New Ways To Steal Music

MP3s are gradually being replaced by a more sophisticated way of stealing music.

(AP Photo)

It's good news for audiophiles and networking companies, but more bad news for record labels. MP3s are slowly going away, being gradually replaced by a more sophisticated way of stealing music.

If after being away for a while, you return to the Internet locales that are hosts to music piracy--which goes by the euphemism of "file sharing"--you will quickly spot a number of new and unfamiliar kinds of files. These new formats go by names like FLAC and APE. They are "lossless" music formats that don't have to make the acoustic trade-offs associated with MP3s. Their growing popularity is evidence of how networks are getting faster and disk drives are getting bigger.

First, some background. The first track on the Beatles' "White Album," "Back in the U.S.S.R.," is 2:43 minutes long. On the recently re-mastered version of that CD, the music is laid out in 28.1 million bytes, aka 28.1 megabytes. When ripped uncompressed onto a computer, this produces what's known as a ".wav" file.

Back in the early days of the Internet, when 2400 baud dial-up modems roamed the earth, it would take more than an hour and a half to transmit that much information, assuming you could keep the connection going that long.

MP3s, however, were a way of dramatically shrinking music files, so they took up about a tenth as much space and a proportionately shorter download time. Suddenly, it became possible to get songs even by dial-up modems, which is how gained the traction that it did. Thus was born the digital music revolution.

MP3s, however, involved a bit of a devil's bargain, in that the process of making the file smaller involved throwing away musical information. Hence, you'll find many music and audio buffs who consider "lossy" formats like MP3s an abomination.

Lossless file systems, by contrast, preserve all of the music data associated with the original CD. They take up more space than MP3s, of course, but with network speeds and disk drives what they are today, you'd never notice.