[linux-audio-user] That whole mp3 vs. ogg vs. wma vs. yomamma thing

The biggest internet music demographic, be it legal or not, is adolescent kids in suburbia. As an adolescent kid in suburbia with 3 adolescent siblings, I can tell you with confidence from experience in my house and with friends that .mp3 is the king of internet music formats by at least an order of magnitude. People in my realm get internet music from three types of locations, in descending order of frequency: 1) P2P (mainly KaZaA) 2) mp3.com et al 3) Ripped CDs In all cases, mp3 is the lingua franca, the de facto standard. Formats such as wma and ra are considered laughable, they sound so much worse until the file size reaches gargantuan proportions. The only people using such formats are 'Tools of the Man', so to speak, and as you can see from the above list, none of the real music listeners give two craps about them. Posting in ogg isn't that big a deal, winamp can play them and I'm pretty sure the internal player in KaZaA can also. These kids aren't as hesitant as most grownups either, if you tell them that "you need to download and run X to use superior format Y" they'll do it. The problem, as I see it, is distribution. To take advantage of the big daddy, P2P, people gotta know who you are and want your stuff in advance. You can try using misleading filenames or info tags so that your stuff gets accidentaly downloaded, but I personally just delete stuff like that, so I wouldn't recommed it. You have a better chance of getting heard by option 2, the music websites, if someone is doing genre browsing, but then you're going to have to use mp3. As for CD ripping... well, if that even becomes an option then we've already won IMHO. In my perfect world, everyone would use ogg or flac or some other equally libre format. In order to help realize that goal, we need to gain musical clout so that the kids look up to us, and then choose to distribute solely in formats that we endorse. We gotta have that clout first, however, and we aren't gonna get that without compromising. A good solution, in my pea brain, is to setup an account with something like mp3.com and post a few _good_ songs (the songs have to be _good_ or else we're dead in the water). If you get the kid's attention, they'll check out your personal artist page, from which you can link to your homepage where they can get "even more and newer" music in the "vastly superior and unrestrained" ogg format. The songwriting is going to be the biggest factor, IMHO. Without kickin' tunes, nothing else matters. Period. Get good songs, get them distributed, get popularity, get power, establish ogg as the new lingua franca for the hip and rebellious music community. Peace, =Pete -- You can only run configure at the top level of the Ardour source tree. You don't want to know why this is true. Don't try to work around it.