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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."
The "Half the size" bit is about Apple Lossless
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
for $.99 a song, you should get the best quality and 128k is just OK...it's cheaper to buy the cd and rip it yourself @ 192kbps
I'd expect them to be roughly equal to 160 bit MP3s, but I'd expect 192 bit MP3s to be superior. That's just opinion, though.
... Except that Apple isn't using MP3, but AAC - which provides significantly higher quality at 128kb/s.
;-)
Sounds a bit like the Megahertz Myth, all over again.
(although I'm unsure what Rhapsody uses, maybe it uses MP3Pro which is pretty good).
I think that 128kbps is a little shortsighted from Apple, there will be losses in the audio at that rate. 192 kbps AAC would be preferable of course.
Then again, most people listen to music on cheap headphones, speakers, etc, or just want music in the background. In that respect 128 kbps AAC is way more than necessary, and beats a cheap FM radio totally (if only in that you don't have a retard DJ wittering on between tracks).
Music is just part of life these days.
I've ran a number of informal listening tests, and many of the people I tested cannot tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 (LAME) and a 256kbps MP3 (LAME) consistently, even on good equipment. (Too much loud music as a teenager, perhaps)?
However, there most definatly are people who can tell the difference, and I am one of them. Personally, I like 200+ mpc (MusePack) files - MusePack seems to do a good job preserving the crispness, and "body" (don't know a better term for it) of the audio.
Bookmark BugMeNot or get the BugMeNot Firefox plugin. Use it. Love it.
I allways encode my stuff in 320kbps variable bitrate, since HD space is cheap, and if I lose a CD, I can be sure that I have a nice quality copy of the song. Recently, I've tried using FLAC too. Even better (lossless), but takes 2.5 times more space or so...
I would only buy 128 kpbs songs from itunes if they had some kind of system where I could download FLAC versions later, when I have more HD space. You've paid for 'mechanical rights', just like with full quality CS's, so why not?
Apple's site uses the "you'll get the full quality of uncompressed CD audio using about half the storage space" in reference to the Apple Lossless codec, not the 128 kbps compression in iTMS songs.
This article is full of so many distortions, it's mind-bending. 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. The article goes on to explain that all music with lossy compression sounds crummy (comparing it with 8-track tapes), and the only measure of digital sound quality that matters is the bit-rate.
Music from the iTunes Store, they say, sounds extra-crummy since it's compressed to only 128 kbps. (The distinction between AAC and MP3 is never even mentioned.) The implication is that consumers will rebel someday when they discover they've bought a bunch of music that isn't "true CD quality". Clutching torches and pitchforks, they'll storm the ramparts at Cupertino.
Maybe I'm just a tin-eared old goat, but the difference between a CD and a 128 kbps MP3 track doesn't leap out at me in casual listening. When it comes to 128 kbps AAC or 192 kbps MP3 tracks, they sound like CDs to me -- even when I listen closely, with headphones. Maybe if I had audiophile speakers or better headphones (or younger ears) it would make more difference, but honestly. . . This is not a distinction that keeps me up laying awake at night, wondering if my music collection is subtly flawed.
At the other extreme, the true golden-eared stereophiles of our world have complained since CDs first appeared about *their* low sampling rate. What, only 44,000 samples per second? You can't capture sonic detail at the high frequencies that way! But given the difference in sales between iPods on the one hand, and SACD or DVD-Audio players on the other hand, I think anyone can see which way the wind is blowing.
I'm doubting the majority's ability to discern or even care about the quality differences. However, anyone into serious collecting will definitely very much be concerned with this. Probably won't hurt Apple's business significantly though, and I'm sure they know it.
Just check out CDs from the Library and rip them with abcde to flac and archive the .flacs on DVD-R (you can fit about 11 "CDs" per DVD), then make .ogg copies or whatever for your devices.
I assume this is why apple is making their music players have so much storage. The smallest 'pod available right now holds about 2 weeks of lowish bitrate vbr mp3s. Then again, our cable modems haven't gotten 5x faster in the intervening years, so I guess you'll still have to wait longer for the stuff that costs money. That and installing Gentoo/Debian/Slackware/FreeBSD on my home box.
