"Soon audiophiles may be listening to their music in surround sound..." Er, I don't think so. Audiophiles don't listen to audio encoded in two channel MP3 because it is not considered an "audiophile" format. Yes, it is good for squeezing a lot of music into a small space but it is, at the end of the day, a lossy format. Audiophiles are looking at DVD-Audio and SACD (both of which use lossless compression) as the formats for audiophiles.

Stereo is just fine for me, left and right is plenty to keep up with. Maybe I dont understand this correctly, but I'd hate to have 3 or more speakers just to hear music correctly (assuming different sounds will go to different speakers). This surround sound would also to be compatible with normal stereo format as well (which i'm sure it will be) otherwise I have no clue how surround sound would be through headphones.

On a properly set up system, multichannel music can be great, and much closer to what you would experience at a live event. It can also work for headphones -- there are technologies like Dolby Headphone that can approximate a multichannel experience through headphones.

Mark Waldrep of AIX is a guy who has really mastered the techniques of mutichannel recording and production.

I think too many people are commenting on the quality of the songs themselves and not the quality mp3s proposes. The demo songs are crummy garage band songs, with terrible acoustics and ranges. However hearing the music fade from ear to ear is awesome in itself. I love surround audio (see the d3 plugin for winamp), and I hope it soon becomes the standard.

(in the US and some other countries) Linux can't legally play or record mp3 because of Fraunhofer. It is also partly their fault that it can't legally play DVDs, or even burn YOUR OWN movies onto DVD. They are an enemy of the public and should be treated appropriately.

i wasn't aware it was a crime to make money of your own inventions/patents. fraunhoffer was there when it all began ... not like some other companies who swoop in and patent existing technologies.

I'm under the impression that SOFTWARE PATENT refers to an idea/function of software, not the specific code used. If this is the case, Software Patents are terrible. Websites, for example, are software. Take google or yahoo or excite... If one of them were able to patent their abstract software IDEA of providing a search engine, e-mail, and other services, we'd be in a world of hurt. Can you imagine using only one search engine, one place to buy things online, one auction site to go to.

Lets say that google puts a patent on the concept of a search enginge, sure you may still have altavista and excite, but they'd have to pay google, although the coding of their sites differ. I really dont think that is fair at all.

see http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/

According to this, my impression (stated above) is correct.
see http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

excuse me and my incorrent grammer and sentence structure but the smaller the mp3 the better... advances such as this will continue to improve the quality of music while reducing the file size (great) easier on your bandwidth and easier to deal with.. not only that but mp3's are used in games and to encode sound from other sources which ... might be in a surround format

Well since they cooperate with thomson it is possible that DRM will also be implemented.
thomson works also with microsoft and time warner in the area of digital rights management.
read more here:
http://www.betanews.com/...oft_DRM_Push/1101145987

This idea is a waste of time. It's not true 5.1 anyway, since the CD's are recorded in stereo, and almost every mp3 player already has a 5.1 decoder built into it. Who's going to waste re-encoding all their stuff and lose quality if they go from MP3->5.1 MP3 (compressing an already compressed format)?

CD music isnt the only thing MP3 is used for. The audio in movies you download and view on the net is often encoded with mp3.

It also doesn't mean you need to reencode all your old mp3s -- thats why they said it's backwards compatible with other versions of mp3. you can leave your old mp3s alone, and start encoding new ones with the better and newer format.

games also use mp3 at times. 5.1 in games is a good thing :)

Not only do we not need 5.1 but we also don't need smaller sized mp3s due to cheap hds with plenty of space. Also, if it's not open source, we don't care :). That's why microsoft's and apple's formats are meaningless as well. the original mp3 format started underground and went mainstream. . . so they won't be going anywhere. .

We shouldn't stay in the past for all this "backwards compatible hype".
"If people were serious about it I'd be able to run Windows XP on my Commodore 64! Why? Because I'm too cheap to buy a new computer."
Ripping MP3 to MP3 5.1 would seem a waste of time if the MP3s were infact just stereo and "not" being mixed. Perhaps it's time that 5.1 became the new Audio standard. We've had Stereo for so long that it's just getting boring. Music artists will just have to lift their game. Games and Movies are already there. (FYI: I'm refering to non-cheap Music artists)

You would never be able to use Windows on a Commodore because they're two different companies. It is possible to run some XT software on an XP machine though.

I think it may be time that 5.1 became the standard, but I can also see some value in backward compatability for the time being, otherwise all of one's MP3 playing equipment would be obsolete.

MP3 is proprietry

Not to mention that in my opinion mp3 really degrades the distinctiveness in the base range. However i don't use ogg even though it is free (as in freedom) because currently it does not support streaming across a network while itunes proprietary aac does. Just because it's proprietary does not mean that it is inherently evil.

I love open source and use it where corporate products make no sense to pay for such as firefox,thunderbird,filezilla, and the various other gpl projects out there the basic point is that proprietary is not bad per say.

whatchatalkin'bout Willis? err ... Wormeyman

ogg has always supported streaming
http://www.vorbis.com/faq.psp#stream

Cool but does it support p2p streaming? Like itunes does across a network?

MP3 5.1 (I suspect may become .mp3s) should be allowed to be transferred via any digital medium so long as no copyright laws are being breached.
Since this article is about 5.1 surround sound: does OGG offer similar supports? If it doesn't, then why bring up "OGG vs MP3" at all?
I wouldn't quote me but: MP3 is by far supported across different platforms more so than OGG.

nobody ever talks about which sounds better to THEMSELVES.
lets face it the only thing important in any format like this is its ability to provide a listening experience at a lower cost.

I DJ a club using PCDJ and play MP3 files. I can assure you that no one gives a crap if they're surround sound, especially when they're all drunk. They probably wouldn't care if all I played were 96 KBPS files from 12:00 onward lol.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea at all. My computer can output 7.1 surroundsound. However my mixer can only output two channels and the sound system I have in my room is a B-52 Matrix 1000 PA system.

Also I like open source wherever I can find it.

Mp3 Surround sounds terrible..

Normal Stereo mp3s played through my Audigy 2 ZS out to my creative 7.1 speakers sounds better, MUCH better.

well all i know is with a dolby pro logic 2 decoder i listen to all my music (or anything else encoded in stereo) in 5.1 surround already, and have been for a quite a while.

Ogg Vorbis is a general purpose perceptual audio CODEC intended to allow maximum encoder flexibility, thus allowing it to scale competitively over an exceptionally wide range of bitrates. At the high quality/bitrate end of the scale (CD or DAT rate stereo, 16/24 bits), it is in the same league as MPEG-2 and MPC. Similarly, the 1.0 encoder can encode high-quality CD and DAT rate stereo at below 48kpbs without resampling to a lower rate. Vorbis is also intended for lower and higher sample rates (from 8kHz telephony to 192kHz digital masters) and a range of channel representations (monaural, polyphonic, stereo, quadraphonic, 5.1, ambisonic, or up to 255 discrete channels). Ogg Vorbis is supported by: Foobar2000 - any version, Winamp since 2.79 or 2.80 STANDARD, XMMS since I don`t know when ;) Lastest Vorbis supports ~32kbps 44.1KHz Stereo. Lastest version is: Vorbis 1.1 aoTuV beta 3

OGG also has supported this for a while anyway. MP3 has hacked the codec up to add this. And that's exactly what this is... a hack