Peter Sinclair: High noon looming in online music war

By PETER SINCLAIR

Sitting here the other morning peacefully eating toast and marmalade and catching up with things on CNET, I spotted the announcement of the release of the next MP3 generation, and at once the dogs of war started snarling on their leashes.

MP3Pro, the latest iteration of the code that delivered songs to the people in spite of the best efforts of Big Music, looks set to bring the online music war back to the boil again. Download a demo at www.rca.com.

For just when it seemed the RIAA was making some headway in taming the beast and eradicating its potential for piracy, it looks like it will have to start all over again with its new, slimmed-down, more powerful big brother, which includes a new player and "ripper" (sound-file creator) that will deliver near CD-quality digital music using about half the disk space required today.

All this, note, without even a nod in the direction of anti-piracy mechanisms. The music industry's going to hate that.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute and Thomson Multimedia, which developed and still own the MP3 format, stand at one end of the street with about 99 per cent of the world's online music-lovers. Big Music, now with Microsoft and RealNetworks at its head, stands at the other. High noon approaches.

The pressure MP3 has brought to bear on the status quo can only be intensified by the ability of MP3Pro to squeeze more music into smaller files - to the point where dozens of albums could fit on a typical drive - thus bringing a fresh wave of consumers with less powerful machines into the online music loop.

Other subscription formats with anti-piracy capabilities, like MusicNet and Pressplay, are being touted by the industry, notably Windows Media, to which the forthcoming release of Windows XP will give an enormous boost. And some months ago this column noted the progress of Ogg Vorbis, billed as the new open-source alternative - a patent-free audio-encoding and streaming technology intended for unrestricted non-profit and commercial use.

There are no bitstream royalties and the reference software, including full source-code, is free.

But what really interested me, as I applied the last of the marmalade, is the unobtrusive threat to existing MP3 music collections - now numbering, it is estimated, in the billions of songs.

There's no way users are going to want to junk treasured playlists they have spent months or years assembling; but it may become increasingly hard to keep them using even a higher fidelity MP3 as backward compatibility becomes an issue and Big Music moves to a different standard altogether in the continuing struggle to somehow render existing collections unplayable.

BOOKMARKS

LEAST ORTHODOX: Rentapriest

As governments and corporations of the world have discovered, the internet is a natural home for dissent. Now it's religion's turn. In what must be one of its more outrageous expressions - at least from the point of view of doctrinally orthodox Catholics - a group of priests is busily reinventing the teachings of Mother Church. Having quit the Catholic hierarchy, usually to get married, they are now offering services hard to obtain within the formal structure - outdoor weddings are one example. Their website is worth a visit if only to view its recreation of The Last Supper complete with a full roster of wives and kids. They appear to be sharing three single-serve pizzas between 21, which puzzled me until I recalled the loaves and fishes ...

Advisory: a priest cannot be unordained, so weddings performed by this new Catholic community are, at least in the US, legal ...

MOST PAINFUL: Dentists.tv

Dentists have always been relatively low-profile on the web, and this new site is unlikely to raise it. Professionals contemplating a website of their own are recommended a visit to see what to avoid.

Advisory: guys, it's not a lot of use having a suburb window without a city one ...

* pete@ihug.co.nz

Links


CNET

Rca.com

RIAA

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute

Thomson Multimedia

Vorbis

Rentapriest

Dentists.tv