Didn't we have a similiar discussion when the world went from vinyl records to the CD disk?
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
I only pay 10 bucks for the CD's on iTMS. Not 17 bucks like in stores. The download is actually about 40% off the retail price. Now if that discount is worth sacrificing the art, quality, etc, thats your choice.
Yes, unquestionably. Actually, the poor overall quality of low-bitrate lossy encoding is what deters me from iTunes et al.
It should be noted that the defects of inferior recordings become increasingly apparent with better playback hardware. Limitations of consumer-grade hardware is a key limiting factor to the widespread adoption of higher quality audio recording formats (both physical media and encoding schemes).
Kinda like the difference between 8bit and 16bit pcm data, there's less hiss, more clarity, better rounding of sound (128 has a very blocky bass sound where 192 smoothes it)
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
That was the promise way back when the first CD's came out. You'd then buy your the complete discography of your favorite band, thinking that even though you were shelling out $15 a disk, you were getting top quality recordings that were on indestructable media.
Then, five years later, guess what? The record companies remastered and re-released those same tracks. It doesn't matter if your favorite artist is Rush or Cat Stevens or Miles Davis, it all got re-mastered. Doesn't it ever strike you as odd, and perhaps intentional, that the first release of every popular CD was mastered so poorly it needed to be redone just five years later?
So along comes the iTunes store, and we're seeing the same damned thing. Once again, there's promises of how great the music sounds. But instead of crappy mastering, they are using crappy bit rates. And you know exactly where this is leading. Five years from now, they'll bump up their sampling rates to 192 kps or something. And even though you've already bought and paid for all your favorite songs, you're going to be asked to buy them all again if you want the best sound. And in another five years they'll probably jump to uncompressed SACD quality downloads, and you'll feel this big incentive to buy the same songs yet again.
Not that I care. I stopped buying CDs a long time ago. The entire business is run by dishonorable people, and now it looks like that mentality is dragging down one of the computer industry's more principled companies.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
In a few years, when everyone is on broad band and storage costs half of what it does now, they will upgrade to "premium" 256 kbps songs. Lots of people will buy their collection again, just like they did with their record collection.
Allofmp3 suppots on-the-fly encoding to let you have 192 kbps Ogg's or whatever. Even FLAC or raw CD Audio is available, but only for some songs.
:-P
I have no idea how legal the site is where I live, but it's definitely legal in Russia.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
In my experience in using my iPod, I'm more than happy with 128kbps AAC encoded rips of my CDs and am very happy with the audio quality of the stuff I've bought off iTunes.
Line eater? What lin
I say boycott any format that is any worse than the modern 192k (preferably better). If they can really do 128k without sounding any worse, that's fine. But based on the reviews I've seen, they haven't, so it's not.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Call me crazy, but I was listening to this one song over and over again. I kept switching between 128 mp3, 192 mp3, 320 mp3, and I'd listen to 128 AAC sometimes too.
I cannot tell the difference between CD and 320 mp3. There is a very subtle difference between CD and 192. 128 is a joke.
For AAC, I've found that importing the song at 192 is about the same as 320 mp3.
Give it a shot. Take some song that has some subtle sounds, like accoustic guitar, and listen to it. Import it from the original CD and listen to all the formats. It's surprising. I used the song "Battery" from Metallica because it has a mix of sounds. Specifically at the beginning where they're using 1 or 2 accoustic guitars.
Let's Look at the benefits of purchasing compressed online music:
... uh, that's it.
1. Immediate gratification.
Now, let's look at the disadavatages of purchasing compressed online music:
1. Lower sound quality. Everyone I have compared them for has asked "What's wrong with it?" after listening to the CD and then the AAC verison.
2. Codecs are changing very rapidly. You are investing a a fleeting software phenomenon that depends on the current and rapidily changing technology and the marketing whims of the computer and music industries. Soon there could be much better quality or with increased bandwidth CD quality. SOme sights now sell 24 bit flacs which you can burn using you regualr old DVDs and burner into DVD-A for BETTER THAN CD QUALITY.
