The End of Mp3 Songs? Future of Music You Should Know

One question that has been doing the rounds in the music community lately is whether today’s music format of mp3 is future proof or not? Many social networking websites are filled with rumors of music industry looking for a higher definition of audio format just like the television industry has shifted to HD and 4k formats of viewing.

In order to explore the answer to this question, this article has been divided into three sections for getting a clear understanding about music formats.

A. The History –

• Before predicting the end of mp3 songs, it is important that you should know some history. Much like analog photography, songs were sold in the form of cassettes with a magnetic tape. These tapes did not have a long life and were prone to fungus. This is one of the reasons that the world moved on to digital.
• Even earlier in history, one could find the example of vinyl record players and gramophones that went out of fashion as they were not deemed fit to be portable in a world that was beginning to move at a faster pace.
• This is where the Mp3 format for latest music songs came in, in 1998 and soon mp3 portable players were introduced in the market in 1999.

B. The Present –

• Today the most common format on online music sites is considered to be mp3.
• Mp3 is a short name for MPEG-2 layer 3.
• This is what Mp3 can do:
• In a CD format music is sampled 44,100 times per second and samples are 16 bits long. So, for a 4-minute song CD quality stores a huge number of bits in each second.
• Mp3 shrinks down the sound data to nearly 12 bits. As a result, a 32 MB song on Compact Disk is brought down to just 3 MB.
• This format, however, has some distinct disadvantages due to which it is being reconsidered as ‘not-so-future-proof’ medium.
• It is a ‘’lossy’’ format which means that the quality of songs gets reduced in order to compensate for a reduced file size.
• It also skips some frequencies during its encoding of the audio. It exploits the fact that the human ear will perceive some frequencies and some not, hence it gets rid of data on its own.

C. The Future –

• Just like technology led us to develop a high resolution wallpaper in HD, the battle for higher and higher definition of audio continues.
• A competitor to iTunes, the Pono System, aims to sell albums at a much greater quality than the iTunes. The audiophiles are now looking to shift more and more to lossless audio formats such as.wav and.flac
• Though.wav format is bit-perfect, it’s file sizes are extremely large and it cannot retain metadata such as – artist, album name, etc.
• This leaves us with.flac format. This format is now being embraced slowly by the music industry a perfect format for digital music. Although.flac files are nearly six times larger than mp3, they are just half the size of CD quality with no data loss.
• Another factor that would determine the future of lossless music files are the buyers themselves.
• How will they respond to purchasing of these songs? And how will they store these large audio files on mobile devices? These concerns need to be addressed first before making lossless formats, mainstream.

Well, that wraps up this coverage of predicting the future music format.

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I am Richa Jha. I am writing this article on behalf of a href ="https://sabakuch.com/"Sabakuch.com.