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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. "

3 of 574 comments (clear)

  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!

  3. 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.