Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard 428
stivi writes "BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. 'Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.'"
aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
I have so many mp3-only players - why on earth would I convert to a diff format when mp3 meets ALL my needs?
now, if all players were firmware upgradable, fine. but the fact is, most are chip based and if there is no
AAC support in the chip, you are SOL.
AAC is a nice idea, but its not 'everywhere'. mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.
Why not MP3? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know AAC is technically superior to MP3, but so was Betamax. Popularity beats technology a lot of the time, especially when the technical advantage is not exactly glaringly obvious.
Either way WMA is going down thought. As it should.
Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:4, Insightful)
oh well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Reasons Why ACC Will Win (Score:4, Insightful)
- It doesn't suck.
- It sounds better per data byte than MP3 or WMA.
- It's cross-platform (or at least (minus Fairplay) more cross-platform that WMA).
- No Microsoft. Apple may not be a company of saints, but they're at least an order of magnitude less evil than Microsoft.
- And speaking of which, AAC will win because Microsoft knifed their "Plays for Sure" partners in the back with Zune. ("Hey lets piss over major consumer electronics manufacturers to bring out a DOA product that loses us money!")
Crow T. TrollbotRe:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
> selling music from the larger labels.
Which is exactly the only thing new here, but some asshat wanted to spin it pro Apple. If EMI is willing to A) give up DRM and B) allow non-Apple retailers in the deal why would they mandate AAC? No, when Yahoo, Walmart, etc enter the DRM Free game they will be selling whatever format(s) customers demand since they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market.
Of course if EMI and the other labels only allow Apple to sell without DRM then yea, Apple wins.
Re:Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention quite a few players support AAC without really going out of their way to bullet point it as a feature.... for example Zune players.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. This is likely to change the relative popularity of MP3 and AAC. There are several reasons for this. First, the iTunes store is currently the most popular of the online music services and likely will be the first one taking advantage of this offer. As a result, a lot of MP3 manufacturers are going to be looking to add AAC support to their player to capitalize upon Apple's work and to make transition easy for existing iPod users. This will expand the potential market for AAC files from iPods and Zune, to almost all portable players. With that change, a lot more music services will consider using the AAC format either instead of or in addition to MP3.
Second, right now almost all commercial services require DRM. That means such a service must choose to either use WMA, RealMedia, or roll their own solution. Support for Real is nonexistent among hardware vendors, so they target WMA as the easiest solution. Very few commercial services offer MP3. So how does this event change things? All those WMA offerings are now going to be looking for format for non-DRM'd files that targets the iPod. That rules out WMA. So they are probably going to be choosing AAC or MP3 or both. MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support, but AAC allows for smaller files for the same level of audio quality, saving bandwidth costs and speeding up downloads. Further, record companies will have already converted masters to sampled AAC for Apple, possibly making that a preference from them.
I don't see that MP3 or AAC will immediately dominate for DRM free music sales, but I bet Apple is not the only major store selling AAC downloads by then end of 2008.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
First, mp3s cost the online music stores money per song download, whereas AAC does not.
Second, most new players support AAC out of box. Nobody cares about your Rio.
Third, since 80% of mp3 players out there today are iPods (which all support AAC), and most of the rest either support AAC and can be firmware upgraded to support it. Why would the music stores give a crap about supporting the less than 10% of music players that don't do AAC?
Forth, you're not thinking about this from the music stores' points of view. To them, selling DRM'd music costs a certain DRM'd-format-royalty on a per song downloaded basis. Right now, they mostly pay that royalty to Microsoft since they all use WMV, since Microsoft is the only company licensing a DRM'd format. Selling non-DRM'd music makes them free to choose among non-DRM'd formats, and there are a shit ton of them:
WMV: costs money per song, and is only supported by a small number of clients.
MP3: costs money per song as well but is supported by nearly 100% of clients.
AAC: is free and is supported by 90% of current clients and soon to be 100% of future clients. (Even the Zune supports non-DRM'd AAC, and that's saying something.)
Other formats: no format has wide enough support and small enough bandwidth requirements to even be considered.
Which format would you choose?
Re:Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Send a message (Score:5, Insightful)
If DRM was really the concern all along emusic.com would be an industry giant today
There's the small matter of having any music that 95% of people want to buy too.
Re:check the boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. I think the author takes the point too far when he leaps to conclusions of AAC dominance, but I do think that he may have a point about Microsoft. The interesting thing to me is that would be a victory *against* Microsoft but not one *for* any other company in particular. Apple uses AAC, but AAC is open to anybody despite what a lot of people think. For Apple, it is a victory in that they do not have to be beholden to Microsoft in this area. The same is true for nearly every other company but Microsoft.
Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe? (Score:3, Insightful)
This may drive iTunes sales
I don't see why. Part of what drives iTunes sales is that it's the only online store that can supply music to your iPod (except those that sell MP3s already). Therefore, if everyone starts selling DRM-free AACs, it's unlikely to drive more business to iTunes. Also, it means that pretty much all new MP3 players will support AAC (if it's really so common-place), and therefore it won't necessarily boost iPod sales.
In the end, this wouldn't help Apple except by reputation (by having bet on the winning horse). Apple still has to make sure they're selling the best portable device in order to keep selling them. There isn't anything shady about it.
ogg doesn't require floating point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not MP3? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What happened to OGG (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is anti-Microsoft because as long as the format isn't Window Media, then who cares?
The only reason why AAC is better than MP3 is because it is actually a better format and also I think MP3 has some patent issues.
Microsoft would like their format to become dominate, but hopefully that will not happen because an open format like AAC is better for everyone.
Re:MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
2) AAC offers technical advantages to MP3s that are not insignificant (not to mention a saner tagging scheme).
3) Most players currently in the hands of the market (which is dominated by the iPod) play AACs and not ogg.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you have to? Any portable music player that matters already supports MP3's and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It's not a one or the other proposition. Most people have ripped their music to MP3, therefore hardware players will support MP3's for the foreseeable future. If the majority of online sales happen in AAC format, which is sure to happen if Apple can convince more labels to drop the DRM since it's already the market leader, then hardware manufacturers will simply add support for AAC in addition to what's already available.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, new bands will continue doing thier promotion via sites like Myspace, and eventually the labels will have to tout themselves to artists, instead of the other way around.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
AAC is not an Apple-only format. Apple just uses it as the default format for iTunes/iPod. Many mp3 players (both portable and software players) play AAC including the venerable Winamp and it *could* be considered the next-gen mp3 due to it's built-in error correction and more robust features (namely more channels and sampling rates). So I'm not sure how that could "help Apple lock up the hardware market."
While it would be great to have DRM-free OGG files, thereby eliminating licensing fees for players and encoders and bringing costs down across the board. Although I'm not totally sure that would be the best idea since I'm not sure how they match AAC in terms of quality vs filesize and next-gen features.
Re:check the boxes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I have two mp3 players (Score:3, Insightful)
Statistically speaking, for each of your players, there are 7-8 players out there that do support AAC. You're in a minority. Since selling AAC files will make retailers more money (30% decreased bandwidth fees) I'm guessing a lot of retailers will start offering them as an option, if not as the only format for sale. Since most retailers will be offering them most hardware manufacturers will most likely soon start supporting AAC, thus your next player probably will support it. Even if hardware vendors don't care about what music retailers are selling and are concentrating mostly on the ripping CDs market (most people) how many of them do you think will ignore the opportunity to make it easier for them to steal customers from Apple by supporting the same format as the iPod?
Jobs's statement (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, they're looking pretty fucking stupid right now.
Re:MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Who is this "the customer", and how the hell do companies actually find out what they demand?
If you believe Microsoft, every change they've ever made to their software is because the customer demanded it. I don't find too many actual customers demanding anything. The ones that make demands generally are the ones that are either, 1) not buying the product the demand is being made over, or 2) are such a high volume customer that your defection to another supplier means serious harm for the company. The latter just isn't the case in the digital music business, and the people infringing copyright with regard to music tend to make pretty unreasonable demands.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"An order of magnitude less evil than Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
In real dollars, a single track for $1.29 is a steal over the per-track price of a single from nearly any point in the history of music sales. For reference, $1.29 today is about $2.50 in 1990 dollars. And that's not even counting the convenience of shopping from home or the availability of previews to avoid the obviously bad tunes. Once upon a time not that long ago, a track from a 45 cost the same as a gallon of milk. Now that milk is $3 and the music is $1.29. The price of milk really isn't affected by anything but inflation (if anything, there are more dairy cows today than back then and they produce more milk thanks to hormones). You'd expect them to track more closely in price.
Re:check the boxes (Score:1, Insightful)
As a result of some design flaws (block length for instance), which can't be changed without breaking compatibility, there are some issues with MP3 you'll never fix.
The amount of so-called "problem samples" with MP3 are much larger than for Vorbis and AAC. MP3 has issues with certain more complex sounds: trumpets, whistles and harpsichord are notorious but there are more. Vorbis and AAC can have problem samples but these are usually the result of the specific encoder and are fixed without breaking compatibility.
