After years as the unrivaled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple Computer.
MP3 losing steam?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Most of these new digital music companies (rather all of them) use there default format for encoding the music itself. It’s a shame too as these files aren’t as universal on many players. Granted they are to some degree, but not by default, maybe not legally even. It’s rather annoying to me personally, especially when somebody messes up the tags completely and you can’t fix them in Winamp yourself. Honestly I don’t even really see much of a point for these formats: I haven’t seen phenominal compression improvements, or higher quality encoding. The only difference I seem to see is that you can’t enjoy it as easily. I guess that is the point of them.
“As far as we can see, there are no devices without MP3 support.” Well, I don’t see MP3 losing any time soon. It’s sad, because MP3 is patent encumbered (in stupid countries which recognize software patent, that is) and patent won’t expire until 2016 or so.
…to Ogg? I thought THAT was supposed to steal Mp3s thunder, not Microsoft or Apple.
You got to be kidding. Ogg doesn’t have a company behind it to drive it. AAC and WMA do. Ogg has seen some support from some players mostly because of the engineers who work on them are usually geeks and because there are no patents/licenses for it, but these players are far and between.
I dont undestand why people dont encode music with Ogg !!
Is the best format ever !
Give it a chance.
Yeah, that’s true. Nobody is going to support and Open Source standard of encoding anytime soon. It’ll probably be a LONG time before that happens. It’ll be a long time before Open Source becomes the standard for anything. OGG quality wise though probably could, but like the article said, most people probably don’t even know they’re not ripping things in Mp3 formats, much less know what OGG is and how it differs.
yep it does, Grip with Ogg rules, I encoded my entire CD collection this way.
why do you need a company nehind ogg? plenty of media formats are without companies… just standards groups. jpeg, png. does html have a company behind it? does linuc have a company behind it? other than support?
Aren’t going away anytime soon.
Oh and Sony’s digital walkman doesn’t support MP3s, or AAC, WMp or anything else but their own format.
hmmm ogg and xvid are supported by kizz dvdplayer
It is different with the media. You see, there are already established media formats. When jpeg came out there was only gif out there with only support for 256 colors. Jpeg really offered a VISIBLE difference. As for PNG, it still has to catch up with Jpeg in popularity after all this years on the web!
Same with HTML. When it came out, gopher sucked. As for Linux, yes, it has Red Hat, IBM, SGI and Novell behind it who use it and sell it (even if they are not directly use just the kernel).
Ogg CAN NOT be as lucky as jpeg or HTML, because established formats like mp3 is already out there and do the same (no visible difference). And as for WMA and AAC they are gaining ground because their companies are pushing for these THROUGH their products or WMP and iPod.
Ogg doesn’t have this luxury.
MP3. Short, catchy, tech-sounding
AAC. Short, catchy, tech-sounding
Ogg? Um, isn’t that always the firstname the universal generic dumbass from folklore round the world?
Ogg Vorbis? Dood, that was that half orc wizard I rolled up back in 7th grade. 8 feet tall, blue hair, yellow skin with puce spots, blue hair, and a broken front tooth!
Now, if the file format had been abbreviated OVB and not OGG, the standard might have caught on.
AAC/WMA are only getting more popular as they have DRM so the music companies will use them.
Ogg is superior, but doesn’t have copy protection, so you won’t see it on any of the downloadable music sites anytime soon.
That’s basically MP3’s problem too – although it’s the most supported format, it doesn’t have DRM (a good thing IMHO).
It aint the best. Sure its unencumbered and sure its open source, but AAC is just as good, and can be played on a decent amount of players(the non DRM version)
Ogg…a format by any other name would sound as sweet.
Sorry, couldn’t resist!
MP3 will be around for a long, long time. Its the only format other than raw audio thats virtually universally supported – my OS, my DVD player, my CD player and even my cellphone have MP3 decoders. Not couting my actual MP3 player, that is.
I’m also too damn lazy to convert my old music (1,500+ tracks would take a lot of physical encoding time, let along retagging, etc) and want to keep it all in one format. I’d guess there are countless others who feel the same way
Unless MSFT or Apple release software that encodes WMA/AAC easily on even obscure platforms, and ensure that everything can play their format, they can’t “unseat” MP3. My digital camera has an MP3 encoder in it, ffs…
.ogg rock and rolls! but indeed even I end up having aac due to iTunes music.
