Apple, EMI, Miscrosoft and DRM free music....

[baggss]

From BuinsinessWeek.

[toothpaste]

Interesting take on the DRM landscape, I'm sure many of us are watching it very closely. I also read an article recently about mp3 as a format is being deleted by more users than before so maybe these people are using other better formats.

Needless to say, I think it might be time to start ripping my new music in AAC from now on, as is seems it will not be DRM'ed.

[miniMAMF]

Interesting article. I had no idea that many devices other than the iPod plays AAC. My car stereo (JVC) plays mp3 and wma, but no AAC, which sucks because half my library is AAC, and half is mp3. At present I prefer to rip everything as mp3 Lame 1 or 0 just so the files are compatible just about anywhere.

Time will tell, but it would suck big time to have to re-rip your entire library whenever the landscape seems to shift to the dominance of another format.

Or do I just hope that the next car stereo I get will support mp3 and AAC both? Heck, as it is I can plug in my iPod direct to the interface and play AAC's.

[bdb]

Originally Posted by miniMAMF

Interesting article. I had no idea that many devices other than the iPod plays AAC.

"That many"? He only named something like four. The non-DRM iTunes music still won't play on 99-plus percent of the non-iPod players (including car CDs, DVD players, etc). It'll just be easier (and legal) to transcode.

It certainly will give the competition a reason to support AAC - since iTMS music was always restricted before (and nothing else used AAC), there wasn't much need to support it. All the legal issues with MP3 as of late make it more appealing as a standard as well.

From what I understand, AAC is not particularly better than MP3 at that high bitrate, so it doesn't really help users at all. For them, its mostly an extra hassle with transcoding and trying to figure out what does and doesn't support AAC. It was easy before - if it wasn't by Apple, its support of iTMS was zero.

WMA isn't a standard - its proprietary. There may be a "standards war", but it will be AAC vs MP3, as those are the most common standards. Without DRM, there isn't much need for WMA. How much this really impacts Microsoft depends on their profits from licensing vs development costs, which the author didn't mention.

It'll be interesting to see how many users leave their iTunes set to use DRM. If most iTMS music continues to be sold with DRM (perhaps because its cheaper and/or neophytes don't really understand DRM or bitrates), record companies may just decide that people don't mind DRM.

[papayaninja]

Originally Posted by bdb

There may be a "standards war", but it will be AAC vs MP3, as those are the most common standards.

Ogg? It's there, and if music players supported it it would be a bigger format, I think.

Great article, and the author destroyed the guy at the dinner.

[bdb]

Originally Posted by papayaninja

Ogg? It's there, and if music players supported it it would be a bigger format, I think.

Neither of them would see much use if Apple didn't insist on using one of them. Ogg is open-source, isn't it? Not too many businesses want to risk complete dependency on something with no support model.

Great article, and the author destroyed the guy at the dinner.

Yeah, but really, how hard is it to make an idiot look idiotic?

[Macromedia]

As much as I love Ogg, I can't see it becoming popular. There is only a few other DAPs that support AAC. Archos is the only one that comes I can think of. Wish more DAPs supported FLAC too.

[toothpaste]

Flac would be nice aside from the file sizes.

[Macromedia]

Size is irrelevant for me at least. Oh well. One can hope.

[papayaninja]

Originally Posted by bdb

Neither of them would see much use if Apple didn't insist on using one of them. Ogg is open-source, isn't it? Not too many businesses want to risk complete dependency on something with no support model.

Support model as in someone calls and needs help with their Ogg files? There isn't much support needed on the codec end of things as long as the player supports it.

[bdb]

No, support model as in software support (the ones Apple would call if the codec stopped working correctly. With open source, "support" often means you post on an internet newsgroup and hope like hell that someone replies. You really don't want your business relying on a support model like that.