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Music Media

MP3 Dead? What, Already? 202

Posted by Hemos from the no-clue dept.
bob_jones writes "Zdnet is reporting that in an interview with Mark Cuban President of brodcast.com that MP3 is doomed because no one has an economic interest to keep it alive. He also compares it to disco. " Mark has an interesting point, but I think he basically misses the point-economic interest isn't everything. He thinks Real Networks or MS will absorb MP3. Odd.
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MP3 Dead? What, Already? More

MP3 Dead? What, Already?

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  • Hey, could you give me an email? I have a friend that's going to be doing some major MP3-only distributing. Your user info doesn't have your e-mail address. :)
  • "/. -- news for dorks, stuff that's dumb."

    I guess that's why you're here.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • Man... I better shut off this encoder, then. I wouldn't want all my music to be stored in a dead format... And what am I going to do with the CD-Rs I bought to burn them to?
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Could you please explain how Linux continues to flourish then?
  • Posted by frodo_bag:

    colin olkowski
    http://www.thecosmos.com
    MP3 Music Share

    This man obviously has no idea what he's talking about. Broadcast.com gets $100 from an IPO and all their competitive intellegence can come up with is that, "No one has the economic incentive to keep it (MP3) alive"?

    Broadcast.com seems to be in the RIAA's back pocket, and I'm sure none of their clients have requested MP3 encoding. They're scared to death of it. The RIAA and the major Labels are so far behind the curve it seems that they can only resort to making controversial statements like "Mp3 is dead".
  • Posted by iJohn:

    ASCII came in with Teletypes, and was a big improvement over Baudot code that ran on Telex machines.

    (I barely remember Baudot and may not be spelling right. No relation to Bridgette I think... But I digress.)

    There was only upper case and a few punctuation marks. I have this funny feeling we only had 5 bits to work with.

    It does surprise me that the HTML entity set hasn't been expanded to include some basic typographic symbols: N- and Mm-dashes; typo quotes and apostrophes, bullets, check marks, check boxes; integrals and sigmas and deltas.

    Not to mention smiley faces.

    I guess we need a new ISO-8859 kinda thingie. How about ISO-Font.2000?

  • Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:

    You make the invalid assumption that in the near future we will experience an all around 10x boost in storage and data capacity. (I get this from the fact that a 40 meg cd audio track can probably be compressed into about 4 megs of mp3. maybe I'm a little off)

    If this were the case, and the desire for more music to be stored locally and immediatly accessibly did not increase at all, then you might be right, because then people could use the higher fidelity standard. But I don't think such increases are going to occur in the immediate future, and even if they do, who says that given the choice between more mp3s and fewer slightly higher quality audio files I would choose the latter? I know people who a few years ago were happy with 500 megs of mp3s, and now have about 10 gigs. Their storage capacity grew 20-fold and yet they didn't start storing cd audio files instead of mp3s. They just got more mp3s.

    And what about RNWK? Think they'll be superfluous soon? not a chance. In the first place, as you so rightly pointed out, there will be a need for video compression for a while. In the second place, even if internet data transfer speeds got an all around boost by 10, realtime broadcasts of audio would still be impossible since the higher data transfer rate would almost invariably lead to more people using real audio broadcasts.

    And you were referring to the Nyquist sampling theorem, in case you were wondering. But you don't seem like an educated person, so you probably don't care.
  • Posted by omot:

    >Um, how is throwing away 90% of the data >"better"?

    Just because your file size may be 90% smaller doesn't mean 90% of the data just got chopped off. Mp3 is a compression format specialized for audio, and a lot of the data just got compressed into 10% of the space. You can still hear the drummer hitting his sticks together, the crowd cheering between songs, everything. Almost CD quality, plus you can set what bitrate you encode at to the point where you simply can't tell the difference.

    Audiophiles might not all like the quality of mp3's, but they should still appreciate the incredibly small size.

    omot@lotek.org / www.lotek.org
  • Real's G2 is better than MP3 for low-bandwidth streaming. Cuban has a vested interest in milking that for all it's worth. MP3 is irrelevant to broadcast.com, therefore it's "dead" to them. Of course, that zombie will probably outlive broadcast.com.

    --

  • I dunno. At, say, 16-24 kbps, a G2 encoded stream is better. But if anyone's mileage varies, that's fine - audio compression is a subjective thing. When rates are > 40 kbps, MP3 sounds better to me. Of course, a good encoder helps, as does good source material - some broadcasters fail to recognize the latter point.

    --

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Why would the CEO of a STREAMING MEDIA company proclaim MP3 dead? To serve his own purpose.

    Saying MP3 is like Disco is such a lame comparison, a better comparison would be to say MP3 is like cassette tapes ... but that wouldn't get the same reaction now would it?

