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SanDisk, Music Publishers Push DRM-free SlotMusic Format
Strudelkugel writes "The LA Times and others are reporting the music industry is working with SanDisk to try unrestricted music files on microSD memory cards to improve sales of physical media: 'In addition to music, the slotMusic cards will come pre-loaded with other things, such as liner notes, album-cover artwork and sometimes video.' The important part: 'The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection, so it can be used on almost all computers, mobile phones and music players — but it won't play on an iPod, which doesn't have a micro-SD memory slot. It has one gigabyte of memory, and the music tracks are played back at high quality.' Could it be the labels have finally recognized that providing features and convenience to customers is preferable to suing them?" Most computers also don't have microSD slots; according to EMI's press release, there will be a "tiny USB sleeve" packaged with each card, and the "high quality" format means up to 320kbps MP3. From the given description, it seems like it would be no harder to transfer the tracks to an iPod (via a computer) than to most other players.
I don't want a memory stick containing lossy 320kbit songs, I can get that easily enough off the CD (they are still giving you a real CD, right?).
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format, and maybe something in 5.1 instead? DVD-Audio and SACD didn't take off because no one adopted the players, but it might take off if you made it easily playable. I might even pay a slight premium.
Ok, let me get this straight. No copy protection so it will play on anything, but it won't play on iPods because they don't have a SD slot? WTF?! If there's no copy protection, then you put the songs on your computer and then sync them to the iPod. I love how these sorts of articles are written when the person writing them has never used a computer before.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
they dont have drm on their CDs for a while now. i have easily ripped 3 EMI label big classic music compilations i bought, and im listening them on my pc since. no hassles.
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Somehow I am a little doubtful, given that the article does not state which format the songs will be distributed in. My guess is, this is yet another "plays on most devices" that the record labels always cooks up
I don't know I have a hard enough time finding my CDs/iPod when I misplace them, nevermind MicroSD cards. Way too fricken tiny.
But the biggest problem, he said, may be that Apple's iTunes and other download services have made customers used to buying a song at a time, not an album, and making their own compilations.
The horror! Now we don't have to pay for the album fillers that comes with the one song that we want?
My cell phone has a microSD slot, so I might consider *wince* buying music that way. But it would need to be at a reasonable price (I'd have to think more about at what price I would pay for this) and it would have to have music I didn't already have or couldn't acquire easier from other sources. I don't have an iPod (yeah I know, I'm one of those people), so that's not a problem for me. But I'm not sure I want to have a collection of 1GB microSD cards laying around. I have a hard enough time keeping track where my keys are.
At least they're finally trying to make something we want rather than forcing us to buy buggy whips though.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but the idea of buying music without in some way being able to damage the environment has been KILLING me.
Way to get on that EMI. Thank god!
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we all know it'll only catch on if the porn industry start distributing on microSD as well.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
Great. More crap to throw out. Isn't one of the big selling features of digital distribution that it produces less crap to landfill?
the number of speakers, or surround do not determine the quality of music.
Actually, it has a potential to make things sound much more clear. Stereo, for example, was invented to create more space for sounds in a recording. If you have too many things going on at once on the same speaker, you'll get distortion and generally unpleasant sounds because too many waveforms are cramped together on the same output. That's why it helps to split recordings into different speakers, so you get a more clear sound. On this logic, I can definitely see how 5.1 might help to bring better sound quality.
You can put the music *directly* into a non-apple player which supports MicroSD (or any other one that accepts cards, via an adapter).
To put it on an iPod, you would need to involve a PC. Part of the point of packing the files on an SD card in the first place is to avoid the annoying PC requirement. If you have to use a PC every time, you almost may as well buy a CD.
I don't get it. What's the difference between slotMusic and a read-only microSD card with a bunch of MP3 files on it?
I'm not sure if I'm real.
would that explain why samsung tried to take sandisk over?
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/samsung-mulls-buying-sandisk/story.aspx?guid={E9E929E4-4C0C-401B-91D1-05B44D4EA8B2}&dist=msr_33
Tell that to the people mixing albums from the ground up for 5.1 listening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Binary_Universe
No copyright protection? So they are only releasing music that is in the public domain!?
Or did the newspaper screw up, and mean to write "no copy protection"?
Kudos to EMI for doing something digital without DRM, but how is this better than what Amazon.com offers us now?
I can download DRM-free songs from Amazon for less than a buck, and albums at about $8. Windows Media Player downloads the album art, and a plug-in gets me lyrics. I can transfer the song to other devices, friends, or burn to CD. Amazon's library is HUGE.
And internet distribution doesn't impact the environment.
About the only advantage I see to this is the "up to 320k", whereas Amazon's are 160k I believe. But, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference.
Physical distribution is dead. If they want to cater to impulse buyers at a retailer, install a kiosk with a variety of ports, card readers, BlueTooth, etc and let people download stuff instantly.
-David
...they have conceived of a method of using physical media to transport bits. And they'll still charge $15 for an album.
You know, watching these guys over the last decade has been like watching a retarded child learning to go poo in the toilet. They're six years old when they finally get it right, and then they look at you like they've just won the Olympics.
No disrespect to retarded children intended.
