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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.
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.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.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
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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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 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.
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.
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