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Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 05, 2007 02:53 PM
from the razors-and-razorblades dept.
from the razors-and-razorblades dept.
stivi writes "BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. 'Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.'"
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Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard
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MP3 (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://vtcarter.com/)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. This is likely to change the relative popularity of MP3 and AAC. There are several reasons for this. First, the iTunes store is currently the most popular of the online music services and likely will be the first one taking advantage of this offer. As a result, a lot of MP3 manufacturers are going to be looking to add AAC support to their player to capitalize upon Apple's work and to make transition easy for existing iPod users. This will expand the potential market for AAC files from iPods and Zune, to almost all portable players. With that change, a lot more music services will consider using the AAC format either instead of or in addition to MP3.
Second, right now almost all commercial services require DRM. That means such a service must choose to either use WMA, RealMedia, or roll their own solution. Support for Real is nonexistent among hardware vendors, so they target WMA as the easiest solution. Very few commercial services offer MP3. So how does this event change things? All those WMA offerings are now going to be looking for format for non-DRM'd files that targets the iPod. That rules out WMA. So they are probably going to be choosing AAC or MP3 or both. MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support, but AAC allows for smaller files for the same level of audio quality, saving bandwidth costs and speeding up downloads. Further, record companies will have already converted masters to sampled AAC for Apple, possibly making that a preference from them.
I don't see that MP3 or AAC will immediately dominate for DRM free music sales, but I bet Apple is not the only major store selling AAC downloads by then end of 2008.
AAC is royalty-free (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, AAC is an open standard and is royalty-free - it would cost other manufacturers to add AAC support to their players (as Sony already has - they have added AAC support to some of ther Walkman devices through firmware updates).
Re:AAC is royalty-free (Score:5, Informative)
AAC is NOT a open standard, unless you consider MP4 to be an "open standard", and it is NOT royalty-free. In fact, I'm pretty sure the licensing for hardware players is slightly more than MP3. This is why most portable audio players don't support AAC, because then they would have to pay double licensing fees (one of MP3, one for AAC) and MP3 is vastly more popular than AAC especially overseas.
Why do they include WMA? Because WMA really doesn't have any licensing fees, and it's as much of an "open standard" as AAC. Microsoft will even write code for your player. Hell, if you're big enough they'll even pay you to include WMA (I know they did for Rio). Nowadays they might be entrenched enough that they've stopped doing this but you can see how they got such momentum.
Apple has no serious interest in promoting AAC as an independent codec. AAC/FairPlay is an important "feature" of iPods and licensing it (Jobs has said outright that they will never license Fairplay) would only cut into their lucrative iPod business. It's the same reason they'll never license MacOS.
Ogg and FLAC aren't widely supported, despite being royalty-free, because of lack of popularity. It just isn't worth it to support these formats. I own one of the very few players that does, the Rio Karma. And yeah, I use FLAC a lot.
Re:AAC is royalty-free (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong [microsoft.com].
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.valerieandevi.be/)
AAC is an 'open' industry standard, not requiring licensing or royalties to be paid for streaming or distribution. It's also better in that it requires less space for the same quality, or allows for more quality in the same space, something music sellers really like.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Interesting)
So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.
MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday May 08 2007, @05:37PM)
That's very misleading. mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification, .mp4 refers to the container format of the MPEG-4 specification that's based on .mov and can contain a large number of different video, audio and other streams in a number of different codecs.
So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
This is also misleading, although AAC *is* better. With codecs like these, the only thing that is fixed is the actual bitstream, leaving a lot of leeway to the different encoders. An mp3 encoded with an excellent encoder will be superior to an AAC by a mediocre encoder (e.g. I don't know about Quicktime's aac encodes but its AVC is complete and utter shit, even though AVC is an excellent spec). Also cpu-time constraints can have a serious impact on encoding quality, although that's normally not an issue if you do the encoding on a PC.
