Slashdot Mirror
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."
Everyone's really into this string thing now.
No mention on Ogg.
"A one - a one zero - a one, one zero, one one, one zero zero!"
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.
...most music players will be able to fly.
Though it would be fun to try.
sulli
RTFJ.
ROFLMAO...gramatical mistake lol.
And this speaks loads for the credibility of, well, you.
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?
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
It's the way to go.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News