September 30, 2004

Mp3 creator sounds warning

Karlheinz Brandenburg, the man who invented the mp3 format, offers some advice for the music industry:

The alphabet soup of technologies is meant to prevent fans from rampantly duplicating and transferring songs to others.

Brandenburg said he twice warned manufacturers and music labels that they risk alienating fans and driving them to unsanctioned file-sharing networks, where the songs are free and encoded in the unprotected MP3 format.

"They didn't listen. Maybe they thought it made commercial sense not to have a standard. It's very strange," he said.

Thanks to Jason for the tip.

Posted by Casper at September 30, 2004 10:12 PM
Comments

you know what i want though? i want a smaller, better file format to kick mp3s out of the game. i mean, sometimes wmas are smaller. but not always. and lots of programs and devices dont even support it. when did this guy invent mp3s? like 8 or 9 years ago? surely theres gotta be something better

Posted by: tim boucher at September 30, 2004 11:05 PM

Tim, of course there is something better. It's called Ogg Vorbis and it's a "completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology". It has better support for meta-data and it produces smaller files than mp3. See vorbis.com for more information.

Posted by: Blenda at October 3, 2004 09:20 AM