3. Commercial CDs are inherently more stable than CD-Rs.
4. It is extremely difficult and time concuming to archive digital files for very long periods of time.
5. In most cases you get no liner notes or cover art.
6. You invite DRM.
7. For all the above, at a lot of stores, particularly iTMS, you PAY MORE for all these problems than a fine sounding CD, or a much better sounding DVD-A or SACD.
the NYT article quotes the idiots at Stereophile. When your magazine recommends that people buy 200$ power cords for their reciever to "filter" out the bad power that your outlet gets, thats trouble.
Stereophile is also well known for shunning proper ABX sound listening tests because with such a test they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a $5000 amp and a $200 amp. link
The fact that the article doesn't even go into how AAC compression works, makes it pretty obvious that its a sham. This article seems to be written from a elitist, anti-logical stance. Sigh.
I'm not into instant gratification as the article implies. In this consumerist society, I'd prefer to be an intelligent purchaser rather than one of the many throw away consumers. I wait for the CDs to show up on half.com for $5, which ends up less than $8 after shipping. I receive my uncompressed CDs at less than 80% of your $10, FLAC it and I haven't sacrificed any quality of the art. I also have the original so that I can circumvent the next disruptive technology to come along. I know not everyone can wait, but I can most of the time. Oh, yeah, I don't own an iPod. Instead, I have a Rio Karma, so FLAC is portable at the get go.
Recently, they released an EP by one of my favorite artists, Iron & Wine, that had at least one song that I had never heard from him before. I snapped it up quickly.
I wish iTunes would move closer to VBR, as I'm an --aps junkie, but I have a feeling they will eventually. There are times I will occasionally buy songs on the service because I could find them there more easily than using something else.
Side note: Getting Hymn to work on a Mac is a bitch. :(
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Just make sure you don't criticize the iTMS's quality before you've actually listened to songs from it. To me, they're easily CD-quality; I wouldn't be able to tell the differences. I don't know much about the technical differences between AAC and MP3, aside from that MP3 comes from MPEG-1 and AAC comes from MPEG-4, but I suppose AAC just allows for an inherently higher quality at a similar bitrate.
Signature.
It's good to see that as dumbed down as this article was, they got the Rhapsody definitions correct.
ITMS uses 128kbps AAC, wrapped with Apple DRM
Real Music Store uses 192kbps AAC, wrapped with Helix/Real DRM
As of a year ago, Rhapsody used 128kbps WMA, which is only streamed to you in a protected format, so that it is only cached and not in a saveable format. I doubt this has changed much.
The underlying idea behind Rhapsody is kinda cool. Think of the entire ITMS minus the exclusives, and then think of that being streamed to you at $10/month. That's basically what you have. It's an awesome service for discovering new music (just like any CD store, who's going to put down a lot of money on music that sucks? Just use the subscription service to give it a try before buying the CD-quality, well, CD).
Of course, the giant and huge drawback of Rhapsody is that you don't to keep any of the music if you cancel your subscription. In this respect, it's a bit like cable TV or the premium movie channels.
Maybe for older folks whose hearing has degraded somewhat. People usually cite an upper limit of around 20kHz. I can certainly hear a tone at 20kHz, from a good tone generator (not a cheap one with harmonic interference.) That alone puts the Nyquist rate at 40kHz.
What's more, although people may not consciously perceive higher frequencies, work has shown that people do subconsciously perceive them.
To quote (from the article I'm linking):
The author also notes such facts as that 40% of a set of cymbal's audio energy is above 20kHz. So a 96kHz audio recording (range=48kHz) is not unreasonable. But good luck finding equipment to really play it back on correctly
Article: There's Life Above 20kHz!
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
The author of this article shows no understanding of signal processing or how music data is compressed, so his conclusions are silly. Comparing lossy music compression to 8-track tapes is silly.
