Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard 428
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.'"
MP3 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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].
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AAC is NOT a open standard, unless you consider MP4 to be an "open standard", and it is NOT royalty-free.
AAC/Mpeg-4 is an open standard. You can go download it yourself. You're correct, however in that it is not a free standard and you have to pay royalties on hardware that encodes it, but not on each encoding, like MP3 or WMA.
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.
Most portable audio players do support AAC. Heck Apple by themselves make most portable music players. Add to that Sony and MS and a few others and you're really looking at a large chunk of the hardware market.
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.
Umm, WMA does have license fees. Most players pay them because they ar
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Re:MP3 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Other music stores will be selling EMI's songs in mp3 format soon...
Which ones? AFAIK, iTunes is the only one selling the songs outright (vs. subscription services.)
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)
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, Interesting)
Re:MP3 (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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)
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So there's DRM free music being sold by lots of online music stores, and some Average Joe wants to get a music player, but he doesn't know what to get. He
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
that's not true, aside from compressing more, FLAC decodes significantly faster than ALAC. see http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html [sourceforge.net]
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No.
An MPEG-4 movie can contain audio in various codecs. The default for perceptual encoding is AAC. Perceptual encoding is when the encoder throws away data that it thinks the listener won't notice is missing in order to create a file that has about 1/10th the data size of the original. Perceptual encoding is always "lossy" by definition. AAC tops out at 320 kbit/s bitrate just like MP3, however the audio quality is DRAMATICALLY be
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Personally, I doubt you could do a blind test and do better than 50-50 picking 256 AAC vs. uncompressed CDs. Especially since most players are used in gyms, cars, walking, etc., where ambient noise rules and non-monitor quality headphones and/or speakers are the norm.
And as far as that goes, some of us would prefer not to blow half a gig or more per CD on completely uncompressed music. Besides, if you're using a flash-based player, you're going to hav
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No, it really isn't distinguishable. I have very well-trained and experienced audio producer ears and I can't tell the difference unless I actually listen for it, and even then I have to look through a few frequencies before I find something. They are too close to care about in most cases. You would do better to worry about your headphones or speakers which in most cases suck ass.
AAC was designed to
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
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Who is this "the customer", and how the hell do companies actually find out what they demand?
If you believe Microsoft, every change they've ever made to their software is because the customer demanded it. I don't find too many actual customers demanding anything. The ones that make demands generally are the ones that are either, 1) not buying the product the demand is being made over, or 2) are suc
Re:MP3 (Score:4, Informative)
I was there was a -1 Incorrect mod.
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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.
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)
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Especially considering AAC doesn't require royalty payments.
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested [wikipedia.org]:
Licensing and patents
In contrast with the MP3 format, which requires royalty payments on distributed content, no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format. This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format for distributing content, particularly streaming content (such as Internet radio).
However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs. It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement.
AAC requires a patent license, and thus uses proprietary technology. But contrary to popular belief, it is not the property of a single company, having been developed in a standards-making organization.
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested:
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I personally never even thought of purchasing music from iTunes until the deal with EMI was announced. Now, I'm looking forward to it. This is what a lot of people have asked for, and now we have started on the road to get there.
Also worth mentioning:
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:4, Informative)
Try listening to classical music sometime, not pop music.
You're not smelling the market opportunity! (Score:2)
Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
"# 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.
AAC only licensed for the hardware (Score:3, Informative)
MP3 has license fees for distribution, which means that the music stores pay a fee as well as the device manufacturer. With AAC the device manufacturer pays, but the music store does not.
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That is what I said about the 5G iPod. The 4G iPods were everywhere, how will the 5G iPods ever capture the market share that 4G iPods have? Turns out the 5G iPod is a NEWER VERSION of the 4G iPod
So it was when MP1 gave way to MP2, gave way to MP3 (delightfully unofficially), gave way to MP4 (AAC). The decoding chips in the hardware you
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.
edit (Score:2)
Dammit.
Re:Why not MP3? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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ogg doesn't require floating point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not MP3? (Score:5, Informative)
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)
So selling DRM-free AAC files will dethrone DRM-free MP3 files as the industry standard?
How, exactly?
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Exactly. The only thing this might "force" other stores to do is sell DRM-free music (which is a good thing). I don't really think there is much else you can assume about this change, except for an increase of iTunes sales for Apple (though that might not even happen).
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.
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Ie, if you rip a CD track to a 256 kbs AAC and re-encode it as 128 kbs AAC, how bad would that sound compared to a direct rip of CD into 128 kbs AAC?
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?
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Why does everyone assume they know what AAC is? (Score:3, Informative)
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE.
It's an open standard, not owned by Apple, it's free to distribute content in AAC (not sure about fees for putting AAC support in a player), and there are plenty of AAC compatible players out there. The only thing nefarious about it was Apple's DRM, and hopefully that is on the way out.
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I'm sure someone could turn up later with patent claims against AAC, too. But by using a patented codec and making the royalty payments, the large corporations g
What? (Score:2)
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2) AAC offers technical advantages to MP3s that are not insignificant (not to mention a saner tagging scheme).
3) Most players currently in the hands of the market (which is dominated by the iPod) play AACs and not ogg.
oh well... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have two mp3 players (Score:2)
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I have two mp3 players neither one play AAC... how will this become the standard?
Statistically speaking, for each of your players, there are 7-8 players out there that do support AAC. You're in a minority. Since selling AAC files will make retailers more money (30% decreased bandwidth fees) I'm guessing a lot of retailers will start offering them as an option, if not as the only format for sale. Since most retailers will be offering them most hardware manufacturers will most likely soon start supporting AAC, thus your next player probably will support it. Even if hardware vendors don'
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. TrollbotRe:"An order of magnitude less evil than Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
In real dollars, a single track for $1.29 is a steal over the per-track price of a single from nearly any point in the history of music sales. For reference, $1.29 today is about $2.50 in 1990 dollars. And that's not even counting the convenience of shopping from home or the availabili
Perfect Timing (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
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Re: Player Investments (Score:2)
I'm classically in the middle of the market that doesn't care about quality for 75% of my collection. You're right that with the DRM stripped, it won't be long before we should be able to just convert an entire folder's worth of AAC into mp3 that legacy mp3 players can use. I made quite a study of Ultra Low End 3rd party players, one as cheap as $10! Plus, my watch doesn't play AAC files.
This is only a good thing.... (Score:2)
Until they all d
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 b
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)
But of course, that could never happen [com.com], right?
Bullshit. (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? So when is Apple going to stop dicking around with Harmony [wikipedia.org] compatibility?
Jobs's statement (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, they're looking pretty fucking stupid right now.
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.
Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin
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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
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This may drive iTunes sales
I don't see why. Part of what drives iTunes sales is that it's the only online store that can supply music to your iPod (except those that sell MP3s already). Therefore, if everyone starts selling DRM-free AACs, it's unlikely to drive more business to iTunes. Also, it means that pretty much all new MP3 players will support AAC (if it's really so common-place), and therefore it won't necessarily boost iPod sales.
In the end, this wouldn't help Apple except by reputation (by hav
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Part of what drives iTunes sales is that it's the only online store that can supply music to your iPod
No, people use the iTunes store because it's a really good store that works well. The other stores suck - they are horrible to use.
Therefore, if everyone starts selling DRM-free AACs, it's unlikely to drive more business to iTunes.
I think it will. Seeing as the other stores suck - people who use other players can now start buying their songs from iTunes, rather than just ripping from CD as they do now. After all, nobody uses the other online stores, even though they do support the other players.
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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.
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Re:What happened to OGG (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
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.
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Market share for online music retailers:
Apple iTunes: 67%
eMusic: 11%
Real Rhapsody: 4%
Napster: 4%
MSN Music: 3%
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The OEMs who make generic MP3/WMA players are not likely to pick up a new chip to decode AAC files unless there is high demand for it, because it will noticably affect cost.
Do you have a source to back that up or is it just a guess on your part. AAC is part of the mpeg standard and a lot of chipsets have support for that. I'd be interested to know if chips that support AAC are significantly more expensive than ones that don't.
With disk space being relatively cheap, the size difference of a MP3 file ripped in alt-preset-standard or alt-preset-extreme versus the size of a similar bitrate file in another format is less of an issue.
A lot of people can't fit their collection on their player and if the standard quality of files goes up to match Apple's offering, that effect will double. Also, it is not just disk space that is an issue. File size affects the cost of bandwidth to d