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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? "
I think part of people's willingness to upgrade is that they see the obsoleteness of the older format. Its a little bit harder to see that CDs are lower quality and less durable than DVDs or mp3s. mp3s would probably last longer because they would just move from hard drive to hard drive and never lose quality.
Your wife is clueless. This is not iTunes's fault.
Anyone who does not immediately burn Red Book CDs of all DRM-encumbered iTunes purchases is at risk of losing their investment. iTunes gives you the ability to back up your purchases and strip the DRM from them with two clicks of a mouse. If your wife gives money to Apple without understanding what she's buying or how to protect it, that can hardly be seen as anyone's fault but hers.
AAC is as vulnerable to obsolesence as any other technology. CD's are still around, and with the relative ease of maintaining software compatibility (rather than hardware which requires material support) I'd guess that AAC will be around for a while longer. The article provided no convincing evidence that AAC is more likely to die out before any other technology. Red Book audio has been around for 20+ years, why not AAC? With CD sales dropping and iTunes constantly gaining new customers, who's to say that CD or plain mp3 support won't disappear first?
I think his point was that AAC tends to throw away certain types of information during the compression process, and once that information is removed the first time, further attempts at recompressing may not cause as much damage.
And while that's true to an extent, after removing information, certain artifacts will appear in the compressed version. Those artifacts are what will cause degradation in the next compression step.
For example, consider an lossy image format that compresses by clipping any colors below 10% brightness under the assumption that people don't really see them anyway. If that is all it does, then yes, any further attempts at recompressing would have no effect. But if that format also introduced JPEG-style artifacts during the process to fake information in the clipped areas, then every generation would be a little worse than the previous one (yet not as much as after the first compression).
And despite the fact that people routinely say "everything gets cracked," there is evidence to contradict that. DRM is going to get "Good Enough" that for all practical purposes it will not be crackable.
.....however I think everyone understands Apple's decision to go with an audio format that would support a DRM....
It was the record companies that insisted on Apple providing DRM on the ITMS. It is the integration of ITMS, the iPod and iTunes that made Apple successful. If the RIAA would allow Apple to drop the DRM today, the number of iPods sold would not diminish, but likely increase since then other music services would be accessible to the millions of ipod owners. Apple makes most of its money on ipods, not the ITMS and certainly not iTunes, which it gives away for free. The number of songs sold by the ITMS would also not decrease significantly if DRM were done away with. Most people are honest and will pay for a valuable commodity. Sales may even increase because many DRM haters may then also buy music.
All theory is gray
This article makes an excellent point. Mp3s could easily go out of mainstream use, and all those people buying all those songs would be stuck. I mean, in the future, who wants to be stuck using an iPod from today for all of their music? In fact, his logic should be applied to everything:
From this point on you should never buy another computer, because, in the future they will have 30 terabytes of HD space, play DVDs at 30 times the resolution of HD, have floating screens, and fit into a tiny slot on the side of any desk's table top.
You should never buy a car, because, in the future the car will be considered archaic. Instead we will be piloting hover vehicles which get us everywhere a hundred times faster and a thousand times more safely.
You should never use the internet again, since in the future... You get the point. This article is a waste of time.
> Maybe your getting confused with the play protected songs on 5 authorized computers at a time?
/Users/Shared/SC\ Info/SC\ Info.sidb. Deauthorize your computer. Replace the SC Info.sidb. Now you have authorized 0 of 5 computers but can still play the music.
That's also easy to deal with. Backup your
My other car is first.
... do realize, of course, that 128 kbps AAC is equivalent to 192 kbps MP3, right? AAC is a newer format with a better entropy encoder and psychoacoustic model. It takes fewer bits to achieve the same quality level.
I tried to summarize all of that into a nice neat little table but the lameness filter sucks ass and HTML sucks double ass and eats gas.
Suffice it to say that communication data has characteristics: Medium, method, encoding (channels), alignment, and lifespan. If you could have seen the table (lameness filter sucks, HTML sucks harder) it looks very similar to a vertical printout of prime numbers or vertical table of Pythagorean triples. There seems to be a pattern to the way data has evolved but it always avoids a clear mathematical definition.
One trend that is clear though, is that new technologies are coming out at increasingly shorter intervals and they're also dying out more rapidly. It's going to be a long time before we replace a linear arrangement of glyphs and that will probably never become extinct technology. Things like a cylindrical drum single channel magnetic hard drive didn't last very long, the multi-channel digital audio tape is a pretty fringe player, I don't know that multichannel floppy lateral disc magnetic media ever existed, multichannel fixed lateral disc magnetic media is only arguable as the number of heads on hard drives have increased and I've never seen single channel fixed or floppy linear photonic media.
I won't buy any more media after photonic compact discs and DVDs for entertainment. I've found a musical genre that I've enjoyed on a day to day basis for eight years. I'm happy with the way that it evolves and I never become attached enough to any one piece to really need to keep my own historical copy. I feel sorry for the people who insist on continuing to try and create their own personalized collection of music which gets older every day because the trend is that it will be playable for increasingly shorter periods of time before the hardware breaks and the media encoding format is made obsolete.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
You read my mind. I was honestly just thinking exactly that. I've lately been enjoying listening to LPs largely for the simplicity of it. Not only is it a simple process, but I also (mostly) understand what's going on with the whole set of devices I'm using.
Also, many audio equipment manufacturers used to consider their craft an art, in that their goal was to provide a beautiful sound, rather than a necessarily "perfectly accurate" sound. Using equipment designed with that intention adds to my enjoyment of listening as well.
In other news, investing in harddrive manufacturers is obviously a sucker's move. In 20 years nobody will be able to read them! Amazing insight. /sarcasm
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Whilst it's not wise to take anything for granted, it should be noted that the DRM that has not been cracked offers no new content over formats that have less protection (e.g. CDs, DVDs). With the weakest link in the chain broken, there's less incentive for people to try and crack the stronger links. Once (if?) the chain is whole again, I suspect we'll see an upsurge of people hunting for the next weak link.
How'd you get modded insightful? Nintendo chose the cartridge format in part BECAUSE it was harder to copy! That's just like DRM. You think they were sitting there and saying "Well, the PSX is so successful, with its CD format and all, let's make sure not to use a CD." Notice how they went with a proprietary disc format with the Gamecube? Again, it's to discourage copying. Tell me there's any advantage (other than the small size) of a Gamecube disc to a DVD. There isn't. It holds a third of the information. Consequently, if they went with CD on N64 and DVD for Gamecube, you just might have the ability to play N64 games on Gamecube. Not like Sony did that or anything.
You can pretend like Nintendo made the storage format choices it did because of "advancing technology" all you want, but it's not hard to see discouraging copying was a major motivating factor. Not to enrage any Nintendo fans, but Nintendo operates like the **AA. You buy a game for a system, next gen system comes out, and it's not backwards compatible so you buy it again. How many times have YOU bought Super Mario Bro.'s 3? I've got it for my NES, my SNES (on the Mario All Stars Collection) and on my GBSP. (Not that Sony definitely is not guiltless in this. Nintendo might be fixing up their act next generation w/r/t old games as well, we'll see.)