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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."
Everyone likes MP3s.
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.
should have been named: The Future of the IPod. Nothing there very visionary about the future of music.
On one hand, if you had a fire and lost several hundreds of dollars worth of CDs, you have the same issues.
I'm not sure thats fair, I can't imagine that it's all that hard to phone you're local insurer up and say "i'd like to insure my CD/tape/MD/betamax/hi8/2" reel to reel/8track colection".
Not to say though that you couldn't insure a hard drive however there could be problems that the data ever existed if lost and also whether it had been copied off before a fatal partition wipe.
Reinventing the wheel since 1979
I did the same thing, but recently have been ripping to lossless (aac lossless, as that's how the others who are doing it are, as they are macheads and don't have the support for FLAC that I do :). The plan is to have a lossless master for the music so that I can easily convert to mp3/ogg/whatever less painfully than having to re-rip everything again.
I think ripping to ogg is algorithmically more complex, based on the performance of the ogg rippers I've used. So, yeah, it is slower than ripping to mp3. But it doesn't take that long, and I only have to do it once. My hope is that my high quality ogg collection will be useful for the duration of my digital music future. I wouldn't recommend going from one compressed format directly to another, though, one should always go back to the source data if at all possible.
Never eat anything bigger than your head.
But apart from a proof-of-concept, no-one's actually written a bit-stripping program yet.
The obvious conclusion is that, rightly or wrongly, not too many people are concerned about bit-stripping...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
DVD-Audio already has lossless compression. I think it's called Meridian.
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.
Remember Princeton professor Ed Felton? Remember SDMI?? It's been done, and it was cracked thoroughly.
Wasn't it the other way arround? I was pretty positive that vinyls had lousy freq. response (and noise, fragility, and so), but they blew away digital media concerning dynamic range, which might be one of the reasons they're reputed to "sound better" for certain music styles (like classical, where poor dynamic range can kill a recording)
No, vinyl has decent (but non-linear) frequency range and relatively poor dynamic range and stereo separation when compared to CD. Back in the days of vinyl, mastering engineers had to be careful about limiting the dynamic range to avoid either clipping the high frequencies or causing the needle to jump out of the groove from the bass. There was also the issue of space available on the record, because too much dynamic range causes the grooves to be cut too far apart, which reduces the time available on the record disk. Ever wonder how those old K-Tel compilation LP's were able to contain 20 or so songs? Compressed dynamic range!
However, (call me pretentious prick if you must) I still enjoy listening to my vinyl records because I do like the way they color the sound on certain material, particularly with rock and jazz.
An interesting thing that I notice on CD's lately, is that despite all of that dynamic range available, it seems that the engineers don't take advantage of it anymore, and instead they just try to record everything as loud as possible because they don't have to worry about the headroom limitations as much with digital as they did with analog. The end result is compressed dynamic range anyway. That may be one reason why some people still think that vinyl is superior to CD in the area of dynamic range. It's just the simple fact that earlier analog material was recorded and mastered more carefully.