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MP3 Format Still Gathering Momentum
PoliTech sends us over to Billboard.com for a detailed article about the coming tipping point in the music business in favor of MP3. The two biggest drivers pushing Warner and Sony BMG toward MP3 are an upcoming massive Amazon-Pepsi download giveaway and a positive move by the usually maligned Wal-Mart (according to sources): "...Wal-Mart [alerted] Warner Music Group and Sony BMG that it will pull their music files in the Windows Media Audio format from walmart.com some time between mid-December and mid-January, if the labels haven't yet provided the music in MP3 format."
I am waiting for MP3.1 to come out before I try it.
But MP3 is superior to WMA. It means that we will be able to listen to it when WE decide to, not when MS decides that we can.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
By "MP3", do they mean "post-MP3 lossless audio codecs"? Because I'm pretty sure MP3 has been going downhill ever so slightly for a while now.
Property is theft.
Seriously, mp3's are so last year. Why can't we have something that has better audio quality for similar size. Maybe even lossless!
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
die .wma die a horrible drm'd death!!!
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
There is nothing they are going to do that convinces me sound isn't free. I have been to over 75 concerts if they want my money I am more than willing to pay to see a band worth it.
For a number of reasons:
1) MP3 was the first. It wasn't the first compressed music format, not by a long shot. Hell after PCM was designed as a method for storing audio I'm sure probably the next day someone came up with ADPCM. However it was the first one any normal person had ever heard of. Prior to MP3, compressed music just wasn't something a normal person was aware of. There was CDs, or older formats. Well being the first gets it some staying power. It has the biggest name, the most recognition, etc.
2) MP3 implies no DRM. While I'm sure DRM can be hacked on top of it, as with anything, the format itself isn't set up for DRM. It was also what was widely used in free programs like Napster. Thus it doesn't have a DRM rep. The newer formats, though not mandating DRM, seem to support it and people have gotten burned. I've talked to more than a couple people who've bought music and then discovered they couldn't get it on to some device they wanted. MP3 doesn't have that problem.
3) Because it is so old, MP3 is widely supported. Everything plays MP3s. If I want to play music on my DVD player, MP3 is the format to use. It doesn't support AAC or WMA. Same thing with portables. What additional formats they support is hit and miss, but they -all- do MP3. Hence you get music in MP3 format, you never worry about "Will it play?"
4) Because it is "Good enough." There is no question, the new formats are way better at compression, especially at lower bitrates. That's nice, but people don't give a shit. MP3 is good enough. Most people would call MP3 @ 128k CD quality, because on their equipment, it sounds like it is. @ 192k it is getting hard to tell without good gear. @ 256k, even pros on good gear under double blind tests can't pick it out reliably for normal music. As such people just don't really care about the gains. Sure, AAC is better per bit. However if people already consider their music "perfect" then why do they care?
As such there just isn't a compelling reason for most people to move off of MP3. I am not at all surprised that many people actively seek it out over newer formats. Technical arguments about perceptual encoding are lost on them. All they want is music they can listen to on everything without hassle, and MP3 is that.
I guess this can be taken as good news, since the alternative was presumably some DRM'd format.
On the other hand, mp3 is still patent-encumbered, and in fact the patent situation is such a mess that nobody even knows for sure when the last patent will expire. You can get a royalty-free license to use a decoder, or to use an encoder for noncommercial use, but ...
The lack of support for open audio and video codecs is a real problem now, because essentially flash is shaping up to be a completely necessary part of people's ability to do things with their computers, and one of the many ways that adobe is keeping flash proprietary is that they only support proprietary audio and video codecs for flash. Now matter how much java applets may have sucked in various ways, at least the technology was always free as in beer (and is now becoming free as in speech).
Even though buying music downloads in a DRM-free format like mp3 is a step up from buying them in a DRM'd format, there are still a lot of issues. You may have to agree to a license that forbids you from reselling the music, and takes away your fair use rights as well.
Personally, what works for me is buying CDs. There's no DRM, and no license. I can resell them. I don't need to back them up, because the disks *are* the backup. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my mp3 player for personal use, and it's legal. If I feel like it, I can copy them onto my computer's hard disk, and put the actual optical disks somewhere else as backups. The only reason I'd really be interested in buying music digitally would be in cases where the music is out of print. Why buy it as a download, when my very first act after downloading it would be to burn it onto a CD as a backup?
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It's too bad that open lossless formats haven't seen the kind of uptake with consumers as MP3. On the other hand, it's probably impossible to encumber MP3 with DRM without breaking compatibility, so overall it's a positive I think. As much as I would prefer lossless encoding, I can't tell the difference between music encoded with `lame --preset extreme' and lossless. I sure hope these distributors decide to go beyond the standard 128kb CBR for their downloadable products.
I thought Slashdot had an article, years ago stating MP3 was dying as other formats were gaining favour. Guess that was another speculator who liked to see his/her name in the news.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Deutsche Grammophon have just opened their huge catalogue of Clasical Music and are now selling them as 320 kbps MP3s here.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
But MP3 is superior to WMA. It means that we will be able to listen to it when WE decide to, not when MS decides that we can.
I'm usually a rabid MS-hater, but let's not spout FUD or falsehoods here. WMA is just a codec, and plays just fine on my Ubuntu machine. I'm pretty sure there's nothing that MS can do to take that away from me (technically, at least).
However, WMA does suffer from the familiar problem many other codecs do, in that it's binary-only AFAIK, so just like WMV, Real codecs, Sorensen (Quicktime), etc., you need the binary codec files and a player (like MPlayer) designed to use them, in order to play files using these codecs. Not only is this of highly questionable legality, but it also doesn't work on non-Intel machines since you can't recompile for your architecture. MP3, OTOH, doesn't suffer from this at all since it's an openly-documented format, and many different implementations have been made, including many free encoders and decoders. It does, however, suffer from being covered by patents, which is a different issue.
Ogg Vorbis, however, is truly the best option, since 1) it has the best technical performance of any of them, and 2) it's completely free and open, not just in implementation and code but also is free of patents. I keep all my ripped music in O-V format, which works equally well on my home machine playing Amarok, and on my portable iRiver H330.
If they're going to start making digital files why not AAC? I thought AAC gets slightly better fidelity for an equivalent bitrate.
ipods can play both mp3 and aac [m4a]. And most other audio players are capable of it as well.
That said, mp3 will do fine provided they up the bitrate. either cbr ~256 or vbr ~200 at a min. I DEMAND QUALITY
Apple has their own proprietary format called AAC; iTunes Music Store downloads are in AAC format, some of them DRMed but some not. In the battle for the hearts and minds of music fans, Microsoft will never support AAC, and Apple will never support WMA. So MP3 is left as the common denominator.
(AAC isn't as proprietary as WMA in that the file format is publicly documented, but it is patent-encumbered so that Free Software implementations such as faad and faac are illegal in countries like the US that recognize software patents. Unlike MP3, there is no free license for decoders, one has to pay for a patent license for them.)
I can imagine that Walmart.com's tech support has gotten pretty sick of fielding complaints that their downloads don't work on iPods...
Request your free CD of my piano music.
That's really not much of an issue though since you can always wrap the binary codec in an x86 emulator or disassemble and reassemble for your architecture.
.... as I actually find myself cheering for the evil WalMart empire who doesn't seem so evil at the moment.
My mind is going. I can feel it.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The same people who bash the MP3 format in every possible reasonable and unreasonable way when it is compared to .ogg or similar "free culture" formats, also unconditionally praise it when it is pitted against the evil M$s WMA or other DRM. Which is fine when the qualities discussed are precisely freedom-related, but when people 180 their views of objective technical qualities depending on who the adversary is, that is just plain hypocritical.
So is MP3 good or evil? Make up your mind already.
WMA is just a codec, and plays just fine on my Ubuntu machine. I'm pretty sure there's nothing that MS can do to take that away from me (technically, at least). While this is generally true, WMA and WMVs both are excellent vectors for dreaded DRM setups. Note that not all WMAs and WMVs carry it, but I prefer to stick with a format that is never really DRM'd in the first place, even if I have the same song, for example, in a non-blocked format or encapsulation. But you are indeed right about all that in your post. I just prefer to go by formats not designed by a company already somewhat infamous for trying to control my computer usage. (Microsoft is big on DRM and Trusted Computing, both of which rape the end user in the long run.) This is one of the big reasons why I'll never touch Windows Media Player or iTunes with a long pole. I must give Apple credit, however. They've been making some progress by stripping some DRM from iTunes, but not enough for my tastes. Just my opinion. Take it or leave it.
This is an interesting problem, because the companies have to choose between interoperability and customer choice. The *only* way to guarantee that a file will play on a digital music player is to sell it in MP3. One point of moving away from DRM is to end the format war. However, if an average consumer buys an AAC or OGG file and finds that it won't play on their MP3 player (car stereo, set-top-box, digital picture frame, whatever) they're going to be pissed and the format war will continue to rage on.
So I get the desire for Ogg, but to get to a market where format is not an issue, the music companies have to mandate MP3.
Ok, how?
A) WMA does have better audio quality than MP3, by a factor of 1.5 to 2 times. And this is a good thing as all decoding chips in portable music players all have WMA support, unless it is crippled like the iPod. So you can throw your songs in WMA at 64 or 128 and have almost twice the fidelity of an MP3, especially when you add in better variable bit rate support, etc.
B) WMA does not inherently use or need DRM, and MS themselves don't push DRM, so it is just as free to copy and decode as MP3. The only hitch with WMA is the binary dependancy like many other codecs have, but that is easily wrapped, and MS has provided non x86 WMA formats before as well, just not with DRM that providers have kept asking for with the exception of I64 and AMD/EMT64 that have DRM WMA support. (Besides how many of us are really using non x86/64 architectures?)
Remember Gates said that DRM should be taken off audio downloads in Dec last year before Jobs did in January. He said specifically until the providers stop limiting access to downloaded music that people should just buy CDs if possible to force them to move to a DRM free online model. (And this is right after Zune 1.0 came out.)
That's really not much of an issue though since you can always wrap the binary codec in an x86 emulator or disassemble and reassemble for your architecture.
Technically, maybe you can do this. The first may be the most workable option. However I have never heard of the second option having been done - if it had been done successfully it would certainly have been posted here on /. - and that means to me that it is so hard it's not worth it. Even for determined geeks with way too much time on their hands. The assembly instructions probably vary way too much over the various architectures.
So, you are saying that we can start including WMA codec in all of linux's everywhere without any issues from any countries legal entities? And I as a developer of a commercial radio/TV/Stereo running linux will have absolutely NO issue getting a license from MS for a reasonable Price? What do you mean no. But you said that I was spouting falsehoods. Or are you STILL not grasping at how much MS controls on this issue?