It's highly speculative and slightly risky from EMI. They're hoping that someone else (mobile phone companies or cheap mp3 player manufacturers perhaps) will provide some of the essential infrastructure for this to become a success.
This does reduce the effective cost of a music player. Mp3 players currently need a PC to work. This makes them quite expensive. The only problem is most people who are likely to want an mp3 player have a PC these days.
excuse me but are you clueless about music?
Insulting people (by stating or implying they are clueless) is generally not a good way to get positive moderation. Just thought you might want to have more karma to burn ;)
Also, the question you're addressing is not music (composition and performance), but recording, playback and auditory perception (production, HiFi, sound).
The number of speakers, or surround do not determine the quality of music.
True. Because music is composition and performance. In fact, the two are orthogonal; I've recently auditioned for a band and I quite liked their recorded songs even though the production on average was (gently put) not on par with commercial music.
The number of speakers does affect some dimension of the quality of what you're going to perceive. I've found that I even when I'm just listening to stereo, I want to have sound coming from behind me in addition to in front; whether it's the bigger, better speakers in the back (should be easy to test) or just the sound coming from all directions, it is subjectively more pleasant to listen to.
Also, if you do have real surround sound (even just 4.0), you can do nifty tricks like putting the drummer in the back, guitar and base subtly to either side and vocals in center/front. I'd think this makes each instrument more distinguishable while not destroying the integration into one auditory whole.
But I'm not audiophile, I just like having four speakers and sound coming from all directions.
And why in the world didn't they choose Ogg Vorbis, the higher quality, royalty-free codec with a fast integer decoder implementation?
the big music providers had been way past that point for a long while now. they didnt care what you thought the standard should be. emi is the first.
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No, but it adds to the experience.
I would love to have some 5.1 surround music.
Classical music would kick ass if you could hear where the violins were and so on.
Normal rock would also benefit to a degree.
but it won't play on an iPod, which doesn't have a micro-SD memory slot. It has one gigabyte of memory, and the music tracks are played back at high quality.
I don't know about you guys, but my ipod doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, either. Hasn't stopped me yet.
Am I missing something here? Is it supposed to be some kind of deterrent that I can't just shove the thing into my little white music thingy?
Tell that to the people mixing albums from the ground up for 5.1 listening.
What, to all five of them ?
That's too much work !
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what an ignorant generalization.
concept of marginal returns also apply to quality of music. buy a crappy pair of speakers, buy a crappy cable, you get crap out of your set. buy good speakers and cable, and a good set, you get good quality. the point beyond where marginal returns start declining steeply in regard to quality-price, is the point for luxury - minimal returns, huge cash.
its the same with sports cars. a honda sports car is good and acceptably priced. and it can satisfy any enthusiast. a porche on the other hand, may give comparably less increase in performance and satisfaction, but much more expensive. still there are those who buy porches.
simple as that.
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Ms. Quinn, the author of the Los Angeles Times article, is not a very good technology writer. She not only quotes that it won't work with iPods (which is terribly misleading; the microSD card won't, but the contained DRM-free MP3s will be very easy to work with), but she also refers to this as a "new music format".
Medium, yes; format, no. Distributing on the microSD cards is new, but seems like something people may latch onto quickly. MP3 is old and a de facto universal format, which is what makes this even better.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Though that might be because I'm a cheap bastard.
Single track on iTunes: 79p - £1.49.
Quality: AAC lossy
DRM: iTunes DRM
Album art: Maybe.
Sleeve notes: None.
More than a couple of tracks from the same album and it rapidly becomes better value to buy the entire CD. Now, iTunes does allow you to buy the album at a cheaper per-track price, but most of the albums I've looked at the price is slightly dearer than buying the physical CD from Amazon - and the CD will be lossless, no DRM, with album art and notes.
I suppose there's the convenience factor, and you're not obliged to buy an album for just one song....
How is this different from selling CD's? Really really tiny CD's. Also... how can you claim there's no DRM on it, if you can't take the files off the device?
It's important for the music industry to keep people thinking, even unconsciously, that these bits and bytes need to be attached to physical media. When the nebulous nature of intellectual property is emphasised then it's more difficult to associate conventional property rights to them.
Am I thinking about the same micro-SD as everyone else? Smaller than my little finger nail?
It's small enough to get lost in your pocket, sucked up by a vacuum cleaner or whatever. They're also fiddly to handle: can you imagine picking through your album collection with a pair of tweezers, squinting at the 3mm x 5mm labels to find the one you're after?
It seems a bizzarre choice for a portable music medium. If they're not intended for carrying around but supposed to be used only once, to get the music onto your player/computer, why not just sell the download?
the number of speakers are irrelevant to quality of music. let me briefly explain :
you need different ranges assigned to different speakers that can give out that frequencies. but, there has to be more of the same speakers assigned to a particular frequency range - lets say, you got a certain size of tweeter. if there are 4 of this, and you divide a small incremental range of high frequency sound to four of these in small increments, you'll have, say, seperated two sopranos' (each soprano will have differences in their frequencies, even if minute and hardly identifiable by human ear) voices to two tweeters of the SAME kind, but while playing these two sopranos' voices, each of their voices will come from the different tweeters. this will increase the distinctiveness of each sound. here, the quality of the tweeters matter VERY much.
