Friday, January 28, 2005

A Microsoft employee's take on WMA/MP3

Chris Anderson of Microsoft bought his wife an iPod. He writes:

I picked it up two days ago, and since have been in process of converting our 3000+ songs from WMA to MP3. I decided that I wasn't going to ever again rip to a proprietary format. I want my music where I want it, not where Microsoft or Apple dictates.

That cracks me up...a Microsoftie publicly renouncing WMA. Someone should remind him that MP3 is a proprietary format. It's just "de facto" and thus it has broad support.

2 comments:

Travis said...

[Imported comment* originally authored by Renice Wernette.] It must be a common misperception -- I was just reading UbuWeb's FAQs:
I only have RealPlayer. How come you mostly have MP3s?
MP3s are open source. RealMedia is proprietary. We'll always choose open source over proprietary. In the beginning, we streamed RealMedia because that's all there was. The few Real files on site are leftover from those days. Today, we won't touch anything having to do with RealMedia if we can help it.
[http://www.ubu.com/resources/faq.html]

Travis said...

[Imported comment* originally authored by Travis.] Here's a pretty good (albeit old) article about MP3 patents and other formats, including the truly open Ogg. [http://www.forbes.com/2000/09/18/dvorak_index.html]