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The Future of Digital Audio
Andru Edwards writes "It can be said that the current digital music scene can be a bit overwhelming with all the competing technologies and file formats. No matter what format you use, these fairly new compression methods make it easy to carry along your entire music collection with you wherever you go, surpassing anything we could have done a decade ago. So where are we headed? This article examines what the future of digital music will bring, both from the hardware and software perpectives."
There's more than mp3, Microsoft and Apple. This is a horrible article.
Everyone likes MP3s.
Everyone's really into this string thing now.
a one and a one and a zero
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I See the this article like something the uncle Bill Said some time ago, like the book's and Cd's will die in 4 or 5 years.. I Don't Think So .... I Think That book and other media will die but not in a so near future ... and they will not dissapear from one day to another .... the will do it progressively ....
but what the hell am I to question about that
Eduardo N. Fortes
No mention on Ogg.
Companies will try harder and harder to make sure DRM exists in all these formats and is ever more restrictive ("Oh, well with our new Super-Duper Audio Discs, you can only play it 5 times on one single device.")
All the while, prices for these new formats will either stay the same, or go up, due to "increasing costs of production" and stay that way.
I have MP3s and OGGs living along just fine. If a better format comes out than OGG I will be using that too.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Where is HDCD in the article? (not that it mattered to what they were talking about)
Man, I was hoping for discussions on what the maximum sample rate that makes a difference is, or how much sample resolution future systems will have. (12 channels of 96-bit 1MHz audio!)
-mkb
I'm stunned the article didn't talk aboutt the fragility of digital music. My coworker's hard disk crashed and he lost a few hundred dollars of iTunes songs. When he called Apple asking for a replacement for the music he already bought, Apple told him he should have backed it up, and they would be glad to send him a history of his purchase so that he may re-buy them. If the future of digital music is paying real money for soft intangible music, then I'm not interested. I'm happy with streaming radio and pirating my friends' CD's, the old-fashioned way.
Digital audio is doing for music what the printing press did for books, it makes the medium available for all, not just those with the means to enjoy it, or create it. Digital audio has led to an era of freedom for our music.
So why does everyone seem to be trying to take it away?
There is to people who are very tech-oriented like we are. My dad, who is pretty handy with a computer, knows only mp3, wma, and wav. Your standard to slightly above-standard user isn't going to be able to tell you a single damn difference between mp3 and ogg. Hell, as I'm just a programmer weinie/college student, I can only name mp3, wma, ogg, that shitty atrac-3, flac, aac, and mpc. I'm sure there are quite a few that I'm totally missing here, but you see where I'm coming from.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
"A one - a one zero - a one, one zero, one one, one zero zero!"
I'm sorry but my mp3s still dont sound no where as full as my good old fasion vinyl purple rain album.
Article sez:
Yah-huh. And after that it makes the observation that:
Isn't it patently obvious? These people don't even know what freedom means. Their view of freedom must include being yoked to someone's cart.They tend to ignore the possibility of a new format all together. It seems to me that something scalable is the ultimate winner where the original can be really high res like SACD but it can "self-downconvert" depending on the media you put it on. For that matter, there really shouldn't be any difference between video and audio. Like MPEG-4 you should be able to put it on any media and play it in any device.
I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo. Future systems will include wireless file transfer, so that you can seamlessly access songs from your player while in your car. Yes, the Griffin iTrip accessory sends the songs over an FM frequency to your car, but it has trouble in certain urban environments, and you have to fish for an available frequency
.
He really has a point there. I got sick of burning CD's, so I bought an MP3 player. I use a car-kit (bless those things) to listen the music from my MP3 player. I use the FM transmit sometimes, but just like the article says, I have trouble finding available frequencies. New compression methods/formats are all well and good, but I'd like to see better integration between audio devices. I want to be able to stream music from my audio unit and have my car audio system pick it up and play it
There are car MP3 players, but the ones I have seen require you to burn a CD with MP3's on them.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
How about filesize/quality, patents, protection/restriction and processor-usage?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Slashdot and the open source community does NOT condome piracy, which is why we use FREE Linux instead of pirating Windows XP. You need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
One fundamental thing, though:
There's always an analog solution to a digital problem. If you can play it once, I guarantee that someone will use that one time to hook it up to their computer and record it in a non-managed format. If you can only listen with X-brand headphones with a special adapter, someone will cut the cable and make a way to record the sounds in a different format.
No copy protection is fail-safe. As such, they will all fail.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I would love to see a CompactFlash slot put into an iPod mini. 4GB of HD, plus the ability to swap tunes in and out on a CF card? Have a permanent core collection on HD, then "stuff you're in the mood for" on a 1GB CF? CF cards are getting really cheap these days.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Oh lord I can hear the digital ramping!
... SACD's and DVD audio are pointless. Media producers need some new selling point, so they come up with audio DVD's and say it has 5x better quality. But, audio DVD's contain more spectral data than the human ear can even percieve. Sure, you can argue that even though some sounds are not audible, they help to better replicate the experience of music perfromed in person. But if I'm listen through a couple of earbuds plugged into my Ipod (that only produce upto 20,000Khz), do I actually gain anything? No, it's just a ploy to get me to re-perchase my music collection.
There are way too many options in digital audio today. I've quit caring what format I use as long as its a high quality copy and in a format that works with whatever player I choose to use. That is until we can get a mega-ipod that can compress cd's on the fly into a lossless format with a 100:1 ratio, running on Knoppix, that is supported by Bill Gates. Or we all start carrying musical instruments and start having random jam sessions on the street in stead of digital audio, but whatever. I'm fsk'in rambling now.
Hector, I hate to break it to you, but ideas can't be copyrighted. He probably meant to say, "patented" (which would need more rewording to be really correct, but it's close enough). Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but it seems like he's not familiar with patent law terminology. Or else I'm reading it wrong - is he really afraid that somebody will implement the ideas in the article? Why would that be something to be afraid of? Is he afraid he won't get his cut? He's a journalist - he's paid to talk about his ideas. If he wanted more payment, he should be an entrepreneur.
...most music players will be able to fly.
What holes remain that can't be plugged with technology will be plugged with lawyers.
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
for those who don't want to rtfa...
- all music companies care about DRM, and they will all continue to care about DRM
- Apple will face more competition for the ipod
- all audio players will get smaller in size
- hard drives will get cheaper, as will audio players in general
- tivo-for-audio (something that has existed for more than a year) will continue to exist
- some guy thinks players should display lyrics like a karaoke machine
- they think consumers want a single device for everything - pda, audio, phone, watch, video player - even though integrated devices are unsuccessful in many other areas of life (tv/vcr, fridge/web browser, etc.)
The above items are all written by me, and certainly omit some of the details. But I fail to see how any of this reveals anything interesting or unexpected about "the future" of digital audio.
