Mike at Techdirt has a mini-rant today arguing that the current music format standards battle is Bad News For Everyone. The thrust of his argument is that MP3 was good enough, and the moves by Apple and Microsoft to introduce other standards are wrong:
In some sense, MP3 has just become a generic term for digital music file — which is only going to lead to problems later when the AAC and WMA files don’t behave the same way MP3 files do. Once again, the industry is doing more damage by fragmenting the way in which people store their digital music. There’s no benefit to the end user, but it will lead to confusion and anger — which isn’t the way you should want your customers to feel.
I disagree. There is a profound benefit to the end user in these other standards. MP3 was not “good enough” for anyone who cares about audio. AAC, in fact, is the MP3 standard updated with better compression and better audio quality. WMA likewise offers better compression and better sound. My collection of perfectly legal digital music occupies nearly 100GB of disk space. It would take twice that much to get the same quality using MP3.
There are two bigger problems at work here. One is digital rights management. I don’t buy music from online music stores (Apple, Microsoft, or anyone) if it’s locked up. I want to be able to reuse it on my own collection of devices. The other problem is the Apple vs. Microsoft feud. Apple won’t license the WMA format from Microsoft, because they don’t want to pay for it or allow iTunes users to download from sources other than Apple. And Apple won’t allow Microsoft to license the AAC format, so any tunes downloaded from the iTunes store have to be converted to MP3 format before they can be played.
Basically, consumers have to choose sides in this war. I’ve chosen the WMA side, and I’m perfectly happy, thanks very much.
Ed Bott 