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.

Comments

Nigger

[Anonymous Coward]

please

I want real High Quality

[ottawanker]

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.

Re:I want real High Quality

[SwedishPenguin]

It's probably to minimize the space required. They don't want half the price of the card be the cost of the card itself after all. Also a 320kbps mp3 can be played by pretty much any mp3 player out there, unlike most lossless compression formats.
Besides, most people (including me) can't hear the difference between 320 kbps lossy and lossless.

Re:I want real High Quality

[seneces]

But pretty much anyone with decent equipment *can* hear the difference between 24bit and 16bit, or 48khz and 96khz. That is a pretty well established fact, and not nearly as controversial as mp3 encoding quality. Audio CDs are generally encoded as 48khz, 16bit, 1411kbps PCM audio - which the majority of modern soundcards (including onboard cards) can outdo in recordings (though obviously they lack in other areas). For comparison, get one of the few albums available in DVD Audio and compare them to the CD - especially at high volumes.

The downside is that 4 minutes of 2 channel music in 24/96 is 65.5MB in FLAC (bitrate of 2275kbps). Quite a bit heavier than CD quality audio.

But i'm also one of those people that is very convinced I can hear the difference between most MP3 and lossless, so you might want to take my opinion as slightly biased ;)

Re:I want real High Quality

[YourExperiment]

The summary states that the card is 1GB in size, so that's plenty of room to store the audio in 24-bit 48kHz quality (arguably the highest quality the human ear can distinguish) and still leave room for extras. They could step up to 2GB pretty cheaply if they want to go to 96kHz.

Sadly I doubt many people would notice if the audio was in 128 kbit/s MP3 format.

Re:I want real High Quality

[91degrees]

Most mp3 players will play this format, at least if you copy the data.

mp3 is a bit old and virtually all other formats are better, but it's the de facto standard. 320kbit at least should give a decent reproduction.

Re:I want real High Quality

[YourExperiment]

Audio CDs are generally encoded as 48khz, 16bit, 1411kbps PCM audio

Minor correction, audio CDs are encoded with a sample rate of 44.1khz, not 48khz.

Around the time of the initial development of CDs, audio was often stored using video recorders, since hard drives were an impractical choice back then. 44,100 samples per second suited both the NTSC and PAL formats, so this format was common at the time, and that's why this non-round number was originally chosen for the CD format too.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

uh.. because a 5.1 192khz track wouldn't exactly fit on a 1GB SD card, now *would* it?

Also... most people wouldn't care, since it seems the masses are satisfied by 128kbps mp3.

Re:I want real High Quality

[BrentH]

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.

Re:I want real High Quality

[hattig]

You've got to leave room on the card for at least 500MB of advertising media and bloatware players.

Re:I want real High Quality

[calmofthestorm]

Feel free to buy a CD. This is fine by me.

Re:I want real High Quality

[uvajed_ekil]

Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format, and maybe something in 5.1 instead?

Why? Because most people don't care. People who listen to ipods, buy from itunes, rip their own cds with crappy compression, and mainly listen to their music with $5 headphones, can't tell the difference between a lossless format and the common, lossy formats. That applies to the majority of consumers. Very little demand for anything better than 320kbps mp3 or aac or whatever. I like flac for archiving, personally, but I also often convert to a mediocre mp3 format for portability with my Palm Treo.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are people still holding on to mp3 instead of using ogg? I created 192kbps mp3 more than 10 years ago, because it was the best audio codec available at the time. It's like people would still be using divx 1 to encode their videos...

Re:I want real High Quality

[AC-x]

I think this is a great idea (as long as the price is right)... A convenient format to copy to MP3 players (no waiting around for songs to rip from CD or transcoding from "higher quality" formats) and presumably I could move the songs off the memory card and use that for whatever I wanted.

Sounds like the industry is finally coming round, now if on-line music stores were better value...

Re:I want real High Quality

[ramul]

Are you referring to the 100Hz part?

44kHz is used because we ideally hear frequencies up to 22kHz, and to sample 22kHz you need twice the sampling rate to transfer the on/off waveform state.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Nursie]

Given that most of the stuff you've ever listened to is in 44.1 KHz and 16bit (CD), I doubt you could either.

You don't magically gain resolution when you encode a cd, you know.

Re:I want real High Quality

[vhogemann]

Well,

Most people associate the word "MP3" with digital music... also it will play on the vast majority of devices out there, while a lossless format sometimes will need to be converted, and this might confuse regular consumers.

But you're right, I can't see how it's any better than regular CDs.

Re:I want real High Quality

[dabadab]

They don't want half the price of the card be the cost of the card itself

Well, actually they want all of the price to be the price of the card itself, since they are selling memory cards, not music. The music part is just some "freebie" thrown in to make the product more appealing to buyers - it more or less serves the same purpose as the Batman action figure that I found in the box of my breakfast cereal.
I know that it is hard to grasp this concept since traditionally it has worked the other way round, but it is not exactly novel - for example the Kingston USB drive I bought a few months ago came with some stupid games on it - and I certainly did not pay for the games but for the drive.

Re:I want real High Quality

[hairyfeet]

Because every music player in the free world can play it? I have a Sandisk M260(love it),most of my family has Sandisk M series,my friends have a mix of everything from Apple to Creative to Coby. What is the ONE format that is sure to work on ALL of our players? That's right! MP3. And the simple fact is most folks are listening to either the earbuds that came with the player or some other cheap set of earbuds.

Because these things aren't for sitting down and really listening,they are for background music when you are walking,jogging,working,goofing off,etc. I hate to sound like a commercial but these things really do let us set the soundtrack to our daily life. I know I can't even picture going back to radio. I plug it into an adapter when I'm in the car,and when my battery runs out I can pop into a convenience store,pick up a pack of AAAs and be back to my tunes in a couple of minutes.

The point is that these players and the MP3s that are on them isn't about audio fidelity,they are about convenience. So for at least the foreseeable future if you want Ogg you'll have to buy the CD and rip it yourself. Because now that it looks like audio DRM is finally dying out MP3s will be with us for a LONG time. While I am glad you have found a format that works for you,it simply doesn't work on the vast majority of players on the market. So for a music company to put out their product in a format that 99.99% of players can't use without conversion would be suicide. Until everything from the iPod to the Sandisk to the little no name Chinese players all support it I don't think you'll be seeing an upsurge in Ogg usage. Because for most folks MP3 is more than good enough. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:I want real High Quality

[suckmysav]

You know, I'm in my mid forties and I grew up with scratchy LP's and compact cassettes. I recall buying LP's and "ripping" them to tapes so that I didn't have to keep handling and playing the LP in an attempt to maintain them in "pristine condition". I've still got those LP's too.

The trouble was that compact cassettes sounded like crap, even when you lashed out and bought the "metal" ones. But we had no choice. You couldn't use LP's in the car so cassettes it was (8-Tracks never caught on in Australia so please refrain from telling me about how they were much better than CC)

Fast forward 30 years and my main problem with music these days is that IT IS MOSTLY CRAP!

To my aging ears, MP3's sound way better than cassette tapes ever did even at 128Kbs. Most of my 120Gb collection is ripped in 128-192K MP3 and I don't care. Most of the music I like was recorded in the analog days anyway, and besides, I'm sure my old ears aren't what they used to be.

128K MP3s still sound better than any cassette tape ever did so I'm happy.

Listening to 50 fucking cent pose and preen in 5.1 lossless audio? All I can say is not in my lifetime buddy.

I'll take an antique recording of Canned Heat, Peter Green or Alvin Lee @ 128Mb any day thanks.

Now, get off my damn lawn you goddamn whippersnappers!

Re:I want real High Quality

[suckmysav]

Well, in my case it's because MP3s sound OK to me and that I can't play ogg on my ipod.

Re:I want real High Quality

[4D6963]

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).

Re:I want real High Quality

[TSPhoenix]

It doesn't really matter in the end because thanks to the loudness war its all going to be ruined anyway. Even with all the extra room 96Hz offers I'm sure they'd opt to ruin it all anyway.

A quick search on Youtube finds a couple of practical examples.;
Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy Metallica - Death Magnetic

I mean if the difference is light and day at Youtube quality you can only begin to imagine how much is being lost overall. I really don't know how artists let this happen, its an insult really.

Re:I want real High Quality

[mrrudge]

I'm only mid thirties, but I remember metal tapes for the things you really loved ( I remember still being able to hear what you had on the other side of the tape in the quiet parts too ).

I don't agree that music has got worse though, certainly the small ( but *pop*ular ) section of it that gets constantly directed at you might have, it's hard to tell once your taste is somewhat set by your hormone rich years, and it's hard for me to find anything in common with misogynistic urban tough guys, but interesting people are making new interesting music all the time, and access to it has never been easier.

It may be that you're listening for familiarity, but if you're not, some of my favourite artists are now on first / second albums and still getting better.

Following *sounds like* on last.fm or pandora.com ( they're ranked by people who-listen-to-also-listen-to ) tend to give you artists from a similar generation, but looking at 'followers' on allmusic.com will give you a list of people who thought simiarily about your favourites, and made music to match.

I hope you find something you like.

Re:I want real High Quality

[L4t3r4lu5]

FLAC.

It's FREE (as in beer) to use, and it's LOSSLESS.

WHAT MORE DO THEY WANT?

Re:I want real High Quality

[amorsen]

There's nothing a sampling frequency higher than 44.1 kHz will bring you since you cannot hear anything above 22 kHz.

Using 96kHz allows you to use a rather stupid filter which starts at say 30kHz and does 100% filtering only at 45kHz. Such a filter is almost certain to not cause any distortion below 20kHz. In contrast, with CD you have to use a filter which only has the range 20kHz to 22KHz to play with, which means you have to use a rather sophisticated filter (or make the cut-off frequency lower).

You can of course do the recording at 96kHz (or higher) and then downsample to 44.1kHz using a perfect digital filter.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Muad'Dave]

8-Tracks never caught on in Australia so please refrain from telling me about how they were much better than CC.

I don't remember if they actually sounded better, but I know that the very loud 'kerchunk' in the middle of a song on a poorly laid-out 8-track was extremely annoying!

On the technical side, the tape may have moved at 3.75 inches/sec (2x cassette tape speed), but the movement of the heads to advance tracks almost guaranteed that they'd be either skewed or off center, making for lousy sound.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Weedlekin]

"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.

Re:I want real High Quality

[RalphSleigh]

A format played by default in windows media player.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Technician]

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.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Lodragandraoidh]

I have a SanDisk player which has the microSD slot. I love the player- it also has a built-in FM tuner, and can show pictures and play video.

I bought a 2GB microSD drive to provide more room onboard. I would love to collect more SD cards so I can store music and other cruft - and swap it out at my whim without having to unload the songs I've loaded into the built-in memory. As a result this is appealing to me:

1. I get to try out new music I may not have heard.

2. I get another microSD card that I can load as I want, after I erase/save the music that came with it.

Win-Win for me. I know there was a reason I liked SanDisk -- now I like them even more.

PS. -- you can also hack the SanDisk players - for those who want to do more with it than just play tunes.

Re:I want real High Quality

[c]

> Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format, and maybe something in 5.1 instead?

Because their target market is people who listen to music on computers, cell phones, and portable music players?

c.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

"In contrast, with CD you have to use a filter which only has the range 20kHz to 22KHz to play with, which means you have to use a rather sophisticated filter (or make the cut-off frequency lower)."

Poppycock. This myth keeps turning up, even though it was outdated at the end of the last century.

Every DAC made in the last eight years or so, from the very cheapest, is oversampling.

I think it is impossible to buy a true 16bit 44.1KHz converter at the moment.

The oversampling means that you get the benefits of gentle filtering with the turnover frequency in the ultrasonic range, but on material with a 44.1KHz original sample rate.

Re:I want real High Quality

[L4t3r4lu5]

WMA?

No, WMP needs to support FLAC. Or, people need to stop using the bundled player and use what THEY want instead of what the corps. want them to use.

Isn't this how we got into this situation in the first place? Vendor lockin and loack of choice through market dominance?

Re:I want real High Quality

[amorsen]

I was talking about recording, not playback. I did not make that clear in my comment. Sorry.

Re:I want real High Quality

[FredFredrickson]

I agree. I've had a few sandisk mp3 players over the years, and each one plays video. I've been happy over the industry freeing MP3s, because now I can feel good about buying the music-

But video- I've been torn. So far, there isn't a single legal way to get a video onto my mp3 player. Nada. I can't technically "rip" a dvd, because it bypasses the encryption, which is against the DMCA. I can't download video- because it's all DRM'd to hell, and no player plays drm'd video. I can't download TV shows- because only itunes does it for the ipod. I can't get "The Daily Show" even though it's FREE! because they're stuck in their flash player, so scared somebody will come along and steal it.