Keep in mind that those who control MP3 have no issues with licensing on commercial Linux/BSD. But MS has other ideas in mind. This really is about freedom. And yes, my post stated that I prefer Ogg, but I will settle for MP3 for the reasons that I just stated. Hopefully, you will re-consider your statements
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
most evil ---> least evil
wma --> aac --> mp3 --> ogg
Does this clear things up for you?
Huh, DEC's FX!32 did both in the 90's to allow NT4 x86 programs to be run and then dynamically recompiled for use on the Alpha port of NT. That's one piece of software I wished were opensourced, I think a lot could be learned from it. Of course not all of the IP in it may have belonged to DEC, but most of it did since they had the best compiler guys in the business at the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
you beat me to it!
...hasn't libavcodec supported wma for aeons, so long as it's not DRM'd?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
So I get the desire for Ogg, but to get to a market where format is not an issue, the music companies have to mandate MP3.
It costs nothing to add ogg decoders to hardware. Unlike mp3, ogg is patent, license and royalty free. My PDA does ogg and so does my better portable player. It's just software and this is not a technical problem, it's a monopoly problem.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I'm tired of reading this comment every time MP3 is mentioned.
MP3 is vastly superior to Ogg in the most critical category: Portability.
I don't have a single device in my house that can play Ogg. Looking over the Amazon top ten list, I see I'm not alone.
A Court proved anti-trust violation is the primary reason you can't find cheap multiformat players, specifically players that work with ogg.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
... that when I saw the title, the first question I had is "well how are they quantifying momentum? Is the MP3 format going much slower than the speed of light or do they have to include a Lorentz factor? It the MP3 format actually traveling faster or did it just have a large thanksgiving dinner with lost of leftovers?"
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
A) WMA does have better audio quality than MP3, by a factor of 1.5 to 2 times. And this is a good thing as all decoding chips in portable music players all have WMA support, unless it is crippled like the iPod. So you can throw your songs in WMA at 64 or 128 and have almost twice the fidelity of an MP3, especially when you add in better variable bit rate support, etc.
Proof please? I've never seen this substantiated. Also, how do you quantify "better audio quality" numerically?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
But MP3 is superior to WMA
Only WMA with licensing. WMA without music licensing is far better in terms of compression and quality. It even has lossless encoding for the ogg fanboys out there. =P
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Do you own any 8 tracks tapes? Can you play them? Have any OLD computer equipment? Can you use it? How much of it can not? A lot. Perhaps you own an apple? Do you use their office package? Have you tried to move the data out from it? Have any old disks that were compressed with stacker? Can you access the data? How about accessing that CPM disk using windows?
Look, MP3 is popular, But like all else, it WILL go away. The closed proprietary things will not last. Mp3 is NOT the most portable. It is simple the most widespread AT THIS TIME. Ogg, or some other open format, will most likely become widespread.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Wouldn't there have to be something else to be tipping away from first?
I mean since 1996 MP3 has been it. Period. Where was nothing before it.
All compressed audio formats that came before either sounded like crap or were some secret sauce, that was closed source close specs, that you had to pay $50,000+ for and had to program windows library's to use.
Yes AAC came out in 1997 and it's actually better then MP3 in almost all measures, but there still isn't any decent application to use it.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
We had that for VAX to Alpha conversion in OpenVMS as well, but it wasn't perfect. Some programs with a lot of low level bit manipulation would refuse to work on the alpha.
I suspect that an audio/video codec would be in that category.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
While this is generally true, WMA and WMVs both are excellent vectors for dreaded DRM setups. Note that not all WMAs and WMVs carry it, but I prefer to stick with a format that is never really DRM'd in the first place, even if I have the same song, for example, in a non-blocked format or encapsulation. But you are indeed right about all that in your post. I just prefer to go by formats not designed by a company already somewhat infamous for trying to control my computer usage. (Microsoft is big on DRM and Trusted Computing, both of which rape the end user in the long run.)
I agree entirely, which is why I use Ogg Vorbis for all my music (on my portable too).
However, I just wanted to avoid any misconceptions that the previous poster's post may have generated, because while WMA is a good vector for DRM infection, not all WMAs have DRM, and people with the appropriate software can easily play DRM-free WMAs and WMVs on non-MS PCs with non-MS software. This can be important as some websites use WMA for things like internet radio.
At the transparency levels of both (lame -V 2 --vbr new & oggenc -q 5), ogg vorbis ends up only being about a quarter smaller (I test on a cd copy of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture). This is a good technical feat, but it is far cheaper to make hard drives a a third bigger than it would be to displace mp3.
MP3 is vastly superior to Ogg in the most critical category: Portability.
I don't have a single device in my house that can play Ogg. Looking over the Amazon top ten list, I see I'm not alone.
Maybe you should have been a little smarter in selecting your devices.
Repetition does not engender truth.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
This is the key phrase. Think about it for a while.
IIRC, it takes more CPU power to decode OGG files than to decode MP3s.
My PDA does it, my tiny Trekstore does it, and so can your iPod. This is NOT a technical issue.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
When I first read this I thought that you were suggesting something like XML to store your audio. What a great compression that would be!
Technically yes, but in practice no. There is not enough support in players to make this a commercially viable format to use. I found that I had absolutely no sales when I used Ogg Vorbis to release my spoken word children's books written in Esperanto!
And when you think about it, Ogg Vorbis is the codec equivalent of Esperanto. Everyone can understand the reason to use it, but hardly anyone actually does. If you do use it, you will end up being incompatible with the rest of the world because they just found it easier to use the established codec/language.
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances. Really the only surprise in the past few years of listening tests is haw amazing the guys at LAME are at adding life to MP3.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
At the transparency levels of both (lame -V 2 --vbr new & oggenc -q 5), ogg vorbis ends up only being about a quarter smaller (I test on a cd copy of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture). This is a good technical feat, but it is far cheaper to make hard drives a a third bigger than it would be to displace mp3.
Only a quarter? That sounds like a good enough reason to me. After all, compressed music files are usually (or at least greatly) played on portable devices. Desktop hard drives may be at 1 TB now, but portables have actually gotten smaller, not bigger, thanks to everyone's obsession with flash memory (several years ago, 20 and 40 GB iPods were common, but now the largest most people have is only 8 or 16 GB). My library is in Ogg now, and it wouldn't fit in 16 GB.
In 10 years, if some of the recently predicted advances in storage come true, then you're right, size won't matter. In fact, we might as well just use FLAC then. But right now, 25% savings is significant when you're dealing with players that only have 2. 4 or 8 GB.
Sometimes I wonder if Slashdot just autogenerates these things all by itself.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
1) Care to provide any concrete studies stating that OGG is "technically" superior to MP3, AAC, or WMA? AFAIK, all four have been shown to shine in some areas, and perform poorly in others, whilst the average listener probably won't notice the difference for 95% of the music out there.
2) And, no. OGG is not the best of them. The fact that OGG isn't supported on either of the two major operating systems or most portable audio players/devices counts pretty strongly against it. I think Sony's proprietary ATRAC format might even be supported on more devices than OGG is (ouch!)
However, if you explicitly define best in terms of the legal flexibility of the codec, I will agree that OGG is the clear winner. As much as I'd love for OGG to succeed, from a pragmatist's point of view, MP3 is a pretty darn good solution -- the quality is quite good, and is almost universally supported.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
That's the way I most often see it done. mp3 for people who want it to "just work" without having to think about it, and flac so I can re-encode it to a better format if my player supports it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While this is generally true, .bins are excellent vectors for dreaded virus infections. Note that not all .bins carry them, but I prefer to stick with a format that is never really infected with a virus in the first place, even if I have the same program, for example, in a non-infected format or encapsulation.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
That sounds like too much trouble.
1) Free, open source, no royalties. Costs you nothing to allow it, even if you already have mp3.
2) Because you can re-encode to anything else.
3) Because saying "digital music" is just as easy as saying "mp3 file", and is actually far more likely to be understood.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be mp3 files also. But I am saying that everywhere there's mp3, there should also be flac derived from the original source, if it's available. (Assuming the "original source" isn't mp3.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Also, how do you quantify "better audio quality" numerically?
Ehm, just off the top of my head, perhaps "less lossy compression" would be a start?
And when you think about it, Ogg Vorbis is the codec equivalent of Esperanto. Everyone can understand the reason to use it, but hardly anyone actually does. If you do use it, you will end up being incompatible with the rest of the world because they just found it easier to use the established codec/language.
Codecs aren't necessarily like languages. I don't bother learning Esperanto because there's no one I can talk to with it; I'd probably have better success learning Klingon. However, a music codec is just a way for me to store music on my computer and portable music player. Why should I care about compatibility? I don't download my music from online music stores (because I refuse to purchase lossy-compressed music in a codec not of my choosing), I don't pirate my music (because I like having the original CDs), and I don't share my music with my friends (none of my friends like my music anyway). So it's just as easy for me to rip my CDs to Ogg as MP3; I just had to make sure I got a portable player which supports Ogg, which I did.
Similarly, I'm also one of the rare people who uses a Dvorak keyboard. I really don't care if every other keyboard out there is QWERTY; I prefer Dvorak. Of course, I can type on either (just like I can still play MP3s on my portable player or my computer), so I don't have problems interoperating, but people who try to use my computer at home usually find themselves totally unable to type. Their problem, not mine.
ogg=esperanto
mp3=english
wma=french?
AAC supports DRM
MP3 doesn't
DRM = Evil Incarnate
ergo
AAC evil > MP3 evil
WMA is just a codec, and plays just fine on my Ubuntu machine.
If you are in the United States, this is a crime punishable by 20 years in prison, as to do so involves a violation of the DMCA.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
>Not only is this of highly questionable legality, but it also doesn't work on non-Intel machines since you can't recompile for your architecture.
I'm kinda confused as to what exactly you're saying. Because it sounds to me like you're saying you can't play WMV, rm, etc on an AMD machine. Running Mandriva 2007.1 on an AMD, I've never had a problem with any of them. Yes, they're often a pain in the ass, having to download the codecs and such, but they work just fine.
Well, mp3 does have its drawbacks (like a lot of geeks here, I'd like to see Ogg and FLAC gain some momentum in the marketplace) -- but heck, for most music, I'll go for anything non-DRM with at least as good a sound as 160kbit mp3. MP3 over WMA, that's for sure. At least it's sort of standard...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Ogg Vorbis, however, is truly the best option, since 1) it has the best technical performance of any of them, and 2) it's completely free and open, not just in implementation and code but also is free of patents. I keep all my ripped music in O-V format, which works equally well on my home machine playing Amarok, and on my portable iRiver H330.
Except its -not- the best option, because despite being open source and totally free it -STILL- isn't supported on half my devices, despite the fact that I can compile it myself if I want to.
