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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.
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
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.