MPEG4

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow Y'all.
        Of course the interesting thing to note is that they say they are
aiming it at a target of a DSP based decoding system. With various companies
interested in the system, INCLUDING E-MU systems, (Read Creative Labs)
imagine when they actually start building these custom DSP based systems for
consumer use. It means the price will drop to levels you can't probably
imagine. I mean who would have thought that the basic chip set in a 10K Akai
sampler was only worth about 5 bux? 

You can imagine the cost of an MPEG-4 chipset in a portable walk-person
style MPEG 4 playback unit. It means one thing. Your Nord Modular and
Creamware SCOPE is gonna be worth about  50 bux on the second hand market in
a few years time because these little chipsets are gonna be able to do all
these things for not very much money. And they'll be standard. Making the
Nords and Scopes of today's market, go the way of the fairlite almost
overnight. A nice museum piece at best. "Look kiddies remember when we use
to do things like that"

Damn that's a scary thought! You give people a synth system that can do
pretty much everything for not very much money, with a transmission format
that means composers and musicians can produce directly in the final format
at the final quality. That changes everything. No more CDs. No More Major
record companies as we know it today. No more traditional distribution as we
know it today. Everything! I'm not saying it's a bad thing I'm just saying.
"Like Wow!"

This technology, when it becomes common place, like cheap sampling
technology is today, will wrap up everything-audio into one slick package.
>From production and mastering though to final delivery. And the only future
competition for it would be the ratification of MPEG-5. Which would have to
be based on some "bio-nuclear-zombie-monster-from-hell" technology. I can't
wait! I mean I can't stress this enough. The land scape as we know it in
music today will look very different. So different that anyone in a coma
today would wake up in 10 years time and think they were on a different planet.

I mean can you imagine walking along with your little MPEG-4 box and
headphones or probably neurophones, (Which actually exist BTW) and listening
to the spice girls Mk II. (featuring Chainsaw spice, the girl with the
jack-hammer dildo) When in actual fact what you're really listening to is
the output of some super-digital synthesizer that is actually synthesizing
the remnants of the original recording under the instructions of some piece
of code that may be only 20K long. So small that thousands of channels could
be encoded into our existing FM bands. But in this particular case you
bought it from some on-line music shop and copied it from you computer onto
a PCMCIA card which is now happily spewing forth this exercise in synthesis
bad-taste along with the mixture of 20 industrial hits which are yet to show
up on your credit card. 

So you're jogging along when you get this really cool idea for a song. You
stop, whip out  your tamagotchi U47 studio interface from your back-pack and
lay down a track. Right there and then. Boom. By the time you get home
you've got it remixed and ready to upload to your own personal distribution
site on the net. Where people can purchase your latest works instantly. Just
like the three toons you wrote before breakfast.

Do you think this might not have more than a little impact on the music
business as we know it?

I dunno about you but as a muso, I wouldn't mind a piece of that action
right now. Get in on the ground floor as it were. Before it's too late to
change my ways. Lest I become an interesting anachronism. But as I said in a
previous post on another list server in a galaxy not all that far away.
"Imagine the new and interesting forms of music when the kids discover the
old GM modules that dad left lying in the basement. Can't wait!

Be absolutely Icebox.
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