just like tweeters, if you have many mid range speakers to assign incremental frequencies, the clarity of sound will increase.
people generally err in that if there are 5.1 speakers, or 7.1, you can do more of that, because there are more speakers - that is not the case. in almost all 4.1 and more speaker systems, the satellite speakers generally come with the same size, therefore being able to effect efficient and clear playback of a certain frequency range. whereas it is good for positioning through different channels through software, it is bad for music quality and sound clarity - because you will have to play a broader frequency range from that speakers.
also, positioning does not matter much when playing music - think - how many times were you able to sit in the middle of a symphony orchestra, or a rock band in concert, and listen to music ?
not only you cant, but also it doesnt make any sense - human ears are directional - you wont be able to hear the sounds coming from the back as distinctively and clearly as the ones coming from an angle from the front.
that is why all music concerts, gigs, playback and whatnot are done in front of the audience.
a stereo setup correctly reproduces that positioning. ie - your hearing field is like a letter 'V' while listening to a concert, your head, field of hearing starting from the bottom end of the V, and the arrayed speakers of the concert setup being placed in upper tips of the V.
in concerts array speakers are used. if you paid attention, there are a lot of speakers positioned in the same place to the right, and left of the stage, on top of each other. this creates a sound stage that encompasses you.
this concept was a niche concept in which only audiophiles knew and were able to use. because mainstream stereo producers were just skipping by it. we didnt have any chance of listening to such stuff on a pc speaker set at all. however altec lansing made a good entry with such a product a while ago, and it changed the way all the speaker system producers designed the speaker sets. see altec lansing fx 6021 here : http://www.alteclansing.com/index.php?file=north_product_detail&iproduct_id=fx6021 notice the 'in concert' technology, and notice how similar speakers are arrayed on top of each other. Read people's thoughts on this thing here : http://www.amazon.com/Altec-Lansing-FX6021-Speaker-System/dp/B0001EMLXE
this thing, is supposedly a pc speaker set. it should be nothing significant. but, when i bought this, it totally ousted my full deck pioneer stereo with $700 speakers each. i stopped listening to anything else.
one of my friends took this choice lightly, and went for a X.1 system from a known manufacturer, but after a while he decided to get the 6021, but he wasnt able to get one because it was out of stock. he is still looking for one since then, and its on the top of his list. he spends $350 on motherboards alone, when doing an upgrade.
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I've always wondered about this. Why do people say a single speaker will have distortion when it plays too many sounds at once, but my ear, a single microphone, doesn't have that sort of trouble when the sounds are all crammed together into a single input.
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1 GB miniSD card? I could care less about a CD if I get that, because once I make a few backup copies, I'll use the SD card for something else. I doubt the company's gonna give you the music on a re-writable optical disc.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Stereo, for example, was invented to create more space for sounds in a recording.
No, it wasn't. Stereo is used to recreate the spatial component of music: when you record a number of instruments sitting at different positions in the studio, you should be able to hear where those instruments are. That has nothing to do with 'too many waveforms ...cramped together on the same output'.
In fact, in a stereo recording, most of the information will be played back by both speakers.
It is possible to make a recording where the left and right channels have nothing in common, but you'll find that those sound very unnatural, so these recordings are (thankfully) rare. It's like having half the musicians on the far left of the stage, and the other half on the far right, with nobody in the center.
So, does that mean that SanDisk's microSD cards will become more expensive now? After all, they'll have to pay for both the content and the USB adapter now.
For someone who genuinely just wants a microSD card, without being forced to pay for other fluff they don't want or need, this might actually be bad news.
Maybe because all the sounds aren't coming from the exact same point in space, and/or because you actually have one microphone on each side of your head to tease the sounds apart?
(I don't know, I'm just throwing out reasonable-sounding ideas...)
The only thing i can think of is that the inertia of the speaker cone somehow muddies the sound with its resistance to change vibration speeds and the eardrum is very thin and lightweight so it doesn't have the same problem. Someone correct me.
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
Not sure about this deal myself. But that statement of yours is incorrect.
There will be what they put on the liner notes and cover stored on the card. You can then import it into amarok and be done with it.
Probably need some sort of pocketed box to store the originals in, however. You don't want 200 mcroSD cards in a tobacco tin, even though they'll fit.
To sort it out for insurance, it should have a unique number so you can prove you had the originals when the box gets nicked/damaged.whatever.
Not since you'd get some numpty buying it and complaining that it won't play on their iPod when they get it home. Not everyone knows how to rip music you know.
It would be more accurate to say 'this specific format won't play out of the box in an iPod', but just saying it won't is also accurate, so far as many people are concerned.
Not, it has to be said, many people who read slashdot (I'd hope), but even then I'm not so sure.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Aren't MicroSDs too small to handle? If each card is meant to contain one album, the user should be able to easily switch cards, but inserting/removing a MicroSD requires attention and patience at least.
They could have used MiniSDs, they're still tiny, but way more convenient to handle.
Perhaps they preferred the MicroSD format because they wanted the cards to be directly pluggable into MicroSD mobile phones. After all, a MicroSD card can still be inserted into a MiniSD device through a simple adapter, but the reverse is not true.
But I'm not audiophile, ...
They all say that until someone finds children's music on their computer!
