I was just wondering what you guys think will completely replace mp3's in the future. Right now it seems mp3's are more popular then ever, and are supported by many hardware/software players, as well as operating systems. While other standards might be superior in compression, and sound, none of them has anywhere near the support of mp3's which is why I don't see mp3's being replaced for a long time, and not by any of the current formats.

Nothing will replace mp3 completely, ever. Mp3 is currently a de facto standard. So were vinyls in the sixties/seventies/eighties and vinyls are still produced. I believe that mp3 will be used to some extent till 2020s.
However, they are powerful competitors. Aac has gained broad industry support (dvb, dvd audio). Vorbis is gaining user base and its developement is still going strong. And eventually more and more people shall migrate to lossless codecs.
All in all, I don't believe that there will ever again be a codec which everybody uses like it has been with mp3.

just like latexxx said, if there is a successor, i think AAC is it.

Yeah I try others but somehow keep comming back to good old mp3 . It seems like every time I use something different there's always some new device that wont play it.

In my experience it seems that some of the other formats are definitely a bit better if you're going for really low bit rates (and consequently allowing for loss of tranparency but still hoping that it doesn't actually sound bad). Once you get to high enough bit rates for near tranparency then there doesn't seem to be that bigger difference between the different formats.

I was converting my mp3's, and other formats into FLAC, but there is no point in converting to FLAC unless your ripping directly from a CD. I just don't see other formats as having the staying power, and dominace mp3 has in support in the long-term.

What happens when you want to convert your whole collection years from now, and it's in a lesser known, but better technically better format (mpc, ogg, etc for example), and you have a hell of time trying to find support for it on newer operating systems, and players? It's pretty much a given that mp3's wil be supported by future OS's, and players in the future.

I think all the formats are important, but when it comes down to support, and long-term life mp3 wins hands down, and to me that is the most important aspects of a music format. It would suck really bad if you had to convert your music collection to a new format every couple of years, at least with mp3's it might be a few decades before that has to happen.

well... MPC.not too sure about that!
I think OGG Vorbis will last, it might not win AAC, but NON-Microsoft computer games developer are using Ogg Vorbis to encode tracks for their games!

There is nothing much to worry about mp3, even the much older mpeg layer-2/layer-1 are still supported by software players!

No one seem to mention the second de facto format after mp3 huh?
huha, M$ WMA...yes WMA, everything after mp3 is WMA, M$ is very clever in marketing their software try to dominate anything related to software and multimedia!!!!!!!

Terrible M$ is gonna push their WMV9 video in HD-DVD....
WMV9 is in their list of video compression?
Actually I hope BluRay win this war....coz BluRay intended to support MPEG-2 and AVC only.....BluRay is M$ free


QUOTED from DOOM9

I think the "wav" format is up there with mp3 in terms of support.

well let's not forget about apple and their AAC format. right now apple has the lead in portable audio players and is going strong with their online music store. if apple stay strong in both areas, they will gain more support for AAC and they will still be supporting AAC years down the road. outside of apple, the mp3 and wma formats will be dominate though.

I don't see mp3 going anywhere anytime soon. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's bad and it reaches transparency at decent bitrates. I see Vorbis and AAC having support in the future. Musepack is iffy. I don't like WMA much but as long as Microsoft is around it will have support.

wma will stay not only cuz of ms money but also cuz flexible lossless codec. but aac will be the next one cuz apple money, good marketing, format for popular 'apple music store', and good quality at low bitrates.

I think (unfortunately) wma is more likely to succeed mp3 than other formats, given the marketing of Microsoft (and their 64 kbps wma = 128 kbps mp3 quality claim). It seems that nearly all players that support mp3 also support wma. I find it utterly surprising that wma has made it even into my Samsung DVD player. wma comes with every windows box as well and I've heard the Taiwanese FVD standard even uses wma (correct me on that one).

I think it depends on what bitrate...if we are talking about low bitrates such as 128kbps AAC will make the race. However, when it comes to nearly CD-Quality, LAME --preset standard will remain standard (and space, bandwidth or traffic is not that much of a problem anymore).

With new formats you will safe only very little bitrate-wise (on high bitrates) and it is questionable if a setting will be ever so heavily tested and tweaked as --preset standard since space is not an issue anymore. Next year, there will be 80GB iPods...so if you safe 15kbps or so on a setting similar to --preset standard it won't buy you anything.

