Quote:
AAC has been around for years but got nowhere as a consumer format until Apple adopted it. ... We didn't do so because nobody was using AAC then


Chicken and the egg problem as usual. Consumers have relatively little influence towards getting a newer format adopted. It is in the hands of hardware manufacturers and software designers. Had AAC been added to the empeg back then, more people would have had the choice to move to it as a format. The empeg was built and designed when relatively few people even knew what an MP3 was. As it, and other devices appeared on the market, consumer awareness rose, and people did start to encode their music to it. The hardware pushed the awareness in this case. For new formats, someone has to decide to stand up and lead the way at some point.

I can see the counterpoint for avoiding early adoption though. Throwing both MP3 and AAC into the mix back then could have led to confusion, and also incompatibility issues with one or the other if people tried to move their library to a different platform. MP3 was for a short time a solid single standard for encoding music. Now we sit at a point where many millions of people encode to WMA, or AAC, or a smaller set to OGG, and no single hardware player supports all 4 formats.

To me, it is a shame a format like MP3Pro never took off. Having backwards compatibility with existing MP3 players, but additional quality when using the new format seems to be the way to go to drive a replacement format, instead of a complete standalone format.