That still doesn't get it onto the ipods, my cell phone, my car stereo, or my 5 year olds Sansa shaker [Awesome little mp3 player for a young kid.] MP3 on the other hand, despite the patents, actually is available absolutely everywhere, making mp3 truly the best option.
At this stage we'd be better off if we just wait out the patents (2017 according to wp), at which point mp3 will be as free as ogg.
I hope I'm very misguided here, but it's my understanding that the mp3 format is, well, complete crap as music storage. Lossy, frequency clipped, and generally no where near actual cd-quality, which isn't perfect either.
Can we not find another format to popularize? One that offers lossless storage, and a complete range of frequencies?
Oggs take up more processing power, which means that they drain more power on portables = less battery life. MP3s and AACs (prefered), are less complicated algorythms, which means that, yes, they're a little larger, but they drain much less battery power when in use.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Actually, I would say that wma's are more like English (since it's such a clunky language), but it just happens that everyone uses mp3s, which is like French... more streamlined, but hardly anyone speaks it.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Given that they cost (new) around five times more than the same thing digitally, or than what I think it's worth, that's a small comfort.
Please don't ever say that again. I know what you meant -- at least, I really hope I do -- but let's avoid this situation.
Because even if the download is flac, you can still probably fit about one and a half album per backup CD, and you absolutely can fit at least 10 or so to a single-layer DVD. If the download is mp3, that's more like ten albums per CD (and 150 or more to a DVD).
Also, because it's likely cheaper, and much easier to buy it directly from the band, or close enough -- Internet labels like Magnatune take only some 50%, which sounds like a lot until you consider that it's going to cost over 90% with the big CD labels.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ogg, no... but seeing as though some 80% of all consumer portable music players are iPods, I think AAC is pretty well supported. Also seeing that Zune's and most other music players also support AAC, you could say that AAC is practically about as supported as MP3 nowadays.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
> ...as I actually find myself cheering for the evil WalMart empire who doesn't seem so evil at the moment.
Sounds like you just took your first step into the real world. Walmart isn't evil. Walmart isn't good either. Just like almost every other publicly traded corporation they simply ARE. They exist to produce returns for their shareholders in the form of increasing stock valuations and/or dividends. They will do whatever it takes to accomplish the goal because if they fail the shareholders will punish the executives.
In this case Walmart needs to grow their digital music business since they know CD sales will only shrink from here. Not only does the iPod account for the majority of the installed base of portable music players, Walmart itself gives the damned things the best placement in their stores. This couldn't continue. They had a few choices. Dump the iPod and throw their full weight behind a second tier product line such as the Sandisk Sansa. (Remember that MS's Zune is just as closed to Walmart since it doesn't do Plays for Sure) Second option would have been to use their clout to force Apple to support a DRMed format they could sell. Not even Walmart can force His Steveness and both sides probably understand that. That left forcing the music industry to abandon DRM. They are many and easy to play against each other, especially with every other online store as ready allies because DRM ensures they all remain also rans behind the iTunes store and the Zune Store. See Amazon.
See? Totally explainable without any conspiracy theories or battles between Good and Evil.
Democrat delenda est
People behind the Darwine project have been exactly doing this : They did porting Wine to Mac OS X, and are using QEMU to support PowerPC processors.
QEMU it self has some plugins able to do dynamic recompiling.
So in fact, even if disassembling and reassembling by hand is pretty hard and not worth the tremendous effort, Dynamic Recompiling is often done in emulators (or Just-In-Time in the realm of virtual machines).
Although I doubt it will run at any decent speed. Multimedia codec probably use a lot of bit manipulation and vector calculation, which very a lot across architecture and are very difficult to map one to another, and such dyna-rec code probably uses a lot of contrived ways to achieve what the original code did and probably loses a lot of performance in the process.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Are you claiming that some day all these open source implementations of mp3 decoders out there will stop support MP3 while their ogg support will last forever? Why would this be the case?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
By the time we finish arguing about this, MP3 will be patent free.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
They are the only company that initially set the default on their audio encoding software to automatically add DRM to all tracks. They also still add DRM to non-DRM tracks when transferring them from their audio player. It seems MS is quite keen to push DRM, even on content the owner has specifically released DRM-free.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Yeah, but .wav/PCM is better than either of them...FLAC if you need compressed.
I'm worried that all of this is leading to a time where you can only find the inferior lossy formats of music!?!?
I'd still rather get a CD, and rip it to lossless for home audio, and then to lossy for portables or the car...two of the worst listening environments there are.....
Doesn't anybody appreciate fidelity any longer?
It isn't like bandwidth is that big of a roadblock any longer...why not offer selections in a lossless format online if you must purchase online?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
[...] and a positive move by the usually maligned Wal-Mart
You say this as if Wal-Mart was somehow being charitable or virtuous instead of plotting to drown puppies. Wal-Mart just does what its management thinks will be profitable without much regard to ethics one way or another. Plainly, Wal-Mart management thinks they'll make more money with MP3 than WMA. That's all. If they thought they could somehow make money from drowning puppies, they'd do that, too, and if anyone objected, some PR drone would be sent out with a press release declaring that drowned puppies is what Wal-Mart customers really want, and what's more, it's good for America.
Although it may seem so at times, giant corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft really aren't out to do harm. It just happens that doing harm to a largely captive audience is often a lot more profitable than charging a fair price for quality goods and services and treating employees well. It's just Adam Smith's invisible hand grabbing you by the short hairs.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I've got a 1G SanDisk card in my Tungsten E2, and I like quality. That means big files and limited space. Fortunately, my media player likes Ogg. It means I can keep about 80 - 100 high-quality tunes available along with the photos, graphics, Office files and such I carry around for real-world use.
I understand that Ogg Vorbis isn't really going anywhere, but for me it's the best answer around. Earned me major points at a company party when it turned out the DJ disobeyed instructions and brought along a collection of the same tired old crap they play at half the weddings in the free world. A two-minute trip to the Dollar Store for a patch cord and it was Stone Roses, Tanita Tikaram, Buzzcocks and Dandy Warhols instead of the goddamned Chicken Dance.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Correction.
You said non-Intel, and you meant non-x86-compatible machines.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It used to be true several years ago with the first generations of MP3 player, where the playing was done by a dedicated hardware MP3 decoder and the player only had a under powered CPU for driving the menus. (I've even seen schematics for homebrew players usings PICs together with hardware decoders).
Nowaday there's much more horse power in all players (even enough to play AAC or WMA). So integrating OGG/Vorbis is easy and is in fact systematically done in Samsung players (and in a lot of brand-less players from unkown asian makers).
There's even FLAC support in some of the bigger asian boxes.
Also notice that, since the first claims that Vorbis is too ressoruce consuming, note that the Tremor library has been made open source. That library does all the decoding using integer registers on the CPU, and thus is much more compatible with the small RISC processors lacking FPU units found in most players.
Rockbox is a firmware for portable player, ported among other to the iPod, thus proving that OGG/Vorbis can be played in almost all but the oldest player hardwares (realtime playback since 4th generation).
And I can't think of a modern PDA that doesn't play OGG/Vorbis (my mostly 4 years old Tungsten does it).
There's no excuse for not supporting OGG/Vorbis, Samsung's doing it, a lot of lower profile makers too, Rockbox is doing it on recent iPods...
My personal experience on the desktop is that it's a little bit more resource consuming than OGG and AAC.
Thus hardware capable of playing MP3/WMA/AAC should be able to handle Vorbis too (and FLAC and Speex seem to be available on most hardware too, according to Rockbox)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
WMA is just a codec
What's interesting is Wal-Mart is a big MS shop. I think their CIO used to work for MS, if memory serves. So Wal-Mart telling them to ditch wma for mp3 is a big deal, for the politics if nothing else.
I'm guessing there were some people frowning over their lattes in Redmond over this one.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Actually the next release of the flash player (currently in public beta) supports both AAC audio and H.264 video. These are both fairly open formats from what I understand.
This was announced several months ago:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html
sig? uhh, umm, ok
I always thought .wma was a possible alternative to .mp3 ... I run xp, and used windows media player to rip a cd just out of curiosity. The files were smaller than I was expecting but sounded just as good as mp3. I ripped the same disc with .mp3 just for comparison and the files were noticably larger. I never did anything else with .wma
.ogg b/c all of the music I download is mp3, but it's just a codec (as long as it's not DRM'd, but then again, any format can be DRM'd)
/.'ers like .ogg/vorbis, idk, but it seems inevitable that eventually there will be a new audio codec that offers analog level clarity
I'm not a windows apologist, and I've never bothered with
seems like alot of
most good (non-apple) audio players support all three codecs, so it's a wash in my mind for now
_j
Thank you Dave Raggett
He means non-Intel, as in machines which aren't x86 compatible, like PPC macs, or SPARC machines. However, for the most part, that doesn't affect the desktop market at all now, because every modern desktop is x86 compatible. It's more of a problem for the portable/standalone areas than desktops.
Are we talking about the file format itself, or just whether anyone has instituted DRM on it? Apple's Fairplay is a wrapper around an AAC file, not inherent in the file itself. Couldn't they have just as easily wrapped an MP3 file?
The proliferation of formats like mp3, ogg, etc. has really been great for me personally and for my work. I've been able to offer my music in several different formats, and to use various formats for different types of mixes. For example, on my music website, I offer mp3 files (192kps) mixed for stereo earbuds and consumer headphones, and ogg files that have been mixed for speakers & subwoofer configurations. I'm getting ready to try out offering surround (5.1) mixes, but I haven't settled on a format for them, yet.
Can you tell me if flac is of the "legally questionable" variety such as wma, Sorensen or Real codecs?
I have recently noticed that some musicians I respect are putting out mp4 versions (DJ Spooky, for example). I have to do a little research to find out what that's about, but I've been busy trying to finish a Xmas album of tortured versions of public domain holiday classics, and haven't had much time for R&D.
As someone who started out with a 2-track Webcor "synchro-trak" recorder and a Serge systems modular synth (it came in a suitcase the size of a small sofa), digital recording and all the attendant tools have made my creative life so much more enjoyable and rich. I never have to think very long when the question of "what has technology done for me" comes up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
RESULTS OF STUDY MAKE OOG ANGRY! MP3 PATENT-ENCUMBERED! PEOPLE NOT REALIZE IMPORTANCE OF FREE-AS-IN-FREEDOM AUDIO CODECS!
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Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
The latest versions of WMA have better compression rates than the most recent MP3 encoders. That is not quite the same thing you said, but I think it is what you meant.
And this is a good thing as all decoding chips in portable music players all have WMA support, unless it is crippled like the iPod.This is nonsense. You might as well argue that all portable players have support for MP4 unless they are crippled like the Sansa Shaker. You have to pay a licensing fee to ship a device that plays either WMA or MP4, so not including it, even if it is on the chipset, saves the developer money. Note, by market share MP4 is the standard by a huge margin over WMA (though not MP3).
