MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) 415
The commentary around IIS Fraunhofer and Technicolor terminating their MP3 licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software has been amusing. While some are interpreting this development as the demise of the MP3 format, others are cheering about MP3s finally being free. Developer and commentator Marco Arment tries to prevail sense: MP3 is no less alive now than it was last month or will be next year -- the last known MP3 patents have simply expired. So while there's a debate to be had -- in a moment -- about whether MP3 should still be used today, Fraunhofer's announcement has nothing to do with that, and is simply the ending of its patent-licensing program (because the patents have all expired) and a suggestion that we move to a newer, still-patented format. MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it's good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it's finally free.
I have thousands of songs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You could always convert them to AAC, because it's a superior CODEC and your songs will sound better at the same bitrate!
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:4, Insightful)
You can build one that's about the size of a Walkman for not much money at all. And nobody will stop supporting MP3 format ever. It's too widely used. Once most manufacturers stop making MP3 players somebody else will start. He'll those black plastic frisbees the old people used to use for music still has players made for them. And that's horrible audio.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, so do shitty speakers and literally every pair of headphones, so this may or may not matter to you.
If you don't buy into the actual science behind all of this, you can go ahead and skip right to the last paragraph of this post and read why none of it really matters.
For portable playback, you're right, there's no difference, as you don'
Re: (Score:3)
I have some monster cables to sell you.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:4, Insightful)
There's literally no reason not to.
Yes there's one. DRM. And this is why the music industry wants you to believe the MP3 format is dead.
Re: (Score:2)
DRM (Score:2)
Most mp3 are drm free. Especially if you ripped them yourself.
Yup. Exactly.
And when they look at your collection, the RIAA feels deep disgust.
They would *definitely* prefer no to have to keep the support for your DRM-free MP3,
but have manufacturers only produce players that exclusively only play some modern DRMed music files (probably AAC based).
Re: (Score:2)
You can also have DRM-free AAC files.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:5, Insightful)
Flac is an open format. DRM maybe a reason to use mp3 over formats, but not flac.
Flac is great for listening to at home (on a computer, say), but the files are too large for me to fit my library on my phone, which is my usual music player for the car.
So I'll use flac as the master, then transcode to mp3 for upload. They both have their uses!
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll just keep MP3s as master and skip the trans-coding step. No one has proven in a blind test to be able to tell a higher rate MP3 apart from a FLAC file, and since I'm not a DJ or music producer I have no need for magic data that may help me manipulate audio but otherwise is inaudible.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup. I've never seen any double-blind study that showed anything like that either. One thing that I really appreciate about music is that the current formats have indeed reached the "good enough" level. Sure, when I was younger and had a room in my house devoted to a massively high quality stereo I might have been able to hear a difference in soundstage between the original and a high quality rip, but even if I still had that setup I'm not convinced that I actually could. Now, there's literally no way,
Re: (Score:2)
Audacity can do this.
http://manual.audacityteam.org... [audacityteam.org]
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't ever convert your entire mp3 collection to flac. The point of flac is that it is lossless compression. If your collection is already mp3, converting to flac will make your files slightly larger and provide the false impression that the data is a lossless encoding from an uncompressed source (e.g. audio CD), with no benefit whatsoever.
There are batch converters that will convert anything (including mp3) to flac. Maybe some of the more caring converters will warn you about not converting mp3 to flac.
Re: (Score:2)
I re-ripped all mine into lossless a long time ago.
Whats the size difference on that though? To go lossless I'd have to re-rip my whole collection. because like you say, there's no point converting a lossy to a lossless.
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:5, Insightful)
Converting a lossy encoding to a lossless encoding doesn't make it lossless. It just makes it appear lossless.
The only reason to convert a lossy encoding to a lossless encoding is if someone pointing a gun to your head asks you to, and maybe not even then.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple could be in a great position to deprecate MP3 files support, forcing all iGadgets users to buy their songs from their store.
Well that might be a problem if you're in the iGarden. Now they've made you rebuy your wires and headphones they may very well use this to put a mp3 on the chopping block and make you rebuy your music (from them). Out in the rest of the world though, where there's choice it's not really going to be an issue
Re: (Score:3)
MP3 will probably be supported on pretty every device for the foreseeable. There's literally no reason not to.
