im writing an essay about mp3 technology.

my main question i will be tackling is whether mp3's will/have ruined or made music better.

im taking into account the fact that industry suffers due to piracy so big corperations responsible for boy/girlbands are not getting as much gain out of manufacturing pop shite for the meatheads of the world.. therefore you see less shite making money..

however the good stuff also suffers..

but the artists who dont do it for the money will still make music of the same quality..

plus a lot more people can get their music heared.. a lot of it is shit so that is a downside..

its going round and round in my head and id like to through a few comments and points others have on the subject..

lets hear what you think of the matter!

thanks in advance!

rich

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This topic has been discussed QUITE heavily before. But meh. I still get the same feelings from time to time.

I care less about piracy and think MP3 might be ruining the "sound quality." for the market. Because the average listener probably doesn't care if it was recored at 24bit and 192khz. Because it ends up being chunked down to 16bit 44.1khz and THEN mp3 compression on top of that. So what's the point in making quality recordings anymore?

So I dunno.

But once again. Kind of a dead horse issue. Do some searching and you'll find PLENTY of threads related to this.

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Some time ago I read an article that mp3 does harm your ability to hear certain frequencies in music because you get used to listening data reduced compressed music.

Dunno, if this is a hoax but it might be something you could mention in your article (if you find some good sources for this statement on the web)

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I sickens me how at house parties the dj will download some mp3 that will be a super crap vinyl rip encoded at what sounds bellow 128k. The worst part is not that he is playing but that most people cant tell that its crap; they think its normal. Atleast normally the kind of people that do this are only stealing crap artists music haha.
Im sure tiesto and benny bennasi wont miss a few extra dollars.

Which means when something that comes on that is produced well and reproduced in high quality it stands out dramatically.

Anyway, for dnace music I think MP3s have INCREASED sales. I can give one solid example..

PPK Resurrection was first floated on mp3.com (gawd bless its soul), from there some collaborations and emixes were started culimating in an acetate getting cut and produced in the UK which was sent back to the Ukraine. That acetate was being played out at a party, Oakenfold heard it, and the rest is history.

I also know a lot of DJs who hear stuff in mp3 and go and order the vinyl to play out. No self respecting DJ plays crappy mp3s on a decent sound system (end sweeping generalization), the quality loss when played in that format is intolerable.

For Britney and those of that ilk it really bad news though. Personally that makes me happy. MP3s put the music back into the hands of the people, not the corporations. Unfortunately most of the mp3s are shite, but that's what happens when you give a large range of powerful tools to people who don't know how to use them. :-)

Though from the large piles of dirt some gems emerge,and without mp3 they would never have surfaced.

It's also REALLY important to note that mp3 is just a format. It could have been something else, but the timing of it (10:1 file size compression, much better quality than other compressed audio at that time, able to be downloaded over a modem (remeber those?!)) was key to its domenance. It also is interesting about how the Frauhofer institute published the specs, encouraged everyone to start using it, and only when established came and waved the patent stick. If it was patented from day one then it would most likelye have never have taken root. Something else woould.

What's sad is people still stick with mp3 when there are much better alternatives you there now which with the advent of broadband for the masses could increase the quality.

Ahhh...PPK! I remember those guys from the days when mp3.com was worth using. Funny how Resurrection was already a few years old when it was released commercially.

Yeah, there's some better formats around, but there's also some really shitty formats too. WMA sucks ass...and it pisses me off that certain websites insist on using WMA instead of other formats just to save a fraction of their bandwidth. Personally I like OGG and FLAC, but MP3 can also give some ample results if used properly (ever noticed how a lot of mp3's online are encoded like 160kbps but sound like 96kbps? Damn noobs!).

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I live in a very remote area in Norway, and I would have never got into this genre if it hadn't been possible to download music. It started out with hearing one or two dance tracks at a local disco, and resulting in countless hours finding similar tracks on the net. That resulted in stumbling upon the mighty trancemaster compilations, again resulting in me getting more and more into this music. Bottom line is: I've bought hundreds of cds and cratefulls of vinyl.

As I see it, this has normalized the profit for the big labels, who only see music as a product - not art. They can't argue that they've "lost" income due to file sharing, because they've been making too much money for too long. How many times have you bought an entire album just to get that one song, while the rest of it is pure shite? I know I've done it alot, and it's not fair.

I've even made mp3 cds for several of my friends, who now are buying albums and singles.

thanks guys.

im hearing some good comments here.

diginerd- thanks for your feedback. the ppk story i had not heared.

rich

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That one I can confirm 100% (I cut the acetate.. ;-)

Well, all I know is that without mp3's I wouldn't even know what the hell EDM or trance was! I live in a very remote place, with a very fast internet connection , and spend alot of my days just surfing and looking for music. I have a collection of about 9000 tunes, which thereof 7000 are EDM. Once a while I place orders for several cd's at a time at amazon.com or juno.co.uk and buy my favorite tunes (since I am not able to get ANY kind of EDM in my home town!)

So, for me, mp3's have opened a new dimension in my life. I can say with confidence that without the mp3 revolution and Napster in the late 90's, my life would not be the same. I would not be DJ'ing nor producing, and I wouldn't be enjoying life the same way I am today!

personally I suspect there are many reasons why trance artists earn only 500$ instead of 5000$ which you would have gotten in the year 2000. Mp3 surely is one of them.

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quote:

If less is more think about how much more more would be. -Frasier

quote:

Originally posted by Transaholic This whole mp3 thing IMO is just a temporary glitch because over the next few years internet connections will be so fast that we wont need to compress to mp3. I'm hoping as well that storage methods and data transfer become so efficient that we'll all have high quality wav playing equivalents of ipod etc. Then we'll just be able to point these at our car stereos, hi-fis etc and press a button to transfer the song we want (we could even instruct it by voice) and BANG, there you go!

Not holding much hope on this theory. Would be great, but consumers will always opt for the smallest option.....why have thousands of uncompressed sngs/movies when you can have millions of them compressed? No matter how big or great the storage option is, people will only see it as more space to put mp3s, and that's an attitude that will take eons to change (IMHO)

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