[Industrial One]

What do you guys think? Will there be a successor to the current state-
of-the-art AAC codec, or do people not give a damn about compression
no more since FLACs and high-bitrate MP3s nowadays download in less
than a minute even in ****ty 3rd world countries? On the other hand,
5.1 audio consumes a lot of space, but that's why we got AAC with all
its cool extensions that retains the same quality at the same bitrates
that MP3 requires for stereo files. And bandwidth keeps getting better
and better at a slow but steady pace, so will there be any demand for
transparency at bitrates lower than 128 kbps? AAC was built 'cuz
mobile audio players had space limited to like 32 megs back then, so
I'm guessing there would need to be a better justification for effort
on a new format than "well because nowadays the best comp can store up
to 400,000 songs, and I wanna store 400,001." There are justifications
for new VIDEO formats for obvious reasons.

But if there was to be a new format, what would it be? MP5 would
probably be the most suitable name, though it's possible that homofags
from ISO might throw in some bull**** like "SAAC" (Super advanced
audio coding) as they did with AAC when it should've been called MP4
and ONLY MP4. Anyway, would it just be an extension like MP4 was from
MP3 with only tweaks to the same general technique? I'm thinking no,
'cuz AAC is really struggling to make its advantage over MP3 DEAD
OBVIOUS instead of "subjective" with add-ons like SBR and Parametric
Stereo. It looks to me the frourier and MDCT techniques have been
exhausted by now and won't get better, so MP5 will likely need a
completely redefined method that will beat the **** out of every
existing format. The thing that comes to my mind is some kind of
smart, procedural coding that looks at high-level elements of the
audio (being able to seperate different instrument and voice staffs,
summarize their characteristics and replace the audio with side
information about how they flow.) Say you got a recorded 3 hour speech
by Obama, the codec stores information about the traits of his voice
in the header, and converts the actual words into text. Upon playback,
the decoder converts the text into audio with voice characteristics as
specified in the header. At the lowest bitrates, his speech would have
his voice, but sound really robotic and lack intonation, e.g. if he
laughs, he will laugh the same way every time (negating the length)
because it's stored in the file as "hahahaha" and not enough info in
the header to convey the original tone since we're using a low
bitrate. Way more permissible loss than the audio sounding like a
rhino shat in the mic like MP3 sounds at 32 kbps. And with music, same
thing, any loss will not be bit-by-bit low-level loss like current
encoders but difference on the exact tone of the notes, the intensity
of the cymbals and drums, etc. much like a sequenced MIDI version of a
song.

I wonder what the new default bitrate would be? I predict 16 kbps to
be advertized as comparable quality to 128 kbps MP3 (MP3 will never
die), and 32-64 being the new transparency point in audio. Finally HQ
streaming be possible on dial-up, or am I just tripping balls?

What about you mofos? What do y'all think?