How do you "support a format"? AFAIK nothing will convince Apple to release music in a better (patent-free) codec, much less convince others to dump DRM.
> How do you "support a format"? AFAIK nothing will convince Apple to release music in a better (patent-free) codec, much less convince others to dump DRM.
Then you start by not giving them your money. It's a uphill battle, but someone has to fight the good fight instead of just throwing their hands-up.
That's a noble, if politically naïve, attitude. Societies, like Congress, have a limited bandwidth for problem solving. The way we prioritize what gets solved and what doesn't, as well as how to solve it, is "politics". (This is more a matter of definition than quibbling.)
There are various political institutions, and individuals have varying degrees of influence over them, depending on how one's society is structured. But unvaryingly, attracting people with political capital to your cause is paramount. This is often done by showing such people an agglomeration of individuals supporting your cause, individually with less political value than them but collectively something interesting.
Even the people at the bottom of the chain have limited bandwidth. This is why most systems default to delegation, particularly at scale. Single-handedly refusing to support something you think is important without patching that into a political system is fine from a personal or moral perspective, but it shouldn't be expected to actually do anything. As such, it's less a good fight than good fussing about.
There's a wide range here. Complaining on a message board where most people agree with you is basically zero effort. Devoting your life's work to it is a ton of effort. There is a middle ground here.
My general thought is: you should, on a regular basis, feel at least a little bit of pain due to your opinions. If you don't then your opinion is probably worthless to society.
> My general thought is: you should, on a regular basis, feel at least a little bit of pain due to your opinions. If you don't then your opinion is probably worthless to society.
I've reread this sentence a few times... and it is actually quite deeper that it first seemed on a more superficial read. Thanks a lot for your comment.
Here's a reform to the copyright law that just occurred to me. If you buy a copy of a published work, then you're allowed to copy and distribute it as you see fit, provided that you pay the creator the same royalty that they were paid for the copy you bought. Other restrictions such as moral rights would still be in force.
That seems to get a lot of incentives right. Publishers have to pay artists decent royalties, and proprietary file formats can't be used to suppress competition. What would go wrong? Apart from the fact that this would have to be enacted over the cold, dead bodies of a lot of music company executives: that's a feature, not a bug.
I think you are confusing the issues. TFA is about the license fees paid to Fraunhofer for the MP3 codec, for which they owned the underlying and now-expired patents.
MP3 is not an encrypted codec, the format itself is quite open and doesn't place any real restrictions on redistributing music -- in fact, most of the original music sharing sites like Napster traded exclusively in MP3. The use of MP3 has no bearing on copyright or music piracy.
The real issue is that software developers had to pay a royalty to Fraunhofer to distribute copies of MP3 players or encoders. That made it impossible to incorporate MP3 into a free (as in speech) OS like GNU/Linux.
There's real a higher-order issue, too. Why did anyone want GNU to incorporate an MP3 player in the first place? There is no law of physics that requires songs to be encoded as MP3.
I wish that worked here. You'd have to establish an open source media group with direct hooks into the i* platform. Then you'd have to get major acts on that platform.
There is radio (online and in the ether), there are alternative platforms (e.g., Bandcamp), concerts and other live venues, (second hand) physical media (e.g., CDs or vinyl), open access music, etcetera.
On top of all that there is the big middle finger of 'piracy' if you are so inclined. For many this is a morally acceptable alternative to a rotten system, for others it may remain an imponderable transgression of law and or ethics — either way, it is a viable alternative in addition to the above.
As an engineer? You can influence design decisions and standards for the products your company makes.
Somebody at apple decided AAC was better than MP3 because of it has better licensing for distributors, they could have gone further to consider codecs which had liberal licensing towards codec developers/manufacturers.
You can only say that because of the astonishing improvements to MP3 encoding over the past fifteen years. Back in 2003 when Apple opened the iTunes Store, AAC was substantially better than MP3 at all bitrates, most particularly the 128 kbps rate Apple initially used.
In fact the decision would have been made back in 2001 or earlier, given that the original iPod released in 2001 supported AAC decoding.
(The music labels also forced Apple to encrypt everything, therefore there was no incentive to use an open format. Had they used encrypted Vorbis, that would have been seen as a giant middle finger to open source.)
I don't think the iPod supported AAC at its initial release. Virtually no software supported it at that time -- that didn't really come until 2003, when iTunes 3.0 added support for AAC (including encoding). The Music Store was introduced in the same release, so there would have been a required software update for iPods at the same time, to add support for Fairplay encrypted files.
Aac is higher quality on all bitrates, it's a much more modern codec utilizing techniques not available in mp3. Using MP3 should be discouraged, it kills hihat clarity and low bass for example.
>How do you "support a format"? AFAIK nothing will convince Apple to release music in a better (patent-free) codec,
Simple: don't give any money to Apple for music in patented or DRMed formats, or to anyone else who tries to sell music that way. If you really want, you can write them to tell them why you're not buying their crap.
Companies get away with this behavior because consumers let them, and reward them with their money. You can make the argument that consumers don't have enough power for necessities like internet service (because of local/regional monopolies or oligopolies), but this just isn't true for luxury goods and services, which is exactly what the Apple music store is. You don't need downloaded music, there are other providers out there, and you can always buy it on CD (frequently for less) and rip it yourself into whatever format you prefer, like Vorbis, Opus, or FLAC.
That's exactly what I do: I buy the physical media and since this doesn't limit my rights in how do I store the music contained inside, I just rip it off that physical media and keep it safely on my machine. That way I also give all the corporations the finger and I am hopeful that even if several tens of thousands of other people do the same, they'll notice a lack of growth at least and reconsider.
I don't seriously believe the corps would actually change their ways to benefit the customer -- but this is my rebellion against their business model and it's an exercise of the small power I have.
Plus I don't break the law. I simply actively don't feed them money in their scheme which I feel are very unethical and greedy.
If buying from iTunes, you can choose ALAC, which is royalty free.
Patent-encumbered audio codecs are popular at this point because of network effects, not technical superiority. There are many ways to reduce the network effect, even without changing music buying habits. For example If you're a website designer, include a royalty-free audio format as one of your <audio> srcs. As a bonus, you'll save some bandwidth.
How do I "choose" ALAC? I thought only select albums were available losslessly.
Support Bandcamp. Support Databeats (storefront for many drum 'n' bass labels). Hell, support Beatport and Juno, even though they insist on huge markups for WAV/FLAC.
I'm glad Bandcamp and even CDBaby support FLAC for the same price. I feel like it's the best format for balancing quality vs size, and it's more open than ALAC.
I'm loving Bandcamp so much. Buy an album once, you get FLAC, plus any other formats you might want (yes, you can always encode FLAC to anything else, but the convenience of just downloading the oggs is nice). I can't imagine buying music from anywhere that doesn't do this now.
The same way I do (and you do): get both ALAC and FLAC downloads from Bandcamp. ALAC for now, FLAC if you want to play your music on systems that won't run iTunes.
As I understand it, this is the year that the last of the MP3 patents expire, nd some already have, but there are still two left. One of them expires on August 29, and the last one expires on December 30.
It seems kind of odd to do this so late in the patents' life, though. I understand the general theory behind a last-minute cash grab, but you generally can't take "last-minute" quite this literally. Why wait so long?
Wikipedia says that MP3's last patent expired in the United States last month:
If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015 [...] If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 [...].
Wikipedia also says (unless I'm missing something) that all the MP3 patents have already expired everywhere else too. If this is true, then Fraunhofer is ending their licensing program just because they don't want to bother getting people to pay for something they can now legally have for free.
The simplest thing, IMO, is just to buy your music on CD and rip it to a free format yourself. Some indie artists release their work online in free formats, but for mainstream artists a physical copy is often the only way.
In the UK format shifting was briefly allowed but media corps objected and the Tories decided it was better for society not to be able to rip CDs you own. iTunes, f.e., is a tool for contributory infringement in the UK.
I'm not saying it is ideal, but the used CD market is hugely depressed right now. I buy a ton of used CDs at various downscale businesses and rip them into iTunes with Apple Lossless. Some of the stores will run them through the disc cleaner/polisher as a matter of course and they rip fine.
I'd love to be able to buy DRM-free 24/96 lossless versions of all the music I actually want but buying used CDs for under $2 apiece seems like a reasonable compromise to me. For the moment if I can't find particular albums on CD in the used market I either buy them from eBay sellers or do without. The remaining chain retail vendors for CDs such as Best Buy have a pretty hopelessly bad selection these days.
The question was specifically "Where can I find Rihanna in Ogg/Vorbis?" Rihanna is not on Bandcamp, so this is a pretty poor answer. You're essentially telling people to like different music than they do.
iTunes was one of the first online music stores to go DRM free, and even now I believe most of it is, but I prefer Apple Music for the much wider variety and greater convenience, especially for Japanese music.
I try to always buy hardware that supports FLAC (which is what everything new in my music collection is ripped/encoded in and what I always download from Bandcamp. Even CDBaby supports FLAC now, which is surprising, but must have been a demand for it).
When looking for a head unit in my car, I specifically made sure I had something that could play FLAC and oggs (and mp3s .. and aac .. my music collection is a mix of legacy formats).
Support software and services that supports that format, and try to avoid supporting software and services that do not support it. Including your own if you are a developer, of course.
