Another point in favor of CD longevity: They’re an actual standard. A CD recorded in Minsk, Barcelona or Detroit and pressed in Bangalore, Nagoya, or Erevan will play in a deck sold in Durban, Abidjan or Cartagena. By now, any next-gen physical-media standard would probably be delayed in designed by the attempts to pre-cripple it as to have it be region-coded, copy-protected, password-accessed and probably rigged to explode if put in an unauthorized player. Heck, already you have those annoying “enhanced” CDs around.
But yeah, what probably will happen is that there will be a wide spectrum of digital media existign simultaneously, with the CD being the default format for use with a “dumb” player/recorder.
I agree. People still like something physical. I think we’ll get, along with online MP3 sales, a memory stick format that you buy. The music will be permanently encoded on to it, it’ll be no bigger than current memory sticks, and it’ll have insets folded into them with the lyrics, photos, etc. The format will be compatible with computers and other players and very similar to a lossless MP3. You also might get your inset in the memory as well, so that it can be viewed on computer or tv.
This would have all the benefits of a CD, but in a sturdier and smaller size. All it’ll take is a continuation in the memory technology advances we’ve already seen in the last 5 years. Why use a tempremental and flimsy spinning disk as your data source when you can go solid state and also make use of audio compression?
Don’t be so sure of that. MP3 is arguably not the best possible format for music distribution, but then, VHS wasn’t the best possible video recording format either. Beta was (is) quite a bit superior and could record more on a smaller cassette at a higher quality, but look what happened. Aggressive marketing pushed VHS to the forefront, and eventually the market was so heavily biased towards it, that Beta became the red-headed stepchild of the video world, and all but economically unviable. Something similar may happen with MP3. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Memory-based media would be great, but would be much more costly to produce. Commercial CD production (stamping) is insanely cheap and efficient once you get things set up.
I think the recording companies would rather go to DVD audio or another optical format for the ease of production.
The cost for flash memory will come down. Don’t forget that compact disks were expensive when they first came out. And, IIRC, the first generation disks had less playing time than a 90 minute cassette. But the sound quality was better, and eventually the cost came down and the storage capacity increased.
Similarly, the cost of flash memory will drop, and the capacity will increase. And since memory cards have advantages in compactness and durability, they might start to become quite popular a few years from now.
How about OGG? I know it’s not being used in many devices now, but it does have the advantage of being an open-source standard. Could manufacturers save money by using OGG instead of having to pay for MP3?
The recording companies won’t let their stuff be sold in OGG format because there’s no DRM technique to prevent/stem piracy. This is the same reason all those online music stores don’t sell MP3s, but instead sell WMA (Windows Media Audio) or AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) instead.
…and both have been all but obliterated by DVD (save for industry-specific uses) which was kinda my point.
“MP3s” themselves are limited and already on the way out. The future will have a huge digital component, but it will not be MP3. It will be AAC, OGG, AIFF, or some other format that hasn’t been created yet.
Aside from it’s limitations, the music industry will never go to MP3. They will eventually go digital, but with something that has some veil of security. Right now, just about every major label has experimented with some sort of digital distibution. Everything from discs that “time out” after 4 plays, to paper CDs to proprietary digital encoders and players but nothing has taken off.
Personally, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I see no problem in going to the store to buy my music, get it on a disc, memory stick, or encoded on some sort of other physical device. The first thing I do when I get home right now is digitize it for my iPod. Best of both worlds; I have a physical backup, pretty artwork, a digital copy that plays anywhere I can hook up my iPod (which is everywhere), and I can still play my disc at a friends house, or in the older stereo at work.
I don’t see the advantage to having digital only. The big downside is (obviously) that if my hard drive goes I’m SOL if that’s the only place my 500+ albums are stored.
Well again, I wouldn’t go that far. Last time I checked every movie at my favorite video store is either available exclusively on VHS or both VHS and DVD. I don’t recall seeing any (save perhaps one or two) on DVD only.
But your point is largely taken. The industry is going to want some sort of security, but this is going to be largely problematic. To date, there’s no completely secure format, and those that are relatively secure generally rely on either software that supports the security, or hardware that does. Both are usually easily bypassed by those who care to do so.–witness the number of “hacks” available for disabling Macrovision support on DVD players. Ultimately, it will be some balance between what the industry wants, and what the public will put up with.
I think the real question the OP should be asking himself is how long does he want to wait around to have the music he wants?