I've always hated that "The daily show" is $2/episode, while it's available for free on their website. $2 an episode is great for somebody who missed a single episode, but if I wanted to hit the entire month- I'm paying more than I would for cable. If they had a $10/month subscription, I'd seriously consider it.

Anyway, I'm rambling, I'm just pissed that I can't legally get a lot of content for my mp3 player. This is, I hope, a breakthrough in the right direction..

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

True, I forgot about hardware audio players - oops ;) But still, there's a lot of hardware players that do support ogg, out of the box or though custom firmware, and if more people would use ogg, hardware player support would come also. So it's a bit of a catch-22 situation.

I was just making a point that for people it shouldn't matter which codec their music is encoded in as long as it works, just like they don't know a movie has been put into an mkv container with an ogg audio stream and x264 encoded video. Most _computer_ player software supports ogg btw.

Makes me think we should have also had a container format for music, then this problem of technology stagnation could have been avoided as it is with the use of .avi

btw. releasing music in flac ofcours would be even better, being lossless. aac also has proponents over ogg. just anything but mp3!

Re:I want real High Quality

[ceoyoyo]

"There's nothing a sampling frequency higher than 44.1 kHz will bring you since you cannot hear anything above 22 kHz."

However, your dog and cat would really enjoy a little extra sampling frequency. Hey, that's the secret! Market to pet owners!

Re:I want real High Quality

[Agripa]

The same principle is used for audio recording as well. Delta sigma AtoD and DtoA converters both take advantage of oversampling and significantly reduce the demands on the anti-aliasing filter. Internally, they both do decimation and digital filtering such that they appear to use a lower sampling rate than is actually used on the analog side. The disadvantage is a higher latency and often the loss of the ability to be used as a sampling converter.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. If they've got 1GB to play with, the audio specification should be HIGHER than CD-Audio, not lower. Pathetic.

Oh, and while I'm at it, why won't Apple's iPods handle sample rates higher than 48Khz? Is there some kind of conspiracy against HD audio?

Re:I want real High Quality

[afidel]

That is a pretty well established fact

Actually, it's quite the opposite. Only ~5% of trained listeners could reliably tell the difference between a high bitrate mp3 and the original 14.1 recording inABX testing on average samples, so what makes you think that they can hear the difference between 24bit and 16bit? Even if you think you have golden ears and can pick up the difference between high bitrate and lossless then I have to ask, can you hear tones above 16khz at volumes that would not produce hearing loss if the entire mix was at that level? Because again that's a VERY small percentage of the population and it's mostly under 20 years old.

Re:I want real High Quality

[DavidTC]

Erm, while we're being technical, it might be worth pointing out that by definition you can fit an uncompressed CD on a 1GB SD card, as audio CDs can only contain, at most, 800 megs of data. (The normal 700 megs of data, plus 100 megs normally used for error correction.)

Re:I want real High Quality

[MoxFulder]

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.

Can you actually tell the difference between "lossy 320kbit" audio and lossless audio?

I highly doubt it. Most people can't tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and lossless. Of course, of course, you're not "most people". You have nice speakers and a very good ear. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that I've seen that *anyone* can systematically distinguish anything better than 192kbps MP3 from the lossless "real thing" even under optimal listening conditions.

As far as I can tell, SACD and DVD-A never took off because (a) they're expensive, (b) they're loaded down with DRM suckage, and (c) no one can hear the difference.

Re:I want real High Quality

[default luser]

FLAC.

It's FREE (as in beer) to use, and it's LOSSLESS.

WHAT MORE DO THEY WANT?

How about a format that plays automatically when you plug it into ANY Sandisk mp3 player with a MicroSD slot?

You did know that this is all about increasing Sandisk's mindshare, right? They're leveraging a feature that already works in the majority of their players on the market, and doesn't work in any iPod. If you remove the compatibility, you instantly erase the existing list of "plug-in compatible" players, and the format dies instantly.

That is, of course, unless you expect Sandisk to crate new firmware for all their players to handle FLAC. Considering how poor their firmware support was on the popular e200 series, I highly doubt that.

Re:I want real High Quality

[MoxFulder]

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.

Re:I want real High Quality

[cbreaker]

Yea sure why not include a lossless version at 24-bit 192Khz? That would be awesome because then we'd all get cheap 8GB memory sticks.

While I do enjoy DVD-Audio discs a lot, and I wish there were more, 320Kbit MP3 encoded with a recent encoder will be audibly indistinguishable from CD-quality uncompressed (which is about 1400Kbit.)

I don't care what equipment you have. 320Kbit MP3 mastered from the same 24-bit source (assuming a modern recording studio) as the CD will sound just as good as the CD. MAYBE even better.

Re:I want real High Quality

[hairyfeet]

Ugh,you brought up what I consider the antichrist of formats...mkv. You ever try to get the mkv converted into anything actually useful in Windows? Good look with that. Yes,I know mkv is a container. But if you can't actually get anything out of the stupid container then it is next to worthless,as I have yet to see a DVD player that supported mkv. So now when I find some funny video someone has posted to the web and see it is in a mkv format,I don't even bother watching,just close the tab. I like to be able to watch on my TV and that just ain't happening with mkv.

And as for needing an audio container,again with the why? I have yet to run into anyone who said "these MP3s just don't give me enough high fidelity sound" because for 99.999% of the folks out there they really can't hear a difference. I know anything above 128k and I can't hear a difference,and I sure as hell can't with those little earbuds. And when I pick up my nephews at school i don't see a single teenager that isn't bopping around with an MP3 player. Talking to the oldest and his friends the thought of playing music on anything other than their MP3 players is simply an alien concept to them. And I have noticed more and more of the "older folks" have begun embracing them. I even caught my 65 year old mother bopping to Abba on my sister's MP3 player while she cleaned!

So I really don't see a point in yet another niche format that will only appeal to .0001% of the listening public. Personally I'm glad we have gotten away from the wma,aac,ra,etc formats where you never knew if it would actually play without keeping a list of supported formats for your hardware. With MP3 I know that whether it is my player,one belonging to my family,my friends,my neighbor,etc it will just work. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:I want real High Quality

[Weedlekin]

"Some DVD-A and SACD albums are remastered without this execrable dynamic range compression... and sound better as a result."

It's more common to eschew the compression on DVD-A due to the fact that they often include a Dolby Digital track set for playing on standard DVD players that don't have a specific DVD-A capability. Dolby Digital has a calibrated average reference level that's well below those that have become common in the Loudness War, so there's much more likelihood that the rest of the content will follow suit. Sadly, SACD is as prone to over-recording as CDs are, and DVD-A is a long way from being free of it.

"But it would sound just as good in CD or MP3 format if record companies would stop butchering them."

CDs are capable of superb results when they're made from well recorded source material and played on a quality deck, hence the fact that Deutsche Grammophon, who have always been renowned for their very high fidelity classical recordings were notable early pioneers of the format. Interestingly, they continue in their pioneering spirit by offering classical tracks for (paid) download in 320 kbps MP3 format with no DRM, which is a notable vote of confidence in the quality of high-bitrate MP3 when it's properly encoded from an impeccable source signal.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea right.
A radio shack tape player and Kmart speakers probably. The player was always the weak link with cassettes. That's why they got eaten.
And car decks and speakers pretty much always suck dude.
Get a Nakamichi deck and some Klipsch speakers.
Ahhh, never mind, put yer shitty earbuds back on...

Re:I want real High Quality

[Marillion]

Correct. If I recall correctly, they converted the digital audio to a video signal and used common video recorders to store the digital audio. At the time, some music "purists" criticized the process because it yielded a slight pitch change because NTSC tape decks at recorded at 29.95 frames per second from NTSC based PCM converters sampling at 44,056 samples per second. When played back at 44,100 samples per second it raised the pitch. PAL based PCM converters operated at 44,100 samples per second.

The ugly details at Wiki

Re:I want real High Quality

[FLEB]

I'm not sure if you can do this on the standard firmware, but on the Rockbox firmware, you can copy, move, and manage files on the player, which would make this a rather nice "pop it in, copy it over, and go" format. My problem has always been, though, how to keep my spare MicroSD cards on hand without losing them.

Re:I want real High Quality

[FLEB]

Perhaps I'm missing something about the nature of container formats, but if all the individual codecs weren't on the player, wouldn't it just move the problem to being one of "my player doesn't support the codec" as opposed to "my player doesn't support the format?

One of the reasons that MP3 is so standardized is that dedicated MP3 decoding chips are pretty much dirt cheap, and don't require a general-purpose processor. With a variable format, you'd end up eating battery life and cost in music players by requiring a general-purpose processor that can handle decoding.

Granted, a lot of the mid/high-end hardware has general-purpose processors (hence firmware additions that allow new formats), but a varying format would prohibit cheaper hardware and likely not end up as the common standard.

Re:I want real High Quality

[FLEB]

Okay. You care. Anyone else? Enough to make a difference?

Re:I want real High Quality

[KillerBob]

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

Because the maximum capacity is 1GB. That's only 300mb more than a CD, which is, itself, a lossy format. DVD-A was able to carry 5.1 surround in a lossless format (more accurately, a *less lossy* format, since it's still a digital recording, and because of the sampling method can't record as smooth a curve as analog), because it had/has a much higher capacity. If you wanted to provide the recording in a lossless format equivalent to DVD-A, you'd have to settle for 1/4th the maximum recording length, or about nothing longer than an EP.

I'm not too keen on MP3 either, because it is lossy. But they're trying to push a product that everybody can already use, rather than trying to push a new player on the world. *THAT* is why DVD-A failed. Everybody and their dog has *something* that can play MP3s. Off the top of my head, I could play this "new" format in my cell phone, my notebook computer, my HTPC, my TV supports video/audio playback from USB mass storage, my DVD player, too.... They don't need to worry about penetration, because everybody already has the ability to use it.

That's why they're going for MP3. Your idea would provide better music, but it would be at the expense of having to market a new player at the same time. Not gonna fly.

Re:I want real High Quality

[YourExperiment]

I think you might be confusing bitrate (e.g. 128 kbit/s MP3) with sample rate (e.g. 44.1kHz CD). The bitrate of uncompressed CD-quality PCM audio is 1411.2 kbit/s, more than ten times that of the MP3 format I mentioned. I can assure you that I can tell the difference between those!

Re:I want real High Quality

[4D6963]

Yeah but wait, you're talking about ADCs. When you record it makes sense to use a higher sampling frequency for the reasons you cited, as well as more bits-per-sample as to increase the dynamic range. But we're talking about playback. When it comes to playing back a finished piece, you do not need the 96 kHz, if any filtering is needed you need a windowed sinc FIR no longer than 88 samples to have a roll-off bandwidth of 2 kHz, which is trivial to convolve with (and you can probably get computationally more efficient with an IIR), and you couldn't possibly enjoy anything more than 16-bits per sample no matter what.

Re:I want real High Quality

[suckmysav]

Nope, don't use earbuds. Or headphones.

I plug my ipod into my car deck and listen while driving.

With all the ambient noise in cars I don't see the fricking point in spending thousands of dollars on a uber-wanker hifi system. Unless you drive a fucking Bentley you'll never hear any subtle nuances anyway.

You obviously do. Well bully for you dickwad.

Go back to Kanye West, monster cables and expensive cassette decks arsehole.

I'd rather have the convenience of having the majority of my collection in my car at all times even if there might be a TINY reduction in perceivable "quality".

Re:I want real High Quality

[afedaken]

Your problem however is exactly what SanDisk likes to hear. :-)

Re:I want real High Quality

[magarity]

put CDs in freezers to soften the sound (I kid you not)
 
Oh, yes, this works quite well. When the condensation from the cold CD drips off onto the laser pickup, it mists the lens and that makes the sound softer.

Re:I want real High Quality

[Free the Cowards]

The range of human hearing is far less precise than you make it out to be. Pretty much any sample rate between 40-50kHz could be easily justified on physiological grounds, and possibly an even bigger range than that. (And DVD-A supports up to 192kHz!) Even just 44 is an awfully specific number just for that, let alone 44.1.

Re:I want real High Quality

[not flu]

Because ogg vorbis is not significantly better than well encoded mp3. To make the switch from mp3 worthwhile the alternative has to either be lossless or offer convenience benefits that out weight the cost of having to switch equipment.

Re:I want real High Quality

[not flu]

Most _computer_ player software supports ogg btw.

Except, say, iTunes.

Makes me think we should have also had a container format for music, then this problem of technology stagnation could have been avoided as it is with the use of .avi

btw. releasing music in flac ofcours would be even better, being lossless. aac also has proponents over ogg. just anything but mp3!

.ogg is a container format, often used with the Ogg Vorbis codec. .m4a is another popular container format, generally used with AAC and Apple Lossless.

Re:I want real High Quality

[ncc74656]

So far, there isn't a single legal way to get a video onto my mp3 player.

