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MP3 Dead? What, Already?
bob_jones writes "Zdnet is reporting that in an interview with Mark Cuban President of brodcast.com that MP3 is doomed because no one has an economic interest to keep it alive. He also compares it to disco.
" Mark has an interesting point, but I think he basically misses the point-economic interest isn't everything. He thinks Real Networks or MS will absorb MP3. Odd.
Hey, could you give me an email? I have a friend that's going to be doing some major MP3-only distributing. Your user info doesn't have your e-mail address. :)
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I guess that's why you're here.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Man... I better shut off this encoder, then. I wouldn't want all my music to be stored in a dead format... And what am I going to do with the CD-Rs I bought to burn them to?
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Could you please explain how Linux continues to flourish then?
Posted by frodo_bag:
colin olkowski
http://www.thecosmos.com
MP3 Music Share
This man obviously has no idea what he's talking about. Broadcast.com gets $100 from an IPO and all their competitive intellegence can come up with is that, "No one has the economic incentive to keep it (MP3) alive"?
Broadcast.com seems to be in the RIAA's back pocket, and I'm sure none of their clients have requested MP3 encoding. They're scared to death of it. The RIAA and the major Labels are so far behind the curve it seems that they can only resort to making controversial statements like "Mp3 is dead".
Posted by iJohn:
ASCII came in with Teletypes, and was a big improvement over Baudot code that ran on Telex machines.
(I barely remember Baudot and may not be spelling right. No relation to Bridgette I think... But I digress.)
There was only upper case and a few punctuation marks. I have this funny feeling we only had 5 bits to work with.
It does surprise me that the HTML entity set hasn't been expanded to include some basic typographic symbols: N- and Mm-dashes; typo quotes and apostrophes, bullets, check marks, check boxes; integrals and sigmas and deltas.
Not to mention smiley faces.
I guess we need a new ISO-8859 kinda thingie. How about ISO-Font.2000?
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
You make the invalid assumption that in the near future we will experience an all around 10x boost in storage and data capacity. (I get this from the fact that a 40 meg cd audio track can probably be compressed into about 4 megs of mp3. maybe I'm a little off)
If this were the case, and the desire for more music to be stored locally and immediatly accessibly did not increase at all, then you might be right, because then people could use the higher fidelity standard. But I don't think such increases are going to occur in the immediate future, and even if they do, who says that given the choice between more mp3s and fewer slightly higher quality audio files I would choose the latter? I know people who a few years ago were happy with 500 megs of mp3s, and now have about 10 gigs. Their storage capacity grew 20-fold and yet they didn't start storing cd audio files instead of mp3s. They just got more mp3s.
And what about RNWK? Think they'll be superfluous soon? not a chance. In the first place, as you so rightly pointed out, there will be a need for video compression for a while. In the second place, even if internet data transfer speeds got an all around boost by 10, realtime broadcasts of audio would still be impossible since the higher data transfer rate would almost invariably lead to more people using real audio broadcasts.
And you were referring to the Nyquist sampling theorem, in case you were wondering. But you don't seem like an educated person, so you probably don't care.
Posted by omot:
>Um, how is throwing away 90% of the data >"better"?
Just because your file size may be 90% smaller doesn't mean 90% of the data just got chopped off. Mp3 is a compression format specialized for audio, and a lot of the data just got compressed into 10% of the space. You can still hear the drummer hitting his sticks together, the crowd cheering between songs, everything. Almost CD quality, plus you can set what bitrate you encode at to the point where you simply can't tell the difference.
Audiophiles might not all like the quality of mp3's, but they should still appreciate the incredibly small size.
omot@lotek.org / www.lotek.org
--
--
=8^
--
--
=8^
Economic interest is the only thing that matters,
or have you forgotten that mommy and daddy are
forking over money to keep you in college?
Some of us in college are footing the bill ourselves. Get a clue, you pompous bastard.
Get a job, and soon you will realize that money drives everything.
Get a life, and you'll realize that money means nothing without happiness. Remember that when you're 80 and financially sound, and emotionally void.
If people are willing to PAY for mp3s, it will
stay alive.
If they aren't, its dead. Its simple as that,
and we haven't seen yet if people are willing
to actually PAY for mp3s.
Then explain to me why I have roughly 2 gigs of mp3's that I've never paid for?
If was going to pay for the music, I'd have a cd of it too, as I do with another 1.2gb of mp3's that I have. I see no point is "pay for play" music selling tactics. I will pirate all my music before I am restricted to how many times I can listen to a song, relative to the amount of greenbacks in my wallet.
It's sad to see someone so shortsighted and unenlightened. You'd probably be a lot happier if you'd realize how little of importance money really is.
-Erik-
.. or the artist, for that matter.
If it'd make you happier, send me a list of all the personal addresses to the artists that I pirate music from, and I'll send them the $1.50 or $2 the RIAA and Music Industry actually gives to them.
In fact, I would be more than happy to. I'm not interested in funding the RIAA, or any of the big record labels that literally "pimp" musicians and clean up off of them, and then decide their fate almost like if it were some really high-stakes game of chess.
I find out abuot tons of bands that I would have never been interested in exploring before had I not had the cash, and then I go to their concerts to see them live, where they tend to make a little more money (but not much).
The simple fact is, is that even if I had the money, I wouldn't have bought these albums in the first place. I see no wrong here, as my situation would have never changed. I'm sure you can find a metaphor to cite me as being wrong, but in this case, it's just like having a radio station on for most of the time.
-Erik-
This sounds an awfully lot like the excuse that a lot of software pirates use to justify their illegal activities. "This is far more expensive than I can afford, and so if I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't have bought it anyway .. so nobody is losing anything." It's an interesting claim, but it's hardly valid (try using that after being arrested for grand theft auto.)
:)
I won't get into your poor analogy, but, no one likes paying for crap. I can count the number of albums I've bought this last year on my right hand - all of them coming from MP3's. Korn, Incubus, Lenny Kravitz. I plan on purchasing 3 Aphex Twin albums this year, even though I own every song made by Richard D James in mp3. Why? I want to support the artist. I do, however have a problem with the RIAA getting a good 90% of hte profit.
