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The Death of the Music CD
Rick Zeman writes "According to the Washington Post, the next new music format will be...no format. From the article: 'What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need. If you want to make an MP3, you make an MP3. If you want a DVD-Audio surround disc, you make that.'"
You get the highest quality so you can always make lesser copies.
...Until they DRM it every way but sideways.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Newsflash!
Not everyone in the world is a nerd.
Keep things simple. Buying CDs are simple. Hence, people will buy CDs.
Never in a million years. The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE. This scheme would mean them giving us MORE and charging us... well, who cares. They're not going to give us more.
So in other words, the format is WAV.
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
WAV files?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
How is this different from the flexibility of an mp3?
http://www.bnlmusic.com/ - barenaked ladies use FLAC (iirc)
I mean, at first glance, I thought: "hey, this is a great use for FLAC". Then I realized that because FLAC takes so much CPU time to decompress, CD players that could play it don't exist (if they did, they'd be more expensive). Just give me a standard CD and I'll rip it myself, thanks.
Sounds good on the surface. But this is only another way for them to force DRM down our throats to the point that we have no other choice but to either accept it or not buy music. My choice? Not buy music...
I'm also willing to bet Microsoft conveniently has patents on whatever technology would be proposed to "secure" the digital file.
bash: rtfm: command not found
poor usage of an ellipsis in the submission ... I read it as ".no" format, thinking ".no" was some kind of new file extension.
At least, this is how I've been running my music collection for a long time now...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Now indecisive people like me will be completely immobilized...
A file format will _allways_ have to be involved, even what this people call "no format", will be a format, raw audio is also a file format, The point is that raw, uncompressed formats are not really very usefull to transfer over the net, compression is fundamental, unleast you want to remix it, or do some quality job over the audio, in which case, you need the full, uncompressed, high quality original, people will want a compressed, small format.
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
the consumer would buy is a data file
you mean raw pcm data, kinda like a wav file, or CD audio.
and you could create whatever you need
so basically encode into whatever format you want.
can't we already have this for quite some time now? most players play only mp3 and wma, so for now, you're stuck with those formats.
the CD will very likely be surpassed as the album format of choice.
you still need some media to transfer the original data. the CD will remain.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
The music industry would *LOVE* to get rid of the music CD, so I see this as a trial balloon.
CD's are great because they have really good quality music in non-DRM format.
Keeping the CD's lets you rip to whatever new format or device that comes along.
Think it through...CD's are the consumer's best *and only* friend in the music business right now.
And for every format you want to convert the data file or if you accidentaly erase the file and nedd to download you'll have to pay some bucks.
Is there a place in my preferences where I can turn off viewing "Death of ..." articles?
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
... maybe they will just be booths where you could have a CD/DVD/whatever burnt with the tracks of your choice and label printed out there and then.
It would certainly reduce the problems with shoplifting. Although you could do the same with a home PC if you had the bandwidth and a color printer.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
i think what the article was trying to say was that in the future, we wont own a cd, or a tape, or an LP, we'll own a limited license on a song that we can use with the format of our choice.
The death of the CD will come from RIAA tactics. Leave aside their random lawsuits of 80 year old grandmas, the reason people will stop buying CD's is because they are made to pay $20 for 15 tracks from an artist when only 1-2 of them are good. Back in the day when LPs were popular, you could buy a disc with just the one song you wanted. Now you're force fed tripe from the industry pushing their flavor of the month, big breasted, tiny brained, diva wannabes. Why would I want to pay $20 for a Jessica Simpson CD when there's maybe one track on there that I might like. Much better to be able to pay a buck and get the one song I want and put it on my Rio. That's actually another point, media size. When's the last time you've seen anyone walk around with a discman?
Hmm, and to think, I just bought 3 CDs yesterday.
Pretty Pictures!
The nice thing about owning the CD is it gives you proof of ownership (unless you physically stole it).
but, so far, all the major only music distribution has been in formats inferior to cd (probably all of it started out as the same bits as the cd release). .flac. I'd pay a little more than the cost of a cd to download the .flac out of a vast library including all the stuff I want and have yet to find. And it would cost the distributor far less as well.
I buy loads of music, and have a reasonably high-end computer-as-transport, headphone rig to listen to it. But I've yet to buy a single track online because of the quality issue (and drm). I buy and rip around 10 cds a month. Its a pain in the a$$ for me to find the music that suits my eclectic taste in CD form and then rip it to
If we could buy stuff in whatever format the artist wanted to output it in (pre-mixing/rendering even (opensource music)), the last remaining desire to have hard copy would be nullified for me:)
.. how this data file would be any different from what you get nowadays when you buy a non copy protected CD? I can reencode that pretty much any way I like, with a minimum of fuss. That's how my iTunes library and iPod fill up, it'll be a cold day in you know where before I'm going to "rent" or "buy" music that's tied into some stupid DRM system. The only two things I can think of that would not be possible with a normal CD is (1) higher bitrates (and really who cares about that seeing that people listen to mp3's all day) and (2) choosing only the songs you want (lots of people would like that). All in all I'll be buying "normal" CD's for quite a while to come.
This will have to be the data file format to end all data file formats, because otherwise there will be quality loss. Also, hard drives fail, and so on; what happens if the data file is lost? Will the consumer have to buy it again? Not to mention the murdering of the already lost language of cover art. Now there will be nothing but a line of text in Verdana (nice choice, webmaster!) to associate something visual with the audio. Well, that and the RIAA logo.
The advantage with Redbook is that it doesn't bite back. What happens if something embedded in this format does bite back?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
To prevent the industry (CD Retailers) from going entirely bankrupt though, perhaps the CD stores (current ones) could instead become "customizing stations", in which customers could request certain songs and have a professional (label, case, everything)CD made for them. Sure you could do it at home, but couldn't you always order a CD from Amazon? And since all the shop would really need is a burner, access to a database of songs, and a computer, it could be as small as a stall!
From the way I see it, the CD Retailers will:
A) Go out of business...
B) Take their shop online!
C) Merge with an existing online retailer (most likely)
D) Do the CD creation for customers by downsizing their shop to a music stall (in the mall).
It's like, like, when you break or scratch your CD and you like have to pay bucks for a new one. The public will like never accept such a pedestrian system. Those bastards are just like, trying to rip us off. Bitches!!! Like, dirty bastards!!!
already. Just a stream of samples. If you want to do anything else with it, you have to encode it. So what exactly do they want to change?