You could record it from TV with your computer (using MythTV, Windows MCE, or whatever). You could record it on your TiVo and rip it from that. You could use a recent version of FlashGot to get a download link for most Flash video.

Next question?

Re:I want real High Quality

[4D6963]

Yeah. Let's leave out the fact data is stored binarily and that it could only result in a higher error rate which would affect all bits, even the most significant ones, and that it would just sound like noise.

Re:I want real High Quality

[FredFredrickson]

Don't have cable, and flashgot doesn't work on hulu...

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure mp3's give high fidelity sound at bitrates of 256 kbps and higher. Ogg-Vorbis/other more modern audio codecs could achieve this same quality in a lesser bitrate saving space on your portable player... Isn't that a good layman's argument?

Re:I want real High Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps I'm missing something about the nature of container formats, but if all the individual codecs weren't on the player, wouldn't it just move the problem to being one of "my player doesn't support the codec" as opposed to "my player doesn't support the format?

Yes you're right, but manufacturers would at least be forced to at least implement a common subset of the codecs most commonly used (and let's hope ogg would be...). Like standalone movie players that support avi, have to support divx, xvid, mpeg4, etc in their firmware.

One of the reasons that MP3 is so standardized is that dedicated MP3 decoding chips are pretty much dirt cheap, and don't require a general-purpose processor.

Ok, that may have been true for the first audio players. Nowadays they have to support multiple formats, like they do wma, and so they all use a programmable cpu.

Re:I want real High Quality

[GWBasic]

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.

I own a lot of DVD-As and SACDs. All of them are excellent, and worth every penny... BUT:

Concert DVDs in 5.1 and DVDs with music videos trampled DVD-A and SACD in the marketplace. Frankly, now that I've purchased a fancy TV, if I'm going to go through the effort to listen to something in 5.1; I want to see a video of something as well. For example, when BT released "This Binary Universe", he released it with a DVD that contained the entire album in 5.1 DTS with increadible animations.

For all intents and purposes, DTS's highest bitrate is just as good as lossless. (Look up "noise shaping" and you'll understand why). This means that a concert DVD-V with 48khz or 96khz DTS is audiophile-grade; and much more likely to succeed in the marketplace when compared with the same concert without the video.

So... Even though I LOOOOOOOVE my DVD-A and SACDs; I find that the format is really only good for remasters of older recordings that didn't have video. Furthermore, the format is kind of useless because DVD-A supports the same audio quality with 96khz DTS.

The other thing with 5.1 is that it's really only a living room format. It doesn't work well with headphones, it's difficult in a car, and it requires a bit of obsessivness on the side of the consumer. For that reason, it's difficult to sell in an audio-only version; because most people want some kind of a video in their living room.

resistance is futile

[Adolf Hitroll]

you got what you vote for: drm lobbyism.

Weird

[suck_burners_rice]

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.

Re:Weird

[mjpaci]

Won't play on iPods like a cd won't play on an iPod. Awesome reporting. Wasn't biased or anything, right?

--mike

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think cluelessness is usually considered a bias.

Re:Weird

[Doogie5526]

Shhh... Don't tell them how easy it would be for someone like Apple to create an SD dongle for legacy iPods then integrate support for new iPods (glad their Dock Connector doesn't support USB or you could even take advantage of the aforementioned tiny USB sleeve). A small software update for support and you can listen to that music as you're walking out of the store.

Re:Weird

[Lyrael]

It is when they neglect to mention any other mp3 player.

Re:Weird

[Hal_Porter]

Yeah, they should mention that it doesn't work on the Gnogg (formerly GnoggPod) either, since that only supports OggVorbis stored on foot diameter spools of one inch tapes.

If the media weren't so biased, every new format would mention that it can't be used with the Gnogg.

Re:Weird

[n3tcat]

I don't think so. As most bias is based in ignorance anyways, this just shows that TFA writer didn't believe in researching the information enough to write a proper article.

Re:Weird

[Soruk]

That's something I like about my bog-standard cheapie MP3 player. It has no memory of its own, but instead plays from (standard) SD cards. Indeed, the card I've got in it at the moment is a 2GB microSD, using the adaptor that came with it. So if I were to get something in this microSD format I could indeed be listening to it as I walk out the shop. No need even to fart around with a USB adaptor.

Re:Weird

[ndtechnologies]

but the real question is how much would apple charge for this functionality.

Re:Weird

[strabes]

My first thought exactly. Somehow I feel like it will still be a battle to get the music off the card, even though they say there's no "copy protection." There's always a catch with the music industry.

Re:Weird

[hobbit]

Not only that, but the implication is that you should be inserting new physical media each time you want to listen to a different set of tracks. Guess this article's author hasn't quite got his head round the advantages of an MP3 player over a Discman yet.

Re:Weird

[DavidTC]

I've been buying SD-card based mp3 players from the start.

Sure, they cost a tiny bit more, but considering I've never had to replace them, and that I have three or four strewn around in various location and SD cards all over the place that I can swap in and out and easily write without having to locate the specific player beforehand and attach it to my computer, it's nothing but a win. (And I was smart enough to buy a laptop with an SD card reader.)

Granted, the SDHC thing, in theory, requires upgrades, but honestly I've found that I don't really want more than 2G of music at a time, and I can easily just make multiple cards. Heck, a few times I've been tempted to buy a few 256k cards and put individual albums on them. I try to collect them from people upgrading their camera's memory.

All told, I've probably spent 100 bucks on mp3 players and SD cards my entire life, and all those still function fine. (Except that SD card that went through the washing machine.) Meanwhile, I've watch people upgrade from 128 meg flash players to 1G ones to 4G ones.

I can walk into the store and buy another 2G card, or buy another 12 dollar player, and it works with all the stuff I have. No obsolescence, no thinking I should have waited until prices dropped, I honestly don't understand why people by fixed flash-based devices. Hard drive based players, okay, I see that, but why would you buy a device with non-swappable flash?

The only problem is that my cell phone takes microSD, so once or twice I've found myself in my car wishing I could play mp3s from my phone on the car mp3 player. I've solved that by getting a few more converters, but it's always a hassle to find them. I was tempted to switch entirely to microSD and leave a converter in each player, but I realized I'd lose all those cards. (I could, of course, treat each microSD cards as a single unit with its converter, but honestly my phone card has other crap on it also.)

Re:Weird

[EXMSFT]

It's not about technicality. It's about making it look anti-Apple. Marketing 101.

Re:Weird

[Lyrael]

My point was, a simple replacement of 'iPod' with 'mp3 player' would have sufficed. I am sick of the media and general public referring to all mp3 players as iPods.

EMI is a pioneer

[unity100]

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.

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[neocrono]

That's pioneering? I didn't think we'd quite gotten to the point where a DRM-free CD was the exception rather than the rule...

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[adpowers]

Is this the exception? I've never once encountered a CD I couldn't rip to my computer. If I did, I would return it to the store and get a refund.

I still buy most of my music on CDs (although, the $2 specials from Amazon MP3 are slowly tipping the scales), so I think I would've encountered a non-Red Book CD by now, if they were in fact common. However, most of the CDs I've purchased recently are albums that were released decades ago, so maybe I'm not purchasing the right demographic to find them.

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[repvik]

Afaik, EMIs releases on iTunes are also available DRM-free (albeit possibly with a small premium).
I like EMI.

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[jabithew]

I haven't found one either but I mostly listen to independent releases. It may be that if I was a devout follower of Ms. Spears I'd have come across one...

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[thermian]

Is this the exception? I've never once encountered a CD I couldn't rip to my computer. If I did, I would return it to the store and get a refund.

Unfortunately some anti DRM people are like creationists, they stick to their opinion that most music is DRM protected when it isn't, and that piracy is the cure, not the cause (which again isn't true, we didn't have drm until we had internet music piracy, piracy caused all this shit).

I do buy the odd music CD nowadays, and never encounter one with DRM on it. Where I do buy stuff with DRM, as in from Apple and Audible, the DRM is removable by their own software, although I prefer to strip the DRM myself directly. I don't really have to, its just that I like to.

DRM probably is bad in the long term, but I'm not seeing the plague of DRM'd titles that the zealots claim are everywhere.

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[cyber-vandal]

The music industry were DRMing away long before the internet came along to threaten their business model. The two digital tape formats were trashed thanks to them.

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the exception? I've never once encountered a CD I couldn't rip to my computer. If I did, I would return it to the store and get a refund.

Unfortunately some anti DRM people are like creationists, they stick to their opinion that most music is DRM protected when it isn't, and that piracy is the cure, not the cause (which again isn't true, we didn't have drm until we had internet music piracy, piracy caused all this shit).

I do buy the odd music CD nowadays, and never encounter one with DRM on it. Where I do buy stuff with DRM, as in from Apple and Audible, the DRM is removable by their own software, although I prefer to strip the DRM myself directly. I don't really have to, its just that I like to.

DRM probably is bad in the long term, but I'm not seeing the plague of DRM'd titles that the zealots claim are everywhere.

The flamebait part of your message: No, piracy didn't cause DRM. Why? Have you ever heard of a CD that wasn't leaked to the internet because it had DRM? Nope. DRM doesn't affect what can be found in the internet. The group to copy them is large enough that even when narrowing them to those who can rip a DRMed CD, it won't help. It just makes it harder for the rest of us (I haven't pirated a single song in 2 years) to copy our CDs.

But then... The problem is... You CAN remove the DRM by your own means and post it. It's not the case in some countries. I live in Finland and the MAFIAA has lobbed it pretty well.

It is illegal to bypass a technical copy protection. Sounds bad? Well, it is also illegal to write or distribute software that does it. (Yes, it means that most open source audio players became illegal in Finland if they can play DRM musiv) Sounds worse? Well, it is also, actually illegal to publicly discuss methods to bypassing such protection... And yes, it is enforced.

For me, any step taken away from the MAFIAA's attitude of "Fight against the customers" is good just because they have MASSIVE lobbying power when they so choose...

Re:EMI is a pioneer

[mzs]

I had an odd situation. I bought the soundtrack to "The Fellowship of the Ring" shortly after the movie came out at a Target and it would not play in my car. I went back to the store and got another one with the same result. I can't remember the details at home but some players would play it others would not, I tried a computer, old CD player, and DVD player. Target did take the CD back and refund the money, I was impressed by this. I just did a bit of googling and could not find any details if this was due to some sort of DRM, it is the only time I ever encountered something like this.

5.1 ?

[unity100]

excuse me but are you clueless about music ?

the number of speakers, or surround do not determine the quality of music.

Re:5.1 ?

[waztub]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[neocrono]

Tell that to the people mixing albums from the ground up for 5.1 listening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Binary_Universe

Re:5.1 ?

[jonaskoelker]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[cheater512]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Fred_A]

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 !

Re:5.1 ?

[NoisySplatter]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[hcdejong]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[JPLemme]

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...)

Re:5.1 ?

[NoisySplatter]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[mabinogi]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[waztub]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[algerath]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[craagz]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[mabinogi]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[jm4]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Fieryphoenix]

Damn straight! Give me my recordings in mono, thank you much!

Re:5.1 ?

[metamorphage]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Maybe it could be because your ear comes with noise correction 'wetware' that's been in development for millions of years?

Re:5.1 ?

[Lodragandraoidh]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:5.1 ?

[hcdejong]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[ceoyoyo]

Because the audiophile world is even more based on pseudoscience than is the alternative medicine world.

Re:5.1 ?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Schadrach]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[pla]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[DavidTC]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[retchdog]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Zerth]

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.

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[YttriumOxide]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[retchdog]

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... :-/

Re:5.1 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Taibhsear]

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.")

Re:5.1 ?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[XHIIHIIHX]

You mean unnatural, like half of the beetle recordings that were ever done?

Re:5.1 ?

[Free the Cowards]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Lodragandraoidh]

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).

Re:5.1 ?

[Zerth]

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.

Re:5.1 ?

[Lodragandraoidh]

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...

Re:5.1 ?

[Doggabone]

So much better and more concise than the copy and paste I was about to post. I wish I had points.

What format is it distributed in?

[deltalimasierralima]

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

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[erikina]

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.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[Firehed]

So... if I buy music on this format (as opposed to CD), I'd be able to just copy the MP3s off to my machine and reuse the card as I see fit, right?

If so, what's the purpose of doing this? If they're trying to do something to kill off the legitimacy of downloads, they'll have to kill off myriad legitimate services like iTunes. We already have CDs, and they're cheaper to produce than memory cards, and quite a bit more versatile when you consider how many pieces of software will rip them into MP3 (or whatever). And the music is of a higher bitrate, etc.

