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? "

Comments

Doesn't work quite so well

[DreadSpoon]

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.

Re:Doesn't work quite so well

[afidel]

eh, the problem is on the mastering end. When producing 95+% of albums the engineer takes the nice clean studio sound he has recorded and mixed with and then applies a bunch of post production filters and compression techniques to the sound for the final cut to make it "pop" on "average" sound systems. I know I've been guilty of doing it when reviewing an album on normal stereos instead of the $10K monitors or my Sennheisers. For the vast majority of stuff out there today you aren't going to get any better sound out of DVD-A then out of CD's because the stuff has been post produced to hell to sound good on $20 radio shack speakers and car FM radios.

Re:Doesn't work quite so well

[afidel]

Nope, it's not just a high bitrate mp4 file, it uses a different compression technology completely. See the wiki entry. Note that there is a cleanroom open source implementation which means it should always be playable.

Re:works half as well...

[johnrpenner]

> 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

Re:you can backup all your itunes purchases

[cmdrbuzz]

itunes 6 only allows you to burn 5 CDs then burning is locked out forever.

Got any proof of this, because iTunes 6 on my Mac says:

If your playlist includes songs that were purchased from the iTunes Music Store, you can only burn seven copies of the playlist to an audio CD. You may have exceeded the number of times you can burn this playlist.

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?

Re:you can backup all your itunes purchases

[dgatwood]

What the hell are you talking about? iTunes allows you to burn up to 7 copies of the same playlist. You can change the playlist and burn 7 more if you want. There are no limits to the number of times you can burn a song....

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.

Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize, if your wife changes the playlist by just one song, she can then burn the songs again.