Photo Channel update dropping MP3 support
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 3:28am by Jake 
It was a fairly good year for Wii updates. We got a few major firmware updates, a few new channels, this and that. Nothing that would deprive the Wii of its current abilities. That is til early December. The Official Wii website slipped out some new info on an upcoming update that might not be so great.
- Check out these enhancements to the Photo Channel, which will be available in December, 2007.
- Personalize your Wii Menu by making one of your favorite digital images from an SD memory card as the Photo Channel icon.
- The Wii console will replace MP3 compatibility with the ability to play AAC files, which provide a greater sound quality than an MP3 of the same size. This new compatibility will work with MP4 audio files in the .m4a format. Additionally, you can now choose to have the songs play back in a random order.
- *Wii consoles sold in retail stores starting in December 2007 should include AAC file support.
- *For Wii Console owners without the AAC file compatibility, you can download the updated version of the Photo Channel from the Wii Shop Channel starting in early December 2007. Please note that once you download the updated Photo Channel (ver 1.1), you will no longer be able to play MP3 format music files.
- Additionally, consumers who purchase a Wii console with the updated Photo Channel (ver. 1.1) already installed will not be able to install the previous version to support MP3 playback.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like converting 12 gigs of music to AAC format to achieve “higher quality” listening in the photo channel. If anything I thought Nintendo would go ahead and make a separate channel for just personal MP3 listening. Instead, it looks like we’re going in a whole different direction. I know a majority of us don’t use the Wii as a music player, but why take away what little is there?
November 13th, 2007 at 3:32 am
Was just about to send this out to you guys, and I might as well say this…
(F-word)in LAME!
Oh well, don’t have to update this.
November 13th, 2007 at 4:51 am
Lame.
November 13th, 2007 at 5:29 am
I don’t put many mp3’s on my SD card as of yet, but the limited amount that I will put on there, I have no problem transferring to aac. It is a bummer though. Oh well, I will just use my AppleTV enabled stereo to play audio while gaming.
November 13th, 2007 at 6:13 am
Wonder why they bother to put effort in such a pointless thing?
You would have thought they had better things to do than fiddling with stuff that already works.
Adding DVD support would atleast show that they have some sort of understanding of what people want out here in the real world….
November 13th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Hmm .. these channels often seem like a test before a real enhancement comes along. Everybody Votes was like a test before online play came along. Now direct loading from an SD card to the Wii Menu and AAC playback? To me, it sounds like we’ll soon be able to play Virtual Console games that are directly stored on SD cards and maybe even some iTunes channel or something!
November 13th, 2007 at 7:09 am
I rarely use the photo channel.
November 13th, 2007 at 7:57 am
I don’t understand … at all.
Also, what happens to Excite Truck?
It played your MP3 music off of an SD card.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Anyone else smelling (hopefully) and iTunes Channel partnership?
And by the way AAC trounces MP3 so this is good news to me.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:54 am
But yes I concur playback for both would have been best.
November 13th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Uhh here’s an idea Nintendo… how about make your machine play both MP3 and AAC. AAC is a better format, but am I going to convert my whole library of music over to it? Hell no. I have a phone and other devices that require MP3. Now the Wii requires AAC. This is so lame. Nintendo really dropped the ball on this one. I absolutely hate dealing with file compatibality.
November 13th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Why would you remove support for the most popular music format available? I bet Nintendo will be forced to fix this pretty quickly.
November 13th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Its great that it’ll play AAC but to drop mp3, thats wierd. I wonder if it was a licensing thing.
November 13th, 2007 at 9:16 am
What about games that can play mp3 music from SD(endless ocean and excite truck)??!
November 13th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Is this really a big deal? How many of you were using this as a player anyways? Besides, iTunes is the defacto standard today and AAC is how they roll. I will gladly embrace this and move some of my 4,000 odd AAC songs on iTunes over if need be.
I do agree with a couple of points, I hope they have some retro fix with Excite Truck and other games and I also think it’s very lame they don’t have a separate channel. If it’s a big problem, use finetune.com which is a great solution.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:24 am
At least they’re adding m4a support… More and more music is taking m4a status instead of mp3; I think it may replace it sometime in the future. Still, for now, sudden lack of mp3 format sucks majorly. Also, AAC is larger, so you’ll be able to fit less songs on the same SD card you already have.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:30 am
I just hope games like Excite Truck will still play MP3s.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I agree about Excite Truck. I like dropping files on a card and playing them with the game.
Dropping MP3 is foolish. Adding AAC is totally unnecessary. Get out of bed with Apple.
We switched to 192 mp3 in ripping CD’s to our Itunes library for this very reason. All of our other digital media devices support MP3. Only the IPod and Itunes played AAC files. My other mp3 player plays - guess what - MP3’s! So does our DVD player and car CD player.
