MP3 Format Still Gathering Momentum

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."

Re:MP3

[wizardforce]

you did have a point though, considering that we have FLAC which is free as in libre *and* loss-less why use MP3?

Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth

[afidel]

Huh, DEC's FX!32 did both in the 90's to allow NT4 x86 programs to be run and then dynamically recompiled for use on the Alpha port of NT. That's one piece of software I wished were opensourced, I think a lot could be learned from it. Of course not all of the IP in it may have belonged to DEC, but most of it did since they had the best compiler guys in the business at the time.

Just make players that work.

[Erris]

So I get the desire for Ogg, but to get to a market where format is not an issue, the music companies have to mandate MP3.

It costs nothing to add ogg decoders to hardware. Unlike mp3, ogg is patent, license and royalty free. My PDA does ogg and so does my better portable player. It's just software and this is not a technical problem, it's a monopoly problem [theregister.co.uk].

Re:How Ironic

[earlymon]

1. AAC is not Apple proprietary, nor was it developed, subsidized or (parent company) purchased by Apple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding [wikipedia.org]

2. "Microsoft will never support AAC..." - except, it seems that they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune [wikipedia.org] (not to mention Windows Mobile....)

3. The faad and faac are illegal in the US - try http://www.audiocoding.com/ [audiocoding.com] - source is there, not binaries (see Wiki, again) and then also try to tell me what is the issue? Are you trying to suggest that there is nothing available for free on Linux / other that plays AAC files - legally? How about VLC? The world doesn't begin and end at the FSF - although the FSF is really, really fab, it's not the world. If anything in media playback is the word, it's VLC - but that's just me.....

Otherwise, your idea of Walmart dropping WMA because it is proprietary and won't play on iPods is probably quite true - I think that was the insightful part.

Re:Cool

[Grishnakh]

So, you are saying that we can start including WMA codec in all of linux's everywhere without any issues from any countries legal entities? And I as a developer of a commercial radio/TV/Stereo running linux will have absolutely NO issue getting a license from MS for a reasonable Price? What do you mean no. But you said that I was spouting falsehoods. Or are you STILL not grasping at how much MS controls on this issue?

Go back and re-read my post.

No, there is nothing that MS can do to keep you from adding WMA support to your commercial radio/TV/stereo running Linux. You can easily download the codecs from Hungary or wherever, add them to your box, and sell it. As I said, there is nothing technical that MS can do to keep WMAs (non DRMed ones) from playing on your Linux machine.

Of course, you can probably expect to get sued, but I wasn't addressing legal aspects. This was clear in my prior post.

For those of us just using Linux at home, and not selling devices running it, legal issues aren't very important. MS isn't sending the BSA around to peoples' houses checking their home computers for proper licensing. They can do this for businesses, but most businesses probably have no business reason to play WMAs at work. Everything is different when you start selling stuff, however. For instance, you could include Ogg support on your Linux-running systems, and you can be sued for patent infringement. Sure, the common wisdom is that Ogg isn't patent-encumbered, but are you sure of that? Have you paid a patent attorney to do an exhaustive patent search and make sure that's the case? The term "submarine patent" exists for a reason. Heck, you could be sued for patent infringement even if there is no infringement; if you don't have the money to mount a legal defense, you'll have to just capitulate.

Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth

[NMerriam]

Proof please? I've never seen this substantiated. Also, how do you quantify "better audio quality" numerically?

You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests [hydrogenaudio.org] wiki list for a start.

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. Really the only surprise in the past few years of listening tests is haw amazing the guys at LAME are at adding life to MP3.

Re:DRM, ogg, CDs, fair use, licenses

[evilviper]

On the other hand, mp3 is still patent-encumbered,

Use MP2 instead. Backwards compatibility is inherent. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 files as well. And at bitrates of 160kbps+ (Joint Stereo, psy-1) MP2 actually sounds better than any MP3 as well. Not to mention it both encodes and decodes faster.

In fact I'd put MP2 up against DD/AC3/A52 any day. Dolby has a history of bribing organizations to NOT include MP2 along-side AC3, such as the US DVD and HDTV standard. In the rest of the world, patent-free MP2 is allowed on DVDs and in digital TV, in addition to AC3.

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.

You're just about completely wrong.

Flash video 7 used a slightly modified h.263 codec. Non-standard, I must admit, but it was very quickly reverse engineered. Not only can anything based on libavcodec play flash videos, but the open source Flash player/plugin GNASH can play them as well, even though it's still developing, and quite buggy at the moment.

Flash 9 added On2's proprietary VP6 codec, but use of that format has been quite limited.

And what's the audio codec with both of them? Plain old MP3.

Plus, Adobe long ago announced the shift to completely standard video formats. The recent beta versions of the Flash9 plugin can play MP4 files with h.264 and AAC audio. All 100% open standard, and interchangeable with Quicktime, MPlayer, etc.

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).

Flash was opened up before Java was, and there are numerous 3rd party implementations of Flash. Gnash is even open source, and can handle many of the common Flash videos found in the wild.

VLC has French devs - no software patents

[MichaelCrawford]

VLC is a project developed by a French technical school, as a programming exercise for its students. The reason they can support AAC as well as numerous other patented formats is that France doesn't recognize software patents - yet.

I know this because I specifically asked on their developer mailing list; I'd like to support AAC in my own application Ogg Frog [oggfrog.com], but I can't, because I live in the US.

While there's been no enforcement action so far, it's my understanding that it's illegal for Americans to even download VLC, let alone use it.

Re:I'm still a little skeptical

[ultranova]

I know that is a joke, but wouldn't it's resolution have to be smaller than the 'strings' of string theory in order to be a higher resolution than outside?

This raises an interesting question: given that photons are, according to the string theory, strings, and that light is composed of photons, can the wavelength of light be made arbitrarily small ? And if not, does that mean that there is an upper bound to the amount of energy a single photon can carry ?

Coming to think of it, wouldn't Planck's width have the same effect ?

For that matter, if the universe has a limited size, then there is a lower bound to the energy of a single photon: it's wavelength can't be larger than the entire universe, because it wouldn't fit into it if it was. Does this also mean that a large enough black hole can't emit Hawking's radiation, because the photons would need to have a larger wavelength than can fit into the universe ?

Re:I'm still a little skeptical

[BitZtream]

Wavelength effects what color you precieve, it has nothing to do with resolution. To obtain a higher resolution, you would just need more photons reflectiving off/emitting from the surface so you got photons from more locations on the surface. Since due to the randomness in which photons bounce off most objects, this already occurs given enough time. Theoretically, the 'resolution' of the real world is infinite.