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AAC Put To The Test
technology is sexy writes "Following the increasing popularity of AAC in online music stores and the growing amount of implementations in software and hardware, the format is now being put to the test. How well does Apple's implementation fare against Ahead Nero, Sorenson or the Open Source FAAC at the popular bitrate of 128kbps? Find out for yourself and help by submitting the
results. You can find instructions on how to participate here. The best AAC codec gets to face MP3, MP3Pro, Vorbis, MusePack and WMA in the next test. Previous test results at 64kbps can be found here."
this makes the format rather irrelevant.
AAC@Everything2
Well, if you don't care about the quality, why the heck does it matter if Ogg has good or bad quality?
All it needs to be is open and unencumbered, right?
Well, the AAC produced by Apple Quicktime isn't DRM burdened, even if it does have some patent stuff attached.
GPL Deconstructed
Most mp3s or oggs you find out there are from someone's CD-Rom drive, who knows how the disc looked, or how much jitter there was. I have heard stories of people downloading songs to find a skip or two in the middle, or been an amalgam of two different files accidently spliced together.
I'd hazard a guess that most people that encode with ogg-vorbis do a better ripping and encoding job, though.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This might get modded Troll, but it's an honest question. Whenever I rip a CD, I encode it into mathematically loseless MP3s, and with the cheapness of disk space these days, I can't stop being amazed at how many people don't do the same. If the quality can be compressed into something loseless from the original digital medium (the CD), then who cares if AAC sounds better than OGG sounds better than WMA sounds better than MP3 at 64 kb/s?
Please enlighten me, I'm actually, honestly, curious.
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
I prefer DVDA.
What hyphen?
graspee
Oh sure, just smack down the Ogg guy, like always happens when the format is mentioned here. As if a free and open audio codec were such a terrible idea... Incidentally it sounds pretty good too.
http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/test/
You mean the DRM features that allow me to rip my own CD's to AAC and copy the resultant files to any and all computers or players (that understand them) and play them back?
Or how about the DRM feature that allows me to export bought AAC's to aiff and then convert them to MP3/OGG/AAC/.wav/.au etc and do with them what I please?
True, Apple's TMS is selling AAC's that have a DRM-like "inconvenience protection" on them but it's not _inherent_ to the AAC format, nor does it affect the sound quality vs. file size questions.
(In any case, we _should_ be cheering for any company that's actually trying to give us quite reasonably limited freedom with copyrighted material, while satisfying the RIAA/MPAA etc.)
Patent encomberment is a serious deal. It means than a legal OSS player is nearly out of the questions. If I can't play the things on my iBook(Linux), iMac(Linux), server(Linux), palmtop(Linux), and at school (OS X) then I won't be using it. Quality is irrelevant at that point.
Ogg Vorbis, because of its openness and mpeg, becase people ignore the patent, are my best two options. AAC is not an option, so its quality means nothing.
Would you rather use a train that can safely travel at 100mph along prelaid tracks that don't follow your route or a car that can safely go 60mph along much more convenient roads?
(Oh yeah, Linux is a rocket car in the analogy because it has to be stuck in there somewhere. Windows is a horse in that it can go anywhere if at a crawling pace while shitting over everything, but a rocket car can go more places...
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I happen to own a Panasonic SV-AV30 (4-in-1), and music management app that comes with it has to options to save in MP3 or MPEG2-AAC. Lately, I have been transcoding the audio from mp3s and cd to 96kbps AAC and the results are surprisingly good. I play it in my car and have not really noticed a much of a difference.
:-)
Obviously, the tracks which were bad to begin with will be bad as AACs.
BTW, I have been playing/making music for 14 years and have a pretty good ear when it comes to tone and timbre. Hi-hats on CDs have always bothered me with the lack of warmth and fullness of timbre. So take my word for it if I saw it's not too bad
I note that in the 64 Kbps test, they used the AAC-LC encoder from QuickTime 6.0. This was a pretty darn lousy one, lacking any ability to specify a sample rate at a given data rate, and had poor quality. The current version of QuickTime 6.3 (for Windows and MacOS X), has a much improved, more flexible AAC-LC encoder, so if they did that test today AAC would likely rank higher.
If using the Apple encoder, encode in "Better" mode with 16-bit source, and in "Best" mode with source that's more than 16-bits per sample (and hence isn't a CD rip). Support for mastering from 24-bit when running in "Best" is one of the reasons why the AAC-LC files as part of iTunes sound so good.
My video compression blog
FLAC
In the Billy and the Boingers' "U Stink But I Luv U" encoding test, the OOP-AAC compression scheme won by a wide margin.
You missed my joke, ArchieBunker. I think the AC below you did too, though he tried to make it himself.
/= DVD-A.
hint, DVDA
graspee
Shit, my card only gets 10 megapixels an hour.
Please note that the survey's host makes no claims that what he's doing is in any way scientific. Keep that in mind. The reasons why the results are to be taken with a grain of salt:
/. crowd, but an open call to the masses to submit their opinions is not science nor does it have any scientific meaning.
1. There is no guarantee of clean data - the users are expected to generate their own files. MIstakes happen.
2. The type of user who participates in this (and more likely in the OGG vs AAC coming debate) may have some predisposed bias. There is no way to weed out any placebo effects.
3. There is no way to weed out folks who have tin ears. I don't want some idiot who loves dance forming an opinion about Bach not sounding "boomy" enough
This may fly in the face of the
Also, I didn't mean that to be a criticism of the original test. 6.0 was the current version of QuickTime when they did the test, so it looks like a fair test for the state of the technologies at the time.
My video compression blog
hint: it has to do with pron.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
please tell me an analog way of recording that has zero loss.
you cant.
Well, any analog medium = much worse loss. LPs and cassette tapes can't approach the dynamic range of a CD. Plus you get noise, which gets worse on repeated playback.
The only lossless music is a live performance. But even then, you may crib about acoustics. Besides, you can't hire Brendel to play live for you whenever you feel like, and even if you could, he may not be in good form every day.
It looks like they're working with 16-bit source, not the 24-bit source that most of the iTunes AAC files are ripped from. So this test, while certainly very interesting, won't be useful to determine the iTunes music store quality.
