I think they're just trying to include all digital media formats... 'music on computers' used to be synonymous with MP3, and now thanks to a major store like Apple using AAC for example, technically they're not. Really though in the minds of most people they still are;) So I would hardly call the MP3 format a loser this year. I bet there were more MP3 files made and copied in 2003 than ever before...
Of course it doesn't. The articles are actually titled "The Digital Media Winners(/Losers) of 2003" not "MP3 winners". So Slashdot narrows the discussion and confuses people like you. Arg!:/ I think this (how DVD sales are doing great, despite rampant online "movie piracy") could have been a more interesting discussion than the MP3 vs. WMA wars going on below...
hehe, well i can just turn that around and say, why should you use WMA? I'd say it still sounds awful at those really low bitrates... it depends on what you're listening to and what kind of awful you like. Just because a codec does well at low bitrates doesn't necessarily mean it's also better at higher ones. My final point, because this is turning into typical useless argument: don't forget to double blind test and/or pick whichever you like!:)
i wasn't very clear.. i used 'more efficient' to mean only 'better quality at same size' or 'same quality at lower size'.. OGG is more efficent in both these ways.
And at very low bitrates, WMA will sound better than MP3 sure, but personally i never want to listen to music with noticeable artifacts and find LAME preset standard an excellent compromise between size and quality.. if you are still basing your comparison (vs WMA) on older MP3 encoders like Xing or even FhG, please try a recent LAME build, not e.g. some 128kbps MP3 downloaded from a P2P network. This is also a disadvantage of MP3, that there is a huge variation in quality depending on the encoding method.
In the long term, mp3 will fade against better codecs, probably aac/mp4 and their successors, i agree. However, i wanted to say that mp3 is still a great choice for many people making music collections on their computers and portable devices, you shouldn't feel pressured to rush to the latest codec (especially if you're going to transcode from mp3s!). Really, Fraunhoffer (sp.?) did a remarkable job of designing the mp3 spec ten years (that's a long time in computing terms!) ago. Let's not forget the great work done by the LAME team, whose encoder has pushed the limit for size/quality and without which MP3 would be looking (er.. sounding) far more dated. As for AudioCDs as a source for uncompressed music - I think CDs will still be available in 10 or 20 years, older people especially will still want to go into shops and buy a disc... i hope uncompressed or losslessly compressed music is always available, although i could see why the music industry would love to stop it.. but this is a whole area of speculation in itself:)
MP3 was won.. long before WMA appeared. It offers transparency on all but a few special samples at around 200kbps, and with storage getting cheaper, slightly more efficient codecs (Ogg Vorbis, for example) don't offer enough of an advantage for most people to move. I won't touch WMA with a long barge pole.. just because you made the (mistake IMHO) of going over completely to it, doesn't mean anyone else has to. Go read some very informative discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org for specific technical reasons not to use WMA.. other than being from Microsoft etc. Of course, there is a danger that many people will use WMA just because MS make it easy for them to get into it... but why that's a reason to advocate WMA, i can't imagine. It's unlikely MP3 support will be dropped in hardware any time soon I think... i'd be more worried about your sound quality and portability of those WMA files.
... hope you don't have a scene like this in your house on xmas morning;) (sorry, just had to slip this link in somewhere! it's none of my business what you spend your money on, and i agree with you on the value thing).
If i was going to transcode (i wouldn't) i wouldn't do it to 128k blade mp3s (Blade btw, is significantly inferior to LAME). Better to save the AAC stream stripped of drm.. no i'm not providing links for that.
I don't understand why if you're going to do all that you don't just pirate the music via P2P.
No that's not flamebait, that's more 'insightful'. I've seen them (at school when i was younger and enjoyed them) and recently was reminded by clips of them shown as part of BBC's 'Big Read' and i can say with some confidence that most slashdotters would find them embarrasing. Not bad, but very dated for kids who've just seen Pirates of the Caribbean etc. I also reminded how good the books were, so i'm looking forward to the new films!
It should be common sense that a made for TV series from years ago is going to have poor production values relative to today's blockbuster movies.
sorry, here's the homepage of the freedb plugin for foobar. You just drop foo_freedb.dll into your components directory. This is of course only an interface between the freedb and the player. There are, as per link in parent, many others.
Not tried MusicBrainz, but I've just discovered "freedb". available as a plugin for foobar2000, so you can just right click a bunch of songs and choose "get tags". Most albums i've tried were found. Fast. Recommended.
http://www.freedb.org/freedb_aware_apps.php - seems to be well supported aswell.
Does anyone actually have their porn in a database (of some sort)? I'm curious whether the "porn database" is just a joke or... hmm, worth implementing! For all I know, there's already a 'porn-o-base' (tm?) collaborative project on sourcefourge that you're all using - after reading slashdot for a bit nothing would surprise me...
What are the pros and cons to databasing (sp.?) your porn? - except perhaps, reduced chance of getting a girlfriend, and chance of ridicule, obviously...
dude, an HDD is soo not solid state:) heh i know what you mean though... flashmemory based players with no moving parts, and hence, nothing to wear out? lovely:)
they could, of course (hopefully before someone else says it!) be making (ordinary red-book audio) CDs from those downloads... no portably mp3 player required, hehe.:)
is that >4/5 of music downloaders still only listen to that music on their computers - ? When MP3 playing portable cd players (whew, that's long), for example, hardly cost more than one's that don't..
if you install Case's special build, you get out of the box support for (just reading the installer file association box):.FPL.M3U8.M3U.PLS.WAV.AIFF.AIF.IFF.SVX.SND.AU.VOC.CUE.APL.OGG.MPC.MP+.MPP.MP3.MP2.MP4.M4A.AAC.FLAC.FLA.APE.MAC.WV.SHN.OFR.OFS.PAC.SPX.WMA (needs MS libs).AC3.XM.IT.S3M.MOD.MTM.UMX.MDZ.S3Z.ITZ.XMZ.MO3.TFM.SPC.PSF.MINIPSF.PSF2.MINIPSF2.NSF.KSS.GBR.GBS.HES.PCE.AY.CPC.SID.XA.CDA (Audio CD)
is that seriously not enough for you?:p it won't however play video..
Perhaps; that seems to be where it's at. Windows only (hey, like >90% of computer users!), but excellent. Can't comment on XAMP, never heard of it! (probably what most of you are saying about foobar?). I agree with you that Winamp's time is over, but it takes a long time for most people to move on - WA is/was an incredibly well penetrated (can i use the verb like that?) product. It's still synonymous with MP3s and 'computer music' to many people. They might just be using it for as long as it works on their OS.
thanks yes, the windows support is clearly some way behind the 'nix - for a change! - but i'll give KCeasy a go i guess.. if anyone knows a better way to connect to the fasttrack network (with basic search/download support of course) from a WinXP machine without running any Kazaa variant i'd love to hear about it.
doh! yes you're right i need to think about the language more. actually... i've moved everyone to foobar2000, which (apart from looking like a windows app) allows dropping of zip and rar albums into the playlist. of course lots of albums come in.ace which has no support... so i have to "do something clever to those" (convert.ace->.zip with powerarchiver). ok it's not rocket science but it's just the kind of stupid thing that people can do without. i just checked the foobar forum and apparently there's no free code to allow developers to add.ace support. so back to square one, maybe i explain archives.. i mean shopping bags;) but then they've got archives and files and no hard drive space! still trying to think of a simpler way to set this up for people heh:)
"How hard is it to search for a zip/rar of the whole album anyway?"
for non-techies, surprisingly hard. i've been through this with family - they can manage to type a band name into kazaa, but trying to explain archives and decompression, you start to lose them. i think this is a bigger issue than you or I appreciate.
seems to be linux only... is there anything similar for Windows do you know? i would be interested to try it, because i find Kazaa (Lite) a bad system hog.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they're just trying to include all digital media formats... 'music on computers' used to be synonymous with MP3, and now thanks to a major store like Apple using AAC for example, technically they're not. Really though in the minds of most people they still are ;) So I would hardly call the MP3 format a loser this year. I bet there were more MP3 files made and copied in 2003 than ever before...
Of course it doesn't. The articles are actually titled "The Digital Media Winners(/Losers) of 2003" not "MP3 winners". So Slashdot narrows the discussion and confuses people like you. Arg! :/ I think this (how DVD sales are doing great, despite rampant online "movie piracy") could have been a more interesting discussion than the MP3 vs. WMA wars going on below...
hehe, well i can just turn that around and say, why should you use WMA? I'd say it still sounds awful at those really low bitrates... it depends on what you're listening to and what kind of awful you like. Just because a codec does well at low bitrates doesn't necessarily mean it's also better at higher ones. My final point, because this is turning into typical useless argument: don't forget to double blind test and/or pick whichever you like! :)
i wasn't very clear.. i used 'more efficient' to mean only 'better quality at same size' or 'same quality at lower size'.. OGG is more efficent in both these ways. And at very low bitrates, WMA will sound better than MP3 sure, but personally i never want to listen to music with noticeable artifacts and find LAME preset standard an excellent compromise between size and quality.. if you are still basing your comparison (vs WMA) on older MP3 encoders like Xing or even FhG, please try a recent LAME build, not e.g. some 128kbps MP3 downloaded from a P2P network. This is also a disadvantage of MP3, that there is a huge variation in quality depending on the encoding method.
In the long term, mp3 will fade against better codecs, probably aac/mp4 and their successors, i agree. However, i wanted to say that mp3 is still a great choice for many people making music collections on their computers and portable devices, you shouldn't feel pressured to rush to the latest codec (especially if you're going to transcode from mp3s!). Really, Fraunhoffer (sp.?) did a remarkable job of designing the mp3 spec ten years (that's a long time in computing terms!) ago. Let's not forget the great work done by the LAME team, whose encoder has pushed the limit for size/quality and without which MP3 would be looking (er.. sounding) far more dated. As for AudioCDs as a source for uncompressed music - I think CDs will still be available in 10 or 20 years, older people especially will still want to go into shops and buy a disc... i hope uncompressed or losslessly compressed music is always available, although i could see why the music industry would love to stop it.. but this is a whole area of speculation in itself :)
again in the time it took me to compose that, 1000 other /.ers ripped the guy to pieces. sigh. :) Time to take typing lessons?
MP3 was won.. long before WMA appeared. It offers transparency on all but a few special samples at around 200kbps, and with storage getting cheaper, slightly more efficient codecs (Ogg Vorbis, for example) don't offer enough of an advantage for most people to move. I won't touch WMA with a long barge pole.. just because you made the (mistake IMHO) of going over completely to it, doesn't mean anyone else has to. Go read some very informative discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org for specific technical reasons not to use WMA.. other than being from Microsoft etc. Of course, there is a danger that many people will use WMA just because MS make it easy for them to get into it... but why that's a reason to advocate WMA, i can't imagine. It's unlikely MP3 support will be dropped in hardware any time soon I think... i'd be more worried about your sound quality and portability of those WMA files.
... hope you don't have a scene like this in your house on xmas morning ;) (sorry, just had to slip this link in somewhere! it's none of my business what you spend your money on, and i agree with you on the value thing).
I don't understand why if you're going to do all that you don't just pirate the music via P2P.
Then I say: Fine, but don't complain when we say the film sucks!
Can't have it both ways :)
(joke, but at least i'm bringing this back on topic, plus he was making a serious point i think).
Apart from being OT you IMHO missed the point of Kill Bill but i'm not going to go there.. enjoy the Oscars heh :)
It should be common sense that a made for TV series from years ago is going to have poor production values relative to today's blockbuster movies.
sorry, here's the homepage of the freedb plugin for foobar. You just drop foo_freedb.dll into your components directory. This is of course only an interface between the freedb and the player. There are, as per link in parent, many others.
http://www.freedb.org/freedb_aware_apps.php - seems to be well supported aswell.
What are the pros and cons to databasing (sp.?) your porn? - except perhaps, reduced chance of getting a girlfriend, and chance of ridicule, obviously...
Hey, this is the right place to ask ;)
nope, i didn't know that.
dude, an HDD is soo not solid state :) heh i know what you mean though... flashmemory based players with no moving parts, and hence, nothing to wear out? lovely :)
they could, of course (hopefully before someone else says it!) be making (ordinary red-book audio) CDs from those downloads... no portably mp3 player required, hehe. :)
is that >4/5 of music downloaders still only listen to that music on their computers - ? When MP3 playing portable cd players (whew, that's long), for example, hardly cost more than one's that don't..
is that seriously not enough for you? :p it won't however play video..
Perhaps; that seems to be where it's at. Windows only (hey, like >90% of computer users!), but excellent. Can't comment on XAMP, never heard of it! (probably what most of you are saying about foobar?). I agree with you that Winamp's time is over, but it takes a long time for most people to move on - WA is/was an incredibly well penetrated (can i use the verb like that?) product. It's still synonymous with MP3s and 'computer music' to many people. They might just be using it for as long as it works on their OS.
thanks yes, the windows support is clearly some way behind the 'nix - for a change! - but i'll give KCeasy a go i guess.. if anyone knows a better way to connect to the fasttrack network (with basic search/download support of course) from a WinXP machine without running any Kazaa variant i'd love to hear about it.
doh! yes you're right i need to think about the language more. actually... i've moved everyone to foobar2000, which (apart from looking like a windows app) allows dropping of zip and rar albums into the playlist. of course lots of albums come in .ace which has no support... so i have to "do something clever to those" (convert .ace->.zip with powerarchiver). ok it's not rocket science but it's just the kind of stupid thing that people can do without. i just checked the foobar forum and apparently there's no free code to allow developers to add .ace support. so back to square one, maybe i explain archives.. i mean shopping bags ;) but then they've got archives and files and no hard drive space! still trying to think of a simpler way to set this up for people heh :)
for non-techies, surprisingly hard. i've been through this with family - they can manage to type a band name into kazaa, but trying to explain archives and decompression, you start to lose them. i think this is a bigger issue than you or I appreciate.
seems to be linux only... is there anything similar for Windows do you know? i would be interested to try it, because i find Kazaa (Lite) a bad system hog.