How often do you go to a concert where the orchestra or band is behind you?
Stereo is more than enough for reproduction of a concert experience.
An existing stereo recording will usually benefit far more from being played on a decent pair of crossover speaker cabinets (and not a subwoofer in sight) than from being converted to surround and then played on someone's horrible five satellite + subwoofer home theatre system.
That doesn't mean that interesting things can't be done with surround music, but the increased cost and effort of production won't usually be worth it.
Advanced users are users too!
The smaller form factor literally makes it easier to steal!
What is this obsession with this inferior 10 year old file format MP3? Who is making sure, time after time, that there is no to mediocre support for Ogg Vorbis in players on the markets?
Ogg Vorbis sounds way better than MP3, especially at 128k/160k bitrates, and it's my favorite format of distributing music. It's royalty free. There is even a lib for fixed point decoding, for embedded devices - everything is there, from a technical standpoint.
What is going on? Yet again, only support for a legacy format? Clap clap, well done!
Do not trust this signature.
In addition to music, the slotMusic cards will come pre-loaded with other things, such as liner notes, album-cover artwork and sometimes video
And advertisements, rootkits, DRM schemes, spyware ...
Why is it every keydisk manufacturer thinks I want their crappy software to run every time I put a disk in the USB slot ? Sick of this nonsense, meaning your 2GB memory is actually only 1.8GB plus some non removable crap, and not one but 2 drive letters to deal with :-(
Well, it might not be the reason stereo was invented for, but it is definitely a side effect of stereo's existence.
I've mixed a lot of recordings, and can say from experience that separating instruments into different speakers (not 100% panning, of course) will definitely reduce distortion.
Of course almost nothing is panned all the way to one speaker, but basically when you pan something 70% to one speaker, you reduce its volume on the other speaker significantly, thus allowing more sonic space for other sounds on that speaker.
It's something that can be easily comprehended when playing around with a recording's mix.
Plus, it's a good way to avoid "clipping" - a signal that goes over 0dB and gets distorted. You can separate the recording into different speakers, and thus the overall volume on one speaker is divided between the others, and neither speaker goes over 0dB, and you avoid clipping distortion.
I am not saying you are wrong, stereo is enough to reproduce a concert experience.
Why does a recording have to be limited to that? Most albums are not really a representation of a concert experience. I have never been to a concert where the performer played a song 60 times and pieced together the perfect parts and played the result, yet that is what many albums are.
I would think one could do some cool stuff by recording and mixing to give the effect of sitting in the middle of the band with sounds coming from all directions, even if it doesn't sound like a concert.
I know not everyone records like that. I am sure I will get a bunch of- (insert my favorite band or artist) records in one take on a concert like stage with microphones in the audience, but most stuff is recorded in a studio over multiple takes and is processed to make an album.
Universal, the world's largest record label, will start with 30 albums available on slotMusic cards, including new releases and compilations. The next album of one of its hip-hop stars, Akon, will be released on slotMusic as well as on other formats.
I was under the impression that they were releasing "music" in this format.
I'll go ahead and applaud their brilliance.
No DRM, a convenient - if not perfect - format, quality as high as my feeble ears can hear. A reusable portable container. No DRM.
If they'll just partner with music stores to provide as much choice as they can and dump to your microSD instead of prepackaging albums with content in the volumes that they hope will sell, they'll eliminate much of the waste of the current system and deliver music I can buy.
It may be time to consider buying music again.
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Human ears are capable of listening to frequency ranges from 20Hz-20,000Hz. But, some speakers create only certain frequencies well. I am sure, once somebody finds a speaker that can generate all the frequencies in that range, you will need only one speaker.
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Get some sleep then dude, you just drove yourself around the block for no reason.
Your head a splode
"The important part: 'The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection, so it can be used on almost all computers, mobile phones and music players"
The important part is it is _DRM_ free I assume - I doubt they are relinquishing their copyright, which is something entirely different.
I have spoken'eth.
tee hee...
You could make a little mini CD rack (an SD rack) for your mobile phone tags (^_^)
and one with a little magnifying glass for reading the title & artist off the spine of the microSD cards.
thx e
For the most part what iTunes and its like have done is allow us to zero in on the music we like instead of having to take the whole album and suffer through the filler.
I still think a USB distribution system would be ideal for movies. Then anyplace could have a kiosk to distribute movies (even games if extended that far). Give the user a usb-key (branded for your business of course) and they could come to your kiosk or even store (for the luddites who want dvd) and without intervention just get the movie of their choice.
But music, nah, if I want a song it is just that, one song.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Like I said - you certainly could do some interesting stuff in surround. But ultimately, music is about music, and surround effects whilst they may add an extra dimension to things won't improve the music itself.
The original poster's statement that it should be 5.1 to make it worthwhile was naive. Even achieving a good stereo mix is hard enough - surround is an order of magnitude harder again. You can't just flick a switch and get instant surround.
There's been plenty of bands and engineers who have experimented with surround mixes in the past, but I don't think it's ever really likely to catch on - at least not outside the traditionally experimental or technically minded genres. Ultimately, people don't buy music for a total immersion experience - they buy it to listen to while they do something else.
Advanced users are users too!
