

Rumors of the imminent demise of the MP3 format are exaggerated, and I for one won't stand for it. A recent DVice article claims that the compressed MP3 is going the way of the Dodo bird because everybody's going to switch to lossless formats, which retain every audio bit on the CDs from which they were ripped.

According to the article, lossless codecs will "destroy" the MP3 format because hard drive and media capacities are on the rise, Blu-Ray movie soundtracks are encoded losslessly, iPod docks are showing up in high-end home stereos and Apple could flick a switch and have iTunes start encoding into Apple Lossless by default. Balderdash, I say!

The article is correct, of course, about hard drive capacity, Blu-Ray, iPod docks and Apple. And I agree with Neil Young that high-quality audio codecs have their place. But on the way to the article's conclusion – that lossless codecs will destroy the MP3 – the wheels fall off of its argument, so to speak.

While lossless formats are certainly on the rise, especially amongelite file sharers, the MP3 will be with us for a long time.

Here's why.

1. Flash is the future

As portable flash memory becomes as capacious as the portable hard drives of five years ago, more manufacturers are opting for flash in their MP3 players. It's a superior way to store portable music, offering better battery life, longer overall product life and slimmer designs.

Notice how Apple is throwing its weight behind the (relatively) low-capacity iPod Touch and iPhone, rather than the 160GB hard drive-based iPod Classic DVice's article mentions? Flash is the future of digital audio players, pure and simple. As for cellphones, which are increasingly being used to listen to music, almost none of them have hard drives.

The thing is, flash memory units suitable for MP3 players and cellphones currently top out around 16GB, and many of those devices average only around 1-2GB of memory. That means, for practical purposes, that the average MP3 player actually has less room for music than the first hard drive-based MP3 player (5GB). Lower capacities mean compressed formats, as always.

2. Companies like to save money

Say you're the CEO of a company that makes portable audio devices. Tooffer a player that can hold, say, 50 albums, would you prefer to encouragethe use of lossless formats by paying ten five times as much for memory and resorting to a larger design? Didn't think so.

Or say you're in charge of a digital music web start-up. In between wrangling code, forging business deals and avoiding lawsuits, you may find yourself buying server space to store or cache music. Would you be willing to pay ten times the bandwidth and storage costs in order to provide lossless audio to your customers when most of them can't tell the difference between that an MP3? No, which brings me to my next point.

3. MP3 Sounds Good Enough Most of the Time

I grant that MP3sdon't sound as good as WMA or AAC, which are newer technologies, letalone as good as lossless codecs, which don't lose any data during the compression process. But people have chosen convenience over audio quality for yearsnow, and audio hardware manufacturers have responded by largely abandoning the middle market between the average listener and audiophiles who'll pay anything for good sound. Even if that changes, and people start buying better speakers and headphones, any format that's even slightly more convenient is still going to beat aformat that sounds slightly better. And by"convenient," part of what I mean is "compatible with a wide array of devices," whichbrings me to my next point.

4. The lossless codec market is fractured

The MP3 came of age during a singularity: the moment when the worldstarted looking online for music. Not so with lossless formats, whichare being adopted in a vast and varied landscape. The mainoptions are Apple Lossless, Windows Media Lossless and FLAC,

and all have significant reasons to survive (Apple isn't goinganywhere, neither is Microsoft and neither is the open-source movement behind FLAC).

Without one dominant lossless format, it'll be difficult if notimpossible for manufacturers, music stores, and – let's face it – file sharers to get on the same page, whereas all of the above are compatible with MP3.

MP3 fileshave been multiplying worldwide at unmeasurable rates since beforethe time of Napster The Elder. It's going to take more than Blu-Ray soundtracks, bigger harddrives and an iTunes preferences setting to dislodge it from itsposition as the default digital audio format.

5. If anything, we'll move beyond 16-bit audio

Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, technology will push us beyond the MP3 to some better-sounding digital format. But that next leap in mainstream audio codecs, when it happens, will likely involve 24-bit audio that sounds better than CDs, not lossless files that sound identical and can be reasonably aped by a far more convenient codec.

Viva MP3!

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Photo courtesy of Doc Rogers