One of the highlights of the 2007 Virtual Goods Workshop was the presentation by Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg titled “From data compression to virtual goods - technical perspectives for the usage of digital music”. Prof Brandenburg is one of the inventors of MP3, and has been involved in the audio field ever since. I must, at this point, also point out that the department head of Multimedia Security at the Fraunhofer IIS (where I am currently interning, and thus my boss); Stephan Krägeloh is also one of the co-inventors. However, Prof. Brandenburg is the main inventor of the MP3, and can be regarded as the “Father of the MP3”.
The focus of the conference was virtual goods, and MP3 is perhaps the most significant virtual good. For the first part of his talk, Prof. Brandenburg focussed on the development of the MP3, which like many new technologies was greeted with scepticism (why would anyone need audio compression?) and took a long time to get through the standardising process.
Off course, MP3 really took off when the Internet took off; but even then, ironically, piracy was a big factor in its success. In the early 90s, MP3 decoders were available for free (i.e. without any patent costs), but encoders cost in the 100s of US dollars. Somewhere along the line, a rogue employee was involved in releasing the encoder software for free (with a redesigned front end). And once it was on the Internet, it was hard to remove, and MP3 encoders became freely available to the public, and the rest is history …
AAC, first really thrown into the spotlight for being the base format for Apple’s iTunes Service is the follow up, providing better quality at the same compression ratio. AAC is also more flexible – according to Prof Bandenburg, there is no improvement in MP3 quality after 192 kbit/s, even though the maximum bit rate is 320 kbit/s.
Off course no discussion of lossy compression can be complete without a listening test, of lossy compression (AAC) and lossless encoding. To make it harder, the test comprised of three audio tracks, with three samples, with at least one sample being lossless, and one sample being lossy. I found it easy to distinguish between lossy and lossless for a classical music track, but could not find any difference in the speech and pop music tracks. No one in the audience picked up all the correct answers.
The last part of his talk was about DRM, and what he thinks of the future of music. In his opinion, DRM for audio will depend entirely on how much piracy occurs for non protected files within the next year. If the record companies do not suffer significant losses, in his opinion, DRM will be dead within a year after that. He pointed out that othe efforts at securing music distribution, such as SDMI, failed horribly, and interoperability will remain the main factor in determining whether DRM will ultimately succeed.
But the future of audio is not only about DRM and compression; but rather search and organisation. It is after all quite common to have gigabytes of music and the organisation and use of the information is now more important than the actual storage of the music. New ideas would include automatic playlist generation (not from the tags but from the actual content of the music) and search by humming.
Personally, I have my doubts about whether non protected music distribution will work. As I commented on my last post, I have very good reasons to believe that there will be more pirated copies than legitimate copies after a year or so, and thus DRM will be needed, if protection is required.
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