We know why apple makes no microSD slots, because they know that microSD cards drop in prices like theres no tommmorow, and apple likes to make 900% margins on ram (i mean ipods). I can buy 1gig mSD ram for $8, yet apples $5 shuffles cost $60. They know if they sold them with mSD slots people would buy the cheapest ipods and upgrade with 16/32g mSD cards, giving all profits to sanDISK or chineese corps. But then again, why does apple deserve such high margins? Only shareholders should buy ipods.
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It's the INPUTs! Having mixed a concert or two in my day, I can attest that there is a very big difference between the controls I have available at a mixing console and what I can do with previously-recorded music.
Consider a concert setup: EACH channel is the input from a single microphone on stage. There is no need to separate one singer's vocals from another; they are already separate! See: mixing console. Want the lead vocalist to be a little louder? No problem! Just boost the volume for THAT input. S/he is standing left of center? Adjust the pan and send more of the mix to the left output than to the right.
That kind of MIX is what gets put together and recorded to a CD. And once it is put together, it's much harder to get everything separated back again. That's why the mixer has all those separate inputs to begin with.
As to why there is an array of speakers, that's another matter. We had two active crossovers that split out low, mid, and highs that came out of the mixing console. One for the left and one for the right. From the active crossover, the bass went to its own amplifier which, in turn, fed the bass bins. The mids went to their own amp which fed the horns. Lastly, the highs went to its own amp which fed the tweeters. IIRC, we used a 300W amp for bass; 200W for horns, and 80W for the tweeters. On each side.
That kind of setup allowed us to use the speakers best able to reproduce certain parts of the audio spectrum and feed them the amount of power they needed. If we suddenly had available a larger venue, we could have taken the same mix as input, replaced the amps with more powerful ones, and added additional speakers.
No copyright protection? So they are only releasing music that is in the public domain!?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. How sad is it that in the music business, copyright lust is so pervasive that "copyright" is confused with attempts to abbridge fair use rights.
Or did the newspaper screw up, and mean to write "no copy protection"?
I prefer the term "copy restriction". This isn't about protecting copies, it's about restricting the ability to make copies. Just like "DRM" isn't about digital rights.
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Oh, I don't know... Maybe the human ear is a bit more sophisticated than a wooden box full of wires and whatever else they use to make speakers.
Damn straight! Give me my recordings in mono, thank you much!
In fact, in a stereo recording, most of the information will be played back by both speakers.
Go listen to early stereo recordings (ex. The Beatles). Typically very little will be down the center - maybe the bass, or drums. Everything else will be on one side or the other.
Maybe it could be because your ear comes with noise correction 'wetware' that's been in development for millions of years?
Troll? Someone hit this Mod with a clue-stick and mod me Off-Topic.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Quadraphonic recording and playback have been around since the 1970s.
I recall my friend's dad had such a system -- it was cool but very expensive.
I also did multitrack recording later on.
One of the key aspects of creating a recording is that for most applications it is going to be mixed down to a stereo master. As such - you really don't want too much separation between the tracks - because it can be annoying for someone to listen to if taken to an extreme (particularly if they are listening through headphones). Most commonly you use a minimal separation where the instruments are still grouped in front of the listener -- but slightly offset (spread) to create the illusion of dimensionality - without blasting one of their ears, while the other strains to hear anything...
The rare exception would be to intentionally shift a given voice/track far left/right -- or even moving/traveling along those extremes - to provide an effect that compliments the music --- quite a few Pink Floyd, and Beatles tracks come to mind as early examples of this technique.
I am trying to think of contemporary music that goes out on that limb..but can't recall any from the major labels. I've heard some very interesting indie music that toys with this in more subtle ways.
Ultimately -- I don't think there will be a large enough demand for surround sound in music - given that most listeners are listening via a stereo device - iPod or the like. There certainly will never be a demand for a portable device that provides surround sound -- because you only have two ears; if you are facing directly towards the source of a sound, or directly away from the source -- you can not tell if it is in front of or behind you. The only way surround sound becomes useful, is when you can rotate your head in the sound field, thus allowing you to triangulate the location of the sound. You can't do that with headphones --- at least not traditional ear buds, or over ear phones.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"I've mixed a lot of recordings, and can say from experience that separating instruments into different speakers (not 100% panning, of course) will definitely reduce distortion."
Arggh.
You are not significantly reducing distortion, you are providing psychoacoustic cues that make it easier for the brain to distinguish between different sounds.
There is such a thing as IMD of course, that speakers do suffer from, but this is so low as to be imperceptible compared to the psychoacoustic effects of panning.
"Plus, it's a good way to avoid "clipping" - a signal that goes over 0dB and gets distorted. You can separate the recording into different speakers, and thus the overall volume on one speaker is divided between the others, and neither speaker goes over 0dB, and you avoid clipping distortion."
You mean 0dBFS. My mixer can handle +33dBvu without distortion.
Yes, there's always an exception. Records with strict stereo separation are hard to play on mono equipment, and most recording studios will try and make sure their records sound reasonable on the broadest range of playback equipment.
If I apply some internet-truth parsing and divide your statement in half I get:
You're Canadian and have been working for seven hours, up for 12, and spelled Porsche correctly for the first time somewhere in the last ten to fifteen years.