For me, that pretty well sums up the present: everything just works, and I don't have to worry too much what format AV files are in. I don't know if it's because I don't use them much, or because the Debian packagers have done a really nifty job of getting things set up.
I suppose that if it were my hobby, I'd want to know all about those file formats, but I shouldn't have to know to have things just work.
See what I've been reading.
Gee that's too bad. I know how it feels: I recently lost about 60GB of music (and lots of other stuff too) when the mandrake 10 installer decided that it should reformat that windows partition without bothering to ask first.
Funny thing is, the stuff I bought online I just went and downlaoded again. All I had to do was put my email address in a form and Magnatune sent me a list of every selection I bought from them and provided a link and password for me to grab them again.
Huh. Maybe the problem isn't that the music is fragile, only that your rights are. Maybe the solution isn't worrying so much about "backups," but making sure that you give your money to someone who respects their customers.
I re-ripped my entire music collection in 160kps .ogg and now carry it around on my iRiver HP-140 40Gb player. Top quality sound and compression, unencumbered codec, open source software! What more could one ask?
Never eat anything bigger than your head.
ther was a far better on the article on the future of digital audio a while back, i think it was even on slashdot. cannt find it now. it was pre del.icio.us, evidently.
i'd like to point out that CPU usage on a lot of audio processors is getting worse, even for the same task. A lot of the Via solutions dont try to offload anything at all. Its really quite disheartening.
And my other big pet peeve, syncrhonized audio. xntpd should let you sync a couple systems clocks, and music software should be able to compensate for renegade sound card clocks to keep music synced.
Myren
i RTFA and i thought it was pretty good. the greg guy sounds like he has an agenda to push (touting napster/rhapsody subscription model or zen being more intuitive than iPod) but otherwise, it was a fairly entertaining read. lack of one detail about a format is no basis to dismiss the entire article as horrible, which is what you are doing since you supplied no other details in your post.
Dude, I got next!
Too many players out there that only support mp3. Less suppoert wma and aac, and way less support ogg.
Unless you come up with a format that will play on existing hardware players, it'll be extremely slow to adopt.
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Pirates used to argue that they would continue to pirate music until there was a ligitimate digital replacement. iTunes seems to be that service.
When you buy a physical CD and rip to mp3's for convenience, privided you treat the CD well, you'll always have a medium that you can re-rip to mp3's if you have a HD crash.
Now when you buy from iTunes, they know what you have bought, but they wont let you re-download it if you somehow lose it? Even if you were to go to extraordinary lengths to prove your identity?
Does Apple tell all users of iTunes to make a backup, because they wont replace what you've downloaded? Do they make the process of backing up easy?
Most n00bs on the internet don't backup anything. Window's doesn't prompt you to do it, Microsoft doesn't provide any easy to use tools (yeah I know they exist, but they're not in your face enough for the average user).
(posted AC as I've already Modded)
Andru: The thing that I see as being the biggest issue going forward is DRM (digital rights management). iTunes has their DRM for their AAC files, while Microsoft has another for WMA. Of course, they are trying to make it easy with their PlaysForSure initiative. Sony has yet another for it's ATRAC files, and MP3 has none. Therefore, an iPod cannot play any WMA files, and nothing but an iPod can play Apple AAC files. Music purchased from Sony Connect can only be played on Sony digital audio players. Why all the confusion? Fine, we understand that the RIAA wants to protect it's property, but do they have to do it at the expense of causing mass confusion amongst casual music buyers? Even better, why can't these protected files just work across platforms? If you look at DVD's, there is one protection standard. We should have the same thing for our digital music. If there was an effective DRM solution out there, it would seem that the music stores would have no choice but to support it as it would ease the minds of the purchasers, thus bringing in more cash.
That's where it all hits the fan - DRM. If the RIAA wasn't such a greedy bunch of pigfuckers, we could all trade MP3s and get dinged for each trade (say, a dime per trade), and everyone would be happy. Napster had a system like that under works, and were ready to roll it out, then it was reduced to a smoke hole in the ground over in Redwood Shores.
Dime a Trade? I'd do it. Especially if a source got a rating (this way asshats who rip stuff at 64 mono, have clicky messy files, or are shills for the RIAA, can be avoided) like in EBay. You would have to use a specific client, and that client would be wired to your bank account. Everybody happy, and we could all use plain vanilla MP3s - no muss no fuss no chocolate mess.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Yes, there is MIDI too!
Hector: I'm almost afraid to comment on what we'll see in the future because some of these ideas aren't copyrighted, and may show up on the next batch of digital players.
"Copyrighted ideas?"
Who the fuck are these people? A bunch of jr. high students? I would call this article a circle jerk, but it's too self indugent for that...
Nah.
You just put very quiet warbly tones into the audio with a binary message encoded in them... When you play it back, the playback machine hears the tones and refuses to play any further.
There is no way of filtering them out as they do a random walk, and you trash audio if you try to remove them with hi-q notch filters anyway.
This system was mooted a few years ago, and got a lot of complaints from 'audiophiles', but it was quickly realised that if you did not tell people the tones were there, they cannot hear them.
So, the tones came back, and are on a large number of CDs released in the last few years, waiting for the DRM tech to catch up to make use of them. They survive analog copying very well.
Disagreeing with someone does not make their words non-insightful.
Um, backing up a digital audio collection isn't a big deal (I use DVDs). And I'll take the "fragility" of having music on my ipod/computer over the hassle of CDs (constant swapping, shelf-space, can't make track lists, etc.) any day.
Minor thing: CD's and streaming radio are still digital music.
Vinyl VS CD, well I'd say the CD had higher quality.
But VS a 256kbps 44.1k Mp3, the vinyl will win every time.
I haven't been able to find anything like this (yet).
So we have portable CD players that play mp3's. That's nice. Plop in a CD-R with mp3's into your portable CD-Walkman-type device, and you are good to go. Who needs hard-drive players that cost much much more and that you have to keep plugging into your USB or firewire port?
CD-Audio is silly. DVD-audio is silly. If you can have a portable device that plays FLAC, which there are (they are hard-drive based) from Rio, I think - then what's the point of having huge uncompressed audio files if you can cut the size in half and still have the same sound quality?
Flac does support 24+ bit audio, so instead of using up tons of storage space with that 24bit 96khz quality, just compress it losslessly.
What we need - and I don't know if there are issues with CSS, etc... but we need a Walkman-type device, not much larger than a CD (you know, those round-type things you can get for $50) - that supports DVD data disks.
A DVD data disk is the same size as a CD data disk, and it can hold about 12 lossless - CD Audio quality albums (give or take). Plop in a data DVD that has flac files on it - I think this is much easier in terms of storage space, backups, and not having to connect to some USB or Firewire port all the time every time you want to change the disk.
What I want is a portable FLAC player that accepts DVD data disks - as our embedded processors get more powerful, the need for uncompressed streams like CD audio or DVD audio will be unnecessary.
