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MP3 Going the Way of the 8-Track?
joepa writes "According to this MSN/ZDNet story, MP3 is dying. Overall, the data has not shown a clear trend, but at least one recent study reports that people are deleting MP3s faster than they are downloading them. AAC and WMA, meanwhile, are apparently gaining market share. Is this evidence that MP3 is being used largely to sample music rather than for permanent archival and listening purposes? They still don't think so. "
People just realize that when they need disk space, it's easier to delete mp3s because they can get them again anytime they want freely. The same can't be said for most WMA and AAC files which cost money. Once they're gone, you probably have to pay again. I know I didn't archive my music collection in mp3, though. I chose Ogg Vorbis, and may people choose something like FLAC.
What about OGG?
no, heck no. (Though to be fair, some of it is FLAC - only 352 hours total)
Insert obligatory RIAA joke here. Go figure, with piracy lawsuits on the rise, and people deleting their MP3s, do you think the RIAA will lay off, ans stop complaining about their "losses"?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
"Is this evidence that MP3 is being used largely to sample music rather than for permanent archival and listening purposes?"
Is this statement evidence that someone's trying to justify illegal activity? Maybe you should try the ol' trusty "Your honor, she was asking for it! You should have seen the way that MP3 was dressed."
AAC and WMA are on the rise, and that makes sense given the current marketing trends with these two codecs. Does that mean mp3 is dying? Hardly. It will be around for quite sometime, despite development of superior codecs.
The pollingreport.com link only shows that on average, Bush is kicking Kerry's butt in polls. Is this a broken link or was it intentional?
all the companies producing new mp3 players agree...
[/sarcasm]
So, most of what we download is crap. What's new here?
See what I've been reading.
Has netcraft confirmed it?
I think this should be obvious, given the rise of "legitimate" music sites like iTunes none too eager to use MP3 as their format of choice. But MP3 will always be around, given the thousands of people out there who have vast hoards of MP3 collections from the heady days of Napster 1.0.
Most of the MP3s I have were recorded at pretty low bit rates, so they've got the quality of an 8-track. That said, I'd still expect to see the use of alternate formats (Ogg et. al.) rise before I'd declare MP3s on the decline. Or was it all just a fad, after all?
Just junk food for thought...
MP3 is not going to vanish any time soon it is cross platform, there are many aplications writen for it. I think that some time in to the near future we will see an update to this standart.
Now I use Mp3s on my home computer, as well as my person cd player, which supports mp3s.
Pretty much everyone I know does have mp3s, and still uses them, and still downloads them.
Of course there are the ones who probably encoded their entire collection of cds to a different format, but will the personal cd player support ogg or aac anytime soon?
Maybe if the personal cd player maker will allow us to use open source standards, I think that will be great.
He's going to download what is readily available, or use the default format of the most readily available CD ripper. Winamp will play them all regardless; you can't even tell the difference.
Could it just be that a lot of people who were prolific in downloading mp3's now have most of the songs they want? I personally don't care about most new music enough to buy a cd or download a track, not that there isn't some good music out there, I just don't feel theres much I'm willing to pay for. And most of the older stuff I'm into I either got in napsters hey-day, or I own on CD, I can't recall the last time I actively seeked a song out. That and as other posters have already said, the mp3 audiophiles and already moved onto ogg and other formats.
Now, if I could just convined the world to provide music in FLAC format, I'd be happy.
Just more FUD.
Study sponsored by Microsoft with their own DRM agenda to push I presume...
The only thing I'd delete my MP3s for, are OGGs.
Suck it down you hapless technoweenies, Give me DRM-Free or give me death!
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
...They still don't think so.
Or maybe 'its' just working really well for them.
MSN is reporting the death of a rival format of WMA? Wow, there's a shocker!
Remember when Fraunhofer threatened companies for infringing on certain MP3 license a few years ago? Well, that shook the industry into finding alternate solutions. For me, if it isn't some form of lossless open standard such as Flac than I prefer to pass not only on the sound track but the playing device as well. For me, listening to highly compressed MP3 isn't my cup of tea even if the compression ratio for lossy is higher than lossless.
I am glade that Wikipedia settled (?) on OGGs rather than MP3s due to the open nature of the format. Hopefully this trend will continue whereby patent encumbrance may not be best solutions.
I for one [...] copy mp3 to free up space. Wesley Crusher needs more room to h^(k.
And for p0rn!
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
http://reilly.typepad.com/cameronreilly/2004/09/aa c_vs_wma_vs_m.html
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
Could it be that the people who are running the spyware for this data to be mined for the research are more prone to losing their P2Ped mp3s when the 128 kilibyte .exe they downloaded thinking it was some game nuked their drive.? :)
I guess I'll have to stop playing mp3s on by BSD boxen..
I frankly don't see mp3 going anywhere in the near future. It's ubiquitous, open, and of high quality. Despite what many "audiophiles" will say to the contrary, a 224 capped VBR0 mp3 will not be perceptibly different from even a the most perfect "lossless" method for 99% of music.
My 486 can play mp3s. My crappy DVD player can play mp3s. My old-as-hell CD-based mp3 player can play mp3s.
Sure, someday there will be a switch. Maybe for multi-channel audio, maybe for special neural orgasm stimulation, maybe for quantum compression. But for the time being, no file format exists that has enough of a net benefit over mp3 to warrent a mass-exodus.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
In politics, you proclaim as already true what you would like to happen eventually.
Just a thought. Must be a slow news day.
i can't remember the extesion but the ipod format should be the only format making in-roads against the mp3 format.
most new electronic devices play the mp3 format but ignore the acc, ogg, wma, etc formats, like dvd players, car stereos, and the like.
Is it 5:30 yet?
Out of 1257 tracks in my iTunes library, only 8 were downloaded off of P2P (Acqusition, to be exact). Basically, at some point I realized that the selection and quality from the P2P networks I was using* was... well, crap. You'll find 40 copies of one version of a song--which happens to be encoded at 128 kb/sec, or has a nasty glitch in the middle. Also, I like my music enough to want to have a real-world, excellent-quality backup (a CD). Most of my friends still use P2P. Frankly, though, they don't care as much about music as I do. *I'd like to note that, as a Mac user, I don't have the selection of P2P networks that Windows users do, so maybe the poor-quality is a Mac-specific problem.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
Doesnt mean mp3 is dying. There are so many bad mp3 files (due to bad nameing, RIAA subversion, etc) and just so much lousy music that most of the mp3s on P2P are not worth saveing.
Also think about how many times you say "I want song x", and then your search on p2p turns up 40 different versions, thirty of which are covers by some irish tenor?
They probably are missing its increased utility, in swapping amongst friends. Whenever I am at a friends house, I rip all of their cds to mp3s, and most of the people I know do the same. This kind of use with the increasing prevelance of iPods and other players is definitely on the rise.
Seriously, the amount that MS want WMP to be the defacto should not be underestimated at all.
Of course MSN are going to suggest that a format lacking DRM is going to be in decline, and of course AAC is all the rage with iPod users.
However, I still rip and encode in MP3 because quite simply, I can guarantee that every appliance I have can play it... from my car, my CD player, my walkman, my computer, a friends computer, etc, etc.
What's this about the 8 track? I still have mine! I even have a working 8 track recorder!
Next thing you know, they'll say I have to replace all my Beta tapes and Laser Disks!
HexaByte
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
What then heck, if you're going to post a link to PollingReport.com on MP3s, you may as well find the Damn Poll you are alluding to on MP3s (if one exists on that site) instead of just having users see Kerry/Bush results on the front page.
Lazy is what that looks like.
This looks more like corporate wishful thinking than anything else. This isn't like an 8-track at all. It isn't ridiculously easy to make your own 8-track and email it to someone.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
...hardly, not anytime soon, in my opinion. I think the industry has invested too much (both on hardware and software) for MP3. MP3 is almost universal. Most newer player system (from DVD-players and home stereo components to keychain-sized mini-cflash/sd based mplayer) comes with capability to play MP3+other codecs. Downside is MP3 I think supports only stereo [2.0] audio (?). Another, I believe one missing music-industry focused feature that will hinder MP3 dominance is probably DRM.
I've never downloaded an MP3, and my collection keeps growing. I sure as heck don't have any WMA or other files, and I'm looking to buy a new portable MP3 player before long.
Mayhaps this is only a measure of people who download as opposed to use the format? I mean maybe there is a disconnect between peer to peer usage and others.
Oh, and the link the pollingreport.com goes to a page which has nothing to do with the posted topic.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The only clear trend shown from your trend link is that Kerry is losing in the polls... ;-)
One has to ask who are the idiots who let NPD track what is on their harddrives? (NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives)
As mentioned in previous articles - most people rip their own CD collections to their HDs and have most of the music they want from DLs/file sharing/friends/etc. Additionally, most new music is shite anyways. Hadesan
that is why mp3 players are not selling.
Oh and I see lots of home stereo players that will play DRM'd music... My audiotron will play WMA's until you get to the DRM variety.
mp3 is as popular as ever, hell the new phone system here uses mp3 exclusively for voice messages, background music and voice prompts.
