Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
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.
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 $100, so why waste my time encoding to a lower bitrate on a superior format? I don't know a single person who's ever filled up an iPod with greater than 40GB capacity. Lossless formats like FLAC will become popular long before people demand better quality mp3 sound.
Even id3 tags will probably stand the test of time. id3v2 is a flexible standard, and can keep growing while maintaining backwards compatability. There's also potential for a huge amount of data in there, and again most people won't really care. What they need is simply ripping applications that enter information for them, and they're done.
Mp3 isn't going anywhere. Its future is as the most used, listened to, encoded to and supported compressed sound format. It's competitors are more likely to bow out before mp3 hangs up its hat. The moral of todays story is; 'Sometimes, "Good Enough", is all it takes.'
May the Maths Be with you!
Apple wants AAC, Micro$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
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.