Paul Thurrott plans on dying young.

Paul Thurrott, of WinSuperSite, has started a new series he calls Digital Media Core, and has started by explaining why MP3 is the one audio format to rule them all, and why using any other is irrational.

Not surprisingly the article leaves one wanting. There is simple silliness there, like he claims that WMA offered: "better compression, better fidelity, and smaller file sizes" than MP3. This is true, but better compression, better fidelity, and smaller file sizes is saying the same thing three times over. Better compression means better fidelity at the same file size, or a smaller file size at the same fidelity. If the compression is good enough it means better fidelity at smaller file size. In the end they are all the same thing. He also offers this brilliant comparison between AAC and WMA: "very similar [...] file sizes at identical bit rates". What makes this such a brilliant observation is that bit rate pretty much is file size. Bit rate times length gives you the stream size (VBR can throw it off). Then as overhead you add the container and whatever meta data it contains and you got file size. The fact that the file size are similar at identical bit rates is evident if you know what you are talking about.

The gist of Thurrott's article is that you should use MP3 when ripping music because of its wide compatibility and that is flaw, bad compression, isn't an issue with todays storage. Generally I agree with him. MP3 is a great format to choose because of its almost universal compatibility. What makes his article such a catastrophe is that MP3 has two other, worse flaws which he doesn't even mention. Recommending someone to go MP3 without giving them an adequate understanding of the consequences seems wrong to me.

MP3's two other faults, besides bad compression, is the fact that it is lossy, and the transcoding related issues, and its licensing uncertainness. The legal environment surrounding MP3 remains uncertain and every once in a while a lawsuit pops up. There remains the possibility that at some future point in time the widespread compatibility of MP3 decreases sharply because of some legal issue.

The legal issues aggravates the second issue. Transcoding with lossy formats. When you transcode one lossy format into another you loose quality because you end up with two different compressions on top of each other. So when you go MP3 you are stuck with MP3 unless you want to transcode and live with the quality loss. This I see as the biggest advantage of lossless formats. The lossless compression is completely removed when the file is decoded so there is no quality loss from double compression. This is why I rip my CDs in a lossless format.

The potential legal pit holes isn't the only reason why you might want to change the format of your music files. With the rapid technological advancement who knows what formats with what features we might have ten of twenty years from now. The ability to move you music to a new format without the quality loss, or needing to re-rip it, may be essential to deal with the future.

As I mentioned earlier I rip into a lossless format. What I chose was FLAC, and not because of the reasons Thurrott claims I have: "The people who do use (and advocate) these formats are generally more concerned with religious issues surrounding their disliking of proprietary technologies or products made by companies like Apple and Microsoft." Although the proprietary nature of Microsoft's format was why I chose the open source FLAC, it has nothing to do with religious issues of any kind of principles, and everything to do with prudence. FLAC is well documented which means if punch comes to shove I can write my own FLAC decoder, which isn't nearly as easy to do with proprietary formats.

He makes a point about how his life is too short for him to bother to manage two sets of your music collection. I presume he plans on dying before he has to rip a new collection as well. This is a valid point though I wonder how much trouble it really would be to set your system up so that it makes two copies of everything you rip, one, in MP3, for your daily usage, and one, in lossless, that it back up somewhere.

Lastly I should add a side note on AAC. Thurrott dismisses AAC due to its inferior compatibility, especially in Microsoft software. At the moment this remains true, although adding AAC support to WMP and WMC is easy with the lighweight and sleek CCCP, which is free. Also, seeing as AAC is part of MPEG-4 along with H.264/AVC, which is Thurrott's favorite video format, which is sweeping the net, I would guess that it is only a matter of time before Microsoft does MPEG-4.