However, what remains a big issue though is battery life on portable players. A 160kbps AAC file gives you literely the same battery life on an iPod like a --preset standard encoded mp3 file. On a flash-based player the difference will be even more drastic since there is no access to a hardrive anymore so the bitrate of a file won't matter but rather it's CPU power needed to decode the file...

I'm not sure if AAC has enough potential to achieve --preset standard quality @ 160kbps and therefore give an iPod equal battery life over --preset standard...it might be possible with a vbr mode and a lot of tweaking...however, a vbr implementation (or more tweaking bitrate wise) might need even more CPU power.



Another question is if someone will actually use AAC's full potential. I mean, FhG mp3's compared to LAME are just crap...so we'd need a LAME tweak for AAC However, no company could afford to put that much work into a codec...so unless AAC becomes open source and someone is still willing to invest a lot of time like seen in LAME this won't happen. Video encoding has become far more interesting for most people since there is still a lot of room for (fast) improvements...

--preset standard will eventually be replaced by lossless. However, this is going to take a long while...the space won't be a problem (many people could store all their music as lossless already on current iPod models), however, the main issue remains: battery life. I'm not sure if there are other lossless formats than Apple Lossless that won't need that much CPU speed. They might come up with better batteries and less power consuming storage devices and add other tweaks....but this is not going to happen in the next year or two

And there is another huge advantage over all the other formats: no matter where you go mp3 is supported. All mp3 players play mp3files...pretty much every computer plays mp3's without installing any extra codecs...so I don't have to worry about my next mp3 player and if it will be still able to play the format I chose.

For instance, people that buy music from iTunes are pretty much stuck with an iPod...this will only change if Apple is forced to allow competitors to support their AAC files...this is a big issue since the format is lossly...if it was lossless it wouln't matter that much but would still be a pain if one had to re-encode to another lossless format when he/she buys a new mp3 player...

These ipods and flash players don't need APS. I personally prefer lame V5 and would never use more than V4. With stock 1cent earbuds drop that to V7. We now have some space for lossless , better lossy codecs than mp3 so I don't see why APS is a relevant now as it was years ago. I'd like to see most tuning go to the low/mid bitrates. Near transparency at these bitrates + long battery life would be ideal.

I agree, APS is overkill on portable players, but I use it for other pruposes as well and don't to re-encode and as you've said, there is enough space so why not

However, I don't get your point. On the one hand you prefer LAME V5, but then you want to use lossless?! What a waste would that be (especially in terms of battery life)...this also leeds to another question. How do you define 'better lossy codecs'? I mean, didn't you just say that there would be even enough space for lossless and that you use LAME V5...since everything else is a waste? So what would you need a 'better' lossy codec for or a lossly codec in general? I'm still guessing about the term 'better' though...

Another important point for mp3 is the huge sharing community based on that format.
mp3 reaching a level of transparency. Unless a new codec really improve the size of the compressed file (say transparency @ 64), I don't see why bother. The size is not a problem for the future knowing that the capacity is multiply by 2 each year. While we stay in stereo I think mp3 is here to stay.
If we talk about multi-channel, this might lead to a new widespread format (it's probably why fhg is talking about surround mp3).

Not really, a lot of hardware players (especially flash-players) do only support MP3 (and sometimes WMA and OGG), not always WAV.

WMA could dissapear when windows media player is removed from windows.

ACC doesnt have enough portable support (Only Ipod).

Lossless wont take off in the mainstream market.

MP3 will not be succeeded in the near future.

I've just installed my first set of 5.1 Surround Speakers. Whilst looking around for simple test material I bumped into this : http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/download/...ound/index.html : Definitely worth checking out.

P.S. I suggest you ignore the "Eclipse" samples on offer! The other samples are more than adequate, and 80s music will never be cool... Heheh!

OT: Know any good software or clips I can use to help me position my satellites?

Unfortunately highly unlikely IMO. Doesn't this ruling just mean that MS can no longer force preinstall it on their OS? It won't stop them from promoting it at install level and bundling it with the install CDs. And don't forget the rising popularity of the Window Media Center OS which I'm sure is not subject to this ruling at all. (I'll admit I'm not entirely well read on this issue though, so feel free to object.)

