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MP3 Winners and Losers for 2003
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Menta over at MP3newswire.net just posted his annual winners and losers list in digital music for last year. The big winner is Apple for dominating MP3 portable player sales and the dramatic success of its iTunes service. Napster savior Roxio and the small independent record labels also made the winners list. The losers list include SonicBlue and MP3.com. Interestingly, Ogg Vorbis made the losers list, not because of the codec per se, but because iTunes has both catapulted the AAC format to number two and stimulated Microsoft to pour more of its efforts ($$$) into WMA and the iTunes clones, leaving little room left for the open source alternative. The 2001 and 2002 winners list are worth a look too and each have links to that year's losers list."
MP3.com declined, as far as we're aware the music archive that was at that site is now dead, and so is the site itself.
There's a bit about it here if you're interested.
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FuckedCompany.com has a nice little blurp on it, as well as the letter sent out to users. See the current mp3.com homepage for a cheezy rendition of mp3.com's future.
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MP3 was won.. long before WMA appeared. It offers transparency on all but a few special samples at around 200kbps, and with storage getting cheaper, slightly more efficient codecs (Ogg Vorbis, for example) don't offer enough of an advantage for most people to move. I won't touch WMA with a long barge pole.. just because you made the (mistake IMHO) of going over completely to it, doesn't mean anyone else has to. Go read some very informative discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org for specific technical reasons not to use WMA.. other than being from Microsoft etc. Of course, there is a danger that many people will use WMA just because MS make it easy for them to get into it... but why that's a reason to advocate WMA, i can't imagine. It's unlikely MP3 support will be dropped in hardware any time soon I think... i'd be more worried about your sound quality and portability of those WMA files.
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Of course the player back then would have been a Rio for sure. In fact if you remember, Diamond pioneered the idea not only by releasing the product, but by fending off an RIAA lawsuit that challenged the legitimacy of such products! (Of course the iPod is DRM'd so maybe it doesn't really owe to this legacy).
The iHp-120 is a winner too and it plays Ogg.
While they may not have RIAA label music on their sites both
Magnatune
and
Audio Lunchbox
Provide drm-free ogg vorbis files for purchase.
As I recall, someone developed a plugin for Ogg Vorbis support in iTunes. Seemingly, the introduction of AAC should of done nothing to detour the popularity of .ogg. Of course WMA is a different story.
Neuros Digital Audio Computer
Rio Karma
iRiver iHP-100, iHP-115, iHP-120, iGP-100, iFP-3xxt, iFP-5xxt
Kenwood's Music Keg
And a bunch of others.
IMO, the Neuros is much better then the iPod. Is cheaper and the battery replacement is from $0 - $12 depending on if it is in warranty or not, which is much cheaper then Apple's $50 or so. Umm, Ogg/Vorbis is an Open Source codec released under a BSD style license. You can wrap it in any proprietary DRM you want and save tons of money from not having to a) write your own codec or b) pay royalties to use someone elses.
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The iPod is not DRM'ed for MP3s. And for AACs, I don't think its DRM'ed either, but rather, the DRM is in iTunes.
The iPod is just a firewire harddrive that plays whatever files it find in its iTunesDB. I don't really see how they could even do any DRM with that setup.
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Though they over look all of the proprietary Apple formats that are attempts to lock comsumers into Apple. Quicktime, Apple's AAC, their restrictive iPod and iTunes, and just about every product they put out
Well to be fair, Quicktime and AAC are not proprietary formats. Quicktime is rather open, it's the individual codecs that may or may not be free/Free (such as Sorenson). You can stick pretty much any ol' video or audio stream in a Quicktime file that you like. AAC also is not proprietary to Apple, it is standardized by a number of key industry players. Whether or not that is much better is, of course, up for debate.
As for the iPod and iTunes, I'm not sure what you mean by 'restrictive'. The iPod lets you do pretty much anything you want, except you can't copy music back to a computer from it. It's a shame such a restriction is necessary to keep the RIAA somewhat happy, but it's not really a significant one IMO. And as for iTunes, what are these 'restrictions' that so upset you? I can play pretty much any music file or CD I wish, rip it, burn it, buy music, play it on any 3 computers I wish, burn it too, and so forth. Yes, I can barely breathe for all the restrictions in iTunes!
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For example, iRATE Radio is a free (as in speech) downloader that fetches MP3s from websites that provide free, legal downloads. It uses collaborative filtering to learn your tastes and select songs based on the ratings of other users who like the same kind of music you do. iRATE's database of MP3 URLs has 46,000 tracks registered.
My article has a Creative Commons license. I urge you to copy and distribute it. In addition, I'm looking for help in translating it to languages other than english. The first such translation, to Romanian, was performed by an incredibly helpful fellow named Ciprian Mihet: Legaturi catre Zeci de Mii de Download-uri Legale de Muzica.
The article also discusses what you can do to make peer-to-peer filesharing of music legal. That's a realistic possibility, considering that more Americans share files with p2p apps than voted for George Bush in the last election.
That's why I want to get every US p2p user to read my article before the upcoming US elections, in November of this year. I want copyright reform - meaning much more than just the repeal of the DMCA - to be a central issue in the upcoming election.
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Yes you can.All of the music files are contained within those directories. Copy away. It even works for DRM AAC's.
What's more, it's Free Software, dual licensed under the GPL or their "binary only" license. If you pay for it, part of it will even go to the EFF and Xiph foundations. Check out the OggS project page.
There isn't a version of QuickTime or iTunes for Linux and Open Source folk can't even build something compatible since these are closed source, proprietary, etc.
Yes, it's such a shame that nobody can build an open source, interoperable quicktime library. Damn Apple and their closed, proprietary formats. *rolls eyes*
If cable TV programming allowed you to just pay for what you want to watch, people could vote with their feet and it would be harder to screw them. But when it's an all-or-nothing service, you take what they give you.
Isn't that what "video on demmand" or whatever they call it in your area is supposed to do? Right now the selection is still kinda crappy, but even so, I find myself flipping to Comcast's on demand instead of wading through 300 channels of nothing.