A portable DVD data player that plays FLAC. That's where it's at, man. Just like the $50 CD Walkmans that play mp3s, except one that plays FLAC and accepts data DVD disks.
I too am curious what the Next Big Thing(tm) in digital audio formats will be, but how much smaller/better quality is any new/evolved format going to be -- and with storage getting so much larger and cheaper, will it even matter?
For audio, I think the eventual winner will be the format not with the best quality per se, but the best lock-down ability (DRM) to get the major commercial people behind it. In terms of pure audio, I think OGG might be the best quality format for now, but has nobody built an *optional* framework for allowing content creators to protect their work? Is it any wonder M$ is ready to eat everyone's lunch in this regard with WMA/V? (On that point, is there not some OSS encryption/rights management project that could be joined to OGG and/or FLAC to enhance the commercial viability of high quality open audio formats?)
Video, on the other hand, is so different from audio I don't think it has a place in this discussion, but to your point of having it play everywhere, I have wondered why there isn't some open technology platform for packaged video (VCD, DVD, whatever is next and then after that). How hard would it be to define a menuing system on something flash-like, that the video files must be of format X (or any number of acceptable formats), and the acceptable DRM schemes will be "___", and then sit back watch the Chinese and Koreans compete on who can build it cheaper? Just my $0.02 on that slightly OT point...
har har har, I'm so clever. *NT*
You're right, you won't ever notice the difference with your iPod, certainly with those ear bud headphones but don't insinuate that more resolution doesn't sound better. The truth is that DVD-A and SACD do sound quite a bit better than CD as a format. The actual amount is dependent on how much you want to spend on hardware to play it back. If you play a great SACD on a $20 ghetto blaster, don't expect it to sound any better than an 8-track. But, spend as little as $1000 on a stereo and you will be able to hear the difference. Then you'll start to get out from under the limits of the hardware.
there's no need to read this article!
Until such a day that OGG is SUBSTANTIALLY better quality at a SUBSTANTIALLY lower bitrate/file size, mp3 will be king. Have you -- or anyone else reading -- actually computed the number of tracks of difference that OGG versus MP3 makes in evaluating a portable music player? OGG is very nice, but MP3 plays EVERYWHERE which is why it's *the* digital file of reference. When OGG is supported by 99.999% of digital audio devices then it (and its supporters) will be able to rightfully complain of exclusion. Until then, let's focus on the substance of what's being discussed in the article rather than bickering over what are eventually irrelevant details.
The article mentioned music players integrating with video players... What about cell phones? Almost everyone has a cell phone, and a lot of people carry mp3-players around at all times. There're already integrated systems and I think this will continue, with cell phones pushing the < 1 GB-music players completely off the market.
:)
The bigger players, like the iPod, are of course a different story. Maybe their market share will grow bigger because people will be demanding higher and higher qualities. Or maybe they will not, because the masses are satisfied with their cell phone-music players.
Or maybe the music players will follow the digital cameras: people will have them both on their cell phones and as 'real' cameras for high-quality pictures, using them on different occaissions. Then you could have your cell phone-music player for 'on the road' and a semi-portable system that could be docked in your home music system, in your car radio and at work for loads and loads of high quality music.
The possibilities are endless. I'm looking forward to it.
Dude -- the unibomber is in jail and you will be too if you *really* believe that statement enough to put your trigger finger where your mouth is. I believe in overcoming stupidity with the light of reason, which is why Linux, OGG, and OSS in general will win in the end.
Save your ammo for the things you intend to serve for dinner...
Article seemed near sighted. If I peer into the future, I see DRM screwing up everything. It already has; wide-area wireless internet radio would have been the biggest and best thing possible.
But peering around that, the coolest radio gadget would be one that tune tunes *every* station in the area simultaneously, and stores it all. Forget about scheduling a recording; if you discover something interesting, you can go back and listen to the whole thing. Then go even farther back, and listen to the previous year's worth of episodes.
Toss in some heavy processing and an internet connection, and it can identify every song, speech, and show as it plays, and you could listen by genre across every station in your area. But if you have internet, you have internet radio, and this whole thing becomes useless.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
ROFLMAO
Wireless at it's best????
This speaks loads for the credibility of the authors who make such a dumb gramatical mistake lol.
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The more they try to get away with shit like this,
the more justified people are to really rip them
off for all their worth.
The record companies really do deserve it!
Online music stores will play a big role in what the format war will bring. As currently DRM exists only for WindowsMedia and iTunes, meaning wma and aac, these are the starting contenders. And mp3 is (still) around due to its past huge success, but unless Fraunhofer adds a way to stick DRM on top of it, it won't be adopted by online stores. Love it or hate it, DRM is what vendors like. They will keep on pushing it.
Another factor will be players. Major player support is mp3, wma and aac these days. Some noises about ogg vorbis support happen here and there, but unless it catches on more it's going to stay insignificant. Maybe we should pray for some music retailer to start using vorbis in DRM-ed ogg files just to show the non-geek world that it's possible to have a free and good digital audio format? After all, not having to pay royalties for encoding/decoding the music should mean more profits, right?
why was this funny?
Though it would be fun to try.
sulli
RTFJ.
I have been predicting for several years that the ultimate file format that everybody may eventually adopt is a compressed, non-lossy copy of the masters used for a given song, plus a fader moves script and an effects script.
Think about it, the stones have introduced their remastered collection on the new 5.1 CD format. Beyond that home theater has 6.1 and 7.1, and a few other formats that I'm sure I have never heard of. The trend is toward more data being given to the listener in a recording. The logical conclusion is a copy of the master. By including a fader move script and effects script, I can play the recording as it was created by the studio engineer. Or, perhaps I am a fan of the band's bassist, so I push the bass to the front of the mix. Mabey I like the bootygrove music, so I dump the drumline and dub in a drum machine backing track. Perhaps I like to have my rap music with disgusting bass, so I crank all the bass in my favorite gangsta ditty. I can also fool with the balance, effects, etc. as much as I want.
As digital processing power gets cheaper, doing real-time remixing with 24 tracks in realtime becomes a viable option. You already have something similar going on in video games.
Personally, I hope this happens in my lifetime. I can think of several albums that I love that I would spend $100 to have a high quality copy of the master, just to be able to fool with them and listen to the results.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
with there proprietary ATRAC3 format, everyone will jump on bored and finally we will see a universal standard!
Whats your Favorite song or artist? YourFavMusi
should have been named: The Future of the IPod. Nothing there very visionary about the future of music.
IANAL ... and certainly you can't patent an idea, *but* you can lose the right to patent something in Europe if it becomes publicly published before you submit your patent. I believe that in the US you have up to twelve months after publishing to submit your patent application.
This is certainly what I was told by my company's patent lawyers, that we were not to announce new software concepts or techniques in our products until they had a chance to submit the patent application.
