Music Pirates Won't Rush To iCloud For Forgiveness

An anonymous reader writes "Lots of people have suggested there's a loophole in Apple's new iCloud that will allow people who illegally download music to somehow 'launder' their dirty music files, getting a nice clean, and legal, license to the music stored on iCloud. This argument is flawed for two main reasons. The first has to do with how the laws of copyright work and the second is to do with why people share or download music (and movies) in the first place."

Comments

Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

One thing the article missed was the fact that iTunes match will allows users to download 256kbps versions of the music in their libraries, regardless of the bitrate the user originally had. I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to that bitrate, regardless of whether their collection was obtained legitimately or not.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Lunaritian]

True audiophiles listen to lossless though.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[jessecurry]

true, but as a percentage of the population there aren't too many "true audiophiles". There are, however, plenty of people who claim to be audiophiles (meaning that they rip their music at the best bitrate of the day).

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

Good point. Maybe "wannabe audiophile" was a better term. Either way, there is definitely a subset of people I know not willing (or too lazy) to re-rip/re-download their entire collection to get a higher bitrate but would still like to have it. iTunes match sounds like it will be automatic enough that I imagine they'd make use of it.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Hatta]

Correct. True audiophiles use $100 speaker cables too. There's unfortunately no word that means "normal person who wants his music to sound good without buying into the woo".

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[SanityInAnarchy]

There are practical reasons for lossless, however. Where lossy media hurt is a generational loss -- maybe on my desktop or on devices which support it, I'd prefer Ogg Vorbis. Maybe if I had an iPod, AAC would be better. My feature phone likes MP3, and that's also useful if I want to share it with people. And maybe someone wants me to burn a CD, and maybe they will then rip that CD into their own lossy format.

AAC 256k sounds fine. But generational losses do eventually add up, and disk space is cheap, so there's no good reason to put up with them.

And no, I don't have $100 speaker cables. I'd much rather have $100 headphones.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

I'd say a "wanna be audiophile" is someone who wishes he could afford a better sounding stereo.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mwvdlee]

And we all know audiophiles are experts when it comes to sound quality.
http://boingboing.net/2005/11/07/astronomically-overp.html

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

True audiophiles listen to lossless though.

Downloaded through gold gas sealed ethernet cables.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

Audiophiles get a bad rap for spending money on things that nobody can really tell a difference between, but really it's all a sliding scale of how much "better" (or "different") do you want to get vs. how much money do you not care if you spend.

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.

Are my $400 headphones better than my $250 headphones? maybe. probably. not by very much though. Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes. Are $1200 headphones better than anything I own? Probably... but also likely not by very much.

Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality, and then you can spend hundreds more to get to 95%, then thousands to get to 99%, and then possibly never get to 100% no matter how much you spend.

When you hear audiophiles rave over "how much product X is than product Y", what they're generally doing is disregarding that first 90% of quality that everybody has, and talking about the differences, the remaining 10% or so. Because that's not clear to the casual reader, they look like idiots for spending $100 on a cable that makes almost no difference. Perhaps they are spending irresponsibly if that money should be going elsewhere to bills, etc... but if they have the money to spend, who is to say that whatever enjoyment they're getting out of their super low oxygen, quadruple shielded, magnesium tipped, fluorescent purple cables isn't worth every penny they spent, to them at least?

Note, I'm not talking about the people who are off the scientific deep end and debating which brand SATA cable attached to their hard drive produces the best sounding mp3s.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[ifrag]

Speaker wire is so low impedance and the signal so strong that even something from monoprice is plenty fine. The "true audiophiles" you are talking about are the brain dead kind. There actually are a breed of informed audiophiles who do the math and don't blow money on magic pixie dust components (several people over at head-fi seem to have their heads on straight). The place to really focus on cable is analog interconnects (if any). Replacing my cable from DAC -> Amp actually did make a very obvious difference that anyone would be able to hear.

Maybe you are right and the term audiophile has been tainted beyond repair. I still like to use the term without all the implied negativity though.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Littlebluedevil]

True audiophiles listen to lossless though.

True audiophiles listen to vinyl.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

The nice thing about digital sound is that you no longer need such expensive equipment (except your speakers/headphones). That's good for us normal folks who don't have mountains of cash, bad for audiophiles. In the analog world, the more you spent, the better it sounded. A $500 turntable sounded far more lifelike than a $50 turntable. With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player. High quality amplifiers have gotten so cheap that what used to be a $2,000 amp now is more like $50 (like all electronics; an IBM PC with no hard drive, 4 mz chip and 64k memory was $5,000. A twenty five inch TV cost $600 in 1976, these days you can get a 42 inch high definition flat screen for less).

An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise played through a pair of four-way enclosures with eighteen inch woofers, a pair of different sized squawkers, a tweeter and a supertweeter will fool you into thinking it's a live performance; that's what hifi (high fidelity) means. It will sound better than the same record in CD format (provided the original studio tapes were analog).

However, with a low end (more affordable) system, the CD will always sound better than an LP. The low end turntable will lack bass, since it will be attenuated to reduce rumble, and will lack treble to make up for the lack of bass. It may also have speed slightly off and may even have a tiny bit of flutter (but you usually only get flutter from tape). It will also introduce distortion and may not have very good separation. Cheap CD players, on the other hand, send the same numbers to the DAC as as an expensive one, and until it reaches the analog DAC the cable the signal runs through doesn't matter at all; it either works or doesn't.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bmo]

I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.