My video compression blog
What you prefer the loss of the pits on your LP wearing as the needle passes through the grooves? Yeah spectral analysis shows that after three plays with a high end player the LP has already lost MORE dynamic range then a ADAT recording, and of course in hundreds of plays and a couple generations the digital copy is obviously superior, plus getting vinyl from mail order sucks, I know I DJ and the % of DOA stuff is way too high for my liking (especially if it's a white label or rare import, ususally means I get the insurance $ but never find the music again for a reasonable price). Analog has its place (like scratching, cd's just are not the same) but long term quality is not where it's at.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
lose quality. If you convert from AAC to MP3 for example, you deal with both the shit from AAC and the shit from MP3.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
With 6000 participants, the double-blind public test results were:
- Ogg
- WMA
- RealAudio
- Mp3Pro
- MP3
- AAC (Sic!)
Of course, this was crazy, with AAC even behind MP3, but these really were the results...Why not show spectrum analasys of different songs encoded into the given formats too?
Perhaps I'm just an audio freak, but I would find that a lot more interesting than just ratings.
Who doesn't like free music?
First, read this:
.zip files.
http://www.ff123.net/abchr/abchr.html
This describes the program and testing methodology used here, which, btw, is based on widely accepted perceptual testing conventions. And yes, by the scientific community. These are the same techniques used by the scientists that do the research and development on these formats. Please note the references at the bottom of the page.
1. Wrong, the MP4 files are already encoded and created for the user, stored in the
2. Wrong, the Hidden Reference (ABC/*HR*, please read the page at the first link), ensures that if the user honestly cannot tell the difference but thinks that one exists (placebo), and rates the original lower than one of the encoded versions, that their results are discarded.
3. This is where the statistics come in. With enough listeners, the "noise" gets weeded out of relevant results. Most past tests using this methodology have been shown to provide highly relevant and fairly uniform results when all the data is factored together.
An open call to the masses is the only way to measure the perception of the masses, and if the test is performed properly (which it is in this case), then it *is* scientific.
Next time, please read up a little more on what is happening before jumping to all sorts of incorrect conclusions.
As was previously mentioned on Slashdot, a highly regarded German magazine called C'T dedicated an article to a similar comparison of various audio compression codecs last year.
.WAV recordings containing 3 short excerpts from various CD music tracks (pop, classical and jazz) that had previously been encoded by 6 popular codecs, each at both 64 Kbit/s and 128 Kbit/s (or as close as possible for VBR-only encoders). For verification of the results, 2 of the recordings came directly from CD and had not gone through any encoding process. Because the .WAV files were all the same size, there was no way for the listener to know which encoder had been used on a particular file. Participants were asked to rank their preferences among these files. The encoders included MP3, MP3PRO, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, RealAudio and AAC.
They created fourteen different
Over 6000 people downloaded those tracks and submitted their preferences. Unfortunately, the results of that test were only published in print and I haven't been able to find an online version of it. A few noteworthy results are below however.
The percentages indicate how many people put a particular codec at a particular ranking:
MP3 64 KBit/s
1st place: 1 %
2: 1%
3: 1%
4: 1%
5: 2%
6: 4%
7th place: 90%
As might be expected for the oldest codec, almost everyone agreed that the file that had been run through MP3 at 64 Kbit was the worst sounding of all. At 128 KBit however, listeners were clearly divided on whether MP3 sounded worse or better than others:
MP3 128 Kbit/s
1: 11%
2: 14%
3: 15%
4: 15%
5: 16%
6: 16%
7: 14%
Now the AAC results. At 64 Kbit, it was ranked a slightly below average performer:
AAC 64 KBit/s
1: 7%
2: 12%
3: 17%
4: 26%
5: 22%
6: 14%
7: 2%
What's interesting is that at 128 Kbit/s, more people ranked AAC the worst sounding encoder than any other codec in the test including MP3!
AAC 128 KBit/s
1: 11%
2: 11%
3: 13%
4: 12%
5: 14%
6: 14%
7: 26%
Not surprisingly, the files that had been read directly from CD without any encoding steps done in between got the best rankings of all. Ogg Vorbis did very well indeed and came in second overall.
This experiment is really designed to test which codec overall sounds better to the average user, for an arbitrary and inconsistent range of hardware setups, acoustic environments, and listening preferences (e.g. do I pay more attention to the primary beat or to the background harmony). I wouldn't place any value on this test other than to choose which codec I might choose if I wanted to please the ignorant consumer (a valid market, of course!). It does nothing to address how accurately a codec reproduces the artist's original sound.
I'll put a lot more stock in the Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests put together by David Meares (BBC), Kaoru Watanabe (NHK), Eric Scheirer (MIT Media Labs) for the ISO. And the other MPEG Audio Public Documents.
You're basically asking for a lot of people to submit their opinions. This will show you what the people who participated in it prefer, but it doesn't really reveal much in they way of actual sound quality. Everyone has their own opinions already about which audio codec is supperior. The only way you could rule out the placebo affect is to give the test blind, so that they have no clue which file is which. Even then since the results are being turned in on good faith, you have to accept that some people may simply lie about the results based on their own biases. You'd need an objectional third party to administer a test like this, and even then almost no one would agree on a third party in the end. If someone's favorite format lost they'd just bitch about the test being rigged. The only un arguable test would to actully compare the integrity of the audio to the original via an olliscope or some other device. Audio's not my area of expertise so I could be wrong there. It seems to me it's best to just not worry about it and use what you're happy with. Seeing a test like this wouldn't change my mind really. "Person A liked Audio B encoded with mp3 the best!" It just doesn't seem to hold that much sway over me.
I care because I have not fallen for the "golden ears" fallacy. To me, 192kbps ABR lame-encoded sounds exactly like the original. I don't have super expensive speakers attached to the computer, nor do I have a fancy sound card (Creative Live 5.1.) Storing music losslessly is a waste of space to me. Sometimes I like to share music files and it's a heck of a lot easier and others are a heck of a lot more interested in trading compressed music compared to lossless files. And I can put a heck of a lot more of them on a CDR. And should I wish to listem to them in my MP3 player with limited memory, I'm sure as hell not going to use a lossless format.
If YOU want to use up your hard drive space, internet bandwidth, and blank media with huge lossless encoded files, feel free. But don't get all smug and proclaim to not have any idea why anyone would not want to waste their resources.
Oh, and I'm not going to touch that "mathematically lossless" crap, others have covered that already.
THANK YOU for linking to e2!
Now for the next hour - or maybe the next few - I will waste my time going to pages such as this.
Once again, thanks!
--Jason
http://www.virtualvillagesquare.com/ Online Communities: The Next Generation
That was a flippant answer to his seeming flippant post.
I like Ogg fine. It is my codec of choice, except of course that no one bothers to support it for my OS of choice, OS X.
