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The Rise of "Hybrid" Vinyl-MP3s
Khyber writes to let us know that First Word Records, a U.K.-based record label, is now selling vinyl records that come with codes that allow you to download a 320-kbit MP3 of that record's content. The article mentions another independent label, Saddle Creek, that also offers DRM-free downloads with some vinyl records. The co-founder of First Word is quoted on why they didn't DRM the download: "Making a legal, paid-for version of the file less useful than a copied or pirated one doesn't make sense."
My conclusion is that this is how things should work. Obviously there's a demand for vinyl, and the convenience of digital is undeniable. Somehow, music companies got this right.
Mostly random stuff.
I'm in a small minority, but I'm a rabid music collector. Often times I'll buy both the cd and the vinyl versions of an album (the vinyl to listen to at home, the cd for the car or to rip to portable player). Basically, this allows me to only buy one version of the album (vinyl, the version I really want anyway) and just burn a copy for the car and drop one on the mp3 player. The only way this could get better is if they start supporting flac...then I can convert that to whatever format I want. This is great news for the indie / record junkie scene, though.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Of course, expading the "doesn't make sense" part is important. It's also critical for the surely-to-be analogizers below to realise that this has no usefulr real world (as in, tangible) comparison. If three clicks of the mouse provides you with something far more useful than something you've shelled out your hard-earned cash for, something is wrong. Lax enforcement -- not to mention the difficulty of enforcement -- and fuzzy laws make this so.
It's not as easy as saying, "Stealing a car has more utility than buying one, we should all steal cars!" since enforcement and history are so vastly different. See, the car analogy is wrong! Ha!
Sony ha
As silly as it sounds with Indie Rock, Hip Hop, Jazz and to an extent, Classical, the sales of vinyl are growing at a quick rate and CDs are slowly massively. People value the sound quality and physicality of the vinyl and generally download the tracks from file-sharing to use portably or in the car. While I don't personally care too much for the free downloads, it will save a lot of people a lot of time and it keeps them "in-tow" with the record label's marketing. Everyone wins.
BINGO, YES why can't the rest of them understand this?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
320kbit/s CBR mp3 encodes are the ultimate "I have no idea what I'm doing" sign in the audio coding world. All the downsides of mp3 (lossy, huge files) with none of the benefits. "I'll just turn all the knobs to 'highest' and hope that's good".
Perfect, now audiophiles can look cool with their 'retro' collections of vinyl (even if they never listen to them), and still get easy access to the far-more-functional digital copy.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
You are correct, the Nyquist theorem states that you must record at a sampling rate that's above twice the higher frequency in your recording.
All this debate over vinil is rather tiresome. Anyone who has studied electronics engineering like I did knows that vinil records have a rather low signal-to-noise ratio. I did a course on "Probabilistic Models in Electric Engineering" where we learned how to calculate noise due to the fact that electric charge is quantized. Now, get this vinil fans: ELECTRIC CHARGE IS QUANTIZED. There is no such thing as a charge smaller than an electron, which is 1.6e-19 coulomb.
There are no such thing as analog values in this universe, everything is quantized. You cannot possibly have an electric signal that's totally free of noise, what you get is a number of "clicks", one for each electron that goes by. The same way, you cannot even hear a sound without noise, what you get is a number of "plocs", one for each air molecule that hits your eardrums.
Now, I know people will say, "sure, but these effects are very small". Well, think again. Human hearing evolved to be as sensitive as it physically could be. Inside an anechoic chamber you can hear the blood flowing through your veins. The sensitivity of our ears is just short from hearing individual molecules hitting the eardrum. In any analog pick-up, be it moving coil or moving magnet, human ears are sensitive enough to hear the noise due to the quantization of electric current.
Digital equipment have much better signal-to-noise rations because they have high currents in low-impedance circuits, the effect of charge quantization is diluted by averaging a large number of electrons. In analog vinil pick-ups either the impedance is relatively high for moving magnet models or the voltage is very low for moving coil types.
And all this is considering only the most fundamental effects, not to mention problems as dust on the record. The cleanest cleanroom specified in the ISO-14644 standard has 12 particles per cubic meter. The lowest spec in ISO-14644 allows over 40 million particles per cubic meter. Does the room where you do your listening conform to an ISO "cleanroom" specification?
Digital sound standards were created to be as good as they need to be. CDs have all the bandwidth and dynamic range one needs in the final recording. It's only when you are going to mix and resample the music that you may need better quality to avoid round-off error in the processing. Because of this, professional equipment normally use something like 24 bits @ 192 kbps. The widespread acceptance of MP3s show that the CD standard has actually a better quality than the majority of people need or want.
Which wouldn't be an issue if "artists" didn't think blindly that louder is better, period.
It's often not the artist that makes this decision. Rather, it's whoever does the mastering that decides this. Sure, the label and artist sign off on it, but remember that the artist's ears are usually pretty shot from playing live music day in and day out. And the label doesn't want to have to pay to have it done again.
This guy's the limit!
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
This is slashdot. This where if you prefer records over CDs you're a 500 dollar wooden volume knob buyer, yet if you want MP3s you want them encoded at 320kps so you don't lose any quality until they come out of your 99 cent earphones that can't reproduce the frequencies you'd be "losing".