Why is it that a large percentage of bands today aren't even wasting their time with a big record label, they're creating their own? Because, after the producers, record companies, and RIAA get their share, they have nothing left.
Pirating Software can also be applied here. I pirate a small percentage of applications that I rarely use. In fact, I am a large proponent of paying for your osftware, but the reason that I pirate so little is because I pay for the good stuff, when I am able, and pirate the crap. Paying $400 for an art app that essentially does a little more than MS Paint for me is absurd.
When a few friends of mine and I were starting a web-design shop, I suggested we took out a loan so that we could pay for this unsaid art app (and many other web creation apps), because it was going to bring us financial gain and a large majority of our work would be done in it.
The pirates that really need to be ridiculed are the guys who own ISP's and milk that T3 dry collecting warez when they have more than enough money to purchase them.
I worked for one of these guys, he had 6 or 7 NT machines running on pirated copies, 3 linux boxen, and another 6 gigs of apps from photoshop to pagemaker to office to 3d studio max. He hadn't paid one dime for any of the software used in the office. Those are the people that the SPA and BSA, etc is targeting, because they ARE costing software companies money. They need the applications to stay in business, and they choose to skirt the payment because of the mega-bandwidth they can offer in shells to pirates.
Something to think about, eh? Of course Free software could solve that whole problem entirely.
-Erik-
Why would the CEO of a STREAMING MEDIA company proclaim MP3 dead? To serve his own purpose.
... but that wouldn't get the same reaction now would it?
Saying MP3 is like Disco is such a lame comparison, a better comparison would be to say MP3 is like cassette tapes
He says that the content providers will own the industry, not the contend creators. What a dismal outlook for anyone who is willing to put the time and effort into creating music people will listen to. Basically he's saying all musicians are whores to the content providing pimps.
What a crock.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
>Can someone translate the phrase "MP3 is not scalable" into English?
Umm, you can't make a Beowulf cluster out of them?
Seriously, though, I think it means that when broadcasting it, you can't easily adjust the quality to the bandwidth available, and thus transmit lower-quality sound if that's all that will go through or higher quality when you have a high-bandwidth connection.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The only problem with mp3 is that the best anyone could do to pay for it was to slap enourmous license fees on all encoders for it. $25 per encoder with a $15,000 annual minimum is outrageous.
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
Both normal types of dashes are actually supported by the HTML standard with the and characters. Unfortunately I have never seen a browser that supports these characters.
A non-proprietary file format becoming a standard? Oh.. my.. God.. It scares them to death. The lack of rigid control. The lack of royalty fees. They want something like DIVX so they can enforce their pay-per-thought programs. Failing that, they'll at least want something like the DVD format (with region locking, macrovision crap, etc. to restrict the end users). Ever wonder why there's no digital output jacks on DVD players and TVs with digital inputs? This would result in better picture quality and can be done with current tech. The reason: the mere-potential for piracy.
Anyone wanna bet that if the Redbook audio format for CDs was just being developped today that it would have copy protection and region locking garbage wedged into it?
Hate to nitpick, but that's wronger. Put a space before and after your em-dashes (or faked em-dashes -- like this one). This visually and logically separates them from the words before and after them.
Visual separation increases readability; logical separation tells the browser that it can break a line.
Incidentally, --- isn't uncommon as a replacement for an em-dash, because that's the TeX code for it.
I've always seen it as the original poster said--without spaces. Where did you read that spaces were required before and after?
MP3 isn't open. As I understood it, legally there's nothing stopping Fraunhofer from ordering an injunction or something similar and declaring that all MP3 encoders and decoders are covered by their patent(s). (In fact, I believe they've done so, but aren't enforcing it...)
Any ``standards'' propigated by businesses with pecuniary interest in that standard aren't ``open'' by any means. The original architects of the internet were working off of government grants, not off of the idea that what they were creating would make them rich later. It'd be nice if a large body like the FSF could similarly fund research into truly open standard formats.
Besides, there's better ways to analyze music than DFT's, wavelets being one method...
NetBSD: the cathedral vs the bizzare.
Well, MP4 and VQF sound a whole lot better. Maybe it is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
MP3 the format may or may not have a future. There are better compression formats, after all. Any freely available, easy to use, and high performance format could easily supplant MP3 the format.
But MP3 the movement (what other name could we use? the "digital music revolution"?), whatever format it champions, isn't going away anytime soon.
I think this guy's "problem" (he may be doing it on purpose) is that he's confusing the two. Just because MP4 or AAC or MS Media Player 4 or RealPlayer G2 or whatever can compress files better than MP3 doesn't mean that people are going to stop distributing music freely over the Internet through places like MP3.com.
I think he'd rather people did stop exchanging full music files over the Internet, so people like him could make money on pay-per-view or SDMI or whatever, and he's trying to tie the future of the digital music culture to the fate of the MP3 format (at least in the eyes of the press).
For this reason the music industry will stop making CDs as soon as it can. Howver, I suspect you will always be able to encode the analog signal coming out of your preamplifier - maybe the home audio industry will outlaw selling separate preamp and amp?
Interesting points. However, both you and Mr. Cuban have the issue completely turned around. For better or worse, nobody has to pay for mp3s, its the erstwhile successor that will have to be paid for. Are people going to pay for it? Only if it gives them a lot more than mp3 does. Its difficult to see how to stop people from making mp3s out of anything they can send to the audio outputs of their amplifiers. Its also difficult to see how improved sound quality will overcome the zero dollar barrier. And improved compression rapidly becomes a non-issue. So what is this new format going to give us? Obviously Mr. Cuban doesn't know, or he certainly would have mentioned it.
The music industry may suffer as a result of the mp3 craze. But the average musician is already suffering, and the successful ones are too successful by half.
Nobody wants to touch it with a ten foot pole- the patent licensing is so onerous nobody wants to go that route.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
MP3 has just as much of a chance of survival or death as any other popular streaming format. It's Open Source origin allows it to be incorporated into any application, even the Windowze Media Player and Real technologies.