WMA does not inherently use or need DRM, and MS themselves don't push DRM, so it is just as free to copy and decode as MP3.Umm MS does push the DRM by selling DRM'ed music from multiple online services they run or are partners in. They've also been convicted of using their influence to illegally retard the adoption of open formats through illegal contracts with player manufacturers.
He said specifically until the providers stop limiting access to downloaded music that people should just buy CDs if possible to force them to move to a DRM free online model. (And this is right after Zune 1.0 came out.)And yet his company is still selling DRM'ed downloads while several other players have dropped them.
The point isn't that iPods and other players don't have the power to decode Oggs (hell, they all do video, which is in a whole 'nother league), but more processing power sucks up more juice, and that's pretty crucial for portable devices. And we're talking about QUITE A BIT more battery power... like a 25% loss in consumption.
Well no, that is exactly what the tubesteak said and what Rockbox disproves.
As far as power consumption goes, I think you are getting confused with another format (WMA 12%) (WMA with DRM 25%). My nano sized Trekstore easily gets more than 8 hours of play off it's tiny lithium battery.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
the labels won't bother to respond.
Here's why:
1) The labels probably actually prefer WMA to MP3 because it has DRM.
2) Walmart would become such a large slow-moving target to be sued for commercial breach of copyright that even the RIAA might not screw this one up.
3) They're hoping walmart might just be bluffing or will forget about it
4) Thy don't need to get someone to do all the encoding if walmart does it for them
several years ago, 20 and 40 GB iPods were common, but now the largest most people have is only 8 or 16 GB
Several years ago, the largest iPod you could get was 40GB, and it cost $399. Nowadays, an 80GB iPod is $249.
If you buy one that's smaller, that's your choice. Presumably, people with large music collections would not buy a smaller device. You're somehow equating buying trends with the available choices on the market, and there is no correlation. In other words, the fact that 8GB or 16GB iPods are so common now doesn't mean that's all you can get.
Not to mention you're ignoring all the 4GB and 6GB iPods that used to be around. Remember, the iPod mini was the most popular iPod on the market in the timeframe you're talking about. So iPods have still only increased in average capacity, as has every other player out there.
btw, whenever somebody tells me that any codec (usually AAC or WMA) is significantly better than mp3, I always trot out this set of double-blind test results: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html
Yes, Vorbis scored slightly higher. But given the convenience and ubiquity of mp3, I'll take mp3. I also took part in that test and honestly, I really couldn't tell the difference in almost any of the files I listened to (using a set of professional studio headphones). There's nothing there in those test results that a slightly higher quality setting wouldn't take care of, and as I said, hard drive space is cheap.
mp3 got a bad rep because of encoders like Blade and iTunes (which intentionally uses an old, crappy encoder to encourage use of AAC). But LAME has really closed the gap.
I'm worried that all of this is leading to a time where you can only find the inferior lossy formats of music!?!?
I'd still rather get a CD, and rip it to lossless for home audio, and then to lossy for portables or the car...two of the worst listening environments there are.....
I generally agree with you, although I don't rip to lossless for home - I just keep the CD around.
But I only buy CD's, if only so I know I have an archive recording. (Yes, I know, CD's themselves have fairly low sample rates by "hi-fi" standards, but they're still better than lossy compression.) I worry that as CD sales drop and download sales rise, the record labels will lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of all purchases are still CD's. When you see stats like CD sales dropping 10% and download sales exploding by 100%, it sounds like downloads are absolutely trouncing CD's. Until you realize that it's 10% off about 1 billion CD's, and a 100% increase over about 1 million full CD-equivalent downloads.
Ditching the CD in favor of downloads at this point would be like the auto industry ditching gasoline in favor of hydrogen. It's premature at this point to say the least.
But it may happen someday. A lot of people will probably be happy about it when it does. People like you and me just have to hope that by then, bandwidth and storage space will have increased to the point where it actually makes sense for labels to offer lossless downloads in addition to lossy ones.
The most recent versions of WMA (WMA9, format 0x162/0x163) can only be played through the use of Microsoft's binary-only DLLs. That means you can only play your WMAs on Linux as long as you stay on an x86 machine (or x86-64, with backwards compatibility, using a 32-bit binary).
As such, there are many things Microsoft could do to stop you from getting a copy of that DLL in the future, as well as making changes to future DLLs to prevent them from working outside Windows.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances.
They do not. Here: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html
I know you mentioned LAME in your last sentence, but I'm not sure how that doesn't invalidate your last sentence. If it doesn't, then the listening test above does.
I'll sum up the double-blind test results above: LAME-encoded mp3's sound as good as AAC files and better than WMA files at the same bit rate. (The bit rates varied by insignificant amounts.)
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I know this because I specifically asked on their developer mailing list; I'd like to support AAC in my own application Ogg Frog, but I can't, because I live in the US.
While there's been no enforcement action so far, it's my understanding that it's illegal for Americans to even download VLC, let alone use it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
People coo about AAC, but its usually Cult of Mac people, who don't realize that AAC is just as nonstandard as WMA, ATRAC3, or other protocols.
AAC is perfectly fine in the little Mac/iPod world, but outside of that, pretty much nobody (except high priced car audio because the product costs so much, the added license is icing on the cake) supports it, because of the high cost of royalties to Dolby.
Hype aside, the only real standard is MP3, but OGG Vorbis should be its successor due to listening statistics.
90% or more of the music players out there support MP3. How many support Ogg again? You might love your iRiver but your options are limited by the format.
Till that problem is solved I'll stick with MP3.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I actually took the GP to mean that we don't have to worry about DRM with MP3, unlike WMA where you may have to acquire a license to listen to a song and may even be limited to how many listenings you have of the song. Do DRM'ed WMA songs work okay in Ubuntu? That may sound stupid but I'm seriously asking since I haven't touched Linux that way (no, not that way) in a while.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Ogg has been around for a long time now. Why is it still not as widespread as MP3? Simply because OGG decoders make heavy use of floating point operations, and MP3 decs get by with fixed point operations. Most small embedded systems don't do floats very well, if at all. As a result, OGG players are going to be more expensive to make.
I have been claiming for a long time the only way DRM will get widespread use is if enough people VOTED for it with their $$$$. It looks like the votes are in and the counters are noting the huge number of votes against DRM.. It's about time. Keep up the good work and keep voting with your wallet. They can pass DMCA all they want in congress, but if it fails in the marketplace, that is the ace up the sleeve. It has to sell to become a standard that is used.
The truth shall set you free!
That's nothing; just wait until MP95 comes out. There will be a huge ad campaign.
One potential problem with Ogg is that there may be patents covering it. One of the major flaws with allowing software patents, as opposed to copyright, is that it is possible to accidentally infringe a patent through simply not knowing it existed, or even simply not patenting something before someone else (early examples of the latter, in the case of hardware, are Alexander Graham Bell/Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell/Elisha Gray). The fact that no-one has claimed patent infringement over Ogg is probably as much to do with no-one making money out of Ogg (and hence it's not worthwhile suing) as to it absolutely not infringing anyone's patent. Once someone starts making real money from eg portable music players using Ogg, we'll find out if it's genuinely free from patent problems.
Yes, but will these new MP3 run linux? And can I set up a beowulf cluster of this new mp3? When shall I welcome my new mp3 overload, and will these mp3 be available in Soviet Russia? Did Al Gore make these new mp3?
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Cool! I wonder how many others have Ogg music libraries and use Dvorak. I've never met another...
We should take a roll call! *raises hand and looks around excitedly, completely unphased by the dead silence of the room*
I still have a physical Qwerty keyboard, so Dvorak acts as an extra layer of security (mainly just an entertaining one) as any Qwerty-based intruder will have to use blind trial-and-error to type out anything intelligible. It's fun to watch.
Don't forget the discussion, a couple of months ago, about about Wall-Mart selling $200 Linux PCs with a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux. Between that and their support for MP3s, It doesn't sound like they are exclusively a Microsoft shop. Perhaps Wal-Mart is big enough and powerful enough to do whatever it wants. Even so, I can't help wondering about the politics behind those two decisions and the possible response from Microsoft, Hollywood and the music industry.
$200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart
Just to add some context here: you are correct that the single test you linked does not definitively prove "MP3 is dead!". But no, it doesn't invalidate my initial statement that listening tests agree other codecs are the future. In the past several years of testing, over a variety of tests with a variety of bitrates, even the LAME MP3 has been usually in the lower range of results (often within the realm of statistical uncertainty, as in the result you linked), but it certainly is not gaining ground on its successors.
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
Contrast that with the periodically stunning improvements by some Vorbis devs, or to a lesser extent Nero's AAC team, and you can see that there is a LOT of room to grow dramatically in those codecs. They have a LOT of different ideas left to implement, developers are still trying to wrap their heads around the possibilities yet they already outperform the most mature LAME implementations on a fairly consistent basis.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Not binary. ffmpeg reverse-engineered it and re-implemented it.
WMA1, WMA2 (WMA8, WMA9), WMV1, WMV2, WMV3 (WMV7, WMV8, VC-1) all have OSS implementations as part of ffmpeg. You can play them back in almost any place with a C compiler.
"Surpassing Xing"!? Are you serious? That should be the easiest thing for any encoder to do! Maybe they got better later, but way back in 1999/2000 when everyone was using Xing ("it is so fast!" - yeah, that's likely the problem) it sounded terrible.
I actually ended up buying "Audioactive Production Studio" because the Fraunhofer Pro coded (not to be confused with "MP3 Pro"!) it used sounded so good, also compared to LAME at the time and did so for a long time. When I ended up switching to Mac early 2005, I could not use it anymore. Fortunately, after doing a double blind test with scripts randomly renaming the test files and keeping a record of what was what so I could go back later and see which one I really preferred, I found LAME had become every bit as good. (I could not tell the difference between the two anymore) I have always used 256K as well, so not sure how the two would compare at lower bit rates.
Now I have abandoned MP3 altogether; I have more than enough space for a lossless codec. The one of choice is Apple Lossless, simply because it works easy in iTunes and iPod. As Apple has a good API, it will never be more than a couple hours of work to whip something up that converts it to something else if I want/need to so while it is binary only, there is no real lock in.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Rarely do I have a listening environment these days where I can hear any difference between a half decent 128-160 kbps MP3 and something better. Ogg's fine, but it would be swell if there were more players. Like, you know, iTunes. (Without some Quicktime hack.)
Fortunately, no. FLAC is released under the banner of Xiph.Org, as is Ogg Vorbis, and is fully free, open source, and royalty free.
If you check the link, it also says that it supports 5.1 as well.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Quite true. If you're in the habit of downloading and running binaries from untrusted sources, you're in for a world of hurt.