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but the idea of buying music without in some way being able to damage the environment has been KILLING me.
Don't worry - all that industrial grade server and networking hardware needed to give you 24/7 broadband internet access is doing its bit for turning irreplacable fossil fuels into nice, warming carbon dioxide - and, before you know it, will be obsolete and happily sitting in a landfill leeching crap into the water table.
I suspect that its still better than moving lumps of plastic around in big trucks, but if you're worried about not doing your bit to destroy the planet, fear not - every little helps and the laws of thermodynamics are right behind you. In the end, entropy will even beat City Hall and the IRS.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Because the audiophile world is even more based on pseudoscience than is the alternative medicine world.
That's why a given speaker may not be able to reproduce very high frequency sounds. If you just add together separate sounds willy nilly then they could produce waveforms that have very high frequency components that exceed the speaker's frequency range. In that case those sounds would be played by, say, the tweeters instead. Or, if they were really high, would be eliminated by the low pass filter you have to apply when you sample music to put on a CD.
You've got to leave room on the card for at least 500MB of advertising media and bloatware players.
Don't forget about hte root kits.
Your examples all use volume. Yes, if you insist on playing things at the bleeding edge of the volume your speaker can handle then if you have two speakers you will reduce distortion because now they can each play slightly quieter and still produce the same overall volume. Clipping might also be reduced a little the same way. However, you can get the same effect buy buying a bigger speaker and mastering the recording more carefully to just avoid clipping.
You get a slightly better dynamic range with two separate channels, but since we hear on a logarithmic scale it's very slight and the return diminishes with each additional speaker.
Actually there's a one-man musical project that does exactly this in certain cases. The guy's name is Brian Voth and he calls his project Fireaxe.
Anywhere that there would be a conversation or anything of that nature, the "participants" (both technically him) will be routed to 100% left and 100% right to help make them more distinct. He also likes to record guitar pieces twice, heavily weight them to opposite sides and play them slightly off time from each other.
Why do people say a single speaker will have distortion when it plays too many sounds at once, but my ear, a single microphone, doesn't have that sort of trouble when the sounds are all crammed together into a single input.
Because we don't hear in the time domain, we hear in the frequency domain.
Each of the stereocilia in your cochlea responds to a specific frequency determined by its length and depth within the cochlea. That very effectively performs a time-to-frequency domain transform, feeding our brains with raw frequency data.
So, to answer your question, recorded sound quality matters because we have thousands of microphones inside our ears, each tuned to a very narrow frequency.
Why?
It's a 1 GB flash -- as compared to a 640MB CD, and that CD is probably not full. There is room to store BOTH the uncompressed audio AND 320kbps MP3 audio.
Of course, that probably cuts into the "video" part.
I'm with the grandparent poster here. I have to buy DVDs to get 5.1 surround music now. That would be a terrific value-add for me. Encoded 5.1 albums, ready to play back on the home system. Along with 2 channel MP3 for playback on the portable (since its portable, I would be fine with 128kbps).
One major advantage that this format has is that (unlike the CD format), it is easy to tailor the size of the medium to the contents. 1 GB now... but if needed, 2 GB, or 4 GB, etc.
I just purchased a 4 GB flash stick from "Tbe Source" for $15 -- including some Golf game. I needed a flash stick to create a recovery USB stick for my Acer Aspire One; so the game wasn't important. But, I could see paying $30 for a 4GB flash with uncompressed WAV, 5.1 surround, and 2 channel MP3 of an album. (or maybe more -- my "buy it now" point would be $30 for something like Pink Floyd; maybe I'd go to $45).
The point of the 5.1 is that it's something that just isn't available on the CD format.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
And it doesn't have anything to do with the type of recording either. You can play a mono recording through two speakers twice as loud without distortion as through one speaker.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
nin's pretty hate machine had some nice left-to-right fades on a few samples, sometimes layered. Not as large-scale as Pink, but a well-done effect.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I've made a set of surround headphones before. Take 2 sets of earbuds, place in a full cup headphones to either side. Tadah, left front, right front, left back, right back. A lot of cords, but it's cheap and neat.
Although turning your head makes the sounds "rotate" around you, which feels really weird.
What the hell is wrong with this industry? I realize that stealing music and other forms of media is a serious problem, but almost every approach to try to forcibly curve the behavior has made the problem worse, and the most prevalent effect is that the consumer response, outrage, basically makes people care even less about it being wrong.
"Could it be the labels have finally recognized that providing features and convenience to customers is preferable to suing them?"
It is sad, IMHO, that this statement is not just a whimsical remark, but indeed the embodiment of the way things are.
So my question is, given all our cumulative brain power, what can we do to take control of this situation? I'm glad people are suing the RIAA and bringing their tactics to light; it doesn't seem to be enough. It would seem that the consumer has all the power... if we could all band together. Perhaps if we all stop buying any form of music for 30 days and make it known that we are boycotting the industry for attacking its consumers? Then maybe the recording labels and artists who would very much like us to give them our money would pressure the RIAA to stop this nonsense? Maybe it's a dumb idea but we need to do something.
We are the consumers, and we make industry. All we really have to do is stand together and we can exude some amount of control to let companies know they can't abuse us. They can't rob us at the pump. They can't sue us for making backup copies. They can't gouge us uncontrollably... in any way, for any product.
