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Barenaked USB Drive
CryptoKnight writes "The Barenaked Ladies are releasing their next album via a reusable 128 MB USB flash drive. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: 'Rather than distribute via CD, DVD or download, the Barenaked Ladies are making their newest selection of songs, videos and exclusive material available on a USB flash drive. Nettwerk Music Group is releasing Barenaked on a Stick beginning today, says the Hollywood Reporter. It plays on PCs, Macs and any other audio product with a USB port -- like some car stereos -- and costs $30.'"
From another article:
However, that last paragraph isn't exactly accurate. What you could download was the whole song, but into it was spliced (and not mixed, so it was easily undone) several of the band members encouraging people to go out and buy the album. One segment was an outgoing answering machine message...
And in 2003 they put instrumental versions of most of the songs on their then-current album on the P2P networks. Not that encouraging karaoke is that great a thing to do, though...
Barenaked Ladies' previous album Maroon contains 12 tracks at about 47 minutes of music. I ripped the CD to MP3s with a bitrate of 192Kbps resulting in about 65MB. That's just over half the available space on a 128MB USB drive.
Just for the sake of argument (this is Slashdot after all) let's say that they release an even bigger album on the USB drive--a full hour of music. That gives us:
That is not bad at all. Considering that 192Kbps is very good quality and 256Kbps is considered to be at least CD quality audio (there should be no noticeable artifacts even to the most astute listener), this sounds like a good deal.
If I were to guess, I'd bet they encode the files with a constant bitrate of 256Kbps. Using this bitrate they could fit about 65 minutes of music on the 128MB USB drive.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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> As a side note, why do audio discussions bring out the vitrol in people?
I'll (probably foolishly) assume this is a serious question.
Audio "wars" happen for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it's in the interests of so many people to "stretch the truth" about sound.
From the makers and sellers of audio equipment (500 watts per channel!!!!) to the goldenears who run mastering studios (gotta have NS1s, dude, anything else is, like, seriously shit) to amateurs who want to justify the fact that they paid $70 for 7 cents worth of copper cable (most of the quality loss comes betweent the amp and the speaker, you know).
All those people -- the first two categories, you'll notice, could be referred to as "audio professionals" -- are lying, or at the very least being very casual with the truth in an effort to either sell more product, book more business, or not seem like a schmuck.
Your original post, and your confusion about what "compression" actually means wrt mastering techniques is a classic example of a classic misunderstanding that's been banging around in pro-audio circles for a long, long time, and has its origin in the "tape wars" of the 1960s. That war was started by the proponents of the two different ways of aligning the magnetic bits on a section of tape.... needless to say both ways worked, but there were two competing sales teams at work.
The article you linked to suffers from a combination of diseases: the "good old days" virus combined with a heavy dose of the "misunderstanding basic physical principles" 'flu. Someone else, in other words, wanting to sound like an "expert" on sound so they can "we don't do that shit here" in their sales pitch and grab a few more customers.
Please, don't think I expect you to believe me! I only worked fixing the computers in one of the world's top mastering studios for 4 years, and kept my ears open, so what the f*** do I know? You gotta bi-wire _everything_ dude, it's the only way...