Oh and when was the last time you saw a car stereo that would play any DRM'd music??
mp3 is solid as a format.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe people are deleting their mp3's faster than they download new ones because they've realized that the music sucks.
...because I just moved my 80+ GB collection to a bigger drive and cleaned off the old one.
Gotta have room for all the new quality music comming out of the music industry, you know.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
But just because many MP3s on P2P simply don't cut it (too low bitrate/pieces missing/fakes/etc.)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I'd agree. Most of the music I really care about is archived on CD-Rom in uncompressed format.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
People are still downloading boatloads of MP3 files--but they are discarding them at an even faster rate, the researchers said.
I didn't realize it was the format's fault that *****SCREEEEECH EEENNNNNNEEEEHHHHHOOOOWWWWW CCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHH****
If people are letting NPD MusicWatch Digital monitor their files, are they going to be the people who have large stores of "questionable" MP3s?
If MusicWatch is just monitoring file sharing networks, maybe less people are sharing MP3s because they're worried they'll get sued.
On the rare (RARE!) occasion that I buy one. Why? Because I can actually play them. See, WMA, AAC, OGG or the codec-of-the-week might be superior to MP3 but everything that plays compressed digital audio plays MP3. It's an issue of what will play where. When everything I have plays OGG, I'll probably switch to that. It'll probably be a long while before I replace my DVD player with one with OGG support though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As much as I dislike starting an argument with a logical fallacy, you should really look at the article a bit before making any claims as to the death of MP3.
First of all the article page loads with the title "MSN Tech & Gadgets". This is noteworthy, especially seeing as how MS is trying to break into this market. Of course they'd say MP3 is dead, especially when they're touting a DRM enabled propriatary format.
Also, we have this gem from the article:
According to researchers at The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago.
Aside from this being really creepy, it's a biased sample. Anyone who would let someone put monitoring software on their PC (assuming it's not spyware) would probably not have a lot of MP3 files on their machine, if you know what I mean *nudge nudge*.
To sum up: Article is bogus advertising spin. Nothing to see here, move along.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I have quite a bit of music stored digitally. Some is mp3, but anything I rip off of cd gets archived as an APE (Monkey's Audio) lossless file, one file per disc, with an embedded cuesheet. On my PC, I can't hear the difference, but if I make a cd from mp3s for listening in my car, or on my good stereo, I can hear compression artifacts in certain passages. This wouldn't be enough by itself to make me waste the disk space for lossless, but I also like the convenience of having a single file represent a single CD in my collection. At some point I will probably batch-convert all my APEs to AAC - most likely when I get an iPod. This also factors into my decision to use a lossless format for now; transcoding from one lossy format to another is never good, and often really bad for quality.
Of course all the stuff I download is mp3, and there's no point in converting it.
I would probably download more mp3s if they were better ripped and converted. Here are a few tips for anyone who is ripping for sharing purposes:
1. Rip with Exact Audio Copy, or a similar secure ripper
2. Encode with a recent build of LAME, using --alt-preset-standard
3. Tag correctly
This minimizes artifacts hugely, and makes it more fun for everyone.
-- Jeff Paulsen
MP3's strength is that while it's a technologically inferior compression scheme to just about anything else out there - OGG, WMA and AAC all usually sound better at comparable bitrates, and there's no lossless version - it got there first.
Just about everything that supports digital music supports MP3. My CD Walkman, Nomad Jukebox, DVD Player all support MP3. Every media player on my computer supports MP3. An Ipod supports MP3. Many car stereos support MP3. The oddball exception to this is Sony's ipod-alike, but there's rumors the company will change that in future revisions.
The picture isn't so bright with other formats, even when unencumbered by DRM. Want to use AACs? well, that gets you use on the Ipod or maybe a player designed to support Real's store, bue not much else. WMA support is getting pretty widespread, but you CAN'T use it directly on the Ipod, and that's the most popular player. Ogg. Hah.
I use MP3 at wastefully large bitrates - with the alt-preset extreme LAME tag, actually - to preserve sound quality while still ensuring I can play my music just about anywhere. The only better solution might be to encode everything in a lossless format, and transcode to other formats as needed - btu that would take some ripping time, processing time, space and inconvenience I'm not willing to devote right now.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: MP3 is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered MP3 community when IDC confirmed that MP3 market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all music files. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that MP3 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. MP3 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive audio test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict MP3's future. The hand writing is on the wall: MP3 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for MP3 because MP3 is dying. Things are looking very bad for MP3. As many of us are already aware, MP3 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Open source MP3 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time MP3 developers Frauhofer and Philips only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: MP3 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of Frauhofer and Philips, abysmal sales and so on, Philips went out of business and was taken over by Magnavox who sell another troubled audio system. Now MP3 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that MP3 has steadily declined in market share. MP3 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If MP3 is to survive at all it will be among audio dilettante dabblers. MP3 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, MP3 is dead.
Fact: MP3 is dying
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The fallacy of Proof by Popularity, without the Popularity.
I haven't seen one WMA or AAC on any of the pirate-music sites I look at.
Not that I download any, mind you. Unless I'm already licensed to possess a copy of them.
8-track? I think vinyl would have been a better analogy. Mp3s will never go completely away since they still have, and will still have, some use. But 8-tracks were an actual offense to music (yes, I'm that old). I don't remember any other format that violently cut a song in half so that the friggin thing could switch to side two. Once casette tapes came out, 8-tracks were dumped hard by everybody. By contrast, while vinyl majorly died off, it still holds a nostalgic quality and has its niche purposes among enthusiasts who just can't give up THE sound a vinyl album produces (I prefer "The Wall" on vinyl -- it's hard to stop thinking of it as four sides to two vinyl disks).
The days of the 8-track is like a bad memory to me....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I stopped encoded my songs in the MP3 format years ago. There are so many better codecs out there why use a very old standard?
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
surely you're familiar with giFT? Poisoned is a Mac OSX client for giFT.
From the Poisoned webpage, (http://gottsilla.net/about.php):
giFT - giFT is a project designed to completely abstract low-level filesharing protocol communication while allowing seamless support for multiple networks. Currently available plugins include: OpenFT, Gnutella, and FastTrack (third party).
OpenFT - giFTs own scalable peer network.
gift-gnutella - giFT-gnutella is a plugin for giFT for the Gnutella network(Limewire, Bearshare).
gift-fasttrack - giFT-FastTrack is a plugin for giFT which enables users of giFT to participate in the FastTrack network(KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh).
gift-opennap - giFT-OpenNap is a giFT plugin for OpenNap, i.e. with this plugin, you will be able to acess the various OpenNap networks.
And according to FOX, W would be a good presydunt. No bias in either report. It seems that people can no longer discern the difference between pure bs hype and news.
Ever since I first heard of AAC about 3-4 years ago, I liked it. For once, you could get ~CD quality without doing 256-320 encoding. (I didn't know a thing about OGG at the time.) It was *very* hard to get a hold of any encoders/decoders/players, though, until fairly recently (iTunes, the really good recent versions of FAAD/C).
Today, I still like AAC, and will probably use it more from now on, but my good-quality MP3's will remain with me for a while, and OGG is still good, so I'm going to be a 3-formatter for some time to come.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
A man can dream I suppose
Just as my copy of Open Office still reads DOS format text files just fine, my hardware solid state music player that I buy in 2050 will still play MP3. Unlike 8-track and Beta (hardware formats), there's no barrier to force old software formats out of the market.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
, at some point I realized that the selection and quality from the P2P networks I was using* was... well, crap. You'll find 40 copies of one version of a song--which happens to be encoded at 128 kb/sec, or has a nasty glitch in the middle.
If you only want top40, you are correct. I can't even find techno, psy-goa or goth metal on iTunes. But then, you cant buy it at wallmart either. But P2P, if found so many new artists I've never heard before, ive started searching for the bands online. This is a way for the public to find artists. The whole reason P2P works.
Wasn't that linux? Or was it BSD?
Steven king maybe?
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
Thanks to assholes out there (RIAA, dumbasses, etc)... you have to download 10 copies of a song just to find one that isn't cut, low quality, a different song mislabeled, the chorus looped over and over, or simply static.
no comment
Thankfully (for MP3 fans) this is a software technology. Even if MP3s lose market share and are not available from subscription services like e-music or the late mp3.com the technology will still always be there.
Not much different than an Atari 2600 emulator.
And certainly the format will continue to get support from most major software and hardware manufacturers. I doubt the day is on us when we can by a WMA head unit for the auto that doesn't support MP3.
For God's sake there is a C=64 web browser. What's the chances that MP3 is going away?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
So what's the RIAA's beef? MP3s are the most widely used interchange format for music downloads. People aren't keeping this "illegal" music. In fact, this "illegal" music is being destroyed faster than it's being created. The RIAA should be Ecstatic. They're winning now. So why do they still have any problems?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Have you ever noticed how almost every small storage technology uses the horribly limited, slow, badly designed FAT filesystem? There is a reason for this: FAT is the most compatable FS available. Few people use it anymore on their main filesystem (because it sucks), but almost everything else seems to use it.
I see the same thing happening with MP3. People just digitizing their music so they don't have to pull out CDs all the time will use whatever has the best sound/size tradeoff (or whatever comes with the system). If they're encoding their music for use on joe random device, they'll use MP3.
