In reply to:

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My appologies for the extended rant. But I feel I speak for many others who are dissapointed by SonicBlue's decision to support WMA.

While I will admit it doesn't seem very likely that WMA will crush the MP3 format, over the last 15 years I have watched the same thing happen again and again when Microsoft sets its mind to something. Personally, I would not discount Microsoft's efforts to make WMA the dominate format.

I understand SonicBlue's desire to support a potentially popular format in order to complete in the marketplace. However, WMA format is just that: a potentially popular format. Why it has to be supported before even proving itself popular is somewhat perplexing. Obviously, SonicBlue management are tuned into and believe in Microsoft's plans enough to help them out.

And this is disappointing because many us thought empeg was a cool company. Not a company leading the way to support a format that may eventually force a DIVX security model for music upon everyone.

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First, I agree that Microsoft's claims at innovation are mostly laughable, that they use their size in very dirty way to strangle technologically superior competition, that our computing environment would have been much better today had not IBM decided to elevate a certain geek to the level of their OS suplier by tasking him to clone CP/M and so on.

But:

Believe it or not, both empeg and SonicBlue were founded not in order to lead holly war against the Evil Empire, but to make money. I don't perceive them any less cool because of that, since they do it (especially empeg, of course) in uniquely customer-friendly and responsible way.

WMA with its copy protection, serial copy management or whatever will probably succeed to squize MP3 out of online music distribution market (such at it exists). I don't care for that very much, since I don't rely on copying music someone else has bought online. Choice of format in which I will encode music from my own CDs will stay mine, and, at least for the time being, I think I will stay with MP3 (but see bellow). Moreover, if I do buy music online, I don't care if I can copy it from the original file in only two or three generations - I only need it on my empeg and PC disk backup.

Music megacompanies (our real enemy here, not M$) will, of course, continue trying to make us pay for our music when we buy it, backup it, listen to it, think of it... I think I read on this board that some were already testing the waters with new, propriatery CD formats that would make ripping and empeg-feeding more difficult, with predictable catastrophic result. Installed base of CD players is too large to allow for that. Of course, there is danger that they will ultimatively succeed in pushing something new, with perceived technical advantages (audio-DVD or whatever). Then, the only venue of action will be defending fair use of our music at court. WMA has nothing to do with it.

Next, WMA is superior format for some purposes. My home machine is temporaryly a Win98 that was gathering dust untill my Linux laptop died, so I had chance to actually listen to some low-bitrate WMA files (samples from CDNOW). Well, at 20kb/s WMA sounds like AM radio or slightly better, RealAudio like Edison phonograph played through bad analog telephone line, and MP3 does not work at all at such low rate. So, it would seem that for high-volume/low-quality applications (say, audio books), WMA might currently be format of choice.

Finally, don't forget that good German ladies and gentleman at Frauhofen Institute still hold our metaphorical balls, since they are copyright holders for MP3 technology and might choose to charge for it whatever they want (or more likely, what they feel the market will take). In this sense, WMA might even be our ally, by keeping FI folks from becomming too greedy.

OK, enough ranting.

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green