By announcing a novel method in a public forum, these pundits could remove the IP protection from that idea prior to the patent being awarded, certainly in Europe.
Quoth the article:
We want to lose ourselves in the music during those long commutes, and digital players will eventually take us there.
I don't know about you, but the last thing I want is the asshat behind me "getting lost" in the latest Britney song and putting a thousand-dollar dent in my fender.
Keep your immersion crap away from people operating heavy machinery, mmkay?
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Joe Average: "Boy, I wish digital music files had more DRM on them. These wide open MP3 files make me nervous!"
Yea, I hear that all the time. NOT!
off topic response: there's a bug in the installer. If you remap the windows partitions it may or may not reformat them. Oddly enough, when it does this it also doesn't do that other thing where it says "this partition (whatever) is about to be reformatted.... continue?"
/etc/fstab after the install.
It has done this to me at least twice. Not fun.
I don't worry about it anymore because mandrake sucks ass and I'm through with it (ubuntu forever, yay). But FWIW if you have valuable windows partitions you might want to tell it to just ignore all those windows partitions and add them manually to
That's what I learned (the hard way) to do. And not just wth mandrake. I ain't taking no more chances...
Andru: One thing I do expect in the future, is to see flash MP3 players slowly diminish from the market. While it is more shock absorbent, I just don't see the cost of the medium as being feasible going forward, especially with hard drive prices plummetting.
I don't believe this will be the case.
Flash memory prices are plummetting quite a bit aswell, especially those exchangeable cards like SD, CF, MMC etc. I bought an SD 512 MB card in May for about 200$ which was then the lowest price on a Danish price index site. It is now listed for 35$ on the same site. That's 17,5% of the original price in just 7 months.
Apple too are taking on flash players eventhough they first dizzed them, maybe because they realized that even their iPod mini with its 4 GB is more than enough space for people. Of course people will demand more and more space for their portable media-players, but flash memory prices will probably keep decreasing at the same rate.
Ditch you portable collection and get connected.
Soon you'll be able to say, store all you music at home (or on someone elses server if Microsoft, Aol or whoever get there way), and pick it up in you car, on your 'walkman alike', at work, or just in the living room.
Say a reasonably compressed song ways in at 3MB and lasts 6mins you should be able to get that down in real time with a 100bps pipe, WIFI can easly cope with that, and 3G should be able to provide.
Now all we have to do is outlaw DRM becuse it effectivly extends copyright indefinatly(or until the DRM is cracked) breaking one of the building blocks of society, public domain works.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The Future of Digital Audio is going to be free, or at least that's the way it looks to me. Musepack, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC. Three wonderful formats all freely licensed. I also must vouch for the terrible quality of this article. The article discusses digital media, yet the title mentions only digital audio.
It's the Nyquist theorem - the sampling has to be twice the highest frequency (in this case, for human beings, about 20Khz) you want in order to get proper reproduction. It's a theory, and there are some things about calculating it that don't make it 100%. It may not be 100% correct. But it's more or less, approximately correct, which is good enough.
What about your pets? Maybe your dog would like to sing along with the Beethoven? Think about that for a minute.
And again, CD audio 44.1Khz is based around how the Nyquist theorem applies to human beings - so if you up the frequencies the sound quality IS better, your ears (hearing) just can't notice any difference because you are a human being with human ears. There may be subtle things, or subtle frequencies that affect your subconcious, overtones that might resonate with frequencies in your body or certain glands in your brain (not necessarily your ears).
Music, live, for instance - can be a very spiritual experience - so these mp3's and 44.1Khz CD Audios might be taking some of that spirituality away from us, unfortunately.
We should all just go back to having random jam sessions on the street. We'd be much happier. That way our pets could sing along and we could all have a lot of fun!
Yesterday, there was an article looking at Spam filters. It covered a number of the proprietary ones but NOTHING in the OSS even though it is OSS filters that are doing the real work. It is like covering web servers without mentioning Apache, or talking about web browsers without doing MSIE. But who knows? may be it is not BG or clueless reporters. Perhaps it it the illuminati.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They do make it pretty damn easy to backup your music, IMHO. In iTunes all one must do is put in a cd and make 2 clicks. If that's too hard, then maybe they should stick with more "traditional" methods.
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
Yeah, but will my modded Nomad 2 stop when it hears the sounds? Never in life. The old machines will keep being in demand just for reason like this.
If you can't get them anymore, you'll be able to import them from Canada or China.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
This may be true, but as soon as programs start scanning for these tones to make use of them, software crackers will be all over it and a utility to strip the tones from the music will be released within days. Actually, even if it becomes a serious problem and these tones are screwing everyone up filesharing completely (which is unlikely), I forsee popular P2P programs integrating the stripping program to automatically strip mp3s/oggs the user is sharing.
I certainly didn't know five years ago that I wanted a hard drive based MP3 player, but with technology comes desires to push that technology even further.
Jeez, and how 'ahead' are these guys? My friends and I knew we wanted ANY sort of portable MP3 player back in 1996. Homebrewed HD-based MP3 players were the only ones that had been implemented (heard about some who homebrewed one into his car), but that was it. CD ones were not around yet. We certainly wished one would be manufactured, but Rio didn't come out with their stuff for another 3 years.
Boy did those 3 years hurt. The best we could do to make our music portable was to attach a notebook running winamp to the input to a car stereo. But I would always worry about the car's effects on the notebook's HD, so we didn't do it that often.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
CDs? What CDs are digital music? I didn't know that!
This may be true, but as soon as programs start scanning for these tones to make use of them, software crackers will be all over it and a utility to strip the tones from the music will be released within days.
Didn't you read the parent post?
There is no way of filtering them out as they do a random walk, and you trash audio if you try to remove them with hi-q notch filters anyway.
Who the hell modded this up? The criticism is that the guys in the article have their heads so far inside the box their ears are pointy. More than not mentioning one "favorite format", they didn't mention _any_ format that isn't mainstream _today_, and didn't talk about any interesting new ways of storing or creating music _period_. What about scalability? What about better portable pseudo-surround? What about automatic sorting by meta-data? This is just stuff I pulled out of my fundament in _one_minute_, and already I'm doing better than those press release regurgitators.
Uh...To storing more music?
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
I respectfully disagee with the idea that the format with the strongest DRM will be the most widely used in the future. I believe that the MP3 revolution has created an entire new way of thinking about recordings, copyright, and who owns music. MP3 caused the control of music recordings to shift from the corporate producers of the recordings to the consumers who listen to them. It will never shift back because corporate control depended upon having the music tied totally to the distribution media (the disk). Once digital technology seperated the content from the medium, it changed the financial equation for the entire music industry. The record companies remind me of the makers of typewriter ribbons, who really, really wish that all these word-processing computers would 'just...fucking...go...away!' In the long run, adding bulletproof DRM to a recording will only guarantee that the recording will only reach a tiny percentage of its possible audience. Just because the global music corporations are so big now doesn't mean that they can halt or turn back the MP3 revolution.