I read the internet for the articles.
What's wrong with that? ATRAC is still alive and well in minidisc players.
Oh, 8-Track.... riiight.....
You mean I'm going to have to deal with my dad constantly shifting his boxes of 8-Tracks AND MP3s around the attic and complaining about not 'being able to find a decent player anymore'?
Informatus Technologicus
That's a shock.
First off, as digital music becomes the norm which it practically is, people are becoming more savvy to it. With tapes, vinyl or 8-tracks, there was one quality essentially and thats it. But when you get into encoding its a whole new ballgame. There have been many comparisons of the current big formats. In the end, unless you listen ONLY to simple electronic music (dance) and encode at very high rates, mp3 is pretty crappy at replicating the source. Most tests show WMA as the best, which i personally find hard to believe, with aac and ogg performing in the middle neither having any strong advantage over the other unless you consider specific music types.
But the strength of mp3 lies in its accessibility, space impact, and reach by having existed for so long. I dont see a reason to replace mp3, and i doubt it will, but i wouldnt rely on it for EVERYTHING.
At the end of the day, mp3 wont be the one and only thing, doesnt mean its dying, it means there are more options. Not need for the doom and gloom on mp3. You can just say, its not the 100 lb. gorrilla it once was.
...and it should be known by now
How many times are we going to hear this - this is the umpteenth time I've seen an article stating this in the last couple of years and I'm still not seeing it.
More likely users are learning to conceal their sharing better, and thus MP3 stashes, making it less likely to get busted by whatever organization is toting lynchmob tactics in your neighbourhood.
.wav is dying, as noone uses it for permanent archival purposes
...I use Ogg Vorbis and it works just fine. All my music is in one place and, it's all legal (ripped from CDs I purchased) and I can listen to it anywhere thanks to icecast+OpenVPN. Power to the people baby! ;)
Un-news
An MSN source is reporting that mp3 is dying, but WMA is gaining.
oh yeah, *that's* an unbiased source...what's next, reports of linux's increase in popularity have been refuted, saying that 98% of linux switchers are returning to windows?
Recent polling data from a leading software vendor shows that other, "open" formats are pushing MP3 further out of the marketplace and into a horrible, shoebox-sized niche. The scientific on-line poll taken from the front of a popular web portal that is the default homepage on several popular operating systems, 95% of respondants chose "WMA" or Windows Media Audio, over 5% choosing "uLaw, other" compression formats, which clearly includes MP3.
To further bury the MP3 format into a stygian abyss of irrelevance, most digital audio players support the open WMA standard over the closed, other standard, whose parent company has several pending lawsuits from companies also named after fruit. Also, it is belived the competing, non-open media format player makes you sterile.
Parent groups applaud the news, citing overwhelming evidence that the MP3 format contributes to the starvation of starving musicians and their starving children. Studies show that 99.9% of all musicians prefer the WMA format over MP3. The remaining 0.01% of musicians, constisting of U2, sucks and will probably die of lung cancer or in a plane crash.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Or is that 404 error I see at http://reilly.typepad.com/cameronreilly/2004/09/aa c_vs_wma_vs_m.html/
mean that they have been
DUN DUN DUN
SLASHDOTTED!!!!!
My car CD player is a MP3 player not a WMA player. The music i steal off the internet is MP3 not WMA.
The article doesn't make it clear how these figures were acquired beyond saying that the research company studied the contents of 40,000 people's hard drives.
Questions to ask:
1. How were these 40,000 people selected?
2. Did they know what exactly was being analysed on their computer?
3. Were there any requirements placed on them? For instance, were only Windows users selected because they had to run some analysis software that only works there?
My main concern is that if these people knew that their usage of digital music files was being studied, then they would be less likely to get involved in unauthorised file sharing, which is, after all, an illegal activity that most people would not want to be monitored doing. Therefore their music files are more likely than average to have been acquired through legitimate means.
People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they're acquiring them. From 82% of people's collections (who were studied) to 73%. Because they're deleted at a faster rate, is the implication that they're less popular? Losing that 10% market share to iTunes et al means users like them less? or is it that people are just downloading more from the new systems and deleting mp3s more rapidly. The research doesn't seem to be able to show a causal link between the two changes...
And along with the misleading headline, the article sounds like we have the voice of an industry giant (CNet) declaring that a trend is over... because they've spoken on the issue. Kind of like how skirts of a certain length can be Done To Death because Anna Wintour says they are.
I've got flu today, so my logic might be flawed. Plus I'm thinking about skirt lengths? I shouldn't be here today.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
I think that some of the rise in the use of AAC and WMA can be attributed to the fact that these are the default formats many programs are ripping to, but most people don't know it. They just know that they copied music from their CD onto their computer and it can now be loaded onto their portable unit. Windows Media Player ripps to WMA (you have to get a plug-in if you want to rip to MP3). iTunes rips to AAC. Winamp rips to AAC by default.
...it's probably because that's what iTunes and WMP, respectively, rip to by default.
I don't care how common WMA is, or that AAC is technically a "standard." MP3 is the only thing I know of that will play on every device and every computer, period. Hell, I bought a $79 AIWA deck for my car and it'll play MP3s from a CD. But not WMA, AAC, or anything else.
MP3 will die--right after Apple & BSD.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Most new users discovering digital music for the first time are using either the software provided with Microsoft Windows, or the free software that is provided for the iPod - iTunes. Both of these programs use .WMA and .AAC as their default formats. How many of these users actually think to change the default setting on iTunes from .AAC to .MP3?
Frankly, I'll wager most of these users think that they are actually copying their tunes to MP3's, and don't give a crap about the file format, as long as their player can play them. They won't realize the difference, unless they try to share with others using the incompatible format.
The manufactures are still marketing the products as "mp3" Players even though they have support for different formats. So people might buy things like the rio karma and the dell jukebox because they are "mp3" Players, odds are they'll end up putting wma's on them. As the story says, many people don't know the difference and don't really care that much.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
No thanks, I don't care what kind of compression it uses; I will never ever accept wmas or wmvs. In addition, I despise WiMP (Windows Media Player) with a passion.
You have all these people that don't really have to to be accountable for what they say and need to fill space and can just saturate the medium with information about anything.
So some guy just decides he is going to throw it out there that MP3 is dying.
It is always some off the cuff remark that they use to stir it up. Broadband is dying. The desktop PC is dying. So on and so forth.
It sounds like they think MP3 is dying because people just are not comfortable without as much DRM in their lives as they can get.
None of these people have much credibility with me.
don't start a flame war please. ugh. I burned every cd I own to mp3 so I could shuffle my favorites and let it play. There is nothing illegal about that.
And people are drinking less water... HAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAH
yeah, whew, FLAMEBAIT....
I have no scientific evidence for this, its just something I have noticed. The noise to signal ratio on previously popular file sharing programs like kazaa has increased exponentially. Someone, probably the RIAA is putting bogus files that only play 10 seconds then are ear piercing noise. Other companies offer you to buy a license when you download music from kazaa and you can't play the track till you do. This has frustrated the casual user, the majority of non techs among us.
.aac (and yes vorbis). Also they offer full albums. Sure mp3 is still the most popular, but it is no longer ubiqitous. Also soulseek, which seems to draw a more mature music sharing crowd, offers a lot more .aac files.
Piracy is shifting towards new p2p networks like bittorent, and soulseek. I suppose as the article says digital music is maturing, as is digital piracy. I have noticed a greater diversity of file types on torrent sites. They offer flac for popular albums, and many are
Perhaps because pirating is becoming less intuative, and the pirate base matures. Then they are more informed to make choices about file formats.
Somehow I don't buy the argument of the article, that they are using mp3's to sample and then delete what they don't like. The common computer user has bought a box with way more hardrive space than they could possibly fill. People don't delete stuff unless their drives are full. Of course if you download an album and like it enough to buy the cd, then rip that cd again, the mp3 files would be deleted and replaced with the standard format of the music player you use. But the RIAA doesn't wish to concieve of online piracy causing a portion of sales.
Hell, "I Might Be Wrong". Perhaps there are just a crapload of iPods, the lawsuits are working and people now think unethical to pirate. But as Radiohead say, "I Doubt It".
Perhaps people are just deleting the MP3 they got 4 years ago (when 64kb was the most common) and relacing it with newer ones at 192 or better. The new ones could be any of a variety of flavors, based on personal preference, operating system or just plain availability.
I maintain that MP3 is still the standard, it may be the only format that every media player will work with.
I think what we are likely to see is that as the average non-technical music lover buys an ACC or WMA device he/she will use the software that came with said device to expand their digial library.
With the proliferation of the iPod the ACC format will become a larger part of the digial music scene (as will the Dell/WMA) and MP3s will reduce in percentage.
As long as these format silos (or camps) exist MP3 will continue on. The fate of the MP3 may be in the hands of the device manufacturers. As soon as they universally support some other format MP3 may very well die, but until then I'm going to keep encoding to MP3.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
The very effective spin-meisters at 2 very large special interest groups are trying to spin the data to suit their own needs (which would give them a financial gain). On one side, Microsoft is trying to say that WMA is gaining share and that Mp3 is dying, because that argument would suit them best. On the other hand, the Music Industry won't agree with that- they'd want everyone to believe that mp3 downloading is on the rise, and that bills must be passed to prevent it.
