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Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard
stivi writes "BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. 'Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.'"
AAC isn't proprietary to Apple, it's part of the MPEG-4 standard.
g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Believe it or not, MP3 actually has more patent issues than AAC at this point. Supposedly, if you run an online store, you have to pay royalties on every song sold to MP3-related patent holders. AFAIK, AACs don't require royalties to be paid per-song. There are also outstanding lawsuits regarding MP3.
So even though it may make sense to you, as a consumer, to stick with mp3, it may not make sense to a business. So if you imagine that MP3 is disqualified, what else is likely to become the defacto standard for online music stores? To answer that, you might want to ask yourself, "Besides MP3, what other formats play on the most popular portable music player?"
Yeah, that pretty much means AAC. It's not that I wouldn't like it to be something that's completely unencumbered by patents, but either way, it's better than dealing with Windows Media files.
From your link:
"# Are there use fees for MPEG-4 Audio?
No. License fees are due on the sale of encoders and/or decoders only. There are no patent license fees due on the distribution of bit-stream encoded in an MPEG-4 Audio format, whether such bit-streams are broadcast, streamed over a network, or provided on physical media.
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested: Well, yes and no - semantically, I was considering royalties and patent licensing fees as separate entities. AAC decoder licensing fees run as low as $0.12 per unit, whereas MP3 licensing fees appear to be independent of volume of devices sold and cost ~$0.75 per unit. Additionally, the sale of mp3 files costs the seller 2-3% of their gross revenue from the sales in royalties - the sale of AAC files does not require royalty payments. So yes, while AAC is not free per se, it is in fact cheaper than mp3 for both hardware manufacturers and content distributors.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
That's very misleading. mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification, .mp4 refers to the container format of the MPEG-4 specification that's based on .mov and can contain a large number of different video, audio and other streams in a number of different codecs.
So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
This is also misleading, although AAC *is* better. With codecs like these, the only thing that is fixed is the actual bitstream, leaving a lot of leeway to the different encoders. An mp3 encoded with an excellent encoder will be superior to an AAC by a mediocre encoder (e.g. I don't know about Quicktime's aac encodes but its AVC is complete and utter shit, even though AVC is an excellent spec). Also cpu-time constraints can have a serious impact on encoding quality, although that's normally not an issue if you do the encoding on a PC.
One big advantage of AAC are advanced features like 5.1 channels and such. There are hacks to tack on lots of features to mp3 but it lacks the (relatively) clean specs of MPEG-4 and it often lead to all kinds of problems.
the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.
yes, it is. (Good Apple; good EMI too btw, even though it took too long until they saw the light)
MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.
It's not odd. Mp3 is the 800 pound gorilla of music formats and noone can do without it. Apple refused to share its DRM system with anyone (bad Apple), so for most competitors WMA was the easiest way to provide customers the capability to buy music (well, Big-4 music) online, thanks to MS's Played-for-Sure(TM) (until they got the URGE(TM) to squirt(TM) stuff all over the place =) and iirc it's the default spit out by WMP if you tell it to encode something for you. Few non-iPod owners use AAC, so there was no real reason to implement it (similar problem as Vorbis).
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Licensing. AAC doesn't require royalties (it's a MPEG standard), but WMA is proprietary.
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