Digital Home Thoughts: PC Mag: "MP3 Grows Up"

"You can rip, copy, or play an MP3 file, but one thing you can't do is get more than two channels of sound out of it. Soon, you will be able to, although you may have more trouble copying the file. The Fraunhofer Institute, originator of the file format that brought the music industry to its knees, is adding surround sound and copyright protection.

Expected this summer, the MP3 Surround format is based on Agere Systems' technology. "What we do is take the original surround-sound signal," explains Peter Kroon, Agere's chief multimedia architect, "and we down-mix that from 5.1 channels to stereo." Rather than capturing all the additional channel information, however, the encoding uses psychoacoustic techniques to capture only spatial and speed information for additional channels, thus preserving compact file size. The MP3 Surround files are backward-compatible, so they play back as stereo tracks on existing players; updated hardware and software will play the files back as surround sound for 5.1 speakers."

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this news. Why bother with MP3 anymore? The future of digital audio is going to center around other formats, particularly Microsoft and Apple standards. MP3 is yesterday's audio format. I don't even like the audio quality it offers anymore. Higher bit rate WMA offers far superior quality, in my opinion. As does AAC. Music services are jumping on the WMA/AAC bandwagon. Do we still need MP3?