Oh well, what the hell...
Am I the only one who thinks that's a bad idea? On the whole, making things more vague will filter out what in the long run may be a large group of users looking for something easy. Granted, converting files is easy...to most. We do however live in a world where if something like a website doesn't load in seconds, we start complaining, checking our connections, writing nasty emails, replacing stuff, etc., etc., etc. Is that really what we want in this case?
28:06:42:12 - That is when the world will end...
Thats what we have right now. CD audio is uncompressed and sampled at 44100 hz 16bit. Wee can do whatever the hell we want with it.
The only improvement to be made is to up the sample rate and bit depth.
The increased sample rate would more accuratly represent the music especialy at higher frequencys. This is because the nyquist sampling therom (1/2 sample rate = highest detectable freq) is a minimum requirement for capturing a frequency at that limit -- it doesn't mean that it's at all accurate.
The higher bit depth would give us more dynamic range.
This will never happen though. They want to lock us into DRM formats which will prevent us from ever getting to the 'raw' data.
In preparation for the inevitable collectors purchasing "classic" CDs, I would suggest buying CDs now.
Store them in your basement for about 10 years and make a killing on EBay!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Washington Post: Hello!
Year 2000: Hello Washington Post! We'd like our story back!
Really this is not news. Maybe a couple of years ago this would have been front page material but I guess its a Sunday and that excuses the posting of "News for Ners that just woke up out of a five year coma. Stuff that matters five years previously."
too bad a surround dvd-audio song takes up about 500 megs each. Maybe in 10 years... Also, too bad that the music-computer industry would never allow open formats like that to be sold.
No, the future of the music industry is closed, inconvenient formats and copy-protected discs.
But in order to convert the DATA file to any format you want, it has to be in a format, after all, it is audio. Also, if they are going to make it easy to convert, then there would be a standard format to convert from.
Fine, as long as they still sell the lossless version for the same price as the lossy compressed one...
and to me even a high quality mp3 is lossy.
The problem I see in such a thing is that some people would have no idea how to do such things. My mom for one is still learning how to use MS Word. =\
-delgertome
There seems to be no real "meat" to this article, they talk about how we will get "raw data files" which we can encode to anything we want. That's really nothing new to me, and I get the feeling that the article is written for people who are not techinically inclined and don't care about the details (which basically renders it useless to me). I mean "the new format is no format, what we will get is a data file"...but what format would the datafile be in?
One interesting thing that the article almost hints at is a change in ideas about how music is distributed and musicians make money. The say that artists will make lots of different stuff (different tracks, videos, album art) available and you choose what to "consume". They don't however, say how this will be distributed, and this is an interesting thing to speculate on. I, for one, would be excited to see the music industry move towards a subsription based model, where you pay a fee to subscribe to your favourite artists and in exchange you get to download tracks, see what the artist has been up to, etc. (I'm not in the business of marketing, somebody else can figure out the details here). This would reward bands that have a loyal following and can keep people's interest for years, and eliminate the hype-marketing that is responsible for convincing so many people to buy crap music.
You can either complain, or do nothing. You don't get both.
That's the TLD for the country of Norway
Maybe in the future instead of buying CDs we will just go buy Norway?
"If you just want to listen to music on your computer, think about what you have to go through to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song.
"There is a simplicity to the CD player."
Ok... So to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song on my computer using a CD, I have to either go to a store and buy the CD, or order it online and wait for it to get to my house. I also have to shell out $12-18 for the whole CD (depending on whether or not it's on sale), even if I only want that one song. When it finally arrives or I get home from the store, I have to break through the ridiculous wrappers they still use on CDs, pop it in my computer, and play it.
To do the same thing without a CD, I double-click on iTunes, click on the music store, enter Ashlee into the search box, scroll down to the song I want, click "buy now", wait a minute or two for it to download, then go back to my library and double-click to play it. If I want the whole album, I can click that instead for $9.99 and wait maybe 5-10 min for it to download, but if I just want that one song I can get it for 99c.
Where is the simplicity of the CD player again? Not to mention the fact that it first talks about wanting to listen to the music on your computer, then says the CD player is the simple part - but to do that, you go through the exact same steps listed above for listening to a CD on your computer, just putting the CD into the CD player instead of the computer.
Methinks the person quoted (a satellite radio exec) has no firsthand experience with this stuff.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
We can do our own mixing, converting, and storing.
Do you know when it will be music hell? It will be hell when you can only listen to music on a device like the iPod, where you pay a monthly fee, and you stream that music via a satellite. The service will only be by subscription only. There will be no CDs, no formats that you want, and no choice. The only way to get around this is to circumvent the hardware on that device and record the streamed music in whatever format you want. What if they make chips and memory cells that are sensitive to air? You'll have to open that device in a vacuum to record the music. How many of us have a airless room in hour house?
So, some joker is bound to make an Edison wax disk engraver, or a 78rpm engraver...
Most ordinary people like the idea of buying something "real" - they will even collect the CDs/LPs of a band (sometimes buying the same recording again) just to have a complete collection. The most famous cover artwork is also a factor, an item people like to own, and have on their bookshelves. The old 33 LPs were superior in that regard- have a look at the prices people are paying for certain old vinyl LPs on ebay..
MP3/downloads-type purchases will saturate out at a certain level - the general public will always go for the "real thing", which will probably still be CDs for the forseeable future..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Yes i'm sure this "magical" format-less data file will become very popular.
If by "data file" they mean raw uncompressed audio, then i doubt this article is accurately forcasting the future. Maybe they should've consulted with the EGGS before writing this story ?
...hey lets stop exchanging commodities coz sometimes I would rather not carry a cow home just coz I sold you a load of wheat. How about I give you give me some bits of paper guaranteed by the authorities and I will get something I want later. Hey wait a minute, are you happy with not having a physical cow now? Sure. The CD is a comfort blanket dudes. The only benefits are: 1. no DRM 2. it can act as a backup The demise of the physical medium is inevitable. The question is what format will replace it and when. The challenge the internet gives (especially as it gets faster) is that with no controls piracy could become a genuine problem (it isn't IMHO today). We are all uncomfortable with this change as we foresee a world where we get WMA protection (and lossy compression) replacing the flexibility and fidelity of CDs. Personally I think Fairyplay shows that there is a workable happy medium. Decent fidelity and reasonable rights limitations. Although even AAC needs to be higher bandwidth than 128kbps before I would be comfortable saying goodbye to CDDA for full albums. I can tell the difference all too easily when listening through my Hi Fi. As for proof of purchase. When did someone last demand you prove that you didn't steal your music?
