Company Set to Launch MP3 Successor

Great, now I have to buy the White album again...

"Company Set to Launch MP3 Successor"

Here lemme fix that for you:

"Company Set to Launch MP3 Successor That Will Fail to Unseat the MP3 Format"

"Company Set to Launch MP3 Successor That Will Fail to Unseat the MP3 Format"

Aw, you beat me to it. Yep, there are plenty of other formats that are better than MP3, but none of them beat MP3's versatility.

MP3s are like the Windows OS, Common, comfortable, good enough, and supported by alot of hardware and software. Sure there are better formats than MP3s, but as long as the above remains true MP3's won't be replaced any time soon.

not interested. i don't trust them. also what about people that buy the cd's and rip them to their computer, do they get anything special

They're trying to beat piracy with this? I doubt that would work at all.

just wait till internet is fast enough to support flac quality based downloads easily and this this will fail. Of course hdd capacity must grow with it but I don't see any stop to that soon.
The info couldn't be more redundant thanks to the options of winamp for me, just put it in my /carebox plz... -> \__/

LOL... almost got my hopes up. Thought this had something to do with a higher quality audio standard set to succeed the quality, popularity, and success of the MP3 format. Instead it's just the same MP3 with more DRM crap, probably in an attempt at further limiting the rights of use for the honest consumer. MP3's don't sound all that great on a pair of good headphones, I'd rather use the extra space for higher quality audio.

ahh I can see it now.....people getting to the end of a song and saying wtf....... I don't remember a commercial fading in at the end of that song?!?!?

"What we are bringing back to the end user is the entire emotional experience of music"

You've got your work cut out for you sir, so far I am utterly unmoved and unimpressed by your creation

ROFL! Just wait, when MusicDNA comes out everything released in that format will just be re-encoded to mp3. I really see no need for album art integration. Album art looks cool once in a while on my iPhone but can you really see it when your mp3 player is tucked away in your pocket. As for "emotional experience of music", go to a concert.

sweet, tomsguide articles now with nipple slips. giggity.

So funny..
Those corporate managers are desperately trying to reinvent the wheel in order to get rid the non-profitable mp3 format.. I don't have problem with that. Spend all your RIAA money on advertisement and promotion of a useless product!

I'm confused. What is this going to provide users over mp3?

I can find the album art online, can get the lyrics automatically (in most cases) through a Songbird add-on, I'm pretty sure I don't want my music updated excepting to find new concert dates locally (which Songbird can do), and I can do this by using regular mp3 files with no possibility for DRM.

No joke! Although I was thinking more like "Company Set to Launch Audio Format Based on MP3 Only With Extra Crap You Don't Want"

I mean seriously, I clicked on the headline thinking it was some new advanced format designed to give AAC, Vorbis, WMA a run for their money in terms of superior compression (especially for high frequency and multi-channel sound). All while remaining as free to work with as MP3 has become.

"This may be some type of DRM hidden behind new interviews, social network updates, or other news content."

And there you8 have it, the key word.... DRM ........

I don't want updates to my music. I'm fine with my FLAC files.

I don't want updates to my music. I'm fine with my FLAC files.

really? how mny songs you listen to in MP# format do you care about lyrics or updated art for?
even if it was free, I would stick with MP3 or AAC or such.

I dont know about most people..I like to just listen to my music, not watch it or oogle at the cover art.
if I wanted lyrics and art to go with the song, Id download music videos..
99% of the time I use maybe 2-3 slots of the MP3 tag areas..give me song, and artist text..thats all I need to know about whats playing.

Kevin, I like the subtle dig on Apple user intelligence:

The picture choice was a nice touch too.

Do people on tom's really think that mp3s @ 320kbps sound bad?

I think they sound just fine. flac files simply aren't worth the space they take up imo. 10mb/minute of music? That's about 3 times as much as I would like...

