The Brunch Table

Can’t wait ’til the day when I ride around in rocket cars
Wear short-sleeve shirts
And all I eat is chocolate bars
–Buck 65, Man Overboard (part 3)

After trying out the Apple Music store yesterday, I was almost convinced that I didn’t mind the fact that the purchased tracks were crippled by “rights management” encoding. I always find myself going back to the bit-rot question, though. When it’s 2030, and I’m sitting in my bubble-skyscraper apartment or mad max desert car or cyborg body, will I still be able to listen to the music that I’m buying today? Or more generally, which digital file formats are most likely to remain completely legible over the long term? My guess is that the less proprietary and the more widespread the code to understand a file format is, the better future-proofed it will be. If I wanted to get a hard number, I’d go to freshmeat and shareware.com and count how many programs understood a particular format. By this metric, HTML is clearly one of the most future-proofed formats to date. (This brings up an interesting nuance–the same HTML file can be rendered very differently by different programs, but the particulars of popular renderers are very well documented, and chances are you’ll always be able to understand what the file says, if nothing else.) A few other formats, in order of increasing bit-rot potential, are standard “red book” CD-Audio, MP3 (even though the format has to be licensed right now, there are reams of MP3-reading code out there), PDF, (and here we cross a divide where third-party programs can’t reliably open these formats) MS Word, Photoshop, and Apple “protected” AAC.

So, if I end up buying any more music from Apple, you can be sure that I’ll download, burn, rip, so that if my computer explodes or Apple goes out of business or I decide to switch to some new operating system that has yet to be invented, I’ll have a better chance of being able to continue listening to the music that I paid for.