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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.'"
...Until they DRM it every way but sideways.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
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 takes a high end 486 to a Pentium to decode MP3 files in the x86 world, yet there are MP3 players that last a long time on a single AA battery. All that someone would have to do is create a dedicated FLAC decoding chip.
But they only compress to about 50% so a CD full of them could only hold two albums instead of one
.75 of original size, and G'd up thuggin' west coast gangsta rap to .60 of original size. I assume that rap compresses better because it has much more redundancy, that is, "wut wut wut" and some bassline will compress better than your everyday rock song.
I used FLAC for a while, and I found that it compressed rock to about
In terms of cpu draw, I found that ripping a CD was not CPU bound when using FLAC, but limited to the speed of the cdrom drive. Even still, PC cdrom drives can process the audio off of a CD on their own (See grey cable) which is a testament to how little processing raw PCM data must take.
From the FAQ:Other nice things about Magnatune are:
1. MP3 is a standard too. It plays on all computers, all digital players (except the few old Sony players that noone bought), many cellphones and portable game consoles. And I bet that CD didn't become the standard it is today overnight.
2. I won't trust you, because it was proven time and time again, that audiophiles lose their ability to distinguish 128 from 192 and CD from MP3 as long as the testing is blind. 128Kbit MP3s are good enough for more than 90% of the people. And the latest OGG/AAC/WMA/MP3Pro are good enough for 99%.
3. That doesn't work. You are not an authority figure, so there is no reason to repeat after you anything. We can all think for ourselves and it is obvious that you can buy an album digitally just as you can buy a single track. In fact, right now I am playing an album (5 albums, to be more exact) and it is in MP3 format. BTW, I am quite happy that I don't have to change CDs...
4. You can't piss people off with that. We will just pity your stupidity. You can eat your placebos as much as you want, of course, but everyone else knows that there is no way to tell iPod playing MP3s from your super-dooper $3k device playing 48bit DVD-audio or whatever else, as long as the testing is done blind.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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.