Downloading music and buying cds are two very differnt things. As the article mentions there wouldn't be anymore liner notes to flip through or pictures too look at. Those little pictures and blurbs about the recording are a major attraction for me and many other music listeners.
How are we supposed to get these magic swirling ones and zeros onto our computers or media manufacturers. Most likely downloading, and doing so takes away from music listening. When people start selecting which songs from an album to keep and which to throw away, I can't help but feel that it will encourage singles and one hit wonders. There is nothing like a complete album to listen to, all the songs in their entirity make a whole. How could you take any song out of the rock opera Tommy? Maybe with this generation of pop music buyers this idea will flourish, a new hit to download every week, and it's never played again. Quite an ingenious way to make the most money for the recording industry and little money for the artists.
Fuck clear channel and viacom btw.
VERY wrong.
Few things computerwise are increasing faster than the capacity of bandwidth. Hard drives are outpacing CPU's, but bandwidth smokes them both. Compression will be VERY undesirable in the future. Something like music subscription services will probably rule the future. Purists of course will swear by the viceral pleasure of having the CD, but the convience of being able to get whatever you want streamed directly to the players of choice as desired will carry the day.
If I were Cingular, I'd try and buy napster or real, and look at adding a $5/mo option with a new 3 year agreement seeing if that washed out.
That's what music CDs are for today. If I want an MP3, I make an MP3. If I want OGG or WMA or anything else, that's what I make.
When DVD-Audio discs become mainstream then nothing will change, just more options for how I want to listen to my music. What's the point of going to some mysterious intermeditary "data file" instead of just ripping it how you want it?
Not everybody is or wants to be computer savvy. I think something like the USB flash sticks would be a better consumer format than disks. For one, the "surface" of the data is not exposed, reducing read problems that were annoying with disk surface scratches etc. They just need to make the sticks a bit less fragile. They tend to crack in my experience because of all the wiggling needed to get it in place.
If internally something better than flash memory comes along, that is fine, but it should not change the interface of the object itself, and thus not making them obsolete. DVD's made CD's obsolute because the encoding mechanism was exposed. If we have a little box with ONLY the interface (wires) exposed, then how the data is written or stored inside the "box" becomes irrelavent, making obsolescence much less likely. As long as the stuff inside can deliver the expected/standard signal across the "plug" (USB interface in this case), then encoding density and data format is abstracted away and can grow over time without changing the "drive".
Table-ized A.I.
Keep things simple. Buying mp3s is simple. Hence, people will buy mp3s.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
The Mac Mini availability is contrained at this point. Making a Mac Mini into something that is not a Mac Mini at this point is really off putting to the rest of us who don't have a Mac Mini at this point.
As hard drives, optical discs, and memory cards keep on getting larger and cheaper, we'll eventually just start using some lossless, 10.2-channel format that is sold on a future CD-type format at Best Buy/Walmart or through iTunes/Napster or through streaming services for your portable music player/computer. Since all the formats will be equal in quality (at the maximum quality of the human ear), an open standard will eventually emerge. Then everyone will just use that and forget about CDs vs MP3s vs OGG vs iPod vs iRiver vs WMA vs FLAC vs etc.
Some new file format would not help. The music must be remixed and resold to pull in the new channels. If you had Abbey road in 6 channels, you'd still have to buy it again to get it in 24 channels in 10 years. This article is silly.
Look on the bright side: if CDs do die, those who had bought CDs would have the antiques of the 22nd century.
"THAT's our family heirloom? A shiny disk with some blonde haired rapper's face on it? God, what was Grandad thinking?"
until it's confirmed by Netcraft.
And digital media is killing it. I just cry at the thought of a world without tapes, CDs, and DVDs.
Liner notes, cover arts, inserts, mini posters, lyrics books, pictures of the artists, CD label design, the excitement of a boxset or a double album, all GONE?!
It's almost scary, a world where everything would become theoretical. We'd hear the music but we wouldn't see it. We'd know we have it, but there'd be nothing to remind us of such.
What's next? They'll take our instruments? They'll get rid of sheet music? And burn music theory books? Well they won't be taking away my piano and my sheet music at all..I'll be playing Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Hilary Duff til I die...and no dead English men or cute blondes are going to be in my way...
As a few people have mentioned, this idea seems very akin to just having a raw, uncompressed audio format, like WAV, which I would agree. However, the thought occured to me, what if future audio files were distributed in a truly raw data file, unable to be played until it was converted to a popular format?
What kind of security risk would this provide? We've already heard about the adware that can crop up in media files. Imagine, 1337 h4x0rz creating a corrupted raw audio file that, when formatted, causes a buffer overflow...
I guess that since this is already happening to some degree, it wouldn't be anything new, but with a raw data file taking on any arbitrary audio format, could this pose an increased risk of malicious media files?
"If you want a DVD-Audio surround disc, you make that"
If the point of DVD-Audio surround would be audiophile-quality sound, what would be the point of making a DVD-Audio surround from the downloadable compressed formats out there now? Would the RIAA allow me to download an uncompressed master? And even if they did, would I have the time to download such an enormous set of uncompressed high-bit files?
I can almost see obtaining one of these discs as burn-on-demand down at the record store, which would keep the record store relevant as a regional download center, but I can't see masses of home users downloading and making these at home.
Just think...a new public, open standard called Digital Music Markup Language. Then you can use a convertor utility similar to XSLT to decide on what format you need...only problem is converting digital music to text is very costly in terms of space requirements. 2-3GB per song, as opposed to 2-3MB.
Kidding aside, it would be cool if there was a public standard for a raw binary format, where you *could* use an XSLT-like translation utility to turn it into whatever format you want.
I see people moaning about how the record companies won't "give" this to consumers. I'm cool with that. It's just one more reason to keep me from "giving" them any of my hard-earned money.
What with Norway 's tld being the same, maybe they're taunting them in some obscure conspiracy theory type of way...