He complains about lossy compression, but saving signal data (like photos or music) is always a lossy process, because there no exact digital representation of them. You decide to save a certain amount of data, let's say, 3 megabytes (or 30 megabytes) for 3 minutes of music, and then you decide what to put in those megabytes. You will always be able to get more/better data into the same space if you use signal processing compressors than if you just use uncompressed samples saved at some sampling rate and width per sample.
People who don't understand signal processing have a problem with the concept of "lossy." Signal processing engineers are not idiots. They don't design algorithms saying "I want to lose information and make a lower quality signal." They're just saying, "I want to save the data in this much space, which part of the data do I want to lose?" If you're saving recorded music, you are always losing data. The goal is to lose the least important part. The idea is slightly subtle, and it is apparently confusing to some people.
No, it isn't. I suspected it might be deficient due to the misleading quotes in the slashdot summary. The author of the article, Randall Stross, knows perdectly well the difference between lossy and lossless audio compression and demonstrates that knowledge in his article. Both AAC and MP3 use lossy compression based on perceptual characteristics of human hearing. They both try to gain space by "throwing out" what we wouldn't be able to hear.
The quote about using half the space refers to Apple Lossless Compression which is yet another entry in the lossless audio compression sweepstakes. So far there are at least three other distinct candidates: APE, FLAC, and SHN. Each does its own 2:1 (approximately) compression which allows for all the bits to be restored during decompression. But 128 Kbps is a 10:1 compression and it is lossy whether one uses MP3, AAC, or ATRAC.
The lossless standards take up about 5 times the space/bandwidth but don't suffer from any loss of quality with respect to the red book audio standard. Since disk space and network bandwidth are cheap and getting cheaper all the time why bother with lossy compression? You could also say why bother with a mere factor of 2 and just use straight CD files but that factor of 2 is free. $50 is still less than $100 but the audio quality is identical.
Apple made a brilliant business decision to move early and decisively with the tools and standards that were available. The challenge now is to evolve to lossless compression as Apple has begun to do and eventually raise the bar for the commercial standard for digitized audio in general. Both SACD and DVD-A are hopelessly compromised by DRM bullshit so who knows if that will ever happen.
Whatever your opinions on AAC vs. MP3 vs. Ogg and so on, anybody reading this article should know that Randall Stross has an extreme bias against Steve Jobs. Stross is the author of "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing", a historical piece on NeXT Computer. You can't go two pages in that book without running across Stross editorializing (negatively) about Jobs' personality or intelligence. Not very professional for somebody calling himself a "historian".
So, aside from the fact that Stross is a completely non-technical writer, take his views on Apple strategy and products with a grain of salt the size of Gibraltar.
Well, if you want to do illegal, at least do it the right way and get Acquisition, Shareaza or the likes.
allofmp3.com songs are *not* legal under European or American terms, just under Russian terms.
Also the reviewer must be confused the iTunes can encode in many formats, including Apples lossless format that takes about half the drive space but the iTMS is 128khz AAC files only.
I have recorded the same tracks at varying rates and it is very hard to tell the 128khz ACC files from the uncompressed songs. Listening to them on most car stereos and on iPods in places that have even modest noise and you can't tell the difference.
If I really cared about the music I would buy the CD but having so many CD's in my collection I might not ever listen to again the iTMS is simple, fast and easy. What I like this month I might not like next month and who wants a large file on an iPod when you don't listen to it.
Unless some online store offers tracks over 192khz then they really don't compare with 128khz AAC tracks. Slashdot readers should check out the results of the online listening test.
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/index.html
Where do you shop? Overpriced boutiques where the thin waif of a sales person tries to sell you some idiotic membership card?
I downloaded a free song from iTMS last week.. "They" by Jem. I liked it so much, I went to Best Buy and bought the entire album for $9.99, the same price as iTMS and with art and a real stamped CD. And I got to rip it at my choice of quality.
Invariably, when talking about purchasing music online, someone likes to bring up FUD about Cd's that cost around $18-22. Reality check: Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon.com and countless other stores routinely sell music for well under $15 and closer to $10 when you get right down to it.