There's no good Ogg encoders that can interface with iTunes and support Unicode (yet, of course)
There's no Ogg codec for Quicktime on OS X 10.2.6 (yet, of course)
I much prefer Ogg, ideologically, but it's not something I can actually *live* with, because the support isn't there.
I have 100% support for MP3 and AAC.
Yes, I believe in fighting for causes I believe in. Right now Ogg is not one of those causes; maybe later. Right now I'm more concerned with my friends, my mortgage, and my state of unemployment, sorry.
GPL Deconstructed
You can probably thank iTunes for that- I had numerous problems with encoding my CDs. Songs has skips, and more commonly, ended early- often by more than 15-20 seconds. It was extremely irritating.
Curiously, I never had such problems with Xing's AudioCatalyst, an awesome encoder for the Mac(it was, and I think still is, the only encoder for the Mac that can do live encoding from line-in). AudioCatalyst was also exceedingly fast on my powerbook- 4x encoding speed, and the rip of the CD was very, very fast.
If you want perfect rips of the audio to encode from, you don't need masters- you need a CD ripper that doesn't suck, like CDparanoia(although CDparanoia is very slow.)
I use uncompressed wav or 256khz mp3 myself
Assuming you mean 256kbit, that's an absurd waste of disk space- anything over 160 is. In fact, if you look at encodes done by "groups", the most they ever do is 192kbit, and usually only if the material is worth it- ie, it has really good production quality, the music is very nice, etc.
Personally, I wish people would take the disk space to do 160kbit- from most encoders, 128kbit files sound pretty bad on anything better than a $25 set of computer speakers.
Please help metamoderate.
First of all there are many different AAC codecs. Second, the AAC codec tested in c't produced slightly lower gain (volume) than other codecs.
It's a known fact that "louder sounds better" in a test situation like this. It should be made sure that the volume of the samples are the same, something they didn't do in the c't test especially when there are lots of unexperienced testers.
Third, the c't test is old already.
It doesn't sound like you use a Mac or the iTunes Music Store, so why do you say the AACs from Apple are shitty?
There are at least three distinct things to keep in mind:
MP3s encoded from your music using LAME at 220kbps VBR is one quality
AACs encoded with Quicktime 6.3 is one quality
AACs encoded from masters, ala iTunes Music Store, are another quality
You, in one sentence, mix all three quality levels as if they are currently comparable.
The music from the iTunes music store is encoded from a higher quality source, and can arguably be of higher quality than even your 220kbps mp3s. It's hard to make any educated guess because I don't know anyone who's done a comparison between AAC files ripped from masters vs MP3s ripped from CD.
The music you get from iTunes itself is based on Quicktime 6.3, and that *is* being compared and characterized in this test; this will probably illustrate the level of quality iTunes for Windows will have, and is more directly comparable to your 220kbps mp3s, but only *after* the test is performed.
it's fine to believe that your mp3s are better, but there is no proof yet.
GPL Deconstructed
One patent is ignored, while the other in eforced. I don't see many people crying over the GIF patent, especially when M$IE has yet to implement support for PNG.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The complete results can be found in issue 19/2002 of Heise's offline magazine C't. Along with the online public test, some 'experts' (such as some music producers, hobby listeners, a singer, and a young student and choir singer) were consulted.
In the online public test, the 64 kBit/s comparison yielded
The parent's results were the ones for 128 kBit/s. The eight experts compared the codecs on 160 kBit/s as well, with much more varying results (not much of a surprise). But on average, the results were
As I said, those were an average, with the individual results of the eight experts strongly deviating. Ogg was placed once 1st, once 2nd, twice 3rd and 4th, and once 5th and 7th. (One had actually placed the plain wave reference 5th...)
I imagine that an encoder could be optimized for re-encoding. I wonder if anyone is working on this. I'd like to write a program which would automatically do this conversion in my music library, but currently I can't stand the loss of quality.
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
First of all there are many different AAC codecs. Second, the AAC codec tested in c't produced slightly lower gain (volume) than other codecs.
That's interesting, would you happen to know if there are any further details that I might read about that claim on the net or perhaps in another issue of the magazine?
It's a known fact that "louder sounds better" in a test situation like this. It should be made sure that the volume of the samples are the same, something they didn't do in the c't test especially when there are lots of unexperienced testers.
I'd agree. Although I should point out that the parallel testing that they published where they asked various professional musicians, producers and audio technicians to do a similar test but including some music of their own choice and additional a 160 Kbit/s run did provide results that were quite similar.
Third, the c't test is old already.
Well, it seemed a relevant article for this topic nonetheless. And hey, it was hardly 10 months ago, it's not completely prehistoric.
It doesn't really make sense to describe an encoding or recording scheme lossy, since that is the nature of recording. Lossless encoding is identical to cloning.
All recording done in the analog domain loses quality through distortion and noise in every stage from the microphone onwards.
Once music is in the digital domain, it is possible to "clone" it by copying the file. One can also employ lossless compression (like FLAC, SHN, and Monkey's Audio aka APE) to copy the music while losing nothing. I can take a CD, rip a track off as an uncompressed WAV file. I can then convert it WAV --> FLAC --> WAV --> SHN --> WAV --> APE -- > WAV and then record the resultant WAV to CD. The result is an identical recording. No losses.
Well, I'm not using AAC until it supports Ogg.
You could always get a laser turntable if you don't want to scratch your record. Expensive, though.
They had one of the AAC staff on the Screensavers, and he said that AAC was actually meant to be used at lower bitrates (96 max), where it sounds better. Now I don't know how it's possible for something to sound better at a lower bitrate, but I haven't seen the codec and I haven't heard any AACs. But if that makes sense to anyone, then it's like saying: "Who's better at football, Aikman or Beckham?" Well, it depends on what country you're in, doesn't it? You can't make a real comparison unless you're comparing them at their suggested/optimal bit rates, not the same arbitrary one.
sic
I mean, damn them! Nirvana didn't pay $606.17 to record Bleach so that some Corporate Asswipe could make a high fidelty copy of it!
The Ramones would be very peeved to find all the work they put into keeping most songs to three, dingy, distorted chords, ripped to a high fidelty format.
You know what?
Over 160? Maybe you've been to too many Megadeth concerts or something, but 160 Kbps is quite audibly lossy in my experience. Now, I'm fussy about encoding artifacts, but 160 is the lowest I'll use for listening to on headphones on an airplane. It has to be at least 192 for me to not find artifacts distracting while listening on a good stereo (Paradigm Active/20 reference monitors attached to my video editing rig, in my case, self-powered with all XLR signal routing from the jukebox machine. I grant this is overkill for the casual listener).