.WAVs, defrag my drives, and finally to burn to CD, it's simply much more convienent for me to go buy the damn thing. And I feel that it's the right thing to do. The MP3s I've downloaded and burned have all been rare songs, demos, etc. on hard to find or out out of print albums and b-sides. And concerts. Stuff that is either next-to-impossible to find or money that isn't going to the label or artists anyway. THAT'S where the record companies could make money from me by doing nothing more than ripping into MP3 an artists collection of rarities that don't make sense to release otherwise and charging a buck a song.
I'm usually one who doesn't take sides in format battles, but in this one only one outcome is true: MP3 has already won.
One of those reasons, as you mentioned, is it's open source origins allowing it to be used anywhere. Another is that there are applications out there from computer applications like WinAmp or Media Player to integrated systems like the Rio. The applications are well done and easy to use. Every piece on MP3 I've seen in the news shows a college kid with a Mac or Windows; obtaining and listening to MP3s is very nearly for dummies.
The methods are also remarkably stable. While not quite point-click-and-drool, it's not too difficult to rip a CD or burn your own.
I think the biggest problem the recording industry doesn't understand is the relationship between MP3 and CDs. Personally, I rarely use MP3s. I download 'em and burn them to CDs that I can use in my stereo or car portable. That's the reason why I keep a library of MP3s around. It's certainly not because of the inconvience of lugging my laptop around or paying 3-4x money for a Rio player over a portable CD player.
Sure the recording industry can come out with a cool new standard that they can charge for, but who would buy it when it's so easy to rip/burn your own using that old, poopy MP3 standard? Especially since "poverty" is a reason that many give to download MP3 over buying albums in the first place?
Speaking for myself, given the choice of spending the 2-4 hours it takes to download MP3s, encode them to
I don't feel like having to leave my G3, so I download the song. I would pay a couple buks per single if it meant I didn't have to go to a cold, impersonal store that I KNOW won't have what I want.
I think the artists have a instrese in not geting
fucked by the distrubution monopielys. only the
people who control the curent broken distrubution
methouds have no ecnomic intrests in mp3. The
artists and consumers have grate instrest in not
filling the pokets of the big labels.
-Jonathan
IP is government-run extortion system supported by big-businesses like microsoft and disney.
IP is the next war on drugs.
IP is obsolete.
ps. i am not a script kiddie.
pps: see ipnot for justification of the above position.
__
Scott Draves
Apparently they are half the size of MP3's and sound better...
MP3'3 are a 12 to 1 compression sceme. It is very hard for me to believe that a 24 to 1 compression of a CD could sound better. It simply does not make much sense to me. When recording digitally I don't even like using anything less than 32 bit proccesing ( which of course gets reduced to make CD format ).
I see two problems with ASF files:
1) Microsoft owns it. That simply SUCKS if it is true that it is better.
2) Until I hear it with some acoustic music with a 3D stereo field and I actually think it sounds better, I can't believe it.
The only "good" thing is you may be able to stream this format, and in that way it may be better than Real Audio. But Better than MP3? I don't believe it.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
It's only dead when people stop using it. I don't see that happening for a while. (And with the price of disk going through the floor, who cares if there is a more efficient, but closed, format out there.)
:-)
or something.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
The home audio industry has been going to all digital of late. I could snarf the digital fiber optice output right off of my DVD and mp3 it if I really wanted to.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
MP3's may never be a viable commerical endevour...
at least until some company decides to embrace and extend
and replace good ole MP3 with a proprietary format
you need to pay $$$ for. The fact is, though, that
MP3's have been great for small-time bands who can't
or won't sell out to the big music establishment who
fear the implications of the MP3 format. They're
cracking down on artists because they're scared, not because
it's some "doomed to fail format". Just a few of my
thoughts... flame at your discretion.
Adam "Fogie" Fogler -- Professional Paid College Student
Actually this is already available (in beta at least) with On Demand Producer and Media Player 6.0. I've played with it for video files and it is pretty good. It uses Mpeg v4 compression and just calls it a .asf file (whatever). It does support audio only and seems to work pretty well for that, but it seems to me that it's just an implementation of Mpeg v4 which is unsurprisingly better than v3. Of course MS probably corrupted it in some way shape or form.
Can someone translate the phrase "MP3 is not scalable" into English? I have no idea what it means or why I should care.
I have free MP3 encoders and decoders on my hard drive, so the minimum entrance requirement of any new format is that the encoders and decoders must be free. If that requirement is met then the new format may proceed to prove its superiority.
Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code. If it's one of these formats where the player is free but you have to pay for the encoder then I'll stick with my free MP3 encoder. I've got plenty of HD space.
>>Will both the encoder and decoder be freely available? Preferably as source code.
>No. In fact they are both proprietary and you must pay for use of either (ie. no free encoder or decoder).
Oops! Then I guess it's MS Audio 4.0 that's dead as far as I'm concerned.
But WE are the ones having an economic motive for using MP3 - christ, I haven't bought a CD for six months, and yet they keep rolling in. How's that for economic incentive?
Think about big name bands giving free concerts. Do they have more economic incentive for their activity than unknown bands posting their MP3's on the net for free download? We're talking about music here! To have people listen to music that you've made, to have them sing along with words that you put together - this is a drug more potent than any of the ones otherwise flourishing in the music business (people trading such substances, by the way, have economic interests - not that it matters much to the current discussion).
Bottom line: Economic interest doesn't control us anymore. Free music, free software - what's the difference? The invisible hand, figuratively speaking, has stopped masturbating the invisible pecker, and it will inavoidably go limp. This is bad news for the "economic interests" that want to screw us, but it's excellent news for those of us who don't need economic interest to yank us out of bed in the morning...
PS: I've heard Clinton knows how to handle a Cuban - who'll tell him we've got one that needs to be stuffed here?
exactly, this guy is talking about disco, when the subject is the tapes it came on. my car, stereo, walkman (and more if i looked) all have tape players in them, and that format is how old? 20 years? seems like as long as i've been around. as bandwith increases, higher bitrate mp3s will become more common, and this guy will be more wrong. as for pkzip (and gzip, same algorithm), those are alive and well, even with bzip2 around. i bet this guy has a floppy drive in his comp, and there's much better technology out there, but it's amazing how simple things like those can be so useful (like when you build a kernel, and it doesn't boot). anyways, to end my rant, the need for higher compression decreases with the advent of cable, dsl, and other higher speed networking devices.
