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The Future of MP3 and Surround
An anonymous reader writes "Wired is running an article discussing the future of the MP3 format with the amount of competition out there, especially from the surround sound scene. Thompson, the entity that licenses the MP3 format, released the MP3 Surround format to try to combat this but will it be enough? From the article: 'It may seem as if the venerable MP3 standard is here to stay, but it faces attack from a number of angles. First, it doesn't sound as good, byte-for-byte, as files purchased from iTunes Music Store (in the AAC format) or any of the Microsoft-compliant stores. Second, the CD rippers/encoders that most people use -- iTunes and Windows Media Player -- have encouraged users to rip to AAC and WMA over the years. Third, only one major online music store, eMusic, proffers songs in the MP3 format, and it lacks most major releases. Fourth, geeks who love MP3 for its wide compatibility can now choose from preferable open-source alternatives such as Ogg Vorbis.'"
I think that open formats as ogg should have a better future if manufactures would offer more support to them. It's in our hand not to buy those gadgets that do not offer support to open formats.
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Well, that's all very interesting, but I'm not aware of any other format that will play on both iPods and other digital audio players. Ogg Vorbis is all very well but it's not supported by many players, particularly not by iPod, and as for AAC - I don't buy songs off iTunes, and why should I rip my CDs in a format that locks me in to buying iPods in future? Like the "Unipage will destroy PDF!" story yesterday, I suspect that reports of MP3's death are, currently, somewhat exaggerated.
Although using MP3 is already pretty questionable, I could almost guarantee that using mm3-surround would start with me firmly in the sights of their patent lawyers. Thanks, but if I'm gonna go past MP3, I'd rather do it on an OGG base.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
According to Caldwell, MP3 Surround can succeed without the labels' cooperation. "MP3 never had major-label content, and seems to have been relatively successful. On the other hand, Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio both had major label content, and millions, if not tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, spent promoting it and they haven't succeeded, (among other reasons) because they don't address the convenience issue."
So mp3 might survive, if only for the many "mp3" players that are arround. People will forget that they play acc & wma on the mp3 player, they have a "mp3" player, for the rest they do no care. As will the apple format survice since a iPod is just cool.
Since several people use the other "major" source - allofmp3.com - and it
allows you to pick what format you like including lossless, aac, vorb, mp3.
I imagine most people pick mp3 because although it may not be the best... it's
by far the most wildly supported. Conversion tools between "better" codecs usually
mean worse sound quality than getting it in a format that pretty much every
player can handle.
And at 192bps MP3 is pretty darn good.
I used Shure E3c earbuds for testing, so the surround effect is evidently not dependent on having full-size headphones. When did headphones start having 5.1+? I know of like one set, the rest isnt going to matter... Have you ever listened to music in surround sound? Mine sucks, center channels are not meant for music... All i want is a car stero style setup: Stereo front and rears getting the same signal, music doesnt need to have diffrent stuff comming from diffrent directions unless you want to simulate being in the middle of the stage, and that would get old fast.
Fourth, geeks who love MP3 for its wide compatibility can now choose from preferable open-source alternatives such as Ogg Vorbis.
Huh? Compatibility and Ogg Vorbis? What's going on here? Just because a format is open doesn't mean it's compatible. It needs implementations in various hardware for that. If it was true that Ogg Vorbis was an mp3 alternative with wide compatiblity, I wouldn't hesitate to use it though.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What support do FLAC and Ogg Vorbis have for surround? I keep my ripped music in these formats because I like how they provide smaller filesizes for lossless and lossy sound than WAV or MP3, but since I listen to music off my computer with a pair of headphones, I wouldn't know what support there is beyond stereo.
Anyway, the article raises an interesting issue with MP3. This format is where it's all at. Anyone old or young understands this three characters. There was MP3 for Dummies for pedestrians, and clearly there's enough technophiles out there that a Martin Ruckert found a publisher for his book Understanding Mp3 , which has a pretty in-depth explanation of the format and the concepts behind it. Yet, the format itself is not offered from places young people are buying music, and we nerds have moved on to other formats. And when people say "I got an MP3 of it", they are using the acronym generically to refer to any sort of digital audio format. MP3 is a format that is alive and dead at once.
Finally, today's faster connections and more capacious hard drives have audiophiles turning to lossless codecs such as FLAC and those offered by Apple Computer and Microsoft.
Anyone who has mastery of the word "capacious" knows a little somethin about somethin.
OK, this is rubbish for several reasons.
MP3 does not sound "noticeably worse"; all codecs have their artifacts at low bitrates. A well-tuned MP3 encoder like LAME in ~128kbps VBR mode will give very comparable results to AAC, with no statistical difference in a double-blind listening test. Hell, in an earlier test LAME beat WMA Standard (the most common version of the codec). And LAME in "--preset standard" mode gives nearly transparent results at around 180-200kbps.
AAC, WMA and OGG all have their advantages, but MP3 is truly a "jack of all trades". You want your audio to play in any player or portable you choose, like iTunes/iPod, WMP, Winamp, foobar2000, AmaroK, etc. etc.? You encode to MP3. Heck, both iTunes and WMP both ship with MP3 encoders now. Like JPEG, MP3 simply isn't bad enough to forsake compatibility for a superior codec.
Secondly, the author clearly doesn't have a solid background in audio technology. I am mystified as to why s/he thought he'd need "full-sized headphones" compared to Shure canalphones to hear the "benefits" of surround sound, when the fact is that with any stereo headphones more than 2 source channels of audio is essentially pointless!
As for surround sound systems, AC3 in the 384kbps+ bitrate is already the standard there. I can't see why MP3 surround will displace it; MP3 surround isn't, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the current or next-gen DVD specs.
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Whilst it may not be the best format is has one very very strong point going for it - Almost everydevice can play it. Try releasing a music player that doesn't play MP3 (*cough* Sony) and see what that does to your sales.
- The volume of MP3 files out there is MUCH larger than anything else.
- Everybody knows MP3. Its to digital music what VHS was to home video before DVDs came along.
- The majority of people DO NOT want their files crippled with DRM.
- Don't assume that everybody always switches to the latest format. I don't know anyone listening to OGG or ACC files.
You forget that MP3 is still alive and kicking on the P2P scene. MP3's limited support of DRM has ensured that it's a popular 'standard' for pirated music.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Not to mention the boxes of vinyl I continue to tote from new house to new house, forever promising the missus that, yes, I WILL get around to ripping them onto the server REAL SOON NOW.