I mean, dropping DRM and their attempts to continue with it is definitely a good thing, but I fail to see the purpose of a new method of delivery when CDs and download services both have advantages over this. I suppose the smaller size as compared to CDs is good for physical delivery and shelf space, but unless it's significantly cheaper than CDs or album downloads, I doubt it'll go anywhere.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[Fred_A]

So... if I buy music on this format (as opposed to CD), I'd be able to just copy the MP3s off to my machine and reuse the card as I see fit, right?

It doesn't seem to be explicitly mentioned but there's a fair chance, from the way the whole deal is presented, that the cards will be read only.

I wonder if there are MicroSD to SD converters/wrappers. Since most laptops and a lot of media players have a SD slot nowadays it would be quite convenient. I've never seen micro SD used outside of phones actually. I guess I never looked at the tiny media players (sticking with my Cowon D2 for now).

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[NoisySplatter]

Record companies are distribution and advertising companies. They know people think the current price is too high for a CD. They're just looking for a new way to justify the price by finding a newer shinier format. They're hoping that Joe Consumer will see this electronic item and attribute a higher value to it than a plastic disc.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[farkus888]

my stilleto II has a microSD slot. I bought an 8GB card to put in it so I can use it as an mp3 player when I am in places where I don't have reception from the satellites or wifi to get sirius. the MicroSD card I bought came with a SD blank that I can put the microSD card into and it works just like SD in anything that supports SDHC of course due to the large size of my card.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[draxredd]

Smaller size ? smaller than CD means no packaging, no physical album art, easier to lose...
Doesn't sound like an advantage (consumer side)
Most of us still buy physical medias (aka CDs et al) precisely because you get those things.
This might be the surest way to have even die-hards go all digital download.
This physical media dead horse really is starting to stink.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[apathy maybe]

"I wonder if there are MicroSD to SD converters/wrappers."

Dude, those things have been available for ages and ages. Check out these pics on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sdadaptersandcards.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MicroSD_vs_SD.jpg

And the entire article is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroSD

You can buy 1GB microSD cards with converters for about $25 (for a given value of $, depending on where you are, prices may vary).

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[peppepz]

I wonder if there are MicroSD to SD converters/wrappers.

Usally, MicroSDs are sold together with a MicroSD to SD adapter. It's just a form factor adapter, the signals on the cards are the same.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[Hal_Porter]

Smaller size ? smaller than CD means no packaging, no physical album art, easier to lose...

You could sell them with a small plastic microscope like device to view the album art and lyrics.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[iainl]

Not only are MicroSD to SD converters available, but the one time I bought a card it came with one in the box. Worked just dandy in my son's camera (I needed a card in a hurry, and it was to hand) as well as in the PC.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[MartinB]

Somehow I am a little doubtful, given that the article does not state which format the songs will be distributed in.

Music, Retail and Tech Leaders to Offer "slotMusic(TM)": High Quality, DRM-Free MP3 Music on microSD(TM) Cards

...assuming that MP3 is the actual format, rather than the generic 'digital music' sense that the media has often used. The Press Release does seem to support the format reading, though.

tbh, this is a way of bringing together the consumers' desire for digital convenience - including lack of DRM - with existing distribution channels. Which is no bad thing, all in all.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[plover]

If so, what's the purpose of doing this?

Perhaps it's simply marketing. Maybe it's test marketing. Maybe they're trying to gauge the public acceptance of chip delivery systems. Maybe they're trying to see if the commercial public will accept 128kbps MP3s over higher quality formats.

Or maybe because everyone on Slashdot has been screaming "you need to figure out a different sales model!" This is indeed different.

The point is they're trying something new. Anything new. It costs them almost nothing to try, they get to look cool doing it, they successfully generated "buzz" by trying (look, here we are discussing it.) I don't think its any deeper than that.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[DavidTC]

I'm not actually entirely sure you can buy them without converters. I've never managed to see one.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[DavidTC]

Also, really, this is SanDisk doing this, who doesn't give a crap about music distribution models or anything. They just want to give people a reason to spend their 20 bucks on a SanDisk card instead of different brand, and considering they have to format the cards before selling them, it really doesn't cost to put random content on them.

The music industry just went along with it because, as you said, they are desperate to try to figure out some way to save their failing business model.

Re:What format is it distributed in?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if there are MicroSD to SD converters/wrappers.

You got me curious, so I looked it up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010070068%201053118914&bop=And&Order=RATING

Looks like about half of the MicroSD cards at Newegg come with SD adapters.

thanks, but no.

[theNetImp]

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.

Still the same problem with buying CDs

[isBandGeek()]

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?

Re:Still the same problem with buying CDs

[Uglypug]

Maybe you could, you know, stop listening to bands whose songs are 80% filler and support someone with actual talent instead? I know it's crazy, but it just might work.

Re:Still the same problem with buying CDs

[repvik]

Unfortunately, even bands with talent has record labels stuffing crap to fill up their CDs. Extremely few artists have 100% control of what is put on their CD.

Re:Still the same problem with buying CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

i think he meant that this "problem" is more of a barrier to people buying the new product than a bad thing over all.

Re:Still the same problem with buying CDs

[Raenex]

I wouldn't blame the labels. If the band could produce a quality album full of great songs they would. The fact is even talented bands usually only have a few worthwhile songs at most on an album. Creating good music is hard.

Maybe...

[oodaloop]

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.

Re:Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no copy protection, just copy all your song onto one MicroSD card. You can probably a couple hundred song in 1 GB.

Re:Maybe...

[mea_culpa]

As compact as mobile phone have become many have resorted to putting the microSD slot in the battery compartment. Not very convenient but I still like the idea. If it ever caught on and was standardized it would be a good format. Heck even having a slot on the front of HDTVs and getting movies this way would be cool. Although I would opt for something a little bigger. I can just see having to buy Finding Nemo for the 6th time because the kids left it out and it got lost in the sofa or heaven forbid vacuumed up. Lost a few DS games that way.

Re:Maybe...

[craagz]

...and imagine the pain of changing those microSD cards everytime you want to listen to a different album!!

Re:Maybe...

[Jesus_666]

This format is DRM-free. Just don't use the original cards:

1.) Get a player with high-density storage or (if your player uses *SD) a large (8+ gig) SD card.
2.) Copy music from SlotMusic card to player/large card. This will take less than 1 gig of space since you leave the non-music stuff out and 320k MP3 still isn't that large.
3.) Store the original card somewhere safe.
4.) Listen to lots of different albums without ever having to switch cards.

If we assume an album to be about one hour in length and one such album taking 150 MiB of space, an 8 GB SD card (which should have about 7650 MiB) could contain such 51 albums; in other words you can fit 51 hours (or 2 1/8 days) of music onto an 8 GB MicroSD card. Switching should not be an issue.

A quick look at Amazon gives us a figure of 23.60 USD for a single 8 GB MicroSD card. Bearable, especially as in most cases this will be a one-time investment.

Re:Maybe...

[Belial6]

Yes. You wouldn't use the original SD every time you wanted to listen to the music. You WOULD likely put it in on the way home from the music store. That is a big benefit. It wouldn't be much different than what I do now with CDs (which I like). Buy the CD, listen to the original in the car on the way home. Once at home, immediately rip it to the server, and make a 'car' copy. Then never use the original again until I need a new 'car' copy due to scratches and whatnot.

It is silly for them not to put an uncompressed copy on the SD alongside the compressed version. Space is not an issue, and it would give the format more respect. The other thing I would want is for the SD card to come in a gem case that is the same size as a cd case. Yes, that would be a lot of wasted space, but, packaging is a big reason that many people buy rather than copy their music. Also, CD packaging is small enough to be easily stored, while big enough not to get lost.

FINALLY!

[np_bernstein]

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!

Re:FINALLY!

[FridgeFreezer]

It's a good job that there's no ready-made distribution method for digital data that doesn't involve physical media, or those guys would look pretty stupid about now.

I hear the next version will have album-art printed on the back of a panda using the tears of dolphins.

It's amazing how so many people can spend so much time and money pussy-footing around and coming up with a million different ways to not just sell a normal MP3 file at a sensible price. Ahhh, progress.

Indeed

[Chuck Chunder]

the number of speakers, or surround do not determine the quality of music.

People who buy expensive "stereo" music are the same idiots who buy monster cables.

awesome but...

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

we all know it'll only catch on if the porn industry start distributing on microSD as well.

Re:awesome but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't work, microSD is too small.
We all know that in the porn industry, size DOES matters.

Re:awesome but...

[craagz]

porn industry going the "micro" way, the Irony!

Re:awesome but...

[Laughing Pigeon]

we all know it'll only catch on if the porn industry start distributing on microSD as well.

They're in the middle of developing compact dicks for that purpose.

Re:awesome but...

[Technician]

we all know it'll only catch on if the porn industry start distributing on microSD as well.

Have you heard much of the new music that comes with warning lables on the cover? Much is soft audio porn already.

Re:awesome but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the porn industry prefers the Mega=D format.

Re:awesome but...

[drinkypoo]

we all know it'll only catch on if the porn industry start distributing on microSD as well.

This would never work. Instead of worrying about your kids finding your porn collection, you have to worry about whether you'll be able to find your own porn collection. I have a RAZR V3i which takes a 1 GB MicroSD (they call it "transflash" for some reason) for data storage. It's my mp3 player. I'm always afraid to remove the card (but I do it anyway because the RAZR has the slowest. usb. interface. everrrrrrrrr) because if I sneeze I might lose it and never find it again.

"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[mellon]

Great. More crap to throw out. Isn't one of the big selling features of digital distribution that it produces less crap to landfill?

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[timmarhy]

right because cd's and their packing that's about 500 times the size is better.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[BrentH]

If they manufactury it sanely, the SD card will be a USB connector. I've seen those cards, pretty smart. One side is de SD connectors, and on top are the four USB-strips. No sleeves needed. Then again, Sandisk makes money by manufacturing these things, and more plastic is more money I guess...

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[Lyrael]

Digital distribution != physical media.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one of these "sleeves", and it's _really_ tiny. The CD makes about 100x more landfill garbage.

Also I might note: One reason iTunes has been more successful than other online stores has been that they sell the iTunes prepaid cards at 7-11, etc. That means teenage kids w/o credit cards can buy them. Physical media has good qualities.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[hcdejong]

Size isn't everything. The manufacturing process for two electronic gadgets could well be more resource-intensive than that for a CD with its jewel box.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[houghi]

Landfill? Have you any idea what size you are talking about?
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2052/1573558430_f4523e7c8f.jpg?v=0 and http://toolazytofail.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/onfinger.jpg where the blue is the USB sleeve.

Even better would be something like http://www.canadacomputers.com/ProductImages/015995/929.jpg so that you have also the SD card.

They are SMALL and cheap to make. The sleeves will be cheaper then a CD case.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[TriggerFin]

Those are SD cards. This is about MicroSD cards, which (I haven't got one to check) could well get lost in a USB port as-is.

Including the USB adapter with every card is wasteful. They'd do as well to use the USB/SD cards you describe. The real reason for using the MicroSD format is that SanDisk Sansa players have slots for them, and for that you don't need the USB piece at all; they include that so it'll sell better.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[TriggerFin]

Yes, the adapter is smaller than a CD and/or case, but the CD is cleaner trash than the electronics in the sleeve, even as un-green as tossing a CD in the trash is.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[Anonymous Coward]

right because cd's and their packing that's about 500 times the size is better.

I dunno if I'd consider a jewel case to be 500x bigger than a CD. Unless you were going for the ridiculous hyperbole modpoint.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[pandrijeczko]

I'd argue that in buying a music CD, it is either going to be in my music collection for many years, sold on second-hand on eBay or a used music shop, or given away freely to a charity shop. (I also buy a lot of used CDs also.)

However, a hard disk that's used to store digital music will probably be replaced every couple of years with the old drives going to landfill.

Digital distribution can therefore be more harmful to the environment.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[mellon]

Um. I wasn't talking about CDs. I can get high-quality digital audio on iTunes or Amazon right now, and there is no physical media, and no box to throw out.

Why, oh why, does nobody actually read to the end of the comment anymore? :'}

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[mellon]

Hard drives contain a *lot* of recyclable material - they're mostly metal. If you throw yours in the trash, you are indeed creating a lot of unnecessary waste.

Re:"Tiny USB Sleeve"?

[not flu]

Not just SanDisk's players, many cell phones too.

I think the editor missed the point

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I think the editor missed the point

[TheRaven64]

And the point of an iPod over a CD player is that you avoid the annoying 'having to carry loads of media around with you' problem. a 1GB card does not help this. 8GB cards are cheap, and 16GB cards will be soon. At 16GB, I can put pretty much all of my music (mostly 256Kb/s AAC) on to a single card. If I owned a player which took micro-SD then I'd get one of these and put all of my music on one card. Having a card that the music comes on is only useful if I buy music from a physical store (I tend to buy online, since it's about half the price) since if you're buying online you have the same wait as a CD and a lot more of a wait than a download. Even if you're buying in a physical store, it's only more convenient between the store and your house (or wherever you keep your laptop), since ripping a CD is a zero-button operation (insert CD, wait, collect CD when it's ejected) and it syncs the next time you plug in your player to charge it.