So that is why WMA is gaining in popularity on Windows and why Apples format is also gaining succes with Ipod users and OS-X users. I would much rather use MP3, FLAC, or OGG to record and listen to music.
The hell it is, LAME VBR isn’t leaving my computer any time soon!
I use PNG for all images – even storing photographs. Its as non-lossy as TIFF but uses about 1/3 of the space of the TIFF’s my digital camera puts out. Its definately in competition with JPEG for storing photographs, and other functions.
What about ogg. I strictly use ogg in all my audio work. Personally I don’t want to use formats that could run into legal issues down the road with patenting. Also what about all those mp3/mpeg rehashes such as mpc?
The argument you’ve made put’s PNG in competition with TIFF or GIF, not JPEG. It’s a very bad substitute for JPEG but a good one for TIFF.
It aint the best. Sure its unencumbered and sure its open source, but AAC is just as good, and can be played on a decent amount of players(the non DRM version)
What is the best then? The information I uncovered says that ogg is better than mp3, wma, and aac. Perhaps you could say flac is better. The sound quality is better (lossless) but the compression is not nearly as good. How do you compare different codecs? If you’re comparing sound quality at a given compression ratio then ogg comes out on top.
By the way ogg and flac are both supported by the rio karma and ogg is supported by a decent amount of players also. I’ve seen a lot of mp3/wma players out there and I would say that the ONLY reason aac is as popular as it is is because of the ipod and ipod alone.
Most of the current formats work okay for playback and most users aren’t critical listeners. The thing I worry about is the control these firms have over encoder tech and who has access to it, and under what terms, (price/restrictions) given the tendency of these firms to side with the RIAA or other big media companies. With Vorbis, the independent artist and content creator have free and open access to both the encoder and decoder tech. FLAC and Speex are also freely available (xiph.org). I don’t think we want to put content creation back in the hands of greedy middlemen and other assorted “Lars from Mars” types.
does not have to be built into a file format. AAC does not have any DRM built into it. fairplay is a LAYER built by apple for apple. Fairplay can be used on MP3s, OGGs, FLACs, WAVs, AIFFs, and any other weirdo format if apple so chose to make it do so. it is an encrypted container that only Quicktime can decrypt, but after it is decrypted, any player that can play the file format could technically play it, the trick is to get QT to let go of the song and give it off to the other player….that is where Hymn and fairkeys come in 😀
I like many of you use ogg solely.
It always baffles me how people encode to mp3 for the sake of their mp3 players, when this is a niche were ogg really could dominate due to the great quality that can be attained despite the space contraints.
The fact that windows media player doesnt play ogg out of the box is something worth mentioning, just as msn messenger coming installed in windows damages other IM networks userbase, wmp not playing ogg out of the box hurts ogg growth.
PS: PLEASE dont encode to .wma for heavens sake..
I hate to sound critical here but I’ve never considered C-Net or ZDNet as being accurate even on current events nevermind predicting what might happen. I’ve found those sites have incredible biases in which they favour whoever the largest companies are whether they make good products or not, probably because some of those companies give them a little monetairy incentive in return.
C-Net and ZDNet writers are probably chosen mostly for their ability to write articles that will cause a reaction in their readers rather then their ability to make accurate predictions and remain impartial.
Its my personal opinion that C-Net and ZDNet editors are giant bags of liquid bull refuse that can’t help but leak their contents all over the internet in an attempt to stir up strong negative emotions and conflict on the Internet (essentially they’re payed trolls). I’m sorry if I offended anyone with this or if I sound like I’m trolling but thats just my opinion of them. Since I’m probably going to get a few replies in contradiction to my opinion and I’m nowhere near ready to change my regard for C-Net and ZDNet editors I’ll refrain from reading any replies.
No matter what they say, mp3 isn’t going anywhere. I’d prefer it wasn’t owned from froenhoffer, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue. If the player support was there for Ogg, i’d switch, but neither my Ipod nor my Nomad Xtra plays the format.
I will never encode my music with a format that is DRM’d. Ever.
We need to fight the DRM battle tooth and nail because every inch we lose, WE WILL NEVER GAIN BACK.
you are aware that any file format can be DRMed right?
sure, WMA has built in stuff that makes DRM harder to crack when it is applied, but any Format can be DRMed. AAC for instance. Apple has developed their own DRM encryption scheme that works through QT, but once it is decoded by QT, that file is free and clear of any DRM. that is when Hymn grabs it and copies it to a location as a free file.
so, Most people I think when they say they will never encode to a DRM format missed the point that DRM is applicable to any format… Even Ogg.
the thing to also realize is that a day may come that the OS gets smart enough to automatically add an encryption layer over all Audio and video files, no matter what the encoder was, or who develops it.