It's just that you'd have to download it and either view it on your computer or print it out yourself instead of getting it physically in a store. In fact, an artist could put out multiple versions of liner notes, etc for the same album - and instead of having to by several copies of the CD, you can just pay a few extra cents to download all the versions. I think this could be great! Get the future version of the iPod photo, and you can view your cover art and liner notes (all ten versions) while listening to your music at the gym or wherever.
And as for boxed sets and double albums, did you see the U2 super-boxed-set on iTunes? $440 worth of songs for $150. People will always want to buy things in bulk for a discount (which is basically what boxed sets are for), and people will always want different versions of the same songs or exclusive tracks (which iTunes has plenty of).
I don't know, maybe some people absolutely MUST HAVE the physical item to feel satisfied... In the case of liner notes etc, you can make that yourself if you have a decent printer. In the case of boxed sets - well, I guess I just don't see the appeal so much. Again, if you really need it, you can make it yourself after downloading it all, but what's the point? They take up so much space anyhow.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
until netcraft confirms it =P
Starbucks just announced at their corporate meeting last week that they will be opening music kiosks at their stores. You program in the song list, it burns the CD for you, you pay ofr it with your coffee. They even had one of the little kiosks made.
It sucks as the base format is most likely going to be mp3 and there is no plans for SACD or DVDA, or any format of decent quality. Considering the propogation of crappy replication, this is just going to make it harder to obtain good reproductions of music for people who wish to listen to an artists work on something other than 2" speakers stuck to a computer or car or crappy "home entertainment" system.
I'm sure some quantum mechanics geek will figure out how to use the Hall effect to read the disc sideways.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Most people in the world don't have computers (a fact that american geeks like to forget). If you go to a random city in the developing world, you'll find that CDs are alive and well, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
Redbook audio already is uncompressed, and includes redundancy so scratches and dust don't kill your investment. I don't think its possible to get anymore basic then Redbook.
The habits of "most ordinary people" change with the generations. Many people still alive in the US remember when horse racing, boxing, and baseball were the three major sports that "most ordinary people" cared about. Today, only baseball hangs on to that claim ...
The future is in Belgium where a new test scheme will be piloted by Microsoft and partner record companies. They implant a special Windows chip in your brain and then you purchase using a dna sample and other ID. Then Microsoft's music store sends passport and msn cookies into your brain so you can make purchase. Then eventually you are sent special encoded WMA format which can play in your brain only. Microsoft have made this happen. You pay once to have the chip implanted by Microsoft trained technicians for I think 1000 Euros and each song cost 50 euros. You cannot have implant removed later. This good news for Belgium and the EU, so we won't need CD anymore. Soon we have email and all our surfing beamed into our brain as well. It help stop piracy and terrorism.
I am usually a stickler for this, but I'm running around helping my son finish his science fair project, I'm fighting a flu, and stupidly reading and commenting on /.
Please accept my apologies, and please don't tell my University about this gaffe.
There will always be new physical media formats. People have way too many habits with handling physical objects to abandon them for virtualization. Beaming contacts hasn't really replaced bizcards; eVites haven't replaced flyers - they'll coexist for different complementary purposes for a long time. But the WP is clueing into the disappearance of physical formats for media storage. No one wants to have to swap media containers; we all want our media online all the time. So there will still be literal "handouts" and physical tokens, if not actual containers. They won't be necessary, but they'll be helpful. The death of physical media will leave a very noisy ghost.
--
make install -not war
1. CD is a standard. An old standard, but a standard. A CD will play on any appliance that can hold the disc whether it be the first CD units that rolled off the line 20 years ago, or a brand new crappy thing from a big box store, or an audiophile-grade playback unit. It 'just works' with no additional fiddling needed from consumers.
Given the number of clocks flashing 12 in this world, don't understimate that value.
2. I've invested in an audiophile grade system--I've got two Macintoshes--one next to my desk and another powering my MLs. Trust me, you can spot the 192s bitrates each time. They're particularly noticable on string music.
CDs--and SACD if it goes anywhere--generally offer a nice minumum. There's a nice floor there and you really don't want to go beneath it. With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
That being said, there are a lot of bad recordings out there.
3. Repeat after me: not everyone listens to pop music. Stop equating the entire musical industry with top 40 crap. Lots of people listen to albums, not songs. Buying one track out of an album of symphonic music generally doesn't make sense.
4. Just to piss people off, I'll remind everyone that an iPod is not a particularly good decoder. Of course, the amount of money needed to get a good (I can tell there's a difference with my eyes closed) DAC is $3k, but I doubt many people really care and even I can't afford one. The point being don't spend forever telling me how much you love your music if you're listening to it on crappy mp3s, ripped god knows how, at 192, on ear phones that use cone drivers.
More likely scenario:
The audio CD never goes away, and software is crafted that is better and better at manipulating CD audio into whatever format people desire without hurting sound quality.
>The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE.
/. comment appropriately modded insightful. At the same time it's completely wrong.
A tipical
Because all the music industry has rights to their content, there is nothing to "give you*", so it's stupid to claim they want to give you LESS.
* For example, they can simply allow you (i.e. make it legal) that you can keep downloading shit via P2P networks. They even don't need to provide download service as the content is mostly out there on the Network.
Do they want to charge more?
As profit-making enterprises, they should be trying to charge more, which is no problem if they offer disproportionately more in return. If you're currently a net-thief (i.e. you steal more than you buy), you'll pay "more" if you buy everything. Folks who pay for all their content will probably pay (relatively) less than they do now.
>They're not going to give us more.
They don't care - they can give you use-rights to everything they own as long as you pay more. For example, if you approach a studio and offer them $10K in cash for "all you can see" I believe they'd accept it as they know they now squeeze (say) $3K per lifetime per customer of your traits. The fact that the average $3K customer sees 1,935 movies for those $3K and you'd see 24,292 titles for your $10K is of no importance whatsoever.
The article is correct in saying that the format of the future is no format at all but not because you buy data (and convert it any way you want) but because you buy use-rights to a song and you don't even need to own the data.
Music can be played someplace else and delivered to your earphone's via GPRS phone or DSL.