Audiophile geeks are clearly the people to ask about The Next Big Trend, but maybe -- just maybe -- we're not the best people to check in on to determine when that trend has passed...
Phonograph records sounded the best, but they're fragile and non-portable. Casettes are portable, but they sound horrible. CDs are more portable than records and sound better than casettes, though not quite as good as records under optimal conditions. CDs won, though it's notable that you couldn't create your own CD when that victory was achieved.
What this would predict is that ultimately convenience wins out, even trumping sound quality, unless the sound quality is much, much worse, viz. detectable by a non-audiophile over cheap equipment. That would predict that formats like FLAC and OGG and WMA and AAC will never trump MP3 unless the industry has sufficient leverage to make that happen. Which is entirely possible.
That's a pretty major mp3 retailer: and windows users have been encouraged to use that by various magazine/online sources.
Not to mention that there are loads of mp3 players on the market, so I don't see it going away. The commercial market always seems to linger behind for a while - mp3 players are relatively new. They'll keep it alive.
Although I do protest naive ipod users being locked into a manufacturers format - when DRM becomes mandatory, they'll be wondering what's going on. Some people just trust the manufacturer default settings (it's not their fault, they assume it's the best - non-geeks have mp3 players now). Personally I'm going to switch to flac format (I just discovered it) for ripping my favourite albums - I wouldn't use alac (although I'm sure many ipod users do) because it's closed, and can see the DRM restriction problem become an issue in the future for closed source media.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
When one thinks of digital music, one thinks mp3. People refer to their digital music collection as their "mp3" collection, despite the fact that there may be few or no mp3's in the entire archive.
Mp3 is ubiquitous. Despite Fraunhofer and Thomson's patents, portable music players will almost certainly support the standard, as will every single ripping application, somewhere in the background. Naturally, every sound player under the sun can play mp3 files, sometimes even when they can't play pcm or wav files.
Mp3 is here to stay, like; txt, html, avi, csv, vi and ascii. The quality might not be as good, but you can rely on the fact that it will play on virtually everything. Encoders like LAME will help keep it alive too. It will be surpassed yes, but never usurped. It might be the lowest common denominator, but sometimes that's exactly what you reach for.
Bitrates, surround sound, sample rates, quality, size, etc, etc. These are important to audiophiles, but the simple fact is; to most of the population, 128kbps stereo mp3 files encoded with something as good as LAME sound perfect as far as they are concerned.
Hardly anyone I know even uses surround sound to listen to their music anyway. That's for TV. I have two ears, and one channel in each is plenty. Unless humans evolve three more ears , no one realistically needs 5.1 on their iPods.
As to bitrate, quality, etc. Again, few people actually care, and even when they do, storage space is dirt cheap. I can buy 200GB for less than $100, so why waste my time encoding to a lower bitrate on a superior format? I don't know a single person who's ever filled up an iPod with greater than 40GB capacity. Lossless formats like FLAC will become popular long before people demand better quality mp3 sound.
Even id3 tags will probably stand the test of time. id3v2 is a flexible standard, and can keep growing while maintaining backwards compatability. There's also potential for a huge amount of data in there, and again most people won't really care. What they need is simply ripping applications that enter information for them, and they're done.
Mp3 isn't going anywhere. Its future is as the most used, listened to, encoded to and supported compressed sound format. It's competitors are more likely to bow out before mp3 hangs up its hat. The moral of todays story is; 'Sometimes, "Good Enough", is all it takes.'
May the Maths Be with you!
I gave to my girl a samsung YPT7Z, tiny (about the size of a lighter) 1G flash, color screen, and she loves it, but the main reason: It can play Ogg/Vorbis files, wich is among the best audio quality for same size of files.
Right now, I think I'd choose an U3 (for it's SNR quality) and they state it works on linux:
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/u3/
But there are aleredy lots of choices:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers
With the price of diskspace so cheap, and bandwidth so fast, who needs mp3s anymore? It was a bandaid of the late 90s and early 2k when couldn't handle anything better. The world has to move on to lossless already. There is no reason to still be using sub-quality lossy formats for music.
1) According to wikipedia, "MP3 Surround, a version of the format supporting 5.1 channels for surround sound, was introduced in December 2004." So... how is this news?
2) I'm a flac guy, so I don't really care what low quality crap you guys listen to.
It has nothing to do with Mp3 being superior, which it isn't. The fact that every player and piece of software is certainly a factor, but that's not quite it either. I believe Mp3 will be the pervasive format simply because we all have so damn many of them, dozens to hundreds of gigs going back to the days of Napster.
"MP3 Surround files are essentially ordinary MP3s with an additional layer of information that tells compatible players where to place sounds. New devices designed to support the format deliver rich and accurate surround sound -- whether through a 5.1-channel system or simulated through a pair of stereo headphones. The format adds minimal overhead, consuming just 15 additional bits per second."
Surround with only 15 bits per second of data?
10 bucks says its just audio steering a'la Dolby Pro Logic
Bandwith is only fast or cheap in a handful of countries. U.S., Europe, parts of Asia. Everyone else is either on 56K dialup or 128 - 256 - 512kbs Cable/ADSL. And in a lot of places thats not cheap and crippled by monthly bandwith limits. So you can forget about mass adoption of formats that generate 30Mb files per track anytime soon. In the developing world even a standard MP3 file can take a couple of minutes to download.
I use to have a wired subscription, although I noticed that their articles had a very commercial feel to them. I always felt that I was reading a well scripted advertisement rather than a real review. For this reason i canceled my subscription pretty quickly. This article seems no different. Wired seems to be predicting the demise of mp3 in favor of properity drm media. I don't see how mp3 is on the way out. Thats like saying jpeg is going out of style because theres better formats out there. Most people, even non computer users know what an mp3 is. I'd be willing to say less 'non techies' know about aac or wmv. MP3 is a household term, and for this, will most likely be a hard format to kill.
All Of MP3 offers MP3s ripped using LAME at a variety of bitrates, as well as Ogg, WMA and others. Pricing is very inexpensive and very fair, you pay according to the chosen file size. For me, the most important issue next to sound fidelity is compatibility. I want to be listening to my MP3s in 20 years time, on a variety of devices. For backwards compatibility, I see the MP3 format as being the one format which will always be supported by every device.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
Not many everyday users care about surround-sound. It's meaningless for personal listening (earbuds, cans), and only a tiny minority of living rooms are set up for 5.1 or whatever.
Me, I'm encoding everything as MP3 because I know it will play on everything for the forseeable future. I'm also using Flac 'cos I like lossless.
Support for MP3 and Flac is why I like Robert Fripp's music download store.
Last I checked, my Sony in-car CD player doesn't play anything besides regular CD's and MP3, and my DVD player is also very similar in it's short list of formats. I doubt the MP3 format is going to go away anytime soon.
What a bullshit. ID3v2 essentially breaks MP3 standards, making files unplayable on any old MP3 decoder.
Apple wants AAC, Micro$oft wants WMA, Sony wants ATRAC... Everyone wants their own format to live, maybe because of royalties, or maybe just to take others away from the marketing. The fact is: most bad MP3 are actually caused by bad ripping.
People don't know (or just forget) that all those parameters you have while encoding are somewhat critical. It's not only a matter of setting it to the highest bit-rate you can, but checking the bandwidth and audio itself to avoid aliasing, sound damping, etc. MP3 files I encode for listening on my car stereo are undistinguishable from the ones on the original CDs.
I think I will create the RGC format and get rich, by saying MP3, Ogg, AAC and WMA sucks!
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
So who has surround music anyway? Most original music sources are stereo too.
Movies ofcourse is a different matter, but then MP3 isnt very relevent there anyway.
OK, so surround sound is a technological advance, and will help with certain applications - but for the main market of plain ol' music, is it going to make any difference? Is anyone really rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of being able to hear their favourite bands in surround sound?
I might be missing something here, but to me surround sound is more Training Day than Green Day...
My, that was a yummy potato!
The reason I hang out with my geek babe is that I love her!
It's true that we should support devices which support ogg and other open formats. On the other hand there's no wrong in say buying an ipod.
Because it is DRM-free (unlike the commercial formats) en most players support it (unlike Ogg).
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Obviously there is room above lossless compression to improve quality - higher sample rates, multi-channel sound as this article says. Nevertheless, I'm just surprised there isn't more demand for audio that hasn't been poluted by compression.
A-Bomb
The market dictates what rules.
Audio cassette was lower quality than anything else at the time, but it was convenient and durable and most important of all offered longer playtime than anything else.
I currently have 100+ gigs of mp3's.
Yes, theoretically the sound quality isn't all it could be, no matter, perhaps as many as 0.1% of music listeners have both the equipment (eg amp stage and speakers) and enviornment (eg anechoic audio only "music" room) to spot the difference with any degree or reliability or repeatability, and they won't be touching digital anyway...
mp3 is not going anywhere, and probably won't for several more years...
imagine, a new codec that offers DOUBLE the file size compression with no extra degradation, ooh wow, I'll save a whole 50 bucks worth of hard disk space, and I still won't use it unless everyone and everything I can touch supports it, just like mp3 today.
Why do people still use jpeg, there are "better" ways out there, provided you exclude universal transparency and platform independence from your definition of "better"
I went/lived through reel to reel, LP vinyl, 8 track, audio cassette and red book CD, and mp3 blows everything else away.
What with the ever increasing storage density of hard disk (solid state or otherwise) media, I really cannot see or concieve of ANYTHING on the horizon that is about to dent mp3.
To all intents and purposes mp3 is free, is open, is universal, and is good enough, prtability is an issue for people like me with 0.1 TB of mp3's, but that is coming, I can fit it all on a new 2.5" laptop hard disk
The ONLY POSSIBLE reason I can see for mp3 being supplanted for audio is people wanting 24/7 indexable and searchable records of their lives as an audio stream, a new codec and file format optimised for that purpose would beat mp3, for that purpose.
Sorry, that's a lot of business plans, planned obsolescence and pet projects dead in the uterus, tough.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
"Surround sound" is bollocks. You have only two ears. There is always an ambiguity when locating the source of a sound, since there are always at least two points from which it might have originated {and many more for continuous tones where there is no timing information.}
On the other hand, people do like very big speakers, and they also like very small speakers. That is an instinct to which manufacturers and salespeople can appeal. There is also a psychological phenomenon whereby expensive hi-fi equipment always sounds better to the person who paid for it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
MP3 as a format is not going to die out very quickly. The main reason is that many individuals already have vast libraries of their music in MP3 format. The fact that new/store music is not MP3 has only a minimal effect, as most people who keep compressed/digital music are getting a majority of their new music via pirated sources (a.k.a torrents, Gnutella etc).
There are also many like me who purchase CDs and immediate rip them to the computer for listening, while keeping the CDs safely tucked away. For most of us, the preferred format is MP3, the only reason being wide compatibility.
MP3 WILL die as a format, just not anytime soon.
It says "We'd be pleased to kick mp3 off the market ASAP" clearly :-)
I dont know what people are talking about when they say that mp3s have poor sound quality. They sound perfect to me. I have never been able to tell the difference between an mp3 and a cd recording.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
All we have to do is compare the availability of mp3s via p2p as compared to ogg, aac, wma, or any other format you care to name. About 99% of what you'll find will be in mp3 and it doesn't appear that the average downloader is at all interested in moving to another format. Even if he/she were, the time required to reacquire or re-rip your library just isn't worth the effort for most people. Why go to the trouble when a 192 kbs mp3 is of a quality beyond what most people can tell the difference on anyway, or almost certainly beyond the ability of the average computer users speakers to render?
This article is an exercise in living in one's own world. For example, iPod users think that the world will convert to AAC because, well, they're iPod users - they think EVERYONE owns an iPod, despite the fact that it appears the U.S. market has been saturated at around 10% of the population (the other 90% have no interest in purchasing an iPod, something iPod afficionados have a difficult time comprehending). Those folks have their mp3s and absolutely no motivation whatsoever to go to all the effort and trouble of moving to AAC, since they don't own an iPod and never will own an iPod.
A certain group of Linux fanboys seem to think that ogg will replace mp3s because a) it's of a mildly higher quality for a smaller amount of space, and b) it's, like, open source, dude! The first reason certainly isn't enough to get people to put out the effort, anymore than the touted superiority of AAC is - it's too much work for little (or no) payoff. The second reason 95% of the public either doesn't know about or doesn't give a shit about.
If there's anyone out there actively promoting wma over aac, ogg, or mp3, you've got to wonder what tiny little portion of never-never land they live in. They certainly aren't making vast libraries of wma-encoded songs available on *any* network, that's for sure.
Mp3s are here to stay. People simply won't invest the time and energy to convert or reacquire or rerip their libraries for what are (correctly) perceived to be tiny differences - insignificant differences, if you own an average sound system - to anyone but sound buffs. And sound buffs don't set the standard for Joe and Jane User when it comes to the music they play on their computer. They already went to the trouble once, they have everything 'just so', and they're perfectly happy with things the way they are. And that's the end of the discussion for 90% of the music-playing public.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"First, it doesn't sound as good, byte-for-byte, as files purchased from iTunes Music Store (in the AAC format)"
That may be true, but 128kbp AAC sounds like dogshit compared to higher bitrate MP3 (192kbp and above) that my music collection is encoded as. Not to mention the fact that my MP3s will always be playable on any computer or device I own.
Just because something is a good idea is no guarantee that the general public will adopt it. It's been my observation that most people would rather be sold crap than actively seek out superior alternatives. :P
Then they slam the better idea as 'elitist'
I can buy an ipod, spending quite a bit more than a roughly-equivalent no-name mp3 player, so that it synchs seamlessly with iTunes.
Or, I can buy an ipod, spending quite a bit more than a roughly-equivalent no-name mp3 player, and have it work like a no-name bulk-storage device player?
If you don't want to use iTunes, why not save some cash and get something like an iRiver?
given the popularity of digital music and mp3 its not surprising that lots of competing formats should emerge, but as far as i'm concerned they're not a great deal better than mp3. if you really do need better sound then look to your setup and enhance that first of all. http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm might help you on your way.
bit for bit arguement is absurd. capacity is enormous now. high bitrate mp3 has been more than viable for years now. 256kbs cbr or vbr + lame extreme/insane presets or just high bitrate with any mp3 codec makes it more than good enough for the average user.
surround is a bunch of nonsense until they come up with a real viable way to sell high def surround audio that doesnt punish the consumer by locking away functionality with silly drm like sacd/dvda do.
anyways shows how pointless it is to get ahardon about lossless is when you are dealing with an already inferior format:( and we are stuck buying inferior cd's until they fix the high def audio. and thats not gonna happen soon since they have their heads up their asses. they wonder why music sales are slipping? they push their oboslete format after destroying their next gen media with excessive protections. consumers are left paying for inferior product, of course they rebel
Correct me if I'm wrong but don't all 'MP3 players' play MP3's?
(Anyone who so much as utters 'Sony' will be troutslapped)
Some chaps I know cant bring iPods or other mp3 players into work because it is a security risk. This might become the norm. Wasn't their a recent slashdot thread about using an iPod to get corporate data from the network? These companys seems to be allowing workers to bring in a portable CD player that can play a MP3 CD. This does not allow for choices of codec or formats. Once can play either audio cds or mp3 cds. Sure mp3 is going away.
Because analogue recording processes provide the equivalent of infinite bits (as against 16) and infinite sample rate (rather than 44.1/48/etc kHz). the only limitation then is the quality of the amplifiers used to record and replay the recording and the quality/condition of the recording (vinyl/tape). The advantages offered by digital are no generation loss and no degeneration of the signal over time (until it won't play at all - after all it IS digital...)
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
I have a Samsung YP-U1X (512 MiB) for Vorbis. And it is a nice player (if you ignore the very faint interference from the DSP and the lanyard eyelet that's so close to the earphone socket only the supplied buds will fit).
Bless those Koreans. Come to think of it, I've bought a fair bit of Samsung gear recently: this, digital cameras, laser printer... I guess the push for Linux in South Korea is a incentive to make standards-compliant (or at least open spec) hardware that works with pretty much any operating system.
Well you can all think what you like but the future of MP3 but in my household it's there to stay until I die.
:) The idea that I would ever spend my hard earned money to buy a compressed, DRM encumbered soundfile from something like iTunes is laughable, toatally laughable. I'll only pay for full CD quality, 441.1Khz, stereo WAV or better, files and then only if they're pressed onto a CD. No I won't pay for CDs burnt for me by a shop.
:)
I've currently got 35,000 + mp3s on my home server; a good 80%+ of which I've ripped from my own CD collection with the remainder mostly coming from mates CDs. All of these are encoded with lame using the VBR --alt-preset-extreme setting and amount to about 150 Gb of fully IDV tagged data. Playback is handled in three rooms via Slim MP3 players.
To make sure these stay with me I've got the lot backed up onto external hard drives. One is used for a weekly backup. One is used for a monthly back up and which spends the remainder of its time "hidden" in my loft. One is a copy of the loft drive which is backed up every two or three months and is then taken to a friends house; at which point I take one of her removables back to my loft.
I've also taken the step of stocking up on some "cheap & cheerful", reasonable sound quality, DRM free, flash based mp3 players and have one 512Mb and two 1Gb units stored in various places. That way when my current 512Mb player gives up the ghost/gets lost/stolen etc. I have backup hardware.
Thanks to the latest Sony rootkit fiasco though I've now stopped buying CDs altogether. If I want any new music I intend to get it from "the source that must not be named"
So I for one..
1 Will not have any DRM crippled device in the house.
2 Am not interested in transcoding my collection to some other format as one lossy encoding is quite enough.
3 Couldn't give a shit about surround sound audio etc.
4 Am quite happy with mp3 for either playing off my PC or playing in my portable.
You may of course choose to follow the new "best ever" format of the day but me, I couln't care less. Non DRM mp3 works for me and I'm sticking with it.
P.S. And in case you're wondering why yes I do share my files. On a private FTP network and by occassional post to the "the source that must not be named"
As proof of this, the author is encouraged to visit IRC...specifically #mp3_collective or #mp3passion on the Undernet, as but two examples.
A couple of major reasons why mp3 won't be going anywhere soon:-
1. AFAIK anywayz, it doesn't have DRM attached at all, unlike the proprietary formats. The corps can crow about better sound fidelity all they want; as long as they keep DRM, mp3 will stay. This is one instance where freedom is something people do care about.
2. Encoding software is free. (as in beer, and possibly according to Stallman's definition as well) I don't know of any non-shareware (or at least closed source) encoder for Microsoft's formats at all.
3. Inertia. If you aren't aware of the absolute ocean of mp3 files already available, you haven't been paying attention. There also is no proprietary format in existence which can come close to competing to mp3 in terms of the number of pre-existing files. This also means that even if a proprietary format gains traction in the future, mp3 players will still be necessary in order to listen to old files.
4. Given a bitrate of 160+ and a sufficiently decent set of speakers, sound quality is perfectly adequate for mainstream consumption at least, and I tend to suspect that pedantry is the only reason why it isn't for so-called "audiophiles" as well.
From the FAQ:
Ten percent of 128 kb/s is a heck of a lot more than 15 b/s. Maybe he meant to say 15 additional kilobits per second.
AlpineR
I bought an iRiver IFP 899 purely because it said it supported Ogg Vorbis. However, I'm at a loss to get most of my files to play on it. Apparently, things have to be encoded at a minimum of 96k/s and a max of 224. But even supplying oggenc with those parameters, it still can't play them.
/me shakes fist at iRiver.
Get your own free personal location tracker
The people who created Vorbis took care to search for any patents covering audio codecs, and then avoid them.
You'd be surprised at the narrow scope of many patents.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
First, it doesn't sound as good, byte-for-byte, as files purchased from iTunes Music Store (in the AAC format) or any of the Microsoft-compliant stores.
The fact is that an mp3 file can have the same quality as a wma or an aac file. It just uses more memory. Memory is cheap and gets cheaper every day.
This gives me two choices:
1. Have my music in a non-standardized format like wma... and then buy a new music player when I realize that everything but the iPod sucks... or vice-versa.
2. Use a little bit more memory for the same quality and play my music on any device I want, now and in the future.
The memory savings are not significant.
Surround sound is for movies. I don't care what audio format my movie files use. The requirement of a video display means that I won't need to play movies on as many devices as I play music.
I too use a Samsung Digital Audio Player due to their excellent support of the Ogg Vorbis format. I've converted all of my store bought CD's to Ogg Vorbis for portability, and to FLAC for long-term archival storage. I don't buy to many mainstream CD's or songs these days. I tend to gravitate towards indie music, so it's easier to find Ogg based formats without DRM. (i.e. Magnatune.com or AudioPenguin.org)
Music is a stereo format. We only have two ears, so it only makes sense to encode two channels for music. Surround music is a superfluous and unnatural extension of digital music.
All our lives, we listen to music, even live music, coming from a single source. Whether its an individual voice or instrument, or a band, or even a symphony orchestra, we here music being radiated from essentially a point source, radiating to hit our ears. We turn to face the music, generally don't listen to live music from behind. We don't here music coming at us from all directions. Most of us have never sat in the middle of an orchestra or even in a band, so we have no point of reference to hear violins at our right, drums behind up, wind instruments off to the rear left, etc, etc. Most of us would find that cacophony of music to be distracting and distasteful. We don't need to "artificially" master music to come from multiple channels. There is no need for the vocals to come front center, the guitar to be played front right, drums rear left, bass rear right, and backup vocals off center to the left.
The only point I could see of multi-channel music is to record the reverb that actually radiates from behind us. And that would be a waste of bytes. Computer technology is capable of taking a stereo source and applying algorithms to add reverb back, so you can sound like your listening to music in a concert hall, or the intimate muted environment of a jazz club. There is no need to discretely record reverb. Recording reverb will only mess up the recorded source, as some people don't like the echo of a concert hall, so why record it and force people to hear the echo. Some people don't like the muted sounds of a jazz club, so why force them to listen to the music muted. Recording the music free of reverb and letting people fine tune playback of music using digital signal processing has succeeded in making music a popular entertainment format.
This is unlike movie soundtracks where a 2D screen is trying to record 3D reality. Having a car or helicopter roar from the background before appearing on screen overhead or an explosion off to the left is one of the ways to immerse viewers into the movie,we are expecting to hear sound coming from multiple points around the room, not just flatly projected from the front.
Multi-channel music will simply cause MP3's will become bloated, storing discrete 5.1 channels would increase file sizes by 2.5 times. For what purpose? None that I can imagine would actually make the MP3 format more popular.
MP3 also hopes to become the standard for encoding movies and games in 5.1 surround. Why? Don't we already have 2 competing standards that are more then capable of offering high quality multi-channel sound? (DTS and Dolby Digital), we don't need another format that doesn't have a chance to compete.
I would prefer if MP3 became a high fidelity format, storing music in BETTER then CD quality, storing music with higher bit and sampling rates. Storing more of the information, not just the audio range humans supposedly can only hear. These "inaudible" sounds create the ambiance that is missing from digital music, the stomach vibrating lows and the highs that interact with the environment in ways that we can FEEL rather then here. This is what is missing when digitally recording live music. I would rather MP3 files double or triple in size due to more of the original sound data being stored, rather then to store multiple channels of audio.
Multi-channel audio has failed to catch on, because it is unnatural. DVD Audio and Super CD both failed as a music format. Also, quadraphonic records back in the day didn't translate into quadraphonic CD's. Multi-channel MP3's will fail to catch on as well.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The fact that all portable music players are called "Mp3" player, and not an AAC player, or Ogg player, is enough to make it the de facto standard.
People just need to be educated not to use proprietary formats. I mean, if someone went into a video store and they only rented Betamax there, people would know not to shop there. But people will buy music from a music store that only sells WMA or Fairplay-AAC and they don't think twice. It really isn't that complicated.
I was helping a guy put a church's sermons on the web. I recorded the sermons, converted them to MP3 at 3 different bitrates. Then the guy who does the web site took those and converted them to RealAudio files. Why do people do this??? Now half the congregation can't hear the sermons and nobody else can open and edit the files. Arggh!
The guy who edited my wedding video gave me the video in my choice of 2 formats: Uncompressed AVI or MPEG-2 Quicktime. This person does this professionally and has a degree in film. But he had no idea how to write an MPEG-1, MPEG-2, or MPEG-4 file. Or even a pseudo-standard MPEG-4 AVI.
What makes it worse is that big business loves kickbacks and incentives. A while back Slashdot covered how Microsoft was helping to put digital movie projectors into theaters. And of course, they played WMV files. I would have expected that the movie industry would pick their own standard! But surely marketing + kickbacks + the promise of DRM meant that standards go out the window.
If we had all of this going on ten years ago there would be no internet, and we'd all be dialing up BBSs -- but only the BBSs that supported the same modem as the one we bought.
With the price of disk space so cheap, and bandwidth so fast, who needs to store their own music anymore? If the big RIAA members would just get off their butts and actually be creative instead of destructive, they could start an iTunes alternative where you just pay to mark a song as yours forever, for ten plays, for playing once or whatever. They could have their "customer pays for the same song over and over again" world.
The hassle of downloading beforehand, saving your mp3s in some semblance of order, using up your own precious disk space that could be better used for porn - all gone, for the measly price of $?.?? per song.
Not that it could ever happen, of course.
When a user goes to a file sharing app and downloads a track for nothing it will be in the MP3 format. I see few Ogg files, virtually no WMA files and certainly no AAC files. It is the universal format for people downloading music for nothing without any form of DRM restriction, and has been for years.
Like piracy or not, the reason why the iPod is so popular and why people are talking about this digital home is because people have been able to build their music collections through ripping their CDs, their friends' CDs and downloading and uploading for free through file sharing. If people had to buy all that through iTunes or another store in AAC or WMA formats that just wouldn't have happened. MP3 is going absolutely nowhere.
Memory is cheap
"That's more an article of faith than a statement of fact"
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
plain surround isn't compelling enough anyways. we've already had high def audio formats with sacd/dvda so consumers know whats possible already, even if its been bungled. while technies are quibbling over how close they can get to obsolete cd sound theres a higher standard that should be reached for if one is to truely justify a new format. but its not going to happen considering how the music industry sank their two hidef formats with drm restricting use when consumers finally were starting to use music the way they wanted to thanks to mp3..which freed consumers of the shackles of album formats. drm tried to put those shackles right back on. they really dont care about the consumer and value for money so we are going to be able to stick with mp3 for quite some time.
i'm sticking with mp3. its usefulness is just obvious when i look at how rarely i even bother to retrieve a cd from my media shelves. small capacity physical media is just so inconvenient its laughable.
as for mp3, they tried to push mp3 pro and that didn't work. people went for mp3 because it was the first convenient format without drm and it was free. (yes i know quibbles but in the real world it was)
i doubt most of the complainers can pass a high bitrate mp3 vs cd blind A B test anyways. much "sound quality" gripes are just a mental disorder.
"I dont know what people are talking about when they say that mp3s have poor sound quality. They sound perfect to me. I have never been able to tell the difference between an mp3 and a cd recording."
they don't. cd is obsolete. its all argueing over nonsense when we know theres the tech for much higher quality sound from dvda/sacd. not that it matters thanks to drm
"It's really a matter of hardware/software support, at the end of the day. For most end-users, mp3's compression:quality ratio is good enough..." And that is *all* there is to it. As I write this I'm encoding my entire CD collection as ~200kps VBR MP3 using EAC and LAME. I just purchased a DMP1 player for my car stereo; its little ARM processor can't handle a much greater bit rate. But it doesn't need to. I've put a lot of money and time into my car stereo. It's not quite competition quality but I would consider it audiophile quality; it's certainly better than a couple of ear buds. At this compression rate in a side-by-side comparison with the CD using the same song, the MP3 was indistinguishable, without road noise. And at this bit rate I can fit ~265 CDs on the DMP1's meager 20GB hard drive.
46 & 2
So, as someone considering joining the cult of the white earbud and a hardcore *nix user, should I re-encode my CDs as aac or mp3? I usually use grip and oggenc but as the ipod doesn't support that, I'd be leaning towards aac with faad2 or something.
Just wondering if anyone out there had opinions on this?
iPods are not "locked" into a manufacturer's format. AAC is the logical successor to MP3. MP3 is "MPEG-1 layer 3", while AAC is "MPEG4 advanced audio codec". BlueRay and HD-DVD utilize MPEG4 as well. iTunes rips music into AAC format, which is not locked at all, any more than an MP3 is at least. At the very least, AAC is more open than WMA, by virtue of being an ISO MPEG standard.
GPL Deconstructed
...nice to meet you. :-)
Until the car stereo players, mobile units, etc. support Ogg, while it's a superior format (and it IS...), it's just not going to get used. I've got an in-dash that plays MP3's. It's supposed to do WMA's as well, but it didn't like some of the stuff that our housemate fed to it recently. It DOES do quite a good job of playing MP3's and it'd just say "Huh" on an Ogg file. What? Get a player that supports Ogg? I don't know of any units that do, and I suspect that IF there were one, it'd take a while for me to even budget the thing into the picture. I got the in-dash because the other methods were sub-optimal in the way playback is done and it means another device floating in the cab- and it's nothing for me to take the SD card out of the deck and stick it in a portable MP3 player and go on my merry way.
Unless I can do that with Ogg, I'm just stuck with playing those on a PC or a TV media player at home.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"Better" isn't really better if you can't hear it. Humans cannot hear frequencies above 20kHz. So if your "perfect" analog signal contains components above 20kHz, it is like a tree falling in the forest, it doesn't matter because no one can hear it.
That's why 44kHz is good enough...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
eMusic does lack a lot of what plays on the radio, but I stopped regularly listening to the radio about five years ago when I decided it was too much trouble sitting through thirty minutes of terrible, over-played garbage while waiting for a song I liked. eMusic has a huge catalog of excellent Jazz, Cuban, Classic Rock, Indie Rock and Comedy, and it's cheaper by far than the other pay-per-file download services (the most you're going to pay is $0.25 US/track, it gets cheaper if you buy more per month).
Another nice thing about eMusic is that the music isn't just MP3, it's MP3 encoded at high variable bitrate (LAME 3.90, I believe, alt-preset-standard). It's pretty much the same setting I'll use for the CDs I buy myself.
And in the end, I have a music file that sounds good and that has no restrictions against copying to my notebook, MP3 player, a CD for playing in the car or anything else. That's worth a lot to me.
I'm using Cowon Jetaudio here, personally think it's an iPod killer :) Supports FLAC/OGG and is a pretty cool player. It mounts like a portable HDD in linux, and I have zero problems with it, no need for extra software. Everything I rip now is in OGG, no more mp3 for me, other than old songs I've ripped in mp3 long before.
Phonograph records sounded the best, but they're fragile and non-portable. Casettes are portable, but they sound horrible.
No, they don't. It's your cassette deck that sounds horrible.
With Dolby C and a good low-grain tape, cassettes rival CDs. With a shitty player, the best cassette sounds like shit.
