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"MP3 death watch" article on CNN.com
haaz writes "CNN.com has a
heavily anti-MP3 editorial called
MP3 Death Watch.
Death watch, huh? What is it with the media? Do they
need something to be on a death watch now that
Apple's back on its feet? "
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I've had that problem before, it's NOT because of MP3 you idiot. your software is at fault. change a player or encoder will make that problem disappear.
each player and encoder has its own weaknesses.
Sound just as good, and no not on pc speakers.
You write: "The idea, however, that intellectual property is a nonworkable concept, rubs my Capitalist fur the wrong way. If you want to give away your talents to anyone with a tape recorder, and starve to death, to be buried in an unmarked grave next to Joan Baez, well, go ahead."
As an anarcho-capitalist (and personal friend of atomly), I'm going to have to disagree with you here. I am exceedingly pro-capitalist, and I am completely opposed to the completely flawed notion of intellectual "property". Any property that must be propped up by the State is not property in my book. Copyright law is they only thing that holds up the notion of intellectual property.
Besides, hasn't the entire experience of Free Software and Linux shown us that we *can* make a business model without relying on the tired notion of "owning" ideas? (Tell me, how can you own something that can be copied infinitely with ~zero cost? The entire idea is insane.)
I do agree that some format will eventually replace MP3, just as some OS will eventually replace Linux. But before it does (and before *I* will used it) it will have to be completely free, just like MP3 is. A closed format will not be widely accepted, I'm afraid.
Somebody hasn't heard about the extensive psychoacoustic research which has been conducted by (among other companies), Sony and Philips. Sony and Philips both designed lossy sound compression CODECs which eliminate inaudible sound.
The Philips CODEC (used in the defunct DCC players/recorders) was indistinguishable from CD quality sound in blind A/B tests. No less an authority than Julian Hirsch proclaimed the quality of DCC to be indistinguishable from CD.
The DCC CODEC was less lossy than Sony's (which is used in the MiniDisc). The MiniDisc CODEC is noticeably inferior to CD sound, but for its intended uses in less-than-optimal listening environments (in the car, on the go, etc.), most people will probably be satisfied with the quality.
Both Sony's and Philips' CODECs take advantage of an effect known as masking. This means that there exist relationships between some frequencies which cause high volume sound on one frequency to mask lower volume sound on the other frequency. This is especially true if one frequency is a harmonic of the other.
The research which led to the development of these CODECs found that you could eliminate as much as 60% of the information from most music without audible degradation.
David Ranada has written some excellent technical articles on this subject in Stereo Review and other magazines. I suggest you read up on these before claiming you can hear things you can't.
a minidisc player is not required to be anti-shock? As far as I know a minidisc was designed to avoid the very thing..
...so what kind of battery estimate do Rio's need?
i agree with mike.
if you got the dough to shell out for your studio monitor, why don't you PAY for a CD? No one ever said MP3 is high-end. For me, it's good nuff to walk around and listen to some musik.
Sucks to be an audiophile,
Read the article carefully. All it says is that MP3 probably won't be the way music is distributed over the Internet. It does NOT say that music won't be distributed. It suggests that the RIAA is, one way or the other, going to lose bigtime.
So what's wrong with that? Who cares what the final standard is?
Look at the history of the record industry. Recently, against a lot of complaints, the CD has taken over from the LP. SO? Is that bad? We can still get music, and in a more - uh - wear resistant as well as rumble/wow resistant, crosstalk impervious, wide dynamic range form that the LP can't match (no matter what the True Believers say).
We'll still be able to get music over the internet, better and bandwidth cheaper.
There's no need for all this hollering.
Crazy Jack
/* The problem with digital losses, is, as Neal
Stephenson discusses in his "Command Line" essay, that digital error-checking techniques work perfectly until some point, and then don't work at all. */
Any error induced in a manufactured CD is induced during the pressing process. Manufacturing specifications allow for far less error than would ever be noticed. If a significant error gets through, you'll know on the first play. The only additional error that can be introduced comes from consumer abuse. There is no steady decay. So if it works for the first you play it, it will continue to work.
/* Also, the lifetime of CD's is violently less than that of vinyl and less even than tapes. (I'm not claiming that CD's and digital media don't have great advantages, however.) */
This is a ludicrous claim. A manufactured CD is made of 1)polycarbonate, 2)aluminum, 3)lacquer. These are all stable materials. The laser does not contact the playing surface and does not degrade it. Furthermore, the actual pits are not exposed to external contact as they are located under the aluminum coating.
Vinyl records and tapes, on the other hand, suffer degradation with each and every use. The grooves on vinyl wear out with even the most delicate tone arms. Dynamic range and noise suffer. Every playing of a tape slightly randomizes the magnetic field and scrapes off oxide particles. The magnetic patterns on tape tend to change simply by sitting on a shelf! (This is why we have print-through).
MP3 most certainly does not cut off audio above 16 kHz. The highest subband reaches all the way to Nyquist (22.050 kHz). You're confusing a property of some crappy encoders with a property of the file format as a whole.
Try your experiment with the Fraunhofer encoder instead of the Xing crap, and you'll see a very different result.
The author of this article probably didn't listen to his Rio on anything other than the ridiculous earbud headphones it ships with. With a nice set of headphones, it's hard to tell the difference between most 128 kbps tracks on the Rio and the CD tracks they originally came from playing on a discman. On the little Diamond heaphones the Rio ships with, many sounds are inaudible or badly distorted.
Don't know about the battery case.
/. are technically able. Bust open that rio and replace those so-so D/A converters and opamps and specify your own parts. The USR/3Com pilot users have been doing that for a long time (OS hack, do it yourself mem upgrades, repairs, accelerometers).
I love my rio, had it for about 4 months. I can feed it crap batteries and it still runs well (ever hear of the "Wegmans brand"? Probably not, but they're dirt cheap but suck at battery life.)
Sure the Rio has it's drawbacks, but what product doesn't? For it's size, portability, and sound quality, it is pretty decent. Plus I don't have to lug around my cd collection. (You should see the poor shmucks who do.)
Besides, I'm sure that most people reading
--Fuzzylogic
This makes pre-existing recordings (often copyrighted) the only source material to readily convert to MP3. If the Rio could record too, then truly, how would it be different from any of the other digital microrecorders already on the market ?
Yup. ;)
Not all encoders are created equal. I noticed high end distortions in Xing , but they went away w/ Blade
And I use 256 bitrate and burn them in CD-R when space becomes an issue. Poor Rio users
Cheers,
Sancho
MP3 quality is as clost to CD-quality as MPEG is to broadcast video.
With the right software tools and a good eye, MPEG videos can look ALMOST as good as the real thing. The same is true for MP3.
Personally, I have yet to see a MP3 encoder that can compress the first track of 'Mad Season' right. That low volume bass rift gets mauled each and every time.
...Every boy from south of the Mason-Dixon line swears that grits are good eatin'. However, no Northerner can seem to figure out why. They suck. The answer every southern boy gives him is, "you just haven't had them the way my mom makes them."
.mp3 fans) try to make it out to be. Fact is, it's going to suck if it isn't done exactly right, and it's next to impossible to do it exactly right, so why not just dedicate the efforts to more worthwhile tasks (like developing affordable broadband internet connections so we can pirate raw cdda data instead, or eating oatmeal)?
The point is, if it's that hard to do it right, it isn't as inherently good as all those southern boys (or
The Rio's storage doesn't matter. It's just one manufacturer's first-generation product. My VIC-20 didn't have much storage either, but the personal computer market somehow managed to survive.
Bandwidth? Hey, I'm all for having more bandwidth, but that doesn't have much to do with MP3's chances of success. For the typical user who is just copying the songs from their HD to a flash card, it's fast enough. The initial ripping/encoding takes a while, but that's one shot -- I rather suspect that most people keep their MP3s on a HD rather than encoding/ripping every time they want to load the player.
Or if you're referring to the time that it takes to download a songfrom the internet, again I'm all for increasing it, but it's still better than music CDs. I buy most of my CDs through the mail (retail stores tend to not stock the good stuff) and it takes about a week from my decision to purchase to the time I have the CD in the player. 600MB/Week for CDDA data isn't as fast as my modem can grab MP3s.
how many people do you know that use quicktime?
I sold DirecTV systems for a while in an electronics megamart. I DO remember the nice tech brochure, and I also remember that they had to make apologies for the mpeg compression artifacts that are inherent in the system. That's just the nature of the beast; sending digital data thousands of miles into space has some tradeoffs and the seller and buyer were both aware of that limitation.
It does look good. It improves on NTSC video vastly. But then, anything does. NTSC is possibly the worst quality transmission format in the world. True videophiles, hold on to your checkbooks; the consumer market is not ready for your high standard yet.
This author does have some valid points. But instead of advocating more bandwidth, he wants to kill the current king of computer audio.
1. MP3's near CD quality
2. Much smaller than WAV format.
3. Gaining support everyday.
Hey if everyone had ADSL or some kind of highspeed access who would care about a 4 MB download.
Beside who's say these companies can't build a home and portable mp3 player with some kinda of removable media. Then sale commerical mp3 disc or whatever the media is.
I mean its just as easy to burn a CD now and much easier to play it back all over the place. (ie car, portable, home) You dont hear them throwing fits over CD burners. They just dont want to adopt a new format. But a Linux's growing use shows, the people will overcome.
MP3 Death Watch, not likely...
This article is guilty of the same sort of 'inside the box' thinking that the record companies are- who cares if MP3's get overrun by some new compression media? In the case of a physical media you have a million portions of your physical production and distribution process that are totally hosed by a media switched- not to mention the players. But for MP3's, a company like Goodnoise (mp3 seller) can just switch to the new format with a software upgrade and still allow people to download mp3's as well- cost to them- jack.
Laserdiscs are analog for their video data and digital for audio. The old CED laserdiscs, now long dead, made by RCA actually had a dual pronged stylus that contacted the disc. The capacitance of the stylus would be varied by the thickness of the ridge passing between the styli. Be glad these things are gone, although this means there are very few Dragon's Lair games still in working order. And audio in 16mm fils is an analog pattern of varying light and dark along the edge of the film to hold the sound.
All of this is old tech. But the biggest myth of all is that Digital loses information while analog stores infinite precision. Bah. Hum. Bug. Information is lost in analog too. It's called noise. Use your perfect ultimate analog get and record a pin dropping 50 miles away. Theroetically the sound waves reach the mic and get recorded, but since the sound is below the noise produced by all of the circuits in your recorded (this can never be totally eliminated), your weaker audio information is lost. This is no worse than what digital sampling loses. Digital is better, though because you and I never listen to artists' master tapes. The master tape is then copied to analog records (more noise and lost audio in this conversion process), while the digital transfer to CD loses no more audio information. Thus, digital is better thereafter and equivalent in quality to analog for the initial recording.
I was in Japan two weeks ago, and from what i saw
in the Electronic/Department stores MD seems at least as popular as CDs. Anyone in japna care to comment.
And how about europe?
Until I can download (legally) more than someone's weekend garage project and/or aging rappers, MP3 is a non-event.
It may take off, but the next rev will have to offer substantially higher quality to attract people outsodfe the nerd crowd.
I just bought a Rio. before this point, I couldn't decide whether to get a Rio or a minidisc player.
:) but that doesn't make me shell out this much money.
I decided to buy a Rio instead of a minidisc player base on price, anti-shock, and speed of transfer, music availability and quality (if you record minidisc out of an MP3 you downloaded, you gota get thru the analog unless you got a.. AWE 64 Gold? does that have a digital out that is optical? ).
Sure i'd like to get a minidisc to record the concert i'm going to
But Rio is really a bad quality product. I wonder why no one mention that Rio's battery case is sooo bad, that it ONLY takes Duracell, not Engergizer, not Rayvac. so i have to put a conductor in it to make it fit, and a huge duct tape over....
I'm not too sure why you guys are so passimistic.
Sure mp3 can be used to store music, sure RIAA is quite worryed about it. It requires understanding of computers...
But that is not the point.
Mp3 is a suporier sound format. 5-20 times smaller for *sound*. Rather its tada or a concert...
MP3 is the standard sound format. WAV used to be it. Because it used to be the standard, not because its good or bad. Its because its universally accepted.
MP3 is a sound format. Anything that is a sound can be recorded in it. Many games already used it. Many sites are switching over.
Why? Because "MP3 is the standard sound format"
-coli
The author makes a good point about "near-CD" quality. MP3 sounds decent coming out of a soundcard into the mid-range speakers most people have attached to their PCs, but it's a different story if you pump it into a good stereo system. MP3's sound substantially worse than CD's and marginally worse than slightly worn-out tapes. I look forward to being able to assemble an MP3 player for the acoustically sub-optimal environment of my car, but that's about it. The RIAA need not worry about losing my music dollars because of pirated MP3's; I'll confess to downloading them, but if I really like what I'm hearing, I'll go out and buy the CD.
What I wish is that the RIAA would get the point that MP3 is not an adequate substitute for CD-quality sound, and that they'd start making MP3's freely available as an enticement to buy the real CD. Being able to listen before I buy, especially to artists I'm not familiar with, is a real incentive to buy.
this is my link
hmm, I was under the impression that "cd quality" was 128k .. so what exactly is "cd quality"?
>You don't see many machines that are capable of real time MPEG video encoding,
>but that format is not dismissed as "only used for pirating films".
Sure you do. VCD (MPEG1) gets ragged on all the time for just this reason. It's just a format, neither good nor evil but it has a reputation as a pirate medium throughout HK and SE Asia. The only difference with DVD is that the average Joe cannot yet burn his own DVDs for cheap the way you can burn CDRs. When this happens...
... and so will Pentium III technology when Pentium IV comes out.
... and so will Microsoft when a fat asteriod hits Redmond.
Welcome to "Poop that Everybody Already Smells for Nerds".
I live in Norway. MD titles are for sale at some of the bigger department stores at the price about an expensive CD. Many of the MD titles come out on the same labels..what other companies than Sony publish on MD?
If I got me a MD walkman that records/plays with some kind of input/output, how would I go best about transfering LP vinyl recording from analog to digital without 'loss'?
Assuming that the Rio slips past the lawyers and Diamond prevails in the suit, the player will have to be upgraded. If the suit succeeds, the market for MP3 devices in general will evaporate.
That part looks backwards to me. The market demand for MP3 players is already raging. If suppliers start disappearing due to lawsuits, the demand will just get hungrier. No?
He's right about the bandwith and quality limits, but the author is clueless to its history and even more clueless when he thinks mp3 will make or break based on a 1st generation portable appliance.
The format's been around and flourishing for over 2 years, it's pretty easy to find a player and slightly less so for a quality ripper and encoder, and it's nonproprietary. But the ugly truth is that mp3 derives much of it's popularity from leech pirates who know the key to all this great stuff is usually user:mp3 pass:mp3. It's kind of funny reading mainstream media technology pundit types (CNN, Newsweek, NYT, etc) complain about the dirth of quality music to play on their Rios. The real ugly truth for the entrepeneurs trying to make a buck off the phenomenom is that the hardcore mp3 fans aren't exactly the types who'll spend a dime. Better formats may come soon, but it'll lack the momentum and installed base of mp3.
...and why has DAT been doomed to a mass-market failure? The RIAA basically made it not economically feasible to implement on a mass-market level on a couple of levels...
The description of your sound system you listed says next to nothing about its sound quality. Except maybe that it's better than a walkman, but that's it. But I agree that minidisc quality is good enough for most people. Rio and the likes will win though cause people get mp3's for free.. not to mention that minidisc recording gear doubles the cost..
>that digital error-checking techniques work perfectly
>until some point, and then don't work at all.
Interesting. I wonder if a display showing the number of times error correction was employed on CD players would be popular among consumers?
>Also, the lifetime of CD's is violently less than that of
>vinyl and less even than tapes.
I'm not sure I agree here. Most CDRs are rated for 100 years of data retention, and pressed aluminum CDs are considered more reliable than CDRs. In fact I've never had a CD fail short of standing on it and twirling around and letting the cement grind up the face, which would probably kill vinyl too. The only instances of this kind of media dying I've heard of is the so-called "laser rot" where the plastic coating comes unglued and air gets into and corrodes the aluminum layer. This, however, is an historical problem, long since fixed.
u cant make legal, open source mp3 encoders without paying like 25k+ !!!!!!!
this prevents fun stuff like dynamic resampling, ect. you haveta rely on the ms codec, which kinda sux for linux users.
all the other problems are solvable with time.
Unsuitable for anything but tinny computer speakers??!! hah! Well, I guess you should be gracing the mpeg community with your awesome set of ears when they determine quality of their codecs. I'm a professional musician, and I'm sorry, but I think your claim is full of it. The difference is very subtle. You must be one of those guys that swears that vinyl is better than CD too. You must have something beyond perfect pitch to notice the missing harmonics in your classical and jazz music. I wonder what kind of amazing mics they used on the CD's you listen to. By the way, let's be fair in making comparisons. Anyone who bashes mp3 for quality/file size has obviously never researched any of the alternative codecs...
If only someone would invent an optical analogue sound recorder/player... nice project for an EE?
Ooh, I dunno. Fifteen years ago that might have been a good idea. But nowdays, digital is the way to go, simply because whatever it is, someone's going to want to store it on a computer or transmit it over a network.
There's good reason for wanting analogue, but if you crank up the resolution of digital stuff enough, you'll eventually hit human perception limits.
I happen to enjoy Excel. And what's the deal with the file extension stuff? Seems to be a bad analogy. Correct, I don't drool over Excel files because of their .xls extension. However, the the documents I produce with Excel are not applications. Neither are mp3s. So, why say they will fail because of their extensions? Maybe I'm just missing the point here....otherwise, it seems like a rather silly argument.
I live in Brooklyn. No cable, no ADSL. I don't have a dog but if
I did, it'd have to move to manhatten to get either.
Now let's talk about 256kbps. I think it's worth the stretch.
In fact, I think everybody should move to 256 mp3s.
Think about it.. storage is cheap.. In one night you
can grab about 100mb even on a 28.8. Now imagine that
in 2 or so years you get a good set of speakers and an amp
and a sound card and (surprise) find out that all your 128's
sound like crap, which they are. Even if that's not going to happen, it's not that much trouble to use 256k's. Most of those who use 128's are gonna be very sorry imho. As for issue of copyright, I look at it this way: mp3s won't be stopped, so I buy cds as a way of casting a vote. Who knows, maybe this way we'll weed out all the crappy bands? Can you see people buying spice world if they can get it for free? I will go and buy The Wall on the other hand. Gotta accept however that this is not realistic. silmarillmindspring.com (insert @ in the addy)
Mp3's at 256bps can fool most trained ears... At 128bps it is "near CD quality", period. One way that I kknow of how mp3's reduce songs in size is to filter out sounds we can't hear anyways.
Also wanted to mention something about the article, (mp3's are sized in megabytes not kilobytes, not good until broadband comes around).
Geez, do you think we send the whole G*D damm file over first? I wonder what this streaming audio thing is?
Well I use 8hz-mp3 to encode all my CDs, and damm it's hard to tell the difference at 160bps. Mp3 is a life saver for those of us who don't have 50+ CD changers.
Anyways... just my opinion.
Ever tried "We Have Explosive" by FSOL? God, I can encode at 192kbps and it still sounds like poopoo.
See RMS' rant 'The Right To Read' at fsf.org/philosophy. That might really be possible :-( ...
Yeah, it's the same way for me. We have this old Compa VGA monitor at home which whines like that. My brother can hear it too, but my parents can't.
If that's what he is saying, he should phrase it in away that it doesn't take an infinite number of slashdot monkeys to decipher it.
SAY WHAT YOU MEAN!!!
You can't tell me that MP3 is near CD-Quality.
I've ripped many MP3's from DDD CD's and I've used commercial software. Anyone without a hearing aid can tell that MP3 is baffled sounding and the high-end sounds get twisted whenever a low-frequecy sound is played.
I can't understand why MP3 is soo popular! I haven't heard a decent sounding MP# file yet.
There is a l3enc/l3dec style encoder/decoder available, but the documentation and the code sucks so much I couldn't really get it going. There's a lot of options to twiddle, and no explanations.
ftpsearch for refsoft9711.tgz, it gives a hit in spain. I know that's not where I got it, but it wasn't there. I think I got it from ftp.vqf.com, but there's nothing there now. the search on www.vqf.com for refsoft9711.tgz also points to ftp.vqf.com. weird.
CD quality is 2*44100*16 bps, which is just over 1378 kbps. Of course that's uncompressed. Mp3 manages to compress this to a rate of 128kbps with not too much loss in quality. But nowadays we have formats with much better quality, and a rate of 96kbps. It is likely that in a few years 64kpbs formats will come around that blow away mp3.
So yes, MP3 is doomed.
I live in the neighbourhoods of Portugal capital city, which is Lisbon, and I've yet to see ONE person who had bought a portable MiniDick. Because of the copyright inflicted by Sony, that format went tottally down. I saw more Discman's than MiniDicks since I remember.
I agree totally, I am a huge music fan. I love all kinds of music and MP3 allows me to get all different kinds of songs from artists who I would not normally buy CD's of because I don't like most of their songs. I have a decent setup too. I have a AWE64 and a subwoofer with 4 small satellite speakers. You can find a lot of really good ones like 192kbps on IRC channels. I have a gig of mp3's and I think that MP3 is not going to die anytime soon.
Told 'ya.
Can't believe it. CmdrTaco said something half-way positive about Apple! And here....on Slashdot!!!!
Isn't this one of the signs of the Apocalypse?
They are becoming very popular in the UK. You can buy the pre-recorded stuff in many shops, but that's not really what MDs are for, is it?
Bye!
Ben.
He killed the whole premise of the article with the last paragraph:
"Think of music the same way you think of e-mail. It isn't important whether you get your e-mail via a client program like Eudora, a Web-based system like Hotmail or a command-line program like Pine. What's important is that you get your e-mail."
MP3 will probably be around forever for EXACTLY the same reasons that SNMP is how 99% of all email is transfered around the internet. It is a format that works, and it is the first that was widely adopted. Sure better compresson formats will come along, but consider that we still download icons as GIFs from this web page.
Ken
yes but cassette tapes WERE treated the same way in their day as the riaa is trying to treat mp3's
I suppose it's somewhat reliveing to see that propaganda methods haven't changed much. You want something to *be*? Just decree it so, and the reality will soon catch up to match your desired definition. Maybe CNN will do a DIVX comeback article. Feh. Lamers.
I would like to know where you read this essay by Neal Stephenson.
When I was living in Japan last year, MiniDisc was by far the most popular portable music format. I'm not saying they're as pervasive as cell phones, but I'd say 75% of people around high school/college age are sporting an MD player, and I saw plenty of people outside this demographic with them as well.
Actually, I believe one of the reasons they are not as popular in the US is the fact that the media is more expensive here, and the technology seems to be about a year or more behind, so the players are bulkier and more expensive. I went to a circuit city a couple weeks ago,and looked at MD players. They had only 2 different players, and both were brand-new (to the US)models I saw being sold in Japan in October 1997.
Most MD (and CD) players in Japan also have a fiber optic connector, which when used to interface with CD players for recording tracks, significantly increased the quality of the recordings over other connectors I tried.
The compression is impressive, but if you listen on a good system you can tell the difference.
Mark
MP3 will probably be around forever for EXACTLY the same reasons that SNMP is how 99% of all email is transfered around the internet.
People are using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to transfer email? Would the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) work a whole lot better?
;-) (Common mistake, I frequently make it myself)
Isn't this kind of like the money that Internet Solutions used to get as part of the domain name registration fee. You know, the part of the fee that was dropped because it was an illegal tax.
As I understand it, one of the activities that the RIAA engages in is lobbying politicians. This involves campaign contributions. If the RIAA is partly financed by tax money, isn't there a conflict of interests there?
I don't know what kind of crap you "MP3 sound quality sucks" people are listening to, but I daresay I've got a much better quality computer sound setup than 95% of computer owners, and I think a well-ripped track encoded with a quality CODEC at a reasonably high-fidelity bitrate sounds pretty damned good.
Okay, my B&W DM100i s aren't exactly studio monitors and my 60w/ch integrated amp is about 13 years old, but dammit, I can tell the difference between good stuff and crap, and quality MP3s are definitely in the good stuff range.
I have a friend who has converted his ENTIRE CD COLLECTION to MP3 and setup a 16GB hard drive on one of his PCs to act as his MP3 server. He can hear the difference between quality and crap, too.
Those of you who are bitching that MP3s sound like crap have been listening to poorly ripped or encoded MP3s (admittedly, at least 60% of MP3s in the newsgroups fall into this category) or playing them with lousy sound cards through crummy amps and speakers. Buy a decent sound system for your computer and try out some high-quality MP3s. You will hear what MP3 fans have been raving about.
A year ago, I remember reading on Slashdot, "Mpeg4 released" Well, WHERE IS IT ROB????
After all, they are being used for illegal
copying of software..
Hynek
They are so worried about the record companies losing money. Why not embrace the format and sell discs using the format. I mean, they can come up with some whiz-bang thing like make enhanced cd's with a free bonus MP3 track or something...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Of _course_ MP3 is a means, not an end. The entire computer industry is a means. There is no end, until the world explodes (and even then...).
What the writer of this article doesn't seem to understand is that MP3 popularity has nothing to do with industry or corporation or products. It doesn't even _really_ have that much to do with technology. It has to do with a fundamental change in the music industry and who controls it.
MP3 shows that CD-quality audio no longer requires us to go down to the store and pay $2 for each song we buy. MP3 means that there is now an audio format that can duplicate the security of the CD without a signifigant loss in quality. It means there is a new standard to audio that no longer requires a major industry to live. It shows that the Internet is revolutionizing things that are indirectly related to it.
And, its going to get better. Maybe two years from now we'll be using a different format. But it will still do the same thing. Maybe they'll name it, "MP5.com", but it will serve the same function.
The other point that is missed is the nature of 'MP3'. You can't kill MP3. You can't sue it, bury it, hide it, or ban it. MP3 servers pop up faster then they can be shut down. It was already underground, and that's the only real effect you can achieve, whether its drugs, booze, porn, or music.
1) The Rio doesn't have enough storage
Can't argue with that! 32M is nowhere near enough; I want 512M. Hopefully, in a few years 2nd and 3rd generation players will sport larger flash memories.
2) "Near CD-Quality" isn't good enough
Depends on where you're listening. Do you really
think you can hear anything over 16Khz above
the road noise in your car while cruising down
the freeway at 70? I sure can't. Yes, if I was
going to sit in a quiet room and concentrate on
music played through studio monitor headphones,
MP3 would be annoying. For what I use it for
(jogging or working in the yard) it's fine.
3) Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth - need more
Yes, but it will remain true that you get what you pay for. I also think optical recording technology is improving at a faster rate than internet connections are -- meaning that for the forseeable future, a box full of CDs/DVDs/whatever will have a heckofa lot more bandwidth any internet connection you or I can afford (ok, it's got lousy round trip time and packet drop is really expensive -- you still can't beat the bandwidth!)
1) He complains about the poor quality, then complains the file size is too large.
Again, you get what you pay for.
2) Tries to separate a file format from an application.
No, what he was saying is that from the viewpoint of the average Micro$oft customer, the underlying file format is transparent; all M$ software is judged by the quality of the GUI, not by the quality of the brain-dead back end code. To a certain extent this is true of compressed audio, but ultimately how many songs it can shoehorn into a given amount of memory IS visible to the customer.
Another point about sound quality: the Victorola phonograph beat out the Edison phonograph DESPITE being later to market, having worse sound quality, and an incompatible recording format. Why? Because it was more convenient for the customer to use. Moral is, the average stereo consumer either can't hear or doesn't care the difference between a CD and an MP3.
Guess who is a major player in the record industry? Time-Warner. I suppose that this would make them somewhat biased. Also, rumors from the CNN inside say that CNN will be taking over all of Time-Warner's media websites that are currently controlled by Time-Warner people. Hopefully the first thing they do is kill pathfinder.com...
Contrast CD audio and CD-R drives with DVD movies and the various DVD-R systems in the works. I don't think any proposed DVD-R drive yet will be able to burn something a video DVD player will like, and I suspect they never will. Just like computer DAT tape drives intended for backup are completely unable to write audio DAT tapes, even though they use the same media (certain special SGI drives excluded). It's not copyright laws that have made this happen, but business pressure.
The fact that computer CD-R and CDROM drives are compatible with CD audio players was terrific, but I fear it's a bonus we'll never get again if entities like the RIAA get their way. This is the battle I'd through my support behind.
And despite some peoples claims, you don't need high end audiophile equipment to hear the artifacts in MP3. A cheap pair of walkman headphones plugged into a Soundblaster 16 is sufficient. Now, a Soundblaster distorts audio in different ways, but even so the MP3 artifacts are severe enough that (if you know what to listen for) you can hear them on practically any audio setup.
You may find it interesting to know that I didn't always think this. The first time I listened to a track in MP3 format I was quite impressed with the sound. So impressed, in fact, that I spent hours downloading MP3's from various sites and also encoding my own from CDs just because it was so convenient to have a bunch of pre picked tunes on a hard drive ready to play.
But alas, after quite a bit of listening, on various types of tunes, I started to hear things. Sort of like shimmering metallic tones mixed in sorta just under the music. It seems like I heard these first while passively listening - like I was working away at something, and had some MP3 track playing and at first it seemed like maybe the sound wasn't in the music, but was coming from behind me - something else going on in the room. Also, at least at first, it seemed to be confined to just a few MP3 files - but once I learned to lock on to those artifacts, I started to hear it on more and more tracks. It got to the point where I just didn't want to listen to the MP3 files anymore.
So now I got curious - could I decode the MP3's back to PCM format and tinker about in an wave editor - maybe isolate these artifacts somehow? What about if I were to encode at different bitrates - would the artifacts go away at higher bitrates? So I sprung for a copy of the FhG "pro" MP3 encoder so that I could try out higher bitrates. What I found, was that these artifacts were just as audible at 160k as at 128k. However, at 192k and 256k I couldn't hear them anymore. I did some reading about the MP3 encoding process and learned that at 192k and higher, the left and right channels are encoded completely separate from one and other. However, at 160k and lower, a stereo matrix is used in the encoding process. That is to say, rather than encode left and right, what is encoded is sum (left+right) and difference (left-right) Most recordings contain a lot of redundant information between the left and right channel - to exploit this, the encoder allocates more bits to the sum channel, and fewer to the difference channel. In the decoding process, stereo is recovered with the simple formula left = sum + difference, right = sum - difference.
Armed with that knowledge, I started fooling about in a wave editor. Interestingly enough, I found that the artifacts live in the difference channel! If, in the editor, you subtract the left and right channels to get a single mono waveform, the artifacts become extremely pronounced. On the other hand, if you add the two channels to get a mono file, they don't seem to be audible. However, the fact that they exist at all means that when the MP3 is decoded, and the left and right are recovered from the sum/difference, the artifacts get introduced into both channels but at a slightly lower amplitude than if you listen to the difference channel on its own.
Note: this is not something that a particular MP3 decoder is going to fix. I have tried multiple decoders - free, shareware, commercial, DSP based - same artifacts on all of 'em. Further, I tried various encoders - the FhG encoder seems to be the best if you put it into its ultra high quality (and ultra slow) encoding mode - but even that doesn't eliminate these artifacts.
Here's something more to think about - these artifacts are just what I personally hear. Other people hear different artifacts in the same MP3 streams. My brother complains that the cymbals and other high frequencies sound "swoshy." A friend of mine tells me that to him, it is like the sound of running water is mixed in with the music and sometimes sounds seem to warble quickly back and forth between the left and right channels. Of course, I hear these weird metallic ringing. Other people probably hear some combination of these and maybe even other artifacts.
So what's my opinion of MP3 after going through all this? Well, I did encode a bunch of MP3 files (a couple CD-R's worth) at 256kbit. The stuff I really liked, I bought on CD. That's one thing about MP3 that is rather cool - you can listen to a track for free a few times in relatively good quality and decide if you might want to purchase the actual track. But, even encoded at 256k (which got rid of the artifacts for me) I still have to wonder if there is something missing or wrong about the sound. I haven't done enough comparison of higher bitrate MP3 with the CD original to comfortably make a judgement. And I also have a feeling that at the higher bitrates, you probably would need reasonably good equipment to hear a difference - if a difference can be heard at all. But, for the majority of stuff floating around out there on the net (128k) - I just can't tolerate the artifacts now that I hear them.
Well - my $0.02 anyway.
Even if network bandwidth and hard disk space become orders of magnitude cheaper, compressed audio is STILL the way to go for portable devices. Hard drives DO NOT survive shock very well, and by definition, if it's got a network cable attached to it, it ain't portable. Much as I would like it to, let's face it -- flash memory isn't going to get cheap enough in the near future for me to carry around my entire music collection uncompressed. In fact, right now it's nowhere near cheap enough to carry around my entire music collection compressed!
This is why the RIAA worrying about flash memory as a method of distributing bootleg recordings is rediculous -- even MP3 encoded, it's still an ten times more expensive than the original CD!!!
Sorry, but if I want to make illegal copies of a cd, I'll use my $250 CD writer...
in 5 years the bandwidth of the average web surfer might be 10 times as large, and so might the hard drive space. so what will the RIAA do then? ban wav files? I guess they would have to ban digital audio extraction too. the problem is going to catch up to them in 5-10 years, with or without mp3.
"When people say they like Excel (OK, nobody actually likes Excel, but bear with me), they don't say that the super-duper XLS file format is the reason they like it. People like a program because of what it does."
I think HTML is one hell of a counter-example to this argument. Common file formats like HTML and MP3 afford more and more sophisticated programs. ZIP also seems like a decent example. I'm pretty convinced that MP3 is doing for audio what HTML did for text + graphics. The power of Decentralized Distribtuion should not be glossed over lightly.
I would think that the sounds that we cannot hear would be dependent on the person. For example, no one in my household except for me can hear televisions making an extremely loud, high-pitched sound even if it's mute. And some people put the treble up on their stereos too far--they like it, but all I hear is a horrible high-pitched, scratching sound along with the music. It must be due to sounds higher than about 18kHz. I wonder what MP3 encoding does to those sounds?
Lots of people I don't know use QuickTime, that's for sure. And if most of them eventually have to get a new version to see some "movie" clip somewhere and thus also gain the ability to play .MP3 files, that can't be bad for the popularity of the format.
Besides, I need it to watch the exploding whale.
Mind the Gap
I see mp3s becoming much more pervasive then they are even now before they start to wane to other, better formats. Even quicktime is going to support it!
This link leads to an AppleInsider article with some pics of a late beta of QuickTime 4.0. Besides just looking really cool, the player is going to play mp3s. This is significant since quicktime ships with all macs (and is easily available for win32)!
Oh and for anyone interested, quicktime IS mpeg4... So look for Good Stuff down the road...
2^5
Most of the German free TV programmes (on Astra) are encoded at ~3.5 Mbps. The quality is terrible; you get artefacts all over the place. I'd prefer the PAL signal (from a 120cm dish) anytime.
I don't think MP3 will "die" any time soon. It's not like it's a company that'll just cease to exist at some defined point. I'm positive it'll be replaced by better technologies down the road, but its successor won't be a proprietary format. The beauty of audio is that it's simple as hell to reproduce.
But two years from now, MP3 will be as dead as push technology is today.
Excuse me? What is used in my webcam then? "Server push" was used as "umbrella" name for a lot of different, unrelated and often poorly thought out technologies, but the original Netscape server push exists.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Can we all try to remember (yeah, I know, this is slashdot and I don't expect much) that digital encoding involves tradeoffs? Music and video are both inherently analog, so there *will* be artifacts when they are quantized for digital encoding. How noticeable the artifacts are depends on how small the quantum ("unit" of digitization) is and how the signal is encoded (e.g. the radio-like L+R/L-R vs. straight L/R); but the tradeoff is against size. Until we get gigabyte (terabyte for hi-res video) storage that fits in a pocket, artifacts are going to be a fact of life in digitized audio/video.
The same applies to digital satellites and other streaming audio/video applications, except there the question isn't storage but bandwidth. The fatter the pipe, the better the quality you can get.
But the artifacts will always *be* there; the question is how noticeable they are and how much you want to "pay" (not so much in money as in space and/or bandwidth) to reduce them below some threshold. (Zero being unattainable in the digital realm, as that means a zero quantum == pure analog.)
So why digital, if it can never be as good as analog? Because in many cases you can get "good enough" with usable storage/bandwidth, and because digital formats can be compressed (the same quantization that produces artifacts also makes the signal more compressible) you can fit more digital audio/video in a specified bandwidth than you can analog.
And yes, there are pathological cases. Sometimes you can juggle the digitization constraints to make up for them, other times you're stuck because they just don't quantize nicely for any real-world quantum size.
Welcome to the real world, folks. If you don't like it, you can try whining to $DEITY about it; but neither Sony nor Fraunhofer nor the marching morons can give you truly analog-quality digital audio/video. Live with the tradeoff or stick to analog --- there aren't any other choices.
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
"There's good reason for wanting analogue, but if you crank up the resolution of digital stuff enough, you'll eventually hit human perception limits."
Well, yes, but how much larger will said digital signal be than the original analog signal? At what point does (say) an optical-analog record player using a laser "needle" to track the grooves (this ought to be doable with current technology) end up being cheaper than a digital audio "superdisk" of some kind which requires gigabytes of storage to produce sufficiently "near-analog" quality?
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
"Myth" isn't quite right. It's a question of what *kind* of information is lost --- and much of that noise comes from the older technology used in audio systems; a record player with a laser "needle" would have lower noise than traditional record players.
:-) (I dare say there are some in a lab somewhere) so none of us have any referents to compare such systems to current digital technology. And it's not currently feasible (possible, yes, but a digital recording built up by molecular beam epitaxy would be horribly expensive, to say nothing of the playback system) to duplicate that kind of resolution in a digital medium.
The real limiting factor in analog comes from the fact that ultimately, analog is really digital with a really small quantum: individual molecules of the recording medium, pickup, and speakers, and individual electrons in the amplifiers. But there are no production mass-market analog systems whose noise floor is enforced by Heisenberg
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Remember that records and tapes undergo enforced decay every time they're played. This is also true of CDs to some extent, but that extent is much less --- it'd take a lot longer for the laser to knock away enough molecules of plastic coating and substrate to affect audio quality than for a record player's needle to warp vinyl or the head of a cassette player to scratch off the magnetic coating of a tape.
In re: digital error checking: quantization removes redundancy, and redundancy is key to error correction. Again, there's a *lot* more redundancy in an analog signal. (Compression removes redundancy as well --- that is exactly how it works --- so e.g. time-compressed analog would also have more drop-outs.)
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Do you see a Mac or PC with multimedia capability that's as small as a Rio anywhere?
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
"If that's what he is saying, he should phrase it in away that it doesn't take an infinite number of slashdot monkeys to decipher it."
If slashdot monkeys had more functioning neurons, it wouldn't require a million of them to see past their knee-jerk reactions.
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
"CNN sure gets a lot of FUD these days. Seems like they will post anything that anyone with deep pockets sends them. shouldn't media *try* to be impartial and not commercially oriented?"
/. topic, I'd say they were spot-on.
Huh? The media doesn't care about that, they care about anything that gets people upset/angry and thereby gets people to pay more attention to them --- if they can cause a riot, they've succeeded.
Judging by the size and content of this
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
"Why would anyone spend the time and money to create a "better" format?"
Why would anyone spend the time and money to create a "better" Unix (Linux, *BSD)?
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
MPEG-1 Layer 4 does indeed exist. You only have to sell your soul to Fraunhofer to get it.
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Let's see: MP3 is already out there and widely used. The competition is a bunch of proprietary formats (how many now?), incompatible with each other and MP3, with no market coverage.
But we're to believe that they are already *the* future? Uh huh. While they're busy duking it out to determine whose proprietary pay-per-play format "will" take over, MP3 will swallow their target market. If it hasn't already....
With every new "MP3 killer" format announced, the chances of any of them pushing MP3 out of the market drop. They just don't get it.
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Posted by PasswdIs ScoreOne:
Makes about as much sense to me as suing Rio because their device "might" be used for pirating music. Also better sue VCR makers, CDR makers, hard drive makers, Iomega (zip disks), makers of tape decks, pens, pencils, crayons, silly putty, and yes, film makers such as Kodak (heaven knows how many pictures were taken of copyrighted material over the last 150 years).
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
How small the author of this drivel sounds. mp3.com's IPO means nothing to many mp3 users. As long as there is a published spec, encoders and decoders, people will use them. mp3s were widely used way before anyone tried to promote them.
Posted by Nick Carraway:
The disc prices are MUCH lower now. The last packs I bought from Circuit City were 74 minute Maxells at $10.00 for 5 disc packs! This is unusually low, but $3-5 discs are not uncommon. I've been extremely happy with all of my MiniDisc equipment, but I don't think it will ever take over the mainstream. Something like a recordable Rio with a lot more storage just might, though...
I think he meant "Even if I could compress. . .".
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
I thought the writer had some interesting examples, but I think that he missed some very important points that these examples show.
"Close Enough is Often Good Enough"
aka
"The Best Technology Doesn't Always Win"
I thought the VCR examples would have jolted his memory about good old VHS vs Beta story. Simply put, the technology with the best playback quality doesn't always win when there are other issues like play length for example. (You can fit a lot more music using MP3 on a CD than normal audio CD.)
Email. The writer missed the most important point here that it's not format that counts (true, he got that right), but the fact that *everyone* uses it, and that everyone exchanges information using it. If the writer thinks that the format for email is not important then he should try to use an alternate format for email for a while. (Hint: Only being able to send email to yourself gets very boring very quickly). MP3 looks set to provide a standard that everyone can agree to use.
The reason I 'cling' to my vinyl is because you can't find lots of the music I have on vinyl in CD format, not because I'm not happy with CDs.
Believe me, I've tried, and moving stuff from vinyl to CD isn't an easy task, it's a pain in the ass and there's no way I'm converting all 4000 LPs.
MP3 could easily be replaced by an improved format because digital-to-digital conversion is easy enough to be painless.
My father still listens to vinyl LPs. Why? Because the tunes he wants to hear are on vinyl LPs.
Yes, they're also on CD, but he doesn't own the CDs. The LPs, however, are in his stereo cabinet.
A big chunk of the music I want to hear is on 200 some-odd CDs in my CD rack, ensuring that I'll continue to listen to CDs.
Damned near every sound recording exant on Earth is on the net in MP3 form, insuring that people will continue to listen to MP3s.
Bring us a better format; by all means give it sweeter compression algorithms and sample rates that require scientific notation, then fail to be surprised when we don't abandon our MP3 decoders.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
becuase no one puts a price on anything that is free.
~
I'm being cynical, but it seems to me that tapes died only after CD's weren't made copyable. They were much worse in quality, but the freedom of sharing with them (copying etc...) was worth the price of poorer quality.
MP3 is out there, and growing. They can't take it back or supplant it with something better that isn't so free. Maybe this is like the articles more than a year back that said Linux was a fad just reaching its peak?
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^
Those earbud phones are ghastly, but they're loud enough. I bought a set of Sony MDR-CD160 phones (excellent, $30 and not really noticeably worse than $100 phones). They don't work well with the Rio, because the Rio can't be turned up enough to power them - even at max volume, in a somewhat noisy environment like a car, the music isn't acceptably loud.
That the media are the puppet of big business. This article could have been written by some one at a recording industry company. CNN, or any of the major media outlets, are simply the mouthpiece for big business, and they hate MP3s. And we used to chuckle at Pravda meaning "Truth". Do we think we have a free press?
From the article:
>There is a small possibility that the RIAA will succeed in its attempt to ban MP3
>players, evidenced by its lawsuit against Diamond Multimedia, which makes the Rio player.
Um, didn't the RIAA LOSE this lawsuit?
I'll admit that there are trade-offs, but that's life.
Your post comes across with the idea that analog recording and/or reproduction is perfect and this is definitely not true. If you really want to hear a guitar, you have to put your ear in audio range of the sound that comes from the string and body of the instrument. If you include a microphone or anything else in the signal path between the instrument and your ear, you are going to get artifacts.
The fact is, both analog and digital methods can be applied in such a fashion so as to reduce the artifacts to a level that is below human perception. Obviously perception and sensitivity to _any_ distortion varies from human to human, but there is a bottom line below which nothing will be perceived by anybody, *philes included.
The reason that digital is so popular today is simply that it is less expensive to apply digital methods of reproduction in order to achieve a given level of quality.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Actually these "good" points are pretty bad.
1) The Rio doesn't have enough storage
The Rio is not MP3. Empeg looks promising but still too expensive probably (I haven't checked because it doesn't interest me). For all we know there could be a portable player coming out tomorrow that will be a good MP3 player. The only two places I listen to pre-recorded music are at home and in the car (and I drive very seldomly), and there must be some other people like me. Portable players would be nice but not crucial to the MP3 format.
Disclaimer: if you have a problem with me forcing my opinions on you RMS-style, skip this section
2) "Near CD-Quality" isn't good enough
Yes it is. I don't know this fucking lame euro-american society came up with the idea that if the quality of something sucks, it must be no good. I'm sorry, but all the true-colour 3D shooters, Myst and rip-offs, driving simulators, and all 5000 games that fit into all of about 3 genres aren't half as good as Pac-Man. The same holds for movies and of course music. Music technology is not something worth complaining about, especially considering how well we have it. Am I saying that we should just give up and stop trying to improve audio quality? Ya, more or less.
3) Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth - need more of it
This will only become an issue when there's something to replace it. What are our options? Real audio? PCM? MP3 is looking pretty good. People need to share music, and MP3 is arguably the best we have at the moment. It does streaming, it's fairly scalable in terms of bitrates. It'll stick around till another format comes out at least, which hopefully won't be MP4.
It's because the dynamic range of the CD is dramatically superior to the tape- even if you're "losing something" digitizing, the amount of info you're getting encoded is dramatically different between the two. Combine this with the ease that you can retrieve the exact same bitstream from something easier than you can retrieve an analog signal from something, you get the performance difference. In reality, DAT is superior to CD because it has an even larger dynamic range.
Note: DAT lasts nearly as long as CDs do with full physical contact, unlike CDs...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Actually, the VCR point was not a good one, because the VCR is analog technology. The audio equivalent of the VCR is the trusty old tape deck -- which has hardly been driven to extinction by the RIAA. The RIAA is frightened by digital technology because of the prospect of perfect copying. And so is the video industry (witness DIVX or whatever it's called).
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
This bit of the article jumped out at me as well. You raise an interesting point; a comparison to MP3 and SMTP is probably more apt.
:-) (To which the music industry says, "Hey, they can't have jet packs unless they're our jet packs!")
But I think I know where Mr. Guterman was heading with his statement. My interpretation: "It isn't important whether you get your music via MP3, or VQF, or AAC, or SDMI. What's important is that you get your music."
I think he misses something very important, though. I agree that it's not the specific format. What IS important is that you have a choice. Going back to the email client comparison: I love Pine. Eudora and Hotmail are too cumbersome for me. I definitely DO NOT want someone telling me "You have to use Hotmail or you can't get email at all." I might grudgingly go along with Hotmail, but I sure wouldn't be happy with it.
The recording industry wants to limit listeners' choice. That's not a slam on them; it's a simple fact. Their survival depends on controlling the means of distribution. They love SDMI because it keeps artists under their thumbs: A lot of unestablished artists can't (or don't want to) pay the price for development tools for making audio in a proprietary format. The barriers of entry protect the status quo; open formats like MP3 tear down barriers and threaten the status quo.
Actually, maybe tearing down barriers isn't the best analogy. Maybe open formats are more like the jet packs that make the barriers irrelevant.
I like this idea. I've always thought that an MP3-upload feature is the one thing that could save the MiniDisc format.
Let's not forget that when Excel first came out, it was considered a great product. People ran out and bought it in droves. Back then, the features were enough to sell the product, and I'd say even today, Excel would sell on features alone if by some magic, the compatibility issue disappeared.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Author Jimmy Guterman is "president of The Vineyard Group, an editorial consultancy."
According to their Web page, the Vineyard Group " develop and manage editorially sound, market-savvy interactive products" - whatever.
Clients include at least three record companies, as well as Microsoft Corp.
Interestingly, when not bashing MP3, Guterman has found time to post more than one article mentioning Linux, generally in a rather dismissive manner. Take a look at the Chicago Tribune's online tech section (www.chicago.tribune.com) for a general look at what this "editorially sound" ex-rock-critic has to say.
Keep in mind that MP3 is not actually an "open" system as in "open source software." You still have to license it from Fraunhofer/Thomson.
Links to a Mac version of Yamaha SoundVQ can be found at VQF Kingdom.
Currently there is NOT a Linux version, perhaps a Japanese-speaking Linux nerd can talk with the folks at NTT about licensing TwinVQ.
There is a hardware VQF player coming out in Japan in fall 1999 called SolidAudio. You can read a review of the prototype here.
First of all, all this death-of-MP3 stuff is written to shock people. I believe that is why this article was written, and why Mark Cuban of Broadcast.Com has said something similar recently.
However, that said, Twin-VQ (vector quantization) technology, aka VQF may cut audio file sizes in half while maintaining a similar audio quality.
On audio quality, MP3 only approaches CD quality at 128kbps. However lots of MP3 is encoded at lower bitrates, but it is just fine for many applications (such as listening in the office on crappy headphones).
I live on Long Island, and I have a cable modem. :-)
Ben
1) He complains about the poor quality, then complains the file size is too large. Bad bad.
He's not saying that anything is currently better. He complained about the size because of download times (which is an issue), and the quality for obvious reasons. Both of those are valid points. It can be solved by better algorythms, or more bandwidth (both of which he listed as solutions).
2) Tries to separate a file format from an application.
How is that a bad point? I thought that was one of the better points of the article. The application is high-quality, portable audio which can be arranged as desired (as opposed to cd's which are arranged by the producer, not the user). The user doesn't care about file formats. The user cares about the application. If there was something equivalent or better to mp3 called "foobar", then I wouldn't care that it was called foobar... that was his point.
Now, he did imply that the mp3 file format was not really better (or not really much better) than cd, which would not be good enough for it to replace cds. The argument is good, but the premise is wrong. He was judging based solely on quality. The main advantage to mp3s aren't their quality, but their arrangeability and size (physical). It is now possible to fit many clips from several artists, arranged in whatever play order is desired, all stored in something about the size of a cd+player. That is why mp3s are cool.
But, as he was trying to emphasize, it's not the format, but the use that's important.
He says mp3's are too big. Someone previously made the point that raw digital audio is up to 10 times as large, with a small increase in quality. That coupled with the massive speed-up of internet service in most major cities makes this a moot point.
He says the quality isn't good enough. Someone else made the point that 128k mp3's aren't the only option, and the higher bitrate files are almost perfect. Maybe they're twice the size, but still, that's 5 times smaller than raw audio.
He says the RIAA will kill the Rio and MP3. Never happen - it's not illegal to encode audio in MPEG-1 Layer-3 and it's not illegal to play such encoded audio. Under the argument they're trying to use, any sort of permanent storage should be banned because it can hold illegal material. Similarly, how many warez kiddies have you seen distributing zipfiles of copyrighted software? Surely any sort of file compression should be banned to prevent this!
He says MP3 will be replaced by something better and will disappear. Here he's finally right, mp3 is likely to be replaced with Layer-4 encoding which figures repetition over time and across channels into the figure (currently mp3 does not do this, 5 minutes of silence will encode to the same size as 5 minutes of pure noise). This also will beat down the size of files.
The guy doesn't have the facts, he's just irritated that his Rio wasn't as nice as he hoped and wants to beat some mp3 skull to make up for it.
I emailed this reply to the author, as well as posted it on one of the MP3.com bulletin boards:
+---
I am very distressed by your column. I think that you have missed some key items that make the MP3 format far more important than you realize.
While I agree with you that the MP3 format will change -- as you say, change in file formats are inevitable -- I don't know why this will constitute the "death" of anything. The HTML format has changed -- changed drastically over the last four years -- yet it is still right here and has kept the web a very open environment.
The promise of MP3 is manyfold, and all of these factors are important:
1) MP3 quality is almost as good as CDs isn't as important as the size of the file.
while you tend to doubt that "almost is good enough" consider that MP3 quality is almost as good as CDs AND is so much smaller than a CD track that you can feasibly download it from the internet. I'll grant it's still not very practical, but new technologies never start out 100% practical. They do, however, evolve.
It's not the quality of the MP3 that makes it powerful, it's the size. The size is SO MUCH SMALLER than your average CD track that it more than makes up for the slight loss in sound quality.
2) MP3 is an open standard.
You site the Sony MiniDisc as an example of near-quality CD sound that was a huge failure. Remember that Sony OWNED the specs for the Sony MiniDisc -- no other company had a chance of making as much money off of the format. MP3 is an open standard -- anyone can use the specs and create MP3 compatible devices. In fact, there is now an MP3 player that can be installed in a car, as well as the Rio and Diamond's new competing product, and some CD-players are now supporting the MP3 format -- so you'll be able to play MP3's from your stereo. Do you think Philips would be able to play the Sony Minidisc without playing Sony a healthy sum of money first?
Open technology is always at an advantage when competing with proprietary technology, because companies usually think they can make more of a profit if they don't have to pay for the tools. That's why PCs continue to thrive today, despite other platforms (like the Macs) that were, once upon a time, far, far better designed.
3) MP3 is being embraced by musicians.
Don't discount this one. Sites like MP3.com and AMP3.com are teeming with thousands of musicians who are, of their own free will, using the MP3 format to release their music, bypassing the record industry entirely. MP3.com even allows artists to create audio CDs that they will sell and split the profits with the artist 50-50 (which is a far greater percentage of profits than artists would get going through a "traditional" label).
This may be even more significant than the "technological" advantages MP3 has, b/c it's so political. There are a lot of artists who don't like the way the record industry works. Record companies exist to make money, and they do it with a vengance, and there's a whole lot of really pissed of musicians from every genre imaginable who would be more than happy to find a way to distribute their music without dealing with a record company at all.
4) MP3 is an evolutionary format.
Like all file formats, MP3 will change over time. The successor to MP3, MPEG Layer 4, is already being developed and talked about. Just as later versions of Excel can still read Excel 5.0 spreadsheets, later versions of MP3 players will be able to play MP3 files. The fact that the file format has become smaller, or more optimized, or higher in quality doesn't suddenly nullify the entire MP3 movement, it simply alters it.
The good thing is that because MP3 is an open format, its changes are also open -- there's very little danger that the new format will suddenly fall into the hands of people who will only authorize its use by the RIAA, for example. Just like any other internet standard, it will be able to be used by anyone with the knowledge and time to write a program that can use it.
I'd like to ad that the people who run MP3.com (http://www.mp3.com, the largest repository of legal MP3 music on the internet) say they don't really care about the format at all -- they chose MP3 because it was the best one for the artists who use their site. When something new comes along that will work (without wrecking everything else) I suspect they'll start moving over to that.
This is not a "fetish over a file type," as you describe it. This is a bruhaha over what the file type is doing for artists who embrace it. The RIAA and the record labels they represent are scared to death that they won't be able to call the shots and make the money any more. They're spreading a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about the MP3 format in the hopes that they'll be able to introduce something they control -- and will therefore be able to continue to have artists depend on them for revenue so they can continue to clean house.
Respectfully,
Baptist Death Ray
http://www.mp3.com/baptistdeathray
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Apparently this guy was just dissapointed with his Rio, and compared all MP3 output to it. The article wasn't REALLY very anti-MP3, but here were some very bad assumptions/comparisons made in this article:
1) Saying that CD quality isn't good enough for a 'new' standard.
Er, CD's were VERY well designed for their day. Okay sure they cut a few kH's for space reasons (original spec was for 48khz recording), but CD's still sound quite good.
2) Comparing MP3 to mini-disks, and equating failure.
Minidisks were a commercial failure because record companies aren't going to manufacure CD's AND mini-disks. Also you make a consumer choose between CD's and mini-disks. I don't think there were any REALLY compelling reasons for going to mini-disks, so it lost out. Not that they were bad, but they couldn't replace CD's and it's infrastructure, and they have a fairly small market beside CD's.
MP3's only need a computer to be listened to. The appliance market is still too immature to tell if it will catch on.
3) "MP3" can't last as a standard.
Well, duh! Technology improves and goes on. However, anything stored as an MP3 can be easily converted to any new format. Also MP3 'appliances' can/should be made programmable and accept new formats as they arrive. As it stands now, however, MP3's have a wide acceptance and should probably last longer than the next few years.
4) MP3's aren't good for streaming.
That's what Mpeg2 Layer 3 is for. This is what Shoutcast/Icecast uses and IMHO, sounds far better than what realaudio does for the same bandwidths.
On a local area network, MP3 streams quite nicely.
Personally, I would hope for a more 'open' format for compressed music, but we take what we can get.
jf
Here in the UK I would say that among my friends around half (including myself) own MiniDisc equipment. The other half wouldn't say no if they had the cash either.
OK, so it's a little biased since I know a lot of gadget-lovers, but amusing nonetheless...
That one I didn't understand. "Until broadband is ubiquitous, MP3 can't fly." - therefore MP3 will be dead in 2 years? Seems to me that 2 years from now, MORE people will have bandwidth which would allow MP3 streaming, and this would strengthen MP3 as a format.
They don't sound better than CDs. They sound slightly worse. But most people won't notice a difference (depending on conditions).
I strongly doubt that the average person could tell the difference between identical recordings on both media, even under ideal conditions. Only way to tell is to have double-blind tests conducted by people who aren't jerk-off audiophiles.
Which brings up another point: MDs have been a huge success in Japan since their inception. Europe too. It's only in America where the MD has failed until only recently to catch on, mostly due (once again) to the hideous price barrier.
For those interested in figures, here's a Sony press release on fiscal '97 MD sales. In short, MD player sales in Japan were expected to equal those of CD players in fiscal '97, and almost double (and easily eclipse CD player sales) in fiscal '98.
MD is really getting going, now. While we still don't have the expansive product line that Japan does, you can now get MD models from companies besides Sony, for reasonable prices, and prices on car units are even starting to come down. Pioneer makes a killer MD/CD in-dash combo right now, the unfortunate part is its ~$600 price point. Ouch!
He is entitled to his opinion, but his predictions about MP3s are based on his opinions. Can I make the prediction that Microsoft is going to go under just because I don't like Misrosoft, without being laughed at. If he (I didn't catch his name) were to consider the fact that some nerds like us actually like MP3 (suprise1) and that MP3 can't be short lived because it (and Mpeg layers 1 and 2) have been around for quite a wile, (suprise2) his predictions might be different.
It seems to me that this guy has the same problem with other members of the media, if they havent heard of it, it must be new. His opinion and predictions are stated as if MP3 just surfaced last week. To a reporter who thinks he knows everything, (I'm sure I don't know evrything) something like MP3 that just recently became a buzz word is obviously new technology, and it's therefore open to speculation as to wether or not it's going to be successful. (It already is succesful you saber-toothed crotch crickets)
Ok, I am surprised that it does not seem that many people have latched on to his whole MP3/Email client analogy. How can one compare the different email clients with music file formats?
MP3 is a file format, a standard for distributing information. Email clients are programs that display information distributed according to some standard. Big difference.
To try to compare file formats to clients is, like the cliche says, to compare apples to oranges. The number of different email clients is allowable, and indeed works, becuase they all communicate with each other using the same *standard* for the *transfer* or information. However, multiple file formats would in no way work the same way. If you have 10 different compressed CD audio formats, it is not the same as having 10 different email clients. If I choose to use MP3 and my buddy chooses to use some other format, XXX, we cannot share this music in the same way we can share our email using Netscape and Pine. The two simply do not equate. Now had he desired a better comparison, he could have chosen Jpeg vs. Gif, or AU vs Wav. IMHO, anyway.
In fact, MiniDiscs are actually making a comeback of sorts, now that players and recorders are getting reasonably cheap. (^_^)
I think MiniDiscs are a great format for car stereos, since they're easier to store than CD's and are pretty immune to shocks since the MiniDisc format right from the start have built-in "shock protection."
Is the spec open?? A quick search through their site found:
System Requirements
Windows 95 or NT 40.
A search of Freshmeat for vqf returned nil. A search of Altavista for vqf linux returned a bunch of pirated music sites with no mention of a vqf player sourcecode. Am I missing something here?
Be this the case, the spec is not open and is too difficult to hack, it is bound to die.
I would more than gladly go to VQF if I could find source for a player/encoder.
This sig is false.
Personally I really don't see much anything about that artical that was "anti mp3". The author simply stated the facts: MP3 will not be with us forever. Sooner or later ( probably sooner givin the pace of technology like this ) something better will come along, and whether its Mp4, MS Audio (ewwww!!!!!) or something else we will all jump on that bandwagon just like we did MP3. We would have to be stupid not to.
To him calling my $100 mini-tweeter/subwoofer combo 'tinny pc speakers'
MP3s sound *great* on them, most of the 128Kbps ones sound as good as CDs. 320s are pretty much perfect.
They are throwing fits over burners. A lot of countries (like up here in the great white north) have source taxes on blank media. The revenue goes to media groups.
And it's really ticking me off. I go through dozens of CD-Rs a month to distribute digital data to clients. Why Sony et. al. have to take a cut of that is beyond me.
Several points were badly presente as bad. First of all the RIO. He complains about it and then MP3 quality in general. I hope this guys listened to MP3 on more than a RIO. As someone who can't afford a hi-fi system, I cant' comment more on this.
I have a CDR and now have close to 11 CD's of MP3's (a little over that). First thing I did was encode the ones I listened too all the time to take to work. Then my friends found out and I have backups of a lot of their music, and just recently I downloaded one CD's worth of music from the net. Most of it it techno and/or from outside the US (which most stores don't carry, let alone have samples), and I am going to BUY what I liked. The rest I keep and trade to let other people sample.If the RIAA were smart, they'd not only embrace this, but maybe even find a way to offer people MP3 formats of music they may have bought years ago on cassette or vinyl which may be borked.
The format is here to stay. With the large support, variety of players, and encoders that end users can easily use and have access to, it's not going away.
And as for the age comments, I work with several guys in their 30s and 40s that download MP3's more than I do. It's not just college students.
He's right ... The MP3 format will probably fade away in a couple of years, thanks to Moore's law.
.wav file of a CD track consumes 44100 x 4 = 176400 bytes/second.
.wav files as it is to download .mp3s at the present.
... which comes to approximately 8.7 hours of unencoded music time, which is about 100 five minute songs on a single disk.
All it will take is a single order of magnitude jump in network bandwidth and disk storage capacity.
An uncompressed
An MP3 encoded at 128 Kbits/Sec consumes 16384 bytes per second.
So, at the point in time where an average hard drive capacity is 10 times the current average, and internet backbone speed is 10 times the current average, it will be as cheap and efficient to download and collect
I would point out that in theory, a gigabit ethernet link could transfer an entire 74 minute CD in (44100 x 74 x 60 x 4) / (1024 * 1024 * 1024 / 10) = about 8 seconds, and even a 100 Mbit/sec link could do it in about 80 seconds. Of course, your computer will have to be 10 times faster to keep up with the network port, but I expect that also.
When DVD-R eventually comes around, it will provide 5.2 gig capacity per disk
The future is clearly NOT in compressed audio. The future is in uncompressed audio. Lossy compression schemes such as minidisk and mp3 will become unnecessary and will fall by the wayside.
- jms
> MP3 *is* a lot more compact than CD audio is.
:) Think about it...
> Does that mean CD audio, being 50MB in size,
> will also die because we don't have the
> bandwidth? It sure doesn't.
It sure does.
The lack of compression in CD tracks is why MP3s
exist. You could dump a raw CD track into a file,
but why? MP3s are much faster to upload/download.
CDs are artifacts of the unconnected days. The
only reason they still exist are because most
people aren't wired to modern CPUs all of the
time.
Am I right?
Not exactly ON TOPIC, but...
Let's start our own FUD campaign. Well, not really FUD. Modelled after the Microsoft Refund Day effort, let's shout about major Microsoft bugs and bad business practices, serially. One after another, let's put them out there for the media to feast upon, and as M$ knocks them down (well, they can't really - but as they respond) let's just move on to the next one. The more bad press the better.
Let's see how long it takes to maneuver the press to sit Death watch for Microsoft.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Of course, MPEG-4 will be much better than MP3 and with better compression too.
If Diamond loses a suit to the RIAA it will pretty much ensure that anyone else creating a portable mp3 player will also lose a suit. Demand will be there, but suply won't. No one is going to get into a market where they know that they will lose a lawsuit and be forced to shutdown.
-matt
This just what the author is saying. When a better format than mp3 (mp4 or whatever) comes along people will switch to it.
He's predicting the death of the mp3 format. Not the death of all computer playable audio formats.
The Math Maestro Tutoring Services in Seattle
Well MD isnt really a competitor to MP3 I don't think. To me MD replaces the traditional tape recorder. I use mine for a variety of purposes from building work out tapes to recording interviews. My MD is going to BurningMan this year to record interviews and experiences as well as audio trails.
To me MP3 is more specialized in what it does. The MD complements the MP3 format by giving it a different method of storage.
The real competition is Rio vs. MiniDisc and to me the MD wins hands down. I mix MP3/CD/Others sources onto my MD all the time. Its amazingly flexible, sounds fantastic and is super easy to use. The indexing features alone make it worth the money.
So don't buy that this is an MP3 vs. MD issue, its Rio vs. MD and MD will win. Its a much more reasonable format.
The only reason the CD may give better quality is because the CD player never touches the media; as with the tape player, there the record/play head touches the magnetic tape. After a few hundred plays, the CD will sound better. But not at first.
Also, the CD is digital, which means that it is sampled, which means you always lose a part of the original sound source. The tapes are analogue, which gives you all of the original. If only someone would invent an optical analogue sound recorder/player... nice project for an EE?
I must agree that MP3 is growing. About the same quality as a CD, but at a fraction of the space used by other formats.
There are a number of programs out there that will encode MP3's for you. It would be trivial to get them to read from /dev/dsp or /dev/audio and encode that. The main problem is that encoding is expensive CPU wise, so the computer may not be able to keep up.
/dev/dsp or whatever) makes the format any less legitimate.
You don't see many machines that are capable of real time MPEG video encoding, but that format is not dismissed as "only used for pirating films".
I don't see how using an intermediate format for creating MP3's (ie. directly dumping the samples from
The author makes a deeper point (or at least alludes to it), which I think is quite valid. The RIAA and all the rest of us for that matter shouldn't be focused specifically on MP3. What really matters is that compression algorithms have improved, net speeds have increased, and hard drive prices have decreased. Sometime about 18 months ago it became quite easy to listen to, store, and copy high quality music over the Internet. MP3? Sure, that's what we use today, but a new format will come along tomorrow that still satisfies us, and that does the same job better.
... :-)
Now, what's really interesting to think about is what happens when the compression, speed, and costs all align to do the same thing to video. You already have all of U2's albums on your hard disk, how about all the Hogan's Heros episodes
WTF is the author on?
This will be especially relevant if QT 4's streaming will include MP3 files. Some Tums, Mr. Glaser?
Regarding the look of the player, as well as the similarly clothed Final Cut video editing app, one might wonder if a new, painterly look for the Mac OS is at hand. We'll be seeing many more subtle gradients and relief brought in to play if the OpenStep UI is any indicator. The trend of the shape shifting look and feel of the host OS via Enlightenment, Kaleidoscope, MP3 player Skins and (ugh) MetaCreation's entire product line would seem to support this.
The demands placed on the hardware and software by such geegaws could be considered another case of bloat designed to prompt the next upgrade cycle. Of course, as long as the user can turn this stuff off, it's not such a big deal. In the case of MetaCreations, this means the underlying look and feel is tossed out in favor of drop shadows, transparencies, 3D rendered controls and, of course, Kai Krause's utterly cryptic metaphors, none of which can be turned off. Compound this with the fact that there is ZERO consistency between the various apps in the product line, and it becomes clear why Adobe is cleaning their clock.
Adobe apps all look the same, act the same, and play nice together. This means leverage, and less duplication of effort in learning a new app. Hovering unobtrusive in the background, like a good butler, the design doesn't draw any unnecessary attention to itself. Adobe "gets" it, obviously.
Let's hope Jobs hasn't forgotten when to say when concerning all this chrome plating in user interface design.
The music is not in the piano -Clement Mok
The claim that MP3 sound quality is not up to snuff is (IMHO) ridiculous.
I play/encode my MP3's through a professional grade audio card (DAL CardD+) and they most certainly do not sound noticibly worse than my CD's. Is the quality worse? Probably, but if you have to listen to them head to head and scrutinize it, it probably wont make a difference through a $9.95 pair of headphones or $29.95 pair of Labtec's, it might not even make a difference through your stereo system.
The Rio ships with a TERRIBLE set of headphones, When I plug it into my mixing board it sounds great. When I plug it into my good set of headphones, It sounds great. When I listen to it though my Sony Sports fold-up headphones, it's not so great.
I question whether this person has really put MP3 to the test with studio grade monitors and a group discriminating audiophiles, making sure that the Mp3's are recorded from high-resolution audio sources using professional gear and audio engineers. It wont beat CD, but it will stand it's own.
-Rich
Many small towns here in Canada are getting cable modems, and all the major cities had them years ago.
Usually we're behind the times up here, but I guess it's thanks to the monopolistic cable companies we've got.
Although, ADSL is already out and soon should be hitting cities that don't already have major competition with cable modems.
Why would any professional use minidisc when they could buy a pro dat. I go to concerts that allow taping, and in the tapers section Minidiscs are always thrown at the end of the chain after all of the DAT's. 74 minutes is nothing compared to DAT's 2-3 hours.
***. Now that everyone and their dog (in North America anyway) has a cable modem or DSL line it is increasingly easier to transfer 256K MP3s - which are near CD quality. ***
I wish. I live in Seattle (high tech mecca) and I can't get either.
but I kind of agree with what he was getting at, that MP3 the format isn't as important as what it does. Then again, that should be kinda obvious. If a couple of years down the road a new format appears that offers better quality at smaller sizes, then everyone might switch over (as long as it isn't proprietery). Until then though, MP3 will be here to stay.
-troy
Troy Harris
Systems Administrator
The problem with digital losses, is, as Neal
Stephenson discusses in his "Command Line"
essay, that digital error-checking techniques
work perfectly until some point, and then
don't work at all. Thus you look at a file
or listen to a CD and don't notice any problems
until it's decayed too much for the processor
to retrieve the intended data, and then it
doesn't work at all. Also, the lifetime of
CD's is violently less than that of vinyl and
less even than tapes. (I'm not claiming that
CD's and digital media don't have great
advantages, however.)
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
I think in turn you're confusing sampling theory with perceptual ability / signal detection theory. Something that "reaches all the way to Nyquist" doesn't say anything in particular about the ROC nor the information encoded, nor even the system in question (for example, the Nyquist for visual contrast sensitiviy?). There is no 'Nyquist' for sound per-se. Just because a system can generate information at a rate twice the minimum needed to avoid sampling artifacts doesn't mean that it is generating accurate information. Your statement is really 0 information.
Most audio compression of the mp3 variety uses perceptual coding, it doesn't just 'cut off' audio above 16 kHz, it reshuffles what 'information' is encoded.
Petty theoretical issues aside, you are quite correct when you point out that the quality of the encoders varies widely. Once you encode it poorly there's very little you can do to play it back well. Most of the encoders I've heard are really poor, usually seriously screwing up the high end (of course where a lot of the perceptual information is), I certainly need to check out the Fraunhofer apparently.
Yamaha's, I do believe. Therefore players and encoders are much more scarce.
Well, quality may not be as much of an issue to you, but it certainly matters to a lot of people. I'm a big trader of Dave Matthews Band concert recordings (they're one of the few major groups that allow it). Lately, we've been running into problems with people who'll download a concert that's been MP3'd, uncompress it and burn it onto CDs and pass it off as a "true copy". Even on my $60 Altec Lansing 3-pc set, I can notice the difference...guitars start to sound "shimmery", etc.
It's actually gotten to the point where a bunch of traders set up a trading network which uses a lossless compression algorithm (Shorten) to send audio files which are decompressed and burned onto a CD. That way, we know we're getting a copy that's as close to the original taper's DAT as possible. I don't take shows that have been MP3-compressed. I'm listening to one that I used to have in MP3, and I can definitely tell a clarity difference.
While I certainly agree that MP3 is a good way to get music out to people for preview purposes (I use it to preview and see if I want to get a particular concert recording), I wouldn't make it my primary music source anytime soon, even encoded at 256 Kbps. Unless MPEG-2 Layer 3 or whatever's next can do the trick, there'll still be people that want the real thing.
Any chance those 192 kbit files were VBR or encoded joint stereo? JS tends to cut down on the quality, though my broken mono-output aztech isn't all that great. I have a hard enough time telling the difference between 64 and 128 kbit on it.
just like mp2 did/is. I'll always have some mp3's, the same way I'll always have some .mod's. It's not worth the time or loss of sound quality to convert an mp3 to an aac, or re-rip the song from the cd (at least for this p-133). When cheap, fast, high-quality MPEG-2 and 4 encoders come out, similar to Xing's AudioCatalyst (and hopefully for Linux), all of the songs I'll rip will be ripped to MPEG2/4 format, or whatever else is around.
CNN is correct, a file format's a file format, as long as it's great quality, small, and my favorite player plays it, it doesn't matter if it's mp3, aac, or stm.
I love VBR too. I use it all the time. If it was a crappy VBR encoder, or a decoder that couldn't handle VBR well, the sound wouldn't be great. If 192 was the max of the VBR, the rest of the song that wasn't 192 would be lower quality.
Lossy compression is great! Correctly used, it gets rid of the cruft, and cuts down on the hdd to sound card bandwidth limitation by milliseconds at least! :)
Economics is 5/8 Psychology and 3/8 Accounting,
You quote Adam Smith as if he were the bible, and I do agree that it is absurd to just disregard the ownership of an object because the government must enforce the ownership. However, his theories of economics is based on the ideas and concepts of his era, during the classical economics age, since his seminal work there has been changes to our system that make a great majority of his theory moot.
So if our generation wishes to view ideas and intellectual property as a public good, then what is the problem? The FS/OS movement shows that a good portion of the elite out there favor this idea, so its feasible for certain general programs to be, or nearly be, free as long as everyone plays along.
Someone else has finally noticed. MP3 is a means, not the end.
For a long while now, there have been "MP3 is dying!" articles, and none of the media has realized the key issue. That being that it's easy.
Look, the RIAA might come up with some format to make money on a per-play basis, or whatever. That's not important. What IS important is that there will always be a free equivalant. You cannot convince me that they can come up with a format that I cannot decode and re-encode into another, free, format. I didn't say it was legal, I didn't say it was ethical. But it's true. MP3 piracy is neither legal nor ethical, but it's giving the record companies a run for their money, isn't it?
MP3 is a file format. It might die, but another free way to get music will replace it. The record companies MUST know this, and they hear the bell tolling. Unless they can adapt, they will die, and that's just all there is to it.
- 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.
The author was saying that a better file format will come along and replace MP3's... I can't remember the last time I downloaded anything that wasn't a ZIP; but there are better formats.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
First off I'd like to say that you aren't always by a high end sound system when you are on your computer. So let's analize your listening options while on your computer.
1. Little tiny-ass radio next to the computer(nice sound there)
2. CD's played through your computer(that makes it very easy to switch between song that would be on other CDs)
3. Download some great MP3's and listen to them however you want whenever you want)
Tough Choices huh!!!
Besides the fact I have a 22gig hard drive and a CD burner at work. Not to mention my place has 3 T-3 Lines coming in. So downloading time isn't even a question. And if you are saying well I don't have the money for one of those, well don't even get started in that direction. Get a DSL line. They aren't that expensive and they can give you some great download times. OK maybe you are even cheaper then that. Then take all of the time that you spend just IMing 40year old men who pretend that they are 12 year old girls, and start downloading some MP3's. So what if they take 15 minutes to download. I'm sure that you are online for much more then 15 minutes at a clip.
Not even a question MP3's are going to be around. (until the MP4's come out that is).
Oh yeah one quick side note. Don't worry Apple will put themselves back onto DeathWatch. They will release an IMac in a color that will bother the hell out of the senior citizens that are buying them and there will be a massive revolt of the elderly again Apple. Trust me, I know these things.
Technology's a battle between companies producing more idiot-proof systems and nature producing bigger and better idiots
I believe that the idea is that it sounds fine to me. What you think of it is irrelevant to me, and to anyone else. If I were interested in laying out enough money to get a speaker system, amp, and CD player, why wouldn't I just go ahead and get one of those 100 CD changers as well instead of taking all my time encoding MP3s? I have to strike a balance between quality and cost, you know...school and life ain't free.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Why would anyone spend the time and money to create a "better" format? Can they patent it and make money? No. There is no reason to make a better one. And without a reason, nothing will change(i.e. MP3 will have total dominance as a digital music format)
.WAV at very high sampling rate. Sure, it takes five to ten times the space of MP3 -- so what? A common HD two years ago was 3 or so MB; these days, it's 10 or 15 MB. In another couple of years, the one reason for using mp3 rather than other, uncompressed, formats -- size -- will become meaningless. If you can stuff 100 hours of CD-quality audio on your disk, why bother stuffing 1000 hrs of sub-CD quality audio?.. there is only so much you can listen to, only so many titles you can actually keep track of.
Here is a better format for you: losslessly-compressed
As I said before, increased storage and bandwdth will make the very reason for using mp3 instead of lossless formats -- size -- a thing of the past. Sure, you will keep your existing mp3 collection -- after all, you cannot restore the tracks to their original quality by converting mp3 back; however, there will be no reason to get the new pieces in mp3.
Think in perspective, dude.
--
--
Victor Danilchenko
I think they've already developed the MP4, but I'm not completely certain.
DES Khaddafi KGB genetic jihad Uzi Rule Psix Qaddafi cryptographic Peking Mossad Legion of Doom Albanian Serbian Saddam
You didn't actually read all of it, including links, did you? Go to that link you posted, http://www.connact.com/~eaw /minidisc/minidisc_faq.html#Q2 and click on "near cd." As of ATRAC 3.5, MiniDisc is as good, if not better than CD quality, and poised to overtake it. And it also cites some blind tests where even audiophiles couldn't tell the difference.
-- atomly
If you want some instances of bands giving away some of their intellectual property and profiting from it, just look at touring bands like Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the late Grateful Dead, etc.
Though I don't really like many of these bands, I do respect the fact that they let people tape their live shows and distribute them freely because it simply spread them further than a proprietary viewpoint would have.
And as for people being lazy, so be it. Most creative people create because they want to. I make music because it makes me happy- I write code because it makes me happy. Why shouldn't I let other people enjoy my music too? Does it make it any less of a creative outlet? Would I feel more fulfilled if I were writing proprietary code or if my soul were owned by a record company? I actually get more enjoyment out of opening up my music and my code and sharing them with the community. Intellectual property is outdated and useless, get over it.
-- atomly
I guess that the author's point is that I should hang on to my 8-tracks rather than convert them to mp3.
The article should have stayed focused on the larger issue, which is the RIAA vs. any recording format it can't put a meter on.
The rest of his article is just worthless filler.
Even the last parapgraph wasn't all that good, it's just that it's the only point in the article that has any thought put into it...
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
I don't doubt that mp3 will be around for a few more years; however the fact of the matter is, after that it will be replaced with something better. That's just how technology works.
The movement behind mp3s will never die, and nobody said it would. And that's what really matters. It's not important what media people use to distribute their music, it's the fact that they can freely distribute their music that's important. Right now the best way to do that is with MP3, but it's not going to be like that forever. Something will come out with is smaller, clearer, and/or freer, and people will use it and be better off because of it.
What's wrong with VBR encoding? I'm working on
:-(
converting my CD's to MP3's, and I'm using
Xing's "-v 75" setting (averages 160kbps). This
to me sounds a lot better than when I did some
CD's at 128kbps straight (non VBR).
I thought the point of VBR was to give you better
sounding files at smaller sizes (because it can
drop down in speed during 'low' points in the song)?
Aaaaahhhh I would hate to get all my CD's done and
then find out I chose the encoding scheme poorly...
-Begin Evan's Dumb Signature.....
rooooar
Everyone and their dog? I live on Long Island, one of the most affluent areas of the country, and ADSL was not even available where I live until this past Christmas, and Cable Modem is still not available (thanks, crapola Cablevision). I have yet to meet anybody who even knows anybody with ADSL or C.M. Definitely not as widespread as you claim.
And as for 256K mp3, isn't the object of MP3 small files? I gave up on mp3 a while ago for songs I really like. I had all of Blizzard of Ozz, all of Dark Side Of The Moon, and I just got sick of the crappy sound. these were encoded at 192. I could tell the difference. I realized the value of MP3 is not in keeping the music for posterity, it's in giving you the ability to listen to a song for a week or a month, and then if you still like it, and it's worth buying, you buy it. At least that's the way I look at it. So I went and bought those two discs and breathed a sigh of relief when I heard them. As long as CDs outperform MP3 to my sensitive eardrums, they will have a customer in me. But I'm not going to shell out my hard-earned dough for crapola, fad songs that I listen to once.
I think what the music industry should do is release 56k encoded mp3s of entire albums so people can listen before buying. If they like it enough, they'll buy it. If not, then not. Plus, you don't need a cable modem for a 56k, 22khz, mono mp3. Of course, fat chance they'll ever do anything like this.
MP3 is not the solution for the world's problems, but I don't think it's dead. Though anybody who thinks it's the last stop on this train is headed in the wrong direction.
-Begin Evan's Dumb Signature.....
rooooar
I agree. I think MP3's should be used for promotion. Bands could put their singles, the stuff you'd hear on radio or MTV, on the web. You get the music for free there anyway, so why not on the Internet too? If you really like the songs, buy the CD. If you only like the one song but think the group otherwise sucks, just keep the song for free instead of listening to some shitty commercial radio station.
Or, you can be like me and DJ a college radio station and get all kinds of free music from unheard of indie artists. It's some of the best stuff out there...
"There are no cool guys in musicals." -- Coach McGuirk
Of course I'm no expert so correct any mistakes I've made...
"There are no cool guys in musicals." -- Coach McGuirk
The news media has absolutely no concept of win-win, win-neutral, neutral-neutral, or big win-smaller win.
If it's not win-lose, or victor-vanquished it's not news.
This is a largely clueless one, to be ignored...
His mention of the RIAA/Diamond case adds nor removes anything. His comments about bandwidth are correct. And I agree that the RIO sucks from a "usability" standpoint. But, so did the first Sony Walkman.
Don't let the title fool you into screaming about the content.
Tim Jones BRUmeister - the keeper of the BRU
The media is getting pretty redicules, the mp3 format is going to be around for quite some time, judging by the popularity it has gained. Sure it has some problems, like copyrights, but it's the format of choice for many users.
Well, I *DO* already have all the South Park episodes on my disk.. at about 40mb apiece. (RV 256bit)
The money probably comes from the manufacturers themselves, not from the gummint, so it's not an official tax. It's a profit sharing plan.
That is, he's not against the way that MP3's allow wide distribution of music as small files. He just doesn't like the sound quality of MP3 files, and thinks this will cause another file format to someday supercede it. He also bitched about the Rio, not because of the RIAA's nonsense arguments about the free market collapsing because of unenforced copyright tariffs, but because he doesn't think it's ergonomic enough. This strikes me as a legitimate beef -- hell, I hate my mouse and would rather have a trackball. I hate the GIF file format because members of a project I worked on had trouble with coding LZW compression; that doesn't mean I'm the sworn enemy of people who publish freely using GIFs.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
if you like your sound without good high and low ranges, which suffer the most with the compression used in mini-disc. Technically, it's the part least distinguishable by the human ear, but it's still not "just as good"
You're absolutely right. However, note that the compatibility problems are absolutely engineered in BY MICROSOFT. If the data's stuck in XLS format, and there's no way to reliably use XLS format without using Excel, well then we're stuck with Excel. Nice position for MS to be in, huh? They DID promise that the Office2000 file formats are going to be open and static.
Care to have a breath holding contest? I'll let you win.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Nobody cares about MP3 for MP3's sake. Everybody cares about MP3 for MP3's utility. When something better (that is, better enough to make converting worth the trouble) comes along, everybody will switch. Fast. We don't have the inertia of having to have assembly lines build machines here. Computer code is MUCH easier to modify.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You say land ownership is would be included, but the state just lets you pretend to own land(at least in the US). Stop paying your property taxes and find out who the state thinks owns the land.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
When the first CDs came out, I used to complain about a very high-frequency "shimmering" noise in the background of all CD music. And I was not the only one. May be a musician is over-sensitive to artifacts - other musicians I knew, also complained. :-)
Now we are all used to it. This is not to justify the lower quality of mp3. Just try to put the sound quality in a perspective with the *means* of mp3. mp3 is a standard that tries to enable new forms of music distribution. Clearly better compression algorithms will come along. Clearly hearing music live will always be more fun. And *that* is the alternative to hearing "low-quality" mp3 music. Complaining that one format produces some more artifacts than another one does not really make sense.
I enjoy hearing mp3 music because there is now a wealth of new exciting music on the net - bands and artists who dont get a chance in the traditional music industry. May be mp3 is over-hyped currently. But obviously it gives music enthusiasts something they really want. Why else would it be so successful?
Lets see mp3 as a start. Rome hasnt been built in one day.
just my 2 pfennig
Compressed audio, like compressed images and movies, will be with us forever. MP3 and other compressed formats will be even MORE important as as we move away from CDs into something like DVD-Audio. (CDs aren't the ultimate in quality - udio professionals have been dying for a 24-bit 96-KhZ discrete surround medium for a while)
It's all a balancing act between hard drive space, RAM, bandwidth and cost. MP3 just happens to fit in the middle of those extremes.
I don't really think that he's anti-anything he's just pointing out that as technology progresses maybe this format will have to progress more.
oh well what caught my eye was when he said pine was a command line email program. last time i cheked pine had a UI...
I have discovered a truly remarkable music-compression algorithm, far superior to mp3, which this margin is too small to contain.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Actually, DVD-Video uses compression, for DVD-Audio, compression would be unnecessary
mp3 reminds me of the jpeg format -- compression isn't lossless, but I can't tell the difference, so I don't care. I said this a month or two ago, but I wrote an mp3-compressed and decompressed track to a CD, and I couldn't tell the two apart, therefore quality isn't an issue.
The other thing is that jpeg didn't seem to be too popular before computers got fast enough to display the format faster relatively quickly. Granted, you're not seeing jpeg-based photo-CD's, but most of the pics out there are in jpeg. Therefore, I don't see why anybody thinks mp3 is doomed.
All we need now is a dvd-based iso9660-reading mp3 player for the car, and a dvd-r for the computer. All of your cd's on one convenient package.
-S
The music recording industry is finally being challenged on a front over which it, to the delight of a lot of unsigned and signed musicians, has little control over.
From the artist's perspective the playing field has become a lot more level. Unsigned artists finally have a way to bypass the greedy ones of the music industry. Until now, they preyed upon new artists' lack of clout by demanding the lion's share of any potential earnings in exchange for hollow promises that they often have little intention to keep.
Until now an artist was lucky to have their music heard outside of their own region by anyone other than the A&R weenies.
The Internet and MP3 are forcing a paradigm shift in the industry, and the big record companies don't like it.
Sooner or later, I'm sure they'll wake up to discover that about the only thing that their legal maneuverings will ever accomplish (other than even more alienation between them and the musician community) is an increased focus on development of a newer, better, cheaply (or freely) available, delivery media that they will have no control over.
there is some precedent here - every tape recorder sold, a percentage goes to some of the big record companies...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
The sound quality issue is not FUD. All else being equal, I can hear the difference between a compressed MP3 and the CD from which I ripped it, as long as I'm using my monitors plugged into the computer.
The compression is even more evident when played through a hi-fi stereo.
Does it matter for the newest Britney Spears crap? Probably not. But there is degradation in the sound quality. That's why they call it "lossy" compression.
darius
darius
One comment on this - for "as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality"
Read "as long as you're not really _anal_ about sound quality.
I have no doubts that as soon as the "better" format appears, a conversion utility will show up to move my 9 gig collection of MP3's over to the new format dujour.
Lotek---
Maybe you're not doing it right. CD-ROM drives aren't perfect, so you should use a program that compensates for drive errors - cdparanoia for example. And the program you use to encode the MP3 and the bit rate also matter. (Most people encode at 128 kbps. I encode my MP3s at 192 kbps.)
"This fetish over file type will crumble when new formats with better compression and improved clarity appear. MP3 is a means, not the end."
.mp3 or .xls or whatever, as long as the file plays the music I want to hear.
That's a good point. Guterman is saying that the MP3 file format itself could be dead in two years. Which is not out of the realm of possibility. He is also saying that online music will continue, unless RIAA wins some major court battles, which is also feasible. But, I doubt RIAA will get its act together enough to make me stop listening to my mp3s. I personally could care less if the extension was
mk
Because we needed a FREE one. MP3 is already free. Next Question.
+&x
Hmm, what do we have in MP3, a widely-used, high-quality (so I'm not an audiophile, sue me), FREE format. Who is going to replace it? Is anyone going to give up something free for something they have to pay for? Does (extreme) quality matter over price? When I can burn a 500 cd collection onto a single DVD what else do I need?
/.er's with >256k connections? At least 50% based on what I read. We are the early adopters not the mass market. The mass market isn't listening to MP3 yet (maybe the 15-24s), but they soon will and then the potential to make money will present itself to those who understand it all.
I can't believe I read posts from people that agreed with this article. Many posted that "something" would come along quickly (within 5 years?) and replace it. What and who would do it? The only reason someone would come up with a new standard would be to make it proprietary, and to make money off it. Does ANYONE want to pay for something they have been getting for free? There is no motivation to replace MP3, none. With my DSL line I can download MP3s faster than I can listen to them, so making better compression isn't an issue(and soon I can burn them to DVDs). MP3 already has mindshare and I would have to say TOTAL MARKET DOMINANCE for digitally transferred music. To quote from the article
Although MP3 files are compressed, they are sized in megabytes, not kilobytes. Until broadband is ubiquitous, MP3 can't fly. It needs to stream so people can get the music immediately, not half an hour after they begin downloading.
To stream? This guy is an idiot. I want to download it and then have it for eternity.
What will widespread broadband take, two more years? What is the percentage of
MP3 will be around for a long time, simple because there will be no reason or motivation (outside the Open Source community, of course) to replace it.
I expect a new mass music paradigm to be built over the next 10-20 years, where (horror of horrors) bands get airplay and sell out shows because they are good and over time, develop a serious following and not because a record industry exec. "discovered" them and marketed the hell out of 'em.
That is all.
+&x
How about a Rio with 512M. How do your 74 minutes stack up now? How about a Rio half it's size now? That's what we'll be seeing in 3-4 years (hopes). The future for MP3 is even brighter than the present.
Does your computer have a MD player? Does your computer play MP3? How many people own computers? How many own MD?
It's really an apple to oranges comparison, but only until the 2nd and 3nd gen. of players come out. Then we'll have MP3 players that have a record button. There go voice recorders. I like MD, but when it comes down to useability (yea it's a word, you know what it means) MP3 and the new players will become dominant. Don't forget that it's a FREE format, digital too.
MP3 long and prosper.
+&x
Why would anyone spend the time and money to create a "better" format? Can they patent it and make money? No. There is no reason to make a better one. And without a reason, nothing will change(i.e. MP3 will have total dominance as a digital music format)
+&x
Something I've never understood about the MD is why Sony didn't push it as a floppy replacement years ago. 150 MB is on a par with several floppy replacements now. I much prefer the enclosed casing of a MD vs. a recordable CD. At $2/100 MB it isn't that far off from a recordable CD either. They could have pushed it as a camera storage medium as well.
could be worse, you could live in the one 4 block section of a large city that doesn't have access to cable modem/ADSL while the rest of the city (including the majority of people you deal with on a daily basis) have access to such things. That is by far worse than just not having any high-bandwith resources. My Dual 56k modems just don't compare to those fancy ADSL lines my friends run on...
true to a point, but even a DVD uses some form of native compression as a medium... don't think your getting away from compression that easily...
I use mp3s alot & I cannot tell the difference on my setup. Just so you know what my setup is here's a brief rundown: Diamond MX300 soundcard connected by gold high-quality connecting cords to a hand-built dolby 5.1 capable amp & finally to a set of fischer stereo speakers. not exactly your average PC speakers...
I've encoded that perfectly. I use Audio Catalyst with a variable bitrate. It sounds great.
people, like the author have missed the point.
it's not the file format that has made mp3 so popular it's the concepts behind it. sure mp3 will eventually give way to a better format but won't change is the underlying concept. the free exchange of info(in this case music) is what is so appealing. many of us get it, many artists get it but people like the author and RIAA have totally missed it.
it's our duty(and privlage) to never let that underlying concept fade away.
-kordic
What I've found is that, by and large, Humanity is Lazy. Less than 10% of us create new content. The other 90% copy it, consume it, or ignore it, but don't contribute to it. So, the heck with them! Since our primary rate of exchange is money, then make the sheep pay for what they yearn for.
If your only goal is to make money, then yes, you will probably want to force people to pay for your work. Not everyone shares your view, however; others value respect and freedom, which are also valid "rates of exchange". As a creator of new content, you may have the power to restrict consumers' access to your work; that does not imply that such restrictions are right.
I'm willing to bet that almost everyone who has anything, doesn't want to share it; and those that have nothing, want everyone who has stuff to be required to share it.
In one sweeping generalization, you have dismissed not only the Free Software/Open Source phenomenon, but the entire basis of the Internet as well. While your statement may be often true for material goods, it completely breaks down when describing information, which may be freely shared without loss (other than perhaps money) to its creator. Yes, MP3 and Linux may utimately be a small part of history, but I would argue that the reign of the RIAA and Micrsoft will be even more ephemeral.
If you want to hoard your talents and restrict your work, and die with more money, to be buried in an unmarked grave next to Joan Baez, well, go ahead.
The author makes what might seem to be good comments, but his two major points stand that:
1. Mp3 quality is bad
2. People don't want to wait for their music
What makes him think that people will suddenly change their mind about either of these things is sort of boggling. People have been dealing with these things since the advent of mp3, and will continue to do so.
Even so, mp3 may not last forever, but digital music is here to stay, as new compression routines will take over and make compressed songs of better quality (if possible).
Bandwidth becomes less and less of an issue as high-speed internet access is becoming available (cabel modems and the various DSLs).
The real end of mp3 could only come with a real purge by the RIAA.
The most interesting part of the article is the attached survey. 94% of people think the music industry will fail to outlaw downloaded music. Whether that is MP3 or not is irrelevant, it means the death of copyright.
Note also that the author is not against MP3, he just dislikes the MP3 player device that he bought. I bet he didn't delete the stash of clips that he downloaded.
I have a fairly new PC (400MHz), and my mp3 player consumes a whopping 3% of the CPU time. Speed's not much of an issue any more.
The compression, though, is a killer. Like jpeg, many of the current encoders lack subtlety (xing is a huge offender here), and hack the sound up much more than necessary. This'll go away eventually.
Finally, if you've ever done sound editing, mp3 to wav to mp3 (...to wav to mp3... repeat ad infinitum) produces absolutely awful sound, even if you've used a good encoder and equipment. While that's not the fault of the medium, it'll result in a lot of crappy sound clips for a while, particularly in rap and other formats with extensive sampling.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
The main reason I dislike MP3 is that all the encoding algorithms are covered by aggressively enforced patents. Anyone can write a decoder but you have to license an encoder from the patent holders (Frauenhofer). This severely limits the format's usefullness as a general purpose sound format. WAV/AU files may suck up space but at least I can manipulate and export them without violating somebody's patent or paying a license fee. MP3 is good for players but little else and should be replaced by a standard with a better license.
Has anyone tried encoding any glass harmonic music lately? You can hear the individual encoding blocks clicking all over the place.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
"I fought the and the won..." (repeat)
Those who are too lazy to innovate or at least keep up with competing technologies have no hope of survival.
The RIAA should just cede (sp?) the battle to MP3, and start convivincing people they need the new 512-bit SuperDuperDuperAudio(tm)(©).
Realistically, if albums could hold many times more than they do now, you wouldn't get any more GOOD music on the album. Most musicians out there just can't make enough good music to fill a DVD's capacity. So what does that mean? Increase the sampling, bandwidth, etc until it takes up so much space that a) today's typical double-album would fill up one side of the disc, and b) it would once again be impractical to store it on a computer's hard drive.
MP3 or its successor is here to stay. You're not going to replace it with something less accessible for all those people who think MP3 is good enough audio quality. If you wanna keep charging $15 for the average disc, you gotta convince me that I'm getting better music on that disc than on MP3.
Stay ahead of the technology curve, and you might just survive.
The worst thing about this whole ordeal whether it be security /w intel and MS. Or whether it be porn or mp3 is that everyone sees potential in the internet to either "own" it, or even regulate it for that matter. I find it really sick when these damn huge companies just because they have alot of money to throw around decide "lets just to play mp3 players" well what about wav files? If everyone had T1 connects and 50+gb of hd space we'd all use wavs. OH NO WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE. I swear some of these stupid industry people who aren't even related to computers need to find something better to throw there billions of corporate dollars into like feeding people in kosovo other than fighting the dying cause because like Durkeim or some guy said "The "criminal" is the most inovative of all" I use criminal very losely in that sentence for this case.
god do corporate suits piss me off.
Um, if I remember the nice tech brochure on DirecTV, the signal is encoded using MPEG technology. Using the S-Vid link to my tv makes the picture look unbelievable.
Linux puts the "O" in "OS"
Reaching 4,000 mp3's on my system i really don't care what the RICA does, what a company does, what is released, what is new or what is old. I'm not going to delete my mp3's becuase mp4 comes out or becuase something better come out. I might convert them to save space but that's about it. And i don't care if you can buy a 24 gig for 200 bucks next year. I'll just buy two and with the space saving of mp4 i'll just grow my collection. And even if there is a cable, asdl, or a T1, i'll just might upload for once. And there is no way in hell i'll ever going to have another cd or tape in my car again once i get my empeg. So you see mp3 arn't going anywhere. I'm so sick of mp3 and internet allways being talked about in the same breath as if you can't have mp3s with out the net. BS. 50% of my collection was copying other people cd's that they left laying around thier houses. And no i didn't have thier permission and i don't care. I returned thier cd's cleaned and bathed.
MarNuke
Silly speculation- what happens to the Rio/WinAMP/MacAMP when Apple incoporates MP3 playback into QuickTime 4 and distributes it for free for both Windows and MacOS?
(sorry, I dunno if QuickTime for Linux is even being considered. Might be worth asking about, tho...).
Silly speculation- what happens to the Rio/WinAMP/MacAMP when Apple incoporates MP3 playback into QuickTime 4 and distributes it for free for both Windows and MacOS?
(sorry, I dunno if QuickTime for Linux is even being considered. Might be worth asking about, tho...).
I'd love to see book and image publishers sue scanner manufacturers. But that makes as much sense as the RIAA suing Diamond over the Rio. Ripping all of my CDs into MP3 format isn't illegal. As a matter of fact, it's perfectly legal, and sanctioned under copyright law. Therefore playing them isn't illegal. Now, does the RIAA really think it can sue companies that help me continue my legal activities? CD quality or not ... who cares ... the 6.4G drive takes up less space than my former wasteland of plastic, jewl-case rack.
BTW - I still have my own CDs (regretfully) & don't distribute my ripped tracks.
Not necessarily. DVD-Video can have PCM audio tracks, unencoded 24-bit, 96Khz (over 3x CD-quality). DVD-Audio will probably be based entirely on DVD's 24/96. However, on my equipment (Panasonic A110 connected with an Interlink Lightspeed 100 optical audio cable to an Onkyo TXDS656, connected to Atlantic Technology's Compact Theater 1 with Monster XP), the difference between a Linear stereo PCM sound track and a Dolby Digital 5.1 sound track is undistinguishable. What we really need is a Dolby Digital 2.0 based music format... Excellent sound quality *and* excellent compression.
Rumor has it Microsoft's MS Audio 4.0 will be announced this week at Internet World. The question is = will it replace MP3. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has actually sampled MS Audio 4.0 and has any comments to this effect.
There is a lot of FUD in that article, and the breathless style seems out of place on CNN.
However, there are some points that I'd like to take issue with. He seems to accept that MP3 is near-CD quality sound, only that it's played through poor equipment (like the Rio, or a pair of tinny computer speakers). This is untrue. MP3 truncates the signal above 16kilohertz, making it unsuitable for jazz, classical, or any other music that has frequent highs. Beyond this, the standard MP3 encoding (128k/s at 44.1kHz) is unsuitable for anything BUT tinny computer speakers. Try this experiment: Find a well recorded CD (I like to use the recent reissue of Kind of Blue), take a song off it and encode it to MP3. Hook a computer with a good sound card up to a high-end stereo and play both the CD and the MP3. The difference is astounding, and the implication is obvious: for anything but standard computer speakers and devices like the Rio, MP3 is inferior. To get anything near "CD quality sound," you need to encode at 256k/s, where the compression ratio is less than half 128, making file sizes approach 10MB.
But this is acceptable for MP3's core audience - college students that have broadband access. Let's face it, there are very few Baby Boomers dowloading music and buying Rios. College students have the time, computers, and access to carry the MP3 movement far, and are generally unaware of or just don't care about the legal implications. Hence, there is already a huge installed base of intelligent users in the 18-24 demographic who will be reluctant to dowload gigabytes of music that they already have in "near-CD quality" (read it: suitable for their purposes) format. What the record companies want is of less importance than what consumers want.
In regard to the 16kHz limitation, that is what I read in an article about the spec in Stereophile a whiles back. If I was wrong, I apologize. As to the Frauenhofer vs Xing, I use Frauenhofer (Xing is certainly inferior) and I can still hear a difference.
As to the professional musician - it's not that the difference is obvious - it's not. But I can hear a difference on my $3,000 system, and that's enough to make me think twice before giving up my CDs.
I've got a good system, THX certified, 5 channels, dual active subs w/ 300 W RMS apiece. My minidiscs sound damn good!
Sure, maybe not quite as good as the CD they were dubbed from, but in an A/B comparison between the original CD and the mini, you've gotta be listening real closely. Let me repeat -- real closely!
Minidisc beats most other home recording gear for fidelity. Make no mistake.
One viagra in the morning before work; I just know I'm gonna be screwed
um, hello? you must be using some terrible ripper to make your mp3s. try www.musicmatch.com
if your cdrom is crappy, that would explain your mp3 problems, but if yours supports digital output (like mine) mp3s are not only cd quality, but cheaper too.
-whatever
Um so your statement is that MP3 sounds
just as good a syour cd player?
Then my advice to you, old boy
is to buy a new amp, speakers and cd player.
Geez.
It doesnt sound as good.
But the the way lots of ppl listen to them
its obvious they dont care.
I mean most SoundCards sound like crap.
(some exceptions do exists)
But hi end audio it aint.
Didn't read the article. Just loved the Apple reference!
itbwtcl
150 megs sounds nice to me. just change the compression algorithm on the rom, eh? Someone must have thought of this and why it should not be or it would. Eh?
d
...
I also think optical recording technology is improving at a faster rate than internet connections are -- meaning that for the forseeable future, a box full of CDs/DVDs/whatever will have a heckofa lot more bandwidth any internet connection you or I can afford (ok, it's got lousy round trip time and packet drop is really expensive -- you still can't beat the bandwidth any internet connection you or I can afford (ok, it's got lousy round trip time and packet drop is really expensive -- you still can't beat the bandwidth!
/usr/share/games/fortune/fortune.dat;
Or as it says in
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
-- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
Check this out...
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Lets look at a few of the arguments the author makes:
1) RIAA will kill MP3.
I doubt this will happen. Should they even manage to shut down the Rio, MP3s on personal machines will still flourish. It is infeasible to sue every single person on the net.
2) Dead as push?
How do you get this? Sounds like FUD to me.
3) Sound quality...
This is my biggest qualm with this article. The sound quality issue is mainly a piece of FUD and requires further analysis.
First of all, I want to state that I don't own a Rio. However, I'm willing to believe that the sound quality is low, and that the software is flimsy, to a Windows user
As a side note, the sound quality may depend more on the headphones. If you use $5 headphones and compare this to a symphony, you are a loser. If you purchase $100 studio headphones, you get a good concert.
4) File size in MB, not KB
Sure, this might be a problem for streaming sound, but the existance of MP3 as a format does not depend on streaming. MP3 *is* a lot more compact than CD audio is. Does that mean CD audio, being 50MB in size, will also die because we don't have the bandwidth? It sure doesn't. The author is surely not looking at the big picture.
With MP3s being just a few MB in size, you can purchase/burn a CDROM with many more tracks than you can using normal CD audio. Why does the author think that this ability is bad? I don't know.
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CNN sure gets a lot of FUD these days. Seems like they will post anything that anyone with deep pockets sends them. shouldn't media *try* to be impartial and not commercially oriented?
-Ben
Reminds me, actually, of a fortune I got the other day.
audiophile, n: Someone who listens to the equipment instead of the music.
Give it a few years and broadcast video will _be_ MPEG, by order of the FCC. Have you ever seen digital television? The quality is _vastly_ better than standard analog television.
I'm not sure what the German standards are going to look like, but 3-4Mbps is the lowest quality of the standard formats for DTV in the US. Basically, you start with something NTSC quality, then compress it... you're sure not going to get anything great that way. US digital channels are going to be 19.2Mbps wide, though, so you can pack 4-6 of those in there... Or you can go to a higher resolution and bitrate and have only one or two multicast (note: this is not the same thing as IP multicasting - I personally think multiplex would be a better word) channels, but a quality that makes NTSC look like the pathetic junk that it is.
I haven't personally seen any of the really high-quality standards (no one's even built the hardware necessary to work with the best quality ones), but with a 720p (that's 720 lines vertically, progressive video, and a 16x9 aspect ratio) picture at a decent bitrate on a 64" screen, you can walk up, stand a foot away from the TV, and it's like looking through a window at something outside... a freshly washed window, at that...
Better formats already exist. The problem isn't with the formats, but with the licensing of same. I can compress a whole cd to a 100k file with no loss, but if I charge too much for it or make the licensing too restrictive or otherwise onerous, noone will touch it.
Even if it's likely that there will be a new format, what is the reasonable probability that the new format will be public domain, or that the licensing terms for the format will be as favorable as MP3?
Just about zero. You have to keep in mind what 'audio compression' really is. It's not so much about compression as about perceptual coding. For example, frequencies below approx. 80 hz are non-directional to the human ear. Therefore, you can save some space by making those frequencies mono instead of stereo. Loud sounds mask quiet ones, so you can skip recording the quiet ones without losing sound quality. It's far more complicated than this in practice, but you get the idea.
The problem is that although the basic concepts have been well understood for several decades, the details that result in the high 'compression' that we see today come from extensive research done by the companies who license these technologies. So in order to ensure a good return on investment, they patent the hell out of everything they can. This might not be a huge problem, but the human ear only works one way. If all the ways to remove information the ear doesn't need/use are patented, then the ability to come up with a useful public domain compression algorithm is gone. And now that it has been shown that there is a large demand for this type of technology, loose licensing is probably a thing of the past as well.
That would imply mp3 and 44.1K CD _is_ serious, which is rather absurd: they aren't remotely serious, just fun and convenient. What's so wrong with that? I'm going to stick with 'as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality'. One doesn't have to be serious all the time...
CDs already ruin sounds like that, so MP3 isn't significantly worse. Either are more or less okay, as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality, and you can also pre-emphasize the input to get as much out of it as you can. For an MP3 this would definitely translate to larger file size at the same bitrate encoding- you'd be basically feeding it more detail, working the decoder like an instrument.
A sample, of sorts- I can do a lot better once I build certain equipment, but that page contains an MP3 excerpt from a long musical piece I recorded.
Go actually read it. The author makes a few points:
1) The Rio doesn't have enough storage
2) "Near CD-Quality" isn't good enough
3) Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth - need more of it
He does, however, make a few bad points:
1) He complains about the poor quality, then complains the file size is too large. Bad bad.
2) Tries to separate a file format from an application.
I don't see MP3 dying this decade. Moreover, I see many formats other than MP3 dying because MP3 killed them - mod, wav, mid. Who needs such well intentioned but obviously limited formats when the nearly perfect sound format MP3 exists? MP3 is an open format that can't be beat.
:)
Nuff said; next question.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
The author makes an excellent arguement. MP3s are an excellent first step into the world of Internet music. However, the author obviously has never downloaded an MP3 encoded at more than 128K. Sound quality at 160K or 192K is much better - even in cheap PC speakers. Now that everyone and their dog (in North America anyway) has a cable modem or DSL line it is increasingly easier to transfer 256K MP3s - which are near CD quality.
Also, many of us have good quality home stereos connected to their computers. We enjoy the MP3 format for what it is. Most of us have an encoder, and those on the Winblows platform enjoy an excellent quality decoder - WinAmp. I've been using MP3s for almost 3 years now, and will continue to enjoy them for years to come. The size and quality of my collection will ensure that. I'm willing to bet that others feel the same.
There will be newer, better audio formats than MP3. However, they will not replace MP3, they will augment it. MP3 created the revolution, but it's up to others to continue the tradition.
Michael.
After reading the article, I had to conclude this will win "FUD article of the year" even though we're only in April.
The author seems to believe MP3 can "go away" or be extended in incompatable ways. This fundamental misunderstanding of what is a semi-open format immediately sounded warnings. Doesn't CNN have technical people all over their company who can proof this crap?
god forbid he reviews Linux. He'd probably declare "they'll be put out of business" or somehow link RedHat to Linux.
Of course, there's always the possibility he is not stupid, but rather he is motivated to write an anti-MP3 FUD story.
It's too bad journalists are not forced to disclose their investments like the politicians are. How can someone be impartial when they have loyalties to the Media, or at least a good chunk of their life savings invested in media stock?
I'm not claiming to know what motivated this aweful story, merely I am publicly speculating what could have gone wrong.
The great thing about all this is time is on our sides; we're NOT a business.. lol!
I encode all my audio files at 192/44, which during lengthy testing was what I found to be the best compression without noticable loss in quality. I tested my MP3's by two methods: linking my Apple PowerMac B&W G3 to the home stereo, and secondly by burning one set of files BACK to CD so I could remove my soundcard and 50 feet of patch cables as a variable. Sounds great!
Admittedly, I store a lot less MP3 at such a high data rate. Oh well. My server is a 20 GB Linux box, and the files are available over my home webserver (primarily used for this purpose since it's not available to the outside world).
On my PC's cheap speakers, I can still tell the difference between 128/44 and the real CD, but above that it's blurred. I really HATE that "pop" the SB cards put before every track, but then again I'm spoiled by the audio in the G3.
Maybe I *am* buying fewer CD's these days, but it's because I'm more informed after having listened to more tracks of a CD due to MP3. I have a lot of CD's I never play because I bought them on the false assumption the rest of the CD was as good as the tracks I heard elsewhere.
I truly hope the artists exploit this technology. There's just NO NEED to force an artist to deliver 8-12 songs when the artist only feels good about 2 or 3. The artist needs more control.
Too bad this article is stale now.
If what you say is true (I'm not doubting you), then your post should be a follow-up article submitted to Slashdot...
We have to expose selective reporting with an agenda.
Could you please enumerate "massive speedup ... in most major cities"?
There's already a post here from someone in Seattle... no cable modem. Hardly anyone in the StL area has cable modems. Most areas in the chicago metro area don't have cable modems. That's three major cities already...
CDs aren't an artifact of the unconnected days... not until we have tons more bandwidth than we have now.
"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" and don't underestimate the bandwidth of your local CD shop.
Most of the areas around where I live (STL), you _can't_ get cable modems or DSL. (Although SWB promises DSL sometime soon.... whatever.) And then figure in all those people who don't live in the city... burbs tend to be spotty and if you get any further out, give up.
Well, actually, most people don't choose Excel,
they're forced to use it because everyone else
is using XLS files. So the file format IS
important - but not its internals, of course,
just the compatibility issue.
MiniDisc is an excellent format, and is still growing. It was a commercial failure, sure. But we're still seeing new professional devices that use minidisc, and the portables are still far cooler than any MP3 portable on the market. Look at the stats...
:)
Rio:
32MB storage (1 hour of shitty audio)
Very expensive removable media
Long battery life
Small size
Immune to physical shocks
Slightly less expensive than MiniDisc player
Does not record
No standard digital audio I/O
MiniDisc:
150MB storage (74 minutes of very good audio).
$10 for 74-minute re-recordable media.
Long battery life.
Small size.
Slightly more expensive than Rio.
ALMOST immune to physical shocks.
Most units can record directly.
Standard S-PDIF audio I/O.
Hardly dead.
A format to store mp3's on minidisc might be cool.
The article should be titled "RIAA lameness deathwatch" since it talks more about the death of the lameasses' attempts to kill MP3 rather than the MP3 dying off. Just look at their poll: "Are the music industry's attempts to stop or supplant Internet music downloads doomed?"
Furthermore, I don't see anything anti-MP3 except the comment that the quality is usually not CD-quality. Although this is true, it's not the format's fault. You can create practically CD-quality MP3s with almost the same compression ratio, provided that you use the right software.
Well.. just my $.02. As a conclusion, here's a quote from the article: "But what of MP3? In the short run, the format is likely to flourish. Its expected inclusion as a native format in the RealPlayer and the support it receives by all but the very top tier in the music industry ensure that the flow of MP3 files onto the Net will remain unchecked."
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He says the Recording Industry folks will fail in their new format, and in suppressing MP3. Then he says the MP3 format is inferior to CDs, and will eventually be replaced by something better. "Don't be fixated on a file format" is a rough paraphrase of his argument.
... just like cassettes. It takes a real quantum leap to totally replace a format. Hey, there are even some people who cling to vinyl records.
As far as I can tell, few to no slashdotters would disagree with these points.
I will say, though, that I found his Excel example ridiculous. He claims people buy Excel because of its features, not because XLS is a universal format. I would say this is most definitely false; the reason people standardize on Microsoft Office is because everyone else uses it, not because it's good or bad. That makes me think MP3s are going to be around forever
D
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For instance, gun control advocates actually argue that because someone might shoot someone else with a handgun, that all handguns should be illegal for citizens to own. We might as well ban any sharp instrument, because I might have a mind to walk out and jam it into someone's eye socket.
The Clinton administration's stance that encryption allows some miniscule percentage of the population to inconvenience law enforcement in their attempts to bug known drug lords simply doesn't justify the danger of exposure of unencrypted data that the rest of us have to put up with, thanks to Cold War thinking.
RIAA doesn't seem to have any problem with me buying a CD, and copying it via a CD-rewritable widget, so that I can have a copy for my car. As long as I don't give the copy to anyone else, they should shut up and go back to counting their royalties.
The author makes a very valid point that, sooner or later, MP3 will be left to twist in the wind for the sake of the Next Big Audio Thing. After all, only the insane among us will fail to admit that our most Holy of Holies, Linux, is a passing thing, too. If you are at least 30 years old, then you may remember, for instance, when Microsoft was going to save us from IBM.
The idea, however, that intellectual property is a nonworkable concept, rubs my Capitalist fur the wrong way. If you want to give away your talents to anyone with a tape recorder, and starve to death, to be buried in an unmarked grave next to Joan Baez, well, go ahead.
What I've found is that, by and large, Humanity is Lazy. Less than 10% of us create new content. The other 90% copy it, consume it, or ignore it, but don't contribute to it. So, the heck with them! Since our primary rate of exchange is money, then make the sheep pay for what they yearn for.
I'm willing to bet that almost everyone who has anything, doesn't want to share it; and those that have nothing, want everyone who has stuff to be required to share it.
"Any property that must be propped up by the State is not property in my book."
This includes a great deal beyond just intellectual property. This would include land ownership, enforcement of contracts, etc. A 'pure' system, would be anarchy. A system where only might makes right. Without government enforcement the system simply would not operate as smoothly as it does. In regards to the intellectual property issues, please do yourself a favor and read some Adam Smith. Without his research our current system today would not be in existance.
Most of Adam Smith's theories still hold today. While it may be true that the US has adopted Keynesian economic policy and a few other ideas, these for the most part leave Smith in place. His arguments for intellectual property still very much hold. I have no objection with a group of people who wish to collaborate to create free software, in fact, I support it. However, I take extreme exception to people who would attempt to abolish all forms of intellectual property. This demonstrates ignorance to me. Atleast if they're going to espouse these ideas, they can demonstrate that they've read some economic texts, not just FSF propaganda. The problem with people that advocate destruction of IP, is that they don't have it all together thought out. I don't have time to get into it, but one of the biggest problems is that there is some considerable need to reward to innovator.
While many geeks may be happy with 'free software', I can't think of any 'free' software that really serves the end users' needs and wants. How does this help people? This of course goes well beyond just software. More significant industries are ones where large investments are required to bring a product to market. Such as the Medical technology industry. The arguments against intellectual property in MedTech may appear to be superficially stronger than it is in software, because people can theoretically be priced out of treatment. Most MedTech markets take millions of dollars to research, more to develop, and more to get through the FDA, not to mention liability issues. There is a great deal of risk involved, you simply need intellectual property, or you will destroy 99% of the MedTech advancements. Without the 'government granted' intellectual property monopoly, the money would never be spent on MedTech research. Not only do the companies need a chance to recoop their direct investment but you need to look at the industry on the larger scale. The fact is that like 1 out of 10 of these ventures fail, those ventures which succeed must pay off a great deal. While many geeks froth at the mouth in the defence of free software, yet they don't contribute to worthy causes such as Aids research. Even if they did, the available research dollars would be a fraction of what they are now.
The RIAA was denied a temporary injunction against Diamond, but the case isn't over, last I heard.
A temporary injuction is awarded based on a quick preliminary injunction if the judge is convinced that a permanent injunction is likely following the trial. (I'm not sure how strongly the judge has to be convinced, but the idea is to prevent additional dammages while the suit is being argued.)
Hence, the RIAA failed to convince the court in their initial briefs and hearing that they would win, so no temporary injunction was issued.
Of course, a temporary injunction or the lack thereof can often persuade people to settle. If that happened here, I missed it.
I can compress a whole cd to a 100k file with no loss
Wanna bet? Let me create 650Mb's of prime numbers and see if you can get it down to 100k with no loss. You may be able to compress "a cd" down to that small, but you can't compress any cd down to that size. If you can then for what should be obvious reasons your brain is worth far too much to risk posting silly comments on slashdot (in case The Man is reading).
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Perhaps there is a use for Intel's SSE, for the average consumer.
Speed ups of MP3 encoding. That should very nicely accelerate the acceptance, growth, and potential of the music format.
However, the point the article made is very good.
Better sound quality is necessary, but I think the fault currently lies in poor/bad encoder implementations in which short cuts and 1/2 degree approximations are used, and a better faster encoder would help immensely. Perhaps even better source data would help too, but we can't actually do much as CDs don't come at 56kHz 32bit sound quality or something...
An alternative to the RIAA would be necessary for the industries involved to embrace such an open and free standard.
I would think, perhaps, that a customizeable CD service might flourish. Download 96kbps songs, which would be acknowledge as lower quality, with 196kbps samples to emphasize the difference, for users to preview, keep, and enjoy.
The same site would also offer the ability to pick and choose any of their songs to be encoded on a CD, at 196kbps, with customizeable source art. Another possibility perhaps is a dual mode CD; one track would contain the mp3s and another the data in CDA format, to be useable in CD players and in PCs. Perhaps they could even offer this on a DVD to utilize 256kpbs quality mp3s, CDA music, and 2 'free' songs in both formats to encourage you to try alternative songs...
One possibility for the mp3 format.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I think Rob's comment was misleading. The article does prophecy the death of MP3, but for a very good reason. The author is not against compressed music format, or even a protection-free such format -- in fact, he sounds like he is all for the idea. What he is saying is that MP3 will die because it will be replaced by another format or similar nature but superior quality.
Think about it in these terms. The bandwidth grows very fast -- think about the discrepancy between the 300-baud modems and ADSL/cable modems. Storage devic capacity grows at astonishing speed as well, I am not even sure which one is growing faster.
What this all means is that we are already now approaching the wide availability of technology to use less space-saving, but higher quality, format, space-wise; we are very close to approaching this point network-bandwidth-wise. The whole reason for using MP3 format -- disk size and bandwidth -- is vanishing. I am merely a poor student, but I have enough free space on my HD to store 10 CDROMs (12GB disks are not that expensive these days); with ADSL and cable modems, and the rollout of InternetII, we are approaching the time when I will be able to download the abovementioned 10 CDs in minutes (another couple of years, tops, and we'll be at least at a point when I can download one CD in minutes).
The time is just about ripe for another, less lossy, format to become popular. MP3's death IS imminent -- simply because the limitations it was designed to overcome, are vanishing in front of our eyes.
--
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Victor Danilchenko
.XLS is NOT a universal format. The only thing that can write and read reliably from it are Microsoft products, and it changes every two years or so. That's a Bad Thing.
Note that Excel has many known bugs importing and exporting other spreadsheet formats...why do you suppose that is? Because Microsoft wants to foster the ignorant end user's dependence on them. That's a Bad Thing too.
Of course file formats aren't important. My DATA is important. I wouldn't care if computers recorded my data on wet clay tablets with a pointy stick as long as it was fast, durable, portable, inexpensive, and reliable (all of which would present substantial engineering challenges for wet clay storage). MP3s (or whatever good fidelity portable digital music format exists this week) ARE going to be around for as long as I have an audio source and a ripper. I have zero loyalty to the MP3 file format...it's here now, it does the job, and there's currently nothing better. Tomorrow is probably going to be quite different.
I think WinAmp is pretty cool, though. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
More like $3 for Minidiscs. Thats the MOST I ever pay.
\
This article is not anti-mp3 by any stretch of the imagination. He is analytically evaluating the commercial possibilities of mp3. I have been an #mp3 op on irc (undernet) for 3 or 4 years now, and I must agree with most of what he said. The Diamond Rio is not for the main stream and mp3.com is not going to make the big bucks. Mp3s will only thrive in certain niche groups. eg: college students and technically literate individuals who have convienient access to illegal mp3 copies, nerds, anti-establishment types, people who want to sample small bands, etc. I'd say the compressed internet distribution method will live on, even if mp3 dies. Like he points out, mp3 is just a means to an end. I don't imagine marginally superior encoding technologies supplanting the existing fringe mp3 user base.
However, mp3s as it stands now it simply can not supplant audio CDs. It needs broad commercial support. It will only make it big if one can go to a certain web site and download(or purchase) just about everything they want. There is nothing technically wrong with the mp3 format, or the current mp3 playback devices. The problem is the distribution method. There is no central place where the uninitiated can go and find what they want, when they want it. While the recording industry will never be able to effectively stamp out the fringe mp3 crowd, as long as it keeps up the pressure, it can make mp3s undesirable for the average user. Thus I would not bet the farm on mp3.com.
I can easily see some alternative format coming into the commercial market like gang busters. While the recording industry is not omnipotent, I think it would be foolish to under estimate their power. Given the fact that mp3s will not take the industry any time soon, it is just a matter of time before something else slips in. The recording industry knows that it needs to find a way to slip its foot in the Internet door. I don't believe it would be too hard for them to do so. With a minimal investment, they could collaborate and setup ONE central online music site on the internet. Put everything they have into that format, and make it readily available. They would probably also have to give the market confidence that they plan on sticking with it. And they'd probably have to make the media cheaper than CDs to encourage growth. But I could see it happening. All they'd need is to find some niche consumer market, and hardware manufacturers would jump in. Hell, with Sony and what not a member of RIAA they'd probably have a model developed before the site is even up.
I think the media defines death of MP3 as the lack of support from any major consumer electronics companies. These companies may manage to institute some alternate RIAA-friendly format for consumer electronics, but they won't stop people from using MP3 in computers or devices from small companies.
I wouldn't really describe this article as being "heavily anti-MP3." He kind of don't worry about the format, worry about the functionality and the freedom associated with it. He even made fun of the RIAA and their pathetic attempts to abolish the Rio and MP3. He simply says that sound quality almost as good as sound quality that was good ten years ago isn't good enough. :) Intellectual property is wrong.
Admittedly, though, he does miss the mark on a few things. Like MP3s don't sound any worse than CDs if encoded properly. And MiniDiscs actually sound better than CDs (don't believe me? Buy one or check out www.minidisc.org)...
And the VCR point was excellent. Stupid RIAA has no vision... And the one thing that bothers me the most about the RIAA is their excuse that they're just looking out "for the artists." As an artist I fully embrace MP3s as a chance to be heard (www.mp3.com/atomly).
Anyway, music isn't something you should pay for anywway
-- atomly
What this article says (quite plainly, I think) is that while the concept of a compressed, readily exchangable digital audio format -- of which MP3 is one embodiment -- is clearly here to stay, notwithstanding the best efforts of the RIAA, kiss this particular embodiment of the concept goodbye the minute a better mousetrap comes along.
Ask yourself: If a new MP3-ish format came along with better sound quality, better compression rates, or -- last but certainly not least -- a public domain algorithm, wouldn't you switch in a heartbeat? If not, why not?
That having been said, here are some real questions to ask the author:
I'd be very interested to hear someone with some knowledge of audio compression theory, audio hardware, etc., speak to these issues. (I'm sure there are other issues I haven't thought of.) The less said about how CNN is trying to crush MP3, however, the better, because that's clearly not the point of the article.