This may not be the newest news around, but… For those who haven’t noticed, Emperor Norton Records have started putting some new albums, in their entirety, up for download as MP4 audio wrapped up in Quicktime.
OK, so it’s not Ogg Vorbis, but it’s damned easy to convert to MP3 — at least on a Mac — and the audio quality is rather good considering the file sizes.
They aren’t in a straightforward “click here to download this” format. Rather, you have to poke at the page source to get the URL of the Quicktime wrapper file, grab that, then extract the URLs for each track. But the wrapper is XML, so this is not particularly difficult.
They also state quite clearly that they don’t mind people downloading these files and hanging on to them.
So far they have Cato Salsa Experience’s A Good Tip For A Good Time, Ladytron’s Light & Magic, and Mount Sims’ Ultra Sex online in this format. The Ladytron album is pretty good, the CSX one is kind of over-rated in my humble opinion.
So what open-source codecs are there for this stuff, i.e. for MPEG-4? I’m running FreeBSD here …
None. MPEG-4 is heavily patent-encumbered, if anything worse than MP3 in that respect. Heck, the stuffing about with licensing is what delayed the release of QuickTime 6 for months…
Wish we could stop playing these stupid games, but so long as companies (labels, vendors like Apple, whoever) insist on playing them we’re stuck.
Still, better that the content be released in a readily-convertible format like MPEG-4 than something that meets the RIAA’s requirements.