future ala carte services - mp3, wma, or aac?
ok, you've read the heated debate. You've seen the piles of discussion. Now it's time to vote. What do readers want services like Rhapsody, Napster, etc... to use for their "drm free" services that are surely coming? mp3? AAC? WMA? Ogg? Something else? Leave a comment and let me know.
Ignore the many discussions around licensing terms, etc...that's the services' problem. What format do you want to buy music in?
20 Comments:
I'd like to see wma.
Honestly? You're right in that WMA vs AAC is, to one degree or another, a proxy OS war. More likely than not, those (including myself) siding on the side of AAC are Mac users.
But as an ex-rabid mac user? As a customer? It's whatever is the most convenient. I get MP3s from archive.org and other legit sources, it stays as MP3. Similarly, I pop a CD in, it rips to AAC (Because it was the default setting), spits out the CD, I'm done. I have one podcast subscription in AAC (Late Night Cocoa) and one in MP3 (NPR Car Talk).
Not only is there no advantage of re-compressing, but 3 steps is more than 1 step (Double-click the sound file vs double-click, right-click to convert, and remove the original).
Formats are not all or nothing. Stores are not all or nothing. I'm perfectly happy to have MP3, AAC, and WMA all on my system, obtained from several places, just as long as it'd nicely work with my music player. The only reason I don't use WMA is because it's a hassle to get it to do that last step. It's the ease of use that counts.
The biggest complaint about Zunes was the mental friction of whether or not a song could be squirted, and the math of how many dollars and points things cost. It was never about sound quality. Most people listen to FM radio, which is like 64kbps MP3s, simply because it's easy to turn on and tune in.
If you really wanted the Zune to make an impact? Let it play WMA, PlaysForSure, AAC, .WAV, where the customer can't even tell on the Zune which is which-- it doesn't matter to him, they're all audio files. Make it so that Zune Marketplace downloads into whatever format you want, just as long as it converts it into something iTunes can play. And when you do buy something, it uses scripting to automagically load the song into iTunes as well. COM on Windows, Applescript on Mac.
If you really wanted to be sneaky, make a driver on all systems that makes iTunes think the Zune is an iPod, enough to do some nice synching. Any audio conversion is done during the sync.
And get the MBU to port support and the store to the Mac, even to a G3, so that users don't have to worry about what system they have when they look to buy. And if an artist doesn't want to be squirted, drop him completely. Better to have no songs than songs that muddy up the features.
Make it so I don't have to sign up to any sort of monopoly money (pun not intended) account in order to buy songs. I'd rather pay $.99 in cold, hard, cash, than hassle with signing up in order to pay $.89 or even $.79 in brownie points. My time is worth more than 10, 20, even 99 cents a song, I'm willing to pay the premium if money if I get a savings in time.
Remember that the iTMS isn't competing with Zune, Rhapsody, Sony, et al. It's not even a contest, and it never has been. Their competitors are Limewire, Gnutella, Bearshare. They aren't successful by winning on price -- How do you beat free? It's on point, click, click, done.
So there's your answer. It doesn't matter, just as long as it's easy to use, and doesn't waste my time.
WMA is just fine for me, it stores the same quality in smaller file sizes than MP3 and works on all my computers without installing extra codecs or players. Also, I have a bunch of ripped CD's that are already in WMA.
I'm not rabidly attached to one particular file format as long as it just PLAYS.
Speaking selfishly, I’d be happiest with WMA (ideally though, I’d like the store to offer a lossless WMA version as well.) But, can Mac and Linux etc. users play WMA files easily? Natively? If not, then I’d have to be more democratic and go for MP3.
Personally, I'm all for choice. I'd like to see the Zune Marketplace offer OGG, MP3, AAC, and WMA. You could even go crazy and offer WAV, FLAC of some other lossless format at a premium price for those that want it.
Having more formats available will potentially draw a lot more customers and will definately be a good thing in the eyes of the consumer.
Most if not all of the people who respond to this post will agree it comes down to functionality. Not bitrates or sound quality. Most of sound quality is lost due to crappy earbuds or speakers.
If Zune could support AAC, WMA, MP3, etc...and I didn't have to wait or create conversions the Zune would be hands-down a winner in the HDD market.
As Blain said "click,click, done" is what I want! Not "click, click, convert, upload, done".
I don't currently buy music from online sources because buying the CD from Amazon or my local record store is frequently cheaper, and leaves me with all the sound fidelity and options I could want.
But it is less than 100% convenient, so there's hope in converting me.
This is a long-winded way of saying that the only format that is potentially compelling for me is 320kps clear MP3. It will play on absolutely anything without ever needing transcoding, and I can't claim that it doesn't live up to a CD in sound quality.
Anything lossless, and easily convertable. I personally prefer FLAC or WMA lossless.
MP3 is associated with music players. We don't call them WMA or AAC players, do we?
While I'd love to say that everyone is concerned with lossless formats, the majority of the consumers buying MP3 players don't care. Look at the file-sharing networks.
Seems like a pretty simple decision to me.
I'd like people to just settle on a next gen mp3 format already... mp3s, while decent at high bitrates are not high quality enough at lower ones. WMA is good, though I think WMA 10 and AAC are better. I agree with blain with the whole proxy war thing... maybe Apple and MS and at least a few other DAP and content providers should get together and do SOMETHING to unify things. The Zune is good having a bridge between the MS world and the itunes world, but it doesn't support PFS (which to be fair is a rather buggy system compared to the Zune Pass), or any independent formats (Ogg, FLAC, APE, etc). Independent formats may not be so popular amongst the mainstream, but they exist and are looked highly upon because they cost nothing.
AAC.
Microsoft does not even support WMA for Mac. MP3 is ok, but takes more space for the same quality vs AAC.
Since some would argue that the point behind DRM-free music is interoperability, I'd have to go with MP3 files. I think 256K MP3 would offer high-enough quality for 99% of consumers, and be compatible with 100% of devices.
If Zune Marketplace sold DRM-free WMA files, they still wouldn't be compatible with all the iPods out there.
AAC.
I know Apple doesn't own AAC. However, they have made sure they are compatible with Mac and Windows OS.
Microsoft on the other hand does not support WMA on the Mac. Even streaming WMV requires FlipforMac.
So I base my choice not (solely) on the fact that I am a Mac user. I base it on the fact that Microsoft created a format and appears to use it to manipulate the end user. Apple has chosen a format, which they do not control, especially with Fairplay removed, and they support that format across Windows and Mac.
Dave,
I worry about your sampling methods here--the type of people to seek out your site and the subset of those willing to comment are more likely to ask for AAC or WMA or something lossless.
I have no data but I suspect that if you asked your full target market, MP3 would probably be the answer.
Why don't you ask your question to a random sampling of people within your target audience?
Oh, for sure I'd want to do a full survey of target market users to help make a decision like this, among other things.
I'm just curious what blog readers would like.
I would vote for AAC because it's an open format and royalty-free, but very popular and compatible with many devices. Similar to WMA it creates higher quality, smaller files than mp3.
AAC.
Contrary to what some think, it is not an "Apple" format. OTOH, WMA surely is a Microsoft format.
WMA and AAC do better compression than mp3, effectively making any music player have 30-50% more capacity for the same quality music compared with mp3. So, it needs to be one of these formats.
Microsoft doesn't even support WMA on Macs (I dunno about anything on Linux), while Apple does fully support ipods and AAC on WIndows.
So, AAC is my first choice, mp3 second, WMA doesn't even make the list.
MP3.
- It's the only format that works 100% on all my devices. That includes: Zune, my PC, Sonos, Zen Micro, Muvo, XBox 360, Media Center, car stereo, cell phone, alarm clock, boombox, shoutcast server.
- I don't care about size. I have over 120GB of music. There isn't a DAP that even comes close to holding all of my music so squeezing an extra 3 or 4 albums on my Zune or an iPod isn't very compelling when over 50GB is still sitting on my harddrive.
- Even if I could reencode all my music from 120gb to 90gb I still wouldn't be ahead.
Thinking about it more, the best idea would be to do what allofmp3.com did.
You could select which encoding you wanted, whether it be AAC, WMA, MP3, Ogg, etc. You'd mark your items for purchase and then it would encode in the background and let you know when they were available for download. I'm assuming they had a high-quality WAV and would encode from that, caching the more popular formats for quick access.
I also liked the "pay based on size" method. Nothing is more annoying than having to pay the same price for a 30 second song as you do for a 12 minute remix. Also, if you encode at 320kb/s vs. 96kb/s it's nice to catch a break.
Obviously that method can handle the load just fine as at one time they were pretty popular and getting quite a few hits. Until of course people discovered that there was some dodgy interpretations of the the Russian radio licensing structure.
FLAC and Ogg Vorbis would be my choice. Me likes open standards.
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