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.

Comments

McDonald's: No Deal To Announce

[amanpatelhotmail.com]

This from macrumors:

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.

Re:AAC is nice and all...

[eXtro]

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.