What will become of the friendly MP3?

[tkdragon]

It seems that the future of digital music encoding is with AAC. The smaller file size and higher quality encoding leaves our old friend MP3 in the dust. However, the term MP3 has entered our vocabulary as a society and seems to have picked up a definition as "any digital music file" (atleast, to the non-techy people).

If AAC takes over MP3 encoding (which seems likely, even though the Windows world hasn't joined the party yet), will people continue to call digital music MP3s? Or maybe AACs or M4As (file extention of AAC files). Although, those two don't seem to have that snappy ring like MP3 does.

I think that perhaps the two will coexist for a few years, then gradually as more and more people use AAC, that term (whichever will be associated with it) will become dominate.

What do you guys think?

[Decado]

jepp!
or maybe not.
Not sure.
hmmm.
The most likely is that it will just be "music", since there probably will be, if not allready, more music that's in an encoded format (like mp3 and aac) than the old cd-stuff. It wont be any more mp3-players. just portable music-players etc. well that is what i think.

[bjurusik]

Nah ... in a few years hard drives will be measured in TBs, not GBs ... internet connections will be 5 MB/s and then there will be no need for compression at all! Ah it's fun to dream.

[JetwingX]

well i the MP3 will fade out like a lot of technology does i mean do you see 8-tracks of the latest songs anymore? or even cassettes (still around but not by much)?
and i also think that that DVD music stuff is going to take over CD's

[phatcactus]

Apple's the only one I've heard of who's using AAC, so I'm not sure the format is really going anywhere fast.

If newer formats always took over old formats' places, the web would use PNG, and GIF would be history.