    He says that the content providers will own the industry, not the contend creators. What a dismal outlook for anyone who is willing to put the time and effort into creating music people will listen to. Basically he's saying all musicians are whores to the content providing pimps.

    What a crock.
  • >Can someone translate the phrase "MP3 is not scalable" into English?

    Umm, you can't make a Beowulf cluster out of them?

    Seriously, though, I think it means that when broadcasting it, you can't easily adjust the quality to the bandwidth available, and thus transmit lower-quality sound if that's all that will go through or higher quality when you have a high-bandwidth connection.
  • The only problem with mp3 is that the best anyone could do to pay for it was to slap enourmous license fees on all encoders for it. $25 per encoder with a $15,000 annual minimum is outrageous.
  • ...probably someone should tell them that it makes no sense to go over 1.4 MBit/sec for CD quality music, because that's the raw data rate, uncompressed ;-)

  • Oh well. That's why I wondered what kind of format Disco was. Stupid me! ;-)

  • Both normal types of dashes are actually supported by the HTML standard with the and characters. Unfortunately I have never seen a browser that supports these characters.
  • A non-proprietary file format becoming a standard? Oh.. my.. God.. It scares them to death. The lack of rigid control. The lack of royalty fees. They want something like DIVX so they can enforce their pay-per-thought programs. Failing that, they'll at least want something like the DVD format (with region locking, macrovision crap, etc. to restrict the end users). Ever wonder why there's no digital output jacks on DVD players and TVs with digital inputs? This would result in better picture quality and can be done with current tech. The reason: the mere-potential for piracy.

    Anyone wanna bet that if the Redbook audio format for CDs was just being developped today that it would have copy protection and region locking garbage wedged into it?
  • Hate to nitpick, but that's wronger. Put a space before and after your em-dashes (or faked em-dashes -- like this one). This visually and logically separates them from the words before and after them.

    Visual separation increases readability; logical separation tells the browser that it can break a line.

    Incidentally, --- isn't uncommon as a replacement for an em-dash, because that's the TeX code for it.
  • I've always seen it as the original poster said--without spaces. Where did you read that spaces were required before and after?
  • How does one absorb an open technology?

    MP3 isn't open. As I understood it, legally there's nothing stopping Fraunhofer from ordering an injunction or something similar and declaring that all MP3 encoders and decoders are covered by their patent(s). (In fact, I believe they've done so, but aren't enforcing it...)

    Any ``standards'' propigated by businesses with pecuniary interest in that standard aren't ``open'' by any means. The original architects of the internet were working off of government grants, not off of the idea that what they were creating would make them rich later. It'd be nice if a large body like the FSF could similarly fund research into truly open standard formats.

    Besides, there's better ways to analyze music than DFT's, wavelets being one method...

  • Well, MP4 and VQF sound a whole lot better. Maybe it is.
  • MP3 the format may or may not have a future. There are better compression formats, after all. Any freely available, easy to use, and high performance format could easily supplant MP3 the format.

    But MP3 the movement (what other name could we use? the "digital music revolution"?), whatever format it champions, isn't going away anytime soon.

    I think this guy's "problem" (he may be doing it on purpose) is that he's confusing the two. Just because MP4 or AAC or MS Media Player 4 or RealPlayer G2 or whatever can compress files better than MP3 doesn't mean that people are going to stop distributing music freely over the Internet through places like MP3.com.

    I think he'd rather people did stop exchanging full music files over the Internet, so people like him could make money on pay-per-view or SDMI or whatever, and he's trying to tie the future of the digital music culture to the fate of the MP3 format (at least in the eyes of the press).

  • Stupid (Score:1)

    by dsfox ( 2694 )
    For this reason the music industry will stop making CDs as soon as it can. Howver, I suspect you will always be able to encode the analog signal coming out of your preamplifier - maybe the home audio industry will outlaw selling separate preamp and amp?
  • Interesting points. However, both you and Mr. Cuban have the issue completely turned around. For better or worse, nobody has to pay for mp3s, its the erstwhile successor that will have to be paid for. Are people going to pay for it? Only if it gives them a lot more than mp3 does. Its difficult to see how to stop people from making mp3s out of anything they can send to the audio outputs of their amplifiers. Its also difficult to see how improved sound quality will overcome the zero dollar barrier. And improved compression rapidly becomes a non-issue. So what is this new format going to give us? Obviously Mr. Cuban doesn't know, or he certainly would have mentioned it.