This is what happens when the 2 biggest forces in this dynamic are on opposite sides. They're both trying to sway your perception of reality, but they're working against each other.
How ironic.
I don't have countless amount of data that these analysts may have, but from what I see and experience here in college, just about everyone with a computer has thousands of mp3's... its impossible to delete more mp3's than what you're downloading...cuz you have to download them first, the only thing close to that statement that you can get actually is that people are deleting their mp3's at the same rate their downloading them. i have noticed greater amounts of .wma, but the frequency of seeing it is still smaller than .mp3's...at least from what ive seen in some hubs.
Ogg is fine, I have no tchnical quarrels with it, and as a free codec, I think its fabulous.
however, if I decided not to use ogg, WMA would be about the last choice. Think about it:
1) WMA is not playable in an iPod and is difficult on non-windows platforms
2) WMP10 plays and RIPs MP3
3) MP3 is probably the best choice for people who need to move it amongst platforms.
4) unemcumbered AAC's are the best choice for people who own an iPod.
5) If you really care about the music and dont' want to be a slave to the flavor of the month, choose flac or ape.
6) WMA's are probably the last choice you'd make. No, check that. ATRAC is the last choice. But WMA's are close.
Seriously, you can rip in MP3. Make it your default in WMP10. Better yet, use your brain and use the FREE version of WinAmp 5.x. Better quality, no lock-in.
Unbelievable Bull Shit!
There is an easy answer as to why more MP3's are getting deleted then downloaded;
We have already downloaded everything, now we are just removing the crap.
=)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I live on a college campus and like many other students know exactly where I can find music that I want. Although I will admit that a few years ago I never saw wma or aac and now i see maybe 1 or 2 albums in that format. The defacto standard still is MP3.
The first comment I saw +5 something) talked about people deleteing MP3's for space, and finding it easy to get them again
I wonder how they measured this 'drop' in mp3 popularity, my guess would be network traffic, which cuts through your argument.
I would say that MP3 hit a fad era, and is just settling down. [people thought mp3's might dissapear perhaps?)
Well I think MP3 is ok, at a high enough bit rate, stereo is fine even for a semi decent home sound rig.
Again, I say MP3 became a commodity, so people were less worried about getting it.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
My downloading habits have tapered off because I've already downloaded everything I want from the past, and there's not enough good music coming out that necessitates being downloaded. I've reached a break-even point where it simply makes sense for me to buy the 1 or 2 tracks off an album that are worth listening to. (Thank you, iTMS.)
blog |
This trend is very alarming. It basically proves what I should have known all along: the technical merits of a format, along with how laden it is with DRM, do not matter at all to the general public.
I thought that Xiph was doing a great thing with Ogg and I moved my entire collection over to ogg vorbis. I love it, and it sounds good. I thought it was a matter of time for the move from MP3 to Ogg to happen, since MP3 is larger, has more audio quality issues, and is not "free". Boy was I wrong! I thought people would be moving over to the smaller, higher quaity, free-as-in-speech codec.
Instead, we're seeing the opposite! People moving to more restrictive codecs (although the quality may still be better). I knew most people didn't care about free-as-in-speech that much, but this is sort of alarming...
"According to MSN "!? MP3 is a format for transient data. Ripped CDs you already own, traded songs, free downloads, auditions of CDs you later buy, jokes... creating those MP3 files on your drive is almost always ($)free, though the drives still cost money. AAC and WMA are more likely to cost money, and therefore persist. Such selfserving damned statistics from ZDNet, in collusion with Microsoft, is a sign only that Microsoft is bringing its monopoly propaganda machine on its chief media content competitor: the entire world that prefers MP3s because they're free, though they're crappier. Are cockroaches an endangered species because they're killed in increasingly vast numbers each year?
--
make install -not war
Joke is up there, if you don't get it your not old enough.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hello this is a marketing ploy to get people to use WMA's and be DRM'ed to death. mp3's made the internet cool :)
I've actually been encoding music to aac instead of mp3 simply for space reasons. I can fit more aac's on my iPod than I can mp3's of similar quality. Not to say that's going to "kill" mp3, but the formats are competing on their merits which is a good thing.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I think the entire article is avoiding the main cause for people deleting MP3's.
It also says nothing about MP3 dying!?! The main post is really badly formulated. I think it's a troll, along with the original article.
They're not deleting MP3's because they shun the format. Most people wouldn't care if music was encoded into high-quality midi. They just want the music.
More likely, people are:
Most people I know are using MP3 more than ever before. Most don't know about, and don't want to know about WMA, AAC, OGG or PCM. I know this, because I talk to people about DRM, and they don't know *anything* about how their music is encoded, other than it is 'the mp3 thing'.
I keep less music on my HDD now than a few years ago. Why? I can pop a 4.7gig DVD into my home or work computer, and listen to the MP3's for hours/days. I don't want to tie up that HDD space with MP3's, when the storage media is that convenient and cheap.
The same way that I wouldn't keep my MP3's on hundreds of flash drives, or in RAM. It's economics, who wants to store MP3's on non-portable, expensive HDD, when the alternatives are cheap and easy?
I bet that once people have significant quantities of any media format on their HDD, they will look into ways of archiving/deleting it.
Those people claim that the sounds CD's and mp3's cut are still part of the overall experience and their absence can be heard.
Are they right? Wtf do I know, I can't tastes brands of coffee but don't doubt coffee tasters. After a few glasses I can't even tell if I am drinking whiskey let alone wich blend but I don't doubt the experts. I can't tell colors apart but am smarter then to argue with a girl about it.
The simple fact is that humans have different ears. Just as some people can see the flicker of those tube lights and others of crt monitors some people have a lot better hearing. I just find flac amusing since it is used to rip cd's. Whats the fucking point? CD's are already leaving sound out. If you want to rip the real sound you gotta at least start at LP's.
So yes flac is kinda pointless, real audiophiles don't want it because it is still only cd's and people with mp3 players don't have the space or hardware.
But don't discount the difference in sound just because you don't hear it. Others may have better hearing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Ive deleted all my mp3s" (cause you never know the person asking the questions might have a lawsuit written up by the RIAA in their back pocket...
personally I deleted all my mp3s... right after I burned them to CD
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
...but the percentage decrease could easily be attributed to these people installing other crap, like 3GB games. Something like that could easily skew these numbers.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
The people that are getting searched should also be taken into account. I don't know anyone who volunteers to have their hard drive surveyed by marketers, but I would venture to guess that they are less representative of the computer using public than the study seems to assert.
Also not factored in are the massive amounts of intentionally corrupt mp3 files placed in p2p networks for download. Trying to download "New Hit Song" can take about 15 tries to get something playable. Deleting these files after determining they are garbage also feeds the study.
Another case of stats being manipulated.
Honestly, I think that whether format x is better than format y is totally beside the point, and saying that "format z is dying" is a little silly.
The real "format" that matters here is "digital music stored on writeable media". That trend is more interesting and I think more meaningful. Think about your music collection 10 years ago, and think about it now. The big change is not whether you are using mp3 vs. AAC vs. Ogg. It's a bookshelf of CDs versus a cigarette pack sized device. It's a mix tape versus a play list.
Sure, format matters, but I think the bigger picture is a lot more meaningful here.
"The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives..."
More info on this group please? If they're accurate, I'm worried. Who submits their entire hard drives to review, anyway?
You are a criminal? Why? What did you steal? What did you do?
You would need to create a digital audio stream that is 45 minutes long. Filter out all frequencies below 400Hz or above 5KHz. Add -10dB of white noise. Randomly reshuffle the track order on the album, ignoring any segues between the songs.
Now split the stream into 4 equal segments. If this can't be done, pick random songs and split them in half with a 20-second silent gap. Otherwise, leave silent gaps of a minute or more to pad out the space. Disable any random access to the stream other than jumping between the 4 segments: You just have to listen 10 or more minutes at 1X speed to get to a particular song. Jumping shall be accompanied by the activation of a large mechanical solenoid and an associated EMP pulse that risks blowing out your speakers.
Next, process each segment to add in -10dB of bleed-through from corresponding position on the other segments.
Finally, the tracks need to be priced several dollars above competing formats, and protected by "Analog Rights Management". This involves stocking them in pricey strip-mall record stores in locked glass cases. The cases have holes so you can stick your hands in them and feel them, but you can't actually take it out until you track down one of the grumpy losers who works in the store to open the case.
I'm _deleting_ my mp3s, I promise, all AAC and WMA over here...... Very, very true....
MP3 is piracy, piracy is wrong. If you pirate music, you are a criminal and belong behind bars.
Now, see, that's what I love about Slashdot: the finely nuanced and rational discourse. It's good to know that we provide a forum for debate in which Tucker Carlson would feel right at home.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
What is the world coming to?