The difference between CDs and the new|current $0.99/song purchase is how much money is made (total). Depending upon the band and the direction the wind is blowing, let's say there are thirteen singles on a CD, and four singles are released to be played on the radio, and the price of the CD is $12.99. You're paying ~$0.99/song on a CD so it's not a big deal compared to the current online offers. The problem is in the new scheme if the "regular audience" only buys the songs they're familiar with - the singles|hits. So money is made only from the songs released and people are familiar with. The diehard fans and those who buying as part of a fad (dark horse songs) will be the only ones who buy anywhere near enough to approach the current release platform.
Bottom line: the user can be choosier about what they buy and listen to. How will that $10 be made up in the revenue stream? Making up the difference has to be done somehow. The big question remains: how will this remedy itself? Such that the bigger sponges make anywhere near what they're making now? Remember, the closer to the consumer a process is, the more of a take they're going] to expect. So if "everyone" (it'll never be everyone) starts buying via downloads, what will the brick & mortar stores do to stay in business? Provide you with the ability to buy entire CDs on the spur of the moment? Permit you to D/L singles and mix|match your own CD on the fly with your choice of songs?
What will the "producers" and "production houses" do? Artists certainly won't be as beholden to them because they will likely be a little more careful to try & get their songs mixed as inexpensively as possible and won't have to pay these sponges for creating covers for the jewel cases, advertising, payola, and anything else they can use to justify their existence.
CDs are great because:
- copy protection is weak at best, you can make backup copies as much as you want. (Yes, I know that you can burn itunes or other DRMd file to CD, but it's already losslely compressed, you will loose quality if you recompress it.
- They aren't using lossy compression. New great audio format appears? No problem, just rip your CDs and encode. RIAA bans MP3 support from portable players? No problem, just encode your CDs into whatever format is supported.
Most online music stores take away rights from consumer and give them to record labels.
- For example, usually DRMd files can be installed on a limited number (e.g. 5) of computers. Suppose that I have main PC, PC attached to the hifi system, PC at work and PC in a car. What happens if I updrage/reinstall two of those PCs? Will all my DRMd music files still work on all computers?
In worst case they don't and I need to pay again for the same content. In best case I get it work after lot of hassle, this is just for the right to listen already paid content!
- What if a new, cheap and otherwise great portable audio player appears and it supports only competing DRMd format? I must either to buy more expensive audio player or buy all of my music files again in order to listen them on portable player.
- These points are valid unless major records labels will offer uncrippled WAVs/FLACs. Somehow I don't see them doing that...
Puprose of all this is to make you pay several times for the same sh*t. Don't support DRMd music, unless you want to be forced to use specific operating system and portable player just to listen your purchased music.
I prefer to buy things on CD when I can. I like having cover art and the lyric books and everything. So I guess this isn't really for me.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Both bleep.com and shitkatapult.com have high-quality MP3s for sale with no DRM at all, totally legit. Leave it to the electronica labels to be ahead of the curve when it comes to music technology, including distribution.
It kind of doesn't matter that iTunes' electronica section is weak. You can get better quality, DRM-free tracks that TOTALLY WORK ON YOUR IPOD (so who says other stores can't take advantage of the iPod?!?!) through Warp Records' online distribution site bleep.com. And ShitKatapult's store has Apparat! Among other great techno/tech-house/IDM producers.
Note that w/ ShitKatapult, there are MP3s for both the CD and LP versions of some releases, and they don't always have the same number of tracks (but might be the same exact price!) Also, I had to use FireFox on Mac OS X for the credit card transaction to work.
Support real music, indy labels, something actually different than what the big guys are pushing on Clear Channel! Why do the little guys with better music offer files that are DRM-free, but the biggies do not? Screw the RIAA!
I generate music on the fly in a lossless format. I don't have to jog around in tights to enjoy it either.
And the only thing saving us right now with the death of VHS is DVDShrink.
If only DL disks would fall down in price, we'd be set.
Free Sound's even better..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
How am I suppose to burn a SACD or a DVD-A disc (yes , I do own these formats). I know my dvd recorder can not burn these types.
Soon, we'll take a child at birth,
having mapped out all the genes.
Run a test and if they're musical,
or might be the next James Dean,
make a clone just for our safety's sake.
Record every move and sound they make,
and never - ever miss a thing again.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I mean, I wouldn't object to having a really high-resolution audio file (with surround sound channels and all) which I could then compress into whatever format I wanted, but how will this mythical beastie make its way into my life? HDDVD? Blu-Ray DVDs? Some other, yet-to-be-announced high capacity disc?
I'm all for having a super-high-quality source for the MP3s I put on my iPod, but the content delivery system needs to be in place first. Downloading a 200mb source file isn't quite practical at this point, so how's it gonna happen?
"The Death of the Music CD." Come on. We've been hearing that since 2000. Meanwhile, CD sales increase yearly.
The only thing I see that is successful enough to kill CDs is the iTunes Music Store. I'd love for DVD-Audio to take off for the increased audio resolution, though.
The ideal:
"What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need."
The real:
Napster's To Go subscription service allows buyers to essentially rent an unlimited amount of music for $15 per month. A subscription-based service will be built into the latest version of Microsoft Windows; for between $10 and $20, users will access songs for a monthly fee but will be unable to burn them onto CDs.
You'll get the data files, but not the "buy" or "create whatever you want" parts, because that would eliminate valuable business opportunities for people who never wrote or played a line of music in their lives.
Wait, how does not being able to buy cheap singles result in not being able to purchase cds from non-mainstream artists?
Have you been in a music store lately? There's thousands of non-mainstream artists, you aren't being force fed anything.
You're also saying that you like some songs from the big breasted, tiny brained, diva wannabes... If such music is force fed garbage from the industry, how did you end up liking it?
Cool, I guess data files don't need a format! For a second I thought that MP3 was a data file, that just happened to sound like music when played through an MP3 player.
From the FAQ:Other nice things about Magnatune are:
probably the indie musicians. Many of them are going down the path of downloads. Sooner or later, several of them will make it big without a label. Once that happens, the labels will be out of the loop.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If nobody bothers to mass-produce CDs any more, we lose that archive. We've been in that boat before with vinyl records, and it's not the end of the world, but it's easy for cool stuff to be lost unless somebody takes an interest and maintains it.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Whatever. They said that about my 8-Track too, but they can get that when they pry it from MY COLD DEAD HANDS! 8-TRACK LIVES BABY!
