The Future of Music

[BlindMelon7]

I know this isn't a sound/music forum but being a musician I would be very interested in hearing peoples views on technology in music.

[BlackDwarf]

What type of technology are you talking about?

My band (shameless plug) are heavily influenced by industrial bands like Tool, NIN, Perfect Circle, Ozric Tentacles who use a lot of electronics in their sound.
We've got 2 Macs onstage (Dans Powerbook running Cubase, holding all the backing audio goodness and my iMac running realtime audio visualisations)

That the type of technology in music you're talking of?

[Funkstar]

going by your post in the HD DVD/BluRay thread below i take it you mean tochnology from that point of view.

Music tech is going backwards in my opinion. We went from vinyl to tape to CD and now to crappy DRM riddled badly compressed audio that we are being ripped off for and don't even own. Oh yeah, and you can only listen to it they way you are told to, not how you want to listen to it.

With CDs we are being treated like criminals by default with so called copy controlled CDs, that are not compatible with some existing audio players, yet the easily producable copies work perfectly. In effect they are making you into a criminal simply to listen to the music you payed for.

the high resolution audio formats we have, SACD and DVD-Audio are a waste of time. There are barely any titles, a lot of the ones you do get are in "surround sound" that the artist never intended in the first place and are compressed in DTS anyway, so the increase in resolution is worthless.

7.1 lossless audio in HD-DVD is interesting, but i doubt we will see anything other than special edition movies that take advantage of this. There is such a small number of people that actually care about the quality of their music these days, that i doubt there is a market for these today.

[BlindMelon7]

I mean any technology, whats the way forward?

[BlindMelon7]

I'd like to see a more convenient analogue format. I've always prefered LPs to any other digital formats.

[autopilot]

We are at a halfway point in digital music storage/playback - a technological void in which everyone is still experimenting at the moment. Digital music technology is far from mature, although i do think it's pretty obvious that CD's will be the last major phyisical format for music. Compressed music is not the future, the reasons music is compressed are; storage space and internet/data transfer speeds. Both are becoming non-issues and by the end of the decade we will be using lossless formats like FLAC, and we will laugh at crappy lossy formats (and the people that are investing so much money building 128kbs hardware locked collections using the likes of iTunes).

On the subject of storage, I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast a few weeks ago. They had the guy on who used to be the head of BT's R&D department, who now runs his own consultancy. This guy really knew his stuff and said that at the current rate of HDD technology development, by 2012 the ipod could in theory have enough storage space to store every song ever recorded in history (i guess he meant lossy mind). He went on to say that by 2020, a device as small as the ipod could locally store every movie ever made.

That said, in home at least, i can see services like Real's Rhapsody, or the new MTV URGE, become more and more popular - when you dont even have any music files stored locally, you just pay a small fee and have access to just about every tune/album ever recorded - streamed accross the net on demand, and the quality will just get better and better. Yes, it's nice owning CD's, but what the difference if the music is stored on your HDD or on a server? If you can access it and play it, there is no real difference. You just have a thin client connected dirrectly to your router and then to your HiFi - no need for a PC. They are already taking off massively (WMP11 supports URGE) and the amazing SqueezeBox 3 already supports such things (those guys at Slimdevices are really on the pulse). Most are US only at pressent, but UK ones are coming. I am completely convinced that this will become the norm. Of course storing files locally will still be usful for thing like in-car usage, but i guess we will probably have a national WiMAX like network one day.

As for DRM, what mess the industry has got into. But like i said, i believe will are still as a point where it's all very experimental - unfortunatly us good money spending customers are the test subjects. It wont go away, but they will simply have to open it up more. Cumsomer power does win in the end. They are currently relying on Jo Bloggs blissful ignorance and lack of technical knowedge, but much of this generation and following generations will be far more savy and they just wont be able to continue in this way, it's imposible. But thats really a moral, legal and consumer rights issue, rather than a technical one. In the meantime, i will stick to buying CD's, ripping them to FLAC and playing them with my Squeezebox (or Ogg on my PDA/DAP).

here is such a small number of people that actually care about the quality of their music these days

I dont think thats really true, I honestly believe that most people dont know any better at the moment. Ask 100 iPod owners off the street what bitrate, file format and DRM type there music is in - i bet the majority would not be able to tell you. It's not that they don't care, they just dont know whats going on. To be fair, it's bloody confusing for most people.

I'd like to see a more convenient analogue format. I've always prefered LPs to any other digital formats.

I dont see how thats posible, unless you employ a robot to put you LP's on for you LP's > MP3, but low quality MP3's days are numbered.

Anyway, I love music and i love technology, and I'm find it all very exciting. People can keep thier HDTV's, music the most important thing to me. Bring it on

[BlindMelon7]

I dont mean LPs should be brought out again, I'm talking about a whole new system. How hard would it be?

[BlindMelon7]

Then again, a robot would be nice.

[autopilot]

I dont mean LPs should be brought out again, I'm talking about a whole new system. How hard would it be?

Massively. Digital is the only way forward now. Some enthusiasts will hang on to vinyl for DJing etc, but there will never be a new system for analogue storage. It’s pretty much pointless and not what people want or artists need. Heck, there will probably never be another phyisical media for digital after CD's either.

The Artic Monkeys won a Mercury Music Price tonight. Two years ago they were unheard of and broke because people heard them on the net and downloaded thier music. Thats the way it's going, like it or not.

But maybe i have missunderstood what you are asking, what did you have in mind?

[BlindMelon7]

Digital audio sounds so dead, I love the crackles and pops you get with vinyl, not to mention the warm tone you get. I've tried to replicate this by recording vinyls into my computer but it sounds almost as bad as regular cd etc.
I imagine cds etc probably sound better with a more modern speaker system (i have 4 40 year old leak speakers and an old mm electronics amp).

[-ChEM-]

Ozric Tentacles

wasnt the whole point of the ozrics that they never used electronic equipment?

[Mike Fishcake]

Digital audio sounds so dead, I love the crackles and pops you get with vinyl, not to mention the warm tone you get. I've tried to replicate this by recording vinyls into my computer but it sounds almost as bad as regular cd etc.
I imagine cds etc probably sound better with a more modern speaker system (i have 4 40 year old leak speakers and an old mm electronics amp).

Technically though, crackles and pops are imperfections, despite how 'warm' they may sound. They can always be added on afterwards, can't they...

I'm willing to admit that the 44KHz frequency of CDs isn't enough for some people, but I refuse to believe that anyone could notice any difference between an analogue system and one of those sound systems that use 96KHz sampling (for example)

[Kumagoro]

Because of the noise that goes with analogue they would be able to tell the difference.

I cant imagine (not unlike people in the past) what music could sound like in the future.
Could anything radically different ever come about now.

As for techno improvements i like 5.1 sound, classical sounds especially good in 5.1

[unreal]

Me votes in positive for music technology! *Hugs Propellorhead Reason 3 tightly*

[mart_haj86]

I also vote for a positive future in music and also hugs propellorhead reason 3 tightly * but with rewire into cubase *

[BlindMelon7]

I'm not saying I'm against music tech. I use nuendo, reason, arturia minimoog, sx3, native instruments etc. but they only compliment certain types of music.
Incidentally does anyone know if steinberg nuendo 3 is any better than sx3? The only reason i use nuendo more is that sx3 has a ram problem with my computer, it eats literally all of my ram and leaves imperfections in the recordings.