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McDonald's Billion-Song iTunes Giveaway
camperslo writes "The New York Post online
has this story.
"Less than a month after Pepsi announced a blockbuster deal to give away 100 million downloads from Apple's iTunes music service to its customers, McDonald's is close to a announcing a much bigger deal"." No matter what you think of iTunes, this is tremendous publicity for music on demand services in general. If the public gets a taste for it, this could be the beginning of the end for the audio CD.
...but what if you like the audio CD? what if you prefer lossless music, with coverart, booklet and printed media you can hold in your hand?
If you prefer lossless music you aren't listening to CDs either. Maybe pristine vinyl if you're lucky.
A CD is not lossless. Because it is a digital format it cannot reproduce some audio. Go with vinyl.
-> You get to choose the song.
(reference: http://www.macnews.com/2003/10/16/applepepsi )
-> For Pepsi, it's one in 3 bottles that will have the code. They're selling 300 million bottles as part of the promotion, 100 million of them will have the codes in.
-> Cans aren't part of the promotion. Just 20-ounce and one liter.
-> McDonald's hasn't said anything about how they would be giving them away.
[Yeah, yeah, I know, just moderate me down as a troll or flamebait already, I don't care, and it still doesn't change the fact that people want to see their names in print that they're willing to post things that show they're being lazy and/or ignorant]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
MacMinute notes a statement from McDonald's regarding today's rumor about the McDonald's and iTunes giveaway.
According to McDonalds, "There are no agreements to announce, so anything else is pure speculation."
McDonald's goes on to say that they are continuing to pursue "bold new initiatives in the areas of music, sports, fashion and entertainment" and that news can be expected in the coming weeks to months.
Sorry to break it to you, but vinyl is also not lossless. There is still a margin of error in the production (and you can not go below the size of the vinyl (or whatever LPs are actually made of) molecule anyway).
And if you take into consideration that you CAN NOT get back EXACTLY from vinyl what was written to it, while with a CD this is perfectly possible, you should doubly reconsider your statement.
Real life is overrated.
Technically a CD is lossless. It uses sampling, but nyquist says that by using 44.1 KHz sampling frequency we can reproduce everything from 0 Hz to 22.05 KHz exactly. Now we are ignoring the frequencies above 22 KHz so I guess you can count that as loss, but it's not really called such. Now AAC, MP3, WMA, etc all throw out frequencies in the audible band, never to be heard from again. You can never reconstruct the same signal hence lossy.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Good idea! However, you lose this round. Kevin Bacon was in Footloose, not Flashdance.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
It seems that McDonalds characterizes the story as pure speculation.
Yeah, but some of us can hear sound above 22kHz. And even those who can't can still perceive fast transients at higher frequencies.
The human ear doesn't just do fourier analysis. Something similar, but it's a lot more complicated. Thus the "audible band" is more nuanced then a mere numerical frequency range.
Are CD's lossless, even within the bounds of human perception? no. But are they "good enough" for 99.999% of the population? yes. For that matter, so is mp3/aac/ogg/whatever is in style this month.
A CD is lossy. Nyquist says that your sampling frequency has to be at least twice as high as the bandwidth of your signal. The lossiness comes in due to the band limiting that is done to avoid anti-aliasing. Any frequencies above 22 KHz are filtered out, so if the highest frequencies of your music are pure sinusoids then yes, it would be lossless, but if they're non-sinusoidal then you will have losses. Consider a 20 KHz square wave. It's below the 22 KHz cutoff so it will be duplicated perfectly, correct? Nope. The 20 KHz square wave is made up of higher frequency sinusoidal waves: 20 KHz sine wave, 60 KHz sine wave, 100 KHz sine wave and so on. Your 20 KHz square wave will be reproduced as a 20 KHz sine wave instead.
You're also lossy because the amplitude of your signal is discrete. The voltage of your waveform can't take on any voltage, only one of 2^16th (from memory) discrete values. That's another form of signal loss.
I still believe that a CD has higher fidelity sound than any vinyl I've heard. Maybe if you spend enough cash and get some very specialized equipment and special albums you'll have higher quality sound, but I'm not personally willing to spend that much money.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
the parent poster was right.
you need to learn how real recording studios work.
CD is so far from being 'pretty damn close' that its funny.
go read about DAT tapes and the new firewire storage we have been using in the studio for the past 2 years (many more years for dat)
compared to the dat recording a cd sounds just as bad as an mp3 or wav or anything you could get your hands on
you are right about one thing
you shouldnt reply to trolls, especially when they are correct and you are wrong
you should also lookup what a troll really is
you and the parent poster arnt trolling, nor am i. we are pointing out facts, and yours happen to not match reality. its called being corrected, not being trolled.
trolls say things they dont believe just to get you to kneejerk react. i see no proof of that in the parents -correct- post
McDonalds do sell apples. Real ones; healthy food.
75c cents here in Sydney.
Anyway, grab a spectrum analyzer and look at the signal. What's the difference between a 20 kHz sine wave and a 20 kHz square wave? The 20 kHz square wave is composed of a 20 kHz sine wave (the fundamental) and odd-order harmonics at 60 kHz, 100 kHz etc. I don't care how golden your ears are, unless you are a bat, you will never be able to hear the odd-order harmonics of a 20 kHz square wave. As far as human perception is concerned, the 20 kHz sine wave and 20 kHz square wave are indistinguishable.
The 16-bit ADC (analog to digital converter) introduces quantization noise, but the SQNR (signal to quantization noise ratio) is 96 dB. With properly mastered program material, the quantization noise is inaudible.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The sound quality is better
Now, which part of the vinyl experience do you find "better"? Is it the rather limited signal-to-noise ratio (50-55dB vs. at least 95dB for a descent CD player)? Or is it the "warm analogue feeling" of the sound that comes from the non-linear frequency response?
I have yet to find a serious (not written by another enthusiast who finds $75/m cables essential to the sound) article that finds the sound from LP superior to that of CD.
Regarding the lossiness of CD's; yes, CD's are lossy. No, 16 bits are not enough for the human ear. But it is not like a vinyl record is a great format for storing audio information.
Saying that studios generally prefer analogue recording (and that it gives better sound) is just plain silly. Studios use Pro Tools. Which happens to record in 24 bits and 192kHz, although 96kHz is commonly used. Then the recording is dithered to 16 bits and 44kHz in the CD mastering process.
In my experience, studios that analogue recording equipment simply cannot afford a good Pro Tools setup.