So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.

Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).

The procedure is, although effective, rather unorthodox. Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures. Simply mounting your hard disk upside down enables centripetal forces to cancel out the rotational ruptures in the disk. As I said, unorthodox, and mainstream manufactures will not approve as it hurts sales (less rotational velocidensity damage means a slighter chance of disk failure.)

I'd still go with uncompressed .wav myself, but there's nothing wrong with compressed formats like flac or mp3 when you treat your hardware right

--
BMO

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise

Yea, because the amp is the weakest link in that chain. LOL

It will sound better than the same record in CD format

This is nothing more than an unsubstantiated claim that LPs are capable of fidelity beyond what 16bits @ 44.1 kHz PCM can deliver.

Where, exactly, do LPs have the advantage?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

*golf clap

I was going to give you a "cool story bro", but that's actually a rather impressive piece there, I award you one internet.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[ydrol]

Dont even need expensive headphones to get audiophile quality (assuming headphones Less that 40 euros delivered.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hd+688b

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree! My Bose ear buds do the job quite nicely and I don't have to worry about what kind of speakers I have attached to the $100 speaker cables.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[CountBrass]

True audiophiles only listen to live performances.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[UnknowingFool]

I'm not familiar with the details but what happens to the 256 bit collection if I stop paying the yearly $25 fee? Also does the matching move over my lyrics and other metadata. Some times I filled in fields like Composer etc. If it stays with me or I can download it that alone is worth the fee. I have 2500 songs mostly in 128 bit MP3, all of them legally ripped.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

true audiophiles keep bitching about the compression fact. STOP BITCHING !

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

woosh

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[winterphoenix]

According to this article, the iTunes match copies are iTunes Plus tracks, which are DRM free. I have no idea about the metadata, though I'm sure it wouldn't be extremely difficult for someone to write a script to merge two sets of ID3 tags.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[biglig2]

Current understanding - which could be completely wrong as Apple haven't said exactly what happens - is that the copy in the Cloud will go away, but not any copy on one of your devices.

So, you won't be able to re-download it from the cloud any more, but assuming you've pulled a copy from the Cloud into iTunes before your sub expires, you could always get it from there.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[idontgno]

I'm definitely in that camp. I'd love to have a few hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on all-tube gear, analogue-only media equipment (EVEN CDs). and oxygen-free 47-braid virgin copper cable insulated with the skins of baby minke whales.

I wouldn't actually waste money on that crap, of course. I'd just love to be able to afford it, so I can spend the money on stuff that actually matters to me. YMMV.

And yeah, I can sometimes hear the difference between 128kbps and VBR, but only on home entertainment gear (even mediocre). On my smartphone, the earbuds are such a loss acoustically that it's distinguishing between a crappy rip and an awesome one verges on fantasy.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Teknikal69]

I've been wondering what would happen if you just made a bunch of fake mp3 files for every file you wanted a free copy of I know it couldn't be this simple to trick them but the service does seem to invite the possibility of being fooled somehow.

I''m not buying into this whole cloud fad myself I think I'll stick to physical storage.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mr1911]

Whoosh

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[idontgno]

True audiophiles only listen to the voices in their heads.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[m50d]

Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes.

Have you got a double-blind test to back that up? "Audiophiles" aren't mocked because the differences are tiny, but because they're usually not there at all.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Oligonicella]

Digital dust? Please explain why my word-processing files sit there unchanged and usable. I have files that I've opened and read after sitting unattended for years. These aren't ASCII, they're structured files for specific programs. Not conducive to any alteration at all.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[rjforster]

I have had good success with a Turboencabulator. I needed to tighten the differential girdlespring but digital dust has been significantly below the measureable threshold.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[kimvette]

So they listen only to live music?

Let's review formats:

CD: encoded at 16 bits, so you have 65,536 possible volume levels, so you are losing some sound there plus as with all electronics you encounter signal losses every step along the analog path. You use S/PDIF? Guess what? That signal eventually is converted to analog - so you are eliminating only one analog stage of the process. The receiver's on-board D/A converter still has to feed its output through the preamp and on into the power amplifier, introducing degradation of the original recording (in other words, not lossless)

DAT: similar to CD, except the sampling rate could be as low as 32KHz, in such cases frequency response is limited to 16Khz on the high end. I don't know how your hearing is, but I can still hear up to 18KHz - maybe not as well as I used to but I can still hear it, because I didn't blast my ears with headphones/ear buds at high volume and was very picky about which concerts I attended.

Vinyl: has EQ applied to overcome "rumble" from the driving mechanism, which introduces distortion, they wear out and become noisier with each play, with crackles, pops, hiss and all that become more and more noticeable because the noise floor is raised, reducing the S/N ratio. Therefore, vinyl is not lossless. Channel separation is inferior to CD and DAT. Vinyl sounds incredible on a good turntable with a new stylus and a brand-new record, but that record will not remain new; it will wear and pick up dust no matter how anal you are about cleaning it, degrading the sound.