Re:I think the editor missed the point

[IanCal]

If I owned a player which took micro-SD then I'd get one of these and put all of my music on one card

This is the idea.

Having a card that the music comes on is only useful if I buy music from a physical store

Again, I believe this is the point.

since ripping a CD is a zero-button operation (insert CD, wait, collect CD when it's ejected)

This does take time, however. I've got a player with an sd card slot, so I'd be able to just put this into my player and copy immediately.

Even if you've got to transfer it through your PC, it's going to be a lot quicker than ripping. Connect, copy, done. No painfully slow reading of the cd, and no transcoding required. The copying speed will only get greater over time, and the media will get *much* cheaper over time.

Re:I think the editor missed the point

[TheRaven64]

A pressed CD costs under 5Â, so it's going to take a long time before ICs with equivalent capacity reach this price. I'm not sure what you're ripping with that's painfully slow. My laptop can rip CDs at 12x (that's 1800KB/s) and is IO limited, not CPU limited. I've got flash devices with slower read speeds than this, and you can bet they'll be using the cheapest flash they can for this. I can then encode the result in whatever format I prefer, I don't have to put up with MP3 (which, even at 320kb/s does have artefacts on certain types of music - particularly orchestral pieces, and especially anything with a harpsichord and one or more other instruments). At the moment, I find 256Kb/s AAC close enough to lossless, but when storage costs drop a little bit more I will probably decide to re-rip my collection as FLAC or similar. I also know that CDs will be compatible with future drives, since the installed base of CDs and DVDs is huge and already contains a lot of pre-recorded content that people are going to want access to for a long time, while flash standards seem to be replaced every few years (I have some RS-MMC, some compact flash and some SD devices, and that's only counting the ones I've bought in the last three years).

What's the difference?

[Yoo Chung]

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?

Re:What's the difference?

[91degrees]

A catchy name!

Seriously, this is quite important for adoption.

Re:What's the difference?

[harry666t]

It's sold filled with music, as opposed to empty cards, and (as I understand it) the goal is to make profit off both the music AND physical media (the media is rewritable, like a normal microSD).

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing they do preload it with music. Selling empty read-only sd cards probably wouldn't sell very well after the initial fad wore off.

Re:What's the difference?

[Gewalt]

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?

Licensing fee, no doubt

Re:What's the difference?

[noidentity]

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?

Marketing gets it: hundreds of thousands of dollars, to be precise.

Re:What's the difference?

[ceoyoyo]

Trademarkability.

Re:What's the difference?

[Schadrach]

Unfortunately, you are right. Catchy marketing names make things sell, as stupid as it sounds.

soo...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

pictures of the press release

[pimpimpim]

some photos forgotten in the original post

No copyright protection == public domain

[harlows_monkeys]

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"?

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[Anonymous Coward]

They _really_ screwed up and posted the journalist's email address for the byline, so thousands of picky slashdotters can politely point out the difference between copyright and copy protection...

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[Pofy]

On the other hand, most of the time when people (including slashdoters) write and talk about copy protection they actually mean access protection instead.

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[houghi]

There is a difference?</sarcasm>

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[Hal_Porter]

They _really_ screwed up and posted the journalist's email address for the byline, so thousands of picky slashdotters can politely point out the difference between copyright and copy protection...

He has stepped into a nest of pedants. Either that or he's starting a business targetted at them and wants to collect email addresses.

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[suckmysav]

You must be new here.

Nobody on slashdot reads the article.

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[Ox0065]

Indeed. Quite a topical point, as this is the first time in a long time that the music industry has even suggested that they are interested in meeting their obligations to publish in a format that can enter the public domain at the end of it's period of protection under copyright law.

They've muddied the waters to such a degree that I'd really like to see someone put the case that Copy Protection == No Copyright Protection.

Re:No copyright protection == public domain

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of content publishers attempt to conflate "copy protection" and "copyright". I don't know why. Probably the same reason for phrases like "intellectual property".

Another Physical Distribution Method?

[DavidD_CA]

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.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[91degrees]

Kudos to EMI for doing something digital without DRM, but how is this better than what Amazon.com offers us now?

Amazon requires an internet connection.

And a PC.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[The Leather Duke]

I agree. This sounds like Just Another Physical Distribution Medium introduced.

In these days:

1. The medium is not important.
2. Content rules.
3. Available content is more attractive than restricted content.

So you get a new way to make content available, BUT can you add whatever you want to the SD-card or are you limited to ready-made compilations (aka. Albums)? If you can tailor the content of the SD, then this will be a genuinely new way to physically distribute music (although you have had that option online for a long time). If not, it's old news wrapped up as new.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[TheRaven64]

EMI were the first label to offer their music on the iTunes store without DRM too.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[DerCed]

And internet distribution doesn't impact the environment.

This is not true. Producing and running ICT infrastructure has of course impacts on the environment. Producing, powering datacenters and backbones, disposing electronic waste, running personal computers, ... a remarkable footprint! I tried to google up some more information and comparisons between different industries, but was unsuccessful. Maybe someone else can come up with some more information?

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[zoomosis]

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 .

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Jesus_666]

Let's see...

1.) Amazon does not run a local brick-and-mortar music store.
2.) Amazon does not sell physical media. I don't want to have to worry about backups; in case of a catastrophic data loss all I should have to do is walk over to my CD (or SlotMusic orr whatever) rack and pull out the album so I can re-rip it.
3.) Amazon has no function where I can chat with the clerk about obscure bands or how band X really went downhill when member Y quit.
4.) Amazon does not sell physical media. When I buy something I really want to have something to own. iTunes and Amazon are neat, but when I buy an album I want an album and not just some files.
5.) Amazon's downloads do not include the assorted extras you might find on a physical album (and which TFA promises). Sure I can download them somewhere else, but I shouldn't have to.
6.) Amazon does not sell physical media. When I support a band with my money (yes, I know most only get peanuts) I want my CD rack to reflect that. Burned CDs with self-printed covers don't cut it.


You say physical distribution is dead; I say digital distribution is a no-starter. Turns out we're both wrong unless we add a "as far as I'm concerned" to the end of the sentence.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[korbin_dallas]

I think you have confused collecting 'stuff' with listening to music.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Jesus_666]

I guess I'm just too old - twenty-four, that is. I still remember those ancient times where you actually expected to get something more than just the minimally possible when you bought something. Where software came with a printed manual instead of a ten-page PDF. And where a nice sleeve/case to go with an album was considered part of the album itself. You know, back when physical possessions were actually worth something.

Consider me an intellectual old-timer, but I think that merely getting the songs when I buy an album is not worth it.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos to EMI for doing something digital without DRM, but how is this better than what Amazon.com offers us now?

Amazon requires an internet connection.

And a PC.

Both offered for free? Like at your local library?

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Taibhsear]

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.

That's... actually a pretty fucking good idea. If you could take an entire record store inventory and shrink it down to an ATM terminal sized kiosk it would save massive amounts of money and time. Wouldn't have to rent a storefront or pay for employees aside from the technician to repair the kiosk or update the library. But then the scene kids might have to find a new shitty retail job to up their "cool kid" karma and look down their nose/teen comb over at.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[DavidD_CA]

We could have the kiosk talk down to the customer if they purchase anything by the Jonas Brothers.

Even refuse to sell it to them, and suggest something by Nine Inch Nails instead.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[dangitman]

Well, I'm ten years older than you, and I always found CDs to be dinky, with poor-quality artwork, compared to the vinyl albums with their beautiful, large-format artwork.

But I got over that pretty quickly, and now realize that the obsession with physical packaging is nothing more than nostalgic bullshit. I care about the music, not the packaging it comes in. It also seems almost criminally wasteful to buy music for the packaging. It's not very environmentally sustainable.

Just what is the purpose of all that packaging, to show off how much stuff you have on your shelf? I think as you get older, you will probably realize that you already have too much stuff, and that "nice sleeve/case" is just more crap laying around, cluttering your life.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Jesus_666]

The physical media is nice because it's essentially an external backup. Even if your entire IT infrastructure dies a horrible death you still have the media around and can restore. It sits in its own protective case, which keeps it relatively safe from damage. Since the case already is around it might as well look nice. Of course the rest of the stuff is icing, but it's very welcome icing when I buy the album/game/whatever.

If Apple etc. come up with a way for me to have a backup that I can use with as many machines as I like without having to go online, even if all machines that contained the data before have died, and that I automatically receive upon buying the song, I agree that physical media are useless. But I seriously doubt that.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Raenex]

The physical media is nice because it's essentially an external backup.

Don't you have other files on your computer that you backup? Amazon just gives you mp3 files -- you can back them up or transfer them to other machines as you wish.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[dangitman]

If Apple etc. come up with a way for me to have a backup that I can use with as many machines as I like without having to go online, even if all machines that contained the data before have died, and that I automatically receive upon buying the song, I agree that physical media are useless. But I seriously doubt that.

That already exists. It's called "buy your songs from Amazon or the iTunes Store, and burn them to disc." iTunes actually prompts you to do this when you make a purchase.

It's already a more efficient system, because compressed files (whether lossy or lossless) take up less space on disc. So, you can either reduce your storage space, or you can make two backups for redundancy, which take up the same (or less) space than the single backup you get with audio CD.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[dangitman]

I thought I'd add a P.S:

If you use a proper incremental backup system (for example, I use Retrospect Backup) you save even more disc space, and it makes restoring your whole library much easier than re-ripping CDs.

Audio CD are often only half-full (or less) - meaning many disc swaps to restore your library. An incremental system fills the entire disc to maximum capacity, so you waste no space.

You also lose any meta-data that you add to or modify in your files. A proper backup system maintains this meta-data, and the organization of your library.

Finally, a proper backup system can read from and write to multiple drives. For example, I have 5 DVD drives attached to my main workstation. So, I can restore (or backup) large chunks of data, without having to waste time swapping discs individually.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Jesus_666]

I don't want to have to do that. I don't see why I should prefer a format that is less convenient. When I have the choice between a bunch of downloaded MP3s and a physical disk that comes with high-quality MP3s and additional stuff and doesn't require an internet connection, why should I choose the download? The download is only advantageous when I can't go to the store or when I think the store is not going to have what I want.

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[dangitman]

Well, for you it may be less convenient. But for me, it is more convenient. I can just use my existing, highly-efficient backup system - rather than have to maintain a dual filing system for audio CDs, and devote more shelf-space to the task.

Also, the restoration process with my system is much more convenient than having to manually copy files from disparate storage units, or re-rip CDs.

But the real question with "I don't want to have to do that" is - why the hell aren't you doing it already? Are you telling me you don't already back up any of your files?

Re:Another Physical Distribution Method?

[Jesus_666]

I do, but I like the fact that physically bought music already comes with an additional backup not coupled to any other backup I make.

Also, let's remember that many users simply aren't smart enough to make backups but smart enough to rip their CDs (a process made trivial by modern media players). They get this as well.

in the age of the internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:in the age of the internet...

[oodaloop]

That's really unfair to retarded children to compare them to recording industry executives.

Re:in the age of the internet...

[TriggerFin]

Charging $15 for an album is the only way they can prop up the falling cost of the MicroSD cards. I saw the standard 1GB SD cards (from SanDisk) for about $3.50 last week.

Re:in the age of the internet...

[craagz]

mentally challenged would have been a better word, but posting as AC nothing more was expected.

Re:in the age of the internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention grossly distorting of the timelines. We've been patiently saying 'No' for hella more than six years and the recording industry execs still refuse to learn.

Re:in the age of the internet...

[chubs730]

In Soviet Russia, politics corrects you!

Re:in the age of the internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Retarded children going poo, and recording industry executives...hmmm...similarities include:

- Being wide-eyed in wonder as the world moves faster than they can comprehend.
- Being undeniably full of shit.

Would quite like to see this succeed

[91degrees]

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.

Re:Would quite like to see this succeed

[TriggerFin]

"Working with SanDisk...." Check out their Sansa players.

Re:Would quite like to see this succeed

[drinkypoo]

Most cheapie mp3 players these days seem to take an SD card or sometimes MiniSD card, you can put MicroSD into either. In fact you can even get a MicroSD with a MicroSD to MiniSD adapter AND a MiniSD to SD adapter. For $15 or so you can get a pretty slick car mp3 player which takes USB1.1 up to 2GB, or SD up to 2GB. I bought one for my lady, it has a display with more characters than my JVC car DVD player.

Ugh, MP3?

[Zygfryd]

And why in the world didn't they choose Ogg Vorbis, the higher quality, royalty-free codec with a fast integer decoder implementation?

