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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.
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.
Unfortunately, No, the mean straight mp3s. Because mp3s are now like .doc files apparently. Even though there are alternatives that are superior, and yes, cheaper, people still want mp3s the way they want Microsoft Office.
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?
Find free books.
you did have a point though, considering that we have FLAC which is free as in libre *and* loss-less why use MP3?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
But Microsoft Office is superior to competition, where as MP3 is not.
No, it's not. OpenOffice is freely downloadable, and does everything almost anyone needs in an office suite. MS Office may be preferred by some (mostly due to brand loyalty most likely), but it definitely doesn't do anything extra that makes it worth $500 more than OO.
BTW, I'm assuming you mean "superior" in a general sense, where all features (including price) are taken into consideration. A Ferrari is a superior car to a Civic only if you have an unlimited budget, for instance. If your income is $40k, a Ferrari is not a superior choice.
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.
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.
How 'bout better than completely-closed-and-would-like-to-be-platform-locked-codec?
I love ogg, and I hope it becomes the eventual de facto standard... but if someone chooses mp3 over wma/aac, well, I'm not going to spit on them.
ogg > mp3 > aac >= wma
In other words, the world (and moral values included therein) does not exist in a binary state. Things are not simply Good or Evil. Thanks for your troll though.
Bill
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.
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.
FLACs are huge.
Because the audio quality is good enough for the vast majority of people and file size isn't an issue for most people, either. There's just no compelling reason to force an entire industry to move to a better format. MP3 is not a broken format. There is no good reason to replace it.
At times it may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good. -- Margaret Meade
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.
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."
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
(I don't recall where WMA fits in all this)
Not all portable players have the CPU to decode OGG. So it's not just software.
http://gizmodo.com/archives/ogg-on-ipod-why-the-ipod-may-not-have-the-horsepower-for-ogg-015607.php
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That is just not true. There are costs:
- You have to pay your engineers to research and implement support. In fact, there may be a validated and certified MP3 implementation already available for your hardware, but not an OGG implementation.
- You have to pay your lawyers to verify that it's patent- and royalty-free.
- You may need to increase the amount of processing power or memory to handle the additional codec.
- You'll need to perform additional testing to make sure OGG files actually work.
- You'll need to account for additional support costs if the OGG support is broken but the MP3 support isn't.
- You have to have your marketing department do extra research to determine if the additional sales of your media player because of OGG support cover the additional costs.
The fact that there are no licensing costs may be inconsequential compared to the costs of just adding the feature to the product.And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Repetition does not engender truth.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
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.
Ahem, seems like a short history lesson is in order.. *Pulls out a slide rule and a stern expression*..
MP3 has several things on it's side that have been successful for other products in historical situations:
1. all things being equal, the sexier sounding name wins. And "empeethree" has a simplistic, yet technical sound to it. Whereas AAC and WMA can be thrown right out the window. Ogg has some appeal, but nowhere near the sexiness of mp3.
2. Recognition.. whenever a brand has become synonymous with the whole technology they have had the advantage of immediate recognition, this is a major marketing advantage (free publicity anyone?). A lot of who use WMA will still talk about their "MP3 songs".
3. Now.. as to being "inferior" technically. You need only to look at things like DC and AC, VHS and Betamax or Amiga and PC (oh boy, am I gonna get it for that last one) to see that the technically superior solution is not always the one that ends up on top.
However, while the wide proliferation of MP3 *SEEMS* to guarantee it's future based on similar historical events, there is always one historical factor that could change it all: A new technology that offers a decisive advantage over MP3 and manages to capture a fanatical core fanbase. Such pieces of technology have many times overtaken rivals with near total market dominance (does anyone remember Atari, 3Dfx, or Altavista?).
But until something earthshattering comes forth, I see cool runnings for the old, venerable, MP3.
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.
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.
I was listening to "Serenade in Bb K361-370a [Gran Partita] - Adagio" on Volume 5 of the Complete Mozart Edition by Philips right before I came across this article and was appalled at the poor quality of the high notes (oboe). It was so terrible I had to skip the song, it couldn't even reproduce the right note. Too bad my car cd player only supports mp3 cds.
Bandwidth is still an issue. Connection speeds don't increase like hard drive sizes. There is also the cost, which remains the same: the quality difference between a transparent Vorbis encoded file and FLAC is zero, but the FLAC file is almost 10 times bigger. Even for slightly less than transparent quality, that tiny quality difference costs nearly 10 times the file size.
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.
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 ]
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
"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.