Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MP3 Going the Way of the 8-Track?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the its-gotta-happen-someday dept.

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. "

6 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. Other Formats? by sp00 · · Score: 3, Informative

    What about OGG?

    1. Re:Other Formats? by arivanov · · Score: 5, Informative
      Major problem - no OGG car devices available whatsof***ever and while many ./ readers can DIY 99.9% of the population cant or will not. If I had an option to buy I would not have looked at doing it either. At the same time every major car audio player has an MP3 device (some real, some with conversion to something else in the PC software).

      This is a shame as OGG is a much better format. I can distinguish MP3 immediately even if it is encoded at 192. It has a nasty distortion in the high frequency range that makes dogs breakfast of any good electric guitar. Disclaimer - my hearing is better then the average for 99.9 people of the same age and I have worked on an MP3 implementation so I have listened to it until puking for several weeks.

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
    2. Re:Other Formats? by hackwrench · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not all free downloads are illegal, thank you very much!

  2. Re:Uh no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Don't Ask Me... by Trolling4Dollars · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...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
  4. AAC is important for me by PureCreditor · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.