Another issue with MP3 is bitrate or SFB21 bloat, some sounds need exceptionally large amounts of bits creating much larger files than would be expected, distorted electric guitar in metal is notorious regarding this issue.
Even Gabriel Bouvigne, one of the LAME devs acknowledges that these issues will never be completely fixed in MP3, you just can't without breaking compatibility. He said years ago that he thinks AAC will win eventually. He pointed at the gap between AAC and MP3 that is widening (listen to AAC at 80Kbps in a blind test and be amazed!) and AAC has still much room for improvement, MP3 is still getting better but the end in improving comes near.
Re:MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I doubt you could do a blind test and do better than 50-50 picking 256 AAC vs. uncompressed CDs. Especially since most players are used in gyms, cars, walking, etc., where ambient noise rules and non-monitor quality headphones and/or speakers are the norm.
And as far as that goes, some of us would prefer not to blow half a gig or more per CD on completely uncompressed music. Besides, if you're using a flash-based player, you're going to have to down-sample it anyway to get enough music to "fit'.
But since they're not catering to your perceived need for "quality", all of your rationalizations are good to go...
Re:Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure someone could turn up later with patent claims against AAC, too. But by using a patented codec and making the royalty payments, the large corporations get two things. First, they ensure that the whole industry will be in basically the same boat, and so they probably won't be the primary target if someone comes in with a lawsuit. Second, they demonstrate good faith which can help reduce liability.
Besides all that, codec payments are a tiny fraction of the costs, so there is not a lot of incentive to switch to a free format... especially one that requires more CPU to decode.
Re:MP3 (Score:2, Insightful)
There is literally nothing that prevents stores and labels from selling lossless songs and albums instead of compressed ones, at the exact same price. If nothing else, compressed songs are the ones that should cost more since if one wants more songs per gigabyte, they'd have to go to the trouble of converting them manually. Serving already compressed files should be the service one could pay a couple cents more for (theoretically).
Assuming you live in a world where storage space is free and bandwidth is free, this comment makes perfect sense. Of course, if you don't, it's a rather stupid comment. In order to store all this music not compressed, they need to buy ten times as many hard drives and pay for ten times the bandwidth, and you're worried about the few pennies extra it costs to convert the data so it takes ten times less space? Hmmm.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:2, Insightful)
Something almost all Slashdotters seem to be missing is that many players already support AAC. AAC is already supported in audio players by Nokia, Sandisk, and Sony. (Did you know that AAC is the native audio format for the PS3?) It's even supported by the Zune, if that ever becomes relevant (*ducks*). Even without this added incentive, there was already a bit of a silent momentum behind the adoption of AAC--due in part to its costs, but also because it's open and it takes less power to decode (very important in portables). It wouldn't have been long before Creative, Toshiba, Philips, and others adopted it; after Apple's recent DRM-shedding move, however, we could make bets as to how many weeks it will take to release AAC-compatibles.
To say that AAC is iPod/iTunes exclusive is pretty ignorant, and I'd be pretty surprised if it weren't supported by all new portable audio players in about a year.
MPEG-4 AAC is already the standard, MS irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't just that AAC has much better audio quality than MP3, which is true. It isn't just that the technology involved is 10 years newer than MP3, which is also true. The main reason that AAC is the standard is that MP3 has a so-called "content tax" and MPEG-4 does not. With MP3 you pay for the encoder, and then you pay again for every file you sell, whether on disc or over the Internet. It is the audio track from a DVD and it is not indie or Internet friendly. It may be a good way to store your CD's on your computer in 1999 but it is not good for replacing the CD for the audio industry. MPEG-4 follows the QuickTime model where you pay only for the encoder and the AAC files you create are your own to do with as you please, similar to CD. This is important not only because the music industry doesn't want to start paying a vig where none existed, but also because there is no system in place to track the vigs, it is not going to happen.
So if you are a content producer and you use AAC instead of MP3, not only does your audio quality improve, but it costs you less money also. It is very, very, very hard to beat an argument that pleases both the music people (higher quality audio) and the business people (keep the vig for yourself).
As for Windows Media
In the music industry, if it doesn't play on an iPod it is not an audio file. PERIOD. The iPod plays all of the standard files plus Microsoft's WAV which is just raw audio, a clone of AIFF. If you take an audio file that plays on the iPod and convert it to something that does not play on the iPod, then you have converted an audio file into a non-audio file. PERIOD. Just because you can burn 10 WMA or Ogg files to a CD-R does not mean you have made an audio CD. Maybe that is impressive in some geek circles but not to music and audio geeks and has no bearing on the music and audio market.