LPs are superior to any format except the 30 inch per second reel they were mastered on. However, put a top of the line cassette player against a cheap turntable and the cassette will win. See, that's the thing with analog -- the equipment you play it on really matters, unlike digital. With digital sound, all that matters is how good your speakers or headphones are.
Check the specs on your cassette, you may only be getting a response of 200-11k Hz. Many cassette players are far worse than this even. However, the format is capable of a flat response from below 20 to ~18k Hz.
cheating MRC="aurally"
I did my own tests comparing MP3 and AAC. While it's true that iTunes-encoded AAC is better than iTunes-encoded AAC, LAME encoded MP3 is better than both.
Yes, LAME-encoded MP3 is better than iTunes Music Store AAC, at the same bitrates. http://www.xciv.org/~meta/audio-shootout/
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I meant "iTunes-encoded AAC is better than iTunes-encoded MP3", obviously.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Don't you need surround-sound content before the lack of surround support for MP3 becomes an issue? I don't have any CDs with surround-sound support on them, so encoding them in a format that supports surround sound would not give me any advantage. There is no front and back channel data there to encode.
I did some tests a while back to see what format sounded most like the original CD. Between mp3, wma, aac & ogg. (Using a detla 44 hi-fi sound card and sony studio headphones) After compairing the formats, I wasn't able to tell the difference between the ogg files and the original CD format. Most interesting was the footprint left by ogg files... very very small. Often 1/2 the size of the mp3 files.
Right off the bat I started encoding my cd rips right to ogg and was quite happy doing things that way.
I ended up going back to the mp3 format once I got my ipod. Lame! (not the encoder) I really wish Apple would pick up the slack here and offer a wider range of supported audio formats.
Honestly in the future I see us adapting to using uncompressed wav files or even upgrading our audio standards to 24bit 96k wavs. (oh they sound so good) With more bandwidth and more storage - I don't see this being to far off.
Until then I'm sticking with Vinyl Records and my crappy 192kbps mp3s
-makoffee
Surround Sound MP3?! Ooooh, wow! Gotta switch to that right aw ... Umm... Wait a second here.
Who releases audio with surround sound information? Do you often see CDs touting surround sound? What is the point of surround sound in an MP3 if the only way to add that information is by getting a sound technician to remaster from source material?
What a useless 'innovation'.
One of the reasons that MP3 is so cheap to implement is because there are MP3 decoder chips. The chips are cheap. This means that the only processing power beyond the MP3 decoder chip needed is just enough to have an interface. That is why I could buy a brand new MP3 player from Fry's for $15. Of course the design of a player that supports MP3 only is also very easy, as all you have to do is feed the raw data into the chip, and out comes music. The hardest part is writing the drivers to read the media.
That being the case, if the Ogg group wants to really push their format, they should try to recruit some hardware guys to work on designing a chip that natively plays vorbis and FLAC.
MP3 is de-facto for "Digital Music" and people understand that when they buy "digital music player" that they want "mp3 player". And what does an "mp3 player" plays? MP3!
That's it. People with good computer-based collections of music have it in MP3 format because it "just works". WindowsMandatoryAudio or some apple's crappy format, who cares? Trans-code it to MP3 format, put it on the P2P network and the music will continue to spread, as it was meant to, in the "digital music format" that does not include crappy drm overheads and similar nonsense reserved for idiot buyers.
Or is it just mee? Seems especially like the classical/jazz groups are trading in FLAC now.
Something I'd not seen 2-5 months ago.
MAC is faster to rip, slightly smaller files and is also now open source. (Did not used to be.)
Only downloads that work on Microsoft Windows, a proprietary operating system published by a U.S. company, are available. Even the FAQ is in a Windows proprietary format (.chm). It may be faster if you're already on Windows, but is it faster than native FLAC on Wine? And is it faster inside a Virtual PC than FLAC is natively on a Mac?
Monkey's Audio itself is also not free software for the same reasons as old versions of the Apple Public Source License. The Monkey's Audio license has the same "Disrespect for privacy" and "Central control" problems mentioned in FSF's article about the old APSL.
Bring on the surround sound. I think this would be very beneficial for the market!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Then where does it get the rear channel from when you play a CD in Dolby Pro Logic?
Dolby Pro Logic puts the left channel on left, the right channel on right, the sum* on center, and the difference* on surround.
*Times a gain of sqrt(1/2) to maintain equal power.
There IS compatible hardware.
Sold at my local Best Buy or Wal-Mart store? Or do I have to send away for it and pay extra for 1. a product without economies of scale and 2. shipping?
> I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a shift away from lossy compression algorithms to lossless compression. As more and more of the market shifts away from the 650-700MB capacity constraint of traditional CDs, file sizes for songs are becoming less of an issue. As portable players get up to 60GB+ capacity, having files that are 6MB instead of 3MB starts to have less of an impact on people's ability to have the music they want at hand - since, if my math is correct, that's still enough memory for 10,000 songs.
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but file sizes are still an important issue. 60GB will not hold 10,000 lossless songs. The average size of a lossless track in my library is 40MB.
The napkin math is something like this:
60GB = 60,000MB; 60,000MB / 40MB = 1,500 songs.
Using lossless files would be like turning a iPod video into an iPod mini without the cute form factor.
Now, when we have 500GB iPods then the 10,000 song libraries will be portable without lossy compression (or you could keep lossy compression and carry around 100,000 songs, roughly an entire year's worth of uninterrupted music). Of course for a library like that you'd need to buy like 8,000 CDs -- and at RIAA prices that's no small investment.
My entire music collection would fit in 250GB using flac or lossless m4a, so I'd still have to buy a lot more to fill the half TB.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Here's an example:
http://www.un4seen.com/download.php?6chan
You can convert Dolby AC3 from DVDs into 5.1 channel OGG Vorbis streams to make DVD rips but it doesn't save you much bandwidth since AC3 is only 192kbps to begin with (can you believe it?)
I have a really nice OGG of the THX intro sound in 5.1 which sounds _much better_ than the AC3 version because of the higher bitrate ceiling. If I can find it I'll reply with a post to a link.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
MP3s are synonymous with music on your computer.
People ask me about downloading MP3s from iTunes (yeah, really).
I myself am a big proponent of OGG Vorbis and OGG FLAC. (Theora too!)
It's very annoying that:
1) DVD/MP3 players don't exist yet (and the ones that do are absurdly expensive, I don't need video!!!)