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[TriggerFin]

Compatibility.

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[suckmysav]

Ummm, because, like, the ipod doesn't do ogg?

Or something?

Like it or not, if ipod users can't buy your crap then you won't succeed.

It's as simple as that.

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[Zygfryd]

I'm pretty sure a firmware upgrade would allow iPods to decode Vorbis, they have two 90MHz CPUs.

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[suckmysav]

Hmmm, this is interesting. Are we talking about an "official" upgrade or the open source disaster known as "Rockbox"

And before you flame me, I say "disaster" as a fully fledged linux zealot*.

Having said that, after trying Rockbox I felt nothing other than an overwhelming urge to remove it and put(the unduly limited and dumbed down OS that is) the official ipod OS back on.

Rockbox is;

1) fucking ugly
2) fucking slow

So, if your ogg support comes with the price of installing Rockbox, then you can forget it.

All I need is to be able to slot my pod into its cradle in my car and press play. The official OS does this without any hassle, even if it won't do some small things I would like it to do.

Rockbox was just too damn annoying.

End of story.

* Post written using firefox 3 0n Ubuntu Hardy 8.04

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[Zygfryd]

I meant an official update, which would be more likely (than today) if Vorbis was chosen for SlotMusic.

I've never used Rockbox myself, my iRiver player supports Vorbis out of the box.

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[dangitman]

It would be even more likely if the big companies weren't worried about lawsuits over potential patent violations resulting from the implementation of Ogg/Vorbis.

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[suckmysav]

Oh, ok.

I got an ipod because of the 80gb capacity as well as the ubiquity of accessories like car docks etc. I looked at the iRiver but they maxxed out at about 30gb and didn't seem to have much in the way of accessories either. All of my stuff was in MP3 format at the time anyway (still is of course) so lack of ogg support was not a show stopper. I would have liked it because it appeals to my open source tendencies but it wasn't enough to tip the scales.

Re:Ugh, MP3?

[not flu]

Wouldn't happen, if Apple didn't hate ogg they would've added support to iTunes long ago.

you were living in a cave then

[unity100]

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.

Re:you were living in a cave then

[Anonymous Coward]

[Citation needed]

It doesn't have a wha-wha?

[Dr. Hellno]

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?

Re:It doesn't have a wha-wha?

[querist]

Dr. Hellno,

I agree that for most slashdot readers, moving the files to any player would not be a problem. However, I believe you are missing a couple of things here.

1. Many newer audio players come with microSD slots. These players offer good functionality and a reasonable interface at a good price. Making the transfer as simple as putting the card into the slot would simplify things greatly for those who still come asking for help to put their music into their audio players.

2. What is to prevent "them" (as in "us" vs "them") from adding DRM later, once the slotMusic (TM, R, Don't you even THINK of using this without paying the RIAA huge royalties) format becomes a de facto standard? Remember, CDs were once DRM-free, but then they added various measures to interfere with fair use.

I hate to be cynical, but I sincerely doubt that the RIAA have suddenly "seen the light" and have repented of their greedy ways. I think this is just a way to shift the common format to something that is EASIER for them to control.

I suspect it could follow something like this:

a. introduce slotMusic (TM, R, Don't even THINK of using this without paying the RIAA huge royalties) without DRM.

b. Watch sales of microSD-enabled devices rise, especially since many of them are made by companies that also make the microSD cards (SanDisk makes a nice little player, for examle).

c. Introduce players that handle an RIAA-blessed DRM standard. Don't release any DRM-ed music yet, just introduce the players with the capabilities. Wait until these players become the "standard" - as older players break/die. A good way to help push this would be to include improved video playback with some cool features like "bookmarking", so you can mark your faviourite places in a movie. Don't include the bookmarking in the non-DRM compliant players. (In other words, just like a "porkbarrel" ammendment to a bill in Congress, attach the crap to something good so people will accept the crap because they get something good with it.)

d. Slowly introduce DRM on higher-bitrate and/or higher-popularity recordings. They need to be sure that they are careful with what they select to be sure to include a large audience. They will most likely blow this one and only hit the "newest" crap they want to push. If they were smart, they'd work out a deal with Apple Music and make this the preferred way to distribute the Beatles' music digitally, for example.

e. Start to phase out the non-DRM on the "latest and greatest" stuff. With sufficient market penetration of the players mentioned in (c), this could work. Just as an example, when was the last time you saw a movie released on VHS?

I'm sorry, but this looks far too much like the proveribal "trojan horse" in that it appears to be a gift, but it hides a dangerous future.

not at all

[unity100]

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.

Re:not at all

[Stooshie]

... still there are those who buy porches ...

I have a porch. If only I could afford a porsche though! ;-)

Re:not at all

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelled Porsche.

This just goes towards proving the GP's statement about the intelligence of Monster Cable customers and placebo effect "audiophiles".

Re:not at all

[SenseiLeNoir]

However, there comes a point where it becomes ABSOLUTELY ridiculous. I am very keen on my sounds, and have some high end equipment in my living room.

As you said, to get the best out of it, you NEED high end throughout, no point having a "weakest link". So the source should be good quality well recorded CD/SACD/DVD-Audio/Other LossLess format. No point using a "high end" system with low quality MP3s.

Where the source is digital, ideally keep the signal digital, and unprocessed to the receiver, via TOSlink/SPDIF/HDMI(BluRay), and use the same transmission as the source, so if the source is CD, ensure the transmission is 44.1khz, 16bit,stereo. I have seen so called "Gold Plated TOSlink Optical cables" begin sold for a huge premium. This is ridiculous, as the gold plating has absolutely no effect on an optical cable. Instead, you want to know the quality of the glass used. Again, this is somethign that makes more of a issue with distance. For a 1m Cable, the absolute top quality may be overkill, as signal degradation will be lower than the tolerances of the error correction system. Again the key here is that Digital degrades differently to analogue, and may be up to a point far more forgiving.

For analogue (and electrical based digital cabling), you need impedance matched "OxygenFree" cabling, where the connectors are electrically/chemically and mechanically matched. No point using a Cable with Gold Plated connectors, if the sockets on the source, or receiver is normal steel (this is a BAD thing, to mix gold plated and non gold plated, especially silver).

The same thing applies to speaker wires/connectors, make sure they are matched to the speakers, and the source.

Oh, and while we are going on, the room itself can make a difference, carpets vs hard floors, wall coverings, etc.

Not forgetting the listeners eardrums being fully functional!

The point being, I agree with you that to create a High End system is very involved. It may also a case at one point the increasing costs may give diminishing returns, but a true audiophile who wants the absolute best, will not hesitate creating a full system taking into account the above.

However, the grandparent poster (despite his slightly trollish nature), was trying to take a digg at the average "joe public" who has won a bonus, etc, and wants to show off his new found wealth, and buy a "gold plated" 3.5mm cable to connect his iPod filled with 128kbps MP3 to a "monster" HiFi boombox. Or worse, a gold plated TosLink from his basic DVD player to his TV.

Re:not at all

[chubs730]

I bet you even consider yourself an audiophile. Buy a good pair of speakers, get your thousand dollar cable, still a terrible sound? You didn't buy the most important part. While their knobs have been discontinued; it appears that Arbelos now sells similar pieces of wood for the same price as the ever important Wood Lenses!

Re:not at all

[MoxFulder]

However, there comes a point where it becomes ABSOLUTELY ridiculous. I am very keen on my sounds, and have some high end equipment in my living room.

As you said, to get the best out of it, you NEED high end throughout, no point having a "weakest link". So the source should be good quality well recorded CD/SACD/DVD-Audio/Other LossLess format. No point using a "high end" system with low quality MP3s.

Where the source is digital, ideally keep the signal digital, and unprocessed to the receiver, via TOSlink/SPDIF/HDMI(BluRay), and use the same transmission as the source, so if the source is CD, ensure the transmission is 44.1khz, 16bit,stereo. I have seen so called "Gold Plated TOSlink Optical cables" begin sold for a huge premium. This is ridiculous, as the gold plating has absolutely no effect on an optical cable. Instead, you want to know the quality of the glass used. Again, this is somethign that makes more of a issue with distance. For a 1m Cable, the absolute top quality may be overkill, as signal degradation will be lower than the tolerances of the error correction system. Again the key here is that Digital degrades differently to analogue, and may be up to a point far more forgiving.

How the hell did the parent get modded "Informative". It's standard audiophile drivel with a tiny hint of awareness of the ridiculousness of the phenomenon...

Let's start with the complete bullshit notion that the composition of digital cables can in any way affect their performance. If a digital signal gets through a $5 Walmart cable, it's as good as a signal that goes through a $5,000 audiophile cable. Period. End of story. Analog degradation of a digital signal makes absolutely no difference as long as the signal is recovered at the other end.

For analogue (and electrical based digital cabling), you need impedance matched "OxygenFree" cabling, where the connectors are electrically/chemically and mechanically matched. No point using a Cable with Gold Plated connectors, if the sockets on the source, or receiver is normal steel (this is a BAD thing, to mix gold plated and non gold plated, especially silver).

The same thing applies to speaker wires/connectors, make sure they are matched to the speakers, and the source.

Oh, goody. Now we move onto the bullshit about analog cables and how audiophiles think they can hear tiny anomalies in the conductance of wires that can hardly be detected by sensitive lab instruments.

Being an audiophile is all about self-delusion and elitism as far as I can tell. There is not a shred of evidence that they can actually tell the difference in carefully controlled double blind listening tests (which tend to really piss them off). This NYT article about high-end speaker wire is pretty funny: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E1D61739F930A15751C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.

If I ever find myself out of work, and lose all self-respect and sell my soul, I know I'll be able to make a living inventing bullshit audiophile products and peddling them with a straight face. Like a rock that sits on top of your CD player and adds "sonic purity" to its output. Oh wait, that one already exists.

For a good refutation of "subjectivist audiophile" BS by a respected audio engineer, read this: http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm (WARNING: Contains actual testable scientific arguments.)

Re:not at all

[p3on]

you're wrong so wrong you should take a look at this http://gizmodo.com/363154/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger

Re:not at all

[XHIIHIIHX]

wow I thought that page was satire but guess not. $100 to anyone that can tell the difference between 12 gauge romex electric wire and monster cables hooked up to your speakers.

Re:not at all

[SenseiLeNoir]

At WHAT point did I EVER say they are "audiophile" cables. I just said MATCHED cables, IE chemically/electrically (impedance) and Mechanically (good cinch Connections). the "cables" I use are matched. NOT gold plated, and NOT mega expensive. if you really READ what I wrote, you would have seen that.

Maybe you shoudl READ before you make a huge sprout!

I actually use Mains wire for my speaker cables, as it gives VERY good impedance, and a nice clean sound, since I am driving two huge celestion speakers with 12 inch drivers. Mains cable is cheap, and is designed to carry 13 Amps at 240Volts.

my optical cables are just normal ones, I picked up, as they are only less than a meter.

My analogue cables are just some decent OFC cables, which are not in the "audiophile" blister box, but fit nicely on the socket, and give a nice clean signal (they are NOT gold plated for reasons i gave in my original post- hint corrosion).

I repeat, real audiophiles are NOT swayed by flashy gold plated monster cables. These are pureply consumer gimmicks with little or no real benefit. We make sure th impedance of the cable is right (usually the case), and the connectors are chemically and electically matched (to avoid damaging the connectors).

Those monstor cables that you described is likely to damage the connectors on my reciever, as they are not gold plated.

Re:not at all

[SenseiLeNoir]

please read my answer to the person below, then re-read my original post, then understand yoru comment is pretty redundant.

i never said i use so called "audiophile" cables. as they ARE pure BS. Hence why i made such a huge dig about the gold plated crap. (i NEVER buy gold plated cables).

I use MAINS wire as speaker wire. I have huge celestion speakers, with a 15 inch driver. You CANNOT use thin speaker wire with those, it will burn out in a month. THATS hat I was taking about matching chemically/electrically and Mechanically. sure if you have micro speakers, any wire will do the job JUST FINE.

And YES, I have been on blind tests with a good source material, and can tell the difference between a good set-up and a bad setup.

I have issues with BOSE, but then i thin BOSE are overpriced crap. (diminishing returns which i mentioned).

Re:not at all

[p3on]

the idea of being an audiophile is hilariously ridiculous, the human ear is incredibly limited and you're just fooling yourself

Re:not at all

[earlymon]

I totally agree and disagree with you, and worked in the audio industry in its heyday. I want to make a few common sense remarks in rebuttal to comments about audio wiring, as I am sure that in your zeal for common sense, you've thrown a bit of the baby out with the bath water. My comments are made based on double-blind tests (not so much), lab measurements, simulations and physical science.

First, you are correct. I worked in the audio industry, some years ago, in retail, distribution and finally in manufacturing. We took awards for our *applied science* in our (manufactured) products. Most are absolute snake oil, as you point out.