PNG is a lossless format, same as GIF. It’s not meant as a jpg replacement.
Last year I started encoding my music in ogg format. But changed back to mp3 because I saw it wasn’t gaining momentum.
Plus mp3 is here to stay.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t AAC really a child of MPEG (as in the expert group)? So wouldn’t it be a successor to mp3 then really? Heck, by the normal (weird) logic of naming going on, it could even be considered to be mp4. So isn’t it natural that mp3 should give way to AAC really? Just like MPEG2 will move away in favor of MPEG4? (For DVDs MPEG4 would need to crank up the bitrates obviously, but at the same bitrate it should beat old number 2)
> Ogg doesn’t have a company behind it to drive it.
Yes it does:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=8218
http://fluendo.com/press/releases/PR-2004-01.html
And another one:
http://lwn.net/Articles/5510/
H.264 addresses he bit rate issue with MP4. it is a high def codec for Mp4 that scales from tv quality video on 3G phones, to High def quality on HD DVDs.
I certainly cannot wait to use it for making quick Time movies to e-mail people.
Listening test: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/index.html
When I click on the News.com article I get a 404… And I don’t see it in the homepage nor in their search engine…
Other than that, Vorbis is in par with AAC and is supported by the company that created it : Xiph. But some months ago they fired the guy who was promoting it : Monty…
Screw the rest especially anything Microsoft or Apple puts out. iPod = amazing how people are effected by marketing.
using musepack here … aka MPC. it’s open source now =:D
best codec at the moment
“the thing to also realize is that a day may come that the OS gets smart enough to automatically add an encryption layer over all Audio and video files, no matter what the encoder was, or who develops it”
Excuse me? You said “The OS”? I read something Orwellian in your words 😉
the last comment was in response to Debman’s “Re: I use MP3″…
png is definitely not a lossless picture format. It is just better than jpeg at some things. The only thing it doesn’t have going for it is that microsoft deosn’t support it well.
How can you even say png is lossy?!?! Saying that is like saying the sun doesn’t emit light. Either you’re extremely ignorant, or just lying/trolling.
I have the impression that all of the comparisons made above flawed somewhat.
For market-related things (i.e. non-technical) you should compare OGG to JPEG 2000. Both are technically superior, but have practically no market penetration, because JPEG and MP3 were there first.
“John Borland @ CNET News.com is full of horse potatos”
was in Dan Quayle’s class.
(to non-US folks: Quayle is a former US Vice President who “corrected” (incorrectly!)a school child’s spelling of the plural of potato. It was quite funny and made national headlines.)
png is definitely not a lossless picture format.
Ahh, that’s why I read OSNews, for these simple comedy moments.
I thought that you only had to pay royalties if you charged for your app. If your app was free and it used mp3 then you wouldn’t have to pay any royalty fees. Is this true?
Anyway, I use mp3 to encode all of my music in itunes just because it’s guaranteed to play on anything.
mp3 is old technology……make way for ogg and flac! Just cant wait till they make a car head unit that supports ogg or flac!
ha ha ha ha ha …umm, no. you have to pay per unit shipped regardless of the amount you charge. apple does not charge for their MP3 encoder or their AAC encoder because they charge for iLife and OS X which is where they make up for the cost.
As long as old hardware (ie, my MP3 Player
) only support MP3s, then that’s all I’ll use.
And until the typical lazy user converts their MP3s to something diffrent…
………SUPPORTS OGG VORBIS!!! Yay!!!
And the Music Player Manager app included with i-River encodes music from CD-DA as OGGs!!!! WOW!!!!
Alot of you are saying Ogg this Ogg that. If you really want there to be a change, than encode *all* your music files with Ogg. One of the major reason that mp3 is still around is the P2P revolution, the majority of the audio files shared on P2P networks are MP3. Guess what if enough of you were to decode mp3->wav->ogg and share those ogg files, than ogg would be king. It’s just that simple.
Also as to why wma format is inching onto the audio file market, is that windows ripper (I don’t know the name, I’ve never actually used or seen it) defaults to this fiel format. Most people, I assume, are too lazy/apathetic to switch to a different format.
