We Got Served - Connecting Your Digital World : The State of Media Formats

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:40:32 +0000

What I’m really missing is support of chiptunes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune There are a lot of formats out there but it seems they’re not supported by any of todays players although they’re actually more popular than some people might think. (A lot of games use them and of course musicians as a master format) But you’re totally right. I’m having the fight with all the different media formats since years. Music is a great example. Even IF you have it digitalized in some way (Either APE, FLAC or high quality MP3) you still have the tagging problem. If you don’t tag it it’ll just overwhelm you at some point. But if you tag it you’re most certainly stuck with and locked within a program like MediaMonkey, WMP, iTunes, Winamp Foobar and so on. Until now I haven’t found anything that gets even close to Mediamonkey which is really a powerful tool. But what about the future? Media will most likely fuse in a way that sound, text (lyrics, info), websources, pictures etc. will merge. Streaming is also a growing factor. In the near future a server should definately also be able to stream content from the web to local clients. Formats: - My main format for audio is still MP3 (superior tagging qualities and it’s playable on almost any device), followed by flac and ape. - For videos it’s AVI and MKV. I’m not a big fan of DVD and Blueray – the whole digital rights crap certainly took a toll on my motivation to buy something that I can’t preserve even if it’s basically nothing physical at all. - My pictures are mostly JPG followed by PNG. Software: - I’m using MediaMonkey Gold which is the probably mightiest player out there that can handle a ton of files in a database, can auto-level and monitor folders etc. It also supports all major audio file formats: http://www.mediamonkey.com/ - An open source media center solution that’s definately worth a look is Boxee: http://www.boxee.tv/homepage/ It does webradio, movies and videos, music, social linking and networking if you like and much more in one package. It’s great for media centers that are attached to a server like WHS. - I don’t have any great solution for picture management other then Adobe Bridge CS4 though. Honestly I don’t believe there will be a perfect all in one solution in the near future. However there will be some mediocre ones. I think I’ll still have to tinker around for a bit longer but eventually the new touch interface generation of computers will inspire software companies to pull off something that just works and bridges all the assets. Social networking is a danger and opportunity though. An example is last.fm. I personally don’t use it and don’t want to use it but I know it and other projects like it will be part of most “all in one” solutions in the future.

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We Got Served - Connecting Your Digital World : The State of Media Formats