In the future the format that provides the easiest,fastest, and most reliable way to copy whole libraries of thousands of albums at one time will be the most widely used format, regardless of any copyright law.
Companies will try harder and harder to make sure DRM exists in all these formats and is ever more restrictive ("Oh, well with our new Super-Duper Audio Discs, you can only play it 5 times on one single device.")
All the while, prices for these new formats will either stay the same, or go up, due to "increasing costs of production" and stay that way.
Precisely why I will not buy this "new" technology. It is just a money grab. I never did buy the CDs available that I used to have in record and tape media. Heck, it is only now I plan on getting a TV-DVD now that the prices are down below $100.
They will do whatever the conumer will let them do. If we all banded together and didn't buy a CD or DVD for a minth we would make them shake.
And if they put copy protection against the owner, I will not buy it.
Bought a VCR the other day, might be hard to get soon and they do record the shows well so you can skip the 30 minutes of adds in a 60 minute show. Tapes are almost free at Costco and reusable.
They just don't get it, a DVD aught to be sold for $6 and most would buy them like popcorn. In essence people are downloading the movies because the pricing is stupid.
Have updatable firmware for their audio player ...
No I don't work for that site, its just that the Soul Player home page has been under construction for the past year or so...
Meet new people, and kill them.
one of two: a. we already know how to play mp3's - are they going to build soundcards? are they going to make homemade soundcards illegal? b. if we can learn how to make the tones we can learn how to unmake them. or maybe i'm a dork who should've stayed lurking.
Wow an article on the FUTURE of Digital audio. MP3 phones! Will the miracles of early 2001 never cease?
Andru: [...] I am not expecting huge storage on these phones either, otherwise they become indirect competition to the iPod. Instead, I think we will see the phones able to port about 50 tracks.
ME: Bah! The phones will certainly be strongly branded as iPod phones, and Apple will certainly recieve licensing fees. That's not competition in any meaningful sense. In addition, time has shown that any attempt to limit a music player's usefulness arbitrarily (like a stupid 50-track limit) will certainly backfire. They say themselves later on that hard drives are great because you can store your entire music collection. If musicphones are limited to 50 tracks, I predict abject failure, and I bet the cell phone manufacturers are right with me.
Hector: With the players of the future, we will be able to schedule personal recordings of incoming broadcast music on a given hour, and play it back when we have the free time.
ME: Bah! There's already products that do this, and although they are popular in a small part of the population, Pogo is not going to upset the iPod any time soon. If you really want to see a model of the future, I'm pretty confident it's to be found in Podcasting. As traditional media middlemen grow increasingly desperate to preserve their vanishing way of life, more ways are found to completely bypass them. Podcasters are individuals who make their own audio content, and provide it for download. Why cling tenaciously to traditional audio delivery methods such as radio with its primitive 1-second-of-audio/sec transmit rate when there are better methods available? Imagine instead a few aggregation service providers and recommendation engines with links and software to help find and download the freshest Podcasts you're interested in!
Hector: I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo.
ME: I've been using my Nomad Zen in my car for two years. What's your problem, Hector? I'm not disagreeing with your desire to have a nice wireless way to hook up my Zen to my car stereo, but, dude, BO-RING. Think about this instead: When you pull your car into your garage, it uploads information about what you've been skipping over and what you like to listen to during various times and various driving styles to your home media center, which then, next time you log on to shop for music, makes recommendations, which your car stereo downloads wirelessly across your 802.11 net.
ME: Or heck, 802.11 is so ubiquitous nowadays, your car could download a track or two while you're in the supermarket parking lot (because it's a relatively big download) and store it encrypted. When you get back to the car, your heads-up display could ask if you want to buy the song. A quick purchase transaction later, you get the unencryption key, and away you go. New music on the fly.
Andru: One thing I do expect in the future, is to see flash MP3 players slowly diminish from the market. While it is more shock absorbent, I just don't see the cost of the medium as being feasible going forward, especially with hard drive prices plummetting.
ME: Buh? Maybe they haven't noticed that Flash prices are also on the move. Assuming the same size, speed, and reliability, I consider it a non-issue really.
Andru: With convergence coming into play, people are wanting to start putting pictures and video on their portable devices as well.
ME: Yes, just as Sony's Photo Walkman and Video Walkman were follow-on smash successes after the breakthrough cassette player. Oh wait. No, sorry, I was just smoking cr
they are easy to remove.
old tech, easy to circumvent. I can write a FLAC without the DRM encoding quite easily.
I can use a simple tool like cooledit to do it, we have a plugin that was made at Berkley for such uses. one fingerprint and it can be detected and removed easily.
and that is all it takes one copy to get rreleased in thew wild and then the game is over.
sid!
they have both text and graphical players for linux, and i'm sure there are players for other platforms as well.
Maybe it was psychological, but the pressure feeling wasn't worth the (muffled) noise reduction provided.
Hate to rain on the parade, but any pattern a computer/chip can detect, it can also modify. Instead of thinking of filtering them, just introduce a secondary harmonic that alters the binary message. Since it has to be outside the human threshold of hearing, then the range available to encode the data is limited. Fill that range with additional 'noise' like the messages, change the messages.
Aside from which, I could just use the always open legacy analog hole, play it back in a sound booth with multiple mics for pickups. Isolate speakers, 2 mics cross matched to each, recreate without wiring. Filter inaudibles out, no message left.
Data cannot be configured to protect itself. It must necessarily be accesible to the user, and there are suffiecient of us in the 6 billion plus population to figure out a way around it. If the data can be accessed, it can also be changed.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
I think the music industry would eventually want a system where consumers don't even possess copies of the music, but rather that the music is streamed on demand, and only to those people who can verify that they have actually purchased the "privilege" of listening to that music. A database could keep track of people's purchase history.
On one hand, this would be very convenient in terms of saving space. I still have a lot of CDs which haven't been ripped, and other people must be in the same situation. It would be handy to be able to access all that content and more without having to decide beforehand what I want to listen to on the go.
On the other hand, not only would this music delivery model use up lots of bandwidth, but it would also limit consumers even more in terms of what they could listen to. There's lots of stuff online, but not everything that I might conceivably want to hear. Especially if you like musical niche genres or stuff from other countries, it's not as easy to find what you want through legal music providers like iTunes.
Above all, this music delivery model would require that people give up their control over the music they love. People want to listen to music when they want to, how they want to, without anybody else peering over their shoulder.
Anakin Simpson: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy--ooh, donuts!
I got as far as Apple/iPod/iTunes is a contender. At 128kbs??? Yeah, this is an article I'm going to put my future in. I'm old and on the way out, but I still can hear how crappy 128kbs files are, no matter what the format. Somebody let me know when they write an article for people who know, or at least remember, what decent music actually sounds like. Way too funny is the BMW thingie that plays iTunes on a 75 grand (or whatever) car stereo. Are there any others out there who actually listen to the music--not just have it making noise in the background?
Sig not available, please try again later. If the problem persists, then the submitter is an idiot.
Remember Princeton professor Ed Felton? Remember SDMI?? It's been done, and it was cracked thoroughly.
I agree. Forget copy protection, just wait for some pissed off underpaid assistant engineer to release a bootleg ripped from the studio masters. Or maybe, the engineer gives a copy to a friend who then uploads it...
We use raw AIFF in the studio where I work, and it is easy to bump it down to an mp3. I could even do it right now...go grab one of the glyph disks, plug it in, open the project, export the mastered stereo track to mp3, open my favorite GNUtella client...
Luckly, I love my job, and the artists we work with. The point is, copy protection is meaningless. The only thing that will keep music from being pirated is a change in business models and a change in how people view music. Record companies have screwed everyone from the customer to the musician. When we do an album here at the studio, it is decent, high quality music, because we love the music, not the money. Hopefully, people will like the music enough to pay for it, instead of pirating it.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
On another note, did those car stereo systems with front mounted line-in jacks die out?
This sucker is close. I got one on e-bay for $120, as a refurb.
% 2C 00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2C1759%2C821305
It plays mp3-dvds as a walkman-type device (and happens to double as a USB dvd reader and cd writer).
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the only lossless you'll get out of this is WAV, so no compression. But if you've got flacs on your hard drive, you could transcode them to high-bitrate mp3s, save a crapload of space, and probably never notice the difference in casual listening. And you'd still have the perfect copied on your HD until something better comes along.
now you are supplying reasons why you think the article is horrible. that was my point. if you just post "no vorbis, no flac, lame article," then that just sounds like a vorbis zealot being snobbish, doesn't it?
Yes because lossy compression certainly doesn't take anything out of the source audio. Correct me if I'm wrong but in good compression formats the first data to go is the stuff humans are unlikely to hear is it not?
Whatever evil the record companies remind you of, they are the ones holding the content that the vast majority of folks want, and they choose AAC+FairPlay or WMA+DRM because they want positive control of the end consumption (to a certain degree) of the product. This will never change, so for a given format to be accepted by those who are holding the goods that we all want, the distribution format will need to have acceptable-to-good levels of rights management on board. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and The Labels have what we want -- and they are not going to distribute it in FLAC.
I too am curious what the Next Big Thing(tm) in digital audio formats will be, but how much smaller/better quality is any new/evolved format going to be -- and with storage getting so much larger and cheaper, will it even matter?
This is why I say the digital format war was settled 5 years ago. There's a reason why we still call all these devices "mp3 players" after all.
There's no great need for better compression at lower bit rates as hard drives get bigger and cheaper. I mean the fact is there are two choices (well, three): you compress music into a lossy format, or you compress it into a lossless format (the third choice being you don't compress it at all). The lossy formats we have today are already so good even at low bit rates that they're nearly indistinguishable from the originals, and obviously if you want even better quality than that you just scale up the bit rate and quality settings a bit. With today's hard drives, storage isn't much of an issue with any compressed format at any bit rate - even very large music collections won't use more than a couple GB extra by using higher quality settings throughout the collection.
So assuming that you can get nearly indistinguishable quality from the original with properly encoded MP3, AAC, WMA or Ogg files, and already at fairly small file sizes on hard drives that are only getting bigger and cheaper, I don't much see the point in trying to reduce file size even further. I mean let's not forget that MP3 became popular because people were still using 500MB hard drives at the time... these days, I could spend $100 on a hard drive that could hold my entire music collection with no compression at all.
So it seems to me that the talk about which compressed format sounds best at low bit rates, which has been Apple's and MS's big marketing message for the past few years, is basically moot. It doesn't matter, because every format sounds good at low bit rates (well, except for ATRAC3), every format sounds great at high bit rates, and hard drives just keep getting cheaper.
My guess is this is one reason why MS is trying to change their focus a bit to video. They're not competing with the iPod, they're trying to create a new category of players where the format war has not already been decided in somebody else's favor. They've decided there's just no money for them to make from digital music, but obviously plenty of upside for them in digital video.
I guess what I'm saying is that there probably is not going to be any "Next Big Thing" in digital music, at least not until the day when we have everything, available everywhere, all the time, via a pervasive network that connects every person to every other person and every piece of content ever created, instantly, from anywhere on Earth. But even that is simple evolution of the net; it's not a stretch of the imagination, and it's not a new concept as storing small digital music files on a hard drive would have been to those listening to LP's 50 years ago. I do think traditional music radio's days are numbered, though; subscription services and satellite radio will be its death knell - eventually.
As for DRM, it's difficult to predict what effect it will have but I honestly think it's probably a little overblown... there's never been a DRM scheme that wasn't circumvented pretty much the instant it appeared, so those who want to will always be able to get around it (and obviously, mp3 doesn't even support it... which is one reason for mp3's continued dominance). That doesn't mean DRM'd files won't continue to sell at stores like iTunes, but I think the lack of a standard is just not really a big issue for consumers. It's a bigger issue for music publishers, though; it just strikes me as stupid that the RIAA would allow Apple to impose a DRM scheme that means nobody with a player other than an iPod could play their files (without breaking the DRM)... and vice versa on other sites. You're just cutting a lot of people out of your potential consumer base with that strategy.
ogg is the envelope, vorbis codec
http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp
Mobiles will transform into the all-in-one devices the article talks about.
.ogg. You can't do that with an iPod (without hacking). You don't worry that your PC won't play a certain video file, you just download the codec, same with a mobile. People have to beg apple to extend the iPod with .ogg playback support, and they STILL won't add it!
Mobiles will get harddrives. The first one of these is already announced.
Once those micro HDs get cheaper and implemented in more mobiles, mobiles will be at least as functional as an iPod mini.
The reason mobiles will win over all other devices:
1. You might leave home without your music player, but you will always take your mobile. Mobiles far outsell mp3 players. The mobile is the primary gadget, others are secondary. This means mobiles will get more upgrades and get them faster because there's just more money in it.
2. Smartphones are much more flexible than consumer devices like an iPod. They're basically pocket computers. You can just install a java program to teach a mobile how to play
3. Because of Java Micro Edition (J2ME) MIDP2.0 and higher, the mobile is a universal platform. Unlike the iPod, Creative, iRiver, Rio, PC, Mac, Linux which all need a platform specific program. You can just create one type of program, J2ME, and it will run on all mobiles regardless of processor or operating system. And unlike the PC where Java is held back because of Microsoft's opposition and Sun's mistakes. Java on mobiles is pre-installed. You just cannot easily program/extend consumer (mp3) gadgets like you can a mobile.