    The music industry may suffer as a result of the mp3 craze. But the average musician is already suffering, and the successful ones are too successful by half.
  • Nobody wants to touch it with a ten foot pole- the patent licensing is so onerous nobody wants to go that route.
  • MP3 has just as much of a chance of survival or death as any other popular streaming format. It's Open Source origin allows it to be incorporated into any application, even the Windowze Media Player and Real technologies.

    I'm usually one who doesn't take sides in format battles, but in this one only one outcome is true: MP3 has already won.

    One of those reasons, as you mentioned, is it's open source origins allowing it to be used anywhere. Another is that there are applications out there from computer applications like WinAmp or Media Player to integrated systems like the Rio. The applications are well done and easy to use. Every piece on MP3 I've seen in the news shows a college kid with a Mac or Windows; obtaining and listening to MP3s is very nearly for dummies.

    The methods are also remarkably stable. While not quite point-click-and-drool, it's not too difficult to rip a CD or burn your own.

    I think the biggest problem the recording industry doesn't understand is the relationship between MP3 and CDs. Personally, I rarely use MP3s. I download 'em and burn them to CDs that I can use in my stereo or car portable. That's the reason why I keep a library of MP3s around. It's certainly not because of the inconvience of lugging my laptop around or paying 3-4x money for a Rio player over a portable CD player.

    Sure the recording industry can come out with a cool new standard that they can charge for, but who would buy it when it's so easy to rip/burn your own using that old, poopy MP3 standard? Especially since "poverty" is a reason that many give to download MP3 over buying albums in the first place?

    Speaking for myself, given the choice of spending the 2-4 hours it takes to download MP3s, encode them to .WAVs, defrag my drives, and finally to burn to CD, it's simply much more convienent for me to go buy the damn thing. And I feel that it's the right thing to do. The MP3s I've downloaded and burned have all been rare songs, demos, etc. on hard to find or out out of print albums and b-sides. And concerts. Stuff that is either next-to-impossible to find or money that isn't going to the label or artists anyway. THAT'S where the record companies could make money from me by doing nothing more than ripping into MP3 an artists collection of rarities that don't make sense to release otherwise and charging a buck a song.
  • I don't feel like having to leave my G3, so I download the song. I would pay a couple buks per single if it meant I didn't have to go to a cold, impersonal store that I KNOW won't have what I want.
  • I think the artists have a instrese in not geting
    fucked by the distrubution monopielys. only the
    people who control the curent broken distrubution
    methouds have no ecnomic intrests in mp3. The
    artists and consumers have grate instrest in not
    filling the pokets of the big labels.

    -Jonathan

  • Thief (Score:1)

    by spot ( 3593 )
    copying information is not theft in the normal sense of the word. legally we have this thing "intellectual property" and indeed people violate these laws all the time. in short: i do have the god-given right.

    IP is government-run extortion system supported by big-businesses like microsoft and disney.
    IP is the next war on drugs.
    IP is obsolete.

    ps. i am not a script kiddie.

    pps: see ipnot [ipnot.org] for justification of the above position.
    __

  • Apparently they are half the size of MP3's and sound better...

    MP3'3 are a 12 to 1 compression sceme. It is very hard for me to believe that a 24 to 1 compression of a CD could sound better. It simply does not make much sense to me. When recording digitally I don't even like using anything less than 32 bit proccesing ( which of course gets reduced to make CD format ).

    I see two problems with ASF files:

    1) Microsoft owns it. That simply SUCKS if it is true that it is better.

    2) Until I hear it with some acoustic music with a 3D stereo field and I actually think it sounds better, I can't believe it.


    The only "good" thing is you may be able to stream this format, and in that way it may be better than Real Audio. But Better than MP3? I don't believe it.


  • It's only dead when people stop using it. I don't see that happening for a while. (And with the price of disk going through the floor, who cares if there is a more efficient, but closed, format out there.)

    or something. :-)

    /dev

  • Nope (Score:1)

    by Bwah ( 3970 )
    The home audio industry has been going to all digital of late. I could snarf the digital fiber optice output right off of my DVD and mp3 it if I really wanted to.

    /dev
  • MP3's may never be a viable commerical endevour...
    at least until some company decides to embrace and extend
    and replace good ole MP3 with a proprietary format
    you need to pay $$$ for. The fact is, though, that
    MP3's have been great for small-time bands who can't
    or won't sell out to the big music establishment who
    fear the implications of the MP3 format. They're
    cracking down on artists because they're scared, not because
    it's some "doomed to fail format". Just a few of my
    thoughts... flame at your discretion.
  • Actually this is already available (in beta at least) with On Demand Producer and Media Player 6.0. I've played with it for video files and it is pretty good. It uses Mpeg v4 compression and just calls it a .asf file (whatever). It does support audio only and seems to work pretty well for that, but it seems to me that it's just an implementation of Mpeg v4 which is unsurprisingly better than v3. Of course MS probably corrupted it in some way shape or form.
  • Can someone translate the phrase "MP3 is not scalable" into English? I have no idea what it means or why I should care.

