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1.1 History of the record methods of music
Since music has been sold to consumers as some kind of commodity, its form of recording has undergone the following variation:

A. Micro-groove recorder：
Date for this??
Maybe the micro-groove recorder is the first generation of music commodity. This kind of thing with its peculiarities such as accidented circlular sound tracks on a disk and sensitive tone arm bring us a into new age: people can purchase and hold their favorite songs, and can listen to them whenever they want to. Before this, it was only a dream unless there was a local performance.

As the pioneering music commodity, the micro-groove recorder has a huge bulk but its content is rather small. A single side micro-groove recorder contains approximately 20 minutes of music, wanna listen to another side? Turn the disk by yourself!

The player was also a big thing that could not be sneezed at. Either the disk or the player was rather expensive in those days, so they have never become not very popular.

Depending on the technology of the time, micro-groove recorder was hard to be copied. (Imitated? Transferred?)

The timbre and wear of the micro-groove recorder is greatly dependent on the material that was used to make it. When the recording (?) has been used for a long time, the recorder maybe distortion if it was not a very good make, of course the music deviates widely from the original. Abrasion is a big disadvantage of the micro-groove recorder due to the direct contact of disk and the tone arm when it plays.

Nowadays, people who feel nostalgic or who work as scene/radio DJ still love micro-groove recorders very much. Especially for some outstanding ‘disk riders’, it is the most charming moment of micro-groove recorder performance when these guys begin ‘skating on the disk.

B. Magnetic tape：
Cassette tape is the representative product of the second generation. These little tapes are made up of a magnetic medium or metal chrome that has the memory capable of bringing us a real popularization of music as a commodity.

Compared with the micro-groove recorder, tape has clear advantages: a smaller shape, ease of carrying; more content (a standard cassette tape contains approximate one hour of music program). At the price, a cassette tape is cheaper than micro-groove recordings, the production cost keeps doing down due to the worldwide popularization, this keeps cut the unit price of tapes and excites the growing of market more.

The problem of copyright has emerged since this time due to the capability in writing and re-recording of tapes. There are tape players with recording ability everywhere in the market, some that even have special double or multiple seats, and play-record machines that have excellent power in recording, blank tapes are also on sale.

Fortunately, copyright was not a very serious problem during the age of tape. Maybe this lack of piracy could be the result of few notices of copyright, but another reason is that the quality of copying depends on the machine used to copy. Normally the machines owned by individual are not good enough.

Cassette tapes have the potential problem of wear as well. A good tape will fray severely after a long period of playing, sometimes it becomes real rubbish due to being affected with damp. It also can be extremely damaging to the tape if it has the misfortune of twisting in the machine.

C. Laser disk：CD/MD
This kinds of products using laser beams to ‘carve’ music numeral data on the disk had been fully advertised before they were pushed to the public. But the mythology of 'impossible to damage’ was broken very soon with the nicks on the surface of disks: nobody can be sure where the damn nicks come from. People began keeping and using the disks very carefully following the direction from newspaper and magazines, and still they did not succeed in stopping the boring nicks and dirty. Maybe it’s partly because of frequently changing the disks, sometimes people forget the directions, put the disks anywhere they just feeling convenience.

To reduce the time for changing disks and increase the continuous playing time, manufacturers have launched multi-seats CD players onto the market such as 3, 6, 8, 10 even 12-disk seats system.

CDs contain more music programs than cassette tape. Due to the numeric technology it adopted, people have more freedom when playing goes on: such as the ability to find a favorite song immediately, or free playing on any looping method. In addition, people can even edit the list of music programs on some well designed systems.

CD players using non-touch laser beam heads to read the dates, so this process could not damage or fray the CDs when it is working. But just as the points we mentioned earlier, the harm from other ways are deadly to CDs as well, nobody can stand the noise that happens when the player reading the nicks on the CD.

Maybe because of the characteristic that a CD can remain distortion-free when it has been copied in some illegal factory (numeral format), or possibly just because the desirability of protecting copyrights is very strongly argued, the problem of infracting copyright is very serious at this time. We can find piratical CDs everywhere and these pirate copies result in angry complaints from the owners of copyrights worldwide.