The media companies want to 'license' their content, and we can't stand their dodgy formats. The software companies make billions of dollars of revenue every year selling 'licenses' for their software, they let business use that software in many different ways, as long as they abide by the terms of the license. Sure, there's little they can do to stop their customers from breaking the terms of the license, but they still manage to turn a good profit nonetheless. If we bought licenses for our content, we could use them to download or otherwise obtain copies of that content in any form we wished. This would also negate the need for backup copies, as if you lost your content, you could just re-obtain for cost of media or bandwidth.
I will believe this the day Netcraft... nevermind.
What About DTS?
I would like to see DTS (lossess surround audio) become the next "music" standard after CDs
It still allows for high quality lossless stero, but where I see audio should be going is to DVD. I guess they could do DD5.1 (lossy encode) and that still isn't half bad. There have been a few DD5.1 headphones out there so portability isn't as big an argument for stero as it used to be.
Basically there are millions of players out there that can at least play that, its the logical next format. You could hope that they would go back to the masters and remix it for surround sound and studios would upgrade but for a while they will probably just run the stereo thru some signal processing and throw that on a DVD.
I already see a larger and larger "DVD-Music" section in Best Buys and Circuit-City, this way they can add videos and other things that they already are making, the audio is becoming the promotional for this mass market where before the videos would promote the album.
Of course it is protected by the mighty CSS encryption. but do they really think they are going to force everyone to buy another player? or will they phase this in by skipping the DVD format and sticking to CD as they won't have to retool until the new encryption on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (which I heard at least one will have DTS) hits the streets.
They will always produce SOMETHING to sell to those audiophiles that give people that like to listen to music a bad name (The ones that put the brass cones under their cd players insisting it softens or deepens or blah blah). The people who probably buy SACD and its 2 Mhz sample rate. So for the people with mortal hearing, something like Flac, Ape, Applelosses (basically wav encoded lossless) would be the best format for the future because the bandwidth and capacites will rise over the future and for backward compatability or the budget minded they will be able to use compression on their older/cheaper devices.
Because, sometimes they just have to touch the stove.
-YY1
Why not just buy a used CD, burn the WAV files to your PC, sell CD, repeat until happy?
you still need some media to transfer the original data. the CD will remain.
Perhaps you haven't noticed these growing new trends.
DRM will never work because speakers cannot be integrated into the song. There will always be some point in the system where music exits (or can be extracted) from a DRM system... period...
Any belief in DRM propagated by DRM creators or held by content owners, is either a damn lie or simply just wishful thinking!
Until I can get a Netcraft confirmation.
I am Zalgot of Rigerius IV.
I will use my special alien ears to consume your puny earth music after which I will use my special alien bottom to plop out the offensive music onto earth format CD discs for you.
Your drm technology is a source of great amusement for the citizens of Rigerius IV. ha ha ha.
*Bzzt*
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
16 bit pcm sucks.
"Never in a million years. The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE. This scheme would mean them giving us MORE and charging us... well, who cares. They're not going to give us more."
It seems to me that if they make you download a bunch of 1's and 0's, that's a lot cheaper than giving you a piece of plastic with 1's and 0's on it. So how is this giving you more?
you mean those shiny coasters we have contain a primative form of music on them?
Get your torrents...
"I'm also willing to bet Microsoft conveniently has patents on whatever technology would be proposed to "secure" the digital file."
Isn't Apple selling the most songs now using proprietary DRM? Why criticize MS when Apple is the real enemy. Even MS will license their tech. Apple refuses to license fairplay. No wonder Real and Napster are forced to compete against iPod instead of selling music for iPod
a friend pointed this out to me once, explaining why she would buy vinyl over CDs:
"i only buy vinyl when i want to play something for other people".
Likewise, it's so much better to show somebody a CD cover when you play something for them at the house. A stereo isn't a stereo without a stack of jewel cases and digipacks next to it. A naked stereo evokes the sterility of a hospital or hotel room, and reaks of neglect.
They sure have a difficult time understanding that the old 20th century way of buying music is pretty much over.
The old way being you pay them 30-50% of the hourly minimum wage for a three to five minute recording on a stable physical medium.
They keep squeezing their heads to come up with new ways to keep this old form of business going, but it's fading every day.
The new music transaction format is much different. There is a completely different amount of music that the consumer gets for the same amount of money.
Now you buy an old hard disk that has 10 to 100 Gigabytes of MP3 or OGG compressed format audio of hundreds of albums in a certain genre or era of music. Some of it you keep, some of it you discard, some of it you will never listen to, some of it you pass on to others, some of it you alter, sample, or mix, and some of it you never know who the artist is.
Of course, you don't buy or trade these old hard disks full of unknown music from the music industry companies. It's not their business model. They couldn't even conceive of selling music in this way. They are doing everything that they can think of to actually put people in prison for selling or tranactioning music in this format.
But it doesn't matter. There has been a fundamental change in the nature of the distribution and storage format for audio in the past ten years. The music industry, which is a contradiction of terms in this new era, will have to come to terms with it.
Our terms.
One last thing, guys, don't put anyone in prison for listening to music. It will have long term nasty consequences, even including bloodshed when the penality for copying and listening to illegal music begins to approach the penality for kidnapping and killing music industry executives. And it won't stop or change the transformation that is happening in the entertainment industry. the new technology is a marketing challenge, not a criminal act that requires inprisonment.
We'd like to think that you won't let all this tough talk and macho posturing about putting people in jail and conficating their life savings for listening to music get out of control. But, frankly, we're losing our confidence in your ability to think rationally.
After all, it's only rock'n'roll.
There's a nice floor there and you really don't want to go beneath it. With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
Not really. In 1987, you could count on a CD having a certain level of quality. Lately, the MAKE IT AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE approach has taken over. Instead of trying to make the most of CDDA's dynamic range, recording engineers are bent on making their album is the LOUDEST DISC IN YOUR CHANGER, and in the process you lose half the dynamic range. Maybe you mostly listen to classical music, and they haven't yet converted to the AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE school of recording. Try listening to a rock album from the 1980s and one from the last 2-3 years. It's depressing how the new recordings, made with brand new computer technology and better equipment sound worse than older ones.
0 1 - just my two bits
Proof that Slashdot has jumped a bay full of sharks - no-one's pointing out that "The new format is no format" is a meaningless piece of marketing fluff uttered by someone who has no clue of what he's saying.
Where did all the "nerds" go? Seems like they've been replaced by good consumers who laugh slightly cynically at anything they're told, but end up believing it anyway, no matter how ludicrous it is.