Tape (all forms of analog tape, be it reel-to-reel, compact cassette, VHS, 8-track): high frequency response is typically more limited than other formats, and you need to deal with tape hiss which gets worse every time you play the tape. You need to worry about head alignment (just a little bit off, the mids become muddy, the highs become very distorted and/or one head will pick up information from multiple tracks), crosstalk (sometimes tape picks up audio from neighboring regions of tape on the reel), limited channel separation in comparison to digital formats (although Reel-To-Reel and HiFi VHS are quite remarkable), the tape heads pick up oxides and plasticizers (requiring very regular cleaning), which coat the heads and make them less sensitive to the magnetic media, the heads become magnetized over time and can damage the tape (requiring periodic degaussing), and the transport mechanism - can you say wow and flutter? Also, the high frequencies tend to become saturated very easily (listen to Queen's The Prophet Song for an example of this during the mixing process) and the S/N ratio can be horrible, especially on the higher end of the audio spectrum so you need to encode the recording using Dolby, Dolby B, Dolby C, Dolby S, DBX, or similar need to be utilized (or DNR on playback, which makes for a muddy sounding experience), and to deal with tape saturation, the tape can be encoded with HX Pro bias. Lossless? No.

The recording process itself introduces losses; is real life stereo, quadrophonic, or even 7.1 surround? No; it is a collection of point-sources in three-dimensional space where each individual instrument, each individual vocalist, and their position relative to the environment colors the sound in a manner that can never be recorded nor emulated by any audio gear.

What does that leave? Live performances? Oops, microphones, amplifier stages and even passive components such as interconnects and speaker wire and speakers and such result in losses.

That leaves live acoustic performances, I guess. ;)

Don't get caught up in the audiophile rat race anyhow; eventually you become so concerned with the perfect listening experience you decide on your third set of speakers which don't have a full sound throughout midrange, or are oh-so-slightly boomy in the midbass region, or the tweeters aren't quite crisp enough unless you are exactly in the sweet spot, or the bass isn't punchy enough you start building your

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[__aamnbm3774]

a CD isn't lossless. It peaks at a crappy 44khz and some other numbers. anything digital is broken down into a set of 1's and 0's which eventually, if zoomed in enough, looks like big lego blocks and is missing the smooth curves of reality.

Saying 'lossless' is akin to saying something is 'infinite'.

If you can quickly pick out the difference between 256kbps and 320kbps, I feel bad for you, it'd be a curse because everything would sound shitty. But lossless? comeon, just like Unlimited internet, eh Comcast... nothing in the universe is unlimited, and nothing digital can be 'lossless'.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Plammox]

No, no, no, no, no. True audiophiles use $500 audiophile ethernet cables ! (sound of toes cringing).

Denon, I hate you.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[UnknowingFool]

Generally I would advise people to get decent cables for anything analog like speaker wire. No need for $100 Monster cables but look for build quality. You can always get cheaper cables but they may not last. For digital there is far less reason to have the high end stuff but quality matters.

I had to buy a TOSlink cable recently. I had a choice between a cheap $6 one, a $12 one, or a $40 Monster. Having used the cheap optical cables before, they are flimsy; they may snap if you bend them accidentally. Also they fit in the optical port but it's not guaranteed that they will stay in. The tolerances on the connectors are hit or miss. I choose the $10 ones because the build quality was good enough and the caps were tethered so I didn't lose them. I could have bought the Monster ones cheaper if I bought online; however, after shipping they would have been more and I would have had to wait.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

256kbps is the best bitrate of the day? Please. Ten years ago I was ripping my music at 320kbps, and I'm by no means an audio snob. Now lossless is ubiquitous and storage is dirt cheap, why would anyone settle for 256kbps?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh...

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

LMAO!
Nice one :)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

I could get you the frequency response curves to prove that they're wildly different, but of course that doesn't say which one is better, only that they're different. Also I'm pretty sure that's not what you're looking for anyway, given your signature.

I'll humor you though.

Double-blind is easy to do with cables, not easy to do with headphones. Anybody who can't tell the difference between wearing a pair of sennheiser HD-650s and a pair of Alessandro MS1s (rebadged Grado SR-125s) probably needs to go to the hospital because they have lost all nerve endings on the sides of their skulls.

That said, is an HD-650 better than an MS1? pretty much across the board yes. The HD-650 reproduces both higher frequencies and lower frequencies than the MS1s, the colorization of the sound (permutations to the frequency response curve) is much less pronounced, the sound is much fuller (more tinny resonance in the MS1s), detail retrieval (hearing the subtle nuances in your music) is easier, and although it's not strictly sound-related, they are generally far more comfortable,

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Registered Coward v2]

Consumers who think they are audiophiles with more money than sense use $100 speaker cables too. There's unfortunately no word that means "normal person who wants his music to sound good without buying into the woo".

There, fixed that for you. http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/06/15/1213249/Music-Pirates-Wont-Rush-To-iCloud-For-Forgiveness#

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mlts]

This is something I have never understood. Why do audiophiles use expensive stuff of dubious use. Instead, why not just use the pro studio offerings?

A pair of high end monitors have excellent clarity and response. Yes, they are flat across the board, but if someone wants the "tube sound", that is easily added in via a unit, stomp box, or other device. Same with amps. Why bother with an "audiophile" one when you can get a pro model made to be used with obnoxiously high digital bitrates?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[black soap]

Your ears are made of finite components that are not infinitely divisible, and have definite acoustic properties.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[UnknowingFool]

If that's the case, it's worth it for me to get iTunes, pay the $25, download my whole collection, and not renew it next year. That beats me having to re-rip all those CDs again.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mlts]

The first part sort of makes sense, especially on media which may get corruption over time. However, this is exactly why we need filesystems like ZFS which can detect bit rot rather than allow a file to have bits flipped at random. This, plus some ECC and plenty of good old fashioned backups will completely take care of this "digital dust".

