An Overview Of Present, Future of Music Technology

prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum magazine is running a feature article on the state of music and current digital formats. They point to an interesting phenomenon in the digital music world that Steve Jobs emphasized as well: for the first time in music history, the next big format was not about better quality (SACD and such) but about better portability (MP3). 'It was only five years ago that the music industry was facing a civil war over the next-generation disc-based music format -- the successor to the wildly successful CD. At that time, hardly anybody doubted that the music would be encoded optically on a round plastic disc the size of a CD.'"

Comments

Make no mistake

[eddy]

All the future formats will be about replacing CDDA with "DRM".

Oh, it will be marketed as being about increased audio-fidelity, but it's all about getting rid of those horrible "insecure" CDs.

What about cassettes?

[Fex303]

...for the first time in music history, the next big format was not about better quality (SACD and such) but about better portability (MP3).

Um... Wasn't that the point of cassette tapes? They were a dominant format for a while and the reason they replaced vinyl was their portability and robustness (maybe play-time, too.) Certainly it wasn't about sound quality.

On another note, why does MP3 have to replace CD? For my money, I really don't think that there's any likelihood that'll happen. CDs are simple to use, store enough data, are lossless, and come with pretty packaging. All good things. I can't see why there can't be two parallel distribution systems.

Re:What about cassettes?

[madfgurtbn]

CD's are not lossless compared with vinyl, it's still a digital format whereas vinyl is basicically analog..

I am not a sound engineer, but LP's were pretty noisy and had much less dynamic range than cd's. Different types of loss, but still a loss. Think of the sound you would hear as the needle rode in the groove before the music started. That sound was always there. There were many other quality issues with LP's, so I gladly switched to cd. It was a night and day difference in sound and convenience.

I know there are LP zealots out there who love the warm rich tones of vinyl, but I for one welcome our cd overlords. LP's sucked.

MP3 vs the rest: Is file size really an issue?

[Simon]

There seems to be an assumption by the technologists and music industry that people are dying for a better format to replace MP3. Better quality, smaller file sizes. I don't believe that is so.

Filesize: But when a new computer comes with a 200Gb harddrive do most people these days even care that MP3 maybe isn't the most effective compression algorithm? I mean, you've got plenty for space so who cares if the typical music collection is 5Gb or 10Gb?

Quality: Most people are happy with CD quality. 192Kb MP3 pretty much gives you that quality. Most people are more than happy with MP3, especially on a portable device where listen conditions are 'suboptimal' shall we say.

Portablity vs DRM: This is the killer feature of digital music. The music industry wants to stop it, for everyone else it is all about being able to move music around. This is the one 'feature' that people do not want to see go.

What I've trying to say here is that people are more than happy with MP3 and the 'problems' with MP3 really aren't an issue for the majority of people, while these replacement formats kill the one feature that people really care about.

Good luck marketing your new formats, music industry. You'll need it!

--
Simon

Re:SACD vs MP3

[hype7]

And this is a real shame, because technology is moving forward but the mediums are moving backwards.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Some people want portability, and that's fine, but what I want is a high quality update of the CD; with it's quality, maybe with more channels, and with the ability to scale it down *myself* if I want to take it with me on an iPod or such. Give me high quality, no DRM, and I'll work out what I want to do with, thanks very much. Oh, and I will pay for it, if it's DRM free, because that means it's portable to me (as well as being high quality). I have a rack of about 500 CDs sitting here beside me as a testament to that.

And this isn't about digital files. Digital files could be great, if they were decent quality. I'd buy lossless versions of the digital masters by the truckload if I could... but not versions that are worse than the CDs I can already buy (128kbps typical online music store vs CDs 1411kbps).

Anyway, I think the main reason that the MP3 is popular is not because it's just portable, but because of that portability it's easy to pirate. Listening to music on portable music devices is fine, but when you stick a 128kB MP3 on a decent hi-fi, or in a car, it sounds like crap. Until they provide us with something more compelling than free (but crap quality), they're going to have a big piracy problem (as opposed to a small one).

But the record companies are going to learn one way or another. If what they put out costs the same, but in every other regard is a backwards step, there are going to be a lot of people throw up their hands in disgust and look for something better. Or at least different.

I (we) don't just want portability, we want fidelity. MP3 and co do not provide that. They'll only get so far in the market without taking that into account.

-- james

Re:SACD vs MP3

[valisk]

I think that you are right in that respect.

128kbps MP3s have noticible artifacts when I play them back through my Nakamichi AV-8 amp + Mordaunt-Short speakers, that simply aren't noticible when played through an iPods headphones.
Variable bit rate encoding helps a lot here.

Makes me wonder why given all the hulabuloo about 'Digital is Forever' that Valenti and his morons trumpet, they persist in offering 128kbps DRMed audio from their download sites.

I guess they simply want this distribution method to fail.