MPEG4

[Tony Clark]

> 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!)

  DIVx is totally incompatible with DVD unless something happened the 
last time I saw this come up.  It's a stupid idea.  The underground 
market is going to boom if and when something as rediculous as that ever 
gets adopted as standard.

> 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"...

   Well unfortunately if the pay-per-listen/view thing ever happens, then 
you can quantitatively reduce the span from 14-30 to 18-30.  I don't know 
of too many 14 year olds with credit cards.  :)

> 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.

   I think that this would be a great move.  For a couple of reason.  
One, the possibility of future fuss about "non-true-reproduction" would 
be extremely hard to justify any future standard.  Two, it'd push the 
audio/computer industry to get off their ass and create hardware capable 
of recording such a media (meaning we'll be able to finally record 16-bit 
48kHz media properly and cheaply).  Not such a bad thing really. 

> 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 I suspect that they will never go out of date....they'll keep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....:)

   Yeah...black-bean burritos...oh!  Yeah, it's always a good thing to 
lag behind technology.  Let the big wigs fight it all out and introduce 
new technology for a fortune while the rest of us buy up all of the old 
"fading" technology for dirt cheap!

   Tony

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I can't drive (my Moog) 55!         |     The E-Music DIY Archive
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Tony Clark -- clark at andrews.edu     | aupe.phys.andrews.edu/diy_archive
http://aupe.phys.andrews.edu/~clark |     Contributions welcomed!
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