The Usage and Importance of MP3 and Other Audio Formats
Music plays an important role in the field of recreation and entertainment. It is now a common form of cultural tradition which is generally adopted by every society and every community. The high demand for music becomes a great commercial business. Multinational companies and even small production houses are building up based on the aspect of commercial demand for music.
These companies used to compose and produce music and sell it in the form of CDs. But, the CD is losing its popularity day by day because of the spreading of audio formats such as MP3, WAV, WMA, and AAC. Usually some questions may arise like why & how? The answer will be explained below.
MP3, for example, is basically a system of encoding melodious files into a layout that can be played either on every kind of media devices such as computers and MP3 Players. A regular CD can do the same thing but in a different manner. Audio files in mp3 format can be compressed for up to 12 times as compared to the mother or original file. This signifies a huge advantage of the mp3 file format over CD’s because compression allows the user to store a relatively large amount of data compared to a traditional CD. This is also advantageous with respect to web-based purposes such as uploading or downloading music files.
The sound may not be as clear as what you hear from an audio CD because compression sacrifices audio quality. But, compression gives convenience to the people especially for storage purposes as the cost of a CD is higher. Many customers could also no longer play obtained CDs on their mainframe. It has also been reported that computers running with a Microsoft Windows Operating System sometimes even collapses when trying to play the CDs. Moreover, disks with digital rights management rules are CD-ROM media that follow the Red Book standardization. Therefore, these CDs could not be played on all CD players.
In addition, it is simple to create and distribute mp3 files and other audio formats even though it is illegal. Users can share the audio formats in their own machine easily, without any cost at all. Thus, music files spread so quickly that companies lose their customers and their profits as well. MP3 was stated as the most performing audio format on the web within 10 months after it was launched and acted like a threat to the companies with other similar audio format.
Sony BMG in 2005 launched the new DRM technology which sets up DRM software on personal computers devoid of plainly notifying the user or asking confirmation. The installed software included a root kit along with other things, which formed a strict security feature that users could utilize. Sony initially minimized the vulnerabilities of its software but in parallel, they also released several attempts to patch the covertly built-in software to at least get rid of the root kit. Actually Sony’s DRM software had also restricted some facility to stop copying, as it exaggerated only playback on Windows, but not on other tools.
