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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.'"
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.
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.
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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.
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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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.
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 $100, so why waste my time encoding to a lower bitrate on a superior format? I don't know a single person who's ever filled up an iPod with greater than 40GB capacity. Lossless formats like FLAC will become popular long before people demand better quality mp3 sound.
Even id3 tags will probably stand the test of time. id3v2 is a flexible standard, and can keep growing while maintaining backwards compatability. There's also potential for a huge amount of data in there, and again most people won't really care. What they need is simply ripping applications that enter information for them, and they're done.
Mp3 isn't going anywhere. Its future is as the most used, listened to, encoded to and supported compressed sound format. It's competitors are more likely to bow out before mp3 hangs up its hat. The moral of todays story is; 'Sometimes, "Good Enough", is all it takes.'
May the Maths Be with you!
All Of MP3 offers MP3s ripped using LAME at a variety of bitrates, as well as Ogg, WMA and others. Pricing is very inexpensive and very fair, you pay according to the chosen file size. For me, the most important issue next to sound fidelity is compatibility. I want to be listening to my MP3s in 20 years time, on a variety of devices. For backwards compatibility, I see the MP3 format as being the one format which will always be supported by every device.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
Apple wants AAC, Micro$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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Have you ever downloaded a lossless-compressed album? You have? good for you and your T3 line then.
In the real world, most people still use 56k.
As a technology trend, however, it is weird because technology tends to evolve by improvement. Lossy compression is a step backward from CD quality, no matter how small the perceived difference actually is.
Another way in which technology evolves backwards is DRM: the kind of technology that works against its own progress. It took so much effort to create a technological utopia where everyone could access any information freely -- and then the media industries are working hard with new technologies that effectively reverse this development.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Well, yes, that was my point. For archiving, FLAC is great. But on a mobile device? Unless you're transporting your archive somewhere via the device, what possible use is taking up all of that space on imperceptible change?
Not everyone is interested in holding a lossless music archive on their system. For many, there's simply no benefit.