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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. "
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.
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!
After Emmett Charles Plant touched it, Vorbis went to shit. Similar to after he touched LinuxToday, TimeCity, Slashdot, and pretty much everything else.
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
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.
With 8 track, the tapes only worked with 8 track players.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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
> Well, that shook the industry into finding alternate solutions.
Yes, certainly that's why they went for WMA (Microsofts patent portofolio) and AAC (AT&T, Dolby, Sony and, you may have guessed it, Fraunhofer IIS).
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
My hoard of Napster 1.0 music files aren't going anywhere soon. Sure, they are redundant with other stuff I have downloaded, and many I haven't listened to in years. But going through them would take time, and I never know when I might need that 'Men Without Hats' track. Besides, harddrive space is incredibly cheap, the whole collection is probably taking up less than $5.00 worth of disk drive.
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.
Actually, Emmett was the founder of Time City. It went to shit when he started to get annoyed that people weren't taking the project in the direction he had hoped. He was quite unclear about what he wanted, and from everyone else's perspective, it was a case of people coming up with good suggestions, Emmett going "that's not right", and putting large quantities of "stop energy" into every attempt at progress.
The fact that the project was little more than a name, a mailing list, and a "mission statement" didn't help, nor the "it's my idea, start your own project if you want to do that" flames aimed at people who were suggesting things he didn't like.
It just goes to show that you can't build a decent open-source project by coming up with a vague idea and trying to get people to build stuff for you without contributing code or elaborating on your ideas.
By that argument, if people are deleting more than they download, more than 100% of the music we download is crap. I do not think you know what that word means.
There are basically two possible explanations for this, at least in my book. One of them is that people are downloading the same songs in other formats. The other is that people are just realizing that the music they previously downloaded was crap, and that they only downloaded it because they could.
Of course, if they owned a CD or DVD burner, they could just shovel it onto optical media and save it for posterity... Moving files isn't quite the same as deleting them. If it was, I'd be deleting everything I downloaded, since it eventually makes it onto CD when I no longer need a local copy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If he thought he was downloading Bad Religion's "Against the Grain" album, and realized that it was incorrectly named from whatever Britney Spears' latest album is, renaming it doesn't make it Bad Religion.
Deletion is the only option.
-9mm-
A hungry man will tell you anything if you give him a cookie.
An playing LPs in your car was always easy.
No wonder they still selling millions of albums on "vynl"
As a DJ I've bought and still buy a significant number of vinyl records, and in fact probably own more LPs than CDs. I love my 1200s and crates of records, but I still wish vinyl sounded as good as CDs and didn't require maintenance. My shoulders, back, and arms also wish the 12 inch records could magically go on a diet and trim down to CD sexiness.
Sure, there are some aesthetic listening qualities to playing stuff on vinyl. Some people like the slight static/crackle sounds and the other random artifacts that they'll call enhancements. After spending way too much time previewing records in reference headphones for years I think I could do without such artifacts.
That said, whenever I'm playing out at parties or a club I've noticed that no one wants to see someone spin CDs. There's some aesthetic aspect of nightlife that makes people think that 12 inch rotating dics look cool. And somehow spinning vinyl appears to be an artform, whereas using CDs is relegated to the respectfulness of queuing up something in winamp. Oh well.
You can only violate the DMCA if you're a citizen of the United States or one of it's territories.
Learn something new.
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
(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.