Personally, I encode my library at 320 Kbps Normal Stereo without any filtering. This is overkill for listening, but that's enough data that I can recompress to another, more portable format like AAC on an iPod without windup up with a audible multigeneration artifacts.
All things being equal, I'd use FLAC, but I really really like the iTunes interface, and 320 MP3 is the best format it has historically supported. It now does 320 AAC, and I'm toying with switching to that (although I haven't yet, since the files won't be quite as widely interoperable).
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The quality loss in dithering 24->16 is much less than the quality loss in doing a lossy encode to 128kbps AAC, by at least an order of magnitude.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The African American Congress? Okay, okay, I'll be the first to admit I watch too much Law & Order.
I did my own test of this a while back (AAC,MP3,OGG only). I didn't do 128K CBR but instead did 160K VBR.
My results were:
1. AAC
2. OGG Vorbis
3. MP3
AAC is much newer, so there are more unexpired patents that apply to it. More importantly, AAC is seen as relevant, while MP3 is yesterday's technology that nobody is really pushing anymore, so the AAC patents are strictly enforced, while the MP3 ones are not.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The other respondent answered your other questions sufficiently (ABC/HR is very well-established testing methodology, and your other claims are just flat-out counterfactual).
As for asking people to submit their opinions, that is exactly what scientific perceptual testing does (and other scientific fields as well). All sorts of studies are run this way: a call for volunteers to take some test. Sometimes they pay you $20 to participate in some psychology experiment for an hour, sometimes they pay you $100 to take an MRI-scan, and so on. This is no different.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Oh, it certainly won't be a night and day difference. But it is a factor. When doing a FFT or any transfer into frequency domain, rounding errors are always a significant factor when delivering with the same precision as the source. I imagine this would matter more for content with a high dynamic range like classical, and less for typical pop/rock content.
This is of course an emperical question. A good test would be to take a 24-bit source file, and encode it to AAC-LC in QuickTime in Better and then Best modes. Better will treat the source as 16-bit, and Best mode will use the extra precision of the 24-bit source. In fact, the ONLY difference between Better and Best is the use of more than 16-bits of information in the signal path.
My video compression blog
You mean the DRM features that allow me to rip my own CD's to AAC and copy the resultant files to any and all computers or players (that understand them) and play them back?
These files do not have DRM.
Or how about the DRM feature that allows me to export bought AAC's to aiff and then convert them to MP3/OGG/AAC/.wav/.au etc and do with them what I please?
These files DO have DRM. Apple currently allows you to do lots of stuff with them, so the restrictions won't bother most people, but the DRM is there. In theory, new versions of Mac OS X could impose additional restrictions on how you're allowed to use these files.
As someone else mentioned, re-encoding loses quality, which has nothing to do with DRM.
True, Apple's TMS is selling AAC's that have a DRM-like "inconvenience protection" on them but
It's DRM, it's not "DRM-like". Apple is just more lenient with their current DRM implementation than anyone else has been.
it's not _inherent_ to the AAC format, nor does it affect the sound quality vs. file size questions.
Very true.
(In any case, we _should_ be cheering for any company that's actually trying to give us quite reasonably limited freedom with copyrighted material, while satisfying the RIAA/MPAA etc.)
Also agreed.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
you should use vorbis with advanced-options lowpass=#largenumber#, with 24-bit or 32-bit IEEE @ 48kKz input.
Set the lowpass to a number that represents your limit of human hearing (people bitch about that, so its configurable). Otherwise make it absurdly large.
Vorbis has gotten better too, that's why it's time to run that test again to see how the state of the art has advanced.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
You've actually listenened to AAC files and think they're shitty :)
Most of the population (at least 90% I bet) haven't had access to a Mac, the iTunes Music Store, or Apple encoded AACs, and thus the complaints of most folk are... probably purely speculative.
Myself, I find AAC by iTunes is >> MP3 by iTunes, and AAC by Apple is ~> than AAC by iTunes and MP3 by iTunes.
It is worthy to note that I'm not using LAME, so my basis for quality is already lower than yours.
GPL Deconstructed
Just remember that digital=loss.
If only I had perfect hearing as well -- and complete atmospheric control. Then I could assure the quality of the analogue sounds I hear.
You are hearing a representation of the original source material.
That's all I'm interested in... if we're going to get philosophical, isn't everyone's perception of a sound a "representation" of the original source material?
deus does not exist but if he does
Also remember that analogue=loss. Your two comments following that statement are equally applicable to analogue. There's nothing magic about analogue.
Advanced Audio Codec. AAC is the proper successor to MP3, approved by Dolby, the ISO etc. You can encode both MPEG2 and MPEG4 audio streams as AAC. Apple encapsulates MPEG4 AAC files in a wrapper they call "MP4" which contains (but doesn't HAVE to contain) things like tags, DRM etc.
Yup, it's confusing. This is because AAC is intended to be the compression used for pretty much anything audio. MPEG4 AAC is good because MPEG4 is designed for low-bitrate applications. You can encode a file with the low-complexity profile, MPEG4 AAC, then apply the MP4 container on top of that. These files work fine in the IPOD. MPEG2 AAC does not, at this point.
read the warranty, most drives require to you activate the 52x function in some manual way or they run at 48X. The cd spec only covers up to 48X, any 52x running will generally void the warranty on the physical device. Gotta love the advertising line though, almost as bad as selling computers using P2P and music sharing as a 'feature'.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
|
v
Hmmm.
When are you going to be selling your downloaded itunes AAC files at a secondhand store? (Or ebay, if you prefer). You can't, can you, as they are permanently tied to you. Thus the right of resale, and the ability to buy it cheaper second hand is gone.
How about copying the work for education purposes? (say, using it for a music class). Well, you can rip it to AIFF, as you say. Woohoo. All the costs of lossy encoded material, along with with size of uncompressed media. How good is that? Yes, it's not a complete destruction of that fair use right, but it is degraded. And please don't suggest transcoding it to MP3, you can hear the artifacts when you do that.
How about streaming your purchased (or even self-ripped) music from home to work over the net if you don't have a legacy copy of the older itunes saved? Oh, you could hack your itunes, thus breaking the law with the DMCA. Great.
I agree that Apple's DRM is significantly less than that of it's predecessors, and that it is below the pain point of most people, and should be applauded for that.
But there are still restrictions, and my concern is that it will provide even greater impetus to bring CD's UP to the level of DRM of Apple's music store, rather than carry on reducing the DRM of itunes, specifically restrictions upon resale rights.