Now, in the case of Microsoft and Apple, you can probably trust them not to put a virus in their compiled code (well, at least not on purpose; they're not Sony...), but they might put something even nastier there by design -- say a DRM module, or a watermarking system that identified all the files you encoded as yours.
It's all about levels of trust. I trust Microsoft and Apple to not give me a virus for the lulz, because to do so would be counterproductive for them. But for the same reasons, I don't trust them not to fuck me over for an extra buck from a 'corporate partner.'
If you're running anything that you haven't code-reviewed and compiled yourself (which because of the bootstrapping problem you are inevitably), you're trusting somebody. But "trust" isn't a black and white state. You can trust someone for some things and not for others.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's just amazing that trolls with sockpuppets like you keep being modded up like there's no tomorrow.
Only the WMA files without DRM will play which is what the GP was referring to.
Ogg Vorbis is a lousy choice, because 1) it has a really really stupid name 2) it is the least likely to be playable on any random piece of hardware you might stumble across in real life (sitting down to upgrade doesn't count). This is probably in part caused by point 1. 3) technical performance is a moot point among modern codecs, since you can really match any given quality on the best of them by using the worst of them and a few extra percent of dirt-cheap storage.
mp3 wins hands-down because it is supported everywhere. Yes, it is half-a-generation of technology too early for ideal standardisation, but the difference isn't that big. Other formats had their chance to grab that position, but lost due to greed and hubris, or in the case of ogg, geeky image and hubris, along with a complete lack of industry support (in the critical phase) and similar lack of strategies to get it.
Among the real contenders, only AAC is really enough of an improvement to bother shifting the industry standard anyway, but Apple managed to nicely smear its image too.
sudo ergo sum
Personally, I'm happy with CD prices anyway. I research my music really well, I know an album will be good before I buy it, and I then find the cheapest prices online without every stepping through the doors of rip-off (UK) music stores like HMV or Zavvi (formerly known as Virgin).
Therefore, people who say that CDs are overpriced because they contain only one or good tracks are, quite frankly, listening to the wrong music, probably the plasticized manufactured trash that's hyped to hell because it makes the most money for the record companies.
I am never going to pay for an MP3 download, just like a lot of other (probably older) music fans. But I'm happy to buy a nice shiny CD with some sleeve notes I can read while I'm listening to the music on a reasonably good hi-fi and then rip a few tracks for myself for when I go to the gym.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I don't know how significant a criticism this is anymore. Rockbox seems to include ogg vorbis decoding in real time, and without any massive cost to battery life (in fact, I've recently read of Rockbox actually surpassing some original firmwares).
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Anybody already saw the weird behavior of Walmart.com: they sell linux pc's but don't allow linux users to download/buy online music ... so much for wanting to buy mp3 songs ...
It matters where you live. Send me the specs for your yard.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
"Good news, everyone!"
Ogg is, explicitly, free. Go to xiph.org and read about it.
MP3, on the other hand, is owned, patented, and licensed by the Fraunhofer Institute.
"Good news, everyone!"
"Good news, everyone!"
But you are not a huge company deciding on what format to use to sell their library of music over the Internet. Nor are you a retailer wanting music to push sales of portable players that mostly do not support Ogg. Compatibility is a huge issue for them.
Are you saying that hardly anyone speaks french? I and, 300 million others disagree with you.
:x
"For up to 400,000 units per year, AAC playback costs $1.00 per unit; for more than 400,000 units per year, the price drops to $0.74 per unit."
But there's no royalties on distribution of music in AAC, which matters to music distributors. The thing is, the only hardware manufacturers who care about the costs to the music distributor are Apple, Sony, and Microsoft (at least until Amazon realizes they'll get more traction selling an Amazon-branded MP3 player than an eBook reader). Sony's format is dead... who even remembers what it's called any more? Apple uses AAC. And Microsoft charges a dime per player for WMA, so all the Lucky Random Word players use MP3 because they have to, and WMA because they can afford to.
They apparently haven't thought ahead far enough to realize that they're helping lock existing iPod users out of their players. Which is just fine by Microsoft.
Quoting: I don't bother learning Esperanto because there's no one I can talk to with it; Unquoting
:-)
Your problem... not mine...
Because HVDC (High-Voltage Direct Current) method is the only viable way of transmitting electricity for distances over 200km in length point-to-point due to capacitance and dielectric issues in AC transmission. One of the major reasons it's not deployed 'unless needed' is because of the cost - AC is 'sufficiently good enough' for short to medium distances.
Serving time in Aristotelean prison for violating laws of physics
Wow, you're an idiot
AAC == audio for MP4
ie the next standard after mp3. (See, 4 is one better than 3)
Google it if you want more details.
And from a popluarity point of view, Apple has sold about 3 billion AAC encoded songs. That's the beginning of a popular standard.
"The fact that OGG isn't supported on either of the two major operating systems or most portable audio players/devices counts pretty strongly against it."
Yeah, if "isn't supported" means "can be played in any number of media players as well as through free extensions to the built-in media frameworks."
The biggest mistake with Ogg Vorbis is the .ogg suffix and lack of marketability of an awkward label for the codec. If Ziph.org et al had of named their new codec something like .mpx to explicitly mean "MP3 eXtended", ie; to unambiguously signify the next generation of the mp3 format then, I believe, this simple non-technical move could have made the difference between mp3 being all pervasive now or... tah dah... this mythical new shiny MPX format. I know quite a few non-nerdy folks who simply won't use Ogg Vorbis *mainly* because it just sounds butt ugh-ly and dumb for a start, and besides, everyone else uses mp3 so what's the point. If I could have said to these same folks "hey, why don't you try the new MPX next generation mp3 format, it sounds much better" I am positive most of them would have got it and done it but the resistance I have seen simply because of the dumb ogg suffix is remarkable. Another awkwardness is using the same .ogg suffix to mean both audio and video content such that it's not simple to call an audio-only application (like amarok) with the single official mime type of application/ogg when the contant may be video and choke the application. Simple little dumb things that have ruined the lossless codec revolution.
Is a machine made in 2006 no longer modern? Because I bought an iBook G4 back then.
"why is it legally questionable to require a binary codec file and a player designed to use the codec?" I think the GP meant that it is of questionable legality for a user to install such a codec on, say, a GNU/Linux machine in contravention of the EULA.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I used to hope for more ogg support, but I don't think mp3 is going away anytime soon. I guess we should count our blessings that a format exploded with no drm. Anyway, mp3's patent is going to expire in 2010 (some sources say 2011, one of the two anyway). Which isn't really far off. And yes you are right on #1, in that ogg is best technically, but there are literally thousands of mp3 products, and once the patent has expired, more companies will add it with no longer being a licensing fee. Btw, does anyone have a ballpark figure of what franhaufer (sp) has made off this one patent? I'm assuming it's a ridiculous figure.
"I don't bother learning Esperanto because there's no one I can talk to with it;"
You haven't looked very hard then! I know plenty of Esperanto speakers.
"I'd probably have better success learning Klingon."
Oh when will this lame joke/urban legend die? In case you actually believe it: A few dozen people can converse fluently in Klingon. Hundreds of thousands of people can converse fluently in Esperanto.
Then, last year (I think, it might have been earlier?), Sandisk had products seized by the police at a trade show (in Germany, I believe), due to a patent infringement suit brought by an Italian company claiming patent infringement.
And this year, a firm in Texas bought a patent from S Korea related to portable MP3 players, and started suing.
Also this year, in the US, Alcatel-Lucent won a lawsuit against MS for $1.5 billion for infringement of their MP3 (and MPEG) related patents (a case currently winding it's way through the labyrinthine appeals process).
It is entirely possible to unwittingly violate a patent; a situation that I would argue makes software patents intolerable. But, the moral of the story is, where there's money, there's lawsuits.
Why was the P marked troll? I am no fan of erris, but this post was right on the mark. In fact, I hate to admit that I did not know about the legal stuff, so it was useful.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'll sum up the double-blind test results above: LAME-encoded mp3's sound as good as AAC files and better than WMA files at the same bit rate. (The bit rates varied by insignificant amounts.)
You left out one bit: and ogg sounds better than all of them.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Is that a mainframe in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When you get down to brass tacks, there isn't THAT much difference
between the two of these in file size or quality in MOST cases. I
have ripped CD's into both formats (usually ogg quality=2 and mp3
bit rate of 128 or 192 though I've used 256 or 320 for classical
music) and I don't notice ANY difference between them on a player
running rockbox (might be different using my stereo / home theater
speakers).
So I would be willing to buy tracks in 320kbs mp3 format and I can
still rip my own cd's into ogg. I'm going to have to take a look at
the Deutsche Grammophon catalog. WOW, someone is now offering Classical
music for download. Their prices aren't that great (but then again D.G.
cd's were always high priced in the stores, so nothing new here). At least
I can buy only the tracks I want. (How about offering the album liner notes in
pdf format guys?)
But portable devices like mp3 because you can get hardware decoders, and IIRC ogg requires more processing to decode than mp3. This equals battery life
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Not good enough. 99% of users aren't going to have a clue how to do that, it's not officially supported, and there's no support on the iPod (sorry, but like it or not, this one is absolutely crucial for it to be successful)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I think he meant, hardly anybody worth talking to speaks french. Kinda like mp3s a few years ago when the only bands who would sell you an mp3 werent worth listening too. :p
:) In reality I'm moving to france in the new year and know a lot of people there worth speaking to and I love my indie mp3s, its usually the mainstream stuff with all the drm thats not worth listening too.
Sorry I jest, but you were asking for this troll
I want my dang PCM files straight. Hold the ice.
It can be much of an issue.
It's not much of an issue for other desktop/workstation architectures, I'll grant.
Try an x86 emulator on a ARM portable, say, an N800 (333 MHz). That doesn't get much speed.
And disassemble and reassemble? Have you ever done that?
Maybe, for sufficiently small things, between two similar architectures. Try porting some x86 code (complicated CISC) to ARM (complicated RISC) and see if that in itself is "really not much of an issue."
EOM
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Brian, is that you? When did you switch from your blank Uber keyboard to Dvorak? Also, how are those 6 spikes thru your testicles doing?
Back in my day we had MP2's and were mighty grateful for it.
Yeah, it's not like it's a big project or anything, you just have to rewrite everything in assembly. x86 emulators are all the rage for portable devices nowadays anyway, it gives battery life a big jolt.
That's really not much of an issue though since you can always wrap the binary codec in an x86 emulator or disassemble and reassemble for your architecture.
In general that's a reasonable approach, but are you sure you'd want to introduce that kind of complexity to code which requires timing-sensitive performance like an audio or video performance?