One big advantage of AAC are advanced features like 5.1 channels and such. There are hacks to tack on lots of features to mp3 but it lacks the (relatively) clean specs of MPEG-4 and it often lead to all kinds of problems.
the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.
yes, it is. (Good Apple; good EMI too btw, even though it took too long until they saw the light)
MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.
It's not odd. Mp3 is the 800 pound gorilla of music formats and noone can do without it. Apple refused to share its DRM system with anyone (bad Apple), so for most competitors WMA was the easiest way to provide customers the capability to buy music (well, Big-4 music) online, thanks to MS's Played-for-Sure(TM) (until they got the URGE(TM) to squirt(TM) stuff all over the place =) and iirc it's the default spit out by WMP if you tell it to encode something for you. Few non-iPod owners use AAC, so there was no real reason to implement it (similar problem as Vorbis).
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Insightful)
The part that actually matters in this context is that AAC audio is "opener" and "freer" than MP3, which is the previous MPEG perceptual audio encoding standard, and the only other reasonable choice for content producers.
An audio producer can purchase an AAC encoder for say $25 and then use it to encode their work and there are no further fees to pay to the encoder maker and there is no restriction on how the resulting AAC audio files can be sold or used. This is not true with MP3 and certainly not with Windows Media, which both require us to pay a percentage of the sale price of MP3 or WMA files to the encoder maker.
When an audio pro or record company uses MP3 or Windows Media it is like selling a percentage of every song to Fraunhofer or Microsoft.
Windows Media is well known among PC users because Microsoft uses it in their products but it is going nowhere. Microsoft is even less respected in the music industry than they are in the typewriter business where they make all of their profits.
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://code.google.com/p/nmod/)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/)
> selling music from the larger labels.
Which is exactly the only thing new here, but some asshat wanted to spin it pro Apple. If EMI is willing to A) give up DRM and B) allow non-Apple retailers in the deal why would they mandate AAC? No, when Yahoo, Walmart, etc enter the DRM Free game they will be selling whatever format(s) customers demand since they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market.
Of course if EMI and the other labels only allow Apple to sell without DRM then yea, Apple wins.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is anti-Microsoft because as long as the format isn't Window Media, then who cares?
The only reason why AAC is better than MP3 is because it is actually a better format and also I think MP3 has some patent issues.
Microsoft would like their format to become dominate, but hopefully that will not happen because an open format like AAC is better for everyone.
Further .. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.dragonswest.com/ | Last Journal: Monday November 05, @07:35PM)
Microsoft would like their format to become dominate, but hopefully that will not happen because an open format like AAC is better for everyone.
This further underscores why Microsoft should stop fixating on the music/video business and turn their attention back to their core business.
Patent issues (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.neilhancock.co.uk/)
Meanwhile, new bands will continue doing thier promotion via sites like Myspace, and eventually the labels will have to tout themselves to artists, instead of the other way around.
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Interesting)
In my mind, the premium is really for the higher bit rate (256 kbps instead of 128 kbps). The DRM-free status is more of a free perk.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.sadistech.com/ | Last Journal: Monday June 05 2006, @11:55AM)
AAC is not an Apple-only format. Apple just uses it as the default format for iTunes/iPod. Many mp3 players (both portable and software players) play AAC including the venerable Winamp and it *could* be considered the next-gen mp3 due to it's built-in error correction and more robust features (namely more channels and sampling rates). So I'm not sure how that could "help Apple lock up the hardware market."
While it would be great to have DRM-free OGG files, thereby eliminating licensing fees for players and encoders and bringing costs down across the board. Although I'm not totally sure that would be the best idea since I'm not sure how they match AAC in terms of quality vs filesize and next-gen features.
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.outpimp.com/?x=57020 | Last Journal: Wednesday September 12, @09:15PM)
And, unlike mp3, AAC can be taken all the way up to lossless in quality. If they'd sell that to me w/o DRM, I'd be fighting my way to the front of the line to buy music from them.
