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Cringley predicts Microsoft Audio will triumph
Chris Siegler writes "Cringley's latest pulpit predicts that Microsoft Audio will prevail over Real/IBM in the fight for distribution of music on the web. MS Audio 4.0 encoding results in smaller files than MP3 by half, with the same quality.
Read the full
article over here. " What do you folks think? Yea? RA's installed base is pretty darn huge-but only MS can compete with that.
No it doesn't. I've encoded samples in both. M$ comes out almost 100K fatter than MP3 when encoded on the same bitrate settings. The smaller file size you're seeing in M$ propaganda is referring to their FM Audio codec, which, while not the quality of MP3, still gets some pretty impressive numbers. For them to try to transparently compare their FM Audio codec to "CD" Quality MP3 is sneaky, and very Microsoftian of them.
Here we have a sample 7 minute 27 second song. If you encode using 128kbps on both encoders, MP3 pans out at 7,164,784 while M$ pans out at 7,258,922.
M$'s "32kbps, 44 kHz, stereo" codec (tagged as "FM Audio") smashes the size down to 1.76 MB. The sound is still pretty impressive for that size (remember, this is a 7 minute 27 second song), though it does sound like a low-quality cassette tape recording.
Conclusion: M$ will make new breakthroughs on streaming over low-speed dialup type connections (watch out, RealAudio), but for high quality audio, MP3 is safe for the time being.
I have mp3. Right now.
I have aac. right now.
They work. right now.
Disk is cheap. right now.
Do you see a theme here? :-) My point is that I don't really care what the music industry and microsoft do, and I don't think that many other average digital music consumers will either. The MS format is a little smaller. Whoopee. Small price to pay for a lot more freedom. Like I said, disk is cheap.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Cringely also takes the record company line, hook & sinker, that MP3 will destroy the music industry by stealing royalties from artists. That's nonsense, just as much nonsense as it was in the 1980s when record company execs testified before Congress in an attempt to get blank audio tapes taxed prohibitively so that people wouldn't make copies of their audio tapes and LPs. (Even Congress didn't believe them, and in return, our people in DC accused the record companies of using unnecessarily cheap material to make 'commercial' audio tapes).
MP3 won't kill off anybody anymore than the VCR or the tape deck did. The record companies need to stop dreaming of 78s and start capitalizing on the new technology, whether through value-add or new distribution techniques. I would say that the VCR and audio tape deck did more for their respective industries in terms of increasing sales, rather than decreasing sales, since their introduction. Like Microsoft, the record companies want to control the playing field, even if that means stifling or co-opting (e.g., encoded MP3 files) the playing field.
--Philip
"It's amazing how our industry is strewn with beautiful, dead technology and bitter engineers." --M. Huyck
Any format will need to have strong support and a strong presence in the conventional audio device market.
I would say that this might provide the IBM/Sony system with an advantage, as Sony is a leading vendor or portable and console equipment, but I think they are still more interested in DVD Audio.
On the other hand, MP3 is also dead in the long run. sorry folks, but the selection of artists using MP3 is simply far too weak. Please, no arguments about "the music biz telling me what to like" - that argument is ridiculous. The leading users of MP3 are garage bands who couldn't score a gig playing a bum's funeral.
In other words, its still up for grabs. Whether DVD Audio will win out is the bigger issue.
Its just another Netscape. Microsoft is working against Real rather than with them. And Microsoft will win.
They'll win in the same way, too. Windows 2000 will include IE, Media Player, and native support for all things Microsoft Audio. What average user will bother downloading anything else?
Only the court case could change anything. But does anyone seriously believe that it will?
-- mind over pixel
Check out the official MPEG Committee website at http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/mpeg/ All you ever wanted to know about mpeg there :)
I think that the Microsoft standard will only result in a horrible fracturing of the market, and it ultimately will have a small effect on the average end user. This issue is really pirating. With a unique user ID on ever Microsoft audio file, I doubt many pirates are going to use its products instead of MP3.
In the long run, it will be who can steal the most music which will determine who wins, and not who has the best compression. Lets face it, if you're running an MP3 warzes site now, I doubt that you're going to jump on the MS bandwagon and land yourself in jail really soon...
I think the Melissa virus proves that you could get slammed for using a Microsoft proprietary system.
I think ultimately the real solution will be for some enterprising young matematicians to work out a GPLed equation for compressing audio and video. I think when that happens not only will the market be totally broke, but free software might win a huge battle.
but that's just my little opinion.