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."
There's more than mp3, Microsoft and Apple. This is a horrible article.
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'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
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.
How about filesize/quality, patents, protection/restriction and processor-usage?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
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.
It takes only one person to deny your statement, be carefull with that, especially on slashdot. ;-)
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"What more could one ask?"
Some more time, maybe?
My time is not worthless enough to re-rip my entire collection.
I rather put that time in something else.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
you can't patent ideas. You can only patent implementations.
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)
Disagreeing with someone does not make their words non-insightful.
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...
there's no need to read this article!
> Article seemed near sighted.
All I see is yet another attitude that music is something to be consumed, and not produced.
I wish for a very low cost digital format (like sony minidisc) but without consumer drm crap that serves to lock ME out of my own music that I create.
If I use a Sony portable MD to record music that I wrote and performed, and the MD does not permit me to extract my recording fully in the digital domain, my rights have been abridged, because Sony has leveraged copy control over my creative works.
I'm sure the argument ends with the fact that I *chose* to use the crippled medium, (so I choose not to) but I still wish for such a format. A buck or two per hunderd minutes of audio that can be extracted without the noise and aberrations of an extra DAC. Compression like ATRAC doesn't really bother me, but an extra set of conversions certainly does.
Yeah, I know that some nonportable MD *decks* don't have this problem (but they won't let you extract from MD's recorded on portables!), and I know that the new Hi-MD portables sort-of let you extract in the digital domain, but require you to use horrible software to do it, and it's still not a fully unencumbered solution.
Nomad and I-River both have solid-state solutions, but it doesn't solve the problem of cheap interchangeable media like MD would, if only it did.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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 to use a specific (presumably closed source) client?
Wired to a bank account?
Gee that wouldnt prevent anyone from making choices. People that use opensource platforms can't listen to music? How about people that dont have bank accounts?
That market will slowly push out proprietary systems, or those with DRM, as each one's protection is cracked, or the format is ignored entirely, etc.
I for one will never buy a media device that enforces any sort of DRM (unless there is some use for it that avoids the DRM functions). That includes digital TV's, DRM'ed music (online or pseudo CD), and anything else they come up with.
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.
I couldn't imagine the horror of being a recorded musician and having people messing around with my carefully crafted tracks. Add to that the fact that your "effects script" concept is inherently flawed, in that non-digital effects (ie, real stuff like overdriven tubes or even just a particular fuzzbox) are used extensively in music production, and the whole thing falls apart.
I'm reminded of the state of colour schemes under Windows 3.1 - 98 where the colour panel was easily found by the average user. The crazy schemes people came up with were often an affront to God - any UI expert, landscape designer, or interior decorator will tell you that people might think they know what they like, but most haven't a clue how to put things/colours/plants they like together to create a coherent and attractive result. The same applies to music.
I certainly empathise with your desire to be able to mess around with the guts of favourite music, but there are way too many good arguments against it for it to ever, ever, EVER happen.
steve
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 ?