    I have free MP3 encoders and decoders on my hard drive, so the minimum entrance requirement of any new format is that the encoders and decoders must be free. If that requirement is met then the new format may proceed to prove its superiority.
  • Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code. If it's one of these formats where the player is free but you have to pay for the encoder then I'll stick with my free MP3 encoder. I've got plenty of HD space.
  • >>Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code.


    >No. In fact they are both proprietary and you must pay for use of either (ie. no free encoder or decoder).

    Oops! Then I guess it's MS Audio 4.0 that's dead as far as I'm concerned.
  • I think somebody needs a little enlightenment here. What mr. Cuban thinks he means by stating that nobody has any commercial interest in the format, is that nobody owns it, and nobody can thus make any money by controlling it.

    But WE are the ones having an economic motive for using MP3 - christ, I haven't bought a CD for six months, and yet they keep rolling in. How's that for economic incentive?

    Think about big name bands giving free concerts. Do they have more economic incentive for their activity than unknown bands posting their MP3's on the net for free download? We're talking about music here! To have people listen to music that you've made, to have them sing along with words that you put together - this is a drug more potent than any of the ones otherwise flourishing in the music business (people trading such substances, by the way, have economic interests - not that it matters much to the current discussion).

    Bottom line: Economic interest doesn't control us anymore. Free music, free software - what's the difference? The invisible hand, figuratively speaking, has stopped masturbating the invisible pecker, and it will inavoidably go limp. This is bad news for the "economic interests" that want to screw us, but it's excellent news for those of us who don't need economic interest to yank us out of bed in the morning...

    PS: I've heard Clinton knows how to handle a Cuban - who'll tell him we've got one that needs to be stuffed here?

  • exactly, this guy is talking about disco, when the subject is the tapes it came on. my car, stereo, walkman (and more if i looked) all have tape players in them, and that format is how old? 20 years? seems like as long as i've been around. as bandwith increases, higher bitrate mp3s will become more common, and this guy will be more wrong. as for pkzip (and gzip, same algorithm), those are alive and well, even with bzip2 around. i bet this guy has a floppy drive in his comp, and there's much better technology out there, but it's amazing how simple things like those can be so useful (like when you build a kernel, and it doesn't boot). anyways, to end my rant, the need for higher compression decreases with the advent of cable, dsl, and other higher speed networking devices.
  • Mark told the webcasting mailing list that scaling meant:

    "how economically and gracefully a server delivering a stream scales...its easy to deliver 100 simultaneous streams, it gets a lot harder delivering 100k simultaneous streams and more. So its how the server scales, how the server interacts withother servers and with users and what kind of programming interfaces are available to enable all of this"

    I believe that Mark is thinking in his own terms of Broadcast.Com, which needs to be capable of serving a potential 100k streams. MP3 would have to be packaged in something like Shoutcast or Icecast that is dependable and scalable to this level. It isn't...yet.

    Whether Mark is also trying to just poo-poo an explosion in webcasting that didn't come from Broadcast.Com is left up to the reader :) But he does have some serious concerns.

    There is an MP3 plug-in for RealPlayer G2, and RealNetworks is talking about making it more tightly integrated. This may be the scalability answer.

    Truth be told, I don't think MP3 is the best solution for large, live events. It is a great solution for music-on-demand.

    Mind you, MP3 is now an old codec. New vector-quanitzation technology (such as TwinVQ aka VQF) is going to make MP3 quality music available at lower bitrates. The question is whether VQF will be licensed in a way to make it "the next MP3" or "the next forgotten music codec."

    MPEG4 multimedia standard will include several audio codecs, including as low as 2kbps speech, VQF, and high-bitrate high-fidelity music codecs as well.

  • > Responding to the challenge that MP3 already has a strong culture around it, Cuban quipped, "Disco also used to have a strong culture."

    Disco still has a strong culture, only these days we call it House, (or Electronica, if you can't dance ;), and it's stronger than ever.

    Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
  • I think it would be safe to assume this is the lower end of the spectrum of human intelligence, whatever that is...
  • Yeah, it's called "buying your CD's and encoding them." Got a clue yet?

    I also have a few tracks that i've paid for via GoodNoise [goodnoise.com].

    --

  • I would have to disagree. Maybe if your trying to stream mp3's at cd quality theyn they are not as efficiant as G2 but if you bring them down a little in quality to say about the same as the music that comes over G2 they are actually just about the same. One big difference is that mp3s have great apps so you get your equalizer and what not where G2 your just kind of stuck which really blows. So I would have to say that there is no way that anyone that actually likes music and need it to sound good would pick the G2 over an mp3.

