Jun 25
More people that piss me off
In this latest installment of “Free floating hostility,” I would like to address an issue that really pisses me off in the extreme: people that insist that MP3 is a highly inferior format, then run off to something that has all of the problems that MP3 has (with a little better sound quality.)
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, the first question one used to ask when choosing a piece of software to do a job was “How well does it accomplish my task?” Now, in this wonderful climate of rabid vigilante intellectual-property defenders like the RIAA, the first question you need to as is “What is this software’s pedigree?” That is, not only what software is the author using as a base for the application (if any) but where does the author intend to go with the application. This is why the GPL is important, because it ensures that at the very least, the version of a piece of software you are using is always going to be freely available.
Using this principle, I would like to aim and fire squarely at my new favorite group of computer fucking morons: MPC users.
Several months ago when I first looked into MPC, it said quite plainly on the author’s website that the encoder wasn’t and wouldn’t be open sourced. I played with it briefly but because I didn’t want to hop right back on a bandwagon as dangerous (from a copyright standpoint) as mp3, I dropped it and went back to LAME (if you’re going to be illegal, standardize.)
Now, after going back and poking around, briefly, it looks as though encoder source on the mpc front is incredibly confusing. One file on the author’s website said it was “pgp encrypted for some users”, so I guess that one’s not freely available. The source file that I was able to download and expand had no license included, so I don’t know what in the hell license the author subscribes to, but it did advise in the readme that the ‘trademark’ Musepack was not to be used in conjunction with the source. Really comforting there.
On the other hand, we have Ogg Vorbis. Not my favorite format for a few technical reasons, but a very competent format by and of itself, with sound quality that (like MPC) is considerably better than mp3. It’s also open source (always has been, was developed as an open source project & licensed under the GPL), is available on nearly every platform known to man and can cook up some damn good files. Source, format specifications, and just about everything else you ever wanted is 100% freely available to anybody.
So which fucking format gets all the attention and love? GUESS.
Humanity is fucking worthless, we never ever ever ever ever learn from our mistakes. Let’s all go blindly running from the clutches of Fraunhofer, right into the arms of another copyright-holding, moneygrubbing asshole consortium. Right, there’s a good fucking idea. In short, I don’t give a flying flaming fuck how good it sounds if the format is non-free, and neither should you. Free is good, especially when it comes to file formats. Don’t let anybody own your data except you.