There is nothing at all out there to compete with MPEG-4. The argument that is being made here in this article happened around 2000 or so and it is long over. The fact that it is becoming apparent to people outside the audio industry is the end not the beginning of the process.
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Insightful)
The part that actually matters in this context is that AAC audio is "opener" and "freer" than MP3, which is the previous MPEG perceptual audio encoding standard, and the only other reasonable choice for content producers.
An audio producer can purchase an AAC encoder for say $25 and then use it to encode their work and there are no further fees to pay to the encoder maker and there is no restriction on how the resulting AAC audio files can be sold or used. This is not true with MP3 and certainly not with Windows Media, which both require us to pay a percentage of the sale price of MP3 or WMA files to the encoder maker.
When an audio pro or record company uses MP3 or Windows Media it is like selling a percentage of every song to Fraunhofer or Microsoft.
Windows Media is well known among PC users because Microsoft uses it in their products but it is going nowhere. Microsoft is even less respected in the music industry than they are in the typewriter business where they make all of their profits.
Re:MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
An MPEG-4 movie can contain audio in various codecs. The default for perceptual encoding is AAC. Perceptual encoding is when the encoder throws away data that it thinks the listener won't notice is missing in order to create a file that has about 1/10th the data size of the original. Perceptual encoding is always "lossy" by definition. AAC tops out at 320 kbit/s bitrate just like MP3, however the audio quality is DRAMATICALLY better than MP3. I'm an audio pro but I find the 256 kbit/s AAC to be really delicious. You can put your CD's in storage if you have them all in 256 kbit/s AAC at least for the next five years before you could go lossless and then maybe not notice the downsides (due to immense 10G iPod storage for example).
At the other end of the spectrum you could make an MPEG-4 movie with raw audio waveforms in it, basically CD audio in there, with no data compression, so the audio tracks would be HUGE in file size, however they would play on MPEG-4 players because raw audio is really easy to decode.
In the middle, you have "lossless compression" where you compress the audio data just like it is a Zip file
The main thing is that between lossy and lossless you have a factor of about 10. So if you are using your iPod today with lossy files and you decide to go lossless you either have to get a 10x bigger iPod with 10x the serial bandwidth and 10x the battery life or you have to put up with your entire digital music experience being 10x slower. What makes perceptual encoding so attractive and why it has been such a world-changing thing is that a lossless track does not have 10x the audio quality of perceptual to match all the other dimensions. "FM" to "CD" is a much bigger jump in quality than AAC 256 kbit/s and lossless CD audio. Again, most people (like 90%) can't even tell a CD audio track and an AAC 256 kbit/s apart even when A-B'ing on a great system. It is the same to their ears. That's the point.
Re:MP3 (Score:3, Insightful)
So there's DRM free music being sold by lots of online music stores, and some Average Joe wants to get a music player, but he doesn't know what to get. He hears that the format to look for is AAC, which seems to be an "Apple" format. He wants to be sure it plays, so he gets an iPod.
Even if most people wise up and realize that they don't need an iPod to play AAC tracks, there will still be a sort of branding with AAC and Apple which, in my opinion, is more powerful than any DRM or marketing campaign. At the very least, Microsoft will be looking be looking like chumps with their cludgy PlaysForSure/WMA format, and being forced to accept "Apple's" AAC format. I love the author's comment about this: Think of it: Microsoft labeling its second Zune player as "compatible with iTunes."
Of course, all this doesn't help me one bit, as you have to buy the tracks through iTunes, which isn't supported on Linux. Bah.... there's always Pirate Bay.
On a different subject, I love how the author shows just how clumsy M$ is. They made their PlaysForSure crap, and then got some hardware companies to support the format. Sandisk and others go ahead and sign up, only to hear M$ say a few years later "screw you guys, we're going to do it ourselves", and start promoting the Zune and the Zune marketplace. Apple then comes in, and opens the door to these shunned hardware guys by making songs available in the DRM free "Apple" AAC format. Now the one thing that people were missing with non-Apple music players, namely iTunes "compatibility", is within reach.
Stay tuned to see what happens....
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Because CD-quality songs will overtax today's technology. If you replace the AAC on a typical iPod with a lossless codec you will end up with 1/4 of the song selection and 1/4 of the battery life and if it is a hard disk iPod the hard disk will run all the time and wear out much sooner.
However Apple just announced a trade-in program. You can trade-in your AAC 128 kbit/s plus 30 cents for a 256 kbit/s version of the same song. You lose nothing compared to buying the 256 kbit/s one fresh today. In the future they will obviously upgrade people all the way up to the CD, and then go beyond that.
