Apple/EMI Deal as Standards Play
Interesting business week article about which I am a little conflict. The according debunks many of the iPod and AAC misconceptions that are driving me up a while. I especially like the list of players, other than the iPod, that support AAC. I wish there was a mention of Dolby’s relationship to AAC, since I think that clarifies much confusion about AAC being an Apple only format.
I guess killing WMA in favor of AAC is technical a “standards war”, but the article’s title is more evocative of AAC supplanting MP3, which I don’t see happening. And another, possibly unintended, benefit of Apple’s higher bit rate, AAC offering of EMI songs is that transcoding from AAC to MP3 will typically result in less perceptible quality loss. Although this is not as compelling as the article’s point about direct support for AAC, it is only a small amount of friction to a dedicate use of a player without AAC support buying and using iTunes/EMI tracks.