Windows XP has one of the new DRM requiring registration, and yet people haven't moved away like you say.
Valve's Steam for Half Life 2 were publicly warned by reviewers everywhere, but gamers still bought the game. After Steam's initial registration problems and Valve's cancelling/stealing 20000 or whatever accounts, people still bought it multiple times and some even think it's good to protect the company from bankruptcy, for they can make another "great" sequel.
The Cell processor will have an on-chip DRM, and yet nobody seem to care about that. Remember the Pentium serial number fiasco? More people back then boycott Intel than people care for Cell's DRM. We'll have to wait and see how Cell's hype will affect its release.
Remember the old adage "boil a frog slowly and it'll die without a fuss..." Therefore, the only way to reduce DRM is not to buy into it, and have zero tolerance for it. If you buy into more and more restrictive DRM, you're just telling the creators you don't care or you're fine with DRM. For countries implementing recordable media levies, DRM is totally unacceptable.
That's nice except that according to Napster: You can't listen to NAPSTER-downloaded songs on an iPod.
So you won't really be able to listen to them via a digital music player such as the iPod.
more confusion for the consumer who doesn't follow this stuff blow by blow.
I like microcars
Gotta go, need to decide wich pill to take. Blue looks like a secure choice but red seems more interesting ...
The only reason the music industry has rights to a monopoly on 'their' music is because Congress is allowed to legislate one for limited times. We the People have the power to take those 'rights' away, especially if it stands in the way of the true intent of copyright: To promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. Given the power of computerized distribution, collaborative filtering, and content creation tools, WE DO NOT NEED to grant the music industry those rights any longer. Copyright is no longer a tool of musicians, but a weapon wielded by corporations against musicians.
Now if you can simply get 200 million CD/DVD buying Americans and 4.2 trillion other Earth inhabitants to agree with you in forming some sort of unified embargo on the MPAA/RIAA, you may have something.
Interesting idea, but I think you're off an order of magnitude... the Earth's (human) population is roughly 6.4 billion (as of 2/13/05 at 23:15:33 GMT anyway) , not trillion (yet).
No man's an island, unless he's had too much to drink and wets the bed.
DRM's purpose is not to stop the most determined from copying.
DRM's purpose is to stop the clueless populous from copying - those who will want to buy the same crap in another media/format in 5 years to 10 years, or periodically and perpetually.
Even if DRM stops 1% of 10 million sheeps, it's still money in the bank. Therefore, DRM is more of an economic issue rather than a technical issue. You'd think they'd abandon DRM after countless failures by now, but economic profitability is their goal and DRM works.
It took years, lots of lawsuits, and ruined bank accounts but RIAA is finally seeing that downloading (by purchase) music in a format the customer wants is the way to go. I'd prefer to have my music in .ogg file format and burn it to CD for my car. If I can find a reason to get a MP3 player, I'd try to get one that supports .ogg format. The fact we can now make DVD audio disks means we can now put loads of songs from one musician or band onto a disk and be done.
What a load of pretentious twaddle. You were making some good points until you decided you were suddenly better than everyone else.
The people who want the paraphinalia that goes with the music can rest assured that it will continue to be sold to them for as long as they will pay for it.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I think the enormous success of the iTunes Music Store shows that we're already well on our way to no-physical format delivery of music first, then down the road as broadband becomes more common and faster no-physical format delivery of videos.
We're already pretty close with DRM-protected Windows Media Audio files that after downloading can be burned onto standard CD-R discs or copied to various brands of portable playback devices that use a small hard disk or flash memory storage. Who's to say by 2010 we'll see complete movies in DRM-protected file(s) downloaded via broadband connections 4-10 times faster than today's broadband connections that can be burned onto DVD or high-definition DVD optical discs or copied to a portable video player that by then could sport as much as 500 GB of disk storage in a device about the size of a Sony PlayStation Portable?
Besides, the media companies can charge lower prices for downloads, since you no longer need to factor in physical packaging and shipment costs. That could be especially useful if you're talking TV series with lots of episodes for the entire series.
The Music Industry has spent $billions developing a new 'hyperfrangible' polymer for the next generation of jewel cases. This incredible substance is capable of disintegrating into its component atoms the first time you try to hinge it open.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Yeah, right. Small and fragile?
I just love how the stylus used to scrape away at the grooves each time I played an LP. And if you valued your vinyl LPs, you didn't play them more than once a day, so the groove could recover.
Funny how my oldest CDs sound just as good after dozens of plays as the day I bought them. Maybe better as I have better CD players than were available in the mid 80's. On the other hand my favorite vinyl ablums sound much worse than when new.
And a CD is much more robust against a simple scratch, or even some forms of abuse. As long as you don't scratch a CD along an arc, the error correction takes care of it. Can't say the same for vinyl. Maybe you don't remember the pops and clicks.
Sorry, I don't buy the small and fragile comment. Now as to your comments about Ashlee....
what would the quality be? I don't buy from places like Itunes because of the low low bitrate. Also, what happens if my hard drive, or whatever I'm using to store the file crashes? With a cd, I can just rip it again. If I have 3000 songs that I have downloaded, and my drive crashes, will I be able to download all of those songs again? I already paid, so why not? After all, what we are paying for is a RIGHT to listen, correct? And if THAT is the case, that we are not buying cd's, but rather the right to listen to the recording, then why cant I get a replacement for my broken cds?
Free electronics!
After I just spent a grand putting out a nice 7" for my first release of 2005. I realize I'll get no points being the sole Luddite on Slashdot, but the fetishizing of music formats is still pretty strong, if very underground and limited to a small percentage of the population. And it's not just the guys like me who grew up in the good old days of record stores; there's a lot of kids out there buying their first turntable. Low, not a band I like but popular enough with said 'now' generation put out AAA records for that added kick! (Analog recorded, mastered, and format) That being said, as a musician (and fledging record company owner) I can sure see the attraction of this sort of thing. Man, if I thought I had any sort of audience on iTunes, I'd grab it like no one's business. My 7 inch has 7 songs and retails for 3.50 - selling at 99 cents per song would double that amount, with no pressing costs! I'd just put the profits back in, however, to putting out obsolete formats, 'cause I don't believe it's a real record, 'til it's a record!