In music studios it has been common to work at 24-bits for a long time now, and sample rates are up to 192 kHz even in small studios. Since most of the music you bought on CD over the past 10 years is actually a degraded 16-bit copy of the true 24-bit master (it's dithered to lose the extra bits) there is no point in holding up the CD as some sort of ideal. The actual audio content is degraded to fit into your CD player just like audio is degraded in a different way to fit into an iPod.
Even mixing 64 audio channels down to 2 is a way to fit the actual audio content into consumer gear. There are compromises everywhere.
> Why are we taking several steps BACKWARDS in the development
> of digital music?
No, it is not a step backwards. The mistake you're making is that you're defining "audio quality" too narrowly, only looking at specs such as bit depth, sample rate, lossy/lossless encoding, etc. and imagining them in a best case scenario that does not exist in the real world. It is a common mistake. What is always compared is a 16-bit/44.1 kHz raw audio file and a 16-bit/44.1 kHz perceptually encoded audio file, in a music studio or a good listening room, with associated graphs and spectrograms to prove just how much "better" the raw audio file is.
The problem with the above comparison, though, is that no CD's are actually involved, and no CD players. When you put your 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio file onto a CD, right away you have greatly degraded its quality because the bitstream that the CD player sees will not be the same due to the CD's unique and funky volume format and massive error rate. Therefore the CD player will make up the missing bits (so-called error correction) which dramatically degrades audio quality.
What's more, if the CD skips even once during playback you have blown your entire advantage over an iPod. It is gone. The slight improvement in quality that you might have from the CD is gone as soon as it reminds you it is spindles and gears and little whirring parts and lots of 1980's technology. CD's wear out
If you consider other factors like power requirements, you can easily imagine a situation where user A plays their iPod LOUD all day long, enjoying every feature of every song they listen to, while user B is playing their portable CD player at half volume in order to not run out of battery life. The way the human ear works, a loud iPod is better quality audio than a soft CD player no matter what the authoring specs.
Consider a person listening to an iPod with 10,000 songs on it, shuffling away by itself, and they are deeply into the music between their headphones, not having to even lift a finger to change a song or pick a song because it is all playlists, and compare them to another person who is manually shuffling a smaller selection of CD's into and out of a player. Who will perceive the better audio quality during their listening session?
Finally, consider that the iPod did not in fact replace the CD, but rather it replaced the portable and mixable audio cassette. iTunes is two years older than iPod, and iTunes has a CD in
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:3, Insightful)
That is what I said about the 5G iPod. The 4G iPods were everywhere, how will the 5G iPods ever capture the market share that 4G iPods have? Turns out the 5G iPod is a NEWER VERSION of the 4G iPod
So it was when MP1 gave way to MP2, gave way to MP3 (delightfully unofficially), gave way to MP4 (AAC). The decoding chips in the hardware you have today may already have AAC decoding in them. It is many years old now. Any device that plays MP3 but not MP4 will be superseded in the future by a very similar device that plays both. Not only will that happen, it is almost over.
If you have PSP, or PlayStation3, or Wii, or XBox, or many phones and set-top boxes, then you have AAC. Of course both HD DVD and Blu-Ray are MPEG-4 all the way, that means AAC. Even the shit-brown Zune plays AAC.
> mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.
Sorry, but MP4 is going to make MP3 and even MPEG-2 (DVD) look like beta tests. In the first place, MP4 is Internet-savvy: smaller resolutions and much lower file sizes. In the second place, there is no content tax so you can produce audio and sell it in MP4 and you only have to pay for the encoder rather than pay a vig on every sale as with MP3 (#1 complaint about MP3 from the people who MAKE content). In the third place, it is easier to author MP4 than either MP3 or DVD. MP4 is going to do for audio and video on the Internet what JPEG did for photos. It's QuickTime that plays outside of the QuickTime player, it is exactly what the doctor ordered right after he complained he couldn't play Sorenson video on Linux in 1999. Not only is the tech industry excited to make MP4 players, content producers are excited to make the content for MP4 players. This is what content creators are talking about for the past couple of years, not HD DVD or Blu-Ray that is yawn.
Almost 90% of all iPods were sold after January 1, 2004, which is well after MP3's notorious phase and long after the file format itself stopped mattering. What matters is that lossy encoding enabled your whole music collection in your pocket. The average iPod user either doesn't know what MP3 is, or thinks he/she is actually using it on their iPod however they are not, they are using MP4.