Actually, my biggest problem is AAC's patents, so I won't be using AAC on my linux box any time soon, just as I'm worried that MP3's patents will be enforced for software codecs at some point.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Hi, is the free (of charge) AAC encoders and/or decoders available?
Is this necessarily an inherent right? It certainly doesn't apply to, say, concert tickets. I guess it's a question of if you handle the piece of music as an object, in which case duplicating that object, a CD, is certainly somewhat questionable practice, but re-selling it is obiviously ok.
Or if you think of buying music buying a license to play that music (for personal use) when you want, where ever you want, how ever you want (and different license for playing it in radio, and different license for playing it for public audience etc).
In the license case you could of course think of selling the license, if you at the same time commit on destroying any copies of the piece you have made... But technically the license is irrevocable, the file says it's yours (I assume, didn't RTFA ;), so how would you revoke or transfer that license without having extra costs somewhere, thus making the whole point of re-sale a bit moot?.
See the license information on its Web site.
This right of resale is explicitly included in copyright law as one that does not breach copyright.
UK and US law is very similar, not only due to the common heritage, but also due to the work of bodies like WIPO to harmonise legislation globally, so there is likely a similar US law.
The exception is with a pre-sale contract, with a willing seller and a willing buyer, along with other things such as legally binding signatures and the ability for both parties to negotiate terms before signing. The standard click-through agreement on a webpage prior to purchase would be unlikely to meet such terms, for various reasons. On top of that, many such pre-sale contracts try to get you to sign away rights which you cannot in fact, sign away with a contract. Such as in the US, constitutionally protected rights such as free speech.
EULA's, or post sale contracts, have similar problems in terms of contract validation, but try to use a legally iffy copyright mechanism* to do an end-run around first sale doctrine. That hasn't been tested in court yet either, in the UK, though specific parts of EULA's have been judged non-binding in the US, which is why the big software companies tried to get UCITA into law. Anyway, I digress.
When you pay money for a product, it is classified as a good. Here, you can resell concert tickets, as the thriving ticket tout industry on ebay shows, as you are selling something tangible, i.e. entrance to a concert building.
The only way something can be considered a 'licence' is if there is a pre-sale contract specifying such, and for example, you pay an ongoing cost for the product. Trying to redefine both purchased music and software as 'licensed' post sale is a typical RIAA/BSA trick, which has little to no legal basis.
Don't be fooled. When you buy something it is yours to do with as you choose. Copyrighted works have one major additional restriction in law - you may not sell or redistribute unauthorised copies of that work. (there are a couple of others, such as not passing off the work as your own, but they aren't relevent to this discussion)
Obviously, copyright law prevents me making a copy and selling the original, but that applies to any copyrighted work, not just DRM audio tracks.
Now, when I buy a CD, I have the right to sell that CD. when I buy a book, I have the right to sell that book. When I buy a DRM'd audio track, even though I still have that right, the DRM prevents me exerting that right.
Legal? Well, I don't own a mac, and I haven't used itunes, and apple don't appear to have posted the terms and conditions of the service on the web so I can't check, but it doesn't really matter, as the technical effect of the DRM is to remove the right of resale anyway.
Someone could sue apple to remove the restriction to allow them to resell the downloaded AAC (i.e. change the user id embedded in the file), or allow them to remove the DRM prior to selling it. A law could be passed specifically preventing DRM being used to prevent resale, a couple of which have been proposed to congress.
Until then, regardless of the legal validity of restricting resale, it is a defacto accomplishment.
*EULA's use the premise that by making a copy of the work, i.e. software, into memory, you are breaching the copyright by making an unauthorised copy. You can become authorised by agreeing to the terms of the EULA. This potentially works as copying the work in order to actually use it is not clearly defined as a legal fair use right, though any common sense interpretation of copyright law would laugh this out of court if they tried to enforce it.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
AAC also allows up to 8 channels of audio, which makes it an interesting standard in view of its use for MPEG-4 (which AAC is part of) video soundtrack. Apple *MAY* see this as part of the reason to promote AAC use - If/When MPEG-4 decoding is standard on home theatre equipment, apple can support up to 7.1 encoding in FCP and other apps. Of course, they've already got a licensed AC3 encoder in DVD Studio Pro, but AAC just adds another option, that will eventually become 'the standard'
Of course, right now, AAC decoding home-theatre receivers are non-existant, or at least cost to it - if there are any, but its a good forward looking solution to the problem.
"so if they did that test today AAC would likely rank higher."
Couldn't go down any. AAC ended up at the *bottom* of the rankings.
Enough with this bullshit that AAC works magic at 128kb. 128kb isn't enough with our current generation of encoders, and isn't likely to improve for 5 years at a minimum.
Meanwhile, suckers are paying $10 for albums with less fidelity than I can get from the used CD section at Amazon, and what I'm buying has no DRM restrictions at all.
And the iTunes fans have the balls to tell me what a great deal 128kb AACs are for $1? Sheesh. If Apple put shit on a stick, some of you would say it tastes better than "regular" food.
AAC is used by distributors for its DRM features.
AAC is acceptable to consumers because they find the DRM restrictions do not interfere with their normal use of purchased music, and the sound quality at least matches other distribution methods.
Personally, I find the sound quality of 128 Kbit AAC to be equivalent to 192 Kbit VBR MP3. But I still use the latter format when I rip my CDs. AAC is only for material that I bought that way. It sounds great, but I'll minimize my exposure until I've seen several brands of portable players with full AAC support.
In fact, there isn't much difference between FM and CD for a lot of popular music. (Think Britney spears). The singles that are released are typically postprocessed in such a way that they'll sound marvellous (and not be distorted) on FM radio, and the exact same, FM-radio-filtered version is pressed on CD.
Of course, you will have spotted this a long time ago, seeing as you are so acute of hearing.
And I'm sure you listen to your music in a room which is as close to 0 degrees Kelvin as possible to prevent distortion due to atmosferic (i.e. convection) disturbance, and make sure that the room is sealed air tight to prevent pressure differences, which only makes sense as you've already paid thousands of dollars to insulate the room against any outside noises, as well as breathing as lightly as possible.
On the other hand, you might just be another freak that has 6 speaker boxes, even though he's only got two ears and high-end headphones would be much, much better quality -- and you know what, you actually enjoy the distortions that are introduced in a "surround" setting [1]even though you claim to be an audiophile..