Since WMA and ACC are MS and Apple proprietary,
I'd expect the PODcasting phenomena to re-invigorate
MP3 as a common supported format. You can assume cross-platform support w/ MP3 and you can't assume
the same with the MS/Apple wars making life difficult. The content creator with PODcasting will
be millions of wannabee "broadcasters"... Millions.
The backbone routers will feel your pain... the telcos will love the extra usage billing and someone
will need to figure out how to pay for it all.
The suddenly successful POCcaster will find that the ISP has shut their link down do to overuse.
Slashdot a great PODcast and you'll see what I mean. There is no free lunch when you are passing out 40MB downloads and have a few thousand potential listeners...
McD
If mp3 disappears, what on earth will all the mp3 PLAYERS be good for? Do you really want to transcode every time you want to listen to something, or buy one of the New, Improved, DRM'd, Extra-Expensive-Cause-It's-New-Tech players?
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Doesn't it make more sense to rip to FLAC, and use a script to reencode to the format your portable player accepts? For the near future that format is going to be MP3, but eventually that could change.
The bigger issue with CDs is their discretisation of the sound: 16 bits = +/- 32768 levels for amplitude, but most recordings don't explore the top end of that, which means feeble sounds could be very discretised. Modern circuitry does a very good job of smoothing it out though. I doubt, for normal (especially acoustic) music, anyone can really hear the difference between a CD played on a high-end system, and an SACD or something played on the same system (2-channel output, no surround). They only think they can. There was a time when many audiophiles seriously believed painting the non-playing side of a CD with green paint improved the sound, and such nonsense.
MP3s are a different matter. Anyone can tell a low-bitrate MP3. Even at 128 kbps, MP3s sound a bit hurtful to my ears. At 192 I'm not sure but it's possible I could still tell a difference; but at 256 I doubt I could. (with ogg I certainly can't.) And that's still less than half the size of a FLAC, so FLAC doesn't have any benefits for me. It amuses me to read the rants on etree.org on not "polluting" their pristine music with MP3s, while most of what they trade aren't even soundboard recordings, but mic recordings that sound like crap anyway.
Didn't you just say "boxen?"
When I cut my mp3 cds every two months....
But that's only because of these dipshits who upload some Britney Spears crap as a Linkin Park song, have a corrupted file, or these annoying-ass bogus files that are starting to flood the servers.
It's at the point where to get one good track that you need to download 8 or 10 bad ones.
So, yeah. Technically, I do delete more than I keep.
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How in the world are they getting these figures of people deleting MP3's? How do they know that N people are actually deleting certain things from their hard drives? Or did they do a poll and were asking people this? How many people in this poll (if it was) were telling the truth? That kinda seems arrogant of this report to assume such a thing on scant little evidence. Isn't this the case though with all "findings" reports.
Here's an example I am making up:
I perceive based on independent web reviews that
cd-roms are dying. People aren't using CD-writeables anymore. Everybody in the world is using DVD-writeables. The reason is because all reviews I have read are of those drives. No one is writing CD-writeable reviews anymore. Thus, CD-ROMS are DEAD as a dorrnail. The nail is in the coffin....etc.
Do you see how skewed these statements can become?
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
Most newbies dont have the sense to go to google and find out how to rip mp3s. Even if they did, they wouldnt understand how to do it with a majority of the tools out there. WMA is as easy as popping a CD into Windows, MediaPlayer comes up, and you hit "copy CD", bingo, youve got WMA. Same with AAC for ITunes. Among newbies who have no idea how to use a computer other than to collect adware and viruses in large droves, WMA and AAC are on the rise because they are IGNORANT. IGNORANCE....thats it. MP3 is my preferred format, OGG is 2nd, because of quality. It has nothing to do with DRM, or anything like that. Newbie users don't know how to do anything but drool on their keyboards....too bad they outnumber us 10-1
According to this MSN/ZDNet story, MP3 is dying.
According to Sony, it's not.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Of course you could also go and buy it legitimately and avoid that headache.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
You'd never know, looking at my hard drive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"According to this MSN/ZDNet story, JPG is dying. Overall, the data has not shown a clear trend, but at least one recent study reports that people are deleting JPG'S faster than they are downloading them. GIF and BMP, meanwhile, are apparently gaining market share. Is this evidence that JPG is being used largely to sample pictures rather than for permanent archival and viewing purposes? They still don't think so. " Only time will tell...only time will tell.
It only takes one favorite song from one favorite album to be perceptibly different from the 'lossless' copy for someone to switch... and then as copies in the newer format accumulate, eventually you have an entire collection in something other than mp3.
I had a handful of songs with cymbals and bells that sounded horrible in MP3 unless I was running at 224+ kbps... until I found out that they didn't sound horrible at all in AAC at 160kbps... and over the course of the past three years my entire collection is nearly all converted to AAC. That, and purchasing a 5gb iPod necessitated the conversion of 8gb of music into a lower kbps... and now I have 13gb of music ^^;
GPL Deconstructed
You neglected to mention the Ogg family of codecs and that there are quite a few embedded media devices and software players that support Ogg. Secondly one can not archive audio for long term purposes in a closed format that will disappear with the market.
It is run on 40,000 people's machines who don't mind having some survey company look at their hard drives.
a) Everyone acts differently if they think they are being watched.
b) Who are these surveyed people? Don't they care about privacy or are they real vanilla computers with no real docs or finances on them.
c) I bet the online porn industry looks very unprofitable in this company's survey.
So lemme get this straight, the maker of WMA (MS) issues a report that MP3 is dying, to be replaced with (among others) WMA? Big shock.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I used to steal music also, but I haven't for years. I still didn't think it was so bad, until I talked with an ex-label owner the other day. He did world music, but had to shut down the shop due to piracy -- not of his music, but because the major labels started to hoard all of the distribution channels and squeezed him out of the market.
Stealing is not good, and you should be carefull who call a dumbass.
Actually, my 486DX4-100 could. Without skips or pauses. I just wrote a program to up the priority of a given PID (man 2 setpriority)... Of course, it made the machine painfully unresponsive for anything else, but it *was* possible and it sounded fine.
Mmm, donuts.
and MPC sounds better than AAC
Comment removed based on user account deletion
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Dear MP3... Even though experts have decreed that you will soon be replaced by a new and better way of doing things, I wouldn't worry. Signed, IPv4 Coca-Cola Classic
This is funny. My 74 Cadillac Elderado Convertible still has the original 8-track player in it. I installed a Sony 10 disc MP3 changer with a remote and FM modulator, totally hidden. I guess I should install XM now before it's outdated.
Does mean my Palm Tung E is also an 8-trackplayer?
Science is the Real TRUTH!
iTunes, by default, rips CDs to AAC files. Windows Media play rips CDs to WMA. Most users do not change their default settings, and so any CD ripped with their primary listening software will be stored in the corresponding format.
I use iTunes and I changed the settings to rip to variable bit rate MP3. But I'm a power user, and I imagine that most users don't even know what variable bit rate means.
A hungry man will tell you anything if you give him a cookie.
This article is pure bullcrap. Microsoft, Apple and the RIAA would love for us all to think that MP3s are going out but we're smarter than that, we're Slashdot readers. Microsoft and Apple want everyone use their proprietary formats and the RIAA want people to use anything with DRM. But we'll just happily burn our downloads to CD and the rip those CDs back to MP3s.
People who care about the format their music is in are going to use FLAC or keep their permanent archives on audio CDs, then whether they use OGG, MP3, or "whatever is easiest" (AAC / WMA) provides pretty much zero interesting statistical information.
As Michael Gartenberg says, people who don't care may well rip their CDs to WMA or AAC and think they're cutting MP3s. MP3 is turning into a generic term for "lossy compressed digital audio". I've heard someone refer to their Sony player as an "MP3 player" even though it didn't play MP3, he hadn't noticed that Sony's music player was converting MP3s to ATRAC.
Jesus christ, actually I DID! OMG!!!
When artists I actually enjoy provide something worth my money, I buy it. The only songs I download anymore are the 1-hit wonders you hear (for free - I know, I know, they were paid for by commercials) on the radio anyway.
If the industry wants to stick with this "one hit song per album" model, and produce albums which aren't worth they money, then I'll just keep downloading the hits. Usually I get bored with the mp3 before it even goes off the radio anyway.
no comment
Some people do hear better than others. however LPs are terrible.
I had lots or records and great turntables (AR and technics). Records were a nightmare. Static, cleaning dust with disc washer etc.etc.. Making sure the needle was wieght right. Then the sound was pretty excellent. Even with all that pre CDs still sounded better.
An playing LPs in your car was always easy.
No wonder they still selling millions of albums on "vynl"
Since you noted the typo, you might be interested.
touché
Used to acknowledge a hit in fencing or a successful criticism or an effective point in argument.
Why is mp3 going the way of the 8-track? Why do people want to start putting mp3's on 8-track now? That erases any portability gains. Also, 8-track sucks. In case people don't know, 8-track is so old (like 1960's and 70's) it's not even funny. Now I am gonna have to shop around at flea markets for an 8-track player just so I can enjoy my myraid of MP3's. Those things suck up battery life like no-one's business too. Well I hope I can get one of those GROOVY models that have built-in speakers that split the one speaker apart so you can have better stereo. Ooh! I want one with additional speaker jacks so I can have QUADRAPHONIC sound. That would be totally kicky-blast and wailin'.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
How much did Microsoft pay this writer to write this nonsense?
