Thursday, October 16, 2008
MP-3
The fear that MP-3 recordings can strike a death blow has gripped the music industry in the US which is gearing up to meet this latest challenge. If realises that if it doesn’t take on this rechnological marvel of the Net age, it may be forced into marginalisation, if not extinction. Here is an update right from the US where a bitter battle is brewing between the upbeat NP-3 proponents and the beleaguered industry.
New on-line market
That electronic distribution would become such a protent new way of procuring music was not realised till recently. “With an extensive collection of music available for free downloads from the Web, there is little chance that music lovers will ever feel the need to go far from their house to shop and spend the extra buck,” says Joe Patrick, consultant, Digitech.
A total of more than half-a-million songs and albums already exist online, Industry analysts predict a boom scenario for the stereo market with more than one million consumers likely to purchase portable devices for playing MP-3 format music. Once the sale o fjusic begins through digital downloads down-loads from the Internet the market will grow tremendously.
However not all Websites that distribute music on the Internet at present are business-oriented. “Many Web hostings are simply being used as platforms to vent expressions and feelings.Music being one of the most potent forms of assertion, has become an intetral part of most communication over the Net by the Web community”,avers joe Patrik.
The ease and converience of downloading music from the Net has hed to unauthorised copying through the popular usage of MP-3, which packs a lot of music onto a relatively small computer file but offers no protection against piracy.
Unfortunately, the incessant increase in the number of computer users who are copying their favourite CDs on MP3 files and transporting them on-line to others for free is causing a tremor in the audio industry.
To illustrate a comparison, months ago the most popular file to downloaded from MP3.com was, suprisingly, Beethoven’s classical composition Moonlight Sonata performed by Richard Morris. The piece has been downloaded almost 100,000 times in the last month itself.
The music industry wants to ban the marketing of portable players for recording in MO-3 format until the piracy is controlled.
A total of more than half-a-million songs and albums already exist online, Industry analysts predict a boom scenario for the stereo market with more than one million consumers likely to purchase portable devices for playing MP-3 format music. Once the sale o fjusic begins through digital downloads down-loads from the Internet the market will grow tremendously.
However not all Websites that distribute music on the Internet at present are business-oriented. “Many Web hostings are simply being used as platforms to vent expressions and feelings.Music being one of the most potent forms of assertion, has become an intetral part of most communication over the Net by the Web community”,avers joe Patrik.
The ease and converience of downloading music from the Net has hed to unauthorised copying through the popular usage of MP-3, which packs a lot of music onto a relatively small computer file but offers no protection against piracy.
Unfortunately, the incessant increase in the number of computer users who are copying their favourite CDs on MP3 files and transporting them on-line to others for free is causing a tremor in the audio industry.
To illustrate a comparison, months ago the most popular file to downloaded from MP3.com was, suprisingly, Beethoven’s classical composition Moonlight Sonata performed by Richard Morris. The piece has been downloaded almost 100,000 times in the last month itself.
The music industry wants to ban the marketing of portable players for recording in MO-3 format until the piracy is controlled.
What makes MP-3 so popular
Typically, when a CD audio recording is made, a large amount of data is digitised. Normaly, a song takes up anywhere between 50 to 70 megabytes of disc space. The file size is never a consideration while listening to audio CDs, unless one decides to download a couple of songs from the Internet
A 50MB download from the Internet can take several hours using a typical modem, but an MP-3 can make slim compressed versions of recordings that sound nearly indistinguishable from the original and are alomost ten times faster
MP-3 files reduce compression to a fraction of the size of an uncompressed recording . A Three-minute CD-quality song that was 50 MB becomes a 4.5 MB MP- 3 file .
To a layman this mean getting as many as 150-to-160 MP - 3 songs recoded on a singal CD at an average price of downloding it free from the web.
The MP-3 technology also allows easy uploading of an extensive collection of music on the website by simply converting records into computer files, using the same method of digital compression which allows music to be sent quiclky and easily over the Internet line. Anyone with a decent connection can easily upload or download music files within minutes.
A 50MB download from the Internet can take several hours using a typical modem, but an MP-3 can make slim compressed versions of recordings that sound nearly indistinguishable from the original and are alomost ten times faster
MP-3 files reduce compression to a fraction of the size of an uncompressed recording . A Three-minute CD-quality song that was 50 MB becomes a 4.5 MB MP- 3 file .
To a layman this mean getting as many as 150-to-160 MP - 3 songs recoded on a singal CD at an average price of downloding it free from the web.
The MP-3 technology also allows easy uploading of an extensive collection of music on the website by simply converting records into computer files, using the same method of digital compression which allows music to be sent quiclky and easily over the Internet line. Anyone with a decent connection can easily upload or download music files within minutes.
What makes MP-3 so popular 1
Points out Mike Wathen, a music producer, “If a new release sells 70,000 copies from a store, it would be counted as a substantial success. But if it is downloaded from the Web that many times, it may still be considered as unheard of.”
For the recording companies the acceptance of listening to music from MP-3 files, which are almost CD qualify, is happening too fast and too soon in the consumer market. Michael Robinson, chief executive officer of MP3.com, a popular Website offering free downloading of songs from 7,000 bands, mostly unsigned,comments: “The truth is that the MP-3 has evolved incredibly quickly into a full-blown mainstream movement and has caught many people unprepared.”
For the recording companies the acceptance of listening to music from MP-3 files, which are almost CD qualify, is happening too fast and too soon in the consumer market. Michael Robinson, chief executive officer of MP3.com, a popular Website offering free downloading of songs from 7,000 bands, mostly unsigned,comments: “The truth is that the MP-3 has evolved incredibly quickly into a full-blown mainstream movement and has caught many people unprepared.”
How do I play an MP-3 file
The minimum requirement of hardware for an acceptable music quality is a Pentium 75. All one needs to do is to either convert from CD audio to MP-3 by using a CD ripper program that grabs audio tracks from a CD and converts them into wave-file format, or from MP-3 to CD audio.
using a decompression algorithm. But many MP-3 players can also decode MP-3 files
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