"I have been claiming for a long time the only way DRM will get widespread use is if enough people VOTED for it with their $$$$. It looks like the votes are in and the counters are noting the huge number of votes against DRM.. It's about time. Keep up the good work and keep voting with your wallet. They can pass DMCA all they want in congress, but if it fails in the marketplace, that is the ace up the sleeve. It has to sell to become a standard that is used."
The numbers don't support your claim. iTunes is growing every year and according to the CEO of Universal makes up 23% of all music sales in the US. Other music stores are not failing because of DRM. They are failing because they lack iPod compatibility. I'm no more in favor of DRM than the next person but the market doesn't support your conclusion.
The parent was joking. Wasn't that obvious?
WMA's can contain malicious code. That's enough to turn me off from it.
Third one's a charm! Been using dvorak for about 10 years, ripping to ogg ever since I started ripping my CD collection to disk.
You do realize that "binary-only" means not open-source, and only available in closed, binary format (without source code)?
I'd still rather get a CD, and rip it to lossless for home audio, and then to lossy for portables or the car...two of the worst listening environments there are.....
I only buy CDs, then rip them to 160 kbps Ogg Vorbis for listening to on both my computer and my portable. Later, if I ever decide I want to dedicate more HD space to music, I can re-rip them all without too much trouble.
I'm worried that all of this is leading to a time where you can only find the inferior lossy formats of music!?!?
That would suck. This would probably be the time I decide to pirate all my music (if I'm even buying any new music at this time; all the bands I listen to seem to be in their 40s-50s now anyway, so they may not be making any more new albums pretty soon).
Nit-picking. It should be common knowledge to anyone on this forum that the two are synonymous. "x86-compatible" is much longer and more clumsy than "Intel" (or just "IA" for short). Besides, Intel also makes Itanium and ARM processors, and it should have been obvious from context that I was referring to the x86 architecture, since those codecs don't have easily available Itanium or ARM versions.
Thanks for your informative post, but why is it legally questionable to require a binary codec file and a player designed to use the codec? I'm curious because I offer my music to listeners in various formats.
As "eldepeche" was saying, it's legally questionable to have a Linux machine and download Microsoft's binary codec files from websites in eastern European countries. If you're living in Russia or someplace like that, it's not a big deal, but if you're in the USA, it's definitely a problem. For home users, it's not an issue (until our government decides to start sending cops door-to-door to check peoples' computers for licensing violations), but for businesses it's absolutely a problem.
Can you tell me if flac is of the "legally questionable" variety such as wma, Sorensen or Real codecs?
As another poster said, FLAC is totally free, just like Ogg Vorbis. You can use it however you want. You can use WMA, Sorensen, or Real too, but you have to follow the appropriate licensing restrictions. This means, as a producer, you'd have to pay fees and use properly licensed encoding software, and your consumers would have to have properly licensed decoding software (assuming they want to be legal), which means Linux users couldn't listen to the WMA and Sorensen versions (without downloading files from Hungary at least).
Personally, I think people offering music on websites should stick to MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC (only if they want a lossless option, since it's huge). The free software advocates will love you for offering Oggs, and everyone else will be perfectly happy with MP3.
Unfortunately, yes, since Apple decided to suddenly move whole-hog to Intel chips. There are now no non-x86-architecture-based laptops or desktops that I know of; the only place other architectures still survive is in embedded devices (routers, portable devices, etc.) and very large server or mainframe-type systems.
As such, there are many things Microsoft could do to stop you from getting a copy of that DLL in the future,
Like what? Sending Gestapo agents door-to-door looking for unlicensed software? Sending hitmen to Hungary to forcibly shut down websites offering their codecs for download? I'm sorry, I don't know what MS could feasibly do to stop people from getting copies of those DLLs, or copies of anything else for that matter.
as well as making changes to future DLLs to prevent them from working outside Windows.
Like what? Every time MS or anyone else tries some type of software-based protection, someone else comes along and hacks it: DVD CSS, Blu-Ray's protection, etc. MS could add strong encryption to the codecs, but then they still have the problem where legitimate users have to have the keys to decrypt the codec to use it; that means you just need a copy of Windows, and you'll have the key. Reverse-engineering it to get that key isn't that hard.
The most recent versions of WMA (WMA9, format 0x162/0x163) can only be played through the use of Microsoft's binary-only DLLs. That means you can only play your WMAs on Linux as long as you stay on an x86 machine (or x86-64, with backwards compatibility, using a 32-bit binary).
Unfortunately mostly true, although as someone else pointed out, you could always run them in an emulator, though you'd take a big performance hit. Of course, with every desktop and laptop sold now using x86 (or x86-64) architecture, this isn't a big problem.
Do DRM'ed WMA songs work okay in Ubuntu? That may sound stupid but I'm seriously asking since I haven't touched Linux that way (no, not that way) in a while.
I actually don't know, but I seriously doubt they work at all. I was referring to regular non-DRMed WMAs in my post. There might be some free utility to strip the DRM out there, as there is for Apple's Fairplay, but I don't know.
90% or more of the music players out there support MP3. How many support Ogg again? You might love your iRiver but your options are limited by the format.
It doesn't matter how many support Ogg; as long as *I* have a player that supports Ogg, that's all I care about, and it's good enough for me to stick with Ogg. I really don't care what everyone else's player supports, as I don't use their players, only my own.
Unfortunately, you're wrong. There's no known patents covering Ogg (Vorbis), but you can't be absolutely sure there aren't any. Have you done a patent search? Even if there aren't any, there may be patents with claims that sort-of sound like they may apply, to an idiot judge. It would be easy for a company with such a patent to file suit, get products blocked with an injunction, etc., even if it's all completely baseless. It would be up to the defendants to mount an expensive legal defense even though the claims are completely without merit. Such is the nature of western "justice".
And as the other poster said, MP3 isn't just covered by Fraunhofer's patents, there's other patents covering it as well (or at least which can be construed as covering it, subject to an expensive trial and court decision).
Bottom line: nothing is truly free from patents. Nothing. You can be sued for violating someone's patent on the wheel if they want to sue you for it.
Hmm, that's very interesting. Does this cover the very latest WMAs and WMVs though?
I guess my argument still holds true for Quicktime/Sorensen and RealAudio codecs...
Of course, MS probably has patents covering WMA and WMV codecs, so you're probably still not legally in the right by using ffmpeg, though there's nothing they can do about the source code.
They don't have to mandate the music gets released in only MP3 format. Just that MP3 is available. That way everyone can get it in MP3 format, and they have the option of going for a higher quality version in some other format such as AAC or FLAC or whatever the hot codec of the month might be.
Copyright infringement isn't legal in Hungary. Microsoft has just looked the other way, since it's more or less in their interest, at the moment. With a lawsuit, you'd see Microsoft's DLLs disappear from websites.
DVD CSS was incredibly weak. Despite some workarounds, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD remain uncracked.
And Microsoft's own DRM remains pretty effective. Though software exists to allow you to strip DRM off WMV files, it only works if you're already authorized to view the file to begin with.
Reverse engineering WMA isn't that hard either, but it hasn't been done. It's seems those that aren't actually involved enjoy saying how easy it is to crack DRM, while those actually doing it, do not.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The Itanium line didn't run standard x86 binaries either, so saying "Intel" would be incorrect. Not to mention it completely ignores AMD and other x86 chip producers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The numbers don't support your claim. iTunes is growing every year and according to the CEO of Universal makes up 23% of all music sales in the US.
iTunes DRM is removable. They can be burnt to regular CD Audio and ripped as MP3. The holes in DRM and compatability is why they sell. DRM WMA didn't have the hole and inspite of the Plays for sure format sold to many manufactures, the format did poorly.
Plays for Sure didn't play for sure near as much as iTunes.
The truth shall set you free!
...Yep, until
1) Your player dies and Ogg is out of fashion and unsupported. Then your Ogg collection is a steaming pile and any time or money you've spent buying or creating it is no longer benefiting you at all.
2You wish to convert that music at some time far into the future when finding software to do it is difficult.
3) You wish to play your Ogg file somewhere else through other equipment that doesn't support Ogg. You know like a friend's place or a party.
4) A new player comes out that supports features you like but doesn't support Ogg. Your choice is to ditch your existing collection, or not.
No thanks. Portable music tied to a small subset of players stinks.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Se malmultaj da homoj povas kompreni la internacian lingvon, kiel mi respondis al via mesagho Esperante? Fakte, pli ol du milionoj da homoj povas utili Esperanton.
Translation: If few people can understand the international language, how did I respond to you in Esperanto. Actually, more than two million people can use Esperanto.
Compared to English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic... French is pretty low. Look, I love French, I chose to take French back in HS because I love the language, but on a world scale of prevolence... French is the OS/2 of languages.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
What the LAME group has done is create a modern encoder with similar psychoacoustic models to modern codecs, and of course the legendary quality-optimized VBR modes. Herein lies the strength of the mp3 standard: flexibilty. Only the maximum number of bits per frame and the way to represent the compressed spectrum are defined; how you use those bits, and what you do to the data before it is compressed, is entirely up to the encoder implementer.
Mp3 has kept pace with modern CODECs because of this flexibility. If yet another CODEC comes out with incredible improvements on the psychoacoustic model, LAME (or some other group) can once-again match it. This is why modern codecs have made little-to-no progress against mp3.
The only place where modern CODECs can beat mp3 are with bitrates 64kbps and below. This is because mp3's datastream is designed to create a more faithful reproduction, and the lack of bits available means you get sharp encoding artifacts. Newer codecs, when presented with low bitrates, try to recreate frequency data using approximations that sound much better to the ear than mp3 artifacts, and thus sound much better (but not anywhere near transparent) at lower bitrates.
But here's the reality: you can't get GOOD quality from ANY modern codec at 64Kbps, so (barring webcasts) it is not hard to realize why we are still stuck at 128k and above. Nor is it hard to realize why mp3 is still on-top as the #1 CODEC.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
"Intel architecture" is a standard term with historical origins, meaning the x86 32-bit architecture which Intel invented. It should be common knowledge on a place like Slashdot. I'm really disappointed; I thought everyone here was supposed to be a nerd who would know things like this.
This is just like people stupidly trying to redefine the terms "megabyte" and "kilobyte" decades after they were in use.
1) Your player dies and Ogg is out of fashion and unsupported. Then your Ogg collection is a steaming pile and any time or money you've spent buying or creating it is no longer benefiting you at all.
a) I buy replacement parts on Ebay (you can get iPod hard drives and batteries for next to nothing there, and these are the main parts that break).
b) I buy a replacement on Ebay for dirt cheap (the same way I got my current player, and replacement parts for it too), or
c) if I must, I get my CD collection back out of the closet and re-rip it. The ripping software is mostly automated, so this isn't that big a deal; just swapping a lot of discs. Why would anyone spend money creating compressed music files anyway?
