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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.'"
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.
Since AAC is an integral part of the MPEG4 standard, and since MPEG4 seems to be gaining momentum in standalone devices, I would think that support for AAC would be a lot more widespread in the future. Besides, AAC should be getting you better quality at the same bitrate as long as the bitrate isn't insanely high.
why should I rip my CDs in a format that locks me in to buying iPods in future?
You are mistaken in thinking that AAC is an Apple-only format. AAC is part of the MPEG4 standards, and e.g. most phones with music playing capabilities nowadays support AAC.
And there was me thinking that the A in ADD with respect to CD's was for Analogue, as in the original recording was Analogue.
/. :)
ADD described a process, where the letters meant "Recorded in","Mixed in" and "Mastered in"
So a purely digital recording would be DDD, a direct transfer of an old Vinyl record from a pressing master (or from the vinyl would be AAD.
Sorry to be picky - but this IS
QUICK ADDITION: from wikipedia
Three-Letter Codes
* DDD: digital tape recorder used during session recording, mixing and/or editing, and mastering (transcription).
* ADD: analog tape recorder used during session recording, digital tape recorder used during subsequent mixing and/or editing and during mastering (transcription).
* AAD: analog tape recorder used during session recording and subsequent mixing and/or editing, digital tape recorder used during mastering (transcription).
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.
iPod in fact now supports Ogg Vorbis (and many other formats too), with an excellent third-party open source firmware called Rockbox. The playback is also gapless and supports Replaygain data, and it doesn't force you to use iTunes or any other database tool. see: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodPor t
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!
Probably not.
From the FAQ:
Are MP3 Surround files much bigger than regular MP3 files?
No, fortunately not. The algorithm used in MP3 Surround employs psychoacoustics to recreate the surround image out of very compact spatial information. By adding surround information, MP3 file sizes increase by just about 10 percent.
10% still isn't a lot to encode four additional channels, though.
The problem with flac (in particular on devices) is that it uses lossless compression. While it's a fantastic format for archiving data, if storage space is a factor it's just not efficient use of space. Nobody can hear the difference between a sufficiently-high-bitrate lossy file and a lossless one, although there is obviously data loss there.
Using flac (or some other lossless format) for a storage format on a main computer system (where storage space is typically effectively unlimited) then transcoding to a lossy format to put on a mobile device would be fine. But when space is a concern, lossless isn't the way to go.
The reason FLAC take longer on the encode step is because they were aiming for an easier decode. Monkey is, I believe, a 1:1 encode:decode whereas FLAC takes more hardware on the encode side vs the decode side to produce a 1:1 time relationship. This means you need less hardware to decode FLAC on the fly than to encode it on the fly. It probably won't matter in a few years, but there you have it.
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