Cinco de Mayo
Cinco de Mayo.While others were celebrating the mexican holiday (mostly by getting stinking drunk, I presume), I spent the day trying to get my boss’ laptop to work properly (why he insists on showing off software that even I, its developer, consider a buggy beta, to prospective clients, is beyond me), and visiting the cows over at Salinas (and getting there too late to get much useful done, thanks to the aforementioned laptop). Oh, yeah, there’s also that blinding earache I’ve had all day. At least the Z proved itself to be a more than capable OGG and MP3 player today.
For the uninitiated: I beleive in the philosophy of Open Source software, and also mostly in the philosophy of Free Software. While I don’t necessarily beleive that all software should be Free or Open Source, I do prefer to support Open Source alternatives to normal software. Ergo: Linux over Windows wherever feasible (I admit that Linux isn’t ready to take over the world in every area quite yet, but it’s getting there, Lycoris, Mandrake, and others are really close to making it a real desktop alternative), Open Office over MS Office, Apache over IIS, MySQL over SQL Server, and even the Zaurus (running Embedded Linux) over a comparable iPaq (running Windows CE/PocketPC). Hell, on the Z I even installed Open Zaurus, which is even more Open Source than the Sharp version of Linux that comes preinstalled on the Z. Which brings me to my point: OGG over MP3.
Don’t get me wrong, I luv my MP3’s, and all the chaos they’ve caused the RIAA and other assorted baddies. But MP3 technology is not free, despite appearances. Despite you not having to pay to listen to most MP3 files, there’s still a fee to pay for licensing MP3 technology so you can program an MP3 player or encoder. You have to pay to include the algorith that turns sound into an MP3 file in your application. And that cost eventually gets passed to the consumer, one way or another. This might even be fine, if MP3 was the latest and greatest encoder ever, if it provided the absolute best audio quality while at the same time giving you the very smallest file size. But it’s not. There’s allready at least 4 proprietary formats out there that provide equal (or sometimes better) audio fidelity with a substantially smaller file size. Microsoft’s WMA, Real’s latest RealAudio codec, Apple’s AAC, and MP3 Pro. But all of these carry licensing terms of their own, and they were designed not so much to provide better quality, but to restrict what consumers could do with their music. They’re custom fits for all sorts of convoluted (and often just plain innefective) DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems. The idea behimd each of these formats is basically finding a way for the RIAA and their assorted record executives to keep making seven figure salaries in a world where digital data can be copied flawlessly and with no loss in quality indefinetly.
I’ll get into my ‘The Music Industry is dead, long live the Music Industry’ rant some other time, but basically my stance is that technology has sounded the death knell for the Recording Industry as we know it, and no matter how much money they throw at it, there’s nothing they can do about that. However, it’s also given artists an opportunity for self-promotion, independent growth, and, yes, financial opportunities, that they could only dream about before. And the key to this will not be in restricting user’s rights, but in expanding them. So into this mix comes the OGG format.
OGG is the file extension for Ogg Vorbis, a completely Open Source, completely free audio codec similar to MP3 and its cohorts. The fact that it’s free and Open Source and can thus be used freely in any application would normally be enough to encourage someone like me (ie. a geek) to switch. The fact that by design it places no restriction on the creation, use, or copying of files created with it should be enough to intrigue those who are worried about the RIAA’s erosion of their rights (and don’t think I don’t know what Valenti and the MPAA have been up to lately, that’s gonna be a whole ‘nother rant some other day). And the fact that Ogg-encoded music simply sounds better than the competition, while keeping file size as small as any of them, should be music to any audiophile’s ears. Most popular computer MP3 players (such as Winamp, XMMS, WMP, and others) allready play Ogg files as well, and with CD to Ogg encoders freely available on all platforms, there’s little reason for you to rip tracks to MP3 anymore.
The only current downside right now to Ogg is the lack of availability for portable players. While portable MP3 players are practically being given away with cereal boxes these days, and Microsoft has strongarmed support for WMA into many of those products, very few play Ogg files out of the box. And while many modern portable digital music players brag about being extensible so support for ‘new and superior formats’ could be added, relatively few have released Ogg-compatible firmware updates. Even Apple’s otherwise drool-worthy iPod players include support for their proprietary AAC formet, but none for Ogg. As of now, only a handful of devices play Ogg. While this is changing, thanks in large part to the release of Tremor, an Ogg decoding engine optimized for mobile processors, the general lack of devices to take your music along with you is one of the major stumbling blocks to larger acceptance of this otherwise superior (IMHO) standard.
Thankfully for a techno~anarchist like myself, though, the Z is one of those few devices that can handle Ogg files (with the right player and libraries installed) While storage space for music files on the Z is an issue if you don’t have expansion cards, sound quality is excellent, even at a relatively low 96kbps bitrate, which lets me fit over an hour of music into ~40MB, leaving plenty of room on my CF card for other files. I’m gonna see if I can get away with encoding at 64 kbps while keeping the quality high, so I can cram even more music in here. o.O;
