News Microsoft loses a $1.5 billion suit

Well, yes. That and it works. To most people that's all that matters; these are the people to whom there is no difference between a 128 Kbps MP3 and a 1,411 Kbps audio CD track. They form the majority, not the people who can tell the difference.

Regarding your complaints though, I must add that as far as gapless playback is concerned, the players manage to work around it without any problems if it's important enough to their userbase, and the quality with a recent version of LAME using the right parameters is quite comparable to any other audio codec. I'd say the difference really comes out at lower bitrates. For example, I use 56 Kbps AAC files exclusively on my cell phone. A 56 Kbps MP3 sounds like, well, you know what I mean. A 56 Kbps AAC, on the other hand, still sounds (to my ears, at least) pretty much like it did at 320 Kbps. I've actually done an informal comparison to confirm this.

 

yeah, im a bit confused. i was like, omg someone finally owned MS in a court of law, but after reading the bit on it, i was... puzzled.

 

Because MS is so big, everyone takes full advantage of them...
Now, probably MS is going to create it's own format....

When people will learn... OGG > MP3 in all aspect... why not use that? When OGG portable player will exist? I guess probably they did not manage to put DRM on it, so no companies wants to make player that supports it.

 

One would assume that the original MP3 codec was opensource as it were, there are many versions of 'mp3' I have a least 5 different codecs with dbpoweramp, not quite sure what the real difference is. I remember a dialog box poping up in dbpoweramp from v9 (I think) upwards saying 'Number of encoding limits reached, please buy the codec', the codec it reffered to (from memory) was the Fraunhofer codec, might just be my memory playing tricks on me.

I still use a really old version the lame codec. I am one of those people who cant really tell the difference between ACC etc.... but hey not many people can.

$1.52 billion is pocket change! - mmmmmmm me wishes

 

Sad but true. I agree that the differences between mp3 and better codecs are more discernable at lower bitrates, and tha low bitrate AAC / Vorbis sounds a lot more acceptable than low bitrate mp3. I also use low BR AAC on my phonel, and given the situation (background music through a fairly low quality 'sound system' to keep me amused on my commute and block out the horrible sounds one hears on the Tube), it's perfectly acceptable.

The problem is, most people don't actually listen. 128 kb/s mp3, especially if badly encoded, is quite noticeably inferior to the CD original if you play them side-by-side through decent hardware (any well set up decent separates system), and that's enough to turn me off. Hard discs are so cheap now that I archive all my CDs to FLAC, and transcode to other formats as necessary for my phone, my girlfriend's iPod, mp3 CDs for the car etc.

Anyhoo, I think we've veered sufficiently far off topic now . I still think this law suit is a farce.

 

I-River make portables that play OGG. Thats one of the reasons im on my second I-River. They are well made, and support lots of formats (my current supports MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV and maybe more that I don't use so can't remember them hehe.

-wolfman