There's a very clear reason not to :
Force users to rebuy the song they are used to listen to.
Armor piercing question: How is this a concern for the makers of MP3 PLAYERS and software that plays/encodes MP3s?
Hint: It isn't...
Re: (Score:2)
At my house, flac files get converted to MP3:
#!/bin/bash
for a in *.flac; do
# give output correct extension
OUTF="${a[@]/%flac/mp3}"
# get the tags
ARTIST=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g)
TITLE=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g)
ALBUM=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g)
GENRE=$(metaflac "$a" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g)
Re: (Score:2)
*eyes half-open, nonchalantly* *chews gum with open mouth* Yep -- you're welcome. *slowly turns head and looks away*
Re: I have thousands of songs (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
No! MiniDisc is the future!
Re: (Score:3)
No! DAT is the future!
Re: I have thousands of songs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have thousands of songs (Score:4, Insightful)
FLAC is certainly lossless and therefore capable of spitting out new encodings or file formats as they arise. I'm not sure it would justify holding an entire collection in that format although it might be a wise to rip new content to FLAC if space is not an issue.
Re: (Score:2)
aoTuV q5 is transparent (Score:3, Informative)
Aoyumi's Tuned Vorbis encoder (aoTuV) is believed transparent at quality 5 [hydrogenaud.io], which is roughly 160 kbps.
And you're right that Opus is too new. It still has artifacts on "killer samples" [hydrogenaud.io] in the 128-192 kbps range that make it little better than Vorbis at transparency under quiet listening conditions. But it wins listening tests in the 64-96 kbps range for streaming to relatively noisy vehicular and outdoor environments.
Re: (Score:3)
It's 2017, so even if you had a collection of say 1000 albums you could easily store them in FLAC. For reference purposes last year I did my collection of music CD's which comes to just over 300 albums, many of which are compilation albums which skew the figures somewhat. However all of those albums, a 500x500px JPEG of the cover, a CSV file describing the tags for each file along with tagged FLAC and 256kbps MP3 for each track come to 148GB.
This is in the era of 2TB HDD's for under 100USD. The idea that sp
Re: (Score:2)
All my computers and devices can play MP3 and AAC. None can play FLAC.
FLAC is the hippy format of the lossless world.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone in the foreseeable future build an audio player and not include MP3 support?
Lobbying from the music industry.
Re: (Score:3)
You're just using it wrong. Flac is not just for just sounding better than a 320Kpbs mp3 file to a casual listener. Flac is useful as an archival format that you can *also* efficiently stream. It's meant to be a better alternative to zipping uncompressed wave files.
You don't need to encode the latest beyonce album as flac. You might want to encode the recording of your wedding or the time you bootlegged your favorite artist at a dive bar as flac.
You might want to use flac if you are doing video editing,
DRM (Score:5, Funny)
Why "dead"? (Score:3)
Er...why would it be? This is how music is stored, shared and played for the most part, isn't it?
>> a suggestion that we move to a newer, still-patented format
I don't believe that Ogg Vorbis is patented. That's the next logical place to move, isn't it?
Re: (Score:3)
Context: There have been a number of articles over the past few days claiming MP3 is dead (and usually 'incidentally' citing AAC as being the 'superior' 'de facto' 'standard' now - AAC incidentally still being patent-encumbered, and for which Fraunhofer still extract licensing fees) ... in other words, FUD claims have been issued to the media, seemingly to try 'scare' people off MP3 by claiming it's "dead" (when in fact it's now completely open), and trying to steer people toward AAC. I'm going to speculate
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
and the processing power of phones compared to audio decompression of any format (is anyone still carrying a dedicated music player?)
My coworker carries an obsolete iPod touch and a dumbphone because they still work and are paid for.
I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis (Score:2)
It's technically superior so why not?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's technically superior so why not?
Because with today's storage capacities and transfer speeds, the benefits of lossy audio compression over lossless are negligible.
Whether I fill up 2% of my drive with lossy audio or 4% with lossless isn't making much of a difference. Knowing that it's lossy does make a difference, even when I can't hear a difference.
Also, my DAWs don't work with the "technically superior" Ogg/Vorbis...
Re: (Score:2)
My phone has 128 GB of storage. I have 21 GB of Ogg/Vorbis files on it, considering it's still approximately 11 to 1, like MP3, just better quality afterward I think I'll stick with lossy.
Re: (Score:2)
My hearing sucks. I have some frequency range deafness (oddly I can hear ranges most people my age can't), I can't filter out background noise so I'm basically useless in a conversation in a bar, food court, or when a TV is too loud. I even play music I'm listening too at lower volumes so I don't get overwhelmed. Even then I can tell Ogg sounds better than MP3 at similar bit-rates, but I really struggle to tell the difference between Ogg and Flak. Sometimes I can pick it up, usually I can't, may as well
OPUS @96 kbps (Score:3)
To get anything reasonable, I get a maximum 4:1 compression ratio comparing lossless to lossy, 11:1 would be like listening to a concert through a cellular connection.
Try using OPUS at 96kbps
(Also by Xiph, the same guys who made Vorbis - but in collaboration with Skype this time)
Resulting quality is incredibly close to lossless.
(It's also patent-free, consieded a IETF web standard and probably already supported by your current smartphone)
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, EVERY PIECE OF MUSIC IS LOSSY.
Why? One word - equalization.
Things were already removed or added in order to achieve that sound.
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, EVERY PIECE OF MUSIC IS LOSSY.
Why? One word - equalization.
Things were already removed or added in order to achieve that sound.
That's not really what it means though is it? You could take that and say every sound is lossy because your ears don't pick up anything close to the full spectrum.
Re: I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You just don't understand what lossy means in a compression context, it seems.
If you compress it and then uncompress it, and the result is not bit-for-bit identical, it's a lossy compression.
Re: (Score:3)
Music (Score:4, Insightful)
No, every piece of music is lossy because analog cannot be encoded into digital without an infinite amount of loss.
Usually, we talk in terms of music.
we don't try to record every possible vibration in existance in the universe, we try to record *sound*.
and the human body, due to limitation caused by laws of physics, has a very narrow set of vibration that it can hear and interpret as sound.
you can't hear ultrasound. there's no physiological way for you to hear them. thus there's no point in storing them.
There's a range of frequencies (tactile can feel up to dozens/hundrer of hertz, ears can feel up to somewhere between 10kHz and 20kHz).
There's a range of intensities (between impossible to hear, and causes pain/hearing loss).
By virtue of mathematics of information theory, every possible sound that you could ever hear can nicely fit within a 44kHz to 48kHz samplerate and 16bits to 24bits sample size.
Everything beyond that is just overkill, you're not physically equipped to percieve it. (That would be like trying to see UV, X-Ray, etc.)
---
BTW: A piano is also bound by the laws of physics and the amount of different vibrations it can produce isn't infinite either.
Re: (Score:3)
But since your organic human ears are extremely limited in their ability to capture the sound wave, your brain will never know the difference.
Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis (Score:5, Informative)
No, every piece of music is lossy because analog cannot be encoded into digital without an infinite amount of loss.
This is a piece of audiophile bullshit that makes no more sense than the tortoise and the hare "paradox". For those who don't know it, the tortoise starts with a head start but whenever the hare gets to where the tortoise was it's moved a little further so the hare must run an infinite number of distances like 100m, 10m, 1m, 0.1m, 0.01m, 0.001m and so on to "infinity". Same with analog, the infinite loss is also infinitely insignificant.
Re: (Score:2)
For mobile usage on Android, opus is currently my golden standard.
Re: (Score:2)
For mobile usage on Android, opus is currently my golden standard.
You could use FLAC there too. Foobar 2000 has an Android version now, and it works pretty well. A 128 GB card mostly filled with FLACs gives me more hours of music than I know what to do with, and if I need more, I can copy it in the background while playing something else.
Re: (Score:2)
I just love having my entire music collection at hand. I do not want to have to choose a subset of my music collection.
Switch to OPUS (Score:2)
It's technically superior so why not?
Why not ?
Because the same developpers - Xiph - this time working in tandem with Skype - brought OPUS to you.
And that one busts nearly everyone else in ABX tests, is considered a IETF web standrad, and thus supported by most browsers and used by several on-line voice-chat apps (Skype, WhatsApp, etc.), there are even informal tools to support it inside Digital Radio Mondial (the digital cousin of AM radio), etc.
It's thus very likely to be supported by your smartphone (e.g.: recent versions of android do play
Re: I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis (Score:2)
Re:I'll still use Ogg/Vorbis (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything is superior to MP3. Vorbis, Opus, AAC, ATRAC, even (ugh) WMA. Because MP3 is simply dated.
But sometimes dated works. It's universally supported. Every device, every platform, from PCs to doorbells. The same reason GIF and JPEG still stick around, when there are superior alternatives now.
Actually : yes (Score:2)
A thumb drive with .ogg files won't.
Surprisingly, more of the in-vehicle-infotainment computers support Ogg/Vorbis that you would have though.
(Software comes for free, requirement to add it as yet another supported format are minimal and it adds a nice additionnal checkbox on the feature list).
It's not widespread among standard DIN-format radios, but the big screens with Satnav support it.
(And stand-alone satnav too. It used to be the default audio format for Tomtom).
Also, most modern car IVI also feature an AUX-In jack and/or bluetooth audio
Re: (Score:2)
That's a political reason - Apple and Microsoft secretly declared war on it BECAUSE it was open and free. I think it was Pioneer that made car stereos that had chips and firmware that supported Ogg natively, but they didn't intentionally build Ogg support into their players. Long story short, their players would play Ogg files, but there were issues with displaying titles and stuff. Not only would Pioneer not support it, they denied the fact they could play it back at all, even when the proof was in fron
Great Opportunity for an Ignore List (Score:5, Interesting)
So apparently some people are incapable of understanding basic legalities or doing basic research before publishing.
While some are interpreting this development as the demise of the MP3 format
We can safely blacklist anyone who ran a story where this was presented as a fact or even a likelihood. Until something better takes the world by storm, the patent expiration will only help the format become more widely available.
Nice chance to see where there is more noise than signal though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
At the same time it mp3 really is dying. avi was great while it lasted. And mp3 might be good enough, but it is inferior in every way to modern formats. Yes, their is loads of stuff floating around their in mp3, but everything new is in a better more modern format. In that way mp3 days years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
And mp3 might be good enough, but it is inferior in every way to modern formats.
"Every way"? If you have many listeners on iPod, iPhone, or iPad, MP3 is superior to Vorbis and Opus because Apple refuses to add support for Vorbis or Opus to iOS. MP3 is superior to the AAC-based M4A because MP3 is no longer encumbered by patents.
OPUS (Score:3, Insightful)
Until something better takes the world by storm, the patent expiration will only help the format become more widely available.
Let me intoduce your to this thing called OPUS.
(It's also by Xiph, the people behind Vorbis, but this time in collaboration with Skype).
It's patent-free, it's free.
it's accepted as a IETF web-standard, it's supported by web browser.
it's already used by lots of voice chat application (Skype - obviously - but also e.g.: WhatsApp)
your smartphone probably already supports it (if it's a recent enough version of android).
there are even informal standards to use it in Digital Radio Mondial (the digital cousin of A
Never understood why MP3 was so popular (Score:3)
Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular (Score:4, Informative)
Compatibility.
I can play MP3 files in both my cars, my phone, our iPad, you name it. It's natively supported by everything out there. Ogg, not so much.
Even in cases where Ogg might work, I know MP3 works, so why bother checking? Why should I rip my CDs to a format that might not work everywhere?
Is it better? Sure, there are technical aspects that are better, but should I care? Storage is so cheap, so a 320kbps MP3 is as good as the original for me. Where's the motivation to even see if another format works?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular (Score:5, Informative)
Never understood why, in a time of .ogg files, MP3 was always the defacto format.
It's because OGG didn't always exist dummy! By the time OGG showed up, MP3 was already everywhere. I may be showing my age but perhaps you are too young to remember the days of MP3.
OGG also needs more processing power (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Because it was universally supported (because it came first) and worked well enough for the application. OGG is a obscure format that most people in the general public has never heard of.
Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason 1: First mover advantage. Mp3 was initially released in 1993. Serious work on Ogg Vorbis didn't start until 1998, the format was frozen in 2000, and the first stable release was in 2002. So mp3 had 7-9 years to build up a lead. Which led to...
Reason 2: Network effect. Quite literally, in this case, because the birth of mp3 went hand in hand with the birth of the internet, and very quickly the rise of mp3 sharing sites and applications, Napster most prominent among them. So for a significant portion of that early period mp3s were getting shared all over the place leading to early adopters quickly accumulating relatively large libraries, which led to...
Reason 3: Vendor lock-in. So now you have a library of thousands of mp3s, you're going to want a media player that can play all the files you already have. Getting one that can even play Ogg Vorbis wasn't even an option for most people until 2002, and for a long time after that it wasn't trivial to get a player with Ogg Vorbis support. And a lot of people didn't want to switch away from a player that they were familiar with that could play all their current files to some new player so they could take advantage of another format as well. And for at least some people they didn't want to bother with the hassle of having to keep two sets of files organized. Unless you want to argue that people should have replaced all the older mp3s with ogg vorbis files, which would be difficult, time-consuming, and probably expensive for most people, and thus even more of a vendor lock-in.
Now all of these are issues that might have been overcome if Ogg Vorbis was superior in _every_ way, but there was this one other issue...
Reason 4: File size. Everyone talks about how space is cheap these days. Well that wasn't always the case. For many people their music collection was expanding rapidly at a time where space to store it was much harder/more expensive to come by. Perhaps the compression has improved since the early days, but when Ogg Vorbis first started making waves i checked it out, and the ogg files at the time were almost ten times the size of the equivalent mp3 files. Meaning my 75-80 GB of mp3s would have forced me to upgrade to a 1 TB drive, which would have been prohibitively expensive in 2005. And the other issue i ran into while testing the new format was...
Reason 5: Most people aren't audiophiles. Most of the time i couldn't tell the difference between an ogg file and an mp3 with a decent bitrate. And even when i can tell the difference... i don't really care. Being able to hear tiny differences when comparing small segments side by side does not lead to me enjoying the lower quality version any less when listening to it in isolation. So the cost of "upgrading" to ogg would be huge, in time, money, and hard drive space, and as a non-audiophile the benefit would be minuscule.
Re:Never understood why MP3 was so popular (Score:5, Informative)
Reason 4: File size. Everyone talks about how space is cheap these days. Well that wasn't always the case. For many people their music collection was expanding rapidly at a time where space to store it was much harder/more expensive to come by. Perhaps the compression has improved since the early days, but when Ogg Vorbis first started making waves i checked it out, and the ogg files at the time were almost ten times the size of the equivalent mp3 files. Meaning my 75-80 GB of mp3s would have forced me to upgrade to a 1 TB drive, which would have been prohibitively expensive in 2005. And the other issue i ran into while testing the new format was...
Aren't you confusing OGG Vorbis with FLAC? I've lived the same period of time and heck no, Vorbis files never were 10x larger than MP3 files.
Widely supported? (Score:2)
I think WAV might have the lock on this one.
Re: (Score:2)
"There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3" I think WAV might have the lock on this one.
I think you are partly right. MP3 is most widely supported as a distribution medium for sure. WAV is used mostly locally where size/transmission speed isn't as much of a factor.
Re: (Score:2)
Wish Video Formats would do the same (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, patents expire exactly the same so soon you'll be able to use MPEG2. Realistically if you want patent-free, use VP9. If you want to license, go H.264/HEVC. If you want to develop, well probably nobody cares until you make money. The world is full of obscure formats, for example many have tried to replace JPG and failed. Not much reason to try a shakedown until there's more than pocket lint.
AOMedia's AV-1 (Score:3)
AOMedia's AV-1 is attempting to be exactly that but for video.
A codec that is either patent free or whose patent are free.
Free code implementation.
supported by nearly anyone involved in video, including content providers (includes both Google and Netflix, so a sizeable portion of all video played), software makes (Mozilla, VLC, etc.) and hardware manufacturer (AMD, Intel, Broadcom, ARM, etc.)
And there are quite a few big developpers involved :
- Xiph (makers of Daala), Google (VP10) and Cisco (thor)
It's goin
Well, MP3 is sort of dead (Score:2)
In that I don't collect files with MP3 extensions any longer.
Those days are past, now I collect my audio with video attached. Space isn't an issue and I might want to watch something while I listen (and every device I have has a screen...) and I can ignore it if I don't.
I haven't bothered to check, but I assume the audio component of those videos could still be using the MP3 standard.
Re: (Score:2)
yup... simple to strip out the video and write a standard audio mp3.. ffmpeg is your friend...
Non-Free Repositories (Score:5, Interesting)
The lack of patent encumbered algorithms in MP3 means two things:
Audio snobs won't stop arguing about the format of the week [audiophileon.com] or FLAC verses DSD or the best bit rates on PCM encoded WAV files.
Mere consumers shall continue on with our plebeian fidelity sound as always.
Online buyers will continue to download low bit rate MP3s to squeeze a few more hundred tunes onto their Zune [bustle.com]. Everyone you know will still play studio damaged music [slashdot.org] through tiny earbuds [reddit.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Can we please ignore the lunatic ravings of the audiophiles? I'm tired of lunatic ravings by goons claiming they have hearing better than the rest of the animal kingdom combined, and lack the most basic understanding of how signals work.
Video games will switch to Opus (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to see quite a few video game projects use .ogg files [...] . I expect to see more of them ship with MP3s instead.
Unlike a web application, a PC-native video game doesn't have to rely on codecs built into the user's existing operating system. Thus the codec choice depends on licensing and rate-distortion efficiency. Yes, I expect games to switch away from Vorbis, but not to MP3 because MP3 is less space-efficient than Vorbis at a given fidelity level. They'll probably switch to Opus, which beats both MP3 and Vorbis at fidelity per bit.
If any change is to be made to the MP3 format... (Score:2)
mp3 is dead? (Score:2)
Mp3 is actually dead (Score:2)
Great example of how Patents should work (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an example of how the Patent system should work.
Fraunhofer invented something good. They Patented it. Patents last 20 years, after which they expire forever.
Fraunhofer enjoyed the monopoly on use of this technology, but only for a short time. Now, the Public owns it (it is in the public domain).
Re: (Score:3)
This is an example of how the Patent system should work.
What a popular format encumbered and thus prevented from being included in the most basic of applications even 15 years after many alternatives were released and the purpose of its original inception (lack of disk space) is gone?
There's nothing wrong with patents. There is something VERY wrong with a patent on a mathematical algorithm in a fast paced field such as technology lasting TWENTY BLOODY YEARS.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I like the AIMP Android port.. It's kinda like Winamp/Android. Simple enough to *just play tunes*. not try to be something like an Android version of iTunes...
Streaming will not kill stored music (Score:4, Insightful)
Been a premium Spotify user ever since and never looked back.
Nothing wrong with that but what do you plan to do if/when Spotify goes belly up? Not saying it will or won't but it's certainly a realistic possibility since Spotify has never to my knowledge made a profit.
I disagree strongly that streaming will kill stored music. It will complement it nicely but it's not a replacement for many people. Streaming is useless in circumstances where you don't have a reliable or fast internet connection (like on a plane) or if you are data limited for some reason. It also ties you to a business which you may or may not be interested in subscribing to. Plus one of the nice things about stored music is that it can't be taken away from you very easily.
Speaking solely for myself even a relatively cheap streaming service would be a waste of money for me - I simply wouldn't use it enough to justify the cost. (I dropped Netflix for exactly that reason and I watch more video than I listen to music) And I'm not unique in that regard. Streaming has some real advantages and I think it has a big future but it's not going to kill stored music.
Re:Remember MP3.com? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember amazon.com? Still alive, and still selling DRM-free mp3's.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would anyone except the patent holders weeping over the end of their 20 year gravy train ever suggest that MP3 is "Dead"?
So they can sucker you into buying into another still-patented format, where they can collect more gravy.
Much like (I hear claims that) DuPont sponsored the research blaming the common chlorofluorocarbon Freon product for ozone depletion - just as the patent was about to expire, but patents on some alternative refrigerants still had a way to go.
No iOS web browser supports Opus (Score:2)
Opus is superior to MP3
I agree with you that Opus is technically better. But technically better means little if your listeners' playback application does not support it. Among major web browsers tracked by Can I use... [caniuse.com], WebKit-based web browsers do not support Opus sources in <audio> elements. This includes Safari for macOS and every browser for iOS.