If only we were capable of banding together. Ideas? I'm willing to put in my time and energy...
Not my words but an article in our second biggest newspaper, title: "Just when you thought the record companies had learned...", sub-header: "...they release memory cards as new music format" and it's getting bashed to hell and back. I don't know any norwegian-to-english robot translator, but for those who understand Norwegian you should read it here. Usually the mainstream press put a positive spin on things based on some bullshit press release - this has to be one of the worst slaughters of a product I've seen in a while.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Subject line says it all. We're past the "buy physical media" stage (especially if that media is not guaranteed to work on all players). Everybody could have seen this coming and planned for it. The labels and hardware companies could have come together and planned out a "standard" so that such a medium would be viable to the mass market, but no... they (mostly the labels) sat by the sidelines whining, crying, yelling and screaming and now the time for 'SD' music albums has GONE. Music stores are going OUT of business for a reason...
Why microSD and not regular SD? I guess there are adapters (microSD card slides into SD card adapter)... but regular SD would be good for some computers, some PDAs/phones, and digital photo frames
...but it looks like the internet wins again as the next media distribution system. Nobody told them?
If you can buy a 1G SD card for $8, then why are you saying that a shuffle with 1GB and an MP3/AAC player is a "$5 shuffle"?
In practice, once you add the MP3 player, you're looking at more like $32.00 than $8.00. And it won't play AAC.
So that's only a factor of two "Apple Tax", which is typical.
Disclaimer: I don't like the regular iPods, but I do have an iPod Shuffle I bought when they first came out. It's got decent sound quality... better than my daughter's iPod Mini let alone the $80 MP3 player I replaced with it (when I bought that, three years before the Shuffle came out, $80.00 was a decent price for a 512MB player). I'd need to listen to one of those $24.00 SD-based MP3 players before buying one.
Can you recommend one that's got two driver transistors per channel like the shuffle? That's not something that shows up in the specs online.
that if you don't like the music, you could just erase it and use the card for something else.
I remember years ago when VHS ruled. If you found one in the bargin bin you'd say to yourself, "Well, if this movie isn't any good, I can just record over it."
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Dear music industry and companies trying to fix something that's not in need,
The CD is NOT a broken method of distribution. While physical distribution has had and will continue having to give way to online sales through services such as iTunes, replacing CDs with something that still requires a person to get off their ass and venture in to the brick-n-mortor world isn't going to increase sales in this space.
I only buy CDs and then immediately rip them to MP3s for listening at home and via my iPod. I buy CDs for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that I always have it in the closet for ripping again in the format of my choice in the event I need to do so. I also like getting something I can touch when I fork money over for something that's not purely a service.
Distributing anything on flash memory in place of much cheaper and environmentally friendly optical discs is irresponsible. Plus, it makes no sense financially in my mind for a company to elect the particular method covered by this article.
Later,
Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
I was about to reply the same thing before I saw that you already had. Pretty Hate Machine was good the first time I listened to it (MANY years ago now) through a friend's crappy tape-deck, but it really came to life for me when I listened with headphones from the CD I picked up the following day.
I agree with the posters saying that it really isn't common and for most music, it doesn't make a difference, or could even ruin it, but when the music is actually designed around making use of this kind of thing (as with Pretty Hate Machine), then it really can change the whole experience quite significantly.
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it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices.
The human auditory system does this. True, the addition of two notes with harmonics is lossy in the general case, but if two singers are singing different notes, the ear can pick them apart:
im a european working for over 15 hours without any sleep for 24 hours. i spelled 'porsche' correctly for the first time probably before you were born.
Since you are European, I will take it that 15 hours is per week. I hope you know that many Americans can spell Porsche correctly working double, even triple your weekly hours. Don't worry about the slashdot trolls though. Take your Tuesday-Friday double paid vacation to put it out of your mind.
Yes! Yes yes yes! Screw the mod points - Yes!
-- All your booze are belong to us.
I had the same experience going to headphones. Incredible, especially the brushing back and forth that begins (I believe) the track Sin.
I was hesitant to mention it as "modern music" though, because the local record store had nin in the "Establishment music" section. Gosh that made feel old... :-/
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection
So it'll be dedicated to the public domain?
Oh, they meant copy protection...
http://outcampaign.org/
Speakers have horrendous amounts of distortion.
Many kinds, IMD, cabinet ringing, crossover distortion, phase distortion, cone breakup, etc etc.
This is the reason that no one has ever made a speaker system that can fool the ear into thinking there is a live acoustic instrument in the room.
I have heard the most esoteric speakers and amplifiers, in perfectly tuned studio control and mastering rooms, and I have never heard an instrument reproduced properly. Even a five year old kid wouldn't be fooled.
I'm not an 'audiophile' but I consider all high fidelity equipment to be laughably bad compared to an acoustic instrument in the same room.
I doesn't mean you can't enjoy it, it's just that even the most expensive hifi is still full of compromises.
