I have a portable media player than can play WMA or MP3 that I bought recently just because the PlaysForSure (Play For Now) certified players (fancy term for supports DRM’d WMA) are being sold dirt cheap.
If you look at Wikipedia’s article on PlaysForSure, you can hardly keep yourself from busting out in uncontrollable laughter. Stores using PlaysForSure goes something like “closed, closed, closed, bankrupt, switched to MP3″ and a handful of stores that still distribute WMA files. It’s not because the format is superior to MP3, but because they can use Windows Media DRM to enforce file expirations, restrictions on CD burning, restrictions about what portable software you can us it on, etc.
Pretty much every music store that managed to trick anyone into buying DRM’d WMA files has sent out letters telling users “Oh by the way, we’re shutting the licensing servers down, the next time you go to reinstall or upgrade Windows, none of your music will work anymore. Be sure to repurchase everything in our new MP3 store”.
iTunes/iPod users may laugh now, but unless they repurchase all their music in non-DRM format, then their purchased DRM’d iTunes tracks are not long for this Earth either. I highly doubt that Apple will want to support that FairPlay (FoulPlay) scheme forever.
Having played around with Windows 7, I see that Windows Media Player 12 still defaults to the old WMA “Standard”, even though the superior WMA “Pro” has been out for some time, mainly because most devices don’t even support it, and most never will. Something tells me that there’s a lot of clueless Windows users out there using Windows Media Player to rip all their CDs who are really going to wish they hadn’t 4-5 years from now when nothing plays WMAs anymore and they’ve amassed several thousand of them.
WMA as a media format is dead. It may find a niche as the official codec of Silverlight (If Silverlight 3 can get the few sites that briefly used Silverlight then ran screaming back to Flash to come back). Other than that, Microsoft has effectively preserved it in their fruit cellar so you can go down and talk to it from time to time. Even noted Microsoft FUD spreader Paul Thurrott has washed his hands of Windows Media, and when he won’t touch a proprietary lock-in format that Microsoft has tried to spread, you know you can stick a fork in it. Not that he hadn’t cheered WMA on and even spread a few lies about Apple rushing to support it on the iPod several years prior, and not that he’ll ever stop insisting that WMA is somehow superior even though it still runs into a ton of problem samples that Lame MP3 handles just dandy.
Is there something I’m not seeing here? Does anyone still offer WMA files (DRM or no DRM) for sale? Does Microsoft have any future plans for it, or is it just a vestigial organ forever attached to Windows?
I’ve personally always used the LAME MP3 encoder (usually the latest CVS source build) and the few times I did whack Windows Media Encoder with my pointy stick, I have to say I’ve been fairly unimpressed. Microsoft’s WMA, and MP3’s alleged successor MPEG-4 AAC seem to be what you get when big media companies design a music format DRM system/patent portfolio for their legal department to play with, and Lame MP3 and Ogg Vorbis appear to be what you get when music fans strive to make good encoders for users.
For once I’ll have to re-iterate Paul Thurrott (Don’t get used to it), and say that if you back WMA or AAC, you’re flipping crazy and setting yourself up for a world of hurt down the road.
MP3 could go on for years and years, and it’s not because it’s the best codec out there, it’s because it gets the job done and is the only codec that gives you any reasonable expectation of cross platform and device support. Microsoft and Apple killed their “MP3 killers” when they decided to be greedy cocks and try to deviate from ISO standards (Microsoft) or hijack and pervert them into being proprietary (Apple).
Donald Rumsfeld wants answers too!
