According to this story, lots and lots of companies that license MP3 technology -- including Apple and Sony -- could end up having, shall we say, interesting times ahead
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I believe that MP4 is iTunes (or at least Apple) proprietary, and more importantly, is DRM'ed to the hilt. Sorry, but that is a format (along with the associated m4p and m4a formats) to be avoided unless you like being able to use that file in iTunes only. Or am I thinking of m4p/m4a here, and not mp4 itself?
Thank you for the explaination. I had the feeling there was a piece in that I had wrong. So m4a is fine but m4p should be avoided since it only works on the PC you initially downloaded the file on. Got it now.
MP4/AAC is _not_ proprietary and is _not_ inherently DRM'd, the DRM format Apple puts on iTunes songs _is_ proprietary, and from what I've heard from people in the music biz who deal with the labels on a regular basis, it's the labels that demanded the DRM, not Apple, something that was confirmed recently with Jobs open letter.
Like so many others have said: .wav, for recording (not that I do tonnes of that these days), and mp3 for listening, just for the convenience factor. I'm not that spectacularly picky about quality, honestly--obviously I don't want a lot of glitches or static and I want to be able to hear it, but most of what I do with digital music is have my iPod on while waiting for the bus/falling asleep/walking around/working out/driving. It's just on in the background, and all I really want is to be able to get music into the program I want them in, put them on my iPod, and go along my way.
As for DRM, I never buy CDs anymore, or iTunes either, because I refuse to support treating customers like criminals and potentially ruining my computer. Oh well.
I'm embarrassingly unsophisticated about computer audio for someone who spends so much time using computers and who is fairly seriously interested in music. I download a small amount of music in .MP3 format because it Just Works; if it's in some other format that my computer doesn't grok, I ignore it
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I usually use Audacity's internal format for recording, and greatly prefer Ogg Vorbis for use on the web and for ripped CDs on my internal server. WAV works as a universal exchange format, e.g. for burning or mastering CDs. I prefer ogg because you get about twice the quality of mp3 for the same number of bytes, and the fact that I can make them using nothing but free software.
My usual practice is to export from Audacity in WAV format and convert that automagically to Ogg for uploading; that gives me a lot more control over text tags.
As of about a month ago I also started uploading mp3 files because I continually get complaints from people who can't handle oggs. Eventually I hope that will change.
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As for DRM, I never buy CDs anymore, or iTunes either, because I refuse to support treating customers like criminals and potentially ruining my computer. Oh well.
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My usual practice is to export from Audacity in WAV format and convert that automagically to Ogg for uploading; that gives me a lot more control over text tags.
As of about a month ago I also started uploading mp3 files because I continually get complaints from people who can't handle oggs. Eventually I hope that will change.
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