[1] or by using radio-tube analog amplifiers.. damn things only introduce additional odd harmonics that weren't in the original. feh.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
A Cradle of Filth song is used as one of the samples!
Of jewelled skies o'er my stringsAnd love, a wanton thing
Can plunge on burnt, black wings
To hang amid the thorns
In scarlet, like velvet worn
About the clouded moon
Who wanes in solitude....
fyi, COF is the world's premiere Black/Death/Gothic Metal band
I used VBR encoding with the lowest bitrate allowed to 112 (lame -b112 -vbr) and then the --r3mix settings.
Did about 700 CDs with this. Sounds great on my headphones on my iPod.
Now of course I'm wondering if I should make the effort to move to AAC yet or not.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Not really. Almost all the time, the equipment doesn't even have the range of a CD.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Id rather use Ac3, it can do 5.1 and 48khz and
you can directly rip the audio ac3 from movie track video clips.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So I bring up Slashdot this morning for my routine skim of the headlines and see this article. It all sounds horribly familiar, and sure enough, it's the test that my site is acting as a mirror for.
:(
Fortunately I'm the second mirror, and there's bitstream available, so a quick check on my site shows little extra traffic. But for a moment I had an image of a webhost in Hong Kong melting
Cheers, Paul
I keep hearing everyone discussing whether 160k, 192k, 256k, etc is better. Why not variable bit rate? Using EAC/LAME with VBR gets smaller files than, 192k and, when it needs it, can reach up to 320k in order to make sure as much of the data is preserved.
I listen on Sennheiser HD600s on an audigy2ex, and Max quality vbr files are indistinguishable from the original WAV.
vk.
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
You question the use of AAC audio ? why bother, if we have MP3 for music ? Well, as a quality freak i will only use musepack ( MPC ) for audio compression, if ever, but for DVD backups with the DivX or XviD codec, i am using AAC as standard now. Why ? well, the new Nero encoder will allow you to create high quality, true 5.1 surround AAC audio with a bitrate of about 180 - 240 kbps, from 5.1 AIFF or WAV files. Use the matroska container and DirectShow parser filter ( http://www.matroska.org ) to store your DivX video with AAC 5.1 and the CoreAAC DirectShow decoder filter to playback on Windows. A sample file ( 10 MB ) in incredible video quality, plus some documentation how to play and make such files, can be found here : http://corecodec.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=P NphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=328
I never said 128kbps from master was higher quality than 128kbps from CD, I only said it was arguable.
And there are two variables here, not one, as your analogy suggests.
Not only are we measuring the quality of 128kbps VBR encoded from master by Apple's exclusive software... we are comparing against a population that listens to and enjoys music on FM radio!
So the whole idea of 'ear for music' is largely elitist and artifical. Music is more than just fidelity, just like software quality is more than zero defects.
Music is rhythm, melody, lyrics, atmosphere, and energy, as well, and fidelity only matters in how effective those aspects are conveyed to the listener.
GPL Deconstructed
The only reason Apple is using AAC is because it is an obscure format which tends to lock users into a Mac/iPod solution.
No, the only reason Apple is using AAC is because it's an open, documented, non vendor-locked format that cannot be simply hijacked and manipulated by, say, Microsoft.
AAC is cross platform; in fact, AAC is the logical successor to MP3, so everything you love or hate about MP3, ideologically, should apply to AAC. To think otherwise seems silly and ignorant to me.
GPL Deconstructed
I have a background working in radio and as a recording engineer, and recently, iTunes and AAC have convinced me to rip my entire 700 CD collection.
I was intrigued by a product from SliMP3 that hooks up to your stereo and plays music files that it reads over an ethernet network. However, I can't stand listening to MP3 files, since the quality sucks.
When Apple announced the new iTunes with support for AAC, I decided to give it a try. I ripped a few tracks at 360k, and did an A/B comparison with the original AIFF files. (A handy way to do this on a Mac is to set QuickTime Player to only play sound for foreground windows, then get two tracks running at the same time, and click back and forth between them.)
I couldn't hear any difference between the two, so I ripped the same tracks at the default 128k, and to my amazement, still couldn't hear any difference. Now, I make no claim to "golden ears", but I am definitely fussier than most, and know that if I can hear no difference with my Sennheiser headphones, then AAC at 128 bit is good enough.
I immediately embarked on a project to rip all my CDs, getting a dozen or so done each day. Last night I finished Lard, The Leaving Trains and Low Pop Suicide. Tonight, it's on to the M's, starting with Malhavoc!
By the way, I have seen nothing that can touch iTunes in terms of convenience and usability. As I rip my CDs, I take care to classify each album and rate each song. Now I can use iTunes dynamic playlists to randomly select my favourites, or just Industrial music from the 80s, or just Electronica, or whatever. Apple's iTunes is invaluable, if for no other reason than for the meta-data that it tracks, such as when a song was played or ripped. Thanks, Apple!
Part 2 of my project: sell enough of my CDs to buy an iPod or some sort of networked audio component with the proceeds. I figure I need to unload these suckers before they become as value-less as my crates of LPs.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
All my CD's are in the attic in a box, well actually they were. I'm re-encoding my collection nown using 224kb/s AAC and I used 192kb/s VBR MP3 previously. I myself couldn't really tell the differences between these encodings and even between the original CD and 128kb/s AAC. But I've listened to loud music a lot :-)
Anyway I performed a number of blind comparison tests in different order with my wive listening. EVERY time (10 out of 10) she chose 224 AAC over 192 VBR MP3. Another funny thing is that se also quite often chose the MP3 and the AAC as sounding better than the original AIFF. Maybe it's a distortion thing but somehow the original AIFF sounded less "nice" than the compressed audio.
I can recognise now (after knowing what to listen for) between 192 VBR MP3 and 224 AAC. Especially with over-produced CD's (Simple Minds) or choir music (any requiem). And AAC somehow sounds "nicer", less "sharp" or "metallic". It's all very strange but I am re-encoding all my CD's. Again.
By buing a (certain kind of) DRM music track, you are buing something "unique" in the same sense as if you buy a special paint job on your car, even if the only unique thing is the DRM signature in the file. Though of course that DRM stuff is a bit more artifical limitation than the difficulty of transferring paint from one car to another...
But anyway it's not as if you are not *allowed* to sell DRM music you've bought (as long as you're not breaking plain old copyright law in the process). It's that nobody else is willing to buy it 'cos it's of no use to them.