*Music COMS chip（non-mainstream product）：
There is a little thing worth noticing, which should be the small music COMS chip. People use these chips when making birthday/new-year cards or some other sets to increase their interest. Of course, these chips that are based on read-only memory technology have very small content and are not aimed at enjoying music, so this technology may have not much effect on the mainstream music products.

D. Full digital memory（computer compatible record memory）：
The most revolutionary development came from computer technology. It is MP3 format that is the most representative digital format. It adopts advantage arithmetic, compresses the space needed to store the music programs greatly. For instance, a piece of CD can contain approx. 16 normal songs and the same disk can contain 150 songs if using MP3 format.

It’s not the main point here to show how many songs a single piece of disk can contain. Storage method is the main innovation of MP3, because the MP3 format adopts the computer competitive formats to store music. Since then, all the music can be stored/copied/transferred/ just like other computer data, all the traditional limits applying to music have disappeared. All the computer technology can be directly used on the music.

Nowadays we can expediently store music that may be up to several hours length into just a square as large as a thumb and a 1~2 mm thickness memory stick. We can download music from the Internet sitting at home instead of stepping out to shop and purchase CDs or cassette tapes. We can even send favorite songs to friends via e-mail…

The current size of music that stored in MP3 format is approximately 1MB per minute. With the high speed increasing of content of computer memory units, a current cassette tape-sized hard disk can contain 20GB or more. That means a hard disk can contain 20,000 minutes of music. Here a normal song runs 4 minutes, so a hard disk can contain 5,000 songs, more than the number that a person could ever have heard! That is to say, we don't need to hang onto a lot of CDs and tapes anymore.

The prices of computer memory units are undergoing steep decreases and this trend continues. For example, the price of RAM was about US$ 40 per MB in year 1995. Today it has fallen down 200 times to approx. US$ 0.2 per MB in the year 2001. And the similar price cuts have happened to the hard disk: in the year 1995 you could spend US$ 100 to buy only a 500MB sized one, but under the same price you can buy a 20GB one, thus the price has fallen 40 times down.

With absolutely covered, the hard disk get rid of worrying about fraying and dirty. Meanwhile the quality of hard disks is under the guarantee from the manufactories for a long time. Even unfortunately it happens to be damaged, it gonna has nothing to do with the authority of access music due to the ‘purchase record’ which will be shown next chapter.

The problem of protecting copyright is gonna much serious than ever before, because of the digital music has excellent characteristics of copying/transferring and it is actually no a bit different between the copy and the original during the process.

About the timbre, we recognize the there is a little deficiency from MP3 to CD, but the current disparity could be distinguished only by experts, for the normal public, nobody could do it, thus the deficiency is acceptable. However, the step of developing digital music has not stopped at MP3. With the developing of technology, the arithmetic must be generated or a new format would burn (we do not care what name it will have, maybe MP4 or MP5, or a name only God knows), till the there is no deficiency or until even the experts or machines could not distinguish one.

Here the case is similar to that of the field of photography. The computer graphs showing pictures with dot array (lattice) were never as good as the film graphs before. But with the development of computer science & technology, the resolving power of the lattice increasing, the colors every dot can shown in are much more varied than in nature. However these kinds of files are generally very big. For instance, a full-color A3 sized photograph cost 20~50MB,if you store it as the format as TIF or TGA. We are very lucky because our engineers have invented a format named JPG, we can use only 1MB memory space to store the file that we just talk about. Of course there is something that has been missed during the process of compressing, but the JPG format just lost the part that is unreadable by the unaided eye, and human beings can not distinguish the difference between the graphs that come from a TGA file and a JPG file. It is stored by using the same JPG format that the most printed/published photograph today use and the digital cameras are using JPG format as well. The MP3 format is taking the same place in the music field as the JPG format does in the graphic field.