Mark told the webcasting mailing list that scaling meant:
:) But he does have some serious concerns.
"how economically and gracefully a server delivering a stream scales...its easy to deliver 100 simultaneous streams, it gets a lot harder delivering 100k simultaneous streams and more. So its how the server scales, how the server interacts withother servers and with users and what kind of programming interfaces are available to enable all of this"
I believe that Mark is thinking in his own terms of Broadcast.Com, which needs to be capable of serving a potential 100k streams. MP3 would have to be packaged in something like Shoutcast or Icecast that is dependable and scalable to this level. It isn't...yet.
Whether Mark is also trying to just poo-poo an explosion in webcasting that didn't come from Broadcast.Com is left up to the reader
There is an MP3 plug-in for RealPlayer G2, and RealNetworks is talking about making it more tightly integrated. This may be the scalability answer.
Truth be told, I don't think MP3 is the best solution for large, live events. It is a great solution for music-on-demand.
Mind you, MP3 is now an old codec. New vector-quanitzation technology (such as TwinVQ aka VQF) is going to make MP3 quality music available at lower bitrates. The question is whether VQF will be licensed in a way to make it "the next MP3" or "the next forgotten music codec."
MPEG4 multimedia standard will include several audio codecs, including as low as 2kbps speech, VQF, and high-bitrate high-fidelity music codecs as well.
> Responding to the challenge that MP3 already has a strong culture around it, Cuban quipped, "Disco also used to have a strong culture."
;), and it's stronger than ever.
Disco still has a strong culture, only these days we call it House, (or Electronica, if you can't dance
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
I think it would be safe to assume this is the lower end of the spectrum of human intelligence, whatever that is...
I also have a few tracks that i've paid for via GoodNoise.
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I would have to disagree. Maybe if your trying to stream mp3's at cd quality theyn they are not as efficiant as G2 but if you bring them down a little in quality to say about the same as the music that comes over G2 they are actually just about the same. One big difference is that mp3s have great apps so you get your equalizer and what not where G2 your just kind of stuck which really blows. So I would have to say that there is no way that anyone that actually likes music and need it to sound good would pick the G2 over an mp3.
--MD--
--MD--
Until recently, nobody had an economic interest
in Linux either. I don't think the argument
holds any water.
It gunna be dead. must think ... ow ... okay think done. disco dead. so say disco was not dead, so say mp3 like disco because disco dead after it not dead once. huh huh me think good.
an analogy between a style of music and an encoding format. how idiotic can you get?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
im posting this drunk as the proverbial Lord but w/oo reading any other posts lemme just add this
.zip format while your at it you utterly clueless schmuck!
lil'l nugget o fun.
HAH! MORON! im listeining to the format you sound the deathknell for at this very moment...!!!!
KNow why brite boy?
Coz' I dinna like getting a single CD for theone song I like. Nor do I appreciate $40+ prices for anime songs.
might as well sound the Heavenly Trumpet for the
~Grell
"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony."
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
Ironically, the only Disco that died was the commercialized crap the record companies put out to suit their 3.5 minute radio format.
This stuff lacked much of the deep grooves and syncopated beats. It sucked so much, the word Disco was forever tainted.
There is a huge industry around House (and Jungle/Trip-Hop/Acid Jazz/etc,.) right now. It happens that most of the players in this industry are indie labels, at least the ones that know quality music.
MP3 is pretty entrenched right now because there is an abundant supply of free encoders and decoders, as well as artists that sell or give away music in this format, thus satisfying the free market forces of supply and demand.
Of course, the media companies feel like they have a God given right to be the middleman of every transaction. God forbid people do business among themselves!
Mike
But there are several companies making money from MP3 - diamond multimedia, for example.
The reason MP3 will eventually die is that another, substantially better format will come along - a format that is sufficiently good to make people want to make the effort tp convert/recompress all their mp3s....
for me to head on downtown for SXSW. i'm on a mission to find this idiot, but hey Ian Moore is playing. :)
damon
"The Internet market is veryu fluid"
The only thing fluid is broadcast.com stock; right down the drain.
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user, Jon Katz hater: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Actually, technically, there should be no spaces before or after, but it should be
repeated--like this.
A "-" is a hyphen, not a dash. A double-hyphen is the standard replacement for a dash, when dashes are unavailable due to character set.
As happened here. Just about all of the 100 or so replies on ZDNET trashed the article, Mr. Cuban's rationale, and questioned his motives.
I would have thought this would be one of the collective purposes of the slashdot community -
to promote the values of a piece of technology worthy of promotion, and provide logical and
well-reasoned opposition to the FUD tactics of others who would otherwise benefit from its demise.
If fact, slashdot comments are probably better utilised on sites like ZDNET rather than here - as most of the time on slashdot you're preaching to the altar boys, not the masses.
Perhaps an ongoing ZDNET pressence by slashdotters
will turn ZDNET - ie. if every FUD article they write gets hammered (thoughtfully), they'll get the message. They do have a comercial interest in their articles after all - so public perception is paramount to their continued success.
'sapientia potestas est'
Hey Rob, we need a filter for that. :-)
This sig is false.
Cool and thanks for pointing that out. I've always used double-hyphen myself, but never really had any good reasoning behind it. So a double hyphen is the standard replacement for a dash? Hmm, what does a dash look like then? Don't we have a 7- or 8-bit ASCII representation for that?
Hey Anonymous Coward, First off, most, if not all, of my friends who are still in college paid their own way by working. Not sure about you, but some of us here in the real world do actually get off our asses and work for our education. Second, economics is only the model which people work with in hopes of understanding the complex dynamics that exists in the market due to peoples' interest in a product or desire to sell a product. It in NO way determines whether something will continue to exist or not. For instance, MP3 is a nearly worthless technology to the Labels because most of their existing equipment and business models are not well suited to it. Actually, MP3 is almost like a pestilence to the Labels. For us, the consumers, however, it is a boon. We can listen to high quality music in a stable format which won't degrade in quality and will easily play on our hardware(PC's/Mac's/Sparc/etc). But yes, Economics plays an important role.. but its role is below that of the interest and efforts of the consumers. And right now, the pool of consumers for the MP3 market is strong. One may even say it is Legion upon Legion. Having worked at several jobs, my own realization has been that economics isn't king. When one get's right down to it, PEOPLE are. Desire drives the market. Money is only the medium. But hey, if they come out with a more powerful audio format with better quality, smaller size, and no encryption techniques, self-correction/error checking would be nice though. ;) In case memory get's "scratched".
- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.
- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.
Has anybody seen MS talk about this? Apparently it's their MP3 killer. It supposedly offers twice the compression factor of MP3 and better quality (I'll believe that when I see it). And naturally it will be supported by Media Player first. http://www.theregister.co.uk/990312-000 013.html has some info on it...
He's right ... mp3 will eventually die, but not until both data storage and network bandwidth increase by one more order of magnitude.
.wav's and .aiff's just as easily as you can now with MP3s.
The only real reason that MP3s are used at all is that they allow you to compress a 10 MB/Minute PCM data stream into a 1 MB/Minute file.
Once the internet speeds up by a factor of 10, and writable DVDs hit the market, you'll be able to transfer and store uncompressed, lossless music files as
And then MP3 will die out.
- jms
More than just companies making $$$ off of MP3, *consumers* have an economic interest in keeping MP3 (or something free) around. It's called Supply AND Demand.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
A. noone is going to pay for an MP3.. I'll pay for a disk full of mp'3 or a audio cd that has both audio tracks and mp3's or just rip them into mp3's for my empeg car player and my rio. I will NEVER EVER pay for an MP3, I'll pay for content. the mp3 will take over because we couldnt care less who owns the format, we like it so I'm going to use it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually the average musician suffers because of the record companies and the thieves they hire called managers. MP3 gives thesee garage bands and upstarts the leg they need, they can thumb their noses at Sony,virgin,and all the other record companies. they can tell the agents that want 30-50% of the pay to go stand in front of a train. This is why the record industry hates mp3, it threatens the cash cow of doing nothing and getting paid for it. There is a radio station near where I live that plays mp3's. the DJ and the station owner dont care about "get sony's ok if we can play xyz's song" they ask the artist themselves and 99% of the time the artist is sooo happy they send a cd to them anyways. Buy from the artist and ignore the record companies...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
MP3 won't be "dead" until people no longer see a benefit to using an inexpensive, efficient, portable digital format to store music.
:P
Since the current alternatives are neither as inexpensive, efficient, or portable I don't see how this guy has case.
Probably the only thing that will "kill" MP3 is if someone were to release an even more efficient / better quality encoding algorithm to the public domain.
-OT
Whatever.
-- ultra1
VHS and audio CD? C'mon, take it to it's logical conclusion. TCP/IP, NNTP, MIME, HTTP, HTML... why, they're all dead protocols! Why in the world would *anyone* think they had an economic incentive to keep these non-proprietary protocols around?
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
One must also remember that not only must a new format be better in all of the above ways, but it must be SIGNIFICANTLY better, such that it will justify converting all my old mp3s to this new format. I'm not going to go through that much work for a measly 5% space savings...
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Excuse me in all my ignorance, for I left the micrsoft world behind a long time ago, but as a part time mac user (PowerPC hardware is GREAT for linux, IMHO) I remember reading some annoucement that MPv4 (MP being MPEG) was going to be based off of Quicktime. Or it mentioned the "QuickTime File Format" (which is ambigous as it gets, considering how many formats are considered to be part of 'quicktime')
Correct me if I'm wrong, and email me your opinions, but not your flames.
How much do you think the authors of x11amp or winamp or mpg123 or amp paid in mp3 licensing fees? Or how bout the author of bladeenc? Here's a hit, it starts with Z and ends in ero. And some people buy the cds because the like owning them. And some people actually believe that the money they spend on the cd actually goes to the artist.
-matt
I'm looking at my copy of forest gump right now. I see a "VHS" logo, but I can't find anything resembeling JVC. Unless maybe they have it hidden, but taht would be stupid.
-matt
Actually what I'm wondering, half the size of an mp3 w/ better quality. How much CPU are you going to have to throw at it to make it play w/o skipping? I'm guessing a quad Xeon 450 should do the trick. Now where did I leave my quad-Xeon-450 box?
-matt
Mp3s produce bad sound? That's funny, here I am listening to mp3s and I can't notice any thing wrong w/ the sound at all.
-matt
Well, as far as I can see, the biggest reason consumers use MP3 is economic - THEIR OWN!
It is true, there will be few people making money off of MP3s, at least in the short term. However, there is a HUGE volume of people SAVING money by using MP3s.
Don't get me wrong, I do not in any way support the wholesale piracy of music. But so far, the economic benefits derived from MP3s are on the side of the consumers, and they will be the ones keeping it alive. The format may "die" in a corporate sense, where major producers refuse to produce music in them, but I can't think of any way that music can be encoded sufficiently to prevent people from ripping it via a Line-In port on their sound cards.
Sure, sound quality will be lost, but then that's what MP3 is all about, isn't it. The controlled loss of quality in a tradeoff against file size.
MP3's played via a Rio, or whatever, will become the medium of choice for commuters, joggers, etc. Who gets "CD Quality" from their headphones anyway? (Outside noise always seeps in when I listen on the train or whatever). Cassette producers will have to worry about MP3, though. Why record tapes, when I can store MP3s on a non-consumable, reusable medium...
MP3's are more alive right now than anything in my opinion. Maybe mp3.com is just loosing money and consedering it dead now.
Natas
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
Yes, this is fud. It is ok to post links to FUD. But put up a FUD icon with them... So as not to spread it any further than needed. Label it something like "FUD".
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
>This sounds an awfully lot like the excuse that a lot of software pirates use to justify their illegal activities. "This is far more expensive than I can afford, and so if I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't have bought it anyway .. so nobody is losing anything." It's an interesting claim, but it's hardly valid (try using that after being arrested for grand theft auto.)
While in general I disapprove of software piracy, it should be pointed out that grand theft auto is not a good analogy. When you steal a car, the rightful owner doesn't have it anymore. When you illegally copy software, you haven't taken it away from anybody.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This is typical ZDNet crap. Can we have a ZDnet category made up so that all ZD stories, regardless of what they're about, can go in that category, so they can be summarily ignored? :)
no kidding. im getting rather tired of
business execs who have their heads up their ass
thinking that they can publicize an opinion
despite not knowing shit. cummon.
mp3 is here to stay. Linux is here to stay.
not cause of the profit to be made but the
superior technology and public backing.
-Z
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
Why would someone buy the CD if they can get the MP3 for free?
Isn't using MP3 selling out anyway? Or do you honestly think that the ISO/IEC working committee isn't composed of, and funded by, "industry"? Do you think the patents surrounding MP3 aren't owned by "industry"?
Maybe the RIAA doesn't want to get involved with MP3 because there is a monopoly in the MP3 licensing business? People complain that they don't like Microsoft because of the lack of choice. What choice is there when it comes to licensing MP3 patents?
Besides, I thought AAC was going to fix all of these problems. If it does then isn't MP3, in fact, quite dead?
Firstly: What new age movies have you been watching, the current trend in bandwidth is to cap general users and leave only the technical elite and rich to the good stuff. (this is a bitter point of view, yes I know)
Secondly: Do you usually write comments with a thesaurus handy?.. Since when is it proper english to tack "less" and "y" to loss?..
who needs an economic interest when the interest
is supposed to be on the MUSIC???
what an idiot....just another business geek
flapping his mouth!
"All that glitters is not gold"
no joke.... as long as i still have a copy :)
;)
of L3ENC sitting on my hard drive (and "the man"
cant find a way to make that copy blow up) they can all kiss my ass because i will continue to produce mp3's
knowing that someone as stupid as Mr. Cuba can be the president of a company gives me hope of ruling the world someday
"All that glitters is not gold"
Joe Blow reads ZDNet. If Joe Blow sees FUD without a response, Joe believes the FUD. If we post to ZDNet to dispel FUD, Joe is less likely to believe it.
Sometimes we need the mirror of the mainstream to reflect our community/attitude/personal ethics system so we can see what others see, and work some PR magic to make the mainstream come over to Our Side.
~BTW, the grammar in the title was intentional, folks. Nothing to see here, move along~
Of a random sampling of 10 of my VHS tapes, only two had any company logo, and they said SONY not JVC... now mind you those were SONY brand blank tapes.
Quite humerous. How does one absorb an open technology? (Besides MS's usual embrace, extend, corrupt.) I have a feeling mp3 technology will outlive MS/Real.
If you read the article all he says it how it'll be dead in a few years... OF COURSE it will. We'll all move to a better standard, like vqf, aac (both available now btw), mpeg 4, etc...
.wav back in the day...
It's just a file format, as long as people are intrested in archiving music and trading it online it'll happen, mp3 or otherwise. Hell, there were even people with phat pipes who copied songs on
No. In fact they are both proprietary and you must pay for use of either (ie. no free encoder or decoder).
---
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will deserve neither and lose both."
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
mp3 has become a movement that is converting audio cds into a better format; this is being done by people voluntarily. How is a firm going to compete with that? Not unless they offer a more compact format and offer content for free. But so what? It's still the same concept as mp3s. Of course eventually mp3s will be replaced by another format-- a better one. This is no profound statement. Mediums are constantly changing. Of course, if the new medium is open source then you can bet it will evolve faster then a proprietary one.
ah, shut up, you troll.
Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. -Horace, Satirae
does anyone with a collection of MP3s actually pay for them? I know i dont... so where is the MP3 economy? the players? the only one i'd get is the Empeg car player... (runs linux no less...) I dont see an economy... do you??
No-one has had an large economic interest in it for 2 years now. That really hasn't stopped it, has it? He fails to understand that the whole reason MP3 took off in the first place was the fact that just about anyone could create them. Something may replace MP3, don't get me wrong. But it's not just going to disappear. Free music is just here to stay. Sorry to all who think otherwise, you've been left behind.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
My company is currently developing a new MP3 site. We have advertisers lined up. We also have the ear of several traditional record labels. They're starting to understand that they can't stop MP3 and if they try they might just be out of a job. We'll be selling MP3s of copyrighted songs. The labels will still get their money, but the user will still get a quality MP3... a fraction of the time and money spent on getting a CD.
:)
When we finish, I'll try and post an article on it, I think the Slashdot crowd will like it.
-Richard
-- Richard Finn http://www.random-seed.com/
Companies looking to make money by providing access to media don't like mp3 for a simple reason. Once you have the file, you have control of the music. You can listen to it all you want, and take it with you on a Rio. Worst of all, you can make a perfect copy and give it to your buddies. This really makes it unlikely that they will sell many mp3's on their site.
From reading the article, I get the feeling that Cuban is lusting for a pay-per-view dynamic. He wants to make money each time you listen to the song. Sort of like a worldwide jukebox. The best way to do this is by delivering the content as a compressed encrypted stream. Fortunately its a really knotty problem figuring out how to deliver the music and not allow it to be stored or shared. My guess is that they are spending a lot more money to develop the 'copy protection' scheme than they are putting into bettering compression. They want control over the format, content, and distribution. As digital internet connections become more common and migrate towards the TV, this kind of technology will become an economic powerhouse. However mp3 is not the format that can be used to exploit it. In fact, it becomes a liability for the new distribution scheme. They want it killed or at least marginalized as soon as possible. ZD seems awfully happy to help. In fact, Im beginning to think that their magazines should have "Special Advertising Section" printed on all of their editorials.
Hmm, what does a dash look like then? Don't we have a 7- or 8-bit ASCII representation for that?
Nope. The closest is micros~1's attempt at embracing and extending. Which means that you end up getting ? interspersed throughout your text (or something similar.)
I believe the "real" name is an em-dash (single hyphen in the word intentional.) It basically looks like a long hyphen. Which is why the double hyphen (--) is used to emulate it. Can't be represented by ASCII, though. Just like a number of other typographical symbols (such as "real" quotes--the proper way to do them is ``text'', rather than "text," but that way looks crappy on most displays, so I don't do it.)
ASCII sucks for proper typesetting.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
...or so it seems, anyway. I've had a number of people trying to convert me... going back a while...
But MP3 is still ubiquitous... vqf is no more than a fringe technology.