Some time ago I did a little experiment: I put my band’s songs to download both in Ogg and MP3 formats. Despite Ogg’s lower file sizes MORE people downloaded MP3s! Most people out there are not interested in any technical details, that Ogg (or anything) is superior to MP3: they know that MP3 = music and that they can play it in WinAMP, WMP or whatever. I doubt MP3 will go away any time soon, especially I doubt that Ogg will replace it.
It’s no accident these companies are now all pushing their own formats. In a time when their old monopolies and niches are breaking up they are looking for new ways to lock us in. Whoever gets people to use their DRM enabled technologies is going to be the ‘microsoft’ of the future. It’s no wonder Apple are chasing after that market, rather than focussing on their established productlines.
What gets to me is how people are buying into this without thinking. Use ogg/vorbis or mp3 if you must, but don’t just give away control to a third party.
Guess what if enough of you were to decode mp3->wav->ogg and share those ogg files, than ogg would be king. It’s just that simple.
I hope you are aware that recompressing a signal that was compressed by a lossy codec is like photocopying a photocopy…
That said, I have ripped my entire CD collection in OGG but people just don’t seem to be interested in that format. I even have some requests to recode some OGG in MP3. Oh well…
I don’t understand why people would rip or get WMA files. At least MP3 and OGG are open (not royalty-free, but open).
That’s crap. Cnet is a mouthpiece for M$ and has a vested interest in spreading FUD about anything non-corporate.
This is utter BS. I cannot believe you post stuff like this Eugenia. M$ and Apple WANT the perception to exist that .mp3 is losing steam so people will migrate AWAY from the FREE alternative and use the DRM-ladn AAC or WMP.
Will somebody here get a clue! How about some insightful commentary and not blind reposting of corporate mouth boogie.
This is a biased and unfair statement. MP3 isn’t anywhere near “losing steam.” Comparison with Windows Media and Quicktime is unreasonable as they are completely different platforms. You can’t play Windows Media reasonably on any PalmOS device; Quicktime isn’t useable on Pocket PC devices OR PDA’s. On the other hand I have four or five devices that play MP3’s.
MP3 isn’t losing steam.
I work for a company that I won’t name that sells music online and we support a couple of different media players.
One of my jobs is to answer support emails when I have extra time and the biggest question I see is ‘how do I convert my music to mp3?’
Losing steam ? From what I can tell its the format everyone wants.
Hi
This isnt suprising. You should just encode everything in ogg vorbis format and tell them its patent free and winamp plays it. thats all.
Here in Brazil mp3 is still the king. People here are only interested in free (as beer) digital music downloaded from P2P programs. Apple presence here is a joke and iPOD is only a tech toy for vey rich geeks.
I will never buy a DRM-protected music because it is stupid. Big companies must respect our freedom.
Boycott M$, Apple, software patents and these stupid “intelectual property” who drain money from poor countries to USA and other european countries.
From the http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
A Turbo-Studly Image Format with Lossless Compression
Boycott M$, Apple, software patents and these stupid “intelectual property” who drain money from poor countries to USA and other european countries.
An iPod plays mp3 files. It doesn’t require DRM.
> This isnt suprising. You should just encode everything in
> ogg vorbis format and tell them its patent free and winamp
> plays it. thats all.
After some time I did it. I even made FAQ for non-technical aware people, that modern WinAMP versions play OGGs out of the box, that they can convert it to CD Audio, etc., etc. Despite all this I still get emails time to time telling “what the hell is this OGG, I want MP3!”. Just ask some of your family/friends: how many of them know what OGG is? And how many of them know what MP3 is? I guess after asking “what OGG is” you will spend some time describing it. I guess most of them know what MP3 is. And about being patent-free: let’s be honest for a minute: they will not care.
I hope you are aware that recompressing a signal that was compressed by a lossy codec is like photocopying a photocopy…
Yes, you missed my point though. Convesion will help these people promote their file format, in this instance Ogg.
since HDD room isn’t a big deal anymore, why not go for something lossless which can strem *cough* FLAC *cough*. WMA/AAC is just DRM stuff which will ruin the market anyway.
http://flac.sf.net
AAC is has no inherent DRM – period.
I would agree! I think the problem here is that you have to make this appeal to a mass market of teens. If we could get say…….100GB+ plus mp3 players for a reasonable price, then I’d think we’d be on to something. Really that’s what’s driving companies to make you use their encoding format because they want you to use their digital music players.
