Why Choice Matters: Music Formats

I read Paul Thurott's article One True Music Format: MP3 and have to say I disagree.

There are many different things that affect what music formats you will use, just like when buying anything else.

Lossy or Lossless?

Lossy formats (such as mp3, ogg and wmv) sacrifice being exact matches to the audio data for greater compression ratios. Lossless formats (e.g. wav and flac) reproduce the original audio data exactly at the price of consuming more space and download bandwidth.

This to me is the most important aspect of a music format. To other people, it will be less important. It also depends on what you are using the format for. For example, when storing your music collection, it is better to go for a lossless compression as hard disk space is cheap, however, when listening to podcasts, a lossy format is better as bandwidth is more important here than fidelity.

Proprietary or Free?

This boils down to personal choice. Do you want to go with a format from Microsoft (wma), Apple (aac) or another company, and depend on them for supporting that format in the future? Or do you go with a format that is freely available (e.g. ogg), with source code if you need it?

Patented or Unpatented?

One of the problems with the MP3 format is that it is covered by a patent, which makes it harder to distribute and use. This is more of an issue if you want to use Linux, FreeBSD, RockBox or an open source media player to listen to your music. This is the reason why the major Linux distributions don't automatically offer MP3 support in their media players.

DRM or non-DRM?

This is another consideration you will need to make and one that depends on how you use the music. This is important if you want to listen to the music on a device that has support for WMV or similar format, but not the DRM part of it, preventing you from listening to music that have DRM enabled.

Your Favorite Media Player

This is an important factor in deciding what formats to use. For example, if you exclusively use an iPod or Windows Media Player, that limits your choice of formats.

Why You Should Consider FLAC and OGG

Paul's article advises people to avoid FLAC and OGG formats. My advice is to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages yourself and choose the format (even if it is not flac or ogg) that suites your needs, usage and requirements.

Paul says that they have "vague technical advantages over other formats". While this may be true for OGG, which is a lossy format, FLAC is a lossless format.

Paul says that they are "less compatible than AAC and WMA". The format specifications of FLAC and OGG are freely available, along with reference implementations. You can get plugins for winamp, mplayer and other media players. These formats are even being supported by some portable media devices, and if they don't, then rockbox (a free replacement for the firmware on a growing number of devices, including iPods). Support and availability is not good, but is getting better.

Paul says that "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." While being proprietary (or patented) are issues, these are choices that each person has to make individually. I will not advocate any way: choice, and freedom to make that choice, is always a good thing.

I personally choose FLAC, not because of a religious hatred of Microsoft or Apple, but because it is a lossless audio format - a must have for me - and it works on Windows, Linux and my media player device. Whatever you choose is entirely up to you.

I will start buying music online when FLAC (or even WAV!) is an available option. For now, I'll stick to buying music CDs.