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iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the drm-ftw dept.

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? "

3 of 653 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't work quite so well by DreadSpoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:works half as well... by johnrpenner · · Score: 4, Informative


    > 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

  3. Re:you can backup all your itunes purchases by cmdrbuzz · · Score: 4, Informative
    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?