Portability the sound of the times
MP3 MUSIC COMPRESSION Music file format is mother of convenience Lower fidelity deemed an acceptable tradeoff
When Bob Chen had his girlfriend’s parents over for dinner the first time, he wanted everything to be perfect. And that included the music. He needed, he estimated, at least three hours of music with no surprises, no repeats and no interruptions. Chen’s desktop stereo could only take one CD at a time, but it did have MP3 capability.
He’d never used it before, but now he swears he’ll never play music any other way.
“ I managed to put 147 appropriate songs on one CD,” he says. “ It worked perfectly, there was no dead time and I never had to get up and change CDs the whole night.” MP3s are digital music files, similar to those on a commercially produced CD, but in compressed form. File compression is nothing new. If you have ever heard a sound, seen a video or even a photo on a computer screen or used a digital camera, you’ve almost certainly used a compressed file — and you may be familiar with names like WAV, MPEG, JPEG, TIFF or GIF.
Compressing is accomplished using complex algorithms to take out data that the computer decides won’t be missed by the human eye or ear. MP3, short for MPEG-3 ( or, third level of compression developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group), is the most popular format for compressing digital audio. While original, CD- quality files take about 10 MB of data for one minute of music, MP3s require just 1 MB. MP3 is what experts call a lossy compression protocol, which means that the data taken out when the file is compressed is lost and will not return ( or may even be replaced by other data) when the file is uncompressed or used. The result is a file that is somewhat different from the original.
Although MP3s are about one- tenth the size of original files, they aren’t onetenth the quality. To almost everybody, the difference is imperceptible, although to audiophiles, it can be annoying.
“ Of course, all digital formats are inferior to vinyl,” says David A. Basskin, president of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency and a selfdescribed music lover. “ But people are ready to put up with a degradation of quality in exchange for portability.”
In today’s marketplace, portability is essential. A typical pop song like Franz Ferdinand’s “ Take Me Out” may take up 43 MB on a factory CD, but just 4.3 MB when converted to MP3.
Files of that size are easy to upload and download, can be burned to discs, stored on the Web or even emailed, pending copyright permission.
Personal music players can now be the size of a person’s finger and still store and play hundreds of songs.
And, for most people, the quality is just fine. “ Nobody who buys an iPod complains about the sound,” says Tim Deal, an analyst for Technology Business Research and an expert in digital entertainment. “ Either they can’t tell there’s a difference, or they’ve never really heard anything better.” Chen agrees. “ Maybe there’s some guy listening to Beethoven on a turntable with speakers as big as my couch who’ll be disappointed, but I’m not,” he says. “ I don’t think the speakers on my stereo would be able to reproduce a higherquality sound than I get on MP3.” Of course, MP3 isn’t the only data compression standard for digital music. The next most popular, MPEG-2 AAC, is used mainly on Apple software ( although their products also play MP3 and other formats as well) and is considered by some to give slightly superior sound reproduction from files no bigger than those using MP3.
Since bandwidths and data storage capabilities are rapidly increasing as Internet service providers and personal entertainment hardware manufacturers desperately compete for market share, the trend in data compression is not toward smaller files, but to increase the quality of files the same size as MP3s. But MP3 is a format users know and trust. “ It will not be easy to tempt people away from a format which provides
them with good sound quality
and impressive data compression, which allows them to make
clean digital copes of whatever
they like (regardless of legal
technicalities) and for which
there is variety of good, free software available,” says Paul Sellars, an author and data compression expert. But even now, the Moving Picture Experts Group is developing a new standard and has been receiving input from such big tech innovators as AT& T, Dolby, the Fraunhofer Institute, Lucent and Sony.
Chen, who is now planning to buy a car with MP3 capability so he can drive hundreds of kilometres without changing the CD, isn’t afraid that the format will become obsolete overnight.
“ I’m sure something will eventually come along and replace MP3,” he says. “ But I can’t even begin to guess how it could be better.”