2You wish to convert that music at some time far into the future when finding software to do it is difficult.
What kind of idiot would ever convert music from one compressed format to another? Everyone knows you lose lots of quality that way. Just re-rip from CD.
Why would I want to convert it? This seems like a strawman argument.
Why would finding software to support Ogg be a problem? It's well supported by free software everywhere, and as long as it's the premier free codec, this will always be the case. You honestly think the free software folks are going to go backwards to a lesser format?
3) You wish to play your Ogg file somewhere else through other equipment that doesn't support Ogg. You know like a friend's place or a party.
Why would I want to do that? I can carry my portable player in my pocket. If someone wants to listen to it, it has a line-out jack on it (yes, this is separate from the headphone jack). That seems much easier than copying the files from the portable player onto their equipment. If they want copies of my music, they can either 1) get some decent equipment that supports Ogg, or 2) buy the CD. It's not my responsibility to cater to other people.
4) A new player comes out that supports features you like but doesn't support Ogg. Your choice is to ditch your existing collection, or not.
We're talking about music players here, not PDAs or smartphones. All it has to do is play music and have enough space, and I'm happy. Please, tell me what "features" I would want that would make me buy a new player. A "fresh" UI? Please. Playing videos? Whoopee; I tried out an iRiver PMP for a bit before I got my present one; it played videos nicely, but ended up being pretty useless because I just don't have much reason to watch videos away from home, unless I'm in a hotel or something, in which case my laptop is a far better player.
I'm sorry, I still don't see the point in worrying about what other people's equipment can and can't do. As long as mine does what I need it to, that's all that matters.
Funny, last time I tried to play a WMA stream from a local radio station, both Xmms and Mplayer refused it.
Just like the last time I tried to run a WMV through Mplayer, again no play.
They are both stock installs, with no added codecs.
So I guess it must be FUD, since EVERY other media type seems to play just fine with those two players.
Why would anyone spend money creating compressed music files anyway?
You don't spend money? Well I'll assume you don't buy music. What's your time worth though? How long does it take you to feed CDs through your computer? You may have the time to re-rip your collection. I don't.
What kind of idiot would ever convert music from one compressed format to another?
The kind of idiot that has lost or damaged CDs perhaps? This is no straw man. Yeah it's not ideal if you can re-rip, but you don't instantly make a quality compressed music file unplayable through a single conversion so long as it's well thought out.
Why would I want to do that? I can carry my portable player in my pocket. If someone wants to listen to it, it has a line-out jack on it (yes, this is separate from the headphone jack).
I take it you've never wanted to play your music at a party. If you have the CD you just loan it out, but then you have to worry about it getting scratched. Do you ever attend parties? "I don't cater to other people" sounds a lot like "I live in my parents basement and have no friends". Good for you. Others don't.
Please, tell me what "features" I would want that would make me buy a new player.
Well I'm glad you think music players are at the pinnacle of their development. I can name dozens of features (none of which have anything to do with video), but i'll start with a 3 I personally find lacking which may or may not appear some day:
1) Advanced search. To start with by name, but imagine search by lyrics...
2) Ability to play new formats as they're brought out.
3) Nicer interface. All the interfaces currently are awful and I'm including the iPod clickwheel.
Even if features aren't a consideration, the players aren't built to last forever. A few years at best. Eventually parts will dry up on Ebay etc.
Bottom line: You're working way too hard to justify your decision to encode in Ogg. There are lots of disadvantages and my criticisms are not as "stupid" as you insist on trying to make them sound. You can't change reality by burying your head in the sand.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why would anyone spend money creating compressed music files anyway?
You don't spend money? Well I'll assume you don't buy music. What's your time worth though? How long does it take you to feed CDs through your computer? You may have the time to re-rip your collection. I don't.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone dumb enough to spend money on compressed music should be happy to spend more money to re-buy the same music in a different format.
Me, my whole collection is on CD. I have physical discs (which themselves are backups) with UNcompressed audio which I can rip to the format of my choice. No need to re-rip.
What kind of idiot would ever convert music from one compressed format to another?
The kind of idiot that has lost or damaged CDs perhaps? This is no straw man. Yeah it's not ideal if you can re-rip, but you don't instantly make a quality compressed music file unplayable through a single conversion so long as it's well thought out.
I guess you don't care much about sound quality if you're so happy to convert between compressed formats. If I'm dumb enough to ruin one of my CDs, then I'll bite the bullet and buy a new copy. Luckily, I've never managed to do this in 2 decades; I'm careful with my CDs, and since I've transitioned to compressed formats (I started with MP3, and went to Ogg later), my CDs have spend all their time in their cases, in a box in the closet, except for the brief times they were being ripped.
I take it you've never wanted to play your music at a party. If you have the CD you just loan it out, but then you have to worry about it getting scratched. Do you ever attend parties? "I don't cater to other people" sounds a lot like "I live in my parents basement and have no friends". Good for you. Others don't.
I'm no longer 20, so I don't attend "parties" in the sense you think of them; people my age generally do things like hang out at friends' houses with a handful of guests, cooking food on the barbeque grill and swimming in the pool. We play music in the background, but we don't make a huge production of it; we generally just tune into an internet radio station, or play from the host's music library. As I said, if anyone wanted to hear my music, I'd plug my portable player into the stereo with a line-in cord. No big deal.
Well I'm glad you think music players are at the pinnacle of their development. I can name dozens of features (none of which have anything to do with video), but i'll start with a 3 I personally find lacking which may or may not appear some day:
1) Advanced search. To start with by name, but imagine search by lyrics...
2) Ability to play new formats as they're brought out.
3) Nicer interface. All the interfaces currently are awful and I'm including the iPod clickwheel.
What new music formats are going to be made any time soon? That field appears very mature to me.
Nicer interface? BFD. I just pick an album and hit "play". How hard can it be? Geesh.
You're the one working way too hard to put down people who choose Ogg, because it works for them, when you think your reasons for not liking it must somehow be accepted by everyone.
According to wiki, Spanish has around the same number of speakers, and Arabic has less.
No, I assume nerds would use correct terms and make accurate statements.
Nerds are often pedantic.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone dumb enough to spend money on compressed music should be happy to spend more money to re-buy the same music in a different format.
/.
You can believe what you like. Others think differently. If the quality is good enough many people are prepared to buy it. You can choose to regard them as "dumb" but you're insulting a lot of people who subscribe to
Me, my whole collection is on CD. I have physical discs (which themselves are backups) with UNcompressed audio which I can rip to the format of my choice. No need to re-rip.
That whole paragraph makes no sense. I think you mean you don't need to transcode, you can just rip them again. It does however take time and effort to feed the discs into your computer to rip them again, so yes you do need to re-rip. If that's what you want to do with your time, that's your business but I don't have time to spend feeding discs into a computer every few years. (Quite aside from the fact that in many places this is still illegal).
I guess you don't care much about sound quality if you're so happy to convert between compressed formats
I'm not "happy to" convert between compressed formats BUT if the CDs had been lost, damaged or destroyed, I'd certainly consider it before I re-bought it all. I might even do some tests to see how noticable the difference is before forking out thousands of dollars.
If I'm dumb enough to ruin one of my CDs, then I'll bite the bullet and buy a new copy.
What if you're "dumb enough" to have a house fire or other misfortune befall you. Under such circumstances you may have higher priority concerns than re-buying your collection of music. In fact depending on the nature of the misfortune that befalls you it may take you quite some to recover to the point where you have spare funds to re-buy all your CDs (and that's IF you can find them. If you damage a rare CD it may not be something you can replace).
Luckily, I've never managed to do this in 2 decades; I'm careful with my CDs, and since I've transitioned to compressed formats (I started with MP3, and went to Ogg later), my CDs have spend all their time in their cases, in a box in the closet, except for the brief times they were being ripped.
I too have CDs that are 2 decades old and still fine. Luckily is the key word here. You and I haven't had a house fire, major flood or anything else an insurance company chooses to call an act of God. Clearly no one's broken into your house and taken your CDs either. Same here.
I'm no longer 20, so I don't attend "parties" in the sense you think of them; people my age generally do things like hang out at friends' houses with a handful of guests, cooking food on the barbeque grill and swimming in the pool.
I'm in my 30s. I'm not socially dead. I still attend the occassional party. I was at a 30th birthday last weekend.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could take your music collection along to your BBQ/Pool party without having to worry whether the equipment there played it?
play music in the background, but we don't make a huge production of it; we generally just tune into an internet radio station, or play from the host's music library. As I said, if anyone wanted to hear my music, I'd plug my portable player into the stereo with a line-in cord. No big deal.
So you're taking me to task and questioning the quality of music I'd listen to for suggesting that I'd convert music between compressed formats, but you're happy to listen to the freaking radio, and don't even care what's on?
Look I very rarely will want to share a piece of music, but if I do want to do that, I don't want to be limited to splicing in my damned music player with a line in. What if you want to include your song in a mix or something??? I don't know about you but if I'm somewhere social I want to set up the music and walk away without having to select source etc. It's just not as convenient as having it in a file fo
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
As far as I'm concerned, anyone dumb enough to spend money on compressed music should be happy to spend more money to re-buy the same music in a different format.
/.
.m4p files), they're going to have to re-buy that file. Of course, they could get around that with some free tools, but what idiot would spend hundreds of dollars on music banking that the DRM will always be circumventable when they need it to be? The answer: none. People who buy from iTunes only intend to play it on their iPod, and their future iPods, and that's it; they have no intentions of ever playing it on anything else. By the logic you've shown in this thread, all these iTunes buyers are "dumb", because they've chosen music in a codec other than MP3 which prevents them from easily sharing their music with their friends, playing on other brands of portables, etc. You're also insulting a lot of people who subscribe to /.
You can believe what you like. Others think differently. If the quality is good enough many people are prepared to buy it. You can choose to regard them as "dumb" but you're insulting a lot of people who subscribe to
A lot of people are apparently dumb enough to buy music from iTunes which is not only compressed, but DRMed. So if they ever had some reason to need it in a different format for playing on a non-iPod player (like MP3; only iPods play
That whole paragraph makes no sense. I think you mean you don't need to transcode, you can just rip them again. It does however take time and effort to feed the discs into your computer to rip them again, so yes you do need to re-rip. If that's what you want to do with your time, that's your business but I don't have time to spend feeding discs into a computer every few years. (Quite aside from the fact that in many places this is still illegal).
I don't think I'll ever have to do this, as I think there will always be a player available that plays Oggs (plus I seriously doubt mine is going to die any time soon, without spare parts available on Ebay). As a last resort, Rockbox works great on many players including iPods, and plays Oggs.
