MP3 Format Still Gathering Momentum 417
PoliTech sends us over to Billboard.com for a detailed article about the coming tipping point in the music business in favor of MP3. The two biggest drivers pushing Warner and Sony BMG toward MP3 are an upcoming massive Amazon-Pepsi download giveaway and a positive move by the usually maligned Wal-Mart (according to sources): "...Wal-Mart [alerted] Warner Music Group and Sony BMG that it will pull their music files in the Windows Media Audio format from walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January, if the labels haven't yet provided the music in MP3 format."
Really wish that they would support Ogg and others (Score:5, Informative)
No big surprise (Score:5, Informative)
1) MP3 was the first. It wasn't the first compressed music format, not by a long shot. Hell after PCM was designed as a method for storing audio I'm sure probably the next day someone came up with ADPCM. However it was the first one any normal person had ever heard of. Prior to MP3, compressed music just wasn't something a normal person was aware of. There was CDs, or older formats. Well being the first gets it some staying power. It has the biggest name, the most recognition, etc.
2) MP3 implies no DRM. While I'm sure DRM can be hacked on top of it, as with anything, the format itself isn't set up for DRM. It was also what was widely used in free programs like Napster. Thus it doesn't have a DRM rep. The newer formats, though not mandating DRM, seem to support it and people have gotten burned. I've talked to more than a couple people who've bought music and then discovered they couldn't get it on to some device they wanted. MP3 doesn't have that problem.
3) Because it is so old, MP3 is widely supported. Everything plays MP3s. If I want to play music on my DVD player, MP3 is the format to use. It doesn't support AAC or WMA. Same thing with portables. What additional formats they support is hit and miss, but they -all- do MP3. Hence you get music in MP3 format, you never worry about "Will it play?"
4) Because it is "Good enough." There is no question, the new formats are way better at compression, especially at lower bitrates. That's nice, but people don't give a shit. MP3 is good enough. Most people would call MP3 @ 128k CD quality, because on their equipment, it sounds like it is. @ 192k it is getting hard to tell without good gear. @ 256k, even pros on good gear under double blind tests can't pick it out reliably for normal music. As such people just don't really care about the gains. Sure, AAC is better per bit. However if people already consider their music "perfect" then why do they care?
As such there just isn't a compelling reason for most people to move off of MP3. I am not at all surprised that many people actively seek it out over newer formats. Technical arguments about perceptual encoding are lost on them. All they want is music they can listen to on everything without hassle, and MP3 is that.
DRM, ogg, CDs, fair use, licenses (Score:5, Informative)
I guess this can be taken as good news, since the alternative was presumably some DRM'd format.
On the other hand, mp3 is still patent-encumbered [wikipedia.org], and in fact the patent situation is such a mess that nobody even knows for sure when the last patent will expire. You can get a royalty-free license to use a decoder, or to use an encoder for noncommercial use, but ...
The lack of support for open audio and video codecs is a real problem now, because essentially flash is shaping up to be a completely necessary part of people's ability to do things with their computers, and one of the many ways that adobe is keeping flash proprietary is that they only support proprietary audio and video codecs for flash. Now matter how much java applets may have sucked in various ways, at least the technology was always free as in beer (and is now becoming free as in speech).
Even though buying music downloads in a DRM-free format like mp3 is a step up from buying them in a DRM'd format, there are still a lot of issues. You may have to agree to a license that forbids you from reselling the music, and takes away your fair use rights as well.
Personally, what works for me is buying CDs. There's no DRM, and no license. I can resell them. I don't need to back them up, because the disks *are* the backup. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my mp3 player for personal use, and it's legal. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my computer's hard disk, and put the actual optical disks somewhere else as backups. The only reason I'd really be interested in buying music digitally would be in cases where the music is out of print. Why buy it as a download, when my very first act after downloading it would be to burn it onto a CD as a backup?
Classics MP3s (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:5, Informative)
I'm usually a rabid MS-hater, but let's not spout FUD or falsehoods here. WMA is just a codec, and plays just fine on my Ubuntu machine. I'm pretty sure there's nothing that MS can do to take that away from me (technically, at least).