I'll just ignore the second part of turning HDDs upside down.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[creat3d]

If you notice a difference between 256, 320 and lossless, there's probably medication for that condition.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

True "audiophiles" know, that there is no such thing as "lossless" audio. As that would require floating point samples with Planck quantum resolution in air pressure and time dimension from all involved equipment, including microphone, cables, amplifier, a/d converter, data format, d/a converter, amplifier again, cables again, speakers, and the air you breathe. ;)

But, as a former such person I say, true "audiophiles" are idiots. They don't listen to the music and long for joy, but listen for the errors and long for criticizing others, so they can feel better about their own failures in life. (At least that was true in my case, and in the case of just about everyone I went into details with about this.)

Even a "audiophile" in love will listen to a love song on the speaker of his mobile phone playing a mp3, and love every bit of it. :)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

An LP on a high end turntable through an amp with less than 1 db of distortion or noise played through a pair of four-way enclosures with eighteen inch woofers, a pair of different sized squawkers, a tweeter and a supertweeter will fool you into thinking it's a live performance; that's what hifi (high fidelity) means. It will sound better than the same record in CD format (provided the original studio tapes were analog).

However, with a low end (more affordable) system, the CD will always sound better than an LP.

And in your first paragraph's scenario, the LP will only sound better the first time you play it.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[swordgeek]

I tend to refer to people who want really good sound as audiophiles, and people who want really fancy (stupid) equipment as audiophules.

Replacement value of my stereo is about seven grand right now, but you'd be hard pressed to get significantly better for less than $12k. More to the point, you'd be hard pressed to get significantly better for any money, upstream of the speakers. A (damned!) good system can be affordable if you're careful, don't buy into the hype, and buy used when you can.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[ian_from_brisbane]

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

Or unshielded, or made of cardboard.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[demonlapin]

It has 65,536 volume levels and can accurately reproduce any sound below 22 kHz. If your hearing is better than that, you're probably a dog.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality, and then you can spend hundreds more to get to 95%, then thousands to get to 99%, and then possibly never get to 100% no matter how much you spend.

Also known as the law of diminishing marginal returns.

Your "marginal return" in this case is the quality per marginal (additional) dollar spent. That can actually become negative in many cases.

You'll see this concept turn up, and be ignored, in many policy debates when you have constantly increasing spending and nothing to show for it: education, health care, defense, poverty, etc.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

There's unfortunately no word that means "normal person who wants his music to sound good without buying into the woo" [skepdic.com].

We call ourselves "metalheads".

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Luckyo]

Medication being called "go back to the crappy speakers and no proper amplifier"?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the 256kbps is one of the things keeping me from signing up to iTunes Match. My files sounds fine to me at an average bitrate of about 160kbps. So, the 256kbps offer hits my ears as "Hey kids! How'd you like to be able to store 30% less music on your iThing!?!?".

What is attractive, of course, it the allure of being able to get rid of all of the pops, clicks, swishy sounds from various stuff I've downloaded... but I'm not going to go for that if it's going to bloat my music library by 1/3.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[itsdapead]

Obviously, you're lucky. Most people who've been working with computers for any length of time have encountered "software rot" or "bit decay" whereby any piece of software left unused for more than a year or two will spontaneously develop random syntax errors and bugs.

This is quite distinct from actual corruption caused by media damage - which tends to be obvious, usually sufficient to stop your code compiling. In contrast, "software rot" is caused by quantum fluctuations in the morphic resonance field of the code, so the effects manifest as plausible programming errors (such as failing to initialize a variable in C and assuming it was 0) and can only be spotted because you're sure that you were never that sloppy.

In the case of document files, bit decay manifests as spelling, punctuation and grammar errors or redundancies resulting from the same thing being said twice. In a music file, the most common effect is that that song that you really liked, and played all the time at college, fails to evoke the same sense of enjoyment, and Rick Astley just doesn't seem to be as good a singer as you remember him to be.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[greed]

I got a noise floor of about -35dB on my turntable. Which, granted, isn't an "audiophile" unit; it's just a Dual from the '60s. (With a modern Ortofon cartridge; with the OEM Shure cartridge the noise floor was closer to -25dB.) Which means the effective dynamic range was 35dB.

16 bit linear on CDs has a dynamic range of, what was it... clickyclicky... 96dB.

What people seem to ignore--and they do it with tubes vs. transistors too--is that CDs enabled a level of crappy mastering that wasn't possible before. (Just like cheap BJTs enabled crappy amps which weren't possible before.)

If you did the "loudness war" thing with an LP, the stylus wouldn't track. And I've owned LPs which were a pain to play; you'd have to fiddle the anti-skate and tracking force because they'd packed the grooves too close together (to get more music on a side), or made the excursions too big (to get louder music) and they'd just skip if you didn't adjust things for that particular album.

We just don't remember the crap.

Oh: LPs also only had a channel separation of about 20dB; so CDs made from the original tapes with hard separation (all vocals in left, all instruments in right say) that didn't take that into account sound ridiculous. That's, again, not a CD problem, but a mastering problem.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[__aamnbm3774]

If your hearing is better than that, you're probably a dog.

according to who?

did you perform those scientific studies? or are you referring to the ones possibly financed by Sony?

there's a reason they started working on the Super Audio CD

there's fidelity and dynamic range and all sorts of other stuff that KILO hertz can't keep up with. Sorry to burst your bubble...single static sounds might be reproduced just fine on a CD, but buddy it ain't perfect!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[m.ducharme]

So that's it! You've figured out how to tell if someone on the Internet is a dog! Well done, sir!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[not-my-real-name]

There is nothing that is truly lossless. Any digital recording has quantization noise. Any analog recording has some noise. Even listening in person has some losses.

