“While Apple scored a public relations coup by offering EMI’s DRM-free tracks through iTunes, the company has also struck a major blow against Microsoft in a less obvious arena: music encoding standards,” Eliot Van Buskirk writes for Wired.
“In an early morning press release, EMI announced the immediate availability of its ‘digital repertoire’ in high-quality, DRM-free AAC format. The new tracks will be encoded at 256 Kbps, EMI officials said, instead of the 128 Kbps that most iTunes tracks use,” Van Buskirk writes.
Van Buskirk writes, “A large part of the news has to do with consumers’ excitement over the “unprotected” part of the equation, since DRM restrictions are often seen as onerous, unfair and contrary to the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law… Still, the removal of DRM is just one piece of the puzzle; of equal significance to the online music industry is EMI’s choice of AAC encoding.”
“While AAC is an industry standard, Apple has been its primary champion,” Van Buskirk writes. “…Apple’s iPod has long supported the AAC format, which is used by the ITunes Store.”
“That’s about to change, now that Apple and EMI have doubled down on AAC as their unprotected format of choice… Other music stores could start adopting the AAC format as well… Luckily for consumers and manufacturers, the audio decoder chips found in most MP3 players are already able to decode the AAC format, even if they don’t support it out of the box. By installing a simple firmware upgrade, users of most music players can upgrade their gadgets to support the files,” Van Buskirk writes.
Van Buskirk writes, “Now, developers and manufacturers have a big incentive to go with AAC rather than WMA, which could cut WMA out of the larger digital music ecosystem. Apple and EMI’s embrace of AAC spells an unlikely defeat for Microsoft at the hands of a technology that consumers didn’t really use until Jobs got his hands on it.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Chris M” for the heads up.]
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is, most simply, the successor to MP3. AAC is MPEG-4 audio; MP3 on steroids. A large part of the confusion over AAC is its name. If it was called “MP4,” the average person would easily grasp that it’s the the successor to MP3. It’s all in the name and “AAC” is horribly named. Unfortunately, the name “AAC” has unnecessarily confused the consumer (and many writers, analysts, and pundits) for years. More about AAC here.
As for DRM, it will continue to exist, as it’s necessary to protect subscription music – otherwise all of the songs offered by such services would be “free.” Such services really haven’t really caught on because people prefer owning their music instead of having to pay recurring fees in order to listen to rented tunes.
When it comes to TV shows and movies, however, we seen a much stronger case for subscription services due to the way such content is consumed. TV shows and movies are generally watched once or twice, as opposed to songs which are listened to over and over, so TV show and movies subscription services make a lot more sense than music subscription services.
Apple’s embrace of AAC is not an “unlikely defeat” for WMA, as WMA has been defeated by AAC, the defacto standard for legal online music sales, for years. Microsoft has been the big loser in this market for quite some time.
Related articles:
Apple: Higher quality 256 kbps AAC DRM-free music on iTunes Store coming in May – April 02, 2007
The de facto standard for legal digital online music files: Apple’s protected MPEG-4 Audio (.m4p) – December 15, 2004
AAC isn’t EMI’s format of choice, it’s Apple’s. EMI will let online music stores sell their music in any DRM-free format they like.
MP3 will probably re-emerge as more of a threat to AAC than WMA.
It didn’t take this deal to make Microsoft a loser.
(ducks as chair flies over head)
And where aac/mp4 goes h.264 follows, and with any luck we’ll be done with windows media entirely.
Ugh! Get that trash Avril off th web page! Useless!
Too many people thing the “A” in AAC stands for Apple.
And by extension, this also makes QuickTime a big winner, too!
it’s stunning how many smart moves Apple has made, based on a real strategy, vs. Microsoft’s knee-jerk, reactionary, if-we-throw-enough-money-at-it-and-wait-we-will-win mode of operation.
MDN Magic Word: Take the BALL and run with it, Apple!
Well, if they would finally ditch the riduclous name of AAC and go with MP4 then they probably would not have this problem. It’s not only a better codec but from a marketing standpoint a no brainer. People always respond to that sort of thinking.
Unless there is some sort of legal reason to not use the name then by all means go for it.
Microsoft is indeed a very big loser in all of this. Not only because this reduces WMA even more, but also because MS has been married to DRM from day one.
Anything that is DRM-free completely runs against everything that Microsoft stands for. Without DRM, they can’t lock people in and make money off of them perpetually. They’ve managed to do it well with software (so far anyway), but with digital media, their plan has totally gone down in flames now. The digital media “war” between MS and Apple was over before it even really started, whether or not MS realizes it yet or not.
As for MP3, that format makes no sense because the file sizes are larger and the quality isn’t as good when compared to AAC. It’s old technology, and AAC is the intelligent way to go now.
“Ugh! Get that trash Avril off th web page! Useless!”
Yeah, it looks like she’s taking a dump or sumthin’…
What is changing here? Apple music store is still selling songs that can only be played on iPods. Or can you play them on other players as well? I mean without burning them on a disk first and then rip back to mp3s.
“MP3 will probably re-emerge as more of a threat to AAC than WMA.”
And wax will re-emerge as more of a threat to vinyl than CDs.
Why would consumers begin to embrace an inferior sounding compression format?
Tom,
How can you say she’s useless?
You have no idea what tricks she knows.
“What is changing here? Apple music store is still selling songs that can only be played on iPods. Or can you play them on other players as well?”
DRM-free AAC files can be played back on any digital media player or computer platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) that can read AAC files, not just iTunes/iPods.
AAC is not a proprietary file format (unlike WMA files for example).
@ Mikko
AAC is an open standard, so yes you can play the file on other players without having to burn, re-rip.
“Ugh! Get that trash Avril off th web page! Useless!”
Yeah, it looks like she’s taking a dump or sumthin’..
She probably has crumbs in her knickers.
“”Ugh! Get that trash Avril off th web page! Useless!”
Yeah, it looks like she’s taking a dump or sumthin’..
She probably has crumbs in her knickers.”
And yellow stains, probably. So her knickers stink as much as her music…?
Avril is hot, rocks and has a great ass.
Anyways, AAC isn’t that poorly named. Can’t use MP4 as the licensing for MP3 is now up in the air with Apple named in a major lawsuit. That lawsuit could be in the billions of dollars if the decision against MS stands.
Also, at the time of AAC’s naming, (probably back before any legal music site existed — I’m not going to bother looking up when PressPlay started or whatever), the original peer-to-peer Napster was scaring the major labels to death, and they didn’t know anything about encoding technology at the time other than “MP3 is bad for us.” I’ve always suspected that trying to sell them on the nascent idea of the iTunes Music Store would have been severely complicated if Apple would have kept talking about “MP4.” Like, that’s one even worse, isn’t it…?
Yesterday I wrote a blog posting about how the EMI/Apple DRM-free announcement spells the end of Microsoft’s WMA format:
How Apple killed Microsoft’s music format monopoly dreams
Buh bye wma.
@danno bonano: you can’t trademark an acronym. Be it MP3, MP4, or AAC. That dispute is about patents that underlie the MP3 format and whether Fraunhaufer had the right to license them on behalf of Lucent.
I can not emphasize enough how much I don’t care about this. DRM-free music is just one more incentive for people to steal music ala Napster. Kids today, and many adults, don’t care about what’s right, just what’s easy. Apple saying they have to “trust” their customers is disingenuous. Customers can’t trust themselves. This whole thing is about money and greed. It’s that simple.
Apple saying they have to “trust” their customers is a Godsend. For once, I don’t feel like some big company is insulting my intelligence and my morality!
There has been speculation elsewhere that the DRM free files from EMI will still have metadata. So it is possible that the file you download from the iTunes store will have your account number encoded. If it’s found in the wilds of a download site, it could be tracked back to you.
So while you are free to copy it, it contains a traceable “serial number”.
Of course, if that is the case, sooner or later someone will devise a way to remove the serial number. Just tlike they do on stolen cars, etc.
Or as my dad always said, “Locks are for keeping honest people honest.”
This is all seriously great and is bound to have a profound impact on the music business. However, the addition of 256Kbps “premium quality” tracks does slightly tarnish Apples previous claim that “AAC compressed audio at 128 Kbps (stereo) has been judged by expert listeners to be ‘indistinguishable’ from the original uncompressed audio source.” If this statement were really true, what benefit would listeners gain (besides the absence of DRM) by purchasing the 256 Kbps “premium” versions of their songs?