Apple's digital music platform - the iPod, the iPod Mini, and iTunes completely dominated the Christmas season. Not just in the market of digital audio, but the overall market as well. The iPod, iPod accessories, and iTunes gift certificates were the "it" gifts this season. There will be close to 10 million iPod users going into 2005. Assuming 95% of these use iTunes, that is a lot of iTunes users as well. iTunes Music store has sold over 200 million songs.

As most here know, the "default" encoding setting in iTunes is 128 kbps AAC, and iTunes Music store songs are encoded at 128 kbps AAC. Given that many users will not change the settings in iTunes, think of the momentum behind (even 50%) of 10 million iTunes users encoding AAC files.

Apple will likely never again enjoy the dominance it enjoys right now. Sony, Microsoft, Rio, Creative, and others will begin to chip away at Apple's market share. The next year is critical for AAC. If it is to become the standard of digital audio, its window to do so is now. Will DAP manufacturers concede the momentum of AAC and adopt this codec to their players? Will Sony give up on ATRAC, which was a disaster for them in 2004, and support AAC - or will they pursue WMA? Will home audio systems and automotive CD manufacturers adopt AAC capabilities like they have with MP3?

A lot depends on Apple and their support of making AAC mainstream. Apple's history in this area is awful. They are short-sighted when looking to capitalize on early success. They have shown this again by snubbing REAL, but the partnership with Motorola offers hope.

I think by the end of summer, we should know if AAC is going to replace MP3 some day as the codec of general use, if MP3 will dominate forever (I doubt it without digital audio rights), or if WMA will emerge the ultimate winner through sheer MS muscle. There is little doubt that MP3 will still be king on Jan 1st 2006 - but with 60% market share or 90% like today? I think it will be closer to 60. We shall see.

Look around, the iPod is EVERYWERE now. Has AAC's time come at last?

Off topic - The average user does not care, but QT VBR AAC should make us audio geeks happy in 2005.

We do not want AAC. ("We" stands for "audio tech entusiasts") We want and we NEED Vorbis in these times darkened by the massive cloud of software patents. Hell, if the new EU patent laws were in use aproimately 1/2 of the software on my hard drive and CD-ROMS book shelves would be illegal/patent offending in some way. And this is if you count out all the Warez. DeCSS, Linux with gif-support, decryption tools etc...

Vorbis is better becouse it's Open. I Don't want iTunes, I won't buy an iPod and I fart in the general direction of all of AAC.

....


(Wow, I feel so much better now)

This post was a Useless Statement brought to you by... I'm not going to tell you my real name, am I????

I don't think AAC has a too bright future while pretty much the entire load of promoting it is on one company's shoulders.

The way it is now, people are seeing AAC more as an Apple thing than as a worldwide standard created by a pool of companies to replace MP3.

As far as I can see, Ahead's and Real's attempts to push the format have been half-hearted so far. You need to dig deep in Nero to be able to encode a song, or to rip a CD, to AAC. And last time I checked, Real Player was still exporting to Real Audio as default (that might have changed, please correct me if I'm wrong).

Also, Apple has the huge advantage that its encoder is offered for free, and is not limited to encoding from CDs only.

My opinion is that AAC would still need a bigger push from some multimedia majors, and would also need a good open source implementation (FAAC has come a long way, but it's still immature) to really breakout in 2005.


PS: Please don't feed the troll ^^

well www.tuner2.com begin to provide more and more aac streams... it's a good way that aac begin to be popular and this list could help a lot imho.

ps. happy new year to all :-)

Btw. how is it with FAAC and AAC HE support? Last time I checked, there was support for AAC HE only in FAAD not in the encoder. And does it even make sense to use AAC HE with higher bitrates?
Thank you for naswers,
Vlada

Is AAC included in either of the competing HiDef DVD formats? If so, that would give a big boost, hardware-wise.

IIRC (might be wrong) it's included as optional codec. I believe only AC3 and LPCM continue being mandatory.

AAC would have had a chance if Apple had allowed other services to sell AAC songs to play in the Ipod. This I do not understand, since Apple makes lots of money with the Ipod but no money with Itunes. As usual Apple has a great product but makes a critical marketing error. As it is with the MS-Sony alliance eventually WMA will catch up and pass Apple and AAC.

Only other chance is if Nero manages to get hardware support for Nero Digital and music download services adopt it.

Don't get me wrong, I would love it if MS had some real competition, but - the competition just keep shooting themselves in the foot!

maybe Apple should change their default setting...how else are they gonna sell their 80GB iPods coming out this year

I wouldn't be so sure about that...they sell so many songs through iTunes...

I think AAC will be more popular when Faac gets to the level of what lame is to Mp3.

I think that Apples support of AAC is incidental as far as the consumer is concerned, it is just the iPod they are after (which is fed music by iTunes or iMS), if Apple were to switch to a different audio format tomorrow, their sales of iPods wouldn't go down.

For AAC to go big time Apple (they are the only ones with working DRM) would have to make iMS available to the Sony, Rio, Creative, iRiver of this world, by providing embedded code, allowing other iMSs to spring up, which is not going to happen as they are Apples competitors.

In the long term, the format that supports multiple players, from multiple stores will win out (after the iPod revolution ends), sadly that will probably be WMA.

As far as hardware support this is what I have seen in stores,

[COMMON]
1. MP3
2. WMA

[RARE]
3. OGG
4. AAC

I would say WMA is the future too. I have seen it gaining support with hardware & P2P networks.

Hmm, AAC is becoming mandatory for dvb receivers.

It's also required for the "computer readable" part of a DVD-A.
HE-AAC is a part of 3GPP spec, which means any new phone will decode it.
It's also required for DVB and DRM (not the copyprotection) broadcasts.

IMHO technically AAC with HE-AAC has already "broken through".

But becoming the "ripping/encoding/portable player" format of choice is another matter and what this thread is really about I guess. Most companies sell "solutions" rather than a format. As has been pointed out, almost noone uses iPod because it's AAC. They use it because they like the iTMS/iPod solution.

Sony is also fronting AAC, as well as H.264(!), with the PSP.

Once the b-team of mp3 players (iRiver, Creative, Dell etc) jump onto the aac bandwagon, it will probably be even more accepted as a format. If only it had been cheaper to license..

Music download services won't adopt Nero Digital because it doesn't include DRM.



The official information is that they make 1 cent for each song sold in iTMS. The rest is spent in copyrights and operational costs.

This makes no sense at all to me. It's way cheaper than mp3. Noone had a problem paying for mp3.

It's more expensive than Vorbis and <shiver> WMA, which are the actual competitors.

MP3 has no competitors, it's ubiquitous, period. People don't have the choice to support MP3, they either support it or they die (think Sony DAPs).

Now, people do have the choice to support WMA, AAC or Vorbis...

And at $0.00 profit per song it adds up fast!

Well not exactly. iTMS is meant to break even so that it doesn't waste their money, but doesn't add much to their pockets either. Essentially they sell at or slightly above cost to promote the iPod, iTunes and the Mac platform, which is where the real money is at.

A couple of people have stated that people buy iTunes becuase of the iPod/iTunes integration, not becuase of AAC. My point exactly! This is why I think AAC has a chance to break through. People will not even realize they are using it until they have libraries filled with AAC. Then they start trading with friends, etc.

While I agree with Roberto's statement, only Apple is pushing AAC, yes but Apple is the 800 lb gorilla of digital music. iPod is synonomous with digital audio player right now. Think kleenex or Xerox.

Sadly, I have a bad feeling Apple will mess this up and WMA will ultimately win.

Microsoft is already doing that: it's the PlaysForSure iniciative.

Microsoft could have produced its own player (just like its video-game console). Or they could have struggled for their own Music Store. Doing that, Microsoft would be adopting Apple's business plan, that has its player and its music store.

Instead, Microsoft has created a platform where hardware players and internet media resources could interact. And the user will not bother with technical details, he will just look for a logo.

Apple can do much for AAC. But I think that MPEG supporters have to participate, or WMA will eventually catch.

IIRC, they broke even some months ago and are now making a (probably small) profit from the store. They have to release their earnings results with their quarterly reports, so it shouldn't be hard to look up.

As far as the iTunes Music Store promoting AAC, it's almost irrelevant, as the DRM-encumbered files they sell won't play on most AAC players in the future. Look, for example, to the recently-announced car decks with AAC support.