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iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served?
Thomas Hawk writes "Apple is out hyping their one billionth iTunes download today, but is building your music library in a format that could be obsolete in the future really the best strategy? Will the consumer once again have to someday replace their iTunes track just like they had to replace their LP, cassette, and CD only to get their music on their hot new non Apple mp3 phone of the future? "
Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality. Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
Also, if you rip to WAV or CD, you lose all the meta-data for the track. So if you want to know the Artist, Title, and Album, you're going to have to re-enter that info on your own.
There's also no clean/easy way to export to MP3. Even if you jump through the hoops to do it, though, you're back to loss of quality.
I just went through the hell of exporting all my iTunes-purchased songs into Oggs so that I can play them on my Linux box, which has the nice sound system. That took quite a few burned CDs and I still haven't gotten the Oggs all retagged yet. Plus there's the quality issue, which while I've only noticed anything in a couple songs, that's still more quality issue than I would prefer.
> Converting to any other format is going to cause a loss of quality.
> Even if you go to WAV or CD Audio, if you ever want to rip it back
> into some compressed format, you're going to lose quality.
the quality you get from converting from aac > aiff will BE what you hear,
because the aac file has to decompress for you to hear it!! -- so it is not
less quality doing your aac backup to AIFF (and then you could convert
back to apple-lossless encoding if you want to save some space).
your second point, however, is correct -- you will lose quality
if you convert back from aiff TO some other lossless format,
due to dithering and artifacts.
in short:
i) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) = no quality loss
ii) lossy (aac) -> lossless (aiff) -> lossy (mp3/ogg/whatever) = quality loss
Got any proof of this, because iTunes 6 on my Mac says:
You can then create a new playlist with your iTunes Music Store songs on and burn again 7 more times....Maybe your getting confused with the play protected songs on 5 authorized computers at a time?
The only limit is to the number of times you can burn a single playlist (i.e. burning a copy of a CD for your friends with all the tracks in order). This is spelled out in the Terms of Service.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually, some lossless encoders tend to *enhance* artifacts that wern't previously there. So sometimes, they do sound worse.
If the putatively "lossless" encoder produces output that decodes to anything other than what the original input decodes to, then by definition it was not lossless.
(If the way I phrased that sounds odd, I wrote it to handle the MP3 -> FLAC "direct" encoding case. "Encodes to anything other than its input" isn't quite right in that case. I'm sure you can FLAC an MP3 file with the right command line argument but you won't get much out of it.)
Thus, if a lossless encoder adds artefacts, it is, ipso facto, not lossless.
Given the relative ease of testing a lossless encoder/decoder combo and the testing any one you've ever heard of has gone through, I find it far more likely that either A: An encoder you think is lossless is in fact lossy, B: You've got a serious flaw in your encoding software (rice up our Gentoo install too much, maybe?) or C: You're full of shit.
Remember, it's AIFF -> AAC -> AIFF -> AAC. The first AIFF is the original, and the second AIFF has lost some of the information. Keep doing it and you probably end up with a concert A sine wave :) .
You do realize, if your wife changes the playlist by just one song, she can then burn the songs again.
That's so not true I'm not even sure what the hell it is you think you're saying.
If you put music on your iPod, you still have it in iTunes on your computer. If you backup your computer often enough, then you have a backup of your music, plus whatever's on your iPod is a secondary backup. So if your computer crashes, it's the same as any data. You've got a backup if you've made a backup.
Now, if for some reason you haven't made any backups and your hard drive completely crashes so you can't retrieve data after the fact, or you've deleted music from iTunes after copying it to your iPod, that would result in a situation similar to what you describe, where your only backup is whatever you've put on your iPod.
In that case, once you've fixed your computer, connecting it does not automatically wipe your iPod, and it is possible to retrieve the music files on your iPod.