In my opinion geeks should go for mobiles because of these reasons. In addition, mobiles will give you the same way to escape DRM hell like you're escaping it on your PC. You just use non-DRM playback software and content sources because you're able to. The cool futuristic features the article is talking about like: "we should be able to share songs from one person's player to another. How cool is that?" Are already possible with a bluetooth mobile, Java MIDP2.0 and the bluetooth API for MIDP2.0
At the moment, mobile manufacturers and network operators are often putting up barriers to freely use them any way you like, as you are using your PC. This is because the phone network operators are afraid people will not download their DRM content. However, as people discover their mobiles can be their mobile PCs, phonemakers who don't free up their products from restrictions will lose market share because in the end, the public is the customer. I also think operators will win bigger by a free mobile market than with a restricted one.
Am I missing something important? I don't think so, and so mobiles will be the future all-in-one gadgets.
My next phone/music player/organizer/whatever will be a Nokia 7710. If it's not hobbled.
By the way, for the "I just want a simple phone" naggers:
1. What are you doing on Slashdot?
2. Powerful doesn't automatically mean difficult to use.
3. There ARE simple phones so buy those and don't try to force your view on mobiles on us. Be happy we love our gadgets.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Compression is a big problem. It seem that every new sound format is more convenient; at the expense of quality.
I would like to see 24 bit, 96 KHz sound everywhere or maybe even an improved analog sound format. 256k mp3's are great for streams or trying out a new band but I am not going to pay for it.
Agreed, ignorant and horrible!
What about ogg vorbis, its open source and patent free. Also Fluendo has a nice streaming platform that makes use of ogg among other things.
Not being tech savy is no excuse to not browse over to www.vorbis.com and read what its all about.
So says ToeNipples
Insurance it totally doable. I made sure when I got my renter's insurance (and later my homeowner's insurance) that it covered my CD collection. I gave them estimates (and inflated it by some margin to give me room to grow) and there was no problem. My insurance company considers CDs as being in the same category as jewelry and so they are used to people having items worth large amounts of money. My CD collection (1000+) barely dented their lowest cap.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
You didn't rtfp.
I don't buy DRM.
Until my CD player (which is really a DVD player, recently), Winamp, XMMS, Nero, iRiver portable, and/or madplay understand (and comply with) this sort of thing, it just won't matter.
And since that's so unlikely that we might as well say that it will never happen, the only use for the warble-tone watermark is just that: Irrevocable watermarking of illicitly-traded MP3s, with the vaguely-purposeful hope of easily identifying the source material.
There just isn't any R or M in this quasi-incarnation of DRM.
BFD.
Kid-proof tablet..
Read The F'n Parent. My thoughts exactly.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Are they disponible everywhere around the world? Are they too expensive? Are they effective?
- First, disponible? They're available, if that's what you mean: Amazon has an entire section on them.
- "Expensive" really depends. You can get them from US$20 to US$350 (and up, and possibly even down, but I wouldn't recommend it), and that's not too bad.
- Effective. Well, the nice ones generally DO cancel out noise (often in the method you suggest, combined with material engineering methods, etc.), so yes. Not really a point unless you want to listen to music with a lot of dynamics, or you have to be around noise all the time.
In summary: they're cool, but I'm an audiophile (got an Audigy 2 Platinum Pro ZS, an Oxygen synth, and some Koss Titanium headphones that work just fine for my studio setup), and it really doesn't matter much for me.I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
...I believe the fact that it's possible to store so much music at all in such a tiny (and portable) space is amazing. If you think about it, we're going a step back in sound quality (compared to CD-Audio) when lossless compression is usedw. That said, turning a CD collection into FLAC takes up about perhaps 4 times as much space as a turning the collection into a set of decent bitrate .ogg or .mp3 files. Taking up 4 times as much space really isn't much when you consider how fast storage space quotas are growing (think: exponentially). What I'm saying is: in the end, saving X amount of space by means of compression isn't really too necessary, as the space will soon exceed the music library requirements.
The bad thing about MIDI is that, most of the time, it just doesn't sound as good as audio files.
I think that MIDI as a music distribution format is on its way out.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
It's the way to go.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Only to tech people oriented like you?
its MP3.
Seriously, what other format even comes close to being supported by _all_ digital music players (ie 'mp3' players) and all players of the past (mine is 5 years old). What format works on just about every platform and most DVD players? what format do millions of people have entire music collections stored in? Switching to another format is going to take a long time and mp3 will be sticking around like VHS for allot longer. People will still be calling any new format an 'MP3' for decades because this is the winning format.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Digital audio is not only a matter of consuming^W listening to music.
What about making/playing/composing music ?
I think MIDI was never meant to be used as a distribution format. It's simply a communication protocol to get data from instruments/to synthesizers.
Offcource MIDI files were distributed by hobbyist musicians in the past, but this was mainly because there was not enough bandwidth or capacity to distribute "rendered" (wave) audio.
With the rise of compression (mp3) and the increase of bandwidth, artists are now better off rendering their music with their own (professional) synthesizers and compress the output to mp3 instead of relying on the enduser's (possibly crappy) soundcard midi bank for playback.
Ps.: I'm not saying there's no one distributing MIDI anymore, just that there's no real reason to do so except perhaps educational purposes.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
With ever increasing number of songs/albums a user want to maintain and access from everywhere through all possible devices, the future is _not_ in huge personal file collections. The future is in having music "streamed" to you whereever you are, through whatever means is possible.
Three lawyers walk in to a bar.
Really, your honour. That's exactly the way it happened. I was just holding it at the time. I had no idea they would come round that corner...
The parent post is wrong. There's no way to make something detectable but not removeable. If you have code that can detect the signal, then that code can just remove that signal. Saying that technique X is too crude and therefore the signal cannot be removed is foolish; just use the same technique you used to detect the signal in the first place.
It's like saying that you can hide an invisible (to the human eye) watermark in an image, but if you try to remove the watermark by putting a big black rectangle over the whole image, it ruins the image quality. Well, duh.
If its presence isn't audible, its absence won't be audible either.
More likely:
"a zero, a one, a zero, one, one zero, one one!"
the poster forgot to mention that TFA is
actually an Apple commercial.
the future of digital audio == the new ipod
The jack would fit nicely in the lawer's butt though.
Léa Gris
As soon as consumers hit a wal with DRM, they say screw it and the store loses another customer. People are used to now being able to do whatever they want with thier music.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
"I think the eventual winner will be the format not with the best quality per se, but the best lock-down ability (DRM) to get the major commercial people behind it."
The most popular digital format is the CD, which is pure digital, sounds better than wma, aac, and mp3, and has no DRM.
Any other wrong ideas you'd like me to shoot down?
I prefer MOD, S3M, XM and IT, myself.
The best compression ratio I've seen was (I think) an XM that I tried to expand to a WAV file to re-encode as an MP3. The original file was under 400k. Unfortunately, my filesystem doesn't support files larger than 2GB.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Ok, not to sound geekier-than-thou here, but these guys are utterly without a fucking clue.