    --MD--
  • Until recently, nobody had an economic interest
    in Linux either. I don't think the argument
    holds any water.
  • It gunna be dead. must think ... ow ... okay think done. disco dead. so say disco was not dead, so say mp3 like disco because disco dead after it not dead once. huh huh me think good.

    an analogy between a style of music and an encoding format. how idiotic can you get?
  • im posting this drunk as the proverbial Lord but w/oo reading any other posts lemme just add this
    lil'l nugget o fun.


    HAH! MORON! im listeining to the format you sound the deathknell for at this very moment...!!!!


    KNow why brite boy?

    Coz' I dinna like getting a single CD for theone song I like. Nor do I appreciate $40+ prices for anime songs.


    might as well sound the Heavenly Trumpet for the .zip format while your at it you utterly clueless schmuck!


    ~Grell

    "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony."

  • Disco (Score:1)

    by Spirald ( 9569 )
    Ironically, the only Disco that died was the commercialized crap the record companies put out to suit their 3.5 minute radio format.

    This stuff lacked much of the deep grooves and syncopated beats. It sucked so much, the word Disco was forever tainted.

    There is a huge industry around House (and Jungle/Trip-Hop/Acid Jazz/etc,.) right now. It happens that most of the players in this industry are indie labels, at least the ones that know quality music.

    MP3 is pretty entrenched right now because there is an abundant supply of free encoders and decoders, as well as artists that sell or give away music in this format, thus satisfying the free market forces of supply and demand.

    Of course, the media companies feel like they have a God given right to be the middleman of every transaction. God forbid people do business among themselves!

    Mike

  • But there are several companies making money from MP3 - diamond multimedia, for example.

    The reason MP3 will eventually die is that another, substantially better format will come along - a format that is sufficiently good to make people want to make the effort tp convert/recompress all their mp3s....
  • for me to head on downtown for SXSW. i'm on a mission to find this idiot, but hey Ian Moore is playing. :)

    damon

  • Jealousy (Score:1)

    by NYC ( 10100 )
    "The Internet market is veryu fluid"

    The only thing fluid is broadcast.com stock; right down the drain.

    --Ivan, weenie NT4 user, Jon Katz hater: bite me!
  • Actually, technically, there should be no spaces before or after, but it should be
    repeated--like this.
    A "-" is a hyphen, not a dash. A double-hyphen is the standard replacement for a dash, when dashes are unavailable due to character set.

  • As happened here. Just about all of the 100 or so replies on ZDNET trashed the article, Mr. Cuban's rationale, and questioned his motives.

    I would have thought this would be one of the collective purposes of the slashdot community -
    to promote the values of a piece of technology worthy of promotion, and provide logical and
    well-reasoned opposition to the FUD tactics of others who would otherwise benefit from its demise.

    If fact, slashdot comments are probably better utilised on sites like ZDNET rather than here - as most of the time on slashdot you're preaching to the altar boys, not the masses.

    Perhaps an ongoing ZDNET pressence by slashdotters
    will turn ZDNET - ie. if every FUD article they write gets hammered (thoughtfully), they'll get the message. They do have a comercial interest in their articles after all - so public perception is paramount to their continued success.



  • Hey Rob, we need a filter for that. :-)
  • Cool and thanks for pointing that out. I've always used double-hyphen myself, but never really had any good reasoning behind it. So a double hyphen is the standard replacement for a dash? Hmm, what does a dash look like then? Don't we have a 7- or 8-bit ASCII representation for that?
  • Hey Anonymous Coward, First off, most, if not all, of my friends who are still in college paid their own way by working. Not sure about you, but some of us here in the real world do actually get off our asses and work for our education. Second, economics is only the model which people work with in hopes of understanding the complex dynamics that exists in the market due to peoples' interest in a product or desire to sell a product. It in NO way determines whether something will continue to exist or not. For instance, MP3 is a nearly worthless technology to the Labels because most of their existing equipment and business models are not well suited to it. Actually, MP3 is almost like a pestilence to the Labels. For us, the consumers, however, it is a boon. We can listen to high quality music in a stable format which won't degrade in quality and will easily play on our hardware(PC's/Mac's/Sparc/etc). But yes, Economics plays an important role.. but its role is below that of the interest and efforts of the consumers. And right now, the pool of consumers for the MP3 market is strong. One may even say it is Legion upon Legion. Having worked at several jobs, my own realization has been that economics isn't king. When one get's right down to it, PEOPLE are. Desire drives the market. Money is only the medium. But hey, if they come out with a more powerful audio format with better quality, smaller size, and no encryption techniques, self-correction/error checking would be nice though. ;) In case memory get's "scratched".
    - Wing
    - Reap the fires of the soul.
    - Harvest the passion of life.
  • Has anybody seen MS talk about this? Apparently it's their MP3 killer. It supposedly offers twice the compression factor of MP3 and better quality (I'll believe that when I see it). And naturally it will be supported by Media Player first. http://www.theregister.co.uk/990312-000 013.html [theregister.co.uk] has some info on it...
  • He's right ... mp3 will eventually die, but not until both data storage and network bandwidth increase by one more order of magnitude.