I for one, don't have any mp3s and I'm happy to see mp3 go.
;)
My 6GB music collection is in Ogg Vorbis
Stealing is not good, and you should be carefull who call a dumbass.
Following mindless propoganda is not good, and you should be careful what you call stealing.
Of course you could also go and buy it legitimately
Not necessarily. Do all countries with a wide Slashdot readership have a licensed downloadable music store? Does any such store carry the artists that other members of my family prefer to listen to? Or is it my job to convince other members of my family to like other different artists?
Seriously, did they break into people's computers and do searches? Did they use P2P searches (which are about as reliable as a slashdot poll)? Did they run around a small part of the US looking for information? No, the story says "analysts" and "researchers", without naming names as far as I read.
You know what this is? This is akin to the old conspiracy theorist FUD model of writing, with a journalistic twist. The conspiracy theorist fud model simply states that you state the problem, in as worrying as words possible, every 2 or so sentances inbetween prooving it. For example:
"Researchers at NY university said that an asteroid is going to hit the earth within 2/3 months. This asteroid will wipe out ALL of the life on the planet. It is the size of texas."
Ect, ect ect and so on. Journalists write it in a journalistic way, however, instead of having the FUD every 2-3 sentances, they restate their thesis in a different way, then proceed to use words such as "researchers" or "analysts" over and over to somehow give it credibility. So, how did they get the information?
The "analysts and researchers" are "NPD group". They have a spyware app called "music watch digital", you know, the one that is put onto EMI's CD's and loaded onto the machine via autorun. You know, the one that can be disabled by the shift key? Yea, that one, the one that catalouges a persons harddisk and sends it back to whoever.
Now, the next question is, why would ZD net have a MS sponsored article written by a CNET staff member? Oh, wait, there's a second article at the bottom of the page, talking about a "maturing" mp3 market. You know, the market that is now going towards paying for DRM'd disabled music online? Notice the mention of sony, apple, and MS's players which will undoubtedly go towards people looking into these players and music services?
This equates to "our spyware app says that the mp3 may be dieing. People are using these players". Must be a slow news day or somethin'.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It takes a lot more work to get even just one "hit" than almost any person is willing to commit to. As the adage goes, if it were really "that easy", everybody would be doing it. People have to make tremendous efforts and sacrifices for those works which you imply are disposable and easy to come by.
When a radio station gets lots of requests to spin a song, that money goes back to the labels, yes, but it also goes back to the artists that recorded the song, and more importantly, back to the songwriter that crafted it, and oftentimes the producer who took care of all the details to get that recording made. They don't get a dime when you download that MP3 from a P2P network.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
I just resumed converting my cassette taps to MP3s so I can toss them. I'll never purchase music online for the prices they are asking ($0.99) is a rip-off. Seventeen songs = $17...shit, why not go out and purchase it then.
Well, this is certainly guaranteed to increase the number of car crashes.
They'll buy them because the rio karm and dell jukebox because they want an "Ipod."
The whole "genericized trademark" issue is getting really annoying, especially because it actually matters a little bit here (ie, tech support doesn't become more difficult when people are using tissues instead of kleenex).
Although I don't think MP3 will disappear completely. A lot of amatuer artists and producers use MP3 to distribute their music online. If MP3 was ever to disappear completely, it would leave a lot of artists stumped (unless they used OGG). Also, we can't really allow MS to gain control over YET another format (WMA).
I say thanks to Apple for not supporting WMA in their Ipod mp3 player.
I know if WMA gained more market share over MP3 and all those 'MP3' sites (mp3.com, mp3.com.au) etc switched to WMA, I know I would release my own music via my own website in the OGG format. Been toying around with idea of doing that anyway.
Hmm, Microsoft telling us that MP3's are out and their format is taking over. I beleive them completely. I also ask my barber if I need a haircut.
Not to be a nitpicker or anything but let's be honest here the article is saying that WMA and AAC are taking presidence over MP3. Let's keep in mind what company created and primarily uses WMA. Now what website is the article on? MSN.
Looks suspcious to me.
What, like into the dashboard of my Gremlin?
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
...the mp3s first sign agreements with Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS), and then they delete you!
Aside being an iPod owner myself, I like AAC for a variety of reasons :
1) it's ISO-standardized
2) it's the default codec for MPEG4
3) it's embraced by Apple and iTunes Music Store
4) it's sound beats mp3 by far
5) it's sound (at 128/192), in my opinion, is slightly superior to WMA
6) by not using WMA, i'm not tied to Microsoft's future changes in licensing agreements
currently i have mp3's by far, but I rip all new CDs to AAC (m4a, not m4p).
Ogg Vorbis is unsupported by most mainstream hardware, and WMA excels only in low bit rates of =64, which I don't rip to. MP3Pro is barely embraced, and mp3's psychoacoustic model is aging, thus leaving AAC good for quite some time to come (at least until the replacement of AAC arrives).
Surprisingly, while MPEG4's AAC is widely adopted and available, few people have access to MPEG2's AC3 (possibly due to licensing issues with Dolby). Sony's ATRAC3+ is so proprietary it's not even funny.
What's with the nerd pessemism? Losing a loved one is sad. A file format not gaining ground is not sad. All I want is a lossless encoded file, and Apple's does work (yes so does FLAC).
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
Music gets boring fast. People aren't hoarding it any more.
Its not something you put on the shelf.
Some say, its something you 'make for yourself', and thats the true spirit of music.. not the mighty buck...
Sure, there are always classics, but generally, stuff gets old fast. Who cares about keeping it around any more?
There's tons of it, old and new, to be had.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've made copies of a couple CD's onto my hard drive (for backup of course) and the files got created with an MP4 extension. I've never heard of MP4 before. Is that just a mistake in the application (I believe it was Nero)? Or is MP4 a different format from MP3?
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
Try using www.mp3shield.com - works well and you at least you don't have to listen to the crap to get what you like - it'll tell you you've downloaded crap. I swear by it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
There are plenty of places online where you can legally buy the individual songs, fuckshit.
Who said anything about it being downloadable? Just go to the record store, or order discs. I can't download DVDs legally, but that doesn't give me the right to go steal them.
*grin*.
It begged to be trolled. :)
I don't understand what the big deal is about formats. Here on /. I hear all the time about how great AAC or Ogg is, but to be honest I never have heard of them anywhere else. Now granted, I'm not am music buff. When I wanted to put the few CDs I own on my PC (to make them easier to listen to / organize, not to share) I went to WMP and looked, and here was this thing called WMA Lossless. Takes more space, but it mathematically lossless, so you have full CD quality at less than 1/2 of the space it would take for pure .wav files. So that is what I use, and if I want to listen to them on my MP3 player I just plug it in and it converst them to either 320kbs MP3 or 192kps WMA, whichever I feel like, and puts them on the player. Ta-da. No extra software, nothing. Works like a charm, and the lossless files on my hard drive are excellent. So what is it everybody has against WMA?....
William George
Now that I think about it, they're right. What is the lifetime of a typical MP3 song? I download it, listen to it a while, forget about it, and then either the disk breaks or it gets accidentally deleted. That sounds pretty unpermanent to me, and it sure as hell isn't archived.
And as for sampling, what better word to describe listening to recorded music? If I like the song, I go to the concert.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Microsoft has predicted the Victory over Sun over Java in 1997, The death of the password in Feb/2004 (also on CNet), and the Death of SPAM by 2006.
Yeah, the same man who said 640K would be enough for everybody. Let's put him on a pedestal and proclaim him messiah, yay!
Hm, must be the reason why the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 heirarchy keeps getting more and more message headers. Yep, MP3's on it's way out (but not so you'd notice).
According to this MSN/ZDNet story...They still don't think...
Maybe in the light of all the rabid persecution by RIAA & MPAA everyone is just getting better at hiding their booty.
"Hide everything quick, The RIAA fuzz is pulling out their mudslingers!"
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
See this journal entry.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I have over 200GB of MP3s, 3 MP3 personal players, and a MP3 player in my car. THE HELL THEY ARE GOING AWAY! I spend so much damn money on MP3 equipment, and I love it all!!!
The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives
What!?!??!
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
This is NOT about Google Desktop.
You are anonymous, you are cowardly, and MP3 is old. Maybe AAC sounds better, but not everyone wants to be seen using a faggoty white mp3 player or even more faggoty computer that supports AAC. Got that?
Interesting argument.
... BUY CDs.
Because complete fidelity with a CD isn't complete fidelity with the original sound, you're saying that it's pointless? Wow. That's equivalent to saying that LPs are pointless -- they, too, lose information. In fact, any recording technique known to man is going to miss data. So it's all pointless? Wow. Real Audiophiles TM don't want FLAC because it's only as good as CDs, eh? What if you only have CDs to start with? Not the band playing in your room with you? Real Audiophiles TM may not buy CDs, whoever those people are, but Real Me TM does. I suspect there are quite a few of us out there who are very real who
Then you go on to warn us not to discount the difference in sound? If someone can hear the difference between uncompressed (WAV, FLAC, etc.) v. 192K MP3 isn't there suddenly a point?