If you want to listen to music today and for the foreseeable future, then buy CDs. If you want to worry about the next big thing, then you can do that until the end of time.
I still have my vinyl collection and I still occasionally listen to it even though I converted all of it to digital format ages ago. As long as I have the means to play it, my vinyl is not obsolete as far as I am concerned.
If and when music starts coming out in a new format, then deal with it then, if necessary.
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I think the real question the OP should be asking himself is how long does he want to wait around to have the music he wants?
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Agreed - regardless of how CDs are replaced, your new players will likely be able to play your old tunes. I doubt a new type of spinning disk will take over the CD. As others have mentioned, CDs are “big enough” for most people. Their really only flaws that I can think of, is that the sound quality is a bit compressed, they scratch, and they skip sometimes (not all players, I know) and the players are very big and bulky.
What new type of spinning disc could solve any but one of these problems?
So the “new media” will be a cheap solid state and you can digitize the CDs you buy today for the new format. I’m not convinced a new “consumable” media will ever exist - I think personal storage devices will get large and cheap enough that you will buy and download all your media electronically. Tomorrow’s generation won’t care about liner notes - thats what the wireless web (or its successor) is for.
In ten years, there may be no such thing as a music store. Virtually every store you go to will sell you any music you want music through kiosks, or you’ll just download it at home.
I’m not sure the situation is comparable, though. It’s essentially impossible to make a single player which will play both VHS and Betamax (you’d basically need two separate players), but it’s trivially easy to make a digital playback device which could handle multiple file formats, or even one which could download new codecs as they became available. So even if MP3 proves to be the most popular, you could still have devices that’ll play other formats, if the user happens to have them.
Probably not in the immediate future. Most consumers targeted for digital audio devices have an investment in MP3s. Any new device needs to support MP3s and thus pay the licensing fees.
The music industry might see an advantage in simplifying its distribution chain. They could cut costs by selling directly to the consumer. Or more likely, consolidating their distribution chain to a small set of online brokers (e.g. iTunes) instead of a larger variety of record stores and general retailers. I suspect that the majority of advertising and promotion is done outside of the retailers anyway. This is all IMHO, of course…
I don’t think we’ll see any big difference in playing hardware until solid-state storage gets a lot cheaper.
Yea, but any spinning-disc media is limited to a minimum size and employing moving parts. The size issue can change, but the mechanical aspect is still hardly ideal. Assuming all the costs were comparable, I would much rather own a solid-state storage music player that had $2 cards that held 700 megs than have a portable DVD player that could play multiple file formats on DVD-R’s.
Commercially-pressed CD’s are estimated to last from 10 to 25 years: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7-5 …The user-recordable CD media has been found to have (in some cases) drastically lower lifetimes than advertised, or even thought. You need to keep up on this subject yourself if it is of concern to you, because research into this matter is ongoing; there’s some new comments on CDR-FAQ that weren’t there last time I looked. I saw elsewhere that one Swedish group did a study that found that although it was presumed from lab testing that CD-R’s should last at least 25 years, some formatted with control data became unreadable in as little as two years. A blurb on the CDR-FAQ site mentions one cheap brand only lasting six weeks, though I find that suspiciously short.
In another semi-related thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=245426 ) I pointed out that hard-drives seem to use a magnetic media that is vastly more stable than what floppy-disks used. I have pulled lots of rather old hard drives (10+ years old) and successfully read from and written to them; they showed no errors at all as long as they had not experienced a mechanical failure previously. The oldest hard drive I have pulled was 14 years old and the newest files on it were eight years old. When ran, Chkdisk showed no errors on the drive.
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I should also clarify perhaps: it is true that a hard drive has a life-span of about five years, but that is assuming that it is run continuously. The idea here is that you would buy a totally separate hard drive just for using as archival storage. You would ONLY hook this hard drive up to your PC to store data onto it, then you would disconnect it-- unhook its data and power cables–so that it wouldn’t run all the time. That way, the ONLY time it would be run is when you connected it temporarily to store more data onto it or to read data off of it, and imediately after you would disconnect it again. Used this way, it would be protected from normal wear, power surges, system failures and malicious software–and it could easily last a very long time.
Alternately, you could use an older computer for this purpose, assuming you used drives with capacities that it could handle–but that computer wouldn’t be used for any normal tasks, and would be totally unplugged when not in use.
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