I apologize if this thread has been discussed or if it incites flames. I did do a search but I wasn't satisfied with the results / replies.

What factors determine an audio hardware manufacturer's decision to support a certain audio / video compression format over other options? For example, the MP3 compression format is a very popular choice used by both hardware manufacturers (i.e., Apple, DNNA, Denon, etc.) and software users (i.e, MusicMatch Jukebox Plus, Foobar2000, WinAMP, etc.). As another example, OGG [Vorbis] and FLAC are being supported by DNNA's Rio Karma. For instance, the LYRA Personal Jukebox RD2800/RD2820 supports the MP3pro format. In addition, SONY supports its own ATRAC3 format. In other words, why did so many audio hardware manufacturers decide to back the MP3 format and what will trigger them to put forth the same commitment behind another compression format?

Please feel free to offer your opinions and speculations. Let's try to keep this on point and civilized. Thank you for your input!

Let's try to break it down:

MP3: There-at-the-right-time kind of situation. It was the first contact most of us had with audio compression, and you know what they say about first impressions.

Vorbis and FLAC: Cult-like, grassroots movement that got enough attention from developers. It also help that both are open-source and supposedly patent-free.

ATRAC and WMA: Money, money, money used to try to shove formats down our throats.

AtaqueEG is certainly right.

MP3 is famous because it was the first
WMA is famous because it has all of MS's marketing muscle behind it
Vorbis is becoming famous thanks to the support from the open source community
AAC is becoming famous because it's being marketed as something like MP3v2.

@Welly Wu,
Did you listen to Monty's presentation @ SCALE?
Some very interesting topics related to your question were addressed by him.

Let's see here.....

I can't say how mp3 became popular over other formats. I would venture to say that it sounded much better than other solutions at the time. I can't back this statement up with proof, but I remember hearing RealAudio and finding that it sounded like absolute crap compared to ANY mp3 @ 128 kbps (112 was tolerable, but was definitely noticeably crappier than 128). That's probably what lead to a lot of mp3 misconceptions of today. I still cringe at the thought of having to listen to anything in RA. I also had similar experiences with WMA (and that's why I'm still appalled that anyone would use WMA over mp3 today, even though WMA has gotten a lot better since then).

Ogg Vorbis is popular today for the same reason that Linux is. It's Open Source and it's better than what's conventional. Patent-free is only something that's been interesting since the introduction of AAC (IMHO, of course).

AAC is popular today largely through the efforts of 3 companies: Dolby, Apple, and to a lessor extent, Nero. Since I'm don't care to follow what goes on in the AAC world, I can't tell you much more about it (I'm a pretty big fan of Free and Open Source, but I'll try and but my bias aside).

ATRAC is supported by Sony because of one and only one thing: Minidisc. They're amazingly popular in Japan, where an MD player can fit in a business suit pocket (not an uncommon sight in Tokyo). It also helps to remember that MDs predate mp3 popularity. Putting songs onto a minidisc (which is rewriteable, BTW) is done by recording it in from your other source. It's also interesting to note that nearly all portable CD players in Japan (at least when I lived there 5 years ago) came with Optical-out, presumably for use with an MD recorder, which often had Optical In.

mp3 players haven't killed MDs yet, but I think that in the long term future, MDs will go the way of the Betamax.

I don't know why Flac has gotten so popular, but I'll guess that having a cross platform solution first may have something to do with it.

Hanky:

No, I am too busy with the upcoming final exams period. I will do a search on that thread topic afterwards. Thanks for the reference!

So, do open source / cross-platform audio compression formats (i.e., OGG [Vorbis] and FLAC) have the best chance of gaining wider acceptance and popularity in 2004? Why so or not?

No and Yes.

Ogg Vorbis's competitor is AAC, which has big money and lots of developers on it. That's exactly why almost all mp3 players today can also do WMA. Because a large company paid for it. Hell, AAC has support on the hottest mp3 player today, the iPod, because Apple's footing the bill on it. Ogg Vorbis will never get that kind of money and will only grow in popularity due to its fans.

