Related link: http://www.echo.com/technology/index.html
Today's unveiling of Echo Networks brings about a new online music venture formed by Best Buy, Tower Records, the Virgin Entertainment, Wherehouse Entertainment, Hastings Entertainment and Trans World Entertainment. Echo plans to license music from the recording industry and offer it to the Internet community, along with a broad range of real-time community features tightly integrated with the listening experience. Their web site states:
Echo will seek to unify the industry through a standard and open platform for the delivery of digital entertainment.
What exactly can we expect from an open platform? Does that mean that they will offer Ogg/Vorbis downloads? Ogg/Vorbis is just about the only truly free codec that is available -- everything else is encumbered by patents or other crazy royalty schemes.
Even classic MP3 doesn't fit this anymore since FHG/Thomson have started collecting royalties. So, Echo, if you are listening, please make your content available in Ogg/Vorbis format! I can't think of a better way to get geeks to buy your music.
I'm dreaming too much again, aren't I?
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Read More Entries by Robert Kaye.
odd statement
This lower excerpt is from the patents page on echo. It makes me wonder whether or not we will be able to choose what music we actually want to listen to.
"Echo’s patent-pending Song Selection technology delivers music based on users’ music profiles using a sophisticated algorithm, reducing the need for continuous song requests and time-consuming playlist creation." http://www.echo.com/patents.html
Lossy music compression
I think you're the exception -- most people (non-audiophiles) think MP3 is just fine. Clay Shirky sums it up rather well:
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True to form, the telephone companies also misunderstand the threat from VoIP (though here it is in part because people have been predicting VoIPs rise since 1996.) The core of the misunderstanding is the MP3 mistake: believing that users care about audio quality above all else. Audiophiles confidently predicted that MP3s would be no big deal, because the sound quality was less than perfect. Listeners, however, turned out to be interested in a mix of things, including accessibility, convenience, and price. The average music lover was willing, even eager, to give up driving to the mall to buy high quality but expensive CDs, once Napster made it possible to download lower quality but free music.
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from http://shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html
Lossy music compression
I would suggest people who spend the most on music are 'audiophiles'. Ogg/Vorbis is lossy compression. I will not buy music on-line unless the compression is lossless like shorten (http://www.softsound.com/Shorten.html), or FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net/).
Most peer to peer music is 'low-fi'. If the music industry was smart, they would repeat this over and over. mp3s sound horrible! If I listened to their current rhetoric, I would think mp3 music is as good as a CD when it's decidedly inferior, even when using lousy stereo equipment. What a bunch of boneheads. Too incompetent to market the main advantage of a CD - sound quality. They should be flooding peer-to-peer networks with 96 kbit mp3s, so people could hear their music, and want to go out and buy the CD-DA (or SACD or DVD-Audio) originals!