Amazonmp3
The first fully DRM-less music store is here, offering ‘over 2 million songs’ by EMI and Universal encoded in 256kbit mp3s — the largest unencrypted music downloads offering to date. Although the service is currently in beta, I have a feeling this is going to usher a new era in music downloads and spur competition. Let’s hope more record labels align themselves behind either Amazon’s or Apple’s store. What’s sad, although completely understandable given the very low proliferation of capable devices, is that tracks are using the ageing mp3 format instead of newer and higher quality codecs, such as AAC. Maybe in the future I guess.
Great news! One question though… Isn’t the mp3 codec updated regularly? Isn’t it getting better and better over time?
I mean, I own songs encoded with old versions of the encoder and today they sound terrible in comparison to songs encoded with newer encoder.
So, why go AAC (or Ogg or WMA or whatever)?
No, the mp3 codec is not getting better and it isn’t updated. mp3 hasn’t changed since it was finalised more than a 15 years ago. Now, the specification is quite open with regards to the encoding process (i.e. which data to lose from the original bitstream) yet there are limits as to how smart you can be without creating an incompatible file. As such, software encoders have definitely improved over time, but they achieved this through smarter signal processing and the use of VBR.
Other codecs, such as AAC have several features that vastly improve sound qualtiy over mp3 at a given bitrate. Check Wikipedia for a list of improvements for AAC (and some more substantial references) if you’re interested.