Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Make OGG not MP3

In reference to recent news, MP3 is still gaining momentum, as Wal-Mart is replacing their Windows Media Audio (WMA) files with MP3. In my humble opinion, MP3 is still better than WMA because it is so well understood (coders, decoders, support, household name, etc.) and WMA is really just a way for Microsoft to get a piece of the Fraunhofer pie. However, as long as MP3 is really "gaining momentum", then we need to collectively do something about it...

Personally, I've made the following pledges and hope they inspire someone:
  1. I will not distribute MP3
    I deal with a lot of original content, and after mix-down there's a choice--how to encode it to let someone hear it over the Internet? I will always choose FLAC or Ogg Vorbis, and refuse to send an MP3.
  2. I will maintain my personal collection in Ogg Vorbis
    When I buy a new CD, the first thing I do (usually) is run it through GNOME Sound Juicer (which supports OGG and FLAC by default) and create Ogg Vorbis files so I can load it onto music player (software) or portable media player (hardware), and to protect the data from being damaged by wear on the CD. This is the cheif method that OGG could become ubiquitous. Transcoding MP3 to OGG is lossy (it's much better to start from the original sampling), and any audiophile would tell you it's not worth it. Therefor, the most important source of OGG files is at the source (audio CD, FLAC, etc.), and we can become less dependent on MP3 by replacing MP3 files with newly-encoded OGG files.
  3. I will not buy a portable media player that does not support free codecs like Ogg Vorbis
    Okay, I still want to be able to listen to MP3, but in order to support pledge #2, I need my portable media device to support OGG out of the box. I personally have a COWON (iAudio) T2, but there are many other options from abroad.
  4. I prefer Ogg Vorbis Internet radio over other formats
    Hey, if OGG has the same fidelity at a lower bandwidth (you'll note the rates on Internet streams have a lower average), then we're saving the host bandwidth by preferring an Ogg Vorbis stream. Also, since Internet radio is struggling with royalties, why don't they save themselves money by dropping their MP3 streams and providing only Ogg Vorbis streams? I feel that most Internet radio listeners would not mind having to download an additional codec (if they even need to) to make the switch.
These are reasonable commitments to make, and the second big corporations catch on, we'll start to see MP3 dwindle away. Ogg Vorbis will have to make a statistical win (what is the probability of an audio file being an OGG?), and a compatibility win (what is the probability I can play this OGG?) in order to acheive this.

Note that DRM is not even in my vocabulary--it seems like the only "solution" to DRM is to avoid it at all costs. This business of limiting where, when and who can listen to a file (that someone has paid for, mind you) is nonsense. This is exactly the reason we dropped vinyl albums and magnetic tapes for compact discs--so we could hear the same thing again whenever and wherever we want.