Really? And that's not caused by the speakers? Can you describe this further? I don't notice this at all, and I'm listening on fairly nice headphones (Etymotic ER4). I should put up a direct CD rip for comparison; I unfortunately don't have the CD with me. However, I remember doing a blind test on this same source material and not being able to distinguish them. And I usually hear artifacts that most people don't.
Anyway...
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
Proper LAME Settings:
LAME --alt-preset extreme -Z [inputfile.wav] [outputfile.mp3]
Use a decent CD-ripping software, such as Exact Audio Copy.
Read http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ for detailed forums dealing with AAC/MP3/OGG and other advanced audio compression methods.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
"on average, the human ear can hear up to the 22khz-ish (25khz or so for gifted people) range"
It's no gift, mate. There's not much up there that you want to hear. UV light fixtures, misc machinery noises. Difference tones from student string players that make a high school orchestra truly painful to experience. There was a dept. store when I was a kid that I literally couldn't enter. Something in the escalator machines screeched really loudly and since they couldn't hear it they never fixed it.
I got a wicked ear infection in my 20s that wiped most of the extra high frequency hearing. It's now more the normal 17khz range that most people have - and I don't really miss it.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
> Compare CD with analogue laserdisc instead.
> AFAIK, there is no noise
Oh, there's noise alright. And the "CX" noise reduction circuitry really doesn't help much...
> and it definitely doesn't get worse with playback
Sure, the spinning and the laser don't do much, but with laserdisc you do get laser rot, and a poorly handled disc DOES result in audible artifacts in the analog channel.
Cheers
Simon
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Neither tattoos or car paint jobs are tangible discrete goods, therefore it is unreasonable to apply the same classification, or indeed the exact same legal protections to them as to discrete objects.
A digital music file is indeed a discrete, tradeable object, as kazaa and apples' music store demonstrates. If I was arguing that I should be able to resell something fundamentally non-discrete, such as say, the ID3 tag of an MP3 file, you'd have a point. As it is, the "unique" argument is something of a straw man.
But anyway it's not as if you are not *allowed* to sell DRM music you've bought (as long as you're not breaking plain old copyright law in the process). It's that nobody else is willing to buy it 'cos it's of no use to them.
Well it's a good thing they don't try and stop you actually reselling the object, as that would be against the law for them, as it is a legally protected right to resell a good without having to consult or seek permission from the original vendor.
my argument is that apple's DRM by it's nature, prevents the resale of the good, by defacto making it worthless to anyone but the original purchaser. That has the same *effect* as if they'd sued me to prevent me reselling the product *which they are not allowed to do* under copyright law.
To reiterate, the effect of the DRM is to remove one of my legal rights. Staw men about tattoo's aside, the DRM is impinging on my fair use.
Now, some people are prepared to accept that as part of the lower cost/ease of access of the product. Fair enough, that's their right to do so.
I on the other hand, will continue to back people like the congressmen who are trying to legislate that companies cannot use DRM to defacto remove fair use rights such as the right of resale, and point out to people who say that Apple's DRM is pretty much perfect, that this is one of the flaws with it.
AS I've said, kudos to Apple to get the RIAA to loosen their grip this much. I remain to be convinced they will get the death-grip reduced to the point where I can buy music online with no greater restrictions than if I buy a CD and rip it myself.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Now, I rip everything onto my server with 320kbps normal stereo in MP3 or AAC. I do this since I have good speakers on my stereo system and would like to use them to their fullest capacity. But I don't need this for my iPod which I use in the car. So is there a way of converting higher bitrate MP3s or AACs to lower bitrate versions without fucking up the quality? There was an article a few months back in one of the home theatre pornography magazines that I read where the author was talking about the conversion problems between different digital audio formats. A possible solution in the form of a metadata standard that would apply to all formats was mentioned. Being able to have a central store of high bitrate recordings that you could convert to lower bitrate versions without too many artefacts would be handy. There are times, such as when I'm listening to my stereo at home that audio quality is my greatest concern, there are times, such as when I'm on the road, that I just want a bunch of toonz at hand. I mean really, you can never tell when you'll be driving through Oregon and want to listen to some Spade Cooley or Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys only to find that you don't have them on your iPod.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I worry because there are many different ways a file can be degraded. A perceptual codec +a noise floor due to rounding can sound a lot worse with very quiet sections than the same perceptual codec without that extra noise.
My video compression blog
A digital music file certainly isn't a discrete object, since there can be at any given time any number of copies of it, and anybody can make identical copies of it. A digital music file is about as much a discrete object as, well, as an RFC document for instance.
I'm not sure if it's legal to take a personal copy of a CD and then sell the CD while keeping the copy. But is it legal to rip a CD into MP3s, then destroy the CD, then sell the MP3s? If it is, then can you sell only some of the MP3, or do you have to sell all of them as a bundle? Can you even keep the CD, and just sell the MP3's? (I mean, according to US law, not according to RIAA 'sue them all and let a bribed judge sort them out' opinion, of course.)
To reiterate, the effect of the DRM is to remove one of my legal rights. Staw men about tattoo's aside, the DRM is impinging on my fair use.
I'm not so sure a right of resale is such a legal right, that it must apply to a piece information itself (in this case music), and not just to the physical media the information is on (and then if there is no clearly defined physical media, there's nothing to re-sell).
Of course it could be made such, by a law which in effect grants consumers "irrevocable right to transfer both a piece of digital information (a music track, a book) and the license to use it, to another person, as a gift or by re-sale, while destroying their own copies of this piece of information". But how do you implement this technically? Outlaw DRM? Require free-of-charge service to transfer a DRM license from one person to another? This is the current situation effectivley (DRM not in use), and lo and behold, for almost all music, I have to either buy insanely expensive CD with lots of stuff i don't want, or pirate the piece I want.
Da Blog
Err, it certainly is.
Discrete means it can be distinguished as a separate, independent object from other objects of a similar type. I.e. I can tell my britney mp3 from my Justin Timberlake mp3 from my Bach ogg.
Being able to make copies is neither here or there. To draw a parallel - I can scan my book, print it, bind it, and there, I have a copy of it. I still have the original on my desk though. A physical, discrete object that is visibly complete in and of itself. And yes, an RFC document is in fact a discrete document.
I'm not sure if it's legal to take a personal copy of a CD and then sell the CD while keeping the copy.
It is not. You may backup or transcode a CD into another format for personal use (fair use), but only so long as you own the original work.
But is it legal to rip a CD into MP3s, then destroy the CD, then sell the MP3s?