That's like saying people aren't interested in the quality of their music - I beg to differ. If that was the case CDs wouldn't have become the current mainstream medium. I'd guess that the only reason compressed audio took off, was due to technical limitations. Constraints which continue to diminish over time as technology progresses. And don't forget that the quality of entry level audio players / headphones continues to improve too. Yeah, you still get the rubbish here and there, but overall...

I meant that now you can have the best of both worlds: lossless on the PC and whatever you want on the portable. Better lossy to me : more efficient. MP3 is the most flexible but not as efficient as say mpc or even vorbis (bitrate bloat, pre-echo etc)

Of course WMA has gaping security flaws that allow spyware and popup windows to be installed and activated just by playing a .wma file. Hopefully people avoid it like the plague ( and Internet Explorer ).

probably the MPEG2 NBC (non backward compatible) codec, known today as AAC'S "low complexity" profile, because of the iPod's huge success.

if not, layer 3 is just fine with me although you have to be careful to buy only mp3 hardware that handles VBR files (i.e. seeking)
The retarded 50€ DVD player I bought recently refuses to fast forward in VBR mp3 streams

I have used almost every codec you can possibly imagine.

We have - High End - for lossless audio reproduction.

(FLAC - would be a good example of this one)

Our - Mid End - Great audio with a small file size.

Mp3, WMA, RA, and more

Our - Low End - These are normally highly compressed
versions of the Mid End codecs to qualitys comparable to
raidio and telephone.

(used for streaming and extreamly small audio files)

This brings me to the answer to your question.

Mp3 TODAY - Is Number One - BUT...

I would not be to quick to save all of your valuable audio
into a quickly growing obsolete compressed format of any type.

Mp3 being one of them.

What drives todays market in acceptable consumer sound quality
is the ability to store files and the time it takes to move them.

If my portable Mp3 player had 8GB of memory
and transfer speeds of 2 or 3GB a second.

I would be using source audio files not compressed audio files.

(such as 24bit 48kHz .WAV Files)

The real question should be how far away from being able to use source
audio like .WAV's instead of compressed audio like Mp3's are we actually??

Not very far away at all.

gatch

I think mp3, AAC & possibly WMA will be the dominant formats in the coming years. Once VBR arrives in iTunes, and if it gives transparency at >30% less the file-size over APS, it has the chance to do really well. It is an ISO standard and will get strong support pretty soon, so why not?

Isn't riaa and their ilk scheming with intel so computers won't even run untrusted (for this purpose non-DRM) programs? IF mp3 becomes limited to vintage hardware it would end up as popular as mod files.

The other thing that would kill mp3 is if 5.1 channels becomes the norm for music distrubution.

The term for compressed files that the public uses is "mp3". Whenever I talk to people I know that aren't very versed in audio coding they don't even know anything else other than mp3. "I want to make mp3's with Media Player." When I send any file type, be it .ogg or .aac to anyone I know I get "What is that? Is that an mp3?" For new products to come out marketing audio codecs other than mp3, it would be a marketing disaster. If two similar competing products were marketed, one with mp3 and the other with let’s say Vorbis or AAC, the layman would choose the one with mp3. He knows what mp3 is. Also the Recording Industry hyped mp3 enough. In my opinion they shot themselves in the foot with all of their lawsuits against people downloading mp3s. How else to better market mp3??? Mp3 is staying simply because it's all the public knows when it comes to audio compression. A smaller audio file is an mp3 to the general public no matter what file type it actually is. Digital audio players aren't even marked with that term, I still see them marketed as Mp3 players.

In terms of computers though, I do see Mp3 dieing out. With the massive hard drive space increases we've been seeing lately, there's simply no need to compress anyone's music. I've seen at numerous DAP forums where people choose a lossless over a compressed format whenever possible. So if people are griping that a 40 gig DAP isn't big enough because it cannot hold all their music losslessly, then mp3 may be out there. But for areas where compression is needed mp3 will not die.

Since mp3 is synonymous with compressed audio, they could just market it as a "better mp3 format" or something like that. Getting the public to move over to more advanced formats haven't been particularly difficult in the past.

Not nessessarily, look here - http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/techinf/layer3/index.html#3

The closest format to MP3 in terms of popularity and player support today is probably WMA. WMA has potential, now that it has VBR option, lossless, and being gapless. Problem is, MS seems to be busier in hyping it up than making sure complete and proper hardware player support (especially for VBR/lossless and gapless playback).

I wish more DAP manufactures will support OGG properly, the fact that it has good quality, open source, and gapless.

If we are talking about multi-channel, ac3 and dts are currently support on nearly all the multi-channel players. I don't know whether mp3 (or another format) are able to compete with that.

No. They are working on getting DRM into the hardware, so that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to circumvent. However, they would lose users like mad if they tried to make it so that non-DRMed content wouldn't work. I'd be one of the users, along with just about everyone I know (Visio and games are my only MS and x86 ties), as I know only a single person who does not find the current one-point-of-failure DRM ideal morally, if not technologically, wrong.

Intel is working on DRM but I really don't think that they will impeach mp3 or any nonDRMed content to be played, nobody will buy their products and the competition would be so happy.

Now, all the majors have decided to release online only thru DRMed wma and aac. Actually, the only “validated format” is wma. Aac is a concession made to apple. It’s an official decision of all the majors which tolerates no exception even for great artists. A group of big artist’s manager in UK (Robbie Williams, Massive Attack, …) has told them they would leave their record label, no matter, they don’t want to change...
If you even talk about mp3, they start to be sick. You can say that DRM is just a big problem for the average consumer while offering an ineffective protection because it’s easy to get around it and on internet, one cracked content is sufficient to provide quickly everyone.
Unfortunately, the legal department has taken the lead of these companies. It’s a pity and it might kill them.

Therefore if their online store succeeds, wma and aac would be de facto an important codec.

Two solutions, don’t buy those DRMed (and often with average quality) content and it might be a good idea to develop an encoder able to transcode transparently from wma and aac to let say… mp3

MP3 is here because of storage issues - these are fast dissappearing. It won't be too long before you can store a terabyte on a matchbox size device that is cheap enough for use in a DAP.

But that isn't the only capacity issue - networks for music downloads still couldn't manage to send full CD's over the wire in an acceptable time. When computers and convergence devices become the norm and are networked, ease will outweigh quality; 'good enough' is often where things get stuck. DSL connections are getting faster so maybe even these will catch up and allow networked distribution of true CD quality - which will of course feature DRM.

Then there is the possibility of all-pervasive networks - we might get to the stage where we never own music, but rent it on demand. I can't imagin that will be MP3 either!

Well before it was because of storage. Now it is because of bandwidth and compatibility.It is already possible to download a track faster than listen to it and faster than buy physically...
Concerning DRM, who wants to pay for it while you can have it without DRM for free...

The industry is trying to impose it (rent model) but I really doubt they will succeed.

Well Marcan, I don't dispute anything you have said.

However, going back to the original question posed about the life of MP3, my musing was technology vs. mass market; not the educated (but relatively small) bunch here at Hydrogen Audio

Storage is still an issue - check out the number of solid state players with under 1GB. When a 100GB DAP is the price of today's 20GB DAP storage will not be an issue, and we won't need to rip our CD's into MP3 or similar.

And yes, there are large numbers that file share music of variable quality for free but this is a tiny minority compared to those that buy legitimately. And your point that you can download quicker than listen or go to a store and buy is true but not for the masses at lossless quality, which was my point. Most people I know over 20 don't see it that way anyway and buy on impulse - if they are in a supermarket and a chart CD they like is there they will buy it - if they are browsing they buy on-line; a small percentage will file-share.


It all comes down to cost - if the music industry makes it attractive, people will do it, despite DRM. There will always be people that go their own way; I was only making the point that when you mix the general/wider public with new technology, you can't always predict what will happen.

MP3 will be around for a good while yet - I work in the computer industry myself and mainframes (which I have nothing to do with, thank goodness) have had their demise predicted for the last ten years or more...they are still around.

Only time will tell for MP3!

Well I dispute few things you have said . Anyway as you said at the end of your post, time will tell. Until then we can talk

For me storage is also a question of choice.

You are kidding. The illegal distribution has topped the legal distribution few years ago now, p2p being just the visible tip of the iceberg. The democratisation of technologies (internet, compression, pc's, CD-R, hd, ...) has helped people to get easily what they want. A large number of young generations get used to p2p. Look at your friends, CD-R start to represent an important part of their CD's. Friends exchange a huge collection of music in a snap thanks to their external HD. People who don't know how to get it for free, often know somebody who knows. It's just the beginning; wireless will be another huge opportunity to exchange music.

I think that masses don't care about lossless ... if they know what it is...

yeah and rip or copy a cd on impulse like "hmm I really like the CD you are listening, who is it" ... "Oh I'm gonna make a copy for you".
Talking about p2p versus "online legal distribution", the legal part represents less than 1%.



I think it's difficult to make it attractive if you have to pay to get it with DRM when you can have it without DRM for free...

However predict is what the industry is trying to do and what we are trying to do as well
Cheers

With so many players supporting WMA today, and only? iPod supporting AAC, I fear WMA will be the dominating codec in some years :-(

Funny you should say that...

Rivals predict iTunes demise

Though they would say that of course!

It always gives me the shivers when I hear the faintest mention of a subscription model. And, as I am quite paranoid, the words "with our plan" has soon caught my eyes.

Multi-Channel Wave format will replace MP3 in the future:

We used MP3 just for compression, started with shitty 128kbps encodes but music lovers always wanted a good compression, more than 192. If I'd had infinite space I would use wav format.

I do think the masses generally care about getting the best quality out of whatever music medium they choose. I have experience at the Riovolution forum where many new users ask what FLAC is and most of the members there say it's the best audio compression, highest quality...etc. A lot don't realize that it's lossless, but they do realize its high quality. Anything touting high quality piques the interest of the masses. I'm not sure if lossless does, but high quality does. Lossless compression is relatively new to the masses and thus not really known yet. Lossless will be more known as people get used to ALAC and if/when more DAPs support FLAC or another lossless codec.

I would say that the main advantage of lossless is the possibility to encode to another format of your choice without fear of transcoding problems... Currently it’s not really possible from a lossy.

Talking about lossless on portable, for me is not really interesting; I rather use the size for the choice. Actually I have to select mp3’s I want to put on my mp3 player amongst my collection of my HD. Sometimes I can’t hear the track I want cos it wasn’t on my player… I kind hear the difference between I have track/I don’t have it … while I won’t hear the difference between lossless and aps on my mp3 player
I think also that size will be more likely used for another media’s like videos, pictures ,…

For quality it’s a selling point but probably not the most important. Availability, playability and price seem quite important. Anyway for lossless they wouldn’t be able to hear the difference, but with placebo effect everything is possible

just to add to that, regarding portable players, the size of the file not only limits how many files you can fit, but also skip protection. the larger the file the more memory it takes to load the song. lossless files are more prone to skipping than smaller lossy files. you won't find too many joggers with large songs on their portable players.

Moreover, a friend tried to listen to a wav (or a .aiff?) with his iPod. It couldn't hear it without drop and skipping...

i think it's slightly myopic to think of anything succeeding mp3 in the sense of being "the next mp3". the moment has simply been lost.

mp3 was in the right place at the right time. CDROM drives were getting cheaper, burners hadn't hit the mainstream yet, and hard disks were small but not impossibly small. meaning you could rip 1 CD and not kill your hard disk, and then encode it to 128kbps before deleting the wav files. mp3 offered staggering compression and sounded so close to the original that it seemed like a miracle. remember the excitement you all felt when you first started encoding stuff?

that is NEVER going to happen again in the same way. it was a revolution, and it changed the world in a small way. this is why people think "mp3" when they think compressed audio.

new lossy formats realistically can only offer _very_ slight improvements over mp3 - even transparency at half the bitrate isn't nearly the miracle that 10:1 compression was. besides which, we have an internet savvy public now, everyone has CD burners, and loads of us have DVD burners. in addition we've all got comparitively massive hard disks and super-fast transfer speeds with both the internet and CD ripping. the problem that mp3 solved simply doesn't exist anymore, and when the other formats offer (at the moment) at best a 10% bitrate improvement for a transparent encode, but also give perhaps a 30% CPU hit (numbers pulled out of my bottom... bear with me:)), there's simply no point going to another format.

however, that's not to say another format can't occupy a larger percentage of the total pool of lossy audio out there. if MS is to be believed, WMA is already doing this (ha! what p2p networks are they on?). but i wouldn't call it "the next mp3" anymore than i'd call a toyota prius "the next car" - sure it's more efficient (the prius, not WMA), but it's still generally the same thing.