2) AAC/MP3/WMA is the best you're going to get in a player. The home/living room devices are a little bit better, but vehicle players are still the best you can get.
I'm getting ready to get a stripped down linux distro and just throw the entire computer in my truck.
That's quite a commitment though, one that I'm not 100% sure I want to make yet.
Well, I would argue that magtape is a much better medium for capturing audio than a record, because the record has the disadvantage of being a physical process (needle being dragged around in resin) while the tape recording has little system reactivity (it doesn't take much EMF to line up domains on a thin film of tape).
That's why analog recording sessions are mastered to tape. Not vinyl.
Vinyl just so happened to be easy to reproduce, ship, and store. They suck as a reproductive medium. While the channel capacity is potential very high, the SNR is high as well, and the creation process introduces some non-tonal distortions that are difficult to filter or compensate for on playback.
Give me a digital reproductive medium anyday. Lasts forever and a good downmix speaks louder than words.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There's an excellent store to buy open, mp3 encoded files in your choice of bitrate. www.allofmp3.com
AFAIK Xiph has not published the details of the patents they considered
This is probably for the same reason that OSRM doesn't publish its list of patents that the Linux kernel may infringe: liability. Apparently, if the study were to be published before the patents expire, it might make the judge more likely to find that an infringement was willful and award treble damages.*
* Here, "treble" is legalese for triple. It has nothing to do with clipped audio killing your tweeters.
The main patent expires in 2012. At that point, anybody can crank out high-quality standard MP3s without any legal impediments. This has the RIAA scared shitless. Watch for *INTENSE* lobbying for "son-of-SSSCA" legislation that will effectively ban MP3 before then.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I've got a mixture of ogg and mp3, but I expect to eliminate/replace the mp3 collection over time. I have no DRMed music in my collection, and never intend to add any. I still buy (rippable) CDs.
The portable player support is not too important to me, since am happy with radio in the car 99% of the time.
virtually lossless, and being able to have better sound quality than CD's (if taken from proper sources,) I'll stick with .flac
I have reasons to use multiple formats (i.e. my cell phone only accepts .m4a files, which I would like more compressed than the files found on my hard drive). Therefore, I like to use FLAC so I can easily reencode the files into new formats. While you may not hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and a FLAC file, you almost certainly will hear many artifacts when you reencode a 320kbps MP3 into an .ogg or .m4a file. Keeping much of my collection in FLAC helps me easily allow for future conversions into other (potentially better) formats.
I would like to bring to your attention the VS1053 chip from VLSI. Download the datasheet here: http://www.vlsi.fi/download/download.shtml While the spec is preliminary, the chip is already on the way. I suppose there are more of them on the market already.
I remember ADD meaning Analog Digital Digital,meaning original multi track analog recording mixed to digital stereo, mastered to digital. These were CDs where a producer got back in the studio to do a remix of the original analog multi track for Cd reissue. Some early CDs were AAD, original analog multi track mixed to analog stereo digitaly mastered to CD, more of a conversion of analog master to digital without remixing from the multitrack source.
The story that one format displaces another because of sound or image quality is a myth. Nothing beat out an entrenched format because of quality.
CDs beat records because they are way more portable.
CDs beat cassettes because you can skip around easily.
CDs beat both because they were shipping with "extra tracks".
DVDs beat VHS because of extra content and you don't have to rewind.
MP3s beat CDs because they are more way portable.
Nothing is because of sound quality, but people do use that to help justify new purchases.
--jono
It is good to see this starting to come out. Looking at the list shows that there are several chips that decode MP3, and one that does vorbis. I suspect that the cost of the different chips is not much, so hopefully, we will start to see more players with vorbis support. I've been thinking about building my own player, but wasn't ready to start coding a vorbis decoder for a microcontroller.
Hopefully they will also make a FLAC decoder on a chip, but for now, vorbis support makes me happy.
- MP3 has extremely limited framing capabilities. This means, for example, that there's no timecode information in a given frame, which, in turn, means that intra-file seeking is either crude, or slow.
- the MP3 de facto standard for metadata (ID3 tags) are downright frightening. The "specification" will make any good engineer cringe. By comparison, Vorbis has an elegant metadata implementation that makes few assumption and imposes few restrictions.
- MP3 files are not sample accurate. This means that when you pass a recording through an encode->decode cycle, it will change length by some small amount. (The length on decode will be rounded up to an even multiple of mpeg frames.) This is particularly troublesome for live music or any other recording that is intended to dovetail seamlessly with another track, and playing such recordings "gaplessly" requires applying some heuristic, such as truncating lead-in and lead-out data below some noise threshold.
It depends on what you mean by "surround". If you mean the actual experience of "surround" while actually being somewhere where the music is being played, well, then you don't need multi channels for that - you just need microphones and microphone surrounds that more closely emulate the human head and pinna (outer ear)- and they need to be where the listener would be. Imagine, if you would, an exact mold of your head, of the same acoustical reflectivity of your head, with microphones in the "ears" - and the head-model at the top of a seat, say, in a concert hall. You get appropriately timed reverb because you're in the right place. Lookup psychacoustics for more info on how our brains interpret micro-delay sound sources. You get appropriate sound shadows and frequency dependent phase inversions because of the head model and 'phone placement. Look up HRTF for more info on this. What you don't get is the ability to turn your head and have the relative volume/shadows/inversion/etc change (the other sound source locator we use). Not sure how important this is for reproducing a concert hall experience. So... this all already exists - it's called binaural http://www.binaural.com/binfaq.html recording. Unlike the other nonsense the recording industry is trying to do, IMHO, this legitimately gives them a reason to see us both earphone-specific and "traditional" recordings - at least of live events. Is there a way to take a pre-existing recording and binaural-ify it? Maybe - especially if thay had multiple channels. Imagine a multi=track recording played back in "perfect" room with each track going to the appropriate speaker, and a biaural head-form re-recording it. You'd at least get as good (in the sense of surround-experience) as someone sitting in that "perfect" room, listening to the same playback. I image you could do that via HRTF - but only if you had location information for each channel. Once you have that, adding delay, reverb, reflections, etc, becomes do-able. Yamaha, for instance, had sound engineets go around the world measuring, delay, reflection, reverb in various concert halls - with the aim of being able to take twh channel sound and add at least some of the ambience of a particular concert hall to the back channels. Not the same problem here, but a bit related.