I use FLAC. It makes sense. I have hard drive enough for the 400 hours of music I've ripped, with space to spare. It's cheap nowadays. With MP3 I hear annoying artifacts. If I get a portable player, I *might* transcode to Vorbis to save disk space (from a CD-quality FLAC). If I didn't, I could still put 800+ CD-quality FLACs on a 20GB drive. WTF? 50+ hours *continuous*, non-annoying, CD-quality play time not enough for "people with MP3 players?" 40GB drive = x 2?
"Don't have space or hardware" my ass. "Pointless" my ass.
I think the hot debate's over. Do some ripping yourself or a little math and see what you think. Geez, things that get modded insightful...
Wait, you mean they don't use 5.25" floppies anymore? Data will never be the same! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!! Seriously, who comes up with these headlines? MP3 may lose favor over time for any number of perfectly good reasons, but this is essentially *nothing* like the 8-track. MP3 is capable of being played on pretty much any PC, and it's big enough that any music player which eschews it will immediately flop -- it's an audio codec, NOT a physical media standard. As such, it's very easy for people to continue to play MP3s on their computers indefinitely, whether or not the have a particular hardware configuration.
(1) Geeks know there are better codecs to rip to then MP3. (2) iTunes makes getting the song you want relatively cheap, so there's less of an excuse to use p2p, where most of the MP3s are. (2) "Average people" don't know about p2p and so they are getting their files from legal sources, sources which don't publish in MP3 because MP3 doesn't have DRM. It looks like the industry's quest to kill MP3 and get DRM into everything is finally starting to pay off. However, I predict the trend against MP3 will reverse when people finally discover just how restrictive DRM is. It hasn't happened yet, but once all CDs have copy-protection and it becomes a pain to do what you want to do with your music, the subject will get more and more attention.
I didnt RTFA but how do they know when you delete an MP3 ? :)
Yes, a 486, or at least a really good one, could play mp3s. I had, and still have, an AMD 5x486-133 based system which I managed to get to play mp3s on Win95 in 1998. The 5x486-133 was a 486 on steroids: it had 16 KB of L1 cache (not 8 KB) and ran at 133 MHz. But it was/is a 486, both architecturally and socketwise.
...
The trick was waiting for the right codec to come along. I remember trying and failing (with results as you described) with an early version of WinAmp. But with a later version, set to CPU hogging high priority, it worked. Mind you I doubt it work for any bitrate above 128 kb
Despite this, I note that the original story indicates that MP3 is still more popular than any DRM-locked format, and that purchased (proprietary DRM-locked) songs are a tiny percentage of what people have around.
What's interesting is they are talking about people's habits in deleting files (which means nothing). Of course, people are less likely to delete files they have paid for over MP3s of files they may have ripped from their own CDs or have downloaded off a file-sharing service. If you didn't pay anything for the copy and you get tired of it or don't like the song, you might (or are more likely to) delete it. You're less likely to do that (even if you don't like it) with a song you paid hard cash for the copy. Witness the number of people who throw away / donate / give away used paperbacks they paid under $1 (and especially 50c and below), versus people who keep brand-new paperbacks and don't toss their new ones away as quickly.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
MP3 is going underground, not dying.
I've mentioned this before, but... A while back a normally-reputable survey outfit had a survey involving a little program that was supposed to make a general report on what hardware and software were present, but without any data that could be "personally identifiable". The output was an XML file, so I took a look at it. While it didn't bother indexing a lot of other file formats, it DID specifically index all the MP3s.
Needless to say, I didn't return the output file to the survey company (not only for what files it indexed, but mainly because there was quite a lot of info that could have been parsed down to ID an individual, such as directory names for Mozilla mail accounts.)
But since the survey offered a $20 reward for completion, I'm sure a lot of people did return the output file, probably most without even looking at it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
OK, just how are they supposed to know what's on people's hard drives? Are they running a bunch of zombies or something? Sorry, man, but this sounds like shlock.
Umm, well there is like this thing called... uh, spyware. That's one way to do it.
That doesn't mean the studies are in any way valid or meaningful. In fact, they are almost cetainly not.
NT
Tell that to my Packard Bell 486-66... Win95 on 8mb RAM with Winamp 1.something played them, no skips. Couldn't use the machine for anything else while they were playing, but it worked.
General Motors says software and electronics already are responsible for more than one-third of the cost of a typical automobile, and an IBM executive predicted this week that the figure will be closer to 90 percent in five years. Yeah, once Microsoft gets involved
Is this evidence that MP3 is being used largely to sample music rather than for permanent archival and listening purposes?
No. It means exactly what you just stated in the summary--people are moving to formats like WMA, AAC, and others. Personally I've noticed a massive increase in the use of MPC.
Anything to postulate a pro-piracy argument, I guess. It doesn't matter if people are "sampling" or not (hint: they're not), it doesn't change the illegality of it. Why is it "theft" when PearPC's code gets stolen, but taking MP3s is "sampling?"
While I can concieve of an increase of popularity with aac because of iTunes I'm a bit suspicious of the report because it specifically mentions DRM formats. My guess is Microsoft is just trying to push the lie that people want DRM.
Why is it "theft" when PearPC's code is taken, but when MP3s are taken, it's "sampling?" Copyright apparently exists only when the GPL is involved. If you believe you should be able to download music, then you should allow people to take GPL code and do what they want with it. To do otherwise would be a double-standard.
My buddy's 486DX4/100 in college played them without any problems. There was occasional skippage at first due to playing them from Windows in WinAmp (while the Nimda virus was hammering his netcard with infection attempts, etc.), but then he got smart and lef the computer running in DOS (playing the files with OpenCP, I think), and that took care of the skipping without having to e.g. downsample. It even displayed realtime spectra on the screen while playing.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Mark my words, Ashcroft will resign from Atty General whether Bush wins or loses.
That guy is bad news and even Bush knows it.
Vlad--
You fat fucking piece of shit! Why didn't you tell us you were involved with
the Al-Quaida network of terrorist cells in the United States? We would have
understood! And arrested you, granted, but what kind of American are you?
Your years in the Navy (all eight of them) ought to have taught you a little
patriotism. Maybe it was the constant hazing with coin-filled socks by your
fellow enlisted, or the constant write-ups by the officers, that led to a
bitterness too intense for most to taste. Maybe. But if that wasn't it, the
dishonorable discharge for obesity and latent homosexuality probably put you
over the top. Who knew a military career could lead to hating the United
States of America so much that you'd aid Osama bin Laden and his army of
fanatics in bringing our economy to its knees.
Of course, it's possible it wasn't just your military career's string of
embarrassments over the years that led to your rash America-hating
decisions. Perhaps it was your mental health. It's no mystery to anyone
anymore that you have a martyr complex, chronic (or "major," as you call it)
depression, psychotic delusions of persecution (which lead to actual
persecution), and anti-social disorder. If it were me with the string of
divorces, restraining order filed by my own children, or the job record
longer than the Mississippi, I'd be in a therapists office or on pills or
something. And if none of that worked, I'd kill myself (hint, hint). I
imagine the feeling that never being able to succeed breeds would work its
way into anyone's skull. I mean, after the second wife I would have bought a
plane ticket to Yemen. You're on wife #4, and on top of that (listen for the
rafters breaking) she weighs 400 fucking pounds.
Well, here's my wish to you that you get what you deserve-- which is Osama
bin Laden and a dozen of his most well-hung, bearded, filthy Muslim
terrorist commandos pumping their huge circumcised cocks in and out of every
orifice of your bloated, sweating body. And, of course, I hope that you
break your jaw on Osama bin Laden's bucking love-bazooka and then choke to
death on his deluge of Islamic semen and go straight to the lowest pit of
Hell positioned directly under Satan's squatting haunches for all of
eternity.
Fuck you, Vlad!
Scott Lockwood whines just to hear himself.
"You know, I'd stay retired if these fools would just find another target."
We did. We had an agreement. We moved on to other things. Scott Lockwood didn't. Scott Lockwood couldn't STAND being left alone. He can't live without negative attention, and he's willing to do whatever it takes to atract it. He had, and still does, have the chance to be left alone FOREVAR, just by shutting the hell up. We gave him once chance, and he flat-out lied to us. We left him alone, and he couldn't stand it, so he started spamming himself all over the Internet and goading us to pay attention to him again.
We put up with it for quite a while, but the frequency and volume of his attention-seeking continued to increase. Well, if he wants attention, he'll get it.
Scott Lockwood, it's all up to you. You can stop it any time you like. You know that VladeKua5y is doomed. Stop fucking yourself over. You can end it any time, if you have willpower and honest. The problem is that you don't. You have no morality as a person.
Is this Scott Lockwood? No, Scott Lockwood is much wider than that. Is this Scott Lockwood, or is this? There are so many that seem to fit him, I just can't decide.
Oh well. On to the future. There's much to be done, and little time to do it.
Just go to the record store, or order discs.
"CDNOW.com result: 0 items found."
Then "eBay Result: 0 items found."
What's your next step?