FLAC is another story. FLAC may very well become more popular, ironically due to Apple. Because of Apple promoting AAC, more and more people are asking what the difference between AAC and mp3. By finding out that difference, they will often discover that mp3 is lossy and the paranoid will look for a lossless solution that's better than just .WAV. Since FLAC has been established on nearly all platforms and has virtually no competition on most of them, the paranoid will most likely end up using FLAC and thus increase it's popularity.

I should stress that the above is just my opinion as a consumer, and I am not an industry expert.

Edit: Clarity

Well, I believe most paranoids will switch back to lossy once they notice lossless is 6-7 times bigger than lossy

Hehe,

Actually Roberto, the paranoids among us will not switch back to lossy-they'll just keep buying bigger hard drives!

I think Napster played an important role in mp3s popularity. By the time mp3 was appearing on the net (l3enc era) there were already free Real 2 and mp2 encoders.

Currently all indicates aac to have a strong posibility, even tho they cheat (modify the specs) over time

The current alternative to it seems to be ogg vorbis, while wma keeps getting forced in the same manner that internet explorer and microsoft office were.

I wonder if the tuning efforts of mpc will be lost over time? Is it doomed to die? are the other formats going to receive a similar tuning? are there still new formats to come?

So, is it entirely conceivable that AAC will become the future successor to MP3 in the next few years? Also, which lossless audio compression format will gain widespread popularity? At the end of the day, aren't all the audio compression formats best utilized on a PC, MAC, Linux, etc. machine?

Not really. There's HE-AAC and the optimisation of ogg vorbis at low bitrates, which means they are targetted for use in portables.

What do you mean by that?

So, if the big guys -- Apple, Microsoft, SONY, etc. -- are promoting different audio compression formats and they are spending heavily to do so, then how / why does any audio compression format gain widespread popularity? In other words, do these big guys with their big wallets dictate which particular audio compression format gains widespread popularity or does the consumer have the final say?

A little bit of both, I would say ...

The big guys (actually some kind of oligopoly) as you call them present a handful of different formats tp zhe public that are prosperous enough for them (mainly from the economic point of view) and can be used over a long period ... the final decision which format "wins" will then be conducted by the customer.

Just an example ... in the HiFi area, ATRAC (Version 4, that is) finally won over PASC although PASC was the better-sounding solution ... the reason for this was that PASC was coupled to an "ancient" hardware format (DCC, that was) based on the old compact cassette

One reason why modern codec support won't make it into hardware devices that easy is the fact that no one of the big guys wants to bet their money on a format that is under steady development by an open-source community (and that is affected by zealotry as well ) and whose licensing/patent issues are still somewhat unclear ...

MP3, on the other hand, is at the end of its development (not talking about L.A.M.E. here) ... it can sound transparent (although higher bitrates are needed), you know who to pay for licensing and nearly everyone can handle the technical specs.

AAC as the more modern encoder concept is on its way to get where MP3 is today .... less flaws compared to MP3, but still steady development.

WMA purely benefits from M$ ... although WMA9 Pro lossy can sound good, too

FLAC already has hardware support (maybe the idea of the Kenwood Car-HiFi HDD Music Box will be continued) so everyone interested in Lossless will keep an eye on that ...

And, remember everyone ... it never have been the most advanced technical solutions which made it into the mass market ... diversity and continuity in codec development might be nice (it keeps this community alive, after all) but the economic point of view dictates all the nasty little compromises when someone is talking straight business ...

If we could find out any chart of portable players distribution (sales) in the world (I speak about players supporting Vorbis Ogg & AAC) we will be able to make some predictions. Did anybody read anywhere some article of that kind?

Most companies don't announce sold units.

I read once at a site about Apple announcing several millions (I don't remember the exact figures) of iPods sold. But it's difficult to define if it's successful thanks to the great design, or the AAC support, or thanks to the iTunes music store...

But AAC compatable users potentionaly may become AAC users, as good as iRiver users may become Ogg Vorbis users.

Right, but we are speaking of potentials here.

For instance, the possibility of converting users is indeed high on iPod, because iTunes incentive users to use AAC instead of MP3.

But does whatever management software iRiver bundles with their players incentive the usage of Vorbis? I think that's another thing to keep in mind, since lazy users won't go after specific Vorbis software, they will just keep ripping albums to MP3 with MusicMatch to use on their iRiver players. (if that's the case)

These are results from a russian site related to music, sound and related soft.
Most people surfing it aren't guru's in using lossy encoders. Many of them use their own command lines with LAME (or not LAME and often CBR). I think most of them are musicians, DJ's, sound engineers e.t.c.

There was poll on that site:
What codec do you prefer to use now?

MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer III) [ 387 ] [62.72%]
OGG (Ogg Vorbis) [ 108 ] [17.50%]
MPC (MusePack) [ 36 ] [5.83%]
AAC/MP4 (MPEG-2/4 AAC) [ 7 ] [1.13%]
WMA (Windows Meida Audio) [ 25 ] [4.05%]
LQT [ 3 ] [0.49%]

(lossless)
FLAC/WavPack/MAC/OptimFrog/.... [ 43 ] [6.97%]
Other [ 8 ] [1.30%]

617 people total participated in the poll.

Of course these data is real for post USSR countries.

My thoughts about iRiver:
I am a happy owner of iRiver CD based portable player for about 1,5 year. I often visit iRivers official site.
1. Ogg Vorbis made and continues making lot of speaks, talks, rumours on iRiver's official site, more than any other codec.
2. In some models iRiver has to throw out WMA support , to fit Ogg Vorbis firmware. Actualy there will be two firmwares MP3+Ogg Vorbis & MP3+WMA. I think iRiver decided to do such anti-MS move after long time studying it's users opinion.
And I don't think they would do so if there has to be less than 15-20% people switching to Ogg Vorbis and there will be no new buyers who buy especially for Ogg Vorbis support.

I think you did not understand what Roberto said.

There is both an "active" and "passive" approach to new formats.

"Active" is when the company is pushing for the adoption of a format. This is done in several ways: setting up a music store in the desired format, releasing ripping/encoding software, talking about how superior your format is to MP3.
This is what Apple does.

"Passive" is when the company rather reacts to what the community asks for. iRiver "adopted" Vorbis because of people's request, but they do absolutely nothing else (and considering that the Vorbis FW is still yet to come, nothing at all) to support it. They don't have a ripping/encoding software that uses Vorbis, but they instead want you yo go and find out WTF is this Vorbis thing. They have never, AFAIK, praised Vorbis in any way. In fact, I don't think they even care.
Ask yourself: which FW would be default if iRiver cared about Vorbis? And which one do you think they will actually ship their players with? I think that people will still be forced to hunt down the special FW if they want Vorbis support. And I don't think this qualifies as promoting a format.

They are still thinking Vorbis is a "niche" format that has no appeal to average users.

Thanks God! Someone understands me

Actually, their most recent hard drive player (iHP-120) supports ogg vorbis out of the box, if I'm not mistaken.

It remains to be seen whether future iMP-550's (mp3 cd) will support vorbis similarly.

AtaqueEG was talking about these players DeMon mentioned that supported either Vorbis or WMA, not both.



Actually, it's not anti-ms at all. An anti-ms move would be removal of WMA support from all their players. The move they made is a matter of choice - they can only support two formats and users want three, so they create two options, and both of them have the most popular format.

Fair enough...assuming the older units are still for sale by the time they actually implement the firmware.

might the lowly imp-150 be getting an ogg upgrade too? it does support WMA so all they'd have to do would be to boot it off for Ogg I'm hoping

It also depends on available memory. Vorbis consumes much more memory than WMA.