portable audio devices designed to play and manipulate such a "format".
Didn't mean to shut down your idea completely though, it's just not very feasible unless it is compressed AND unless they narrow it down to mixing the basic tracks individually and just making those available (vocals, guitars, bass, drums, percs, horns...), because a single song mix, in the recording studio, is made up of a minimum of 30 to 40 tracks most of the time. And in some cases, it can go quite higher than that.
So it's not just a matter of delivering it, it would be a nightmare for sound engineers to do a full regular mix (for today's CDs) using all the tracks, and then remix each basic instrument seperately. The music industry is cutting corners as it is during recording... you would be asking them to spend more money on something that would be used by a minority of people that are either hardcore audiophiles or people that are sticking rich with an itch so spend.
This would be very similar to surround-sound music (albums playing in 5.1 surround on DVDs). It never took off because it was hard to justify the costs for such a small market share. It will never sell as well as CDs (though more and more surround-sound concert DVDs are being produced) because its just not accessible to everyone. Even those DVDs I mentioned only sell to the basic fan base of the band that's being promoted... who's going to buy a 30$ concert DVD of a band they don't know?
My 2 cents.
Cheers!