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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. "
What about OGG?
http://reilly.typepad.com/cameronreilly/2004/09/aa c_vs_wma_vs_m.html
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
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
Here's what I do: I just pipe the directory of the CD-R to a text file with the CD-R's number as its filename in my library. Then I grep through the text files which are kept in a seperate directory on my HD. Takes very little space, and you can make a command prompt shortcut in Windows that starts in that directory.
Of course it means you have to remember how the files were named, but usually you just search for parts of titles or artist names.
Maybe there should be a MP3-grep that searches the ID tags? Maybe it already exists, but my system works fine so far so I never checked.
I delete MP3s when they are riddled with dead air, errors, beeps, or incorrectly named (on purpose) by asshats.
...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
I use DVD's to archive my music. I buy tunes from Itunes and strip the DRM then when I get 4 gig, I burn to DVD.
so far I've only got 3/4 a dvd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Item number: 5725414072 on ebay is all I need ;)
I was just being funny. But I got a good laugh when I searched for '8 track' on ebay and saw how many pages of hits there were.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
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.
OK, here's the deal: 5.1 music is a fucking joke.
If you read some of my posts on that very topic, you'll see that I agree with you, for the most part.
However, where more-than-two channels does matter, you described as the most likely situations in which to listen to music - Moving around the house (better position independant spatial reproduction), in a noisy environment (better resistance to directional noise), etc.
But no... Sitting at home, in the living room, deliberately "just" listening to music - A good pair of 'phones will do worlds more for sound quality than adding more channels to the signal. No argument there.
How many people do you know who have a 5.1 system and would sit down and actually listen to music in that environment?
Several, but I'll grant your point - Still not very many, percentage-wise.
How many 5.1 systems are installed in cars again?
I actually see that as the most likely place for 5.1 to catch on... Most newer cars already have digital audio systems, as well as 4+ speakers. The leap to 5.1 (or more realistically, 4.1) would take only a bass tube (a standard upgrade for most car audio systems) and software support.
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
Also, analog does have another bonus, which is related to the "spikes" above. When you push digital/solid state too hard, it clips, ie, that crappy loud pop/click noise. Analog, on the other hand, will just naturally compress--which is really great when you're looking for the 'wall of amp' sounds in hard rock/heavy metal. Max out the board and you have instant, music compression.
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.