MP3's by themselves don't really piss me off. They were an important piece of online history. What irritates me is that it's the de facto standard for all players, especially portable ones. It's a licensed beast and it's also old. There are newer, modern, and arguably better encoding formats out now that have the extra advantage of being royalty and license free. Ogg is probably the most popular of these formats right now, having the backing of the geek community to keep it going strong. Problem is, I can only play it back on my computer and I don't want to be tied to my computer to listen to music. The vast majority of portable players, boom boxes, car CD players and that ilk don't support it... but they do support MP3. I wish they would just switch or add Ogg. Most notably, Apple should have at least have included it in their iTunes/iPod. I mean, the freaking encoder would be free for them to include, so what the heck? The second iTunes supports Ogg is the second that others will start to follow suit and this whole MP3 format thing, which has admirably served it's purpose, can finally start to step aside and let a modern public format prevail.
Ok, I know, pipe dream. Companies are more interested in DRM than free public formats, and I know that they only grudgingly support MP3 because it is so wide spread. Feh!
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