Dropping support for the most common audio file is not a wise decision.
Please listen to the community.
If you want to add AAC capability, that’s fine. Don’t drop MP3.
Where’s their head at?
November 13th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Moving your AAC files to MP3 drops their audio quality. Its a resample and adds artifacting while dropping fidelity.
If you want to make a good AAC, you have to rerip your CD’s to AAC files, or Buy them from Itunes.
This is sounding more and more like a deal with Apple. I disagree that Itunes is a defacto standard. As a programmer, I’m appalled at their lack of progress in the last several years.
Apple’s Itunes interface is the worst and slowest application in the Windows platform.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I don’t really care about the mp3 thing seeing as I just use Orb when I want to listen to music on the big screen.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:00 am
WTF IS AAC
November 13th, 2007 at 11:13 am
what about FLAC?
Do you really do slideshows all that often? Quitcha bitchin’.
I understand AAC support, but why drop MP3?
Also, who cares about the photo channel when you have GALAXYYYY?
November 13th, 2007 at 11:33 am
I totally get why this sucks for most of you, but as a Mac user, I have a few thousand AAC’s already, and in fact, I was frustrated with the ‘MP3 only’ functionality of Wii when I first got it. This is a godsend for me… sorry!
November 13th, 2007 at 11:44 am
1. I’m sure Excite Truck will still play mp3’s after the update. The code to play them mid-game is likely pulled from the game disc, and not the Photo Channel’s code. “Loose coupling”, for the programmers out there.
2. It’s about time we get a custom photo on Wii menu screen.
3. Hopefully, with enough high-volume customer service phone calls and online “troubleshooting” requests (support.nintendo.com), we can get Nintendo to put .mp3 support back into the Photo Channel. In the meantime, Sourceforge.net has a bunch of freeware converters.
November 13th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I totally see this as a harbinger of the “iTunes Channel”. Which’ll be interesting as it’ll be the first time I’ve ever been able to actually use iTunes (not having had any Macs or Windows boxes in my possession since before iTunes was conceived.)
November 13th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
I was one who used the Photo Channel a lot to play tunes while looking at pictures! I’ve never used the AAC format, since I don’t have an iPod, but if the memory size is bigger, isn’t that a bad thing even for people who already have some music in that format? I mean, the biggest memory size card that the Wii supports is 2 Gigs!
And I absolutely love playing Excite Truck with my own music! That was one of the biggest draws to that game. What confounds me, though, is this: if Excite Truck keeps MP3 support (very unlikely), will it also include AAC support (even more unlikely)?? If not, that means I’ll have to keep two formats within the same card, or switch cards every time, or even keep two versions of the same song!
I smell a lawsuit here… I think Nintendo is having problems securing the money for licensing fees for MP3 support.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
From what I can tell, the mp3 licensing fee is $1.25 per hardware unit, and the AAC licensing fee is $1.00 per hardware unit. That’s not enough of a difference to warrant this change, so there must be something else going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about.
IMO, if they’re going to switch and alienate their users, they might as well just switch to something like ogg and not have to pay a licensing fee at all. I don’t know what Nintendo makes on each system sold, but $1.25 per unit sounds like somewhere in the neighborhood of 1%. mp3 is such a scam.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Elmer has a point… hmmm.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Is there really a charge on mp3? I was under the impression that ownership of the decoding tech was disputed, and therefore, who one would actually pay is uncertain. AAC is much clearer.
I smell strategy here. After all, Nintendo is the one company of the three who doesn’t have vested interests in their own proprietary file formats. Maybe now they do?….
AAC isn’t larger. Generally AAC produces better quality files (in terms of psychacoustic perception) at the same bit rate at practically all bit-rates. Generally purchased AAC files are simply set to a higher bitrate (and higher quality) than the most common mp3s.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Sure AAC is better but so is WMA, OGG and a ton of other formats, but there’s a reason why MP3 is the norm, it’s the “standard”. Why not just leave both in? I don’t see how taking out a feature is an “upgrade”. Oh well, let’s hope they do make an MP3 channel to play music, that’d be fun.
I’m not worried about Excite Truck though, cuz I’m sure the MP3 decoding is done within the game and not the Wii. Just got to play it by the way, first I was like “meh” and now I’m hooked.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Man, I listen to all of my podcasts through my Wii. And when I lay down to read, I let my Wii play my music for the background. They could have at least switched to ogg, I use that also. Now I gotta find an aac converter that’ll work with ubuntu or, or use wine and hope that’ll make a converter work. Boo Nintendo. I’m calling in everyday for 2 months starting Dec. 1 to make a complaint.
Ya, I don’t have to update, but customizing with custom pictures are hard to resist, and why only the photo channel icon, why not the entire Wii start-up screen?