No, for two reasons. Technicially, when you destroy the original media, you lose the right to keep the copies, i.e. the MP3's. More importantly, by selling (or giving away) the MP3's, you are breaking the fundamental rule of copyright, i.e. you may not distribute copies of a copyrighted work. That's what copyright means. The right to make copies, and that right rests with the owner of the work. In fact, the owner is by definition the person who holds the copyright on it.
I'm not so sure a right of resale is such a legal right,
It is the UK. You give me a discrete product, I give you money. That is called a sale. I can now walk away and do what the hell I want with that product, as long as I break no laws. You, as original seller have no way to restrict, impede or otherwise block what I (legally) do with your product, which specifically includes resale.
If its a digital good, one law I might be breaking is copyright, as that grants general broad rights to the original holder of the work. But under copyright law, again, the right of unrestricted resale of a purchased work (with the exception of fine art, where additional restrictions apply) is specifically mentioned as a fair use right. I cannot sell copies, I cannot give away copies, but I can definitely sell or give away the original product.
that it must apply to a piece information itself (in this case music), and not just to the physical media the information is on (and then if there is no clearly defined physical media, there's nothing to re-sell).
This is a standard piece of FUD propagated by the BSA and big software companies, and to a lesser extent, the RIAA.
You do not buy the physical media. You buy a physical media with a specific instance of a copyrighted work on it. You have certain fair use rights to go with that purchase of that product, to counteract the time limited (hah!) monopoly of the copyright holder. One of those specifically defined fair use rights is that of resale. The fact it comes on a round plastic disc is neither here or there.
Of course it could be made such, by a law which in effect grants consumers "irrevocable right to transfer both a piece of digital information (a music track, a book) and the license to use it, to another person, as a gift or by re-sale, while destroying their own copies of this piece of information".
That's rather ironic, as that law already exists. It's part of copyright law.
But how do you implement this technically? Outlaw DRM? Require free-of-charge service to transfer a DRM license from one person to another?
Ah, but there's the rub. I have the right to resell a DRM'd music file. It is however, worthless as the person I sell it too cannot use it. I do not have a mechanism to force the original seller to remove the DRM, nor is it legal for me to re
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
For instance a cymbal actually has much of it's energy in frequencies that we can not hear, but studies have shown the recording that contains the high frequency information sounds more real to the listener. Some how we percieve the information that we can't hear.
Could this have something to do with the slight nonlinearity of air? Would a subtle distortion function mimicking air's nonlinearity applied before the Nyquist brick wall give the same result?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Send would translate into "give", if you really want to use a different word. Steal is the word for "take away".
If a government has granted a limited monopoly to the author of a vector of bits, then reproducing and "giving" the bits to another party may constitute "taking away" from the author.
ObTopic: Likewise, if a government has granted a limited monopoly to the inventor of a method of audio analysis and data reduction, then performing such a method may constitute "taking away" from the inventor. That's why binaries of free MP3 and AAC encoders cannot be distributed openly in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries where Fraunhofer holds such a monopoly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Gigs are cheap.
Gigabytes of local storage at consumer reliability may be cheap. Gigabytes of storage at enterprise reliability are not cheap, and gigabytes of Internet transit are not cheap, which is why Apple sells recordings encoded at a 128 kbps data rate rather than 700 kbps like FLAC produces.
In addition, gigabytes of silicon ROM are not cheap, which is why most Game Boy Advance programs use sequenced music (such as MIDI with a sound font) rather than live recordings.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why doesn't some enterprising individual buy a license, write an open source player, and then sell it (source and binary) to Linux users?
The typical license for LZW data compression patents (the foreign counterparts to U.S. Patent 4,558,302 owned by Unisys, which expires in just over a week) do not allow redistribution of the encoder's source code and binaries. I'd guess that the typical licenses for software implementations of audio codec patents have similar terms; otherwise, somebody would probably have already donated an MP3 patent license to the LAME project.
Palmtops should run PalmOS.
That's like saying "Desktop computers should run BeOS." Palm OS is not the only PDA platform. For instance, Sharp Zaurus handheld computers do not ship with Palm OS; instead, they ship with a Linux OS.
iBooks and iMacs should run OS X.
What if the fastest available GUI for Linux runs more responsively on Linux than Quartz runs on Mac OS X on a given piece of Mac hardware?
There's no Ogg support in QuickTime.
I beg to differ, unless you're talking only about those QuickTime components shipped by Apple Computer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't see many people crying over the GIF patent, especially when M$IE has yet to implement support for PNG.
Microsoft Internet Explorer supports PNG images at least as well as it supports still GIF images. It correctly displays all indexed PNGs that I've thrown at it, whether non-transparent or binary-transparent.
The only thing GIF can do in IE that PNG and its cousins can't do in IE is animate. IE lacks support entirely for MNG animations. (Mozilla.org has temporarily removed the MNG decoder from the Mozilla trunk, but it'll be restored once it's cleaned up; see bug 18574 in b.m.o.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
there is an even better option 4. Buy from people like cdbaby
This helps precisely zero when I can't control the artist and song preferences of a family member who prefers major label teen pop.
I would prefer an option 5 though. A digital music service where I can download individual tracks with no DRM
Anything like eMusic?
Will I retire or break 10K?
And as far as emusic goes... You tell me cdbaby is useless to you, yet promote an online service with virtually no major artists in its catalogue?
emusic is a step in the right direction, as, as you say, the tracks are unencumbered. However, if I'm going to pay an ongoing non-cancellable subscription (minimum 3 or 12 months) it needs the type of music I listen to (britpop style and ambient, mainly), including the artists I currently listen to. It's different if there's no subscription, then you can cherry pick anything you like for minimum cost. With a subscription, you better be providing me with significant value. I only tend to buy a 'new' CD every few months, as I built up a substantial collection when I was younger and prices were lower.
And secondly, no WAY do 128kb mp3's cut it for me. I can hear the difference in anything less than 160kb, and on some tracks that minimum is 192. Ogg is even more preferable, but I'm a realist. I still don't see why I should buy something that is of lower quality than a CD, just because it's online.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
OK then, second hand record stores are surely an ever better option for you?
I agree wholeheartedly. In the last few months, I've bought four CDs at pawn shops.
And as far as emusic goes... You tell me cdbaby is useless to you, yet promote an online service with virtually no major artists in its catalogue?
I meant something with a business model "like eMusic", not something with a selection "like eMusic". Sorry for the confusion.
And secondly, no WAY do 128kb mp3's cut it for me
The files available from eMusic were once 128 kbps MP3. Now they're 192 kbps ABR MP3.
Will I retire or break 10K?