A ZDNET article outlines Microsoft’s attempts to kill the MP3 format. Apparently Microsoft is shipping an MP3 encoder with Windows XP but limits the encoding to just 56kb/s. OTOH you can encode music in Microsoft’s proprietary format with all the quality you want, but then the user has to deal with digital rights management bugs.
According to ZDNET, most of the people they talked to expect MP3 to be around for a long time to come but,
Still, experts said Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive efforts to popularize its proprietary audio format–along with legal difficulties facing Napster–could stem MP3’s popularity. They cite Microsoft’s vast resources and the broad reach of its Windows operating system. Microsoft, for example, has been giving away free licenses to other companies to use its audio technology, which now is supported–along with MP3–by major hand-held music players.
Here’s what I think: most digitial rights management schemes are horrible simply from an end user experience. Sure DRM is being built into some handhelds, but even computer savvy reviewers are finding the almost impossible to use and slower than molasses (Sony and Pioneer, for example, both have DRM-enabled players where the time required to encode an MP3 song into a DRM version and then transfer that song onto the player often exceeds the playing length of the song — which just won’t cut it).
If electronics manufacturers ever get together and come up with a single, easy to use, fast, unbreakable DRM system then we’re in trouble, but I just don’t see that happening — these are the same folks, after all, who can’t even agree on standards for the next generation of CD/DVD audio.