The only thing that can be lossless is reading the music and imagining what it would sound like.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[uglyduckling]

A lot of what you say is right, but I have to disagree about the CD players. The DAC makes a huge difference, as does the quality of the analogue preamplifiers that sit between the DAC and the outputs at the back of the CD player. There are ways of designing a DAC and different ways of shaping and filtering the signal post-DAC. I've had cheap CD players with terrible amounts of noise both analogue and digital.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of bollox. Go and learn about file systems and error correction.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[__aamnbm3774]

That is a great argument.

But do you really believe CDs, that were invented in the 80s, cover everything our ears can hear? KiloHertz, really?

There's a reason Sony produced the SCAD and theres a reason it's popular among audiophiles.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

I would imagine another way it can go negative is when you start looking for other factors you can use to sell your product that don't actually impact the ability of the product to do "it's job" yet still cost more money, when quality on the actual product functionality may begin to slip. you see this all the time at the very high end.

like putting fancy electronic and mechanical bells, whistles, and toys into your luxury car that actually make it heavier, slower, handle worse, and get worse gas mileage than cheaper models.

making a "signature model" musical instrument that includes reproductions of every scuff, scrape, dent, and blemish of the historic instrument that your favorite artist takes on tour with him, yet sounds worse than the plain run-of-the-mill version of the model sitting next to it at the store (that costs 1/3 the price of the signature).

or for the double-whammy, putting both monster cables and dr dre's name on a pair of headphones.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[chuckugly]

There is no such thing as lossless, but a lot of "Audiophiles" say stuff like this while shopping for exotic cables and other snake oil, because it makes them feel better. Any time you sample or record a performance, there is loss - one just decides where and how much, that is all.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[GauteL]

"There's a reason Sony produced the SCAD [wikipedia.org] and theres a reason it's popular among audiophiles."

There is a reason Denon supplies a $999 ethernet cable for their stereo systems and the reason is not that it sounds better.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[c.derby]

studies have shown that 256kbps AAC is at least as good as 320kbps MP3...

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[GauteL]

"there's a reason they started working on the Super Audio CD"

As I said to you above. There is also a reason that Denon supplies a $999 ethernet cable for their stereo systems.

"there's fidelity and dynamic range and all sorts of other stuff that KILO hertz can't keep up with. Sorry to burst your bubble...single static sounds might be reproduced just fine on a CD, but buddy it ain't perfect!"

You may well be right, but you haven't burst anyone's bubble. You're just mentioning a couple of buzzwords and pretending that it is an argument.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[AJH16]

Lossless isn't. It's still compressed from the original recordings to get to the audio recorded on a CD. Sure you can digitize the files on the CD to a format that will reproduce exactly what was on the CD, but at the end of the day compression is about portability. I am very much a true audiophile, but I mostly use 320 or 360kpbs encoding depending on the player I'm using simply to be able to have the collection portable. The DAC makes a far bigger deal anyway and there is no comparison between live sound from an analog or even a good digital board to what comes out of a CD. What really annoys me is the psycho-acoustic compressions that horribly distort music outside the "popular" frequency bands and the people who claim to be audiophiles and swear by them.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[__aamnbm3774]

CDs do not have enough bandwidth to provide surround-sound for starters, which is a pretty surreal experience listening to a SACD that is put together well.
there are plenty of other reasonable/logical reasons to go with SACD, like increased resolution, reduced noise, higher fidelity and dynamic ranges...it isn't just a blind raping like Monster HDMI cables or being trapped by a special power adapter on your phone.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, you can hear the difference between a $12 cable and a $200 cable? Sounds like a combination of buyers remorse and cognitive dissonance to me. If given a setup where there are 50 headphones with 50 cables setup and only 5 are your $200 cable, could you accurately find those 5 every time? I doubt it.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Hatta]

When you hear audiophiles rave over "how much product X is than product Y", what they're generally doing is disregarding that first 90% of quality that everybody has, and talking about the differences, the remaining 10% or so.

The problem is that that last 10% is mostly beyond the range of human perception. Chasing that last 10%, when there's no evidence that it's actually perceptible (e.g. can be discriminated on an ABX test), is woo.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Hatta]

Sure, metal heads are pretty much immune to audiophilia. After all, metal just sounds like white noise no matter what you play it on.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[blosbanes]

Piracy is very rampant most specially in the net, hopefully we can stop this so the artist don't stop creating songs that we loved and for all the people do not support piracy. Manila School

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

You are to late for 1 April joke.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Artifakt]

If you actually calculate surface areas, the black letters are a small portion of the text image, and most of it is the white background. Digital dusting may eventually cause the white to age to a sort of yellow or even brown shade, and the crisp black to dark reddish brown, but since, as everyone knows, most digital artifacts tend to cluster in isolaterally unique bydirectional tone areas (sometimes called 'tone zones'), the discoloration occurs chiefly in the margins (since they are all white). Changing fonts or font sizes, or editing text, tends to "shake the dust off" of those areas, again onto the margins. This is also why the basic word processor that comes with Windows has fixed text width (or did back when I used Windows). Microsoft, in its infinite compassion for computer novices, was trying to preserve the dust catching properties of the 'tone zones' so users documents would last as long as possible. Microsoft even tried to use this as a selling point once, but since that was in the ads for Windows Me, no one noticed.
          Remember too, we're talking about a digital medium here. Because of the high brightness and contrast of modern monitors, display of increasingly dust laden margins on a monitor is almost invisible - only a highly skilled eye can spot the traces, by long staring at the margins. (Try it for a few minutes, and you will see how much dust is accumulating in your documents).