This just tells me they're just adding a feature to the current MPtrash format and giveing it a new name, there are loads of better music formats then MP3 such as .OGG .FLAC MPC and so on, but aslong as people are using crappy media players such as an Ipod that can't support any of these formats, MP3 is still going to be the standard music format until people smarten up and get media players that can use .OGG or .FLAC files in it.

Space is of noconcern since disks and flashes are constantly growing bigger.

I find digital music as a whole sounds flat no matter what sampling rate is used the mid range, high end and low end suffer too much loss, when i was a kid it was about fidelity now its volume.

Vacuum tube amps and records sound so much better than mp3's i find even flac suffers from too much frequency loss need a better format without so much loss.

I'll stick with non-DRM AAC audio, thanks

The problem with replacing MP3 is that there is no need... It's good enough (not perfect but with a high bit rate its damn good) Everything works with it so why mess with something else?

I think this will go the way of Atrac and seemingly a dozen other formats that have come out since MP3.

MP3 and FLAC are good enough for me. We don't need another format.

completely useless. It seems as just a way to add DRM and gain more control over the music.

things like news updates with the music is crap, because when music services have "news updates" it usually means advertisement in the form of a news update

lyrics are useless also, many players will automatically get them and most people don't like reading them anyway.

this will only add more to the file size while offering no additional quality. it will also be a problem for users with limited bandwidth, imagine a collection of like 15000 songs trying to update them self every little while, it will be a waste of system resources and also a waste of bandwidth.

while there are better formats out there, unless you have a $500-1000 pair of headphones you generally cant tell the difference.

when going from a 320k mp3 to flac, generally all you get is a slight improvement in the treble and it is hard to notice in many cases.

if they want to reduce piracy, adding advertisements and DRM wont help, what they need to do is offer better service. allow people to sample like half of a song minimum or the entire thing (eg with pandora radio, I bought a lot of music because I was able to hear the whole song and since I liked the whole song, a simple click of the buy button is enough for me to get a legit copy of a song in good quality)

they also need to reduce music prices, especially when it is digital, sending someone 10MB of data is insanely cheap generally about 1/1000 of a penny

if music was priced like 5-20 cents per song, more people will buy the music because it will be safer and cost effective, and they can still make a good profit from it

when music is sole online, it is pretty much 100% profit

with digital, other than the initial production, all other sales ate basically 100% profit.

Lossy compression formats have what is known as artifacts that are audible even at 320k. These artifacts are clearly audible on average equipment, especially when using an equalizer, but only on some songs.

But Ogg and Musepack already are valid successors to MP3 so I don't really see the point with the MusicDNA format. I would like to see some really thorough tests with different "trouble songs" too see how this format is dealing with artifacts.

But then again, if I want to make sure the compressed songs are free from artifacts, flac and ape are viable options which gives fair compression ratios. And the DRM scheme is not exactly encouraging, even Apple can testify to that.

I only wish there were a portable media player which supports Musepack MPC/MPP, Ogg Vorbis, flac and ape. Cowon does but their players don't have much memory. So my hope is that a media player such as VLC, Amarok or Songbird gets ported to Android and to later see an Android based media player with SDXC support.

But why would anyone even bother when there already are other formats out there? I'm willing to bet that this format is born to fail, just like the MP3+ and other obscure formats.

The only viable way of distributing digital music is by using a DRM free lossless format, preferrably ape (Monkey's Audio) because it is currently the best compressor out there and/or flac which is a popular open-source format, and letting the end-user transcode to whatever lossy format he or she wants.

The ID3v2 tag already supports all of what is mentioned in the article (such as lyrics, album art thumbs etc). If there ever will be a feature not supported in the current ID3v2 tag there should be no problem developing an ID3v2.5 or ID3v3 that can be incorporated with existing mp3, Musepack, Ogg, flac, ape, etc formats and yet be backwards compatible with ID3v1, ID3v1.1, and ID3v2. There is actually room for that.

Then it is an MP3 update and not a successor!