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."

Comments

free replacements

[poptones]

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.

This article

[Muttonhead]

should have been named: The Future of the IPod. Nothing there very visionary about the future of music.

Re: What about a new format?

[gidds]

I believe the Ogg Vorbis format already supports bit-stripping, whereby you can downconvert a file to a lower bitrate without losing any quality (compared to encoding it at the lower rate from scratch).

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...

Re: NMWTFH, OTIC

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

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.