HOWEVER - let's start with typical wiring - lamp cord, or your basic 16 gauge zip wire. If you think about it - it's conducting AC (audio is ***theoretically*** 20 to 20kHz (actually much less) but it is AC. Therefore - zip wire is an inductor. Many esoteric wires are mega-multi-stranded and individually lacquered for insulation and braided to avoid this effect - and often become capacitive as a result.

The first thing the wire sees in a typical speaker is the crossover network. I won't argue snake oil, I will simply submit that if all of the following are actually true, then what I say applies. Here are the conditions: proper crossover, meaning all inductors at right angles to one another, non-magnetic leads on the capacitors, and the crossover actually equalizing for the drivers to achieve the proper crossover, not just generic circuits with generic drivers. (We made speakers - we tested and coded each driver and all parts, and tuned the crossovers to the drivers. With quality components, this is quite doable, and can be done without going overboard on price.) We used a very sophisticated circuit simulation program to model the drivers so as to optimize the crossover/equalizers. A typical woofer's impedance response took on the order of 17 to 25 passive components to model (simple pi to T or T to pi inputs were insufficient to characterize the impedance at all operating frequencies - for example). Finally, with such decent speakers, let's assume equally decent amplification - and - let's match the amp's characteristics - especially damping factor and how it's achieved (i.e., output impedance of the power transistors) to the to the particular speakers. This is the physical how of an amp performing better with some speakers than others and vice versa, all quality factors being equal, because of impedance balancing and matching being necessary for optimal power transfer.

Under these conditions, wiring can make a difference. It can be measured, it can be modeled, it can be predicted. Depending on the grotesqueness or quality of the match, it can be audible.

If you don't actually have the decent under the hood, physically (as in physics) defensive parts and construction and matching, then any extra filtering or impedance differences due to wiring WILL BE masked by the grosser errors of the system.

In the late 70s or early 80s - can't remember which - an excellent compromise solution was found for high quality speaker wiring: what we used to call 4-cross Romex. House wiring, basically, but with four STRANDED conductors, with good-quality copper and 14 gauge. With instrumentation and internal knowledge of all components (meaning - take 'em apart and measure them in the lab), you could optimize for theoretically better, but the 4 cross worked great. You run red ("positive" as they call it, even though it's AC) and black on opposing pairs. I'll try to illustrate in ascii:
xo
ox
The wire has a twist to it such that its inductance is much lower that 2-lead or zip wire, and is sufficient in gauge and stranding so as to not introduce capacitive reactance to any great degree. On any decent system, such wiring very often results in an audible improvement - provided an acceptable definition of decent and that the music being listened to is equally well-recorded (and not compressed, over compensated, etc, etc, etc - you know - music, n

Re:not at all

[antispam_ben]

If you don't care how much you pay, Denon makes a decent Ethernet cable at a Rolls Royce price:

http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp

Check out the Amazon reviews!

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B000I1X6PM/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/105-8770533-9603641?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Uninformed Journalist

[MidnightBrewer]

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.

I still don't understand the economics

[jimicus]

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....

Re:I still don't understand the economics

[itsdapead]

1. Release lame music format which combines the convenience, economy and logistical advantages of physical CDs with the sound quality of MP3 and the relative cheapness of flash memory.
2. Make big deal of how it is DRM free
3. ???
4. Fail to profit
5. Announce that there is clearly no demand for DRM-free music.

Y'know, I don't think that business plan even needs the ??? step!

Re:I still don't understand the economics

[UnknowingFool]

The reason that Amazon and iTunes stores sell anything at all over CDs are the advantages:

1. Some people only want one or a few tracks from an album. This reason is become more and more prominent as the record companies produce more and more crap.
2. Some people don't want to drive down to the store or don't have time. Many an invention have sold well because they appeal to convenience.
3. The store may not have the CD you want. Older CDs, independent artists, etc may not be at the local BestBuy or Walmart. iTunes may not have it either but you can quickly check if they do.
4. MP3s appeal to the average consumer not the collector/audiophile. Liner and album notes are not really as important to the average consumer as they used to be. At one time they were handy because they had song lyrics which you can get online anyway.

Tiny CD's

[WoollyMittens]

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?

Re:Tiny CD's

[Jesus_666]

There's nothing in TFA where they say you can't copy the files off of it. According to TFA they simply sell a MicroSD card with some MP3s and some bonus files on it.

Re:Tiny CD's

[flyingfsck]

Hmm, it must be Write Only Memory (WOM)...

They have a vested interest in physical media

[Motley Phule]

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.

Is Micro-SD the right choice?

[SlashBugs]

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?

Re:Is Micro-SD the right choice?

[craagz]

Sell the download? How would that help Sandisk apart from increasing their server costs!! :P

Re:Is Micro-SD the right choice?

[Jesus_666]

CDs are just as bad. They're hard to pick up and after a while they get all scratchy. Now if there only was some kind of packaging that would make them easier to handle and at the same time protect them...

MicroSD cards are sold in ~5x4x1 cm cases. Less easy to lose. Maybe SlotMusic will come in larger cases so they can actually have cover art. In any way you won't have a dozen MicroSD cards just lying around.

Re:Is Micro-SD the right choice?

[noidentity]

Am I thinking about the same micro-SD as everyone else? Smaller than my little finger nail?

It'd be perfect for a child's dollhouse*.

*Extra licensing fees apply, otherwise the RIAA might sue your dolls for copyright infringement.

Re:Is Micro-SD the right choice?

[Anonymous Coward]

loosing them isn't a bug, it's a feature. They would like you to buy more of them

No they dont

[unity100]

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.

Re:No they dont

[hcdejong]

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.

Nonsense. No audio system works like that.
1. you can't separate two voices or two instruments like this, because each voice produces a range of frequencies that mostly overlaps. They'll sound different because their harmonic spectrum (the relative volume of each harmonic) differs a bit, but there is no filter that can separate them.
2. A loudspeaker box usually contains a few drivers of different sizes, because the driver size needs to be matched more or less to the frequency. A 12" bass driver is too heavy to produce 10 kHz, conversely a 1" tweeter can't move enough air to produce convincing bass. The challenge is to use no more drivers than necessary, because dividing the frequency spectrum like this introduces all kinds of problems. The holy grail of loudspeaker design is the point source: a single point that can produce the entire spectrum.

The only reason loudspeaker arrays are used, is volume. Multiple parallel drivers can produce more volume than a single driver.
There are some interesting side effects to arrays. The dispersion pattern changes a bit, which can be beneficial if done right. But 'a sound stage that encompasses you'? No. That's due to the surfeit of power which sets up reverberations in the hall. You get the same effect cranking up your non-array home stereo.

Re:No they dont

[unity100]

bullshit.

your statements defy all the setups in concerts that are being performed around the world even as of this moment.

Re:No they dont

[solkimera]

I once went to a concert, where an orchestra would be in front, an on the back, barely visible, was a smaller band. I have to say Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was pretty damned amazing in that setup.

Re:No they dont

[unity100]

that was an intended positioning.

1812 aims to give an impression of a battlefield. for that, it is logical to do extensive positioning. 1812 is kinda like a FPS game of classic music, if you will.

but for almost all other classic music pieces, such positioning would hurt.

Re:No they dont

[hcdejong]

Care to provide proof? What you suggest is impossible.

Re:No they dont

[unity100]

just google 'concert speaker arrays'

Re:No they dont

[Soruk]

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, [...], and listen to music ?
Many times. Frequently. I'm in one.

Re:No they dont

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

There's something else that matters, namely the distance between your ears and each individual tweeter. If the distances are slightly different, certain frequencies will be amplified, others will be cancelled out. This is inevitable, since crossovers are not infinitely steep and therefore multiple tweeters will play the same signal, which will then arrive at your ears at different times. This may result in you perceiving the sound as clearer, but actually isn't really desirable. An Ideal loudspeaker would be a point source that emits all frequencies.

Re:No they dont

[hcdejong]

I have. Interestingly, the elements in an array are usually full-range loudspeaker cabinets (ignoring subwoofers for the moment). Again, it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices. If you think otherwise, provide an example. JFGI isn't going to cut it.

Re:No they dont

[someone300]

conclusion : positioning is not only unimportant, but also deteriorating to the sound quality after 2.1 (or stereo), because noone ever sits in the middle of an orchestra or a rock band while listening to music.

Only because they *can't* sit in the middle of a rock-band while listening to music. It's just not practical to do so, particularly in a crowd of more than five people.

Given that it *is* practical to have more than two/three audio channels, and that human ears are able to sense direction in more than left to right (ever seen someone look behind them when there's a loud bang?), why not have more than two/three channels?

Directional audio certainly enhances a film, there's no reason it can't enhance music either.

For the sake of completeness, while humans only have two raw audio-in channels, they can hear things in a vague sound-sphere because of our mental processing and head related transfer functions. This is very much human-dependent and fairly difficult to emulate, and isn't done in most recordings. Greater than two channel sound is generally best we've currently got access to with most consumer level hardware.

Re:No they dont

[elgatozorbas]

gain, it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices.

Actually this is non completely impossible. Using special DSP techniques (adaptive filtering and SVD) a digital system can try to decompose a stream into several sources. This doesn't work perfectly, e.g. if the two sopranos would be producing exactly the same sinusoidal tone, they cannot be isolated. Similar techniques are being used in hearing aids (not talking crap here, I worked as a phd student in a DSP lab where similar things were being done).

This aside, it is indeed impossible to do such separation using only analog circuitry, let alone just speakers. The only thing that comes close is when the recording was done using multiple microphones. In that case some analog processing (beamforming etc) may separate different voices on different tracks, and the audio field may be regenerated using multiple speakers.

I don't understand why such an obvious false claim (by the GG..GP) is modded up.

Re:No they dont

[Anonymous Coward]

"Again, it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices."

Actually, this is possible with Celemony Melodyne.

You can edit, delete and re-pitch single notes in a polyphonic recording.

Re:No they dont

[amorsen]

Again, it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices.

I think "physically impossible" is a bit too strong. I'll bet that before 2020 someone will write an algorithm (or a neural net or something) which can do it.

Re:No they dont

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy commercial versions of this algorithm for a year or so.

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna_intro2

Re:No they dont

[amorsen]

Melodyne does it for instruments, but they don't (at least on that page) say that they can distinguish between two sopranos.

Re:No they dont

[rpmayhem]

Also keep in mind that the idea of a concert setup was mentioned for this system. While DSP can do this (not at 100% though), most concerts would just send the input from the various singers' mics to difference speakers to create this separation effect as originally described. Of course, if you're just lip-syncing, then DSP is for you!

Re:No they dont

[Anonymous Coward]

Melodyne does not care if it's a trumpet, a clarinet or a voice.

Compared to re-pitching individual notes in a guitar chord, or ten part piano chord, two monophonic voices with individual formant patterns is easy.

Re:No they dont

[Technician]

The only reason loudspeaker arrays are used, is volume. Multiple parallel drivers can produce more volume than a single driver.

Partly right. An array extends the frequency range down. An array of close spaced 6 inch drivers can replace a subwoofer as well as cover the normal range. An array can create a flatter wavefront, so they can produce narrower pattern to reduce feedback while running at high volume. This narrower pattern in large arrays has to be compensated for because the pattern becomes too narrow. This is why large arrays are curved, not flat. A large flat array can be used in an outdoor setting to project most of the power in a long narrow pattern such is common in many outdoor concerts at a waterfront for example.

If you want to play with software that shows the relation of speakers in an array and how they change the sound field, there is free software from Yamaha that can be used to learn this stuff. Pro audio was my specialty for a long time.

A single speaker in a box is much less directional than an array of speakers phased in boxes to create a unified steerable wavefront.

http://www.yamahaproaudio.com/downloads/firm_soft/ys3/index.html

"The Yamaha Sound System Simulator is free software that can be downloaded from this web site."

"Simulation begins when you select the speaker array. You can change several conditions for the speaker array in real-time as you view the simulation result to optimize the sound field design."

Normaly I don't plug a manufacture, but the software is free to play with.

Disclaimer, I have no relation to Yamaha except I own some of their products.

Re:No they dont

[BPPG]

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna&L=0

mod parent up.

Re:No they dont

[jedidiah]

That still sounds like something that wouldn't be able to
pull out multiple copies of the same instrument either.
If it can't pull out "two sopranos" then it shouldn't be
able to pull to "two soprano guitars" or "two soprano
violins" either.

Re:No they dont

[hobbit]

Blind Source Separation algorithms are improving all the time. Melodyne, as others have mentioned, has such functionality, though (having dabbled in DSP and MIR) I doubt it would work as well for soprano as it does for guitar -- and I'd be surprised if one separated note didn't at least have a little of the ghost of the notes that used to accompany it.