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

We should be careful not to confuse "sounding good" with accurate reproduction, resolution, and linear response.

I think a reason people consider the "ye olde vinyl vs cd trope" to be the case might be that the inherent distortion and limited dynamic range of vinyl "sounds better" to them than "cold, heartless" digital formats.

Many audiophile systems that I've read about seem to be really designed to affect the output in a euphonic fashion, rather than offer the best S/N ratio in the amplification, phase accuracy from the loudspeakers, etc. Despite much of the marketing literature for these things inventing ridiculous claims to the opposite.

If you want the most accurate reproduction of what is recorded, you want high end studio gear, and a well designed room. You might be surprised how crappy some music sounds on those systems, because the gear is giving you the warts and all reproduction of what has been recorded.

In general, "warm" (even harmonic) distortion and limited dynamic range sound "better" to many people, which is the very reason most popular records are deliberately squashed to barely a hint of dynamics, and distorted up the yin yang.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[__aamnbm3774]

You haven't burst my bubble either.

If you can't tell the difference between CD/SACD, it doesn't matter to me.
SACD Has more resolution. That is a fact. Whether you can hear it or not is your argument, but that isn't the same as two identical ethernet cables.

Your example of the Denon Ethernet Cable would be more akin to a regular CD, and that exact same CD imprinted on Gold.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Artifakt]

You're lucky it was just the differential griddlespring. Mine turned out to be a Prall sprue issue.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

Being an audiophile specializing in digital music for over 10 years, I am glad that finally someone from an academic background can verify this "digital dust" phenomenon. However, what the author failed to realize is that, similar to the essence of this "digital dust" issue as opposed to its analogue real world problem (that is, real dust on your desk, CDs, etc), there is a digital way to tackle it, which has been known as "digital vacuuming". It's pretty much like how you clean real dust from your floor. You need to record the sound of a vacuum machine into your computer and save it as audio clips in bitrate matching the audio files you want to clean, and put them in the folders of your audio files. To clean, just play the vacuum sound for a while (1-5min depending on file sizes) and it will clean the audio files in that folder. The key is matching the bitrate of vacuum sound to your audio files. It works like a charm! And I would suggest implementing this procedure on a regular basis to preserve your audio files in perfect status.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

Would it be difficult? Very, because as I said, the difference was quite small. Not to mention that listening to 50 headphones would probably show enough variation in different pieces of hardware that I'd lose track of the differences in cables, because the difference was that small.

I have 0 problem admitting when two things sound exactly the same. I have said in this very same comments section that I can't reliably ABX Ogg Vorbis -q4 from lossless. I'm not trying to defend my purchase here or claim I have super hearing. In retrospec, I would never make that purchase again. What I'm saying is that if specifically looking for differences between the two, I could tell very minor differences between the two cables, and I can't even truly say that one was better than the other, only that they were different.

For all I know, that could mean that the $200 one was -worse- than the $12 one, from a sonic accuracy point of view. People have proven time and time again to prefer colored reproductions of music to accurate ones.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

That's why I said "before the signal gets to the DAC".

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

True audiophiles acknowledge that they can't actually hear the difference, and that stripping out stuff like infrasound doesn't affect sound quality for most people (no, you can't hear infrasound, i don't care how much those fancy cables and headphones cost). you're thinking of audio snobs.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hairyfeet]

That is one of the reasons I try to listen to local indie artists instead of the mainstream crap, as the loudness war has pretty much destroyed quality audio and I'm by no means a snob, I'm just a humble geek and bass player.

To show my band why there will be NO compression allowed anywhere near the recording (the only compression being on my 5 string live to even out the tone) I took them by an old friend's house and had him play "Hey Bulldog" by the Beatles off an LP from the 70s, and then had them listen to the modern "digital" CD version. The first thing they said was "hey, that sounds like shit!" and I said exactly, as over compression sounds like shit yet that is what every damned CD you get nowadays has!

So frankly you can have a thousand bitrate for all I care, it is still just gonna be really accurate shitastic sound. Thankfully the nature of LPs means you can't over compress them as they won't play, so if you can get an LP version and rip THAT, all is well and good. But frankly since the late 80s the level of compression all the major studios have done to CDs have made them so much plastic Frisbees, certainly not any good for listening to.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[demonlapin]

I wondered if anyone would notice that ;)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you provide links to scientific studies that back up this assertion of "digital dust"? It all initially sounds like rubbish to me.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

Are you speaking general to all money-sink hobbies, or to audio reproduction specifically?

Let's take car enthusiasts for example. There is a demonstrable, if slim, performance difference between say, a porche 911 GT3 RS and a regular base 911. The difference is probably way less than the difference between the base 911 and some non-enthusiast choice like a chevy astro van, even though the base 911 is actually closer in price to the astro van than it is to the GT3. That last little bit of extra performance is there, it's just freakin expensive.

