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The Beatles On iTunes
Yesterday Apple put a big old teaser up on their homepage for an unknown
announcement to occur today. Speculation ran rampant from the delayed
iOS 4.2, to iTunes Streaming to a release of the Beatles catalog on the iTunes
store. Well, it was the latter. They have 13 albums on the store now, and a $150
box set. So here's hoping that we get that iPad multitasking yet this November.
Another reason not to use iTunes!! YAY!
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This is a small announcement that has had no effect on the Apple stock, other than perhaps supporting it some in a market that is down 1.5% so far today..
Other than in the Game rock band (mentioned by someone else), yes it is. They were also #3 selling band in the US last year. It is significant, but perhaps not a day we will never forget.
So, the solution is to sell out? It's assholes like you that ensure that very little quality art will ever be made out of the massive pool of talent which exists. Worrying about selling the stuff pretty much ensures that much of what could be created won't. Either it's commercially nonviable or to time consuming to pay for itself.
I take it you haven't actually listened to the later Beatles stuff. And by that, I mean really, really listened. Because there's some extremely sophisticated stuff going on, particularly in their later work. "Eleanor Rigby" probably sums things up pretty well.
There were no downloads then, and LPs are far superior to any lossily compressed music. A Beatles CD has all the failings of both analog and digital, and none of the advantages of either.
Listen to it backwards if you want to blow your mind -- he's singing about "smack" (heroin).
Free Martian Whores!
Can't believe this was modded flamebait. So much goodness in just two lines.
Thanks for playing. Now put down your Linux for Dummies book and go back to sleep.
When the music was remastered in the 80s, they tried to boost the low gain frequency bands, which annoyed the LP listeners who like the "warm" sound you get without high frequencies.
That is totally and completely incorrect. LPs have a far larger frequency response than CDs, which are limited to the 22kHz Nyquist limit (and the closer you get to the Nyquest limit, the more aliasing you have).
In the early 1970s they came up with a gimmic called "quadraphonics". The way they got 4 channels out of one groove was to modulate the rear channels with a 44kHz tone and mix it with the front channels. On playback, this signal was separated and demodulated. The modulated 44kHz tone was recorded on the LP itself.
Lower frequencies were a problem with cheap (affordable to most) turntables, and with early recordings. Early recordings suffered from the stylus' tendancy to jump out of the groove with a loud bass tone, and this was overcome with the RIAA equalization curve. That didn't stop the problem of "rumble", noise produced by the turntable's bearings. Cheap turntables simply de-emphasized the lowest frequencies (which needed bigger than an eight inch woofer to reproduce anyway) and also the higher frequencies to compensate for the lack of lower frequencies.
The "warm" sound comes from the lack of aliasing.
I find it hilarious that folks today are buying turntables to play music that was originally recorded digitally. As I said earlier, when you mix analog and digital, you get the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. With music originally recorded digitally, the CD will sound better than the LP.
The "lossy" refers to MP3 compression. Convert a wav to MP3 and back several times and you'll have something that sounds like shit. Analog's waveforms are smooth, digital's are pixilated. Draw a sine wave with three sample points and there's no way of telling if it's a sine wave, sawtooth wave, square wave; there just isn't high enough resolution. And with the CD's 44kHz sampling rate, a 15kHz tone has three samples.
As to hisses and pops, you only get audible hissing if the LP was manufactured out of the cheapest vinyl, and you only get pops if you scratch it or let it get dirty.
Free Martian Whores!