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Replace Your Music....Again
sethadam1 writes "I was not at all surprised to find that experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years. This article over at Ananova suggests the next format of music will be little fingernail-sized cards. As cool as these sound, is anyone else worried that sneaky industry folks might try to distribute all new music in DRM'ed WMA files?" Yeah, this description sounds basically like bigger Magic Gate, that wonderful situation where you can pay more than normal to get DRM. Update: 11/13 16:45 GMT by H : As RobertB-DC pointed, this is sort of a dupe - see our previous article.
You can buy music in a fingernail card in Toysrus with rhe little reader for 10$ (Can) and you can buy card with two or three song for +/- 5$ (Can)
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
One thing I can't help but wonder is how these changes in the medium we distribute music on will effect the low-budget independant musician. As a musician that's tried to produce albums without the help of a record label I have to wonder if a medium like this could do wonders for bands with no money and big dreams. I know a few years back it was rather expensive just to produce cds in bulk and cds are very inexpensive. But now, if they have these little polymer chips, it should be of almost no cost to the musician. Anyone else follow my thinking?
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
5 years in a very short time on the market as pervasive as the music industry. I still buy videotapes (no, not Betamax), but how long have DVDs been available? Consumer demand will keep CDs rolling until either (a) the quality of this new media is much better, (b) they offer some added value (cheaper?), or (c) CDs are simply no longer produced. I doubt that (c) would happen because the RIAA goes into fits if their revenue drops 10%, how'd they like a 50-60% drop because people don't want to buy chip players (for their homes, cars, walkmans, etc)-- it's too big of a change, too soon. Maybe 10 years...
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
I could imagine that those cards could play the stored music by themselves, to make it impossible to reach the digital data
Well, there could be all sort of fun upgrades, depending on how much the cards store. Maybe they could put DVD-like things on there - special features, commentary, 5.1 surround sound. It might actually make buying these things worthwhile.
Yes, we all know this article is a dupe, but Ananova slanted the data to look at CDs in particular.
The problem with replacing CDs with this technology is the form factor:
Scientists say each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte of information - equivalent to 1,000 high quality images - in one cubic centimetre of space.
I have enough trouble finding my CDs in the car without having to worry about them blowing away in a stiff breeze. If size were the issue, CD Singles would be released on half-size discs... in fact, many pop albums don't seem to have more than 30 minutes of music anyway.
The best way to incorporate this technology in a consumer-oriented music distribution would be to enclose it in a larger plastic enclosure with an interface to the player. Something like this, perhaps?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
That's why you make a new copy every few years.
Its not just the death of cds, but recorded music that is coming. Lets face it, there is nothing special about buying a protools rig, some microphones and cruising the highschools for some talent. The recorded medium is already dead. The emphasis will shift away from automatic music generators, autotune, and all the dj's masquerading as talent.
Music was, and is still a PROCESS, not a file, in the system.
More and more musicians, even the electronic ones are adopting the discipline of creating as opposed to REPAIRING music.
For superior event driven acoustic phenomena, I recommend these tools
So they've gotten it to work with one BLOB of this polymer! I haven't read the Nature article but elsewhere I can't find any mention on how they plan on achieving the suggested density. This sounds like a cool idea but there also seems to be a lot of Marketing Hype(tm) mixed in.
They have very few to catch consumers this time : when the CD was out, they argued the quality was better and so on.
Now, we all have CDs which is an uncompressed, perfect 16bit copy of music.
As of yet, most people are really happy with their CDs because the recorded stuff is in stereo (originally, so there's very few interest converting it to 5.1) and they won't easily differentiate their 16 vs 24bit resolutions so, it will be damn' hard to sell them something new.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I'd rather have just a plain audio CD. I can record it in the format of my choice, and then do any of the things you describe above. If it's provided in a digital file format, it may or may not allow me to make CDs, load it onto portable devices, etc.; but if it's in an audio format, I control the format it takes once I record it onto my hard drive.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
My riovolt runs a battery charge out pretty quickly playing a CD, because the disc spins the whole time. But when playing MP3's off a cd, it only spins the disc when it needs to read and decode. Runs much, much longer on a battery charge.
If we could get CDDA ripping speed faster, we could have players that simply rip the audio from the CD and play it from RAM.
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