It's been posted over and over again, but people keeps forgetting. Apple's AAC is not the same AAC that you get when you buy a CD and rip it to AAC. Apple's AAC is encoded from master tapes, therefore, eliminating the master tapes -> PCM (CD) -> CCA process. The result is better than what you get at the same bitrate. However, it is debatable at which point the bitrate defeats the source.
Since the last update the Apple AAC encoder pulled way ahead of the others. just google for it.
I'd say 128 AAC WAS like 160 mp3, which is FINE for me, I can't tell on most music; HOWEVER, since the update, I'd say 128 AAC is more like 192 mp3. I can no longer hear the stuff I used to be able to hear at 128. Not that I have perfect hearing, but there was a very noticable change when the updated the encoder...
More importantly, would be to ask if Apple re-encodes their music store music when they get encoder upgrades...
All that said, I now encode at 160 for good measure; because my audio freak friends can't tell between 160 and uncompressed.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
People here are saying its like a 192kb/s mp3. AAC is about 1/3 better (see http://www.mp3-tech.org/aac.html) than mp3 (imho) which brings it closer to 160kb/s mp3. you've also got to remember that this isn't a lame vbr comparrison but a fraunhoffer cbr comparrison which has not had the massive open souce development efforts over many many years.
So yes, very adequete on iPod (especailly with those relatively average headphones that come with it), but for playing through any mid to high level hi-fi (depending on music type) it could be better.
Have you ever tried to describe highly technical concepts to highly non-technical people? As you go on and you realize that they don't understand basic required concepts...you find yourself simplifying things so much such that anyone in the know who overheard you would think you're a blittering idiot. If this savy eavesdropper only arrived to hear your final version of the explaination, he would probably think you have no clue what you're talking about. I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but it's harder then it looks you know.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Well, let's see. I used to listen to albums, that were apparently far superior in sound quality than anything else in the world. They would get scratches that would cause them to make popping sounds and would add fuzz to the music. What the hell, it still sounds fine.
Next, I bought cassettes. Cassettes had an always present hiss in the background and after several plays, the music on the cheaply made cassettes would start to fade. What's worse, the tapes would eventually stretch and snap after overuse. That was fine too. I could listen to my music.
Then I bought CDs. These were okay too. They were bulkier than cassettes--sort of. They were also prone to scratches, but far less so than records. The problem was that they were digital and not analog, which meant that I wasn't getting to hear all the sound that was being played by the artists (as we obviously were with LPs and cassettes since they had infinite information storage capabilities). Oh dear. Where's my tape hiss? Where's the fullness of my phonograph? Well, whatever. I can still hear the music.
Now I have lossless MP3s and AACs. The horror. They don't scratch. They don't add tape hiss. They don't wear out at all and are incredibly portable. However, they don't store all the information that our CDs do. They even distort some of that sound. Oh no! Oh, wait, I can still hear the music. That's okay.
So, my point is, what the hell does it matter? There's no perfect recording medium. If there were no choices we'd be happy with whatever we had. Now that the common consumer has a choice, she frets day and night over how many bits she's losing. Talk about a waste of time. Freedom of choice isn't always a blessing. It can distract you from those other freedoms that are slipping away.
No, it's a slightly different story. AAC beats MP3 in listening tests, but only by a little bit. (And Ogg Vorbis beats AAC, again by a little bit).
Being the skeptical type, when iTMS was launched, and having not been impressed w/ 128k mp3s I did my own quick A/B test of 128k AAC / AIFF from the CD. First, Rip a song (preferably one w/ a significant dynamic range to 128k AAC in itunes. Then select the song and choose "Show song file" from the file menu. Right/Control click (thats either right -or- control, yes, you _can_ use a multi-button mouse w/ a mac.) and choose "Open With" then select Quicktime Player from the submenu that appears. Open the song track from the CD in a similar manner. Now you have the original and your 128k AAC both open in QT Player. Then select "Play all Movies" from the Movie menu. both will start simultaneously. Now you can option-tab to switch between which as focus (and thus which is heard) and do a real-time AB test. It put me at ease. Once you have your hand in place you can close your eyes and randomly switch back and forth a bit to loose track, then try to guess which you're listening to.
