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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.
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.
From the article:
Music, Retail and Tech Leaders to Offer "slotMusic(TM)": High Quality, DRM-Free MP3 Music on microSD(TM) Cards
My guess is, this is yet another "plays on most devices" that the record labels always cooks up
And your guess is wrong. This is genuinely good news, they're finally realizing that certain people will pirate regardless how inconvenient they make it.
Tell that to the people mixing albums from the ground up for 5.1 listening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Binary_Universe
If you're going to throw specs around, please make sure you've got the right ones: CD's are ALWAYS (not generally) 44.1KHz 16bit PCM audio. If those cards are a GB large, then fitting a lossless copy of the CD with FLAC on there shouldn't be too difficult (this shrink the CD down from ~650MB to ~300-400MB, worst case scenario ~500MB). And those of you requesting 192KHz 24bit resolution, please do the calculation and find out you'll need a lot more space that way and please do the ABX and find out that, apart from some killers samples and some killer ears, you're never going to hear the difference with a normal CD.
A catchy name!
Seriously, this is quite important for adoption.
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
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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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.
About the only advantage I see to this is the "up to 320k", whereas Amazon's are 160k I believe.
160 kbit is a bit marginal, but Amazon's MP3s are encoded at 256 kbit. For most people who aren't audiophiles, this is indistinguishable from the original CD.
I ran MediaInfo over one of their MP3s. The output is at http://pastebin.com/m75a78b22 .
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.
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format
You cannot hear the difference between a 16-bit recording and a 24-bit because in 16-bits per sample the SNR already is 96 dB. There's nothing a sampling frequency higher than 44.1 kHz will bring you since you cannot hear anything above 22 kHz. DVD Audio never took off because its target niche is the same fools who buy gold connectors, $500 wooden volume knobs or even put CDs in freezers to soften the sound (I kid you not).
You just got troll'd!
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 :-(
If you're of the crap I think you're thinking of it is removable -
http://www.u3.com/uninstall/
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"But pretty much anyone with decent equipment *can* hear the difference between 24bit and 16bit, or 48khz and 96khz."
Lots of people who pay large sums for audio equipment _claim_ they can hear such differences despite the fact that the original source signals from the best microphones in the world don't produce any useful information above 22KHz and have signal / noise ratios of 90db or less, so there won't be any extra musical information that requires the higher frequency response and dynamic range provided by more bits and higher sampling frequencies.
Studios use high sampling rates and word sizes (192 KHz 32-bit) because multiple tracks can act as input to other tracks, which means that noise accumulates, and positional differences of high frequency bits in lower sampling rates can combine to produce artefacts (both of these can and do also occur when mixing multiple tracks down). Neither of these is a factor in domestic listening however, because _any_ system below the native studio resolution of 192 KHz 32-bit will end up being dithered down using the same algorithms (often on the same hardware).
"That is a pretty well established fact"
Established by whom? Double-blind listening tests indicate that there's no objective difference between them on any level of equipment when they're only being used to play back pre-recorded sources, irrespective of the musical genre being used to evaluate them. There's plenty of psycho-acoustical information to indicate that rise-times in waveforms above the upper threshold of human hearing can have a notable effect on the way it's perceived, but the inability of microphones used in music recording applications to transduce those frequencies into useful signals means that it's of academic rather than practical interest (some microphones such as the ones used in bat detectors can respond to extremely high frequencies, but they have other characteristics that make them useless for recording music signals).
"Audio CDs are generally encoded as 48khz, 16bit, 1411kbps PCM audio"
The audio on digital video is recorded at 48KHz. CDs are 44.1 KHz.
"For comparison, get one of the few albums available in DVD Audio and compare them to the CD - especially at high volumes. "
You'll need one of the even fewer DVD Audio albums that isn't up-sampled and re-mixed from a 44.1 KHz 16 bit master, and therefore actually has some chance of containing real extra musical information that isn't on the CD version to make such a comparison valid, otherwise any perceivable differences will be nothing more than artefacts of the up-sampling and re-mastering process.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format
The memory is only 1 Gig in size. This was designed for iPods and cell phones which are often used at work, in transportation, and other noisy environments and on equipment with out amps with only .1% THD or worse quality. 24 bit is lost in these invironments. There are very few golden ears listening to a nano that could even tell the difference between a CD quality lossless 44.1K sampled 16 Bit or 24 bit recording. Few can notice the change when the program is recorded in 48K or 96K 24 bit.
DVD audio is included in many DVD players. You missed the target. No one adopted the high priced format for music, especially when they crippled the standard CD layer to poor quality. The high quality was encrypted and the CD quality was vastly substandard. This format was stillborn for anyone wishing to buy music to rip to an iPod.
but it might take off if you made it easily playable.
Point well taken. Since they did the oposite and added DRM (copy protection) to the high quality and distorted the standard CD layer, it wasn't worth the extra price.
I might even pay a slight premium.
Funny how the industry thinks they know what the consumer wants, but doesn't ship what they ask for. The request is simple.. Quality for an affordable price. In other words, value.
I don't want a memory stick containing lossy 320kbit songs,
You got that right, especialy at full retal prices for both the music and the memory.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
Mod parent up. Thanks for the voice of reason in here.
You'll need one of the even fewer DVD Audio albums that isn't up-sampled and re-mixed from a 44.1 KHz 16 bit master, and therefore actually has some chance of containing real extra musical information that isn't on the CD version to make such a comparison valid, otherwise any perceivable differences will be nothing more than artefacts of the up-sampling and re-mastering process.
Just for those who don't know: what the parent is referring to is the ongoing Loudness War, in which nearly all popular music is produced at higher and higher loudness levels, severely reducing the dynamic range to well below what the CD format is capable of. (Louder music sounds better "at first glance", so there's a lot of commercial pressure to do this.)
Some DVD-A and SACD albums are remastered without this execrable dynamic range compression... and sound better as a result. But it would sound just as good in CD or MP3 format if record companies would stop butchering them.
My bicyles
you're wrong so wrong you should take a look at this http://gizmodo.com/363154/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger