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Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store
DrJenny writes "C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple's iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music — they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads. The article goes into details on how Apple's home-grown ALAC lossless encoding relates to FLAC, DRM, and the iPod ecosystem."
Forget "lossless" when you've already lost so much of the original wave by mixing it down to 16-bit 44khz stereo in the first place. I'd rather have something that started out with a higher sampling rate/etc, but with good lossy compression to pull it down to something that doesn't require DVD-type storage for a single album.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
From the blog:
"And now I have an inkling Apple will add lossless music downloads to the iTunes Store within the next 12 months."
Translation:
I have no fricken clue that this will ever happen, but because I think it'd be cool if it did, I'll go ahead and blog about it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
import system.cool.Sig;
Isn't it amazing that 25 years after the release of the CD, we're excited to finally have a way to buy DRM free, lossless, digital music? If this happens, we'll be back inline with 1982 technology.
You might like all the songs. Since I listen mostly to rock/alternative genres, I probably only want his singles. Can I buy them cheaply, like my dad could in the 70's? He's got a stack of 45's that probably reaches the ceiling of my apartment.
I do realize they still sell them, but are they $0.99 per song cheap?
So they lock down these files with DRM. Then DVD-Jon (or someone else) comes up with a DRM-stripping program for the files.
Then people can re-encode the files to their format of choice. But by then, most consumers have said "fuck it" and decided to just download their format of choice directly from p2p or usenet because it's easier and simpler than paying Apple and still violating the DMCA just so the music they paid for will work on the audio player they own.
Oh wait, that's already the status quo... Never mind.
Enough with the 24/96 wet dreams. Yes, 24/96 does offer real advantages for mixing houses in terms of being able to normalize levels generated by different sources and reducing the complexity of filters. But 16/44.4 is perfectly fine for home audio playback.
What does >16 bits get you? More dynamic range. BFD. 16 bits gets you (realistically) 90+ dB of dynamic range. Unless your listening room has a background noise level of 20 dB or less (trust me, it doesn't), you're not even enjoying the true benefit of the 16-bits you have now.
What does > 44.1kHz sampling give you? Wider frequency response. BFD. Let's assume that most people have good hearing beyond 20 kHz (very few do). Let's assume that most music/movie content has lots of information above 20 kHz (some do, most don't). Let's assume that your speakers can reproduce signals above 20 kHz (some can, most can't). There is still the issue of how you get that > 20kHz info on your recording on the first place. You see, most microphones don't record signals out that high, and of those that do, they only do so over a very narrow angle. When we have tech that can produce mics that are omni-directional above 20 kHz for reasonable costs then maybe you'll have an argument.
Let's deal with the loudness wars before we start worrying about 24/96.
That is a good argument for why a studio should sample at a rate that accommodates the roll-off in their analog low-pass filters. However, once that is done you can use a can use a digital lo-pass filter / downsampler which can easily be designed to have very sharp cut-off rates. There is no reason at all for a consumer format to be more than 48kHz.
There is an advantage to higher sampling rates, but it has nothing to do with the frequency content of the recorded material or Nyquist's theory . If you sample at 44.1 khz (CD standard) you get 44.1 khz noise in the output. That has to be filtered out somehow, without affecting the in-band audio signal. Rolling off many DB in a short frequency span (factor of ~2) takes quite a filter, which depending on how it's done, introduces phase shifts of the in-band signal. The sound quality from CD players it largely determined by how, and how well, the D-A conversion (which has a frequency response all it's own determined by the guts of the converter)and analog filtering are done.
Sampling at higher frequencies makes it easier to build a good output filter. That's a very secondary or tertiary level effect, so it doesn't really make much difference, but it theoretically could.
Note that this is assuming the standard PCM encoding. "Single Bit"/streaming encoding (like SACD runs at fantastically higher sample frequencies, but the frequencies aren't really comparable (and it's not a good way to go because you introduce other issues (like tons of quantization noise).
The only identified issue with the standard red-book CD format is the dynamic range, but there are so few sources that need more than 16 bits and certainly very few playback systems/environments that will let you take advantage of it, it's essentially a non-issue. HDCD (which is a 20-bit PCM format) addresses this but hasn't and probably won't become common.
Bottom line - the guys who came up with the audio CD sampling format pretty well knew what they were doing and there aren't any practical limitations in the recording format. Everything else in the system (from microphone to engineering to speaker) is the limiting factor.
Brett
It's still a lossy format which strips out some of the audio detail. I'm no gold-connector-magnetically-balanced-shielded-cable audiophile, but I do appreciate being able to listen to the entire depth of a piece of music (especially classical).
Perhaps a better way of putting it would be 'the human ear cannot distinguish between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC if listened to on iPod headphones', which is fair enough. There's no need to include everything if all I'm going to do is listen to it on the bus. Which leads to my original point - MP3 is lossy. AAC which is my format of choice is better quality for the space and bitrate, but is still lossy. FLAC isn't, which means I could have my lossless FLAC copy on my desktop where there's easy storage space, then have iTunes automatically create reduced quality versions for carrying around on my iPod. Compression from lossless source is always better than compression from an already compressed copy.
Not to mention that the iTunes store *isn't* 320kbps. 128kbps for the normal content, 256kbps for iTunes Plus.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?