    The only real reason that MP3s are used at all is that they allow you to compress a 10 MB/Minute PCM data stream into a 1 MB/Minute file.

    Once the internet speeds up by a factor of 10, and writable DVDs hit the market, you'll be able to transfer and store uncompressed, lossless music files as .wav's and .aiff's just as easily as you can now with MP3s.

    And then MP3 will die out.

    - jms
  • More than just companies making $$$ off of MP3, *consumers* have an economic interest in keeping MP3 (or something free) around. It's called Supply AND Demand.
  • A. noone is going to pay for an MP3.. I'll pay for a disk full of mp'3 or a audio cd that has both audio tracks and mp3's or just rip them into mp3's for my empeg car player and my rio. I will NEVER EVER pay for an MP3, I'll pay for content. the mp3 will take over because we couldnt care less who owns the format, we like it so I'm going to use it.

  • True! (Score:1)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 )
    Actually the average musician suffers because of the record companies and the thieves they hire called managers. MP3 gives thesee garage bands and upstarts the leg they need, they can thumb their noses at Sony,virgin,and all the other record companies. they can tell the agents that want 30-50% of the pay to go stand in front of a train. This is why the record industry hates mp3, it threatens the cash cow of doing nothing and getting paid for it. There is a radio station near where I live that plays mp3's. the DJ and the station owner dont care about "get sony's ok if we can play xyz's song" they ask the artist themselves and 99% of the time the artist is sooo happy they send a cd to them anyways. Buy from the artist and ignore the record companies...
  • MP3 won't be "dead" until people no longer see a benefit to using an inexpensive, efficient, portable digital format to store music.

    Since the current alternatives are neither as inexpensive, efficient, or portable I don't see how this guy has case.

    Probably the only thing that will "kill" MP3 is if someone were to release an even more efficient / better quality encoding algorithm to the public domain. :P

    -OT
  • ... another paint sniffer that's backed by over-inflated stock.

    Whatever.

  • VHS and audio CD? C'mon, take it to it's logical conclusion. TCP/IP, NNTP, MIME, HTTP, HTML... why, they're all dead protocols! Why in the world would *anyone* think they had an economic incentive to keep these non-proprietary protocols around?


  • MP3 won't die just because some other audio format comes out. It will only die if another audio format comes out that is free, significantly smaller, and the same or better level of quality.

    One must also remember that not only must a new format be better in all of the above ways, but it must be SIGNIFICANTLY better, such that it will justify converting all my old mp3s to this new format. I'm not going to go through that much work for a measly 5% space savings...

  • Excuse me in all my ignorance, for I left the micrsoft world behind a long time ago, but as a part time mac user (PowerPC hardware is GREAT for linux, IMHO) I remember reading some annoucement that MPv4 (MP being MPEG) was going to be based off of Quicktime. Or it mentioned the "QuickTime File Format" (which is ambigous as it gets, considering how many formats are considered to be part of 'quicktime')
    Correct me if I'm wrong, and email me your opinions, but not your flames.
  • How much do you think the authors of x11amp or winamp or mpg123 or amp paid in mp3 licensing fees? Or how bout the author of bladeenc? Here's a hit, it starts with Z and ends in ero. And some people buy the cds because the like owning them. And some people actually believe that the money they spend on the cd actually goes to the artist.
  • I'm looking at my copy of forest gump right now. I see a "VHS" logo, but I can't find anything resembeling JVC. Unless maybe they have it hidden, but taht would be stupid.
  • Actually what I'm wondering, half the size of an mp3 w/ better quality. How much CPU are you going to have to throw at it to make it play w/o skipping? I'm guessing a quad Xeon 450 should do the trick. Now where did I leave my quad-Xeon-450 box?

  • vfq (Score:1)

    by dirty ( 13560 )
    Mp3s produce bad sound? That's funny, here I am listening to mp3s and I can't notice any thing wrong w/ the sound at all.
  • Well, as far as I can see, the biggest reason consumers use MP3 is economic - THEIR OWN!

