I've gone back to mp3 as my audio format of choice. I'm still an avid iTunes fan and iPod owner but the Apple AAC format simply isn't accepted widely enough.
For one thing, my Dell doesn't run iTunes. I blue screen. Sure, it's probably some hardware issue that I could probably deal with. I could reseat all of my cards, update my drivers, and spend a whole weekend tweaking my machine so it would work again. But I could also use Windows Media Player 10.
The big deciding factor came when I installed WMP 10 and saw that it could rip to mp3 right out of the box. Obviously they realized iTunes offered this capability and they had to follow suit. WMP 10 is an incremental improvement over Windows Media 9 Series, but iTunes is still a better application.
Additionally, my video editing applications don't understand AAC.
A friend of mine likes the ogg format over at vorbis.com sicne it's open source, which makes it free, and it has some technical advantages over mp3. However, my video editing programs don't understand it, iTunes doesn't understand it, and neither does my iPod.
So, mp3 it is.
The conversion to mp3 was pretty painless. I used iTunes to do most of the conversions. I buy a lot of songs from Apple's Music Store but the protected AAC files don't convert to mp3. That is, not until you strip the DRM from the files with a nice program called hymn.
So, now I can share all of my music with my coworkers via the music sharing feature of iTunes and I don't have to give them access to my raw media files, nor do I have to "authorize" their machines to play the files I buy off the iTunes website.
On another level, my motivation to convert seems to parallel, in my mind, to the motivations of people supporting free software (as in freedom, not cost). Although mp3 isn't a free format (someone owns the patent), it feels free and all of my tools work with it. If I were a purist, I suppose I'd go with ogg. I'd use ogg-compatible software, buy an ogg-compatible mp3 player (hah, I mean digital music player), and I'd have to find video editing software that would support the format... or I convert to WAV (temporarily).
Posted by Nick Codignotto at September 25, 2004 08:19 AM | TrackBack