If you use iTunes or Windows Media Player you must do this simple thing immediately! Do not delay! Change the format you use to rip or download music to MP3! Do it now, while you're thinking about it. It's easy, it's one of the basic menu settings, and there's no downside to doing it. On the contrary, the downside is if you continue to use m4a format (standard on Apple and iTunes) or wma format in Windows Media Player is your music will non-portable, and hence will depend on the device you're using it on.
The reason to change it is, both systems will use MP3 without a care or hiccup! But neither of the proprietary systems will work with the other product line without major hassles. And most “third party” music software and hardware have problems with, variously, the two proprietary formats.
Remember when a band released their latest material, you'd just go down to the record store and buy their new album on vinyl? It would work on any record player you happened to play it on. No problem. Then came cassettes. Some people bought all new versions of their music, because tapes were more compact and didn't wear out as quickly, and with the right tape player you could play both sides continuously (those long blank spaces at the end of a tape could be a problem, but not too bad). Start replacing records with tapes.
Then they invented laser disks (did anyone actually buy those?), digital tapes (DAT's, which never took off in the US because the record industry passed laws to keep the manufacturers from creating effective recorders), followed closely by CD's. Then the iPod came out and the consumer period of music had finally arrived. With CD's, it's possible to rip a more or less perfect copy onto your computer that can be used in any number of convenient, fast, easy-access music playing programs. With the iPod and follow-on products, those copies (and any that you bought directly from the iTunes Store) could be squirted into an itty-bitty player that would hold the equivalent of a whole room full of vinyl records and which you could access and play with just a little thumb manipulation on the outside of the player. And the iTunes store freed us from having to buy the whole album if we only wanted to listen to one song. Billions heeded the call, and a whole new music market was born.
Enter my brother, who has owned several rooms full of music media at various times in his life. LP's, cassettes, CD's. He's serious about music. Now he's got a fairly new computer (a Dell Windows machine) and Windows Media Player running under Vista. And iTunes too, because that seemed like a good thing. He has an account at the iTunes Store, and he's got accounts at a bunch of other places as well. He was mystified (and miffed) when he canceled his subscription to Crescendo and all the hundreds of tracks of music he'd been buying for $24.95/month suddenly disappeared. WTF? You mean they just rent it to you? That even though you pay them and spend the time to download, the music never actually belongs to you? Now he's got his whole collection of CD's ripped and stored away on his hard drive. It gives those old songs some new life, because it's much easier to locate and play an obscure track on the computer than to try and find it in several floor-to-ceiling bookcase of CD cases that never quite get or stay organized. I pointed out that he was vulnerable to hard drive failure, and he got an external hard drive to back it all up. Great!
The problem now is if he decides to get an Apple laptop (that was something he was considering) that whole collection of (mostly) wma files, representing countless weekends of mindlessly ripping CD's, is useless. If he wants an iPod (he already has a Zune, which he won online from a Pepsi cap), he's out of luck as far as the 2500+ CD's he already ripped to wma. And all that problem would have been avoided completely if he'd just gone into the menus and set the rip format to mp3. There's no downside of that-- it's no slower, it's no less convenient, it's a simple change. And it's almost criminal that Microsoft (and Apple, which is also guilty of the same proprietary lock-in, in reverse) makes the default format the their own. For shame.
OK, enough with the babbling, here's the upshot: Change your music software to use MP3 for ripping and you won't have nearly as many problems down the road when the technology (or your listening, recording, organizing, or playing) devices change. It happens. A lot! Devices break, new tech comes along, you decide to get a Nano, or you win a Zune, or some software comes along with a sweet new interface, or you want to listen to stuff on your new netbook, or your new phone. Don't let the big tech companies trick you into proprietary file format lock-in. MP3 is an excellent portable format that works with almost everything. None of the other formats can say that.
That is all.
0 comments:
Post a Comment