    It is true, there will be few people making money off of MP3s, at least in the short term. However, there is a HUGE volume of people SAVING money by using MP3s.

    Don't get me wrong, I do not in any way support the wholesale piracy of music. But so far, the economic benefits derived from MP3s are on the side of the consumers, and they will be the ones keeping it alive. The format may "die" in a corporate sense, where major producers refuse to produce music in them, but I can't think of any way that music can be encoded sufficiently to prevent people from ripping it via a Line-In port on their sound cards.

    Sure, sound quality will be lost, but then that's what MP3 is all about, isn't it. The controlled loss of quality in a tradeoff against file size.

    MP3's played via a Rio, or whatever, will become the medium of choice for commuters, joggers, etc. Who gets "CD Quality" from their headphones anyway? (Outside noise always seeps in when I listen on the train or whatever). Cassette producers will have to worry about MP3, though. Why record tapes, when I can store MP3s on a non-consumable, reusable medium...

  • MP3's are more alive right now than anything in my opinion. Maybe mp3.com is just loosing money and consedering it dead now.
    Natas
  • Yes, this is fud. It is ok to post links to FUD. But put up a FUD icon with them... So as not to spread it any further than needed. Label it something like "FUD".

  • Thief (Score:1)

    by Jeremi ( 14640 )
    >This sounds an awfully lot like the excuse that a lot of software pirates use to justify their illegal activities. "This is far more expensive than I can afford, and so if I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't have bought it anyway .. so nobody is losing anything." It's an interesting claim, but it's hardly valid (try using that after being arrested for grand theft auto.)

    While in general I disapprove of software piracy, it should be pointed out that grand theft auto is not a good analogy. When you steal a car, the rightful owner doesn't have it anymore. When you illegally copy software, you haven't taken it away from anybody.
  • This is typical ZDNet crap. Can we have a ZDnet category made up so that all ZD stories, regardless of what they're about, can go in that category, so they can be summarily ignored? :)

  • no kidding. im getting rather tired of
    business execs who have their heads up their ass
    thinking that they can publicize an opinion
    despite not knowing shit. cummon.

    mp3 is here to stay. Linux is here to stay.
    not cause of the profit to be made but the
    superior technology and public backing.

    -Z
  • Why would someone buy the CD if they can get the MP3 for free?

    Isn't using MP3 selling out anyway? Or do you honestly think that the ISO/IEC working committee isn't composed of, and funded by, "industry"? Do you think the patents surrounding MP3 aren't owned by "industry"?

    Maybe the RIAA doesn't want to get involved with MP3 because there is a monopoly in the MP3 licensing business? People complain that they don't like Microsoft because of the lack of choice. What choice is there when it comes to licensing MP3 patents?

    Besides, I thought AAC was going to fix all of these problems. If it does then isn't MP3, in fact, quite dead?
  • Firstly: What new age movies have you been watching, the current trend in bandwidth is to cap general users and leave only the technical elite and rich to the good stuff. (this is a bitter point of view, yes I know)
    Secondly: Do you usually write comments with a thesaurus handy?.. Since when is it proper english to tack "less" and "y" to loss?..
  • who needs an economic interest when the interest
    is supposed to be on the MUSIC???

    what an idiot....just another business geek
    flapping his mouth!
  • no joke.... as long as i still have a copy
    of L3ENC sitting on my hard drive (and "the man"
    cant find a way to make that copy blow up) they can all kiss my ass because i will continue to produce mp3's :)

    knowing that someone as stupid as Mr. Cuba can be the president of a company gives me hope of ruling the world someday ;)

  • Joe Blow reads ZDNet. If Joe Blow sees FUD without a response, Joe believes the FUD. If we post to ZDNet to dispel FUD, Joe is less likely to believe it.

    Sometimes we need the mirror of the mainstream to reflect our community/attitude/personal ethics system so we can see what others see, and work some PR magic to make the mainstream come over to Our Side.

    ~BTW, the grammar in the title was intentional, folks. Nothing to see here, move along~
  • Of a random sampling of 10 of my VHS tapes, only two had any company logo, and they said SONY not JVC... now mind you those were SONY brand blank tapes.
  • Quite humerous. How does one absorb an open technology? (Besides MS's usual embrace, extend, corrupt.) I have a feeling mp3 technology will outlive MS/Real.
  • If you read the article all he says it how it'll be dead in a few years... OF COURSE it will. We'll all move to a better standard, like vqf, aac (both available now btw), mpeg 4, etc...

    It's just a file format, as long as people are intrested in archiving music and trading it online it'll happen, mp3 or otherwise. Hell, there were even people with phat pipes who copied songs on .wav back in the day...
  • Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code.