However, WMA does suffer from the familiar problem many other codecs do, in that it's binary-only AFAIK, so just like WMV, Real codecs, Sorensen (Quicktime), etc., you need the binary codec files and a player (like MPlayer) designed to use them, in order to play files using these codecs. Not only is this of highly questionable legality, but it also doesn't work on non-Intel machines since you can't recompile for your architecture. MP3, OTOH, doesn't suffer from this at all since it's an openly-documented format, and many different implementations have been made, including many free encoders and decoders. It does, however, suffer from being covered by patents, which is a different issue.
Ogg Vorbis, however, is truly the best option, since 1) it has the best technical performance of any of them, and 2) it's completely free and open, not just in implementation and code but also is free of patents. I keep all my ripped music in O-V format, which works equally well on my home machine playing Amarok, and on my portable iRiver H330.
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:5, Informative)
That's really not much of an issue though since you can always wrap the binary codec in an x86 emulator or disassemble and reassemble for your architecture.
Re:How Ironic (Score:2, Informative)
AAC is not Apple Proprietary, it is in fact License and Royalty Free and a superior Codec. Hence the reason that it is pushed as MP3's successor.
MP3's limitations lie in the fact that it is a Royalty Ridden Audio Codec. Mean using MP3 for commercial use requires an fee, not exorbitant by any means, but enough to throw off your local recording/production studio to a superior format.
If the only reason why MP3 is used is because is just plays on 'everything' then why do I have to manually (PacMan) install an MP3 decoder library every time I install Linux on a computer?
Because you are all bigots and lack the mental capacity to think outside of the electronics that you own.
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
AAC is not an Apple proprietary format.
I believe the only reason this idea ever began is because the iPod was one of the first commercial products to support it, and at the time it was a relatively new format, so to laymen the only thing that could play AAC was an iPod. Since they never bothered to find out what AAC stood for, they decided it must be "Apple Audio Codec" since that fit their pre-conceived idea it was an Apple-only format.
AAC was developed by Dolby labs if I remember right, and many other portable music players support it now, including Sony's newer digital music players and some cell phones.
5) M$. (Score:5, Informative)
A Court proved anti-trust violation [theregister.co.uk] is the primary reason you can't find cheap multiformat players, specifically players that work with ogg.
Re:Just make players that work. (Score:5, Informative)
(I don't recall where WMA fits in all this)
Not all portable players have the CPU to decode OGG. So it's not just software.
http://gizmodo.com/archives/ogg-on-ipod-why-the-ipod-may-not-have-the-horsepower-for-ogg-015607.php [gizmodo.com]
Rockbox. (Score:4, Informative)
IIRC, it takes more CPU power to decode OGG files than to decode MP3s.
My PDA does it, my tiny Trekstore does it, and so can your iPod [cnet.com]. This is NOT a technical issue.
Re:How Ironic (Score:3, Informative)
That is also incorrect. T.T
From Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net]:
"For up to 400,000 units per year, AAC playback costs $1.00 per unit; for more than 400,000 units per year, the price drops to $0.74 per unit."
I've always been under the understanding that the only truly free codec is OGG.
I think Fraunhofer pushed AAC as being MP3's successor partially because, at the time, the music labels were looking for someone to blame for music piracy, and they were looking in Fraunhofer's direction since they had invented MP3 but did not include any sort of DRM from the get-go. They wanted the pirates to move off their format to take the heat way.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
Not true any more (Score:5, Informative)
It used to be true several years ago with the first generations of MP3 player, where the playing was done by a dedicated hardware MP3 decoder and the player only had a under powered CPU for driving the menus. (I've even seen schematics for homebrew players usings PICs together with hardware decoders).
Nowaday there's much more horse power in all players (even enough to play AAC or WMA). So integrating OGG/Vorbis is easy and is in fact systematically done in Samsung players (and in a lot of brand-less players from unkown asian makers).
There's even FLAC support in some of the bigger asian boxes.
Also notice that, since the first claims that Vorbis is too ressoruce consuming, note that the Tremor library has been made open source. That library does all the decoding using integer registers on the CPU, and thus is much more compatible with the small RISC processors lacking FPU units found in most players.