All of modern medicine is based off of that "alternative medicine." Modern chemistry is based off of ancient alchemy. Modern astronomy is based off of ancient astrology. I see what you're doing but I don't appreciate the derogatory connotation to our historical scientific roots. Just because it seems silly to you doesn't mean it has no merit. How about instead of just ridiculing the field we use their statements and test them for verification. Maybe there is something there of merit that we (and they) are just not seeing in the proper light. (Disclaimer: I am a Ph.D applicant for a program that researches validating or invalidating "alternative medicines.")
Modern medicine is based on "alternative medicine" that has been validated. Chemistry is related to alchemy, but using the scientific method.
"Alternative medicine" today is a name for a big group of "therapies," the majority of which don't have any benefit and do active harm. That has been shown through numerous, scientific trials.
Yes, there are certainly some bits of "alternative medicine" that do work. I wish you luck finding and validating them - someone has to. But at the point where you validate them they will cease to be alternative and become part of mainstream, scientific medicine.
If you look at my post, I said that the alternative medicine world is based on pseudoscience. It IS. As soon as a treatment is based on science rather than pseudoscience it becomes "mainstream medicine".
Disclaimer: I have a PhD in medical research and taught a lecture in clinical trials and validation techniques last Monday.
You mean unnatural, like half of the beetle recordings that were ever done?
I suppose this is a dead thread by now, but speaking of more than two or three audio channels (and sitting in the middle of a group), Canadian artist Janet Cardiff has a great installation consisting of 40 speakers on stands, each reproducing (mostly) one of the 40 voices singing Thomas Tallis' 40-voice motet Spem in Alium nunquam habui in a 15 minute loop including about three minutes of quiet talking from the recording session. The speakers are arranged in a large oval and you can wander about in the gallery trying out different positions. A fascinating demonstration of multi-channel recording and playback that wouldn't have been possible not so many years ago (imagine syncing 20 2-track tape decks!)
Google "Janet Cardiff Forty Part Motet"
I'll believe that the record companies will do this when I see it on the store shelves. Given their track record, there has to be a catch somewhere.
What kind of logic is that? The fact that modern chemistry is the direct descendant of medieval alchemy doesn't change the fact that modern chemistry is a rigorous scientific field and medieval alchemy was a total load of crap.
Alternative medicine is essentially crap by definition. Because when alternative medicine works, regular medicine co-opts it and it ceases to become alternative. The parts that stay outside the mainstream are almost necessarily the parts that don't actually work.
Any field which tolerates the existence of the dreck you find in things like Homeopathy is fully deserving of as much ridicule as one can provide.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Isn't this really the same as selling CD's which I can rip (legally in australia at least).
Does this mean that now we'll be able to play video off of the cards? That's the biggest drawback of the Sansa for me (after the huge format you're required to put the files in with the original firmware)--I bought a couple of cards thinking I could put movies and TV episodes on them and switch them out after I watched them, keeping my music static on the player. As of whatever the last firmware update was, SanDisk players can't pull video files off of the SD card. It would also require a significant speeding up of the re-databasing time to be useful; I already have to wait close to a minute for the thing to boot up when there's even only a few files on the SD card.
"This is gonna replace CD's soon; guess I'll have to buy the White Album again..."
I don't understand how this would work in practice. From your description, the sound would still be directed at one ear in a fixed manner; your left ear, for example, can't hear the right front speaker when you turn your head right because they are isolated on your ears.
The only way I could see this working would be to somehow move the speakers in reference to your ear - but to be effective, you would need 4 Boze bookshelf speakers hanging from a harness attached to your head -- or do that electronically to virtually create the same effect (bleeding over left/right and front/back in response to head movement). This concept actually might be good for gaming, where 3D sound is important (hear the enemy sneaking up on you in an FPS, and triangulate their position, by turning your head slightly).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Very few things are mixed exclusively left/right because, even being able to hear the opposite speaker, it sounds "wrong" if a sound comes only from, say, right front.
Since the speakers move with your head, the soundscape does too. You could locate things by the direction of the sound in a game, but you'd have to rotate your character, not your head, to home in on them. Much like you rotate your character to see, instead of moving your monitor.
there are lots of locks on the hardware, but I love the open source spirit in the no DRM support. there's more at this article.
If you have a quadrophonic surround sound system using speakers -- then only way to triangulate the location of the sounds that are directly in front of, or directly behind you is to move your head. Once a sound is largely coming from off center - then you don't have to move your head because that serves the same purpose. This is the same issue with analog sounds -- if I am facing directly towards a given sound, and I have no other cues (such as echos off walls and such) -- I can not tell if the sound is in front of, or behind me.
Under most circumstances, your ears are getting cues from the diminished sounds coming from the other directions (echos and so forth) - which allows you to triangulate. With headphones, you have no such cues unless they are provided artificially.
The point I was making about what you described is that with a headphone set up, without some virtualized effects that mimics these diminished sounds and echos and the changing of the ears' location e.g. turning of the head -- you won't get any benefit - no matter how you turn your head with those headphones on, you can't have the sound swirl around you - as you describe without some additional input.
I've played video games that do provide surround sound - and the problem with playing with headphones is as I described. Luckily you can face your avatar's head in a different direction - thus artificially changing the orientation of the ears within the virtual sound field to allow you to triangulate. This is not currently possible with recordings - unless you are listening to them inside of a game that mimics a quadrophonic system...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
So much better and more concise than the copy and paste I was about to post. I wish I had points.