    No. In fact they are both proprietary and you must pay for use of either (ie. no free encoder or decoder).
    ---

    "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will deserve neither and lose both."

  • mp3 has become a movement that is converting audio cds into a better format; this is being done by people voluntarily. How is a firm going to compete with that? Not unless they offer a more compact format and offer content for free. But so what? It's still the same concept as mp3s. Of course eventually mp3s will be replaced by another format-- a better one. This is no profound statement. Mediums are constantly changing. Of course, if the new medium is open source then you can bet it will evolve faster then a proprietary one.
  • does anyone with a collection of MP3s actually pay for them? I know i dont... so where is the MP3 economy? the players? the only one i'd get is the Empeg car player [empeg.com]... (runs linux no less...) I dont see an economy... do you??


  • No-one has had an large economic interest in it for 2 years now. That really hasn't stopped it, has it? He fails to understand that the whole reason MP3 took off in the first place was the fact that just about anyone could create them. Something may replace MP3, don't get me wrong. But it's not just going to disappear. Free music is just here to stay. Sorry to all who think otherwise, you've been left behind.
  • My company is currently developing a new MP3 site. We have advertisers lined up. We also have the ear of several traditional record labels. They're starting to understand that they can't stop MP3 and if they try they might just be out of a job. We'll be selling MP3s of copyrighted songs. The labels will still get their money, but the user will still get a quality MP3... a fraction of the time and money spent on getting a CD.

    When we finish, I'll try and post an article on it, I think the Slashdot crowd will like it. :)

    -Richard
  • Companies looking to make money by providing access to media don't like mp3 for a simple reason. Once you have the file, you have control of the music. You can listen to it all you want, and take it with you on a Rio. Worst of all, you can make a perfect copy and give it to your buddies. This really makes it unlikely that they will sell many mp3's on their site.

    From reading the article, I get the feeling that Cuban is lusting for a pay-per-view dynamic. He wants to make money each time you listen to the song. Sort of like a worldwide jukebox. The best way to do this is by delivering the content as a compressed encrypted stream. Fortunately its a really knotty problem figuring out how to deliver the music and not allow it to be stored or shared. My guess is that they are spending a lot more money to develop the 'copy protection' scheme than they are putting into bettering compression. They want control over the format, content, and distribution. As digital internet connections become more common and migrate towards the TV, this kind of technology will become an economic powerhouse. However mp3 is not the format that can be used to exploit it. In fact, it becomes a liability for the new distribution scheme. They want it killed or at least marginalized as soon as possible. ZD seems awfully happy to help. In fact, Im beginning to think that their magazines should have "Special Advertising Section" printed on all of their editorials.
  • Hmm, what does a dash look like then? Don't we have a 7- or 8-bit ASCII representation for that?

    Nope. The closest is micros~1's attempt at embracing and extending. Which means that you end up getting ? interspersed throughout your text (or something similar.)

    I believe the "real" name is an em-dash (single hyphen in the word intentional.) It basically looks like a long hyphen. Which is why the double hyphen (--) is used to emulate it. Can't be represented by ASCII, though. Just like a number of other typographical symbols (such as "real" quotes--the proper way to do them is ``text'', rather than "text," but that way looks crappy on most displays, so I don't do it.)

    ASCII sucks for proper typesetting.
    --
    - Sean
  • ...or so it seems, anyway. I've had a number of people trying to convert me... going back a while...

    But MP3 is still ubiquitous... vqf is no more than a fringe technology.

    And to be quite honest, that's fine with me. The quality of my MP3's is quite fine, thanks. I have almost 3 gigs that I encoded off my albums, and I can play the 2 back and hear no discernable difference.

    And yes, my sound system is quite high quality. Still no problems.
    --
    - Sean
  • Economic intrest doesnt drive everything. I work for a living and know that in most things it does. As for mp3's it may die in the commercial world but there are way to many people who couldnt care less if it made any money they are just in it for the music. Look at all the websites offering mp3's. 90% of them dont ask for money or care to make any off of the mp3's they offer. Almost all of them just want more music in return. You must be a complete idiot if you belive that the only thing driving the world today is economic intrest.
  • Isn't the anti-MP3 argument that "MP3 is not scalable". Real's G2 and MSFT's ASF supposedly support "more scalable" streaming content.

    Of course, do customer care? No.
  • I asked the same thing earlier, I don't undertsand how Frauenhoffer can have a patent on this.

    They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?

    I can see that the original code is not GNU protected. In my experience in Europe we are less aware of how necessary that is, because companies in general do not tend to act so agressive i.e. they aren't that sue-happy as in the US. It is kind of ironic: in a more "socialistic" Europe the awarness to defend our open-source freedom is less keen than in an agressivly capitalistic USA.

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