Slashdot Mirror
Are iTMS's 128kbps Songs Worth Collecting?
pinchhazard writes "Randall Stross of the New York Times offers his opinion on iTunes Music Store's decision to offer downloads at only 128 kbps, and that decision's potential to affect collectibility of the songs. The article says that Apple makes the claim on its web site that "you'll get the full quality of uncompressed CD audio using about half the storage space."
Rhapsody, which offers encoding at 192 kbps, is compared."
It only took till the second modded-up post for me to find someone defending Apple's infinite wisdom and being rewarded by the moderators for doing so.
I would like you to challenge yourself by doing a little thought experiment. Not just the original poster but everyone who read the post and said, right on, you tell those Windoze fools. Please try to wipe your pre-formed opinion from your mind and look at this story objectively, and then come up with several reasons why Apple *should* offer downloads in a lossless format or at least at a better bitrate. Can you even do it? Or are your preconceptions that everyone who criticises Apple is wrong and an ill-informed idiot so overpowering that you can't even conceive of a valid argument that goes against your programmed response?
What it comes down to is that Apple is charging 99c per song for a crappy bitrate. Most serious music listeners that I know do not rip below 192kbps MP3 and far more often above 256kbps. Myself I go for 320kbps as a baseline. On a decent stereo with a subwoofer there is absolutely no question that you can tell the difference between a 128kbps AAC and an uncompressed CD audio track for all but the simplest, slowest music.
As for the megahertz myth... whatever else you want to say about it, until recently Intel and AMD have been so insanely far ahead of Apple that even if you want to take a 2:1 'myth factor' into account you still come out ahead on a (real) PC. And let's not even THINK about dollars per unit of non biased performance (tm).
Now I prepare myself to be sacrificed to the gods of Apple and modded into oblivion... let the cleansing of the thought crimes begin (Mod -1: Failure to Think Different (tm)).
Read Pynchon.
twat
First, they are revealing the secret -- which they assume none of us gullible rubes ever realized before -- that most digital music we get from the internet is stored with lossy compression.
Come off it, this is an article aimed at the typical user, not techies/audiophiles. Why should the general public know details of audio compression schemes?
The implication is that consumers will rebel someday when they discover they've bought a bunch of music that isn't "true CD quality".
Well the difference will become apparent when AAC becomes an obsolete format, as transcoding to another lossy format makes artifacts much more obvious. So yes, someday people who were otherwise happy with the quality may start complaining.
Whatever. Anybody who's even vaguely familiar knows that these compressed audio formats are approximately equivalent, and a 192kbps compressed in any popular format will definitely sound better than a 128kbps compressed in any other popular format.
Who cares what the company marketing departments are doing? The article is right: for certain people, 128kbps is only acceptable for certain purposes (listening in a bus), 192 is generally acceptable.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.