My Amiga with 50 MHz 68030 (about 25% slower than a 486-100) played MP3's quite handily (even in 1998). But then, she is helped by a smarter sound chip than what would be found in a 486 PC. And a better OS and more media-friendly architecture generally.
I remember this format trying to steal MP3s thunder early in the game (1998 or so), and haven't heard a word since. The files were smaller than MP3 and had less frequency distortion. Marketing problems??
Regardless of it's accepted meaning, FUD has always meant (to me)
F*&cked
Up
Disinformation.
Microsoft makes more of this than anything else.
That said, would you believe news about computers that comes from a federally convicted technology-market abuser?
Neither would anyone else in the world with half a brain.
The RIAA,MS, Apple and every other online music vendor wants you to think that MP3 is dead. This is just the latest salvo in that direction.
As long as MP3 remains the most popular format people are never going to see protected media formats as the better option. If enough people stop using MP3, the mp3 lifestyle can be killed locking people into one DRM format or the other. The music war will really settle down then between WMA vs. AAC, MS vs. Apple, Sony vs. Ipod - wars that MS/Sony is effective at waging. At the moment Mp3 creates an escape route for the customer from each of these wars. MS doesn't like MP3s for the same reason it doesn't like Linux, it gives customers a choice.
Making MP3 illegal/evil/inferior/useless is the ultimate quest of the evil empire.
The only reason that the ratio of MP3 files to other music formats is falling happens to be human stupidity.
When MP3 files first broke on the next back in the 1990s, it took a certain amount of knowledge and work to convert audio files.
Now there are a thousand and one useless music converters that do the job. Some even do it well. But now that digitizing music has become common and popular, we are having to deal with the masses.
The masses, as always, are busy doing other things, and are completely ignorant of the importance of having a shared, DRM-less standard, which MP3 is. They don't care that they can't transfer their files completely at well. Worse, some are so clueless that they just assume that files with DRM are "natural".
These clueless people will be the death of us all.
Personally, I plan to be part of the resistance, and plan to keep creating and enjoying MP3s. Damn these locked down formats. They can go to hell.
P.S. Don't tell me about ogg. I tried it, and I disliked it.
P.P.S. Don't tell me that MP3 isn't an open standard and that Fraunhofer owns me. I don't care.
Just like there's never going to be a need for more than 512Kb of RAM...
:)
Hey, the guys got to the moon with no mouse, and if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Sometimes "experts" in a field tend to look down on non experts in a field for not knowing the terminology in the field. Due to the limited nature of the cerebal cortex and basic smithian economics, it is to be expected that not everyone will take an enough of an interest in every field to learn the basic terminology. This is a good thing. The supperior attitide of the expert is generally a manifestation of deeper psycological neurosis indicating a lack of self confidence and a desire for recognition.
Sorry for the cookie mr troll, hope you're not diabetic.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Now, I guess I could go through and re-encode all my CDs to AAC since it's supposed to be better, but who has the time? Either way, how would anyone ever know which format I'm using?
What?
What they find is probably tecnically correct, however they are reading too much into it. My guess is that people may not inetersted in having millions of mp3s for bands they never listen to anyway when it's a hassle to backup, and could get them arrested, etc. etc. To draw a trend line from this culling of surplus mp3's to world dominance is (more than) a bit optimistic, but probably good propaganda.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
...but at least one recent study reports that people are deleting MP3s faster than they are downloading them...
This study also found that burning an mp3 to a CD-R was slower than deleting it. Story at 11.
First BSD, now MP3 is dying too? Where will it end?
I don't know how others do it, but I rip all the CD's I purchase into mp3 and then burn them to CDR. I then use those CDR's as my daily music source... while I keep the originals in dark storage bins. I rip to mp3 because I know everything will play them... and when i'm listening to music at work on crappy computer speakers, 128bit mp3 doesn't sound any different then playing them off the original CD. If a CDR ever dies on me, I just re-create it from the original CD's. Easy, no?!
Meh.
And pointing out the sales number you also think the McDonalds has the best food in the world because they sell the most? That ford has to best cars because they sell the most?
Quantiy does not equal quality.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Please. MSN runs the story that a format that competes with Microsoft's own WMA format is dead , and of course their own WMA is thriving. And the massess accept it as fact. Drink some more of the kool-aid guys. If you read it on MSN it must be so. No conflict of interest in this story. Cant imagine it has anything to do with Microsofts push into the portable music market (v.s. iPod). Consider the source, always...
I can't but others claim they can, don't really care all that much just don't like if other people who also can't hear the difference claim that therefore everyone else can't hear it either.
I know I got poor hearing because I was cleaning up my mp3 collection and choosing wich version of a song I would wipe and wich I would keep. Basically it came down to size as listening to two different encodings at the same time had me not detecting any differences.
Of course I do hear the difference between a really bad one and a good one but between two good encodings the one at 128 and the other at 192? No difference I can hear.
But unlike the poster I responded to I don't claim that others can't hear it. I like people who still have a huge vinyl collection and are fighting a lost battle against the CD. I like eccentric people. People who have a collection of thees wich they blend themselves for the best taste for the time of year. People who roast their own coffee. People who have tube radios.
So go ahead and use flac or even digitize your LP's. It makes little difference to me, hell I listen to music on the computer, any audiophile would be horrified by that already. Soundblaster Hi-Fi by even the loosest of standards.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"AAC and WMA, meanwhile, are apparently gaining market share. "
I find that MP3's are too easily breakable.
A small amount of corruption renders the entire file unreadable.
How many companies are producing players _without_ mp3 support? Sony was the last stalwart and they recently gave in to the obvious just to compete.
Yes this story is obviously a farce formed from a host of misconceptions.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Please report to the nearest re-education centre immediately. Or not.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Seriously, did they break into people's computers and do searches? Did they use P2P searches (which are about as reliable as a slashdot poll)? Did they run around a small part of the US looking for information? No, the story says "analysts" and "researchers", without naming names as far as I read.
The researchers are the NPD group. They provide a client that can be voluntarily downloaded and used, that keeps track of these things. It is safe to say that most people running this client know about it.
Of course, this still retains the problem of sample bias. People tend not to do illegal things when other people are watching, and the recent lawsuits may have provided a reason to clean up some computers.
Although it's true i was downloading much more mp3 when i first got my broadband some years ago, there's still a good amount of mp3 material sitting on my hdd. Also there's a couple hundred cdroms with mp3 on them waiting for me have a listen. Basic reason for not downloading so much anymore would be that i have too many mp3s to be able to listen to in my life time anyway, and a lot of new music isn't really music i like (like people with a couple hundred cds, at some point you got the classics of whatever music you like and your collection stops its rapid growth). So unless it's some really interesting music i wouldn't download it so quickly anymore.
Sample this!
And not just that, they also show their bias and clearly take sides, which ends up revealing their motives, when they say:
"The slow shift in MP3's role is part of an ongoing change in the digital-music industry, with the focus moving slowly away from the anarchic file-swapping networks and toward money-making stores and services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store."
For those who didn't get it, notice that they freewillingly used of "anarchic" to put a bad light on file swapping to make it seem like it's something obsolete already.
This is self serving BS. Mp3 is still the shit because so many devices can play it!
Consider the source!!! -- MSN -- It's a campaign, that's all it is.
Because the other 16 items on that albumn probably are shit. I think the whole download thing is good because it will get us out of the old studio model where they would drag out some piece of crap that the drummer wrote just to fill up the otherwise empty space. Or worse a bad cover of somebody else's hit song. Of course it also means that our listening preferences are directed by the media - oh...wait... it already is!
The present day MP3 refuses to die!!!
Back in 1998... I remember it quite clearly, Bill Gates said "The MP3 is dead." Six years later, Sony finally relents and adds MP3 playability to some of their hardware (including the PSP!).
I'll give you another example that I ran across this week.
Back in 2001 when I bought my Ford Focus ZX3, I had to add in my own CD player that would play MP3 files.
While taking my car in for service this week, I got a complimentary rental car for the day, 2005 Ford Focus ZX4 SE. It came from the factory with a built-in CD player that would play MP3 files.
No WMA/AAC support, just MP3s, and it was able to read the ID3 tags.
Personally, I'll probably always use MP3. After all, I own all of the following devices that play MP3 and it's handy to be able to easily move files from one to the other:
- in-dash CD/MP3 player in the car
- small boombox that plays CDs/MP3s
- small portable CD player that plays MP3s
- mini-CD player (8cm CDs) that playse MP3s
A few of those devices support WMA, but some are MP3 only. MP3 is the lowest-common-denominator format and there's now a lot of hardware out on the market that support MP3.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
What's your next step?
Umm, maybe tell us what you are looking for?
... or just record it from analog.
But the soundcard driver would provide the best quality for transcoding.
you insensitive clods. ;)
i have never downloaded a track as you discribe, other than a miss-labeled track. i have downloaded loads (over 1Tb) and if i like it (Rare!) i'll BUY it. if it is crap, i'll delete it.
why can the music industry be like other industries, for example if my shirt is not quite what i wanted, when i get home from buying it i'll take it back, and change it or get MY cash back, if the CD i buy is CRAP, then i have lost HALF-A-DAY's hard work earning my money to BUY it.