Rockbox is a firmware for portable player, ported among other to the iPod, thus proving that OGG/Vorbis can be played in almost all but the oldest player hardwares (realtime playback since 4th generation).
And I can't think of a modern PDA that doesn't play OGG/Vorbis (my mostly 4 years old Tungsten does it).
There's no excuse for not supporting OGG/Vorbis, Samsung's doing it, a lot of lower profile makers too, Rockbox is doing it on recent iPods...
My personal experience on the desktop is that it's a little bit more resource consuming than OGG and AAC.
Thus hardware capable of playing MP3/WMA/AAC should be able to handle Vorbis too (and FLAC and Speex seem to be available on most hardware too, according to Rockbox)
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:3, Informative)
Several years ago, the largest iPod you could get was 40GB, and it cost $399. Nowadays, an 80GB iPod is $249.
If you buy one that's smaller, that's your choice. Presumably, people with large music collections would not buy a smaller device. You're somehow equating buying trends with the available choices on the market, and there is no correlation. In other words, the fact that 8GB or 16GB iPods are so common now doesn't mean that's all you can get.
Not to mention you're ignoring all the 4GB and 6GB iPods that used to be around. Remember, the iPod mini was the most popular iPod on the market in the timeframe you're talking about. So iPods have still only increased in average capacity, as has every other player out there.
btw, whenever somebody tells me that any codec (usually AAC or WMA) is significantly better than mp3, I always trot out this set of double-blind test results: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html [rjamorim.com]
Yes, Vorbis scored slightly higher. But given the convenience and ubiquity of mp3, I'll take mp3. I also took part in that test and honestly, I really couldn't tell the difference in almost any of the files I listened to (using a set of professional studio headphones). There's nothing there in those test results that a slightly higher quality setting wouldn't take care of, and as I said, hard drive space is cheap.
mp3 got a bad rep because of encoders like Blade and iTunes (which intentionally uses an old, crappy encoder to encourage use of AAC). But LAME has really closed the gap.
Re:mp3PRO, MP4, MP5 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:5, Informative)
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances.
They do not. Here: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html [rjamorim.com]
I know you mentioned LAME in your last sentence, but I'm not sure how that doesn't invalidate your last sentence. If it doesn't, then the listening test above does.
I'll sum up the double-blind test results above: LAME-encoded mp3's sound as good as AAC files and better than WMA files at the same bit rate. (The bit rates varied by insignificant amounts.)
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:1, Informative)
AAC is perfectly fine in the little Mac/iPod world, but outside of that, pretty much nobody (except high priced car audio because the product costs so much, the added license is icing on the cake) supports it, because of the high cost of royalties to Dolby.
Hype aside, the only real standard is MP3, but OGG Vorbis should be its successor due to listening statistics.
Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth (Score:3, Informative)
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
Contrast that with the periodically stunning improvements by some Vorbis devs, or to a lesser extent Nero's AAC team, and you can see that there is a LOT of room to grow dramatically in those codecs. They have a LOT of different ideas left to implement, developers are still trying to wrap their heads around the possibilities yet they already outperform the most mature LAME implementations on a fairly consistent basis.
Re:mp3PRO, MP4, MP5 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php [fluendo.com]
Esperanto (Score:2, Informative)
You haven't looked very hard then! I know plenty of Esperanto speakers.
"I'd probably have better success learning Klingon."
Oh when will this lame joke/urban legend die? In case you actually believe it: A few dozen people can converse fluently in Klingon. Hundreds of thousands of people can converse fluently in Esperanto.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
I think we can be quite sure of that. Several years ago as ogg was being beta tested, Fahnhoffer made a lot of noise rattling their legal swords. The ogg folks sent them the source so they could see for themselves if anything patented was being used, and told them to put up or shut up. Fahnhoffer shut up. I think that says it all.
What I fail to understand is that since ogg is the audibly superior method, and its free, whyinhell are the record companies even thinking of using mp3 with its 5 and 6 digit per song licensing fees? The total lack of anything resembling good business sense in the RIAA/MPAA world boggles the mind.
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