1.1 Comparing the different recording methods
The following compares the four generation of music recorders：

Memory Units Characteristics
Sort	Content	Bulk	Needs extra protect	General playing needs number	Nature fray or dirty	Be affected with damp	Fee	Restore music
Micro-groove	Approx. 40 mines	Big	Much	A lots	Yes	Yes	Every	Re-buy
Tape	Approx. 60 mines	Small	Little	A lots	Yes	Yes	Every	Re-buy
CD/MD	Approx. 75 mines	Small	Much	A lots	Yes	Maybe	Every	Re-buy
MP3	More than even needed	Small	Little	Single	No	No	One time	Free
	Up to several hours	Very small	Little	Few	No	No	One time	Free

Figure 1-1

Playing capability
Sort	Change medium	Locate aiming song	Free playing	Control interface	Timbre	Playing abrasion
Micro-groove	Very usually	Hard	No	Weak	Good	Yes
Tape	Usually	Could	No	Normal	Good	Yes
CD/MD	Depend on the seats of player	Easy	Partly	Good	Good	No
MP3	Never	Easy	Absolutely	Very good	Good	No
	Yes	Easy	Absolutely	Very good	Good	No

Figure 1-2

Copying capability and copyright problem
Sort	Factory Copying		Individual Copying		Internet Copying		Pirate
	Possibility	Distortion	Possibility	Distortion	Possibility	Distortion	Possibility	Fact
Micro-groove	Yes	Yes	No	——	——	——	Little	Little
Tape	Yes	Yes	Large	Yes	——	——	Yes	Yes
CD/MD	Large	No	Little	Little	——	——	Large	Serious
MP3	——	——	Very large	No	Very Large	No	Very large	Very Serious

Figure 1-3

The following figures point out the characteristics of current main memory units and which way they gonna be use:

		Hard disk	Mini hard disk	Laser disk	Memory stick	Floppy disk
Unit price		High	Very high	Low	High	Low
Normal life		Long	Long	Long（careful protected）	Long	Short
Bulk		Big	Small	Small	Very small	Small
Content		Very large	Very large	Large	Large	Small
Number needed		Single	Single	A lots	Few	A lots
Reading speed		Fast	Fast	Fast	Very fast	Slow
Writing speed		Fast	Fast	Slow	Very fast	Slow
Apply
	The sign“*”shows the possibility
	Main memory unit on vehicles	****	**
	Main memory unit on local system	****	*
	Main memory unit on walkman		*	*	***
	Transferring carrier			**	****	*
Backup unit for long term	***	*	****

Figure 1-4

1.1 The trend of variation of music storing forms
It can be seen from the figures above that the storing format for musical commodities goes the following ways:



l The bulk of storing units are becoming smaller and smaller, and their content are going larger and larger, easy to be carried. Maybe sometimes in the future, we don't need to carry any memory units anymore due to the development of wild bandwidth wireless technology.



l Because the music programs can be very easily copied and spread and stored, even the most simply individual owned set can do the above things without a little distortion. Therefore, music programs can exist independently forever without any traditional physical storing-unit in some certain meaning.



l Music programs can be played on more platforms and in a more expedient and free way..



l Combining computer science and technology very closely, makes it easy to apply any possible fruits of research the to music field. Accessing music with the computer allows us to control any operation about the music absolutely and freely. As an important part of our lives, music now has no technical barriers to carry into our future digital/intelligent life. Since the present time, this playing ability is not only a dream that we watch in science fiction movies.

But these kinds of trends are striking at the copyrights. Music commodities no longer need traditional physical carriers such as CDs or micro-groove recorders or tapes, consumers no longer need to step out to shops and bring a heap of such things home. In fact, productions comprising much hard work by the music makers could be spread worldwide during a short time, and generate uncountable copies that have no difference from the source.

It is no doubt that the copyrights are being damaged very badly. The question is: are we going to abort the benefit that comes with the development of science and technology so that we can protect the copyrights; or shall we take the weapon of science and technology to plan a new project to protect the copyrights? If we do this latter we stand to ensure the profit of the copyright owners when we enjoy our advantage.

Obviously, it’s not a good choice to close the door to new technology; nobody can stop people’s pursuit of the advantage of using the new and the desires of human nature. Then, the latter one is the necessary choice. That is, finding a way on which we can not only protect the copyrights, but also let customer use advanced technology, a way to double win.