How about computer processors? Is there a performance difference between a regular intel i7 and an extreme edition i7 (well, aside from the 6-core one)? yes. but it's pretty damn small, especially considering the price may double or triple when you go to the extreme edition. The regular i7 may be twice the price of an i3 and perform twice as fast, but the EE i7 is 3 times the price of the regular i7 and performs maybe 10% faster. (note i'm talking about trends over the past several years, not any specific cpus out right this moment). that last little bit of extra performance is there, it's just freakin expensive (Again).

You can do this with anything. A gibson custom shop historic Les Paul costs $3500 or more and is only marginally better than the $500 mass-produced epiphone plus top, but the epiphone is a whole world better than the $100 wal-mart version.

etc. etc. etc.

Why would the situation be any different with speakers, amps, cables, etc? Sure there are snake oil salesmen out there, as well as people who believe them hook line and sinker, but those exist in any business. That doesn't mean that there isn't really a difference between the $1000 speaker and the $7000 speaker... you just may not be into the hobby enough to notice the difference.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[acohen1]

Which is why your 'CD-Player' should go PCM over spdif optical cable to your receiver.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[ImprovOmega]

Now *that* is an awesome troll. Pay attention kids, this is how it's properly done. I applaud you sir, that wrapped around into magnificent.

You actually had me mentally crafting a counterpoint about how compressed formats are more prone to complete data loss due to any bit corruption until I finally read the payoff at the end.

Golf clap --> Standing Ovation.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[demonlapin]

Fidelity is a function of kilohertz; you can accurately reproduce any sound of half your sampling frequency or lower - or are you holding back a disproof of Nyquist and Shannon? Humans generally can't hear anything beyond about 20kHz.

Dynamic range is a function of bits. Given that the 96 dB of CD audio is roughly the difference between a whisper and a rock concert, yes the SACD has more information. But it's almost certainly beyond the ability of your equipment to reproduce or your ears to hear.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[PsychicX]

They totally could. If you bought a two mile span of it.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[creat3d]

Alright, let me put it this way: if you notice a difference between 256, 320 and lossless, you're spending way too much time and money on your audio setup.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[ColdWetDog]

Pah. Poser. Cretin.

You want these puppies.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

If we accept that 16/44 PCM is all that is needed for accurate reproduction in sane listening environments (96dB of dynamic range = instant ear damage volumes in all but the most theoretical of rooms) then we must accept that all the "euphoric" distortions of analog/tubes/vinyl can be reproduced with said 16/44 PCM.

Again you are describing mastering preferences not format issues.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

In this day and age when one can order $0.50 DACs with noise floors 90dB down...

In this day and age when even the $10 CD players at Odd Lots oversample (so as to push the filters into ultrasonics)...

You are describing systems defective to the point one needs to go out of their way to design one with such problems.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking "Digital Dust!", That sounds like something out of academia that no one everr encounters, and if they do it's called a corrupted file man! I've been dealing with files practically my whole life, many of which if one bit was to shift would make the whole thing crap. Dumbest bit of tripe I've heard in a while.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Xtifr]

Speaker wire is so low impedance and the signal so strong that even something from monoprice is plenty fine.

Forget "fancy" speaker wire--it boggles my mind that people (even non-audiophiles) pay extra for something labeled "speaker wire" when stock zip cord works just as well and is invariably cheaper. Of course, I use coathangers (see the mouseover text in the linked cartoon).

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[MattskEE]

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

To be fair, expensive cables usually have easier to use more durable connectors, and more flexible cabling with a more durable jacket. Features like that are certainly worth a few extra bucks.

But it's true that there is negligible effect on sound quality.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[DanseDeMorte]

I like how this post appears to have been generated from this blog: http://holyfuckingshit40000.blogspot.com/2010/09/final-final-verdict-on-flac-vs-mp3.html

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

I couldn't disagree more. Uncompressed music works fine for a very thin mix (e.g. guitar and voice, piano and voice, etc.). Add in drums, and it sounds like ass without compression unless you're listening at 24-bit resolution. The tops of the peaks for drums are so high relative to the area under them that you blow all your dynamic range on them just trying not to clip. The result is that everything sounds weak and distant.

Now I'm not saying today's music isn't massively overcompressed dynamically, but it's just as bad to undercompress stuff that needs it.

BTW, LP audio can be just as overcompressed as audio from any other source. They just tend not to be because anybody doing a vinyl recording is likely working from an analog tape master that already builds in some tape compression, because they are mostly older recordings, and because there is no consumer demand for them to be so compressed. (More on this later.)

More to the point, your comment about overcompressing to vinyl breaking the vinyl is just plain backwards. If you don't compress audio enough when going to vinyl, it won't play. There's only so much loudness you can achieve on vinyl before the cutter excursion is too great and it breaks through into the next track over. And you have to leave a certain amount of wall thickness between tracks, or else the needle will break through while you're playing the LP. This means that there is an absolute limit for maximum loudness on vinyl (at least for any given duration and RPM setting).

Add to this the baseline noise caused by mechanical imprecision during the cutting process, and you get a typical SNR of about 60-75 dB on average (Source: itrax). And many albums have even lower SNR because if they compress the audio more and lower the maximum volume, they can cram more tracks per side. Thus, if we're talking about the ability of the medium to reproduce the sound, LPs must be compressed more than CDs, not less.