I don't care if it is FLAC or AAC-lossless, but, if they'd just take the ONE more step to go that far, I'd be happy to do business with them. And since the iPod can already play AAC-lossless...they could easily go for it.
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://flac.sourceforge.net/)
that's not true, aside from compressing more, FLAC decodes significantly faster than ALAC. see http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html [sourceforge.net]
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Because CD-quality songs will overtax today's technology. If you replace the AAC on a typical iPod with a lossless codec you will end up with 1/4 of the song selection and 1/4 of the battery life and if it is a hard disk iPod the hard disk will run all the time and wear out much sooner.
However Apple just announced a trade-in program. You can trade-in your AAC 128 kbit/s plus 30 cents for a 256 kbit/s version of the same song. You lose nothing compared to buying the 256 kbit/s one fresh today. In the future they will obviously upgrade people all the way up to the CD, and then go beyond that.
In music studios it has been common to work at 24-bits for a long time now, and sample rates are up to 192 kHz even in small studios. Since most of the music you bought on CD over the past 10 years is actually a degraded 16-bit copy of the true 24-bit master (it's dithered to lose the extra bits) there is no point in holding up the CD as some sort of ideal. The actual audio content is degraded to fit into your CD player just like audio is degraded in a different way to fit into an iPod.
Even mixing 64 audio channels down to 2 is a way to fit the actual audio content into consumer gear. There are compromises everywhere.
> Why are we taking several steps BACKWARDS in the development
> of digital music?
No, it is not a step backwards. The mistake you're making is that you're defining "audio quality" too narrowly, only looking at specs such as bit depth, sample rate, lossy/lossless encoding, etc. and imagining them in a best case scenario that does not exist in the real world. It is a common mistake. What is always compared is a 16-bit/44.1 kHz raw audio file and a 16-bit/44.1 kHz perceptually encoded audio file, in a music studio or a good listening room, with associated graphs and spectrograms to prove just how much "better" the raw audio file is.
The problem with the above comparison, though, is that no CD's are actually involved, and no CD players. When you put your 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio file onto a CD, right away you have greatly degraded its quality because the bitstream that the CD player sees will not be the same due to the CD's unique and funky volume format and massive error rate. Therefore the CD player will make up the missing bits (so-called error correction) which dramatically degrades audio quality.
What's more, if the CD skips even once during playback you have blown your entire advantage over an iPod. It is gone. The slight improvement in quality that you might have from the CD is gone as soon as it reminds you it is spindles and gears and little whirring parts and lots of 1980's technology. CD's wear out
If you consider other factors like power requirements, you can easily imagine a situation where user A plays their iPod LOUD all day long, enjoying every feature of every song they listen to, while user B is playing their portable CD player at half volume in order to not run out of battery life. The way the human ear works, a loud iPod is better quality audio than a soft CD player no matter what the authoring specs.
Consider a person listening to an iPod with 10,000 songs on it, shuffling away by itself, and they are deeply into the music between their headphones, not having to even lift a finger to change a song or pick a song because it is all playlists, and compare them to another person who is manually shuffling a smaller selection of CD's into and out of a player. Who will perceive the better audio quality during their listening session?
Finally, consider that the iPod did not in fact replace the CD, but rather it replaced the portable and mixable audio cassette. iTunes is two years older than iPod, and iTunes has a CD in
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Informative)
I was there was a -1 Incorrect mod.
aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
I have so many mp3-only players - why on earth would I convert to a diff format when mp3 meets ALL my needs?
now, if all players were firmware upgradable, fine. but the fact is, most are chip based and if there is no
AAC support in the chip, you are SOL.
AAC is a nice idea, but its not 'everywhere'. mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested:
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:4, Informative)
Try listening to classical music sometime, not pop music.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you have to? Any portable music player that matters already supports MP3's and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It's not a one or the other proposition. Most people have ripped their music to MP3, therefore hardware players will support MP3's for the foreseeable future. If the majority of online sales happen in AAC format, which is sure to happen if Apple can convince more labels to drop the DRM since it's already the market leader, then hardware manufacturers will simply add support for AAC in addition to what's already available.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday June 29, @03:09PM)
Not to mention quite a few players support AAC without really going out of their way to bullet point it as a feature.... for example Zune players.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 04 2006, @12:04AM)
First, mp3s cost the online music stores money per song download, whereas AAC does not.
Second, most new players support AAC out of box. Nobody cares about your Rio.
Third, since 80% of mp3 players out there today are iPods (which all support AAC), and most of the rest either support AAC and can be firmware upgraded to support it. Why would the music stores give a crap about supporting the less than 10% of music players that don't do AAC?
Forth, you're not thinking about this from the music stores' points of view. To them, selling DRM'd music costs a certain DRM'd-format-royalty on a per song downloaded basis. Right now, they mostly pay that royalty to Microsoft since they all use WMV, since Microsoft is the only company licensing a DRM'd format. Selling non-DRM'd music makes them free to choose among non-DRM'd formats, and there are a shit ton of them:
WMV: costs money per song, and is only supported by a small number of clients.
MP3: costs money per song as well but is supported by nearly 100% of clients.
AAC: is free and is supported by 90% of current clients and soon to be 100% of future clients. (Even the Zune supports non-DRM'd AAC, and that's saying something.)
Other formats: no format has wide enough support and small enough bandwidth requirements to even be considered.
Which format would you choose?
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.eggytoast.com/)
"# Are there use fees for MPEG-4 Audio?
No. License fees are due on the sale of encoders and/or decoders only. There are no patent license fees due on the distribution of bit-stream encoded in an MPEG-4 Audio format, whether such bit-streams are broadcast, streamed over a network, or provided on physical media.
Alert! Alert! (Score:4, Funny)
Why not MP3? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know AAC is technically superior to MP3, but so was Betamax. Popularity beats technology a lot of the time, especially when the technical advantage is not exactly glaringly obvious.
Either way WMA is going down thought. As it should.
Re:Why not MP3? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://homepage.mac.com/ap_llywelyn/Writings)
Oh, and stop using betamax as a comparison point. Please, just stop it. Betamax lost the format war more because of bad marketing, licensing, and format confusion than because of lockin. Even to the degree that it could be path dependency, such is not a relevant comparison point here since AAC is already a widely adopted standard (not as widely as mp3, I'll grant, but I'll ask one simple question: what percentage of players in the hands of consumers can play AAC? Considering that it includes the iPod, the Zune, the PSP, and a great many phones its probably quite high).
Re:Why not MP3? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.nine-times.org/)
Believe it or not, MP3 actually has more patent issues than AAC at this point. Supposedly, if you run an online store, you have to pay royalties on every song sold to MP3-related patent holders. AFAIK, AACs don't require royalties to be paid per-song. There are also outstanding lawsuits regarding MP3.
So even though it may make sense to you, as a consumer, to stick with mp3, it may not make sense to a business. So if you imagine that MP3 is disqualified, what else is likely to become the defacto standard for online music stores? To answer that, you might want to ask yourself, "Besides MP3, what other formats play on the most popular portable music player?"
Yeah, that pretty much means AAC. It's not that I wouldn't like it to be something that's completely unencumbered by patents, but either way, it's better than dealing with Windows Media files.
check the boxes (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
So selling DRM-free AAC files will dethrone DRM-free MP3 files as the industry standard?
How, exactly?
Re:check the boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. I think the author takes the point too far when he leaps to conclusions of AAC dominance, but I do think that he may have a point about Microsoft. The interesting thing to me is that would be a victory *against* Microsoft but not one *for* any other company in particular. Apple uses AAC, but AAC is open to anybody despite what a lot of people think. For Apple, it is a victory in that they do not have to be beholden to Microsoft in this area. The same is true for nearly every other company but Microsoft.
Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vorbis? FLAC? (Score:5, Funny)
Whats a DAP? Is it like an iPod?
What? (Score:2)
oh well... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have two mp3 players (Score:2)
(http://www.gargoyleslanding.com/)
Reasons Why ACC Will Win (Score:4, Insightful)
- It doesn't suck.
- It sounds better per data byte than MP3 or WMA.
- It's cross-platform (or at least (minus Fairplay) more cross-platform that WMA).
- No Microsoft. Apple may not be a company of saints, but they're at least an order of magnitude less evil than Microsoft.
- And speaking of which, AAC will win because Microsoft knifed their "Plays for Sure" partners in the back with Zune. ("Hey lets piss over major consumer electronics manufacturers to bring out a DOA product that loses us money!")
Crow T. TrollbotWhat happened to OGG (Score:1)
Re:What happened to OGG (Score:5, Informative)
(http://integramod.tripod.com/)
I'm listening to Oggs on my H320 with factory firmware as I type this.
Unfortunately, their newest players don't do Ogg any more. I recommend that you get another good player, the Cowon iAudio X5 or X5L. It has 30GB and plays Oggs.
Perfect Timing (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday August 21 2005, @02:38AM)
If you're not familiar, everyone who licensed the MP3 patents is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Alcatel-Lucent because they co-own the patent rights, but weren't party to all the licensing that was going on before.
One word... (Score:2)
(http://www.namethatgoogle.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 21 2006, @06:55AM)
And now some more words: Yes, it'll dick all over the audio quality, but the reality of it is most people don't care about high fidelity audio. Those that do would rather now download losslessly encoded audio anyway.
My point is it doesn't matter if AAC becomes the de-facto standard, because transcoding it isn't that much of a chore if you need to put said files onto an incompatible player.
DRM was the real barrier, not the file format.
This is only a good thing.... (Score:2)
Until they all do, this isn't the "eureka" moment that people think it is.
May not make much difference (Score:1)
AAC is a good format, but its another "standard" in a crowded field of compressed music file formats. I wish, if chipmakers started supporting more than MP3 or WMA, to support OGG as well as AAC.
Can't anyone actually READ anymore? (Score:2, Informative)
EMI clearly said that music stores could made their own choice as to which digital format to make their catalog available in. WMA, AAC, MP3... It is up to the music store who licenses EMI's catalog to decide what format to make the music available in. Apple has chosen AAC. Frankly, I wish they had gone with MP3 since every music player under the sun supports MP3 playback. But with the way people who license the MP3 codec have been being successfully sued for large amounts of bank lately, I can see why Apple would avoid MP3 if they can.
Nobody buys AAC's for their iPods (Score:2)
(http://www.xpriori.com/ | Last Journal: Friday June 18 2004, @04:18PM)
DRM free mp3s are nicer (Score:2)
I think we might as well just have everything play mp3,ogg (yes, yes thats the container not the codec I know),aac and wma and pick whatever bloody format you want. I think we should just have DAP players compete on price and actual features rather than artificially based on what formats they support (though it'd be fun to have a good DAP that only supported royalty free formats to bring down the price). This way you could get your DRM free music from iTunes, Yahoo, Napster, ZuneStore or EMusic or next big thing and use it on any player you like.
Even better, Allofmp3 allowe(d|s) you to select what bitrate and format you wanted and really that should be standard for any online music store.
Alternatively if they were just selling DRM free music and HAD to pick a format for some reason then I wish they'd just stick to mp3 because its compatible with everything sold thus far (except some Sony players IIRC) and at 256kpbs I (and I suspect most people) cannot hear the difference between the different formats, and I really wish Apple would do this - yes I know AAC is a great standard and if you can decode mp3 you can likely decode AAC but there are more players out there that support mp3 than AAC and I doubt that most of them are going to get a firmware upgrade (maybe w/ Rockbox). I do want DRM free music but my DAP doesn't support AAC and I hate iPods.
Welcome to the next gen (Score:1)
ogg>aac>wmp
Is mp3 still patent encumbered? I get the feeling that aac is in spirit the same as mp3 when it first came out. A codec you have to pay for, but at least it isn't linked to a specific platform.
Riddle me this ... (Score:2)
There seems to be a big difference in the respective marketplace that I can't figure out.
marginalized? (Score:1)
Hallelujah (Score:1)
Yes (Score:2)
(http://www.artboy.org/)
Now that any player can be made compatible with (some, and hopefully in the future all) iTMS tracks, you can bet every music player manufacturer is salivating at the idea of finally getting access to the other 90% of the market!
Here's what's killing WMA (Score:4, Interesting)
What is marginalizing WMA is new releases of WMP that break backwards compatability with older files. See here for a music publisher [theregister.co.uk] where Microsoft WMP 11 broke their sales model.
unless... (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday February 04 2002, @03:31PM)
But of course, that could never happen [com.com], right?
Apparently Microsoft is already responding to this (Score:1)
Opposite effect possible? (Score:2)
(http://www.globalloc.com/ | Last Journal: Friday April 13 2007, @01:12PM)
AAC is the only format that can be DRM-free? (Score:1)
I think the onus lies on Apple, not the others, to adopt support for DRM-free WMA (and other formats) in their players.
Effect on Mac OS? (Score:2)
(http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 07, @06:50PM)
MP3gain equivalent for AAC? (Score:1)
16 Zune Users (Score:2)
"AAC-format supporters include some notable names, including Microsoft's Zune. So come May, the 16 people who own one will be able to buy EMI tracks from iTunes and presumably play them on that device."
Only 16 people own a Zune? I would have guessed at least 25 or so.
Bullshit. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://jargon-file.org/)
Really? So when is Apple going to stop dicking around with Harmony [wikipedia.org] compatibility?
Jobs's statement (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday February 21 2003, @05:17AM)
Yeah, they're looking pretty fucking stupid right now.
Beating Microsoft at their own game (Score:1)
It simply can't happen now. Maybe AAC will displace MP3, I wouldn't mind seeing that happen. . . My intuition is that MP3 and AAC will both be with us for a long time -- but either way, the future belongs to a format that Microsoft doesn't own. Microsoft has been put in an intolerable (from their viewpoint) situation -- one where they are "just another competitor" in the marketplace. That's all the Zune can be now, merely another competitor among several. They can't be The Emperor, which is the only thing they ever want to be.
Obsolete (Score:2)
Still, it seems to me that even if AAC becomes an industry standard people will be playing MP3 files for a long time to come.
It may all be moot (Score:1)
It may all be moot if iTunes/EMI/Everyone else sell the non-DRMed files at a greater price than the DRM-files. I think the number I heard was $1.29USD for DRM-free files and $0.99USD for the FairPlay-ed stuff.
At the $1.29USD price, it is likely cheaper to just order the CD from Amazon or somewhere and convert it to a DRM-free file after you get the disc. I know we live in an "I want it now" society, but a 30% jump in price is likely enough to make more people willing to wait.
Of course, people who know nothing of FairPlay or only have an iPod and a short-sighted view such as, "I'll I will ever buy is an iPod" will go ahead and buy the FairPlay'ed music in much greater quantity than the non-DRM'ed tunes, prompting the recording industry to say, "Gee, DRM presence doesn't really change sales."
I'll be happy to wait it out and see which way all this goes, but until non-DRM'ed music is selling for the same price as DRM lock-in crap is today (or less, of course), I'll consider this trend of DRM-dropping as closer to defeat than victory.
AAC Industry standard? Never! (Score:2)
It's too little, way too fucking late...
DRM Free does not mean Watermark FREE. (Score:1)
Apple does not own AAC (Score:1)
MPEG-4 AAC is already the standard, MS irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't just that AAC has much better audio quality than MP3, which is true. It isn't just that the technology involved is 10 years newer than MP3, which is also true. The main reason that AAC is the standard is that MP3 has a so-called "content tax" and MPEG-4 does not. With MP3 you pay for the encoder, and then you pay again for every file you sell, whether on disc or over the Internet. It is the audio track from a DVD and it is not indie or Internet friendly. It may be a good way to store your CD's on your computer in 1999 but it is not good for replacing the CD for the audio industry. MPEG-4 follows the QuickTime model where you pay only for the encoder and the AAC files you create are your own to do with as you please, similar to CD. This is important not only because the music industry doesn't want to start paying a vig where none existed, but also because there is no system in place to track the vigs, it is not going to happen.
So if you are a content producer and you use AAC instead of MP3, not only does your audio quality improve, but it costs you less money also. It is very, very, very hard to beat an argument that pleases both the music people (higher quality audio) and the business people (keep the vig for yourself).
As for Windows Media
In the music industry, if it doesn't play on an iPod it is not an audio file. PERIOD. The iPod plays all of the standard files plus Microsoft's WAV which is just raw audio, a clone of AIFF. If you take an audio file that plays on the iPod and convert it to something that does not play on the iPod, then you have converted an audio file into a non-audio file. PERIOD. Just because you can burn 10 WMA or Ogg files to a CD-R does not mean you have made an audio CD. Maybe that is impressive in some geek circles but not to music and audio geeks and has no bearing on the music and audio market.
There is nothing at all out there to compete with MPEG-4. The argument that is being made here in this article happened around 2000 or so and it is long over. The fact that it is becoming apparent to people outside the audio industry is the end not the beginning of the process.
Sure. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin
Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe? (Score:2)
This seems to be one of the key points that the author relies on - that AAC somehow gives the advantage to Apple. I really don't understand how this is the case. This may drive iTunes sales, but Apple is more concerned with iPod sales. Since other players will be able to play music purchased on iTunes (I believe the Zune, god forbid, plays AAC), this could in theory hurt iPod sales (though that seems a bit remote).
Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe? (Score:2)
Ogg is all well and good for ripping your own collection but if virtually no-one is selling music in that format it's irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion.
Re:Send a message (Score:2)
Why use iTunes? If the new format is truely DRM-free we can just use eMule instead.
Seriously, do you think the people who were unwilling to buy CDs and convert them to MP3 and thus started to pirate music instead are really going to goto iTunes?
Do you really think that the people who shouted "8 USD an album" are now going to go running to iTunes since they've found a free music outlet? Please.
The vast majority of people who are "boycotting" iTunes are "boycotting" the music industry by making the music industries "inflated prices" as the reason that pirating music is legitimate.
Simply put: it's not going to happen. And this isn't even taking into consideration Apples higher price for the DRM-free music. Sure, you can say it's a better quality format/bit rate but do you think that's going to phase the guys who've been downloading 128-bit MP3s from the net like there is no tomorrow?
If DRM was really the concern all along emusic.com would be an industry giant today.
Re:Send a message (Score:5, Insightful)
If DRM was really the concern all along emusic.com would be an industry giant today
There's the small matter of having any music that 95% of people want to buy too.
Re:Send a message (Score:1)
Non-DRM carrying a 30% markup? Give me a break.
Re:Zune already supports AAC (Score:2)
Re:Dollars and Secrets (Score:2)
Re:MP3 HAS WON (Score:2)
Ummm, most of those "MP3 phones" already support AAC.
But it's somewhat besides the point. Very few people listen to music on their phone or a "music center." They listen on their iPods, even if they have an MP3 playing phone in their other pocket. The phone is for making phone calls and texting. The iPod is for music.
Re:Non-DRM a New Thing? (Score:2)
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