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Last Updated: Feb 18th, 2008 - 14:39:01 |
MP3 taking net world by storm
Let me introduce you to the fascinating musical demi-monde of MP3. It's at the very bleeding edge of multimedia on the Web. MP3 - short for MPEG 1 Layer 3 - is a technology for making compressed, though still high-quality, digital recordings of music that can be stored on a computer hard disk and played back using shareware software on a multimedia PC or Mac. Or on new MP3 hardware players through your stereo system.
You can download MP3 music from the Web and even listen to an ''all request'' MP3 radio station originating in Canada that blows RealAudio out of the water. In short, it's taking the Net by storm - and causing a storm of copyright controversy in the music recording industry.
It's the kind of technology that is almost impossible to control, and could even spark a paradigm shift in how music is distributed.
In technical terms, MP3 is the audio component of the MPEG 1 (Motion Picture Experts Group) digital video standard, the first generation of digital video recording technology.
MP3 is a compression technology. It uses mathematical algorithms and other techniques to produce a kind of shorthand version of a digital data file used to store multimedia content. When the file is uncompressed, it ''plays back'' more or less in
its original form and with its original quality. More or less.
As with other compression technologies - such as JPEG, used to compress digital image files - MP3 is what's known as ''lossy'' compression; meaning that some of the original information is lost during the compression/decompression process.
You can vary the amount of MP3 compression that you use when you encode a file. The more you compress, the smaller the file, but the greater the loss in playback quality.
Even at their highest quality (or lowest compression ratio), though, MP3 files are small enough - about a megabyte per minute of music, compared to about 10 megabytes a minute for a CD-quality wave file - that it's feasible to share them over the Internet. It's this economy of data storage that makes the format so powerful.
While the music when played is hardly ''CD-quality,'' as MP3 proponents claim, it's close enough, especially for non-audiophiles who listen to loud, crashy music anyway – and they make up the mass of MP3 users.
And besides, MP3 is merely the first such format. There is already a new form of digital audio compression from Yamaha called VQF which is gaining momentum on the Web. It is demonstrably superior in sound quality to MP3, and the files are even smaller. Others are sure to follow.
As well as being an important new music technology with possibly far-reaching implications for the music industry, MP3/VQF are also the focus of a howling debate over intellectual property rights.
It pits a Web counter culture of mostly young, too often irresponsible music fans against the music industry establishment.
Digital encoders such as MP3 and VQF also have fantastically positive implications, though. They enable independent music makers - indie bands and music hobbyists, for example - who have no access to the established music distribution channels, to find their own markets on the Internet.
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