MSRP - Tax, Title & Licence Extra Your Milage May Vary
Apple, Microsoft and Thompson each claim that their codecs are more efficient than the old standby, 128 kbs MP3. Thompson proposes 64 kbs MP3Pro; Microsoft, 96 kbs WMA.
Apple, realizing that disk space is cheap, that bandwidth should be cheap, and that "128" is so entrenched in the minds of the consumer, has wisely decided not to offer smaller downloads. Perhaps 128 kbs AAC is equivalent 160 kbs MP3. Perhaps not. It's all dependent on the ears of the listener, the audio hardware, the quality of the original recording, and the subtlety of the original piece.
It has long been observed that much popular music has been "compressed" in the studio, as cynical producers believe that any attempt to utilize the entire dynamic range of CDDA will simply result in tinny sounding music, when reproduced on cheap hardware. As a result, such music is amenable to further compression with low rate lossy codecs.
But some other labels, recognizing that their customers have access to high end systems, release recordings lauded for dyanmic range and subtlety. These tracks are less resilient to lossy compression techniques.
Keith Jarrett's "The Melody at Night With You", a selection of solo piano pieces, is a rather subtle piece, known for, inter alia, the sustained piano notes. It sounds rather undistinguished on cheap computer speakers. When compressed to, say 192 kbs AAC, many more of the notes are distorted. It is therefore stored losslessly on my hard disk. Other CDs in my collection are less subtle, and don't require that much space.
Ideally, a consumer would match individual codecs to his ears, his equipment, and his choice of music. But this is a time consuming process-- it's much easier to pick a (high) bit rate, rip at 15-20x and be done with it, returning later to rerip when one notices that the elided subtleties were sonically and artistically important.
As for the quality of downloadable tracks, it's not enough to buy the CD, and encode using various consumer level codecs. One must purchase the tracks from the online site, and compare, preferably using a blind test, as the various music stores might encode using 24 bit masters, professional level codecs, artist participation and other resources not available to the average consumer.
If one reencodes a DVD using Apple's quicktime, the resulting output is quite poor, at least in comparison to other codecs designed around the DVD rip scene. But the Quicktime trailers that Apple distributes are exquisite, indicating, in a rather broad sense, that when Apple encodes a piece of media, its results can be superior to those of its customers.
>Once freeze-dried, there is no way to reconstitute the music into CD quality for playing through a good stereo.
Most people forget the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown , Phil Spector, etc. recorded music for *transister radios* In most cases, high fidelity is a red herring argument concocted by the music industry to sell more music.
The not-good-enough-for-home-stereo argument is nonsense. I play MP3s and AACs through my home stereo all the time--the sound quality is indistinguishable between CDs. And that is using only the sound card's line-out jack and a cheap connector.
Admittedly I listen to mostly rock. Classical music is more difficult to encode, given its more dynamic nature.
joab
1. Nyquist theorem also assumes that the samples are real numbers, not 16 bit ints.
2. Phase is not important IF you have a perfect band limiting filter when doing ADC conversion and perfect sinc(x) filter on the output. Of course building a perfect noncausal filter (sinc(x)) is physically impossible, thus the higher sampling frequency. Only dogs can hear imperfections near 20KHz anyway.
The biggest problem with CDs right now is not their sampling frequency (although raising it to 96KHz would allow engineers to not pay so much attention to band-limiting - the aliasing would be well above 20KHz anyway which you can't hear, and sinc(x) filter could be simply omitted on the DAC end).
The biggest problem is that the samples themselves are 16 bit, so any kind of digital processing in your stereo that goes before DAC can screw up things pretty dramatically. The problem becomes especially bad for low-level signals.
First of all IANAE (Iamnotanengineer) but a former audiophile that used to do quite a bit of signal processing while in grad school.
I see what you are saying about introduction of artifacts going from a 48 kHz digital copy to a 44 khz digital copy and then compressing. What some posters don't seem to get is that processing digital is not the same as working with analog - you get essentially digitization artifacts of digitization artifacts if you are not careful.