And to be quite honest, that's fine with me. The quality of my MP3's is quite fine, thanks. I have almost 3 gigs that I encoded off my albums, and I can play the 2 back and hear no discernable difference.
And yes, my sound system is quite high quality. Still no problems.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Economic intrest doesnt drive everything. I work for a living and know that in most things it does. As for mp3's it may die in the commercial world but there are way to many people who couldnt care less if it made any money they are just in it for the music. Look at all the websites offering mp3's. 90% of them dont ask for money or care to make any off of the mp3's they offer. Almost all of them just want more music in return. You must be a complete idiot if you belive that the only thing driving the world today is economic intrest.
Isn't the anti-MP3 argument that "MP3 is not scalable". Real's G2 and MSFT's ASF supposedly support "more scalable" streaming content.
Of course, do customer care? No.
cpeterso
I asked the same thing earlier, I don't undertsand how Frauenhoffer can have a patent on this.
They are a German tax-financed research institute. Software patents are not granted in the EU and hopefully never will be. Did they patent it in the US?
I can see that the original code is not GNU protected. In my experience in Europe we are less aware of how necessary that is, because companies in general do not tend to act so agressive i.e. they aren't that sue-happy as in the US. It is kind of ironic: in a more "socialistic" Europe the awarness to defend our open-source freedom is less keen than in an agressivly capitalistic USA.
Economic Interest:
The millions of consumers that think that CD's are
overpriced.
Sig Under Construction. Please Come Back Later.
What a twit...mp3 is popular because it's an easy way of distributing free high quality copies. Who the hell wants to get rid of it (except record companies of course, assuming they *could*) and all it's infrastructure (eg programs) for a format that means that you have to pay doubtless extortionate rates for music again? I still remember the UK Mondex electronic money trial in Swindon which went swimmingly until they declared that we needed to be charged £1-50 a month for the privilege; the blizzard of returned cards forced two postponements! Mp3 will only be replaced once someone invents a similar free format but with better compression :-) As for broadcast.com? Their only hope is to become a portal like mp3.com, and boyo, you don't get people to go to portals if you charge them!
// Hmm, another variant of IE/W9x/NT to add to the "integrated MS value proposition"
I don't know what you mean by that. I can tell you though that you don't have to quit your job to do any other activities outside of that job...
/. T-Shirts now. I plan on buying them all. AND... I don't have to pay for this wonderful service he offers. KeWl huh? =P
Furthermore, as a musician myself, I really dislike the idea of others making money off of my own creation and dictating to me where, how and to whom I can distribute my creation. With that said, I can offer my creation for free. In this case in the format of an mp3.
Now I don't know about you, but most people now a days still own cd players and not portable mp3 -players. So offering a full album on cd to me seems quite alright. Not to mention that any money as profit made from that cd will actually go to me. In the hopes that it may help subsidize more work created by me. This is a good thing.
I could also use the mp3's to create a market for other things. Like T-Shirt's, ball caps and even posters or bumper stickers.
A band or artist could use the same model for making money as say RedHat or LinuxPPC or Debian use to distribute thier flavour of Linux.
It isn't a big mystery. At least it isn't anymore IMHO.
Heck! Rob sells
- Jase
Who the hell is going to give up on a format that compresses digital audio to 1/10 the size with no loss in quality? If MS or RealNetworks can come up with a compression routine that does the same thing, I'll think about switching...and then I'll still stick with MP3.
nihil
Why else would you call it property?
So what if there's no market for MP3s? There's was never any market for .wav files either, but lots of different samples have been stolen from TV, radio and music all the time, and they still seem pretty popular.
So what if there's no market for MP3s? There's was never any market for .wav files either, but lots of different samples have been stolen from TV, radio and music all the time, and they still seem pretty popular.
Another example of the business model popularized by Microsoft. I'm surprised he didn't complain that the MP3 community lacks a corporation to sue when you don't like a song that you downloaded. We'll just have to see which audio format is around in a year or two, eh?
this feature would make it worth having a userid in and of itself
I've heard RMS's take on MP3s, and the fear he expressed was that it would be outlawed by the government it ways that strong encryption exporting has been outlawed. (It's not that no one exports strong encryption, it just means that the makers of software with strong encryption in it have to obey the stupid export laws.)
This is, of course, a far cry from the nonsense that ZDNet was spewing ("Microsoft will take over MP3's!"). But with regards to your post, the use of MP3s, or any software the government dislikes, is not a certain freedom.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
MP3 won't die just because some other audio format comes out. It will only die if another audio format comes out that is free, significantly smaller, and the same or better level of quality.
Don't forget the marketing angle. Look at how long MS has hung on with a crappy GUI. It doesn't actually have to be better if you can make people think that it's better.
Void the Warranty
Thats pretty much how I feel, I was downloading hundreds of megs a day 2 years ago, but now I use .mp3's to backup my cd collection. yeah, but now every maw and paw out in the sticks are searching for mp3's since the media blew it up up out of proportion. Mp3's aren't going anywhere soon, just like .jpg's. Mp3's are good in some ways, like finding hard to find rare or out-of-print albums or indroducing you to new music. The truth is I would't have half the albums I bought with out hearing the mp3's first. I like to own the quality if I can find the real album...
GIF and JPEG will die, there is no money in it!
There's plenty of money in GIF. I forget which corporation it is that owns the patent, but if you want to produce a commercial app that uses GIF, you have to pay someone lots of money. That's one of the reasons that PNG was created.
In all the press hubub about open source and such, no one seems to get it. So I'm not surprised that they don't get the point of open standards.
The almighty buck has been God with such power and for so long that most people involved with it in a big way miss the point of almost anything. Examples about, like slashdot comments to the effect that linux and freeBSD will "disapear" without "mindshare"..
But money has nothing to do with it. In fact, in most open source projects and open formats, there really isn't an analogue to money - something that has nothing to do with the project yet that somehow drives it's life.
Money people just are not going to understand this. Because it's a huge buzzword game for them right now (in the media), business will talk big and pretend to get it, and might even succeed in making a buck. But they will not understand until money is no longer key.
>>Besides, there's better ways to analyze music
>>than DFT's, wavelets being one method...
