Re: (TV) Uncle Bill threatens world peace (again)

[Joe Hartley <jh@brainiac.com>]

Keith Allison <keith@marquee.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Anyone following the news of the bid by The World's Richest Geek to
> capture the mp3 market? Windows Millennium will contain a new media
> player featuring Bill's new wonder format, .wma.

I have to admit that some things that I pulled down as .wma streaming
audio (the King Crimson in Mexico City concert springs to mind) sounded
better to me than any streaming MP3 that I've heard, but I've not run
any sude-by-side tests.

>  Despite lining up MOR
> rock hacks like Mick Fleetwood to claim that the sound quality is
> superior to mp3,

I think the real reason the music industry likes .wma is the locking
mechanism built into it.  To listen to the KC concert, you needed to
dowmnload a key that let you listen to the stream or play the file.
This, I'm sure, was key (sorry) in Fripp's decision to use .wma, as he's
always been particularly touchy about piracy.

However, this is problematic for a number of reasons.  1) Key storage - 
I don't want to have to store the keys for every .wma I want to listen
to.  The registry's already a ridiculously bloated thing as it is.
2) "Protection" is laughable anyway.  Fripp realized this eventually and
authorized the burning of the show to CDR so you can listen to it in
places other than the computer.  There is software that will convert
.wmas to .mp3s or .wavs simply by ignoring the protection bit.  Once 
converted, any protection is gone, and the music can be freely copied.
3) Lack of an open standard.  I can listen to MP3s on almost any platform
available to me.  Windoze, Mac, Unix and even my old Amiga can play MP3s.
Anyone who doesn't think that Microsoft will change the file format just
to force use of newer software and punish people who aren't on Windoze
machines *and* running the newest version of software has never tried
exchanging a Word document with someone else.

> Before you knew it, we had a
> new "industry standard" (really?) that we all knew was second-rate. Sums
> up everything that's wrong with Microsoft to me - grab the market and
> dumb it down to their level.

Yes, yes and yes.  I posted an almost similar rant in a newsgroup, only
there I was bitching about Outlook.  Its use of HTML as the default mail
composition mode seemed to be a deliberate move to try and get people to
move to its software as the path of least resistance, and once installed,
it converted your old mail to a proprietary format so you couldn't go back
to another mailer and access those archives.

> "Windows Millennium"?! Jesus, Windows 3.1 doesn't work properly yet!

I would submit that nothing MS ever released was any good, but they used
to have a very nice mail and news program that was small, ran quickly,
adhered to all the Internet standard RFCs and was very stable.  Of course,
this couldn't stand, and MS quickly replaced it with Outhouse.

Fortunately, with music encoding, there will always be enough people
working to make free tools available to allow us to do what we like with
the music.  MS is never going to stop the use of MP3s, no matter what
its marketing thinks.  Eventually this hubris will cut them down to size.
They never got the penetration into the server market that they wanted
(the vast number of Internet servers are Unix-based), and while the
majority of desktops are Windoze, the number of people and companies
willing to try something else is growing.


======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh@brainiac.com
     12 Emma G Lane, Narragansett, RI  02882 - vox 401.782.9042
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

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