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."

Comments

Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth

[afidel]

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.

Re:How Ironic

[earlymon]

1. AAC is not Apple proprietary, nor was it developed, subsidized or (parent company) purchased by Apple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

2. "Microsoft will never support AAC..." - except, it seems that they already do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune (not to mention Windows Mobile....)

3. The faad and faac are illegal in the US - try http://www.audiocoding.com/ - source is there, not binaries (see Wiki, again) and then also try to tell me what is the issue? Are you trying to suggest that there is nothing available for free on Linux / other that plays AAC files - legally? How about VLC? The world doesn't begin and end at the FSF - although the FSF is really, really fab, it's not the world. If anything in media playback is the word, it's VLC - but that's just me.....

Otherwise, your idea of Walmart dropping WMA because it is proprietary and won't play on iPods is probably quite true - I think that was the insightful part.

Re:Really wish that they would support Ogg and oth

[NMerriam]

Proof please? I've never seen this substantiated. Also, how do you quantify "better audio quality" numerically?

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.

Re:DRM, ogg, CDs, fair use, licenses

[evilviper]

On the other hand, mp3 is still patent-encumbered,

Use MP2 instead. Backwards compatibility is inherent. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 files as well. And at bitrates of 160kbps+ (Joint Stereo, psy-1) MP2 actually sounds better than any MP3 as well. Not to mention it both encodes and decodes faster.

In fact I'd put MP2 up against DD/AC3/A52 any day. Dolby has a history of bribing organizations to NOT include MP2 along-side AC3, such as the US DVD and HDTV standard. In the rest of the world, patent-free MP2 is allowed on DVDs and in digital TV, in addition to AC3.

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.

You're just about completely wrong.

Flash video 7 used a slightly modified h.263 codec. Non-standard, I must admit, but it was very quickly reverse engineered. Not only can anything based on libavcodec play flash videos, but the open source Flash player/plugin GNASH can play them as well, even though it's still developing, and quite buggy at the moment.

Flash 9 added On2's proprietary VP6 codec, but use of that format has been quite limited.

And what's the audio codec with both of them? Plain old MP3.

Plus, Adobe long ago announced the shift to completely standard video formats. The recent beta versions of the Flash9 plugin can play MP4 files with h.264 and AAC audio. All 100% open standard, and interchangeable with Quicktime, MPlayer, etc.

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).

Flash was opened up before Java was, and there are numerous 3rd party implementations of Flash. Gnash is even open source, and can handle many of the common Flash videos found in the wild.

VLC has French devs - no software patents

[MichaelCrawford]

VLC is a project developed by a French technical school, as a programming exercise for its students. The reason they can support AAC as well as numerous other patented formats is that France doesn't recognize software patents - yet.

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.