From that comment, I'd assume that you know a fair bit about audio compression. If that's true, why don't you start a GPL'd (or invent a GPL-style license for open standards/formats) compressed music format? The only thing it would need to catch on for opensource people would be a player, compressor, and utility to automatically convert mp3s(and other formats) into the new format. And if it is a technically superior format (read: compresses more on average), then it would be poised to replace mp3 entirely.
The thing to remember is that open standards can't force you to pay royalties for using them.. remember Unisys's GIF fiasco?
(yes, i know PNG is still not a major standard.. but it is better!)
Despite this being obviously a troll, I'd like to add something:
You are thinking of (or at least are expression a cultural mode driven by) the supply and demand system. as in, without demand there is no point in supply, and without supply there is no demand.
What you must remember is that most of what we know of the supply & demand feedback systems is in the domain of economics. As in, demand==people paying for product, and supply==controlled distribution and pricing.
None of these apply without an entity or set of entities doing the supplying for money. MP3 players may be being marketed by companies, but there are many free implementations available anywhere. That codebase will never disapear, meaning the support from a mother company that a product traditionally requires is no longer needed -- it is an entity of it's own now.
For those who (apparently) don't know, MP3s are not doled out by distribution companies: they are ripped and compressed by people sitting at their computers at home, who have no economic interesest in them.
>> If people are willing to PAY for mp3s, it will
>> stay alive.
MP3s are thriving, and have been for a couple of years. And in that time, no one was willing to pay for them.
an idea: if mp3s suddenly and magically were pay-only, they would likely disapear!
Most browsers can definitely render endashes (not that common) and emdashes (most common). Any style manual should tell you that no space is allowed between these-the dashes, that is-and the words or clauses they set off. The HTML code is ampersand, pound sign, 150, semicolon (endash) and 151 for the em variety. Though I've always felt most browsers rendered that emdash a little long--it's more like an ememdash.
+++
Chromalon
elisha@nojunkmail.bway.net
+++ Chromalon.
Cuban is clearly off base with his statements.
MP3 has just as much of a chance of survival or death as any other popular streaming format. It's Open Source origin allows it to be incorporated into any application, even the Windowze Media Player and Real technologies.
Aditionally, Bandwidth will not be "free", unless an advertising model can be found that offers scale, i.e. many listeners. I predict that the current ditribution methodologies will change, allowing economical use of bandwidth and facilities, but make no mistake, the end user will pay one way or another.
Remember: BroadBand may entail use of Internetworking tools and technologies, but doesn't mean it will have to be an open network, we are more likely to see closed systems on a subscription basis, that offer BroadBand experiences.
AC
http://www.curry.com/
It's just BlaBlaBla from record compagnies who STILL think they can get rid of Mp3. They don't get it.... Even if by some way they can get rid of it ( maybe in 4-5 years ).. there is going to be a new format ( like Mp4 or any other ) and people will STILL distribute High Quality Music.
Mp3 is here to stay as long as people will let it stay....
It's just BlaBlaBla from record compagnies who STILL think they can get rid of Mp3. They don't get it.... Even if by some way they can get rid of it ( maybe in 4-5 years ).. there is going to be a new format ( like Mp4 or any other ) and people will STILL distribute High Quality Music.
Mp3 is here to stay as long as people will let it live...
the three types of dashes are the hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash.
the hyphen is the shortest. it is used for word hyphenation, and is represented in TeX as '-'.
the en-dash is so-called because it is defined as having the width of a capital N. it is used to show ranges of numbers (like 1996--1998 or pp. 72--81). it is represented in TeX as '--'.
the em-dash is so-called because it is defined as having the width of (you guessed it) a capital M. it is used as punctuation--- perhaps this will give you an idea of how it's used. it is represented in TeX as '---'.
ASCII sucks for typesetting. this is why programs like TeX and SGML exist. we who dwell in the world of email still live in a barren, desolate place.
-krog
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Well, I just noticed the other day that, in true Microsoft fashion, MS seems to have developed a competing standard for audio compression. I wonder if this fellow trumpeting on ZDnet is just trying to get some good 'ole MS marketing started. Screw them, we already have a good thing. And it's ours, not theirs.
While you are probably right that most people think of money whenever things economic or trade related are mentioned, you are not entirely right that music can be lumped in with Ferraris or any other good. Perhaps that's the way you think about it when you buy a CD or download an MP3 (you're obtaining a good), but some people like to think about music as art, which from the artist's perspective lies 100% outside the economic realm. I think the great thing about MP3s and any other format that allows artist to get their work out without big companies is the freedom it gives musicians to create what they want. I don't particularly care that you or I can download a song for free that the artist should be getting something for.
Ben
A better comparison would be MP3 and vinyl. MP3 has nothing to do with style or content. I don't think this guy's comments could be any further off track. File formats are more affected by technological trends than business or artistic trends. Look at the GIF format...Compuserve tried to control it for a while. It stuck around until something technologically "better" for the application came around...the jpeg format.
Furthermore, MP3 is not a copywritten format (right?)...unlike Adobe PDF's. There are many different encoders that can generate the same type of files.
MP3 have a really strong foothold in the community, and any attempt to shake it results in strong user opposition. I don't think MP3's will lose ground until something substantially better comes along.
i don't know about MS, but Real has claimed that their 96k codec sounds as good as mp3 at 128k. i personally haven't done any side-by-side comparisons, but you can get encoders for each for free if you feel like doing the test yourself.
Sickboy
This guy is talking like MP3 is a genre of music. MP3 certainly isn't specific to, say, 80's rock or Electronica. MP3 is a music compression format. How can a compression format be dead? If there is something better than MP3 available, i'd certainly use that than MP3. Why do you think people used MP3 in the first place? Excellent sound quality at a very high compression ratio... What is it, like 15:1? MP3 would be dead if something better came along, but so would any other compression format... it's like saying PKZip is dead. Since there is nothing better, it certainly isn't. This guy is a moron; he's speaking of MP3 as if it were a physical thing. It's a method of storage, for God's sake! I think i've made my point.
MP3 won't be dead I think. ... most of them are illegal, sure. But WHO cares?
Look, there are still MCs on the 'Market'.
Why are they - because not everybody has
got an CD-Recorder and someone maybe never will!
And there are although to many mp3s-archives arround
the web