I think ogg is cool and all but I use the following encoding method:
bestmp3guide.com
mp3’s sound indistinguishable from the orginals, and you enjoy the wide market support for mp3. I think mp3 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s pratically suicide to not include support for it. Sony tried, then realized the error of their ways and (will) correct it very soon.
…. Right On!! Ogg is the best! I encode all my audio in ogg, and yes: grip + ogg = heaven
As far as images, yeah, .PNG is my fav as well.
I would love to see .mng replace .gif totally.
/my 2 cents
Whoa, the world is going down due to a nuclear war. Whoa, the world is going down due to a nuclear war. Whoa, the world is going down due to a nuclear war. Ad nauseam. Start believing. Sing: ‘I vant to to believe.’
How about keeping focussed on at least an open standard for a change?
It could be that wma/aac are growing faster than mp3. But mp3 use is still rising.
MP3 losing to Apple/MS??
I used to download only MP3 through P2P, now I mostly download OGG and also often MP3.
The problem with WMA is, that nothing supports it. I haven’t come across AAC files yet, so I don’t know much about them, but since AAC is the succesor of MP3, it probably is/will be supported by most media players.
@anonymous who thinks hard disk space isn’t an issue any more – I beg to differ. my music collection (my *legally purchased* music collection, at that) would take up around 180GB of space compressed in flac format. My hard disk is 160GB. The biggest available portable player is the 80GB Neuros. Besides, even if hard disk space *isn’t* an issue, bandwidth sure is.
to anonymous.nl – just because “aac” is supposedly the successor to mp3 doesn’t mean it will be popular. After all, mp3pro was the last “official” successor to mp3 – how many mp3pro files do you have? Show of hands!
My i-river mp3 player plays mp3, wmas, and ogg. I am using wma over mp3 because wma takes so much less space. Does anyone know how ogg does? I don’t care about the zealotry. Just want to fit as much as I can on my mp3 player.
I guess after asking “what OGG is” you will spend some time describing it. I guess most of them know what MP3 is. And about being patent-free: let’s be honest for a minute: they will not care.
—-
Tell them its better compression superior quality and has no patents. you will get their interest. after it plays on winamp, they shouldnt have a problem. tell me its better than mp3 and we offer only this
all the tests I’ve seen place it either equal to wma in quality or very slightly ahead.
Frankly, given the quality of the audio of a) most portable players and, much more importantly, b) the ear/headphones most people use to *listen* to most portable players, the quality of the format is hardly going to be the limiting factor. Tests between codecs like this are usually done on very high end equipment; IMO it’s going to be close to impossible to really tell the difference between them on the average portable listening setup. (I sure can’t tell the difference between MP3 and Vorbis on my Sennheiser MX400 earphones, while I can on my beefy home speakers). You really need a couple hundred dollars worth of headphone or canalphone before you start worrying about the format…
This is FUD. who would use one those 2 DRM aware format ?
MP3 quality is enough for everybody and in case it’s not perfect there’s still .ogg !
The big deal for me with ogg is the higher quality sound with equal size files. Or; a smaller file with equal sound to a larger mp3. Lets me either cram more into my player or using a similar bit rate; have better audio. Try it, I noticed the difference immediately. And I also think that this may be why people download an album of mp3’s over the same album in ogg – they see larger file sizes and think that the mp3 must be better. This may not be that case.
Again, try it and see for yourself. I won’t buy another portable player unless it supports ogg format.
After trying to get a nice experience with Ogg, I caved in and started re-ripping my music collection into Windows Media Audio Lossless. That and I just bought Windows Media Center 2005 and some hardware. I like how the album art and details are displayed on the screen by album cover from within WMC 2005. I use a BelCanto DAC connected up to a USB Soundblaster with Fiber Optic Optical out into a nice Musical Fiedlity “hi-end” audio system. My next thing is to get a touchscreen LCD to complete my bachelor pad. The ladies already love it that they can pick the music on my 30″ LCD TV and wallah when it comes time to play I don’t want to be stuck inside Winamp or even Rhythmbox because of the interface inconsistencies. I want immediate gratification and I have that with Windows Media Center 2005.
