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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.'"
What exactly makes this different than .mp3? Other online music stores have had the option to sell unrestricted .mp3 files for plenty of time and still haven't decided to do that. Yes, AAC is arguably better than MP3, but both are quite "iPod compatible".
and so it will never capture the market share that mp3 based hardware (chip) players have.
I have so many mp3-only players - why on earth would I convert to a diff format when mp3 meets ALL my needs?
now, if all players were firmware upgradable, fine. but the fact is, most are chip based and if there is no
AAC support in the chip, you are SOL.
AAC is a nice idea, but its not 'everywhere'. mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.
--
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liqbase
Every digital music device can play it, and it's already a more well-known and common standard than AAC.
I know AAC is technically superior to MP3, but so was Betamax. Popularity beats technology a lot of the time, especially when the technical advantage is not exactly glaringly obvious.
Either way WMA is going down thought. As it should.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard
So selling DRM-free AAC files will dethrone DRM-free MP3 files as the industry standard?
How, exactly?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
There are plenty of free codecs out there that do a fine job. Why would a music store gravitate towards a non-free codec?
Who really uses .wma for anything anymore?
- It doesn't suck.
- It sounds better per data byte than MP3 or WMA.
- It's cross-platform (or at least (minus Fairplay) more cross-platform that WMA).
- No Microsoft. Apple may not be a company of saints, but they're at least an order of magnitude less evil than Microsoft.
- And speaking of which, AAC will win because Microsoft knifed their "Plays for Sure" partners in the back with Zune. ("Hey lets piss over major consumer electronics manufacturers to bring out a DOA product that loses us money!")
Crow T. TrollbotAAC 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."
Lucent's recent assertion to MP3 patent rights ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/technology/23pat ent.html?ex=1329973200&en=6a3c7d2b220acec5&ei=5124 &partner=digg&exprod=digg ) combined with this move by Apple and EMI probably have doomed MP3 to an also-ran status.
If you're not familiar, everyone who licensed the MP3 patents is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Alcatel-Lucent because they co-own the patent rights, but weren't party to all the licensing that was going on before.
So that people could play the music on an iPod, the #1 DAP on the market? Yeah, that might be a reason.
>>the #1 DAP on the market?
Whats a DAP? Is it like an iPod?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
You haven't been looking hard enough. iRiver has been making OGG-compatible players for years (no, they don't require reflashing with RockBox for this).
I'm listening to Oggs on my H320 with factory firmware as I type this.
Unfortunately, their newest players don't do Ogg any more. I recommend that you get another good player, the Cowon iAudio X5 or X5L. It has 30GB and plays Oggs.
If DRM was really the concern all along emusic.com would be an industry giant today
There's the small matter of having any music that 95% of people want to buy too.
What is marginalizing WMA is new releases of WMP that break backwards compatability with older files. See here for a music publisher where Microsoft WMP 11 broke their sales model.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Unless, of course, Microsoft also offers DRM free WMA files in its Zune Marketplace.
But of course, that could never happen, right?
[i]MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support.[/i]
Actually, AAC is an open standard and is royalty-free - it would cost other manufacturers to add AAC support to their players (as Sony already has - they have added AAC support to some of ther Walkman devices through firmware updates).
Microsoft would like their format to become dominate, but hopefully that will not happen because an open format like AAC is better for everyone.
This further underscores why Microsoft should stop fixating on the music/video business and turn their attention back to their core business.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why are so many people so stupid when it comes to AAC? Everyone jumps on it as a proprietary format owned be Apple with license fees and can only be played on iPods.
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE.
It's an open standard, not owned by Apple, it's free to distribute content in AAC (not sure about fees for putting AAC support in a player), and there are plenty of AAC compatible players out there. The only thing nefarious about it was Apple's DRM, and hopefully that is on the way out.
MPEG-4 AAC audio is already the professional standard for perceptually encoded audio. It replaced MP3 audio not only in the MPEG-4 spec, but AAC has even been "backported" to the MPEG-2 standard to replace MP3 there as well. Every device that supports MPEG-4 H.264 video playback supports AAC audio. HD-DVD video: AAC audio. Blu-Ray Disc video: AAC audio. iTunes+iPod: AAC audio. PlayStation3, PSP: AAC audio. Zune: AAC audio (yes).
... it is fucking hilarious to suggest Windows Media is even relevant. NOBODY USED WINDOWS MEDIA FIVE YEARS AGO WHEN IT WAS HIP AND THERE WAS NO iPOD. NOBODY IS USING IT NOW. NOBODY WILL USE IT IN THE FUTURE. (Yes, you made some with your 'puter. Good for you. Means nothing. You gained NOTHING.) It is ridiculous to suggest that professional audio people are going to take the extra step of converting their audio to WMA using Microsoft's ridiculously immature My First Audio Studio tools in order to pay MS a vig on every file they sell.
It isn't just that AAC has much better audio quality than MP3, which is true. It isn't just that the technology involved is 10 years newer than MP3, which is also true. The main reason that AAC is the standard is that MP3 has a so-called "content tax" and MPEG-4 does not. With MP3 you pay for the encoder, and then you pay again for every file you sell, whether on disc or over the Internet. It is the audio track from a DVD and it is not indie or Internet friendly. It may be a good way to store your CD's on your computer in 1999 but it is not good for replacing the CD for the audio industry. MPEG-4 follows the QuickTime model where you pay only for the encoder and the AAC files you create are your own to do with as you please, similar to CD. This is important not only because the music industry doesn't want to start paying a vig where none existed, but also because there is no system in place to track the vigs, it is not going to happen.
So if you are a content producer and you use AAC instead of MP3, not only does your audio quality improve, but it costs you less money also. It is very, very, very hard to beat an argument that pleases both the music people (higher quality audio) and the business people (keep the vig for yourself).
As for Windows Media
In the music industry, if it doesn't play on an iPod it is not an audio file. PERIOD. The iPod plays all of the standard files plus Microsoft's WAV which is just raw audio, a clone of AIFF. If you take an audio file that plays on the iPod and convert it to something that does not play on the iPod, then you have converted an audio file into a non-audio file. PERIOD. Just because you can burn 10 WMA or Ogg files to a CD-R does not mean you have made an audio CD. Maybe that is impressive in some geek circles but not to music and audio geeks and has no bearing on the music and audio market.
There is nothing at all out there to compete with MPEG-4. The argument that is being made here in this article happened around 2000 or so and it is long over. The fact that it is becoming apparent to people outside the audio industry is the end not the beginning of the process.