MP3's on their way out?
Slashdot
links to an interesting article at
MSN Tech and Gadgets:
bq. MP3 losing steam?
After years as the unrivaled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple Computer.
bq. MP3 is still the overwhelming favorite of file traders, but the once-universal format's popularity has been going quietly but steadily down in personal music collections for the last year. According to researchers at The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago.
And meanwhile, some of the bigger companies are finally getting around to adding native MP3 support to their products:
bq. Some big companies that have resisted this notion for years are finally adapting to the MP3 world.
bq. Last month, Sony confirmed that it would at last let its digital music players support the MP3 format directly, instead of making consumers convert their files into Sony's own proprietary ATRAC format.
bq. Microsoft also recently added the ability to rip CDs into the MP3 format to its new Windows Media Player, after years of sending users to third-party plug-ins if they wanted to make MP3s.
Lots of other formats out there too -
Ogg Vorbis is a lossless compression for all platforms.
Posted by DaveH at October 21, 2004 10:58 AM