Re:No they dont

[Lisandro]

The holy grail of loudspeaker design is the point source: a single point that can produce the entire spectrum.

Also known as full-range drivers. They do have some issues though (intermodulation distortion and low power), so, like every other speaker technology, you end up making compromises in order to achive the desired result.

Re:No they dont

[Anonymous Coward]

In my impression that's not what poster was talking about. The argument was dividing the frequencies among tweeters/midrange speakers/etc makes for a clearer sound and that 2 sopranos (roughly ofcourse) have distinct frequencies (eg. an alt-soprano and a soprano). It seems you're being the troll here by attaching these statements to the poster about actually seperating instruments and voices into seperate channels, which IMHO no sane person would believe another person really believes this is possible. OTOH this is /. so...

Re:No they dont

[XHIIHIIHX]

Allow me to clarify. What the OP is suggesting, and is frequently done, is to separate different instruments and voices onto separate channels in a 5.1 system, which does allow the speaker to more accurately reproduce that single instrument or voice which was recorded in isolation just for that particular channel. Nearly every large concert system works the same way nowadays. You don't feed the output of your bass drum mic into the same speaker array you are using for voice. There are many reasons for this, feedback protection is one of the most important, also being able to reduce input level to the amplifier from a high spl output instrument like a snare drum or trumpet versus a low spl output like a triangle or acoustic guitar. If you separate two singers voices onto separate 5.1 or 7.1 channels you can allow natural third harmonics to take place in the air, rather then the magnetic coil, and the effect is quite startling. You can flip a switch between stereo and 5.1 and hear a significant difference. Assuming you can still hear third harmonics.

Re:No they dont

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. They know what they're talking about. I was about to post about intermodulation from a single cone but I read through the thread first and found this. (Firefox spell check, please put intermodulation in the dictionary already. It's a real word!)

Re:No they dont

[jhfry]

I think what the GP was saying is literally "point source"... not a 10" driver that will produce the full range of frequencies and be subject to intermod.

If complete sound waves propagate from a single point in space (and are not reflected) there is no possibility for intermod.

Who needs the CD?

[Khyber]

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.

Price increase?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

it might not be nice to say. but it's most often true.

people ARE clueless.

no

[unity100]

it goes to your own ignorance and insolence.

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.

before doing stupid generalizations about groups of people :
1) Grown enough balls to post with your own identity
2) Take care to make valuable contribution to insolent arrogance ratio in your posts higher

Re:no

[c0p0n]

Get some sleep then dude, you just drove yourself around the block for no reason.

Re:no

[L4t3r4lu5]

Please do not feed the trolls.

Thanks.

Re:no

[L4t3r4lu5]

Troll? Someone hit this Mod with a clue-stick and mod me Off-Topic.

Re:no

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:no

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Album art on the device, not on the cover

[Anonymous Coward]

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 so silly to say that

[thermian]

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.

Re:not so silly to say that

[CastrTroy]

It will play on your iPod. iTunes just has to detect that you plugged it into your computer, and then ask you if you want to add it to your collection, just like it does with CDs.

Re:not so silly to say that

[DavidTC]

Yeah! The other day, I bought a car radio, and was disappointed it wouldn't play on my iPod either!

They could have used MiniSDs...

[peppepz]

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.

Children's music.

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'm not audiophile, ...

They all say that until someone finds children's music on their computer!

Form factor

[Anonymous Coward]

The smaller form factor literally makes it easier to steal!

*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[paniq]

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!

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[TSPhoenix]

As much as standard MP3 sucks its really quite amazing what they've managed to squeeze out of the format with the LAME encoder. In most listening tests it performs about as well as Vorbis. I wish they'd go with a free and more efficient codec too. I'm actually surprised that companies are still eating the MP3 licensing fees when they could have forced it out of the market. I guess its probably to do with them not being able to agree on any alternative.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[4D6963]

What is this obsession with this widely unsupported file format OGG? You know, one of these formats that the iPod doesn't play... Yes, not supported by the iPod = widely unsupported. Because the iPod is very very wide, market wise.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[paniq]

Apple has had the chance to add Ogg Vorbis support to the iPod, yet didn't.

As far as I understood, it was part of an iTunes deal with Universal, which ensured that MP3 would be supported as the only DRM-free format on their players - if Universal had gotten their will, MP3 wouldn't even be supported on the iPod.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[pmontra]

IMHO it has to do with the phenomena for which most people believe that the Internet is that blue e icon on the desktop: cluelessness. In the case of digital music, many people believe that MP3 is free (as in pirated) music and AAC is a proprietary and DRM-protected format. Companies are just dealing with a general mindset that lead to a world full of MP3 players: trying to change it may cost them more than paying the MP3 licenses.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[paniq]

All well and good, but do you think that Universal Virgin EMI Warner Music (I suppose by the time this comment is published, the final merger has gotten wrapped up) are using the LAME encoder? Or rather something inferior?

MP3 has also a few shortcomings in audiophile terms. MP3 has a fixed frequency limit at 16khz that you can't overcome and usually packs data especially in the high frequencies, which you can hear even with a 256kbit compressed MP3 if you cared enough to buy nearfield reference speakers.

Plus the usual glitches when you expect your average encoder to handle pure saw waves. It's just not the same quality.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[Hal_Porter]

The orginal reason MP3 was more widely supported was because you could use a cheap slow/low power microcontroller and and a move most of the decoding into hardware. The hardware codecs all support MP3 and none of them support vorbis. If you use an expensive/high power enough microcontroller you can do any codec in software. But its one of these situations where the needs of the many (cheap player/long battery life) outweigh the needs of the few (support for fringe codecs).

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[paniq]

Great, so Ogg Vorbis doesn't have a stigma yet.

If they believe AAC is the white knight nobody wants to sits beside in the schoolbus, and MP3 is the pirate everybody likes (though his breath is smelly), there might be a chance for Ogg Vorbis to become, in the public image, the Good Witch of the North, free of DRM, but also endorsed by rehabilitated record companies.

Boy, talk about messed up analogies.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are in fact some Ogg Vorbis capable hardware decoders available. You're right though that no one is going to pick one of those just because it supports Vorbis. They might pick it for other reasons and choose to support Vorbis because it's easy to do and adds a small additional differentiator between themselves and their competitors, but that's just a side effect.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[pmontra]

Yes, it might be so but it will take a great deal of marketing money before the masses will know about Ogg Vorbis and I don't see any company starting to invest on it.

Re:*cough*Ogg Vorbis*cough*?

[paniq]

No biggie, I got an investment proposal from the Lehman Brothers ... oh crap.

And what else ?

[daveime]

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 :-(

Re:And what else ?

[Hal_Porter]

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/

Re:And what else ?

[Jesus_666]

Never happened to me. Maybe you'd want to buy keydisks that don't boldly advertise including the U3 stuff - in my experience those are easier to find and usualy cheaper than their U3 counterparts while still being very much usable and even decently fast. Buying devices that were specifically designed to offer a certain feature and then complaining about said feature is a bit weird.

Re:And what else ?

[drinkypoo]

Buying devices that were specifically designed to offer a certain feature and then complaining about said feature is a bit weird.

AFAIK I can't buy a Sandisk (or other manufacturer that will honor their lifetime warranty without a receipt, unlike those fuckheads at PNY) with a sliding interface (no cap, retracts) without U3. However, I don't find formatting to be arduous.

Apologies for my misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Since I said they should do this

[symbolset]

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.

Terminology

[Nodamnnicknamesavial]

"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.

Re:Maybe... ...an SD Rack keychain

[Ox0065]

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.

Movies I can see, but music?

[Shivetya]

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.

No slots on ipods = crap

[cheekyboy]

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.

Re:No slots on ipods = crap

[UnknowingFool]

Apple doesn't deserve high margins. They make high margins because people buy their products. People buy their product because they like their products. There does exist many, many competitors to the iPod. You are free not to give Apple their high margins by buying a competitor. However your plan to modify the Shuffle suffers from a flaw: The Shuffle is bought by those who want a small, no frills MP3 player. Adding an expansion slot would make it larger than it is and would move the size segment which Apple has targeted. Most MP3 players that have an expansion slot are more in the size range of the nano. The Sansa e200 is a little smaller than a nano and the cost of a Shuffle.

It's the INPUTs

[martyb]

your statements defy all the setups in concerts that are being performed around the world even as of this moment.

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.

Re:It's the INPUTs

[Skye16]

I don't know why it is I only get mod points on weekends. It seems like all the good comments (such as yours) are only made whenever I don't have a modpoint to spare. I usually have to end up rating things as +5 LOL(cat) just to get rid of them.

Copy restriction

[DragonHawk]

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.

Death, Taxes and the 2nd law of Thermodynamics

[itsdapead]

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.

root kits

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Minimize the space?

[ratboy666]

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.

Re:Minimize the space?

[rtechie]

Encoded 5.1 albums, ready to play back on the home system.

Very, very, very, little new music is recorded in 5.1. Mastering costs are AT LEAST an order of magnitude higher, if you spend $100,000 for a stereo album mastering that in 5.1 will cost you AT LEAST $1,000,000 and probably closer to $5,000,000. And remember, nowadays the ARTISTS pick up the tab of mastering, not the studio. So mastering that album in 5.1 adds to their massive debts (since few artists are making much money).

You CAN do 5.1 with substandard equipment, but the resulting album will usually be inferior to a stereo mix and VASTLY more time consuming.

Re:Minimize the space?

[rtechie]

I should probably point out that your best bet is a technology called Dolby Digital Live that remixes stereo recordings to DD in real time. As far as I'm aware, it's restricted to specialty PC soundcards like this one: http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/mtgoddl/home.aspx.

It works fairly well, especially if you like bass. The compression they use seems to be very good at detecting the "lows" and redirecting those to the LFE channel making much better use of your sub-woofer. Everything else is just "okay". You get a good sense of "the source is in front of me" but that's it.

Perhaps needless to say, this technology works best with video games.

Re:Minimize the space?

[ratboy666]

Not sure I understand. Take a case I am familiar with:

Childrens Choral group does several performance a year (some with the cities orchestra, some not). Each performance is recorded, most are released on CD.

Current technology: mics on the stage, recorded, mixed, released. Takes a couple of weeks.

5.1 technology: add "ambient" mikes to the back of the concert hall. Remix with sub-woofer content separated, encode, release.

An order of magnitude? No... not even twice as difficult. Cost? One more pass through the digital audio data, 2 mics, maybe an additional spare. Two more digital channels. (maybe an additional hard drive).

Of course the costs are increased if "in studio" techniques are used -- even stereo is synthesized in that case (instruments recorded separately, audio engineer has to figure out placement).

Actually, given the typical production cycle, synthesizing the back channels is probably a sensible idea anyway. Fairly easy to do (left back is "attenuate, echo delay left front + attenuate,echo delay longer right front", right back is the reflection, sub is lower frequency, boosted). I'll cook it up myself now.

Thanks for your input!

Re:Minimize the space?

[rtechie]

Of course the costs are increased if "in studio" techniques are used -- even stereo is synthesized in that case (instruments recorded separately, audio engineer has to figure out placement).

This is exactly the scenario I'm talking about. The audio engineer has to build a 5.1 "soundscape" using the individual instrument tracks. You can technically do this by hand, but it's a major PITA. There is equipment (really, software) to do this automagically, but it's very expensive.

RIAA / DRM / What to do, what to do?

[cjhanson]

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...

"Just when you thought [they] had learned..."

[Kjella]

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.

Too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

One question I haven't seen addressed

[TheLoneGundam]

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

The Internet

[ProfessionalCookie]

...but it looks like the internet wins again as the next media distribution system. Nobody told them?

Can you recommend one?

[argent]

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.

The interesting thing here is...

[slapout]

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."

The CD is not a broken method of distribution

[Slashdot Junky]

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

Musical feature extraction

[tepples]

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:

1. Perform short-time autocorrelations to find the period of each mixed signal. Wikipedia has an article about pitch detection.
2. Use comb filters to "tune in" the frequencies associated with each period and "tune out" other strong periods. This smears the recording in time, but it does provide an impression of the part of the recording associated with each voice.
3. Perform further complex processing on each voice to account for moments where the two voices could not be separated. Evidence for how the post-processing works can be discerned from its failure modes.

Yes!

[Cillian]

Yes! Yes yes yes! Screw the mod points - Yes!

These guys just can't help abusing the terminology

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection

So it'll be dedicated to the public domain?

Oh, they meant copy protection...

MULTI-channel

[Version6]

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"

Believe when I see It

[linesma]

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.

where's the innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this really the same as selling CD's which I can rip (legally in australia at least).

Video on the MicroSD Cards

[CrashCart9]

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.

Which reminds us

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is gonna replace CD's soon; guess I'll have to buy the White Album again..."

cheers android!

[sarahoneill]

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.