However, I have a problem with your test about cutting off frequencies above 16kHz. Seems to me that this would be very hard to do without affecting the other frequencies in the waveform. Again this is because we are dealing with digital copies and thus can only adjust the signal by a single bit at single time point. So we have to worry about introducing more quantization noise. Furthermore the distortion would only be in a subset of higher (not important) and lower frequencies and not across the entire spectrum. This might be the the variance that you hear when you do this especially in quiet passages.
From what I remember, vinyl has a practical limitation of somewhere around 16kHz especially as you get near the end of the record where the grooves are more tightly spaced. However, vinyl still sounds better A/B (to my ears) at least compared to early CD's made from analog masters probably because of the lack of digitization artifacts. (Also, the early sound engineers probably didn't know what they were doing yet and there might not have been much signal above 16K in the masters anyway since the orignal engineers knew it was going to be for vinyl so there was not much benefit for digital to start with but that is another issue..)
Oh to get back on topic, I was listening to a friend's high end system and we both noticed the distortion in the digital MP3 streams that we got from his cable radio stations. Don't know what the bitrate was but I wouldn't want to buy it either...
NYT Describing Real's service: "With a subscription service like RealRhapsody, one saves personal tastes in the form of playlists that replace actual music collections, providing access to favorites no matter what storage format comes out "
I'm really surprised the New York Times allows this blantant advertising within its editorial content, done through the guise of one interviewee's quote. I know the NYT is trying to appeal to a younger hipper audience, but damn! if this is the best they can probe the problems with music distribution, they should stick to covering opera.
Could the reporter not do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations? How much would it cost pay a small subscription fee the rest of your life, starting at $10 a month and working upwards over the years.
My parents bought 4 Simon & Garfunkel albums in the late 60s. Cost? Maybe $16 for the whole lot. They then enjoyed them for the 30 years. Then I transferred them to CD. That $16 has lasted them the better part of a century. They, like most people, do not own a *lot* of music, maybe 70 albums total (most of which I listen to now, actually). The cost of that collection is *far* cheaper than what they would have had to pay in subscription fees, would such a subscription service been in place in the 1970s. Now they enjoy the msuic they bought years ago without paying anybody anything!
joab
allofmp3.com songs are *not* legal under European or American terms, just under Russian terms.
I notice that corporations are now able to outsource their labour costs to effectively captive populations trapped in low-wage countries. Corporations also take advantage of manufacturing within countries with laxer environmental and social welfare laws.
What's the point of all this hoopla about "global free trade" if consumers are not equally able to outsource their media purchases to arbitrage price differentials and different national IP laws and regimes? People in the expensive, walled-garden West using legal encoding and distribution services are just being good global citizens, spreading their wealth...
Da Blog
Could the reporter not do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations?
I'm pretty sure that the "reporter" did not want to do any back-of-the-envelope calculations. The column gives the reader a strong impression that there's something wrong with the iPod and iTMS. Stross gives a flawed explanation of music compression, and then proceeds to single out Apple as though they're the only ones that distribute compressed music. He never bothers to explain that all the online music distributors sell music compressed to about the same degree with lossy techniques. He doesn't mention that iTMS sells tracks compressed with AAC as opposed to the WMA tracks everyone else sells, and that AAC arguably gives better fidelity than WMA.
After reading Stross' column last night, I did a little test. I listened several times to Cowboy Junkies' "Mining for Gold" on my copy of the "The Trinity Sessions" CD. The track is just Margo Timmins singing a capella for a minute and a half in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto, and was recorded with a single microphone. Listening to the CD version with a good pair of headphones you can hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I then ripped the track onto my PowerBook at 128 kbits/sec and listened to that. With a good pair of headphones, you could hear subtle echoes, lots of detail in Timmins' voice, and occasional soft ambient noises. I'm sure that an editor of Stereophile magazine would know better what to look for to discern the difference between the CD track and the compressed version, but for practical purposes the two versions are indistiguishable.
It's clear that Stross has some sort of bone to pick with Apple, or else is completely unqualified to write about these things. Either way, this is one column that certainly never should have been printed in the NY Times.
