Damned MP3-Releases

Written by Guido

The MP3 Situation - Advantages of MP3

When you look on the hompage of a music group, you will see that many, most or even all releases are MP3 files. If you face the list of advantages of this file format, you'll understand the reason:

- The quality of MP3 files is nearly as good as CD quality.

- No sample restrictions apply, because the file size depends on the length of the song. This makes it possible to use big lyrics or to have long 303 sequences in a track. Also there's no need to downsample big samples which would make the file too big.

- After converting the tracked tune into a WAV file, it can be edited and finetuned with, for instance, Cubase software to make it sound more professional.

My (Humble) Opinion - Some thoughts (the truth about MP3)

I don't think that MP3 is the file format of the future. Why? Well, first let's take a look at the filesize, which is important because of the download times:

- 3 minutes of MP3 makes 3 MB.

- The average file size of 3 minutes of tracked music saved as IT or XM is between 500 KB and 1 MB, depending on the samples. Even a song with lyrics isn't bigger than an MP3 file of it (for example, all the songs from the greatFox musicdisk Mate play around 5 minutes, while the size of the XMs is between 2.5 and 5 MB).

Compared with digital audio files like WAVs, MP3s ARE small, but they are about four times bigger than module files on an average, so you can't really call it an advantage.

Second point. Tracking is the way of creating music in the demo/music scene. It's a bit different from creating "normal" music - patterns with more or less channels contain the notes which are written down as codes, not as symbols. It might seem a bit strange for non-scene persons, but it fits the rest of the demoscene: doing things (art) in a "technical" way, like coding demos/intros or pixeling pictures.

The goal of every scene production is of course to be liked by other sceners, but perhaps even more to show new technical tricks and to do the best with the given possibilities. Scene productions have never been commercial, all of them are spread for free.

So in my opinion MP3 doesn't fit into the scene! It hides the technical aspect while giving a professional one and an overkill of quality. For those of you who haven't gotten my point yet, this is my thesis about the consequence of using MP3:

IF WE START RELEASING MUSIC AS MP3 ONLY, THE RELEASE OF THE FIRST 'DEMO' AS AN MPEG VIDEO FILE COULD BE TOMORROW!

This paragraph is called "My Opinion", so if you have a different opinion than me, you should let me know!

The Stereoman Aspect - A few words about a well known tracker's MP3-thoughts

What does Stereoman/Noise say about MP3? He is going to release MP3s from now on. Does this mean he likes MP3s? "Non-stop dissection of my tunes makes me take this decision." Perhaps I misunderstood what he wanted to say, but he seems to like the good old IT format very much and uses the MP3 format only to keep rippers away. (An MP3 a day keeps the ripper away!)

So throw your MP3-Encoder into the recycle bin, please!

- Guido

P.S. Some personal words.

That was it - my first article... (hey, that wasn't an order to take it less serious!), so please excuse my faults. Perhaps you will hear some music _modules_ by me one day, when my trax have reached some kind of quality...

Hello to all those groups out there - you noticed the missing group name after my name? (Don't worry if you didn't 'cause there isn't one.) Yours could be there soon...