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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
"A one - a one zero - a one, one zero, one one, one zero zero!"
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.I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo. Future systems will include wireless file transfer, so that you can seamlessly access songs from your player while in your car. Yes, the Griffin iTrip accessory sends the songs over an FM frequency to your car, but it has trouble in certain urban environments, and you have to fish for an available frequency
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He really has a point there. I got sick of burning CD's, so I bought an MP3 player. I use a car-kit (bless those things) to listen the music from my MP3 player. I use the FM transmit sometimes, but just like the article says, I have trouble finding available frequencies. New compression methods/formats are all well and good, but I'd like to see better integration between audio devices. I want to be able to stream music from my audio unit and have my car audio system pick it up and play it
There are car MP3 players, but the ones I have seen require you to burn a CD with MP3's on them.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
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.
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.
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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Hector: I'm almost afraid to comment on what we'll see in the future because some of these ideas aren't copyrighted, and may show up on the next batch of digital players.
"Copyrighted ideas?"
Who the fuck are these people? A bunch of jr. high students? I would call this article a circle jerk, but it's too self indugent for that...
Nah.
You just put very quiet warbly tones into the audio with a binary message encoded in them... When you play it back, the playback machine hears the tones and refuses to play any further.
There is no way of filtering them out as they do a random walk, and you trash audio if you try to remove them with hi-q notch filters anyway.
This system was mooted a few years ago, and got a lot of complaints from 'audiophiles', but it was quickly realised that if you did not tell people the tones were there, they cannot hear them.
So, the tones came back, and are on a large number of CDs released in the last few years, waiting for the DRM tech to catch up to make use of them. They survive analog copying very well.
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.
Though it would be fun to try.
sulli
RTFJ.
I have been predicting for several years that the ultimate file format that everybody may eventually adopt is a compressed, non-lossy copy of the masters used for a given song, plus a fader moves script and an effects script.
Think about it, the stones have introduced their remastered collection on the new 5.1 CD format. Beyond that home theater has 6.1 and 7.1, and a few other formats that I'm sure I have never heard of. The trend is toward more data being given to the listener in a recording. The logical conclusion is a copy of the master. By including a fader move script and effects script, I can play the recording as it was created by the studio engineer. Or, perhaps I am a fan of the band's bassist, so I push the bass to the front of the mix. Mabey I like the bootygrove music, so I dump the drumline and dub in a drum machine backing track. Perhaps I like to have my rap music with disgusting bass, so I crank all the bass in my favorite gangsta ditty. I can also fool with the balance, effects, etc. as much as I want.
As digital processing power gets cheaper, doing real-time remixing with 24 tracks in realtime becomes a viable option. You already have something similar going on in video games.
Personally, I hope this happens in my lifetime. I can think of several albums that I love that I would spend $100 to have a high quality copy of the master, just to be able to fool with them and listen to the results.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
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.