This is an article on the future of digital audio, and the best they can come up with is:
They're like guys looking at a Segway HT and going "You know what the next big thing's going to be? Electric bicycles! ".
I mean, really. Time-shifted radio will never be popular, because we've moved almost entirely over to downloading MP3s - a content-on-demand system.
Obviously there will always be some form of broadcast media, but if they're right how do they explain the popularity of CDs/MP3s vs broadcast radio? The popularity of video-on-demand systems? And what's TiVo, but a blatant attempt to turn an entire broadcast medium into a content-on-demand one?
I could go on, but it'd just get boring. I don't know who Andru, Hector and Greg are, but I'm pretty sure they aren't industry analysts. Or musically-oriented geeks. Or even regular readers of Slashdot. In fact, they come off more as a bunch of inexperienced and exciteable young teenagers swapping ideas about "this cool MP3 thing off the interweb computer machines".
Hell, I'm not an industry analyst or even musical geek, and I know half of what they're saying is old news and the other half is uninformed twaddle.
Can't say I've run across gearlive.com before, but if this is the standard of their commentary and insight, I think I'll just stick with Slashdot (in all it's flawed glory).
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Alpine units with the "AI-Net" connector can, for about $30 or
so, be set up with RCA line-in jacks. Any decent stereo shop can do this.
The decision of where and how to route and mount the
RCA female connectors is one best left to the individual car owner.
Alternatively, Aiwa makes a head unit which comes with a line-in
jack on its front panel.
I prefer the ergos of the Alpine, though I have owned both brands.
EIther way, you get MUCH better sound quality using an iPod than you
will EVER get using one of those bogus cassette adapters or an FM transmitter.
It is well worth the expense to upgrade to this setup, IMO.
sid?!
might just as well include midi then..
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
I am tired of all the extraneous artifacts in digital to analog conversion. I'm learning to love listening to the ones and zeroes.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
I saw a solution to this. You people have media pc's, why not a similar solution for a car? Take a small c with integrated mobo everything, hook up a 6" touch LCD, stick linux and xmms on it, wifi in your garage, hey it would work.
Waffles rock.
Don't bother RTFA, I'll sum it for you:
"Things people on the fringe are doing now, those things are going to be more popular. The industry is fragmented into MP3, AAC, WMA, and we don't like that, and we think people won't like that in the future, so we, um, we think there will be some convergence.
Oh, those fringe things we were talking about. Podcasting. PVR/DVR (PAR?). Wireless stuff. YEah, we know all this exists now, but we think it will be important in the future.
Also, I want to see the lyrics on my player, because there aren't enough USELESS features already, and I'm too lazy to just look it up on google.
We think that in the future, sound quality will improve! I know it's hard to believe. People keep talking about this Moore's Law thing, but we don't understand it. Some about data density and storage and stuff, it's all greek to us.
Oh, and we think audio players should have the ability to wirelessly beam music between each other, because we don't really care that there is a crisis in copyright-theft, and the REASON the RIAA has been so slow to react is because they want to avoid this. "
Worst. Article. Evaaaar!
I like how they end it. "Digital audio has led to an era of freedom for our music." They want to talk about the FUTURE of radio, but they talk about what has led up to the present.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The redbook CD specification was created in 1980 -- LONG BEFORE there was any concern about digital piracy. CD burners and blank media either were not available or were cost prohibitive, and does anyone recall just how big hard drives were at the time? 5MB? You were not exaclty going to image a CD to your computer and begin copying it even if the burners had been available. It was not for AT LEAST another ten years that all relevant costs were to the point that it was cost effective for those without morals to pirate redbook CD's.
And on the topic of redbooks and DRM, there have been several attempts by The Labels to put copy protection on the CD (see the latest Beatles release for an example). These CD's don't conform to the redbook specification and the packaging even says that the media will not play on all devices. The only reason this isn't done more widely is because consumers won't buy media that will not play in their car, their older CD player hooked to their stereo, their portables, their computers, etc (and we generally don't appreciate being treated as prospective pirates by the media companies either).
Contrast audio CD's with DVD: even though it was not yet cost effective to pirate DVDs when they were released, it was foreseeable that such copying would be feasible before long, hence the CSS scheme. The studios are lucky that the resolution of new TVs and monitors is high enough to make DVDs look bad and require a technology upgrade. You can guarantee that this next generation of video disks will have MUCH stronger DRM. Unfortunately for the record labels, the redbook CD spec was good enough to still be the gold standard in digital audio 24 years later. If they could ever convince us that we need to scrap redbooks in favor of a new surround-sound CD format, you can rest assured that such a disk format will be armored with DRM as well.
Which goes back to my point: as long as they have what we want, they are going to protect it.
hi-q notch filters anyway
Ok, so possibly a high quality linear filter wouldn't be able to remove them, but they sure as hell could be removed with a non-linear one. Clearly you have much to learn in the way of digital signal processing. We have the ability to do some kick ass things nowdays. If some machine can detect the tones to stop playback, those tones can be removed or modified to be invisible to that machine.
Anyway, you think that all those tones survived mp3/ogg/etc lossy compression?
FLAC, sure, and lossless compression would be definition have them, but they wouldn't be too hard to remove. The trick is just knowning that they are there.
it might have had an infinite loop in it or something like that... can xm files do looping? i know sids can
Yeah, they can loop. But I had the player set to run through a loop once. The song's run time is finite, but it's over 200 minutes.
(44.1kHz 16-bit stereo is about equivalent to 10MB/minute. So 200 minutes works out approximately to 2GB.)
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Manny people who own a DVR also have stereos next to their tv sets. Why not add support for digital music to a ReplayTV?
I use a DVArchive server to collect recorded programs and stream them back to my two networked ReplayTV DVRs with excellent quality. This gives me the ability to have an entire season of any show, NFL team, etc I want online and ready to view from either DVR whenever I please without having to deal with tapes or DVDs.
This is how digital audio in the home should work. A media server hidden away some where serving up video and audio content to an appliance that can provide excellent playback quality.
The solutions I see today don't seem to pull it all together into a high quality easy to use system.
Not that an XM actually involves compression or anything.
No, but the file size is usually a lot smaller than the PCM output. I've never encountered a counterexample, though one file did come close. It was about a minute long, but had 8MB of samples packed into it. That means the file was about 80% of the size of what the output WAV file would be.
For those that aren't familiar with module formats, here's a simple description: Take a MIDI file and include sound files to serve as your instruments. The sound files don't have to be traditional musical instruments (or even traditional MIDI instruments.)... I've even got one file that holds non-repeating lyrics.
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AKA an audio version of sodding Macrovision (which does the same thing for video, and all VCRs sold in the past few years are supposed to be calibrated so that it works). Lucky that worked, no such thing as a time-base corrector is there!