MP3 no more

It appears to me that MP3 is about to bow out and leave the stage. For the past five years or so it has been the true standard for digital music. Most of us knew that early on, way before Napster. The rest of the world was slow to catch on for some reason. But once Napster became national and interntional news people got the message. As with any marketplace, and especially the internet, wherever people gather there is money to be made.

Which is why MP3 will not last much longer for the preNapsterites.

Music of this format, that for a decade has been the only medium for internet music, will soon be sold at inflated prices and deflated quality and will be labled product. That won't sit well with the people who made MP3 popular to begin with. MP3 is to be used as a marketing tool for promoting hard copy music sales. I guess they think they can sell a sample of limited quality and entice consumers to spend a little more, and it's likely that a few people will. But some have pointed out that charging people to listen to advertizing does not make a good business model. In an era of internet advertizing when people actually get paid to view and hear commercials Pay Napster and the other music nets are not likely to turn much of a profit.

Comercialization does not necessarily destroy everything it touches, but in this case where MP3 has gone beyond free entertainment and into the realm of free information it will not easily be tamed by the media giants of cable TV and radio. Interestingly the companies that enable worldwide communication often find themselves at odds with the companies that depend on worldwide communication. They create an infrastructure for the media middlemen to use and then allow the consumers to communicate directly, indeed that is the master design of the World Wide Web. Not surprisingly the resellers of information cannot compete with individuals who freely distribute it.

So to be competetive they must not fall behind the times, they must integrate MP3 technology and use it themselves. For all its glits and glamour MP3 is not all it's cracked up to be. It really doesn't matter what format is used to transmit music around the world; any time something better arrives it will replace MP3. Non-lossy compressors and broadband technology will become cheaper and more numerous, making MP3 cliché if not obsolete. But people will not change their preferences until the music peddlers with their tired old laws make MP3 inconvient for the average person. By that time the computer geeks and audiophiles will already have a solution to fall back onto.

MP3 is part of the internet lexicon now, and its meaning is sure to change. For now it is a bridge between technology and pop culture, but as the times change MP3 will be called The End of the Begining. Free information is as addictive as any narcotic and MP3 is definitely a gateway drug. So when MP3 goes the way of the dodo bird it will not be forgotten.

[schmooky007]

For all its glits and glamour MP3 is not all it's cracked up to be. It really doesn't matter what format is used to transmit music around the world; any time something better arrives it will replace MP3. Non-lossy compressors and broadband technology will become cheaper and more numerous, making MP3 cliché if not obsolete.

i believe that too but dont expect this to take place any time soon. truth is if you're not an audiophile you find that mp3 performs quite well

[mike4947]

well there's MP3-pro which supposedly at 64k equals a 128k MP3. Half the file size. I haven't heard any yet, but there's many users who have and swear by it. I'm waiting for a file I can swap into one of my file rippers to try it.

[zombywoof]

As for mp3 files, I don't see them going away too quickly simply because there is so much of them out there and has become a format standard on the internet.

I have tried mp3pro and listened to files at the 64k rate and what I get from it is it sounds better than an mp3 encoded at 64k but I don't think it quite equals an mp3 encoded at 128k. Maybe its the RCA player but I cant say for sure.

I would like to hear some mp3pro files that are encoded at 128kb and higher to make comparisons there. This would be a good test to see if without increasing the filesize mp3pro produces the music with less loss of quality of an mp3 file.

Now I am not an audiophile per se, but I can tell a poorly encoded mp3 vs a well encoded one, but any mp3 format music I have burnt on to an audio cd has sounded very good and I dont really hear any or much loss of quality. Note: Anything I have burnt on to cd has been an encoded mp3 at a bitrate of 192 or better.

[Catbert13]

Well I expect MP3s to become what MIDI files are today.

What about this stuff http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/ I have already started to encode with it and download files. Filesize is close to Mp3 and quality is as good if not better.

I'm not really exicted about MP3pro. It would probably sound really good at high bitrates, but it's virgin technology, untested theory. As it develops it will be competetive, but it will take time to grow to the Classic MP3's popularity. By that time internet music will not be available in MP3pro format without a subsciption because the encoder will not be released publicly.

Originally posted by Catbert13
Well I expect MP3s to become what MIDI files are today.

Originally posted by Mazer
For all its glits and glamour MP3 is not all it's cracked up to be. It really doesn't matter what format is used to transmit music around the world; any time something better arrives it will replace MP3. Non-lossy compressors and broadband technology will become cheaper and more numerous, making MP3 cliché if not obsolete.

MP3 is just another fad when it comes down to it. It's trendy and people throw the word around like they're showing off their hairdo and their clothes. It's functional and it performs well, but just like the Apple II, it'll eventually lose its appeal.

From the Ogg Vorbis FAQ
Why Vorbis? MP3 is open.
No, it isn't. Fraunhofer (and other MPEG consortium members) claim that it is impossible to create an mp3 encoder without infringing on their patents. To create/use an encoder, the law says one must pay royalties to Fraunhofer and other MPEG Consortium members. In other words, you can play what you like, but you're not allowed to contribute without paying the ante. MPEG-4, destined to be the next generation of internet audio, is even more tightly controlled.
More worrisome is the prospect of behind the scenes alliances between MPEG (which dominates the audio technology) with the RIAA/music industry which seeks to control all distribution.

Do you really want a corporate alliance controlling what music you can listen to and when? Remember that the RIAA is working hard to make players that play anything other than officially sanctioned streams illegal.

Why Vorbis? We already have MP3 and don't want to change.
I'll be blunt.
If you didn't pay for that copy of mp3enc, you're [technically] a thief. Strictly speaking, LAME users are supposed to pay royalties to FhG too. Of course, MPEG members tend not to go after individuals; that would be nearly impossible.

Going after businesses is an entirely different thing. If you're running a business, you either pay the arbitrary royalties (FhG decides this on a case-by-case basis, and generally protects 'exclusives' it has arranged with other companies) or you don't stream. There are no low cost, unrestricted, legal streaming solutions for small business. The alternatives to MP3 aren't cheap either.

That all true. If you go to the FHg site you'll see that a lot of effort is going into security, watermarking, and copyright protection in the development of MP3 technology. The technology, the law, and the companies with their dreams of monopoly will ensure that only certain companies will be allowed to distribute MP3's. Ogg Vorbis is a good alternative; in time people will have as many ogg's as MP3's in their libraries. But the crossover from lossy to non-lossy formats will send them both to the scrap heap.

This decade will mark the begining of a bandwidth explosion. And you need to understand this to put internet music into context. With analog modems music takes five or six times more time to download than to listen to it. But now the slowest cable and dsl lines can download in real time. Eventually every PC in the world will be able to upload and download multiple music streams simultaneously. Hard drives are getting bigger exponentially. Everyone is going to get their terabite drives within the next ten years. In decades to come people won't even compress their music. Will MP3 even matter at that point?

Well for now it's just a dream, but it's going to happen in time.

[I'll_Do_It_For_A_Dollar]

Originally posted by Mazer


This decade will mark the begining of a bandwidth explosion. And you need to understand this to put internet music into context. With analog modems music takes five or six times more time to download than to listen to it. But now the slowest cable and dsl lines can download in real time. Eventually every PC in the world will be able to upload and download multiple music streams simultaneously. Hard drives are getting bigger exponentially. Everyone is going to get their terabite drives within the next ten years. In decades to come people won't even compress their music. Will MP3 even matter at that point?

Well for now it's just a dream, but it's going to happen in time.

geez i remember back when i got my first pc.. it had like a one or two gig hd.. now we're talking terabites, i didn't have windows.. just ms dos... none of that fancy stuff we have now, let alone any type of music file!
technology sure changes super quickly... you don't even realise the changes until they are pointed out....