I think they're talking about a physical format, i.e the medium (CD, MiniDisc, cassette, vinyl, 78, DCC, DAT, audio DVD, &c), not a data format (digital PCM, MP3, analogue line, &c).
This sort of mixup with words isn't new. Another common one is audio 'compression', which can mean either data compression (FLAC, MP3, AAC, &c) or level compression (an audio process which reduces the loud parts and boosts the quiet ones to narrow the dynamic range -- to allow for louder mastering or broadcasting, or to adjust the character of voices or instruments).
Another is 'remix', which used to mean generating a new master from an existing multi-track tape (or the digital equivalent); and now means creating an entirely new and usually worthless track borrowing almost nothing from an existing one...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I believe
"I think there will always be a market for the physical product," said Steve Blatter, 38-year-old vice president of music programming for Sirius Satellite Radio, a company that intends to thrive on the consumer's desire to customize musical options. "If you just want to listen to music on your computer, think about what you have to go through to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song. "There is a simplicity to the CD player." I hate going through all that trouble to find that Ashlee Simpson song.. yeah..
Some of us do have above-average hearing. I have passed double blind testing comparing 256Kbit MP3 to CD. But then again, I've been playing the violin since I was 5 (now 24), and my hearing still extends to 24 kHz.
The music cd medium won't die if it is worth paying for. I only buy cds when there is some value added to it (box sets, great album art, dvd included, etc.) NEVER will i pay 10-20$ for a crappy cd without any extras.
On July 1, 2005 a new FCC rule will take effect in the US which will further restrict what we can record with ordinary PCs. On July 1st it will become illegal to manufacture or import digital televison tuners unless they include DRM technologies. That would keep people from using their computers as TiVo like personal video recorders for unencrypted broadcast digital HDTV signals that they receive with an antenna. After that it will only be legal to manufacture devices which are "robust" against user tampering. Here is more infomation:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/
So you were probably right when you said this:
The media companies won't allow you to download or play a DRM media file on a normal PC but they will on your **AA company approved media center PC.
Most of the rational side of me says that I really don't want to see CD die. But yet, there is a small part of me that does.
Online shopping has given us stores that can specialize in extremely niche products, because now one location with one stock of items can service everybody in a particular country, or more. I am a fan of Japanese music, and if I want to buy a CD, I certainly can't find anywhere locally to purchase one. Thanks to the internet, there can now exist America-based J-music stores because their customer base can be everybody in the U.S., not just people in their location.
(Here's the point I'm getting at, coming up.)
In the same kind of way, if music becomes digital instead of physical, because you don't have stores with a set amount of space, and locations that must survive on the local customer base, music companies have far more freedom on what they can offer to whome. J-pop and the like will never be huge when it comes to physical CDs, because there aren't enough people to go to each store and purchase them. But once you don't have stores, but instead just bits of data on a server somewhere, you can offer every kind of music to people anywhere in the world, and as long as one person purchases a song, you've made profit.
If we get away from a physical medium for music, and suddenly the entire world becomes a possible market for the music, then hopefully things will get better for both sides. Music companies don't have to worry about expensive physical media, and they can very cheaply offer their wares to the entire world. Consumers get a huge increase in the amount of music that is available to them, and they can purchase that music more easily and cheaply.
as everyone on /. knows you only need to break the DRM once, convert it to a non DRM format (say Ogg Vorbis) and then the cat is out of bag.
And more importantly, breaking DRM on an audio file is trivial-- it has to be converted to an analog signal to listen to it, and can be easily and inexpensively redigitized into a DRMless format. Good quality D/A and A/D converters are cheap. Really good ones aren't very expensive. Short of requiring digital brain implants to "listen" to audio, there's nothing that can be done to prevent this.
And the small amount of loss in the signal in doing the conversion is pretty insignificant compared to the amount of downsampling that usually gets applied to get things down to a shareable/iPod-able size.
So it's a data file... but it doesn't have a format? Huh?
Seems like some people equate "no format" with wav file. I had the impression from the article that what he means is you'll effectively be buying a *license* to a song. After that I'd expect to have options to download a song in a variety of formats, or even just stream the song to my hearts content.
I could see an initial charge for a license (eg: $1) and possibly small downloading charges for the track in different formats (10c). That way you could own a song for the next 20 years and as newer formats and storage mediums come out you keep "upgrading" the song.
So let me get this straight. I can create a surround CD out of format-less files. The only real format-less file I can think of is maybe an analog file, but that's prone to noise and how would you store it on digital storage media?
So, I guess we're talking about a digital file without any kind of header - which means we're talking about RAW PCM samples. So here's the problem then : even to read RAW PCM samples, you need to know a few things : sampling rate, bits per sample, number of channels and endianness. So where will we get that information from? The label of the storage media? Some kind of watermark? Gess what - there already is a "format" that will give you this information with a minimum of fuss and that's the WAV format. So, we're back to where we started.
Let's take the next argument - making surround CDs out of the data on file. To date, as of my knowledge, the closest you can get to that is by a technique called virual miking, which means you need the original RAW PCM samples AND complete acoustic information about the studio it was recorded in. Only then can you calculate what microphones placed in other points of room would have heard. Otherwise, for every new channel, you would need a separate PCM stream of data. So how do we represent all this info? How about a format?
So, in other words, this really doesn't seem very technically sound. Formats are around for a reason - they make it easy to represent information.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
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The Only way that they are going to stop music pirates is by giving out DRM-enabled ear implants (enforced by the goverment law of course) and send music by fm or wifi directly to our nervous sytem (to feel the bass)or to the brain but disabling our ability to sings the songs because that's making freely available copyrighted material. But Someone in Taiwan will post a hack to transmit over a radio of 27 meters your thoughts and the FBI would call this terrorism and banning "The Napster Ear Implant".
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CD players that could play [FLAC] don't exist
The Zensonic Z500, due out this spring, is supposed to support FLAC, among a bushel of other capabilities, not least of them Linux server-software.
See http://www.z500series.com
Just the other day, saw the latest in inkjet printer technology: a slot to feed CDs into the printer.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I bet people go to more trouble finding her songs than she went to making them.
I can get free music from the radio (all rock, all the time...) and TV (VH1, MTV , SOME of it is good). Why would I PAY for musc? Listen live , record, playback... It's all I need.
And of couse the MP3's I ALREADY have...
Cheers
BillyBob
bamph
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