I think the thing that bothers me most about this piece is that the NY Times published it without making it clear whether it's news or opinion or what. It's published under the heading "Digital Domain," but that alone is not enough to tell me what the nature of the writing is.
Interestingly, and I haven't seen this discussed below, Randall Stross seems to have a negative attitude towards Apple and has previously been chastised for biased and inaccurate editorializing. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~peer/writingsBigThing.h tml
It's not a /. contributor that really misleads, but the column (and Stross, it's author) itself.
If they offered that, you'd find something else to complain about. Face it, you're not going to be a customer, and by making impossible or nearly impossible demands on a service like iTunes, you just cement your "non-customer" attitude.
:)
:)
That's fine. I don't use iTMS much because most of what's on there is not what I listen to normally. (I'm not a big radio listener.) But claiming you'd be a customer when "X" occurs is just silly.
BTW, some people say "I'll be a customer when they rip that DRM out." Not going to happen, but I guess it makes them feel better.
It's funny... LAUGH.
---
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I assume iTunes are distributed using Apple QuitTime AAC Encoding (rather than MP3). THere are some threads on hydrogenaudio.org which discuss QT quality. Briefly, with iPod, it is very difficult to distinguish QT128 vs QT192. However on a good quality stereo, you *can* hear the difference. OTOH, QT192 is VERY HIGH quality, apparently, under normal circumstances it is very hard (if not possible at all) to detect the difference between the QT192 and the original source, so the opinion is that anything above 192KBps (with Apple AAC) is overkill.
So the bottom line: if Apple claims that QT128 is as good as the original source without qualifying 'on iPod and similar portable device, but *not* on high quality stereo', it's just a marketing BS.
The scary thing is that to the uninitiated you will sound like you know what you are talking about even though you haven't the slightest clue.
First you say that 320 kbps is lossless because the waveform is "pretty much the same". Then you demonstrate your extreme ignorance of the very process you try to sound knowledgeable about by implying that all 256 kbps compression does is filter frequencies above 20Khz. This is wrong. Completely wrong. Not even close to how it works.
Your assertions about what people can hear or not hear are just that: assertions. It's totally meaningless. Just because audiophiles have not bothered to produce some kind of test to your satisfaction that proves beyond any doubt whatsoever that they can hear the difference does not mean that they cannot hear the difference.
I have done so called abx testing of my own using the software from hydrogenaudio, and I was not only able to correctly distinguish which tracks were compressed, but also which tracks were encoded with which codec (although not as accurately).
I am confident that I could personally pass any legitimate test you could come up with comparing 256 kbps material with the CDs. I will admit that 320 kbps would be more difficult, but given a sufficient amount of time and high enough quality source material, I could blindly identify those as well. So much for your 320 kbps is lossless theory.
There is one codec that I am not completely confident I can identify though: MPC. At a high vbr this codec tends to sound really good, even to me. The author of that proggy really did his homework when it came to psycho-acoustic compression. I haven't done a lot of testing with it. Maybe it really is transparent. I don't know.
I am poor and I can assure you that I do not buy CDs out of the goodness of my heart or because I feel sorry for the rich record company executives and "artists". I buy CDs because I can hear a very significant (varies based on source quality and bitrate) difference.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Actually, iTMS downloads a "m4p" files, some sort of MPEG-4 standard for audio. Still lossy of course, but allegedly better than MP3.
Apple had an interesting demo at the World Wide Developers Conference this past week. They showed HD-quality video compressed with H.263 using the same bitrate as DVD. Very nice picture at a much-improved resolution. Not all 128Kbps are created equal. ;)
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Here's a CNET article about the closing: http://news.com.com/2100-1017-991480.html.
The official date now is October 14th. They originally wanted to close it July 13th, but a lot of Half.com sellers complained about their plans for selling textbooks on the site before it shut down, so eBay switched the date to October 14th. On that date, Half.com will no longer exist and sales will be done using eBay's auction format or by eBay Stores for those sellers who can justify the cost.
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