http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/05/business/ptend06.php
The Web is awash in anti-MP3 audiophiles. By Victoria Shannon Wednesday, September 5, 2007 PARIS: First, we saw a recoil against social networks, then a backlash against blogs. Now, just when digital music has reached enough of a mass audience to make even my tech-challenged sister take the plunge, the Web is awash in anti-MP3 audiophiles. For those who wouldn't know an MP3 from an Ogg Vorbis, let's review. MP3 is a digital audio format created in Germany that gained global popularity because it could shrink a CD song into a manageable, e-mailable, Internet-friendly size at a time when slow-moving dial-up Web connections dominated. Compressing a song tosses out bits and pieces of the music file that we don't generally hear, or at least don't miss. There are lots of other audio formats today, but MP3 is the most popular, in part because it carries no copying restrictions. So all digital music hardware and software can handle MP3s. But wouldn't you know it, as soon as something becomes popular, along come the detractors. Music fanatics believe that MP3s have poor audio quality because so much data is eliminated to compress them. And now broadband - or high-speed - Internet connections are commonplace. That combination has led to a grass-roots following for "lossless" digital audio formats, or those that do some size-shrinking without losing sound quality. (The "true" fanatics, naturally, are against digital music of any kind, preferring the warmth of analog recordings. But that's another story.) So "lossless" is the newest latest fad in digital music among a moral minority. Apple and Microsoft have their own proprietary lossless formats (Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless), and the free-software proponents have FLAC, which stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an open-source version (available at flac.sourceforge.net/). Another free one is called SHN (short for Shorten). (Of the lossless varieties, the newest generations of iPods can play only Apple's.) One company, called MusicGiants, caters to audiophiles with an online music store selling only lossless recordings (motto: "Upgrade your downloads") from the major studios, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner, for $1.29 each (U.S. residents only for now). Many sites that offer live concert recordings, like Live Phish and Live Downloads, do so losslessly. Of course, as with any kind of digital music, pirated lossless files are more available than the legitimate ones. Lossless Legs (at www.shnflac.net) is a site that claims to share "high-quality, trade-friendly music" from what the proprietors say is an "attempt to keep a legal database." And Exact Audio Copy, free from a German site, is one example of software that can turn your CDs into FLAC files. There are also Dolby and DTS lossless audio formats for the sound and soundtracks on the next-generation DVD formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray. Even at the Fraunhofer Institute, the engineers behind the original MP3 have a lossless version. But it is unlikely to make tracks the way their first inspiration did because digital music has become so commercial, rather than a researcher's pet project. Lossless compression algorithms "do not diminish the original audio quality in the slightest, because the original audio material can be exactly reconstructed," a Fraunhofer research paper explains. "This is also of great interest with the digitization, restoration and storage of old recordings." Want to know more? Two sites that offer expert advice and resources are Hydrogen Audio and the Lossless Audio Blog. Don't shed a tear for the MP3, however. Just like social networking and blogging, the MP3 isn't going anywhere soon just because lossless is getting some attention. Its universality - and, especially, its playability on iPods - will keep it in vogue for some time. In that weird creative-literal way the Internet has of naming things, the opposite of lossless is, of course, "lossy" - as in, MP3s are lossy. And Ogg Vorbis? That's just another audio niche format with devoted supporters, but just so you know: It's lossy, not lossless.