What if you're "dumb enough" to have a house fire or other misfortune befall you. Under such circumstances you may have higher priority concerns than re-buying your collection of music. In fact depending on the nature of the misfortune that befalls you it may take you quite some to recover to the point where you have spare funds to re-buy all your CDs (and that's IF you can find them. If you damage a rare CD it may not be something you can replace).
I too have CDs that are 2 decades old and still fine. Luckily is the key word here. You and I haven't had a house fire, major flood or anything else an insurance company chooses to call an act of God. Clearly no one's broken into your house and taken your CDs either. Same here.
I'm not going to choose codecs or anything else based on the remote possibility of a house fire or flood. (Floods are impossible where I live anyway, unless a cataclysm of Biblical proportions happens.)
Since my CDs are all packed away in a nondescript box in the closet (with other boxes of crap piled on top), I don't think I have to worry much about theft. That's really a bigger concern for people that keep their CDs in display cases because they still listen to them.
Look I very rarely will want to share a piece of music, but if I do want to do that, I don't want to be limited to splicing in my damned music player with a line in. What if you want to include your song in a mix or something??? I don't know about you but if I'm somewhere social I want to set up the music and walk away without having to select source etc. It's just not as convenient as having it in a file format that others can play.
WTF are you talking about? You consider a line-in line an inconvenience? How is that any more inconvenient than having to drag around a special USB cable, or worse, in the case of i
y the logic you've shown in this thread, all these iTunes buyers are "dumb", because they've chosen music in a codec other than MP3 which prevents them from easily sharing their music with their friends, playing on other brands of portables, etc. You're also insulting a lot of people who subscribe to /.
I said it wasn't for me. I'm not the one throwing around the word dumb.
I don't think I'll ever have to do this, as I think there will always be a player available that plays Oggs
Can I borrow your crystal ball? I'm hanging out to work out if my first born is going to be a boy or a girl.
I'm not going to choose codecs or anything else based on the remote possibility of a house fire or flood. (Floods are impossible where I live anyway, unless a cataclysm of Biblical proportions happens.)
Your choice. I'd prefer not to re-buy my entire music collection if my house burns down. I also keep a spare copy of my wedding photos on a hard drive at my mother's house. I like to back things up.
I have about 250 CDs. How hard is it to go to Artist and then Album? "Endless menus"? Please. With around 50 or so artists, and then usually several albums per artist (some 10-20), it doesn't take that long. Are you one of those people who has 1 song per artist?
Certainly not one song per artist, but now you're knocking others for having varied musical taste???? WTF!?! Varied musical taste is a good thing. I'm building up a picture of you as someone who doesn't care about music at all. You just have 50 or so favourite artists and then listen to the radio. Good for you. Your choice. Not mine though.
Tell me, what more improvement can there be in a compressed music format?
You're smoking something aren't you? When you say something that STUPID and lacking in imagination I wonder if you're just trolling....
Try more channels (optional subchannels). Improved compression. Better alogirthms for chosing what parts of the signal to lose. Better response. Better directional encoding. Imagine audio 20-30 years ago. That's how an MP3 player's going to look 20-30 years from now. Like a goddamn turn table.
Why do you think there are so many codecs with different characteristics in the first place?
That's already covered; the newer formats don't limit you to 16-bit, 44.1kHz. But this isn't very useful anyway since almost no one can hear the difference between 44.1kHz and 96kHz sampling rates. More speakers? I'm pretty sure the newer formats allow 5.1, 7.1, etc., though again this isn't very useful for studio music and especially for anything played through headphones; but it's supported since some of these formats are also used for A/V streams (movies) where surround is much more commonly used. Better tagging? The newer formats have that one covered. Better compression? They're already pretty close to the theoretical limit. A 2% better compression rate isn't going to attract anyone, and with lossy compression it's hard to compare them anyway since it's subjective. So what could be done better in a compressed music format? I'd honestly like to know.
What a silly rant. "Almost" no one can hear blah. That means someone will want it, even if it's not rational. Lots of people insist on using lossless codecs when blind testing can show the existing codecs are transparent. You can't imagine more than 7 speakers. Imagine directionality that lets you assign each instrument a channel and location so you get a virtual orchestra. One day that may happen too. Who knows how many speakers and how large or small that would take. I can imagine a grid of speakers that gets fitted to a wall. How about multiple microspeakers for headphones. You like the tagging today. Imagine tagging that includes lyrics, timing, a history of the song, embedded album art.
How many people do you think in the early days of circular tv would have imagined the entertainment systems that get sold today, and at a price that a moderately well of
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Hey, if anyone of you is looking for an mp3 you can find it from one of these sites. justmusicstore.com alloffmp3.org lowmp3.info lyrics-catalog.com really big stores on internet
Ok, now you're just being idiotic.
.zoo and .arc achives, and those weren't even open-source when they came out. No proprietary vendor can take Ogg away. Hell, if no one else wanted to do it, I could get the source code myself and do it myself.
.gz in the Unix world which dates from the early 90s, and we sometimes use .bz2 which is slightly newer. Tell me, what advances in data compression have there been in the last 10 years? Nothing really significant, and nothing that ever completely dislodged ZIP.
I don't think I'll ever have to do this, as I think there will always be a player available that plays Oggs
Can I borrow your crystal ball? I'm hanging out to work out if my first born is going to be a boy or a girl.
This is just stupid. Ogg is open-source. If people still want it at any time, players will be available. There's still software available for opening
Certainly not one song per artist, but now you're knocking others for having varied musical taste???? WTF!?! Varied musical taste is a good thing.
No, liking only one song per artist just shows you only like what's popular, and have no real taste of your own; your musical tastes are dictated to you by others.
"Varied musical taste" != liking only 1 song per artist. These are totally unrelated.
You just have 50 or so favourite artists and then listen to the radio.
WTF? Now you're just being a complete moron. I said that at parties, we'd put on INTERNET radio, you dumbfuck. Maybe you've never heard of that? There's no commercials, and they play stuff you don't hear on normal radio. There's probably even an internet radio station for Norwegian shouting choruses. Stop acting like such an ass.
Try more channels (optional subchannels). Improved compression. Better alogirthms for chosing what parts of the signal to lose. Better response. Better directional encoding. Imagine audio 20-30 years ago. That's how an MP3 player's going to look 20-30 years from now. Like a goddamn turn table.
Oh please. Better compression? I guess that's why there's such huge differences in compression between the latest codecs?
How about a parallel: lossless data compression. I remember 15 years ago when everyone was using this data compressor called PKZIP. Now, 15 years later, everyone's using... PKZIP (or a variation thereof). They also use RAR a lot, which was around in the early 90s, we use
Or how about graphics compression? Even though there's actually real improvements possible there (unlike lossless data compression), we're still all using ancient JPEG. The only thing that got us past GIF was the patent issues.
If you really think music compression will be all that different in 10 or 15 years, you're dreaming.
What a silly rant. "Almost" no one can hear blah. That means someone will want it, even if it's not rational.
Who will want it? "Audiophiles"? WTF cares about them? They're such a small portion of the market they don't matter; they don't like MP3 or other compressed formats, or even CDs, but iTunes seems to be doing just fine without them. How are SACD and DVD-A doing? Not so hot. Most people aren't willing to go out of their way for imperceptible gains in audio quality.
You can't imagine more than 7 speakers. Imagine directionality that lets you assign each instrument a channel and location so you get a virtual orchestra.
You only have 2 ears. With enough signal processing, you could replicate the sound of 7 speakers with just 2, and no one would be able to tell the difference. There's already a big debate over whether more speakers are actually useful or not.
Moreover, multichannel sound has been around since the 70s (remember quadrophonic sound?). What are people listening to now for music? Stereo.
How is that any more inconvenient than having to drag around a special USB cable, or worse, in the case of iPo
Ogg is open-source. If people still want it at any time, players will be available
Can you even read what you're writing? IF people want it. Plenty of open source projects die or are closed.
No proprietary vendor can take Ogg away. Hell, if no one else wanted to do it, I could get the source code myself and do it myself.
Oh puhlease! What a bunch of bullshit. You can single handledly bring to market an Ogg player if the format fails to take off? The entire fantasy that "if it's open source you can fix it yourself" is as ridiculous as suggesting that if you don't like your current car you can design and build one yourself. Purile!
"Varied musical taste" != liking only 1 song per artist. These are totally unrelated.
Listen bud, you're the one that said you've got only 50 artists to scroll through in your collection. If that's your definition of varied musical taste you can keep it.
Tell me, what advances in data compression have there been in the last 10 years? Nothing really significant, and nothing that ever completely dislodged ZIP.
Hmm perhaps that's why the latest versions of Winzip using proprietary password security (which can't be unzipped using other software) was an issue. You're talking out of the wrong hole.
I said that at parties, we'd put on INTERNET radio, you dumbfuck. Maybe you've never heard of that? There's no commercials, and they play stuff you don't hear on normal radio
Why the fuck do I care what brand of fucking radio or what mode of transmission. My point is you don't care what you're listening to beyond a handful of artists (50 by your count) and you don't have any interest in discussing or sharing music. Nothing you've said counters that. No amount of name calling will either.
Who will want it? "Audiophiles"? WTF cares about them? They're such a small portion of the market they don't matter
Tell that to the myriad of companies selling high end audio equipement. You bet your arse they care. Another stupid comment by you.
You only have 2 ears. With enough signal processing, you could replicate the sound of 7 speakers with just 2, and no one would be able to tell the difference. There's already a big debate over whether more speakers are actually useful or not
Okay this is laughable. You may have only 2 ears but you perceive sound from multiple dirrections and at different frequencies. Last I checked sound systems with more than 2 speakers were selling. Hell there's even a specialized speaker for bass hence 5.1 not just 5 etc. Different speakers built differently for different response at different frequencies. Imagine that. Heck imagine multiple bass speakes in future for that matter. I have 2 ears therefore I only need 2 speakers is a stupid stupid argument. If you had your way we'd never have had surround. Most people shelling out for a new home entertainment system think it's worthwhile. In fact I can't imagine a less than 5.1 in a home theatre these days.
I should ask you the same question! You still haven't addressed the issue of the cable! How are you going to get your songs from your iPod (or whatever) in MP3 format onto your friend's system?
Oh yeah I didn't answer one of your points therefore I must be mistaken. Get a life. If it's not DRM and it's a common format moving it across to your friend's system isn't a big problem. Lots of ways to do that. My issue was that if you hooked in your iPod you'd have the issue of scheduling the song to play in the middle of a playlist. THAT is why I consider this more than just a minor inconvenience. Nice straw man though. Fool.
Who cares about cutting over? Do you not know how to press a few buttons on a stereo? I don't even know WTF you're getting at here.
Who the hell wants to babysit their sound system at a party. I'd rather be socialising. So would most people which is why in most cases the song would never get played. It's clear you have no idea what I'm getting at
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer