The MP3 file is as old as the Bangles, the soap opera Dallas, and the first Friday the 13th movie.
I just did a bunch of research for a pretend essay that would compare and contrast the MP3 file to the CD. I've never been a fan of the MP3 and this research gave me even more reasons to believe that there are much better alternatives to what is now deemed "the worldwide standard" for music consumption (ISO 1991).
When people think about CD's they often associate them with the 80's. Well I got news for you, the audio compression technology that was first developed, and essentially resulted in the creation of the MP3 file, started in the 80's. You can now start associating the MP3 file with the already lengthy list of 80's memories, that includes hair metal, guitars that shoot lighting bolts out of the end, and cheesy mustaches, just to name a few. The point is that the MP3 is just as out of date as CD's are.
Let me be clear... I am all for the creation of the digital audio file. I do, however, take exception to the fact that the MP3 is the most popular type.
Technology has evolved to the point where it's not a burden for people to use uncompressed wave files (PCM), even for P2P sharing. If downloading wave files is inconvenient because it takes too much time, FLAC (stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an excellent alternative.
FLAC encoding technology compresses audio files using a “lossless” method that renders the file smaller, but without audio degradation. I believe it compresses the files at a 6:1 ratio, whereas an MP3 is compressed at a 10:1 ratio (and is not truly stereo separated). FLAC just sounds way better than MP3, and it's almost half the size of an uncompressed Wave file. To put that into perspective: a 4 minute song in MP3 format compressed at a sample and bit rate of 44.1-128 is approximately 5 megabytes (MB) in size. Which means that the Wave file is around 50 MB and the FLAC file would be around 8 MB.
Glaven!
I know most people can't tell the difference between MP3 files, CD's, or Wave files, but most people can't tell the difference between the "handling" of a BMW and a Buick, but that doesn't mean there isn't one, and that we shouldn't all want to drive BMW's if we could... Okay, so that's a terrible analogy. I don't even want a BMW.
The point is that, so long as you agree that the available technology makes downloading FLAC files just as convenient as MP3 files, than it serves to reason that the worldwide standard should be the newer, better technology.
In case you're not convinced about the FLAC file yet, this might help. FLAC is an open source file format, which means that you don't have to pay licensing fees to use it. So if you wrote a piece of software that has an audio component to it, you could use the FLAC source code and codecs without having to pay for it, and it's totally legit. OGG VORBIS is another example of an open source file format, and it too sounds better than MP3.
The MP3 was developed by a company called Fraunhofer (in conjunction with AT&T), and any company that has MP3 encoding technology built into the core of the product has to pay licensing to Fraunhofer (EG: Microsoft Windows, Apple operating systems, Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, essentially any application that can trans-code to and from the MP3 format etc...).
So even at a developmental level the FLAC file makes more sense. I hope that consumers smarten up and demand a higher standard of audio enjoyment. In this case, we can have both the convenience of digital audio (compact, portable, liquid), without sacrificing sonic quality.
I'm sure most people still don't care, cause they are listening to The Pussycat Dolls, and who the hell wants to listen to that in high fidelity?
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