So indeed Microsoft has gained another fan. To be honest Compression like Ogg is still great for my portable Rio Karma but for home use I will not go to lossy compression. Don’t even talk about FLAC or whatever else, think about how much time you are all wasting inside bash in the first place. If you are sick of wasting time in primitive interfaces and just want to get down go get a Windows Media Center. There’s nothing like it out there today, MYTH TV and all others only wish they could be that grand. On the other hand if you like the thrill of recompiling apps and actually have the time to set it up just right, then by all means use another codec and OS. My time is more important to me than anything else, it’s the one thing we have so little of. So why waste it if a proprietary solution that takes 1/1000th the time can work, and work damn well.
Ha ha, you bought their marketing line, hook line and sinker. Time == money, and I cherish my money more than my time.
That’s funny. When you are on your death bed and look back on how 75% of the prime of your life was spent hacking source code and trying to get Xine to work with dvd, I am sure you would look back and regret every minute you wasted. But at least you can say you died with a lot of money.
I don’t see how gif isn’t lossless since it only support 256 colors.
PNG is meant as a replacement for JPEG.
well, sure it makes a good file, but when I compare my Korn CD to the files I rip at AAC 192 and OGG 192, the OGG mutes the base, which for some people might be nice, and I must say the song was enjoyable and smooth sounding, but AAC had a more true to the CD sound than the Ogg file.
From the PNG website:
“The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format was designed to replace the older and simpler GIF format and, to some extent, the much more complex TIFF format. (See the main page or the history page for background information.) Here we’ll concentrate on two major uses: the World Wide Web (WWW) and image-editing.”
stop. spouting. crap.
@debman: are you aware that setting a bitrate for vorbis isn’t the optimum way to encode? It’s generally better to send it a quality setting. I use 6 for files on my PC and 4 for files on my portable player.
@bullethead: what does flac have to do with the commandline? If I want to rip something to flac I change two settings in grip. never see the command line.
It’s certainly true that WMA and AAC are more popular with commercial music retailers. But have a look on any file sharing network and you’ll see that 99% of the files are MP3. I can’t see MP3 dying any time soon, if anything I think it’ll mainly be replaced by lossless formats once storage and bandwidth are sufficient for such large files.
yes I am aware of that, the quality setting was quite high. I set it through the sliding quality setter for the WinAmp plugin. it used Oggenc from the Vorbis site and everything.
the bitrate was just a reporting that came along with the quality setting.
and like I said, the Ogg sounded nice, it lost the reverberating bass that many of my Metal songs from bands like Korn and Tool use. the bass was not Muted or neutered like you hear in WMA or MP3, it almost seemed like it was mixed back and normalized to be more even with the rest of the music in the song.
bandwidth will not increase until technologies from I2 get brought to the Internet for commercial use, technologies such as GigaPOPs, and fiber to the computer are available today but cost to much for commercialization.
All this Ogg talk and nobody realising that most games now come with ogg-encoded files. Not only is it superior to mp3, it’s royalty-free. The last game I bought (a few weeks ago) was Richard Burns Rally by SCi/ Warthog . You guessed it; encoded in Ogg as well…
I think it’s a stupid name too.
I think the prevalence of mp3 players will ensure the format stays. I have two mp3 players, one of which plays WMA files as well.
Returning to the name, I can’t imagine a company marketing “ogg players”. They’d use something like “portable media players”.
of course, mp3 is an innately great name. the moment you heard “mp3” for the first time you thought “compressed music format!”, didn’t you?
mp3’s not even a name; it’s an extension. The name is MPEG-1 layer 3 audio. (Catchy!) And ogg isn’t right either; I could send you an ogg file which had no sound in it at all. The audio codec we’re referring to here is vorbis.
I think my point is, since no-one knows what the heck they are anyway, the names aren’t terribly important.
Yes, I am an ogg zealot. I encode everything I can to ogg.
I won’t buy any music playing device unless it plays ogg.
Try ogg today, encode the same song with all the formats in a similar quality, then use good speakers/headphones.
And the problem with png is the horrible IE bug which displays semitransparent images incorrectly. Yes, there is a workaround, but it will not save you when you want to use such images in tables (for example). The bug’s been there for years, I wish those idiots at ms would fix it.
I think that bug was put there originally by accident, but was kept deliberately all these years to stain the open source formats’ reputation.
…and then, to counteract your existing bias towards any format, do a *blind* test to see which one you like best.
if you read dan’s data you’ll know all about the startling differences you get with audio tests depending on whether you do them blind or not…