In short, the only reason CD audio tends to be worse than LP audio is because the industry thinks people want to listen to music that way. And unfortunately, with the number of people listening to music in cars or on iPods while walking around loud city streets, they're probably right. People who listen to music in an environment that lends itself to high dynamic range are, unfortunately, a rarity, and modern digital music production merely reflects that unfortunate reality.

That said, I'd really like to see the overcompression moved into a special hint track and implemented by the player instead of permanently marring the sound. This would require some significant retooling, but it's not inconceivable. Alternatively, provide two separate mixes: a high compression track and a low compression track. Either solution would let the audience decide when they listen rather than when they buy the CD.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

If you notice a difference between 256, 320 and lossless, there's probably medication for that condition.

Lossy audio compression encoders weren't written by gods or anything. Each encoder has its own different "killer samples" known to cause difficulty in compression without causing audible artifacts, even at very high bit rates.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

Why would you have to re-rip your CDs?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[iluvcapra]

Oversampling on the A/D converter would "push the filters ultrasonic," among other things, depending on what kind of A/D we're talking about -- quant noise from delta-sigma A/D goes down as sample rate goes up, and by design a delta-sigma has to have a significantly higher rate than an integrating A/D in order to get the same dynamic range for the equivalent passband.

Oversampling on the D/A converter, like in an Odd-Lots CD player, is a marketing term used by manufacturers to try to differentiate their 1 bit delta-sigma D/A converters, which must oversample by design, and people like seeing the word "over-" associated with a product; it makes it seem like they're getting something extra, and though 1-bit MASH DAs can sound a lot better than some other DAs they're still a low-end solution.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

If you did the "loudness war" thing with an LP, the stylus wouldn't track.

I don't know why people think this. The loudness war didn't make the loud parts louder. It made the soft parts louder. If anything, the more consistent excursion should make it easier to adjust your hardware.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bmo]

I wasn't sure how successful it was going to be.

I certainly did get some fish on that lure. :-D

--
BMO

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[iluvcapra]

As someone who works in a studio, I can only say that what generally want from the equipment is simplicity and clarity -- you want control and you don't want a lot of extraneous gear adding its own little flavor to the operation.

Audiophiles really see their setup as a kind of musical instrument. They like how the tubes affect the sound, in the same way that violinists or guitarists experiment by sticking stuff in their resonant cavity. Audiophiles get a certain sort of solace from knowing the cables come from a single crystal of copper (whatever that precisely means), in the same way that a saxophone player might seek out unusual wood for a reed, on the recommendation of a friend or some respected genius of saxophoning. Many audiophiles say they want the pure recording but what they really work toward is a certain sort of enhanced listening experience, something that's more than what's on the recording.

Again, as a professional I'd point out that "more" is by definition "not as accurate," but there are many different ways to define "good," and "accurate" is a very restricted one.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hairyfeet]

But what you and I are talking about are two different things. you are talking about level compressions which is pretty much a "have to" as its the only way to get instruments like drums (and 5 string bass, i nail that low B and can stomp the low end) to record accurately without slamming the needle in the red. that's fine, all well and good, SOP. What I am talking about is what is called "musical compression" where after the recording is done running the entire mix through compression which gives that tin can all midrange sound.

And maybe it is the fact they can't spike the volume right up to the edge with LPs like they can CDs, hell if I know I'm just the bass player, but I've found even modern LPs don't have that tin can compressed all to shit sound. And I'd argue that the reason people with iPods and the like listen to that is they don't know any better as those I've played a non musically compressed song for, even on my crappy $15 Behringer cans, has said "holy shit that sounds MUCH better!"

So I agree there needs to be a way to give people the choice instead of the current "shit sandwich or nothing". I'd argue that CDs are cheap enough they simply ought to package two discs, one with the original non compressed and a "road mix" that is compressed all to shit. I bet they'd find people ignoring the road mix disc and simply turning up on the softer songs than having everything sound like it is coming through a tin can.

That is the nice thing about indies though, most really care about the music and don't compress all to hell, at least not the ones around here.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones back when I had money to burn (ah the good ole days). Was it noticeably better than the $12 cable that comes with the headphones? yes. was it $188 better? Hell fucking no. not in my opinion anyway.

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

Incorrect. A standard two-wire (non-twisted) pair is prone to interference. You know the GSM 'dit dit dit dit dit' your computer speakers pick up? You won't get that with a properly shielded and/or twisted-pair cable.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[aix tom]

I have actually read a few articles about that phenomenon. There seem to be some developments in the work to alleviate the Problem.

For example, there is a technology called "RAID" (Real-time Automatic Information Duster) that keeps the information free of aggregating dust and other particles, like network sewage and electric soot, which can be quite a problem in machines with faster processors. The Linux version works quite well. Unfortunately the Windows version seems to be available only with with an automatic indexing product that slows the machine down pretty bad. (called Windex, I believe). And it's not available at all for those Mac things. There the proprietary there iBlow software seems to keep the data on the mac clean all right, but it blows all the dirt to adjacent non-Apple machines on the network. That's why it is so important to have your dustwall up to date.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Headphone cables have no effect on sound (as long as they are not torn or shorted).

Maybe someone should conduct a randomized double-blind study to find out, mmm? I'm just as skeptical about your out-of-hand dismissal as I am about the GP's positive claim.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

Actually your speakers/phones are the weakest link and always have been, although your inputs (turntable or tape deck) were almost as much a weak link. These days cheap amps are good enough; