With the release of DRM free music on iTunes there is now talk of Apple winning a war for a new defacto music encoding format. The talk is of AAC taking over. There is talk of other online music stores switching from WMA to AAC. Personally, I don't see why this would happen.
The winning will probably be good old MP3.
One reason that WMA is used is that it's the part of the Microsoft eco-system that implements DRM on music files. With out a need for DRM there is no need for WMA as MP3 will do fine but there's still the pull of the Microsoft eco-system.
However, in the player market it's an Apple eco-system which does not support WMA. iPods support lots of formats including the ever present MP3; but they, like iTunes don't support AAC.
Thie leaves MP3 as the common format. A Microsoft based store can sell MP3s which can be downloaded imported into iTunes and downloaded onto an iPod.
If the Microsoft world goes DRM free with MP3 it could leave AAC as the minority format only being sold on iTunes.
The winning will probably be good old MP3.
One reason that WMA is used is that it's the part of the Microsoft eco-system that implements DRM on music files. With out a need for DRM there is no need for WMA as MP3 will do fine but there's still the pull of the Microsoft eco-system.
However, in the player market it's an Apple eco-system which does not support WMA. iPods support lots of formats including the ever present MP3; but they, like iTunes don't support AAC.
Thie leaves MP3 as the common format. A Microsoft based store can sell MP3s which can be downloaded imported into iTunes and downloaded onto an iPod.
If the Microsoft world goes DRM free with MP3 it could leave AAC as the minority format only being sold on iTunes.
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