And has anyone been able to get a .avi file to work? I havn’t.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Something tells me we’re gonna see some sort of iTunes action down the line. Wii is already the spitting image of Apple right now and it seems like they’re creeping more and more into the same bed together. I respect both companies and iTunes support wouldn’t be a bad thing… but proprietary software like AAC (it’s apple’s music format like WMA is microsoft’s) is the devil and I shall rant more on that another day.
November 14th, 2007 at 1:27 am
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt [IMG 250PHCH2]It was a fairly good year for Wii updates. We got a few major firmware updates, a few new channels, this and that. Nothing that would deprive the Wii of its current abilities. That is til early December. The Official Wii website slipped out some new info on an upcoming update that might not be so great. Check out these enhancements to the Photo Channel, which will be available in December, 2007. Personalize your Wii Menu by making one of your favorite digital images from an SD […]
November 14th, 2007 at 1:39 am
here’s an idea: what if in those Wiiware releases there’s a AAC AudioCD encoder media player coming? Space is the main feature it has so adding them to Wiiware games with a 40MB size limit pretty much leaves mp3 out the door.-
November 14th, 2007 at 1:43 am
and Jake, don’t tell me you are using 12GB of mp3 on your Wii, why don’t you buy an appletv? it’s way more practical without counting how many SD cards you are using…
November 14th, 2007 at 5:11 am
mp3 is only the standard because its so old. but companies pay license fees to use it and nintendo is trading one license fee for another. this is a move to keep their services as cheap for them as possible so they can keep it all free for us. they dont have the ability to lose money left and right like sony does, then give things for free and still stay afloat.
granted, they could afford to pay both licenses, but for them they dont feel it would be good business.
acc is becoming the new standard though, and its something that will be excepted.
nearly every music player supports it now, its default on itunes, the most popular music download pay service, and even game trailers offers mp4 downloading for ipod/psp.
their mp4 files should be aac standard also. its simply where everybody is slowing going for audio, so while its a pain now for some people to convert mp3 to mp4 or m4a, its part of evolving with the times. I can guarantee, with the.sales of players that use aac, services that are aac only, and those that offer both, most consumers are going to have no problem with nintendos decision, they will roll with it.
any game that allows music playback from SD cards is either not using the Wiis photo channel for music playback, or it will simply allow for aac playback only in the future also.
November 14th, 2007 at 5:27 am
to the person that said aac files were bigger, thats not true, and in fact its the opposite.
thats the whole point of nintendo doing this. you can get better audio quality from the same size music file.
http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2004/01/20/comparison_of_mp3_and_aac.html
links to info about aac vs mp3 quality vs file size
November 14th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
You know, I don’t care if AAC supposedly saves space. It doesn’t sound better when you save the space.
192 k mp3 still trumps 128k AAC.
Anyway, its MY memory card that I’d be saving space on, if I cared to use the AAC format. Memory cards are cheap. Sound quality isn’t.
I’ve already sent a letter to Nintendo strongly opposing the removal of MP3 playback. How dare they change my device after they sold it to me? How dare they do that to the loyal buyers of the Wii who’ve made it successful?
What if you owned a DVD player, and they said that they were going to come service your unit, replacing standard DVD playback with Blu-Ray encoding, and that your standard DVD’s will no longer play? Is that fair?
What’s the difference between that and this?
With the actual rate of absorption of AAC, just based on posts I’ve been reading on the blogs so far, it doesn’t sound like the United States has adopted the format. The only way you have an Ipod full of AAC files is if you never changed the default rip format, like I did. Nothing else was compatible with AAC’s! Why would I commit my digital library to a barely used file format?
Apple should not be dictating file formats. They’re less than 10 percent of the personal computer market. Ipod is a great music player, but even it doesn’t play AAC exclusively. The Wii shouldn’t go exclusive either.
How about making an optional ADDITIONAL format offering for AAC files for the Apple users that want it, available for download on Wii Shop instead?
Make AAC file users pay for the additional license if they want it.
That is fair and trackable, and doesn’t steal capabilities from my device.
By the way, if you haven’t tried the slide show on the Wii, you should. It is excellent, and doesn’t seem to be limited on the file sizes of pictures it accepts. I’ve had problems with DVD players that have this capability that require you to make 2 megapixel or smaller copies, but the Wii takes 8 megapixel shots without blinking.
November 15th, 2007 at 2:10 am
I’m simply not going to download the mp3-removing update (and yes, I have done Photo Channel slideshows to mp3 music numerous times in the last year.) If they force the update somehow, well, I guess it’ll be as good a time as any to write a flash Photo Channel/mp3 player, if someone hasn’t already.
November 17th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
People, iTunes’ DRM infected music isn’t gonna play on the wii. So quit all your crap about it being good because iTunes uses AAC.