MPEG4

[Eric at Svetlana Electron Devices]

>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. 

Sorry Batz, but I've seen these exact same battles from the audiophile
side. The entrenched record industry will fight this tooth and nail.....
most likely the average consumer will end up with a highly crippled
version, with some method of back-billing the user on a per-play basis.

Such a great idea! You will need a valid credit card to listen to
music at ALL! (A big hi-fi retailer in the USA is currently trying
to create just such a format for DVD-disk movies, it is called DIVx...
You buy the player and pay $5-10 for a disk, and the machine lets you
play it ONCE....wanna watch it again? Call the company and give them
more money! Major credit cards only, of course!)

It may or may NOT open up the world to the indie artist...don't count
on it, and don't invest any of your pin money in it.

Remember how CDs would "change the face of the industry"? It's still
run by the same damn giant corporations.....
Why is it that an average CD costs 85 cents to make, yet popular titles
on CD retail for $16.95? And that's US prices! $20-25 in the UK.....

Remember home taping and the DAT? How it would break the music industry
wide open? Try finding PRE-RECORDED tapes for your DAT player today....
Now it's strictly a "pro" format.

Remember DCC? Now THAT was a joke. Philips spent some $2 BILLION 
promoting it. All down the toilet.

Remember Mini-Disk? Still only a minority format, even with
Sony pouring billions into it. (They just introduced a car
player for Mini-disks in the USA...5 years after such machines
became available in Japan!!)

Have you been watching the ugly battles over recordable CDs and
DVD formats?? The lawyers in Washington ALWAYS get involved, because
some little bastard with $100 million in loose cash wants to keep
making a $5 profit from the sale of each Mariah Carey (Spice, whatever)
CD....

face it, the industry is driven by 14-30 year old males who prefer
their pop singers young, female, beautiful, skinny, blonde and as naked
as possible.....either that, or ugly guitar-pounders with big hair,
or hip-hop with mumbled dumb-boy lyrics about "bullets, bitches and
40-ounce beers"...

....most people don't give a DAMN about experimental music.

And you should see the political jockeying about future audio formats
using 20-bit, 96-kHz sampling rates. A LOT of perfectionistic 
recording-industry pros are arguing about the need for this.

Some think digital audio should be compressed till it squeaks, to save $$$.

Others are still using 40-year-old Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorders
and complaining about how rotten all digital audio sounds.......

pick up a copy of PRO AUDIO REVIEW someday. Or better yet, subscribe
to the Pro-Audio mailing list. God, it's depressing to see
grown-ups squabbling (for months) about 20-bit noise shaping filters.....

>This technology, when it becomes common place, like cheap sampling
>technology is today, will wrap up everything-audio into one slick package.

Hope you're even 10% right....so far, though, previous revolutions
haven't made much of a difference.......sorry, just wanted to put
in a few cents of my old-man crappy attitude.....

everybody else, save your modular synths and analog tape recorders.
I suspect that they will never go out of date....they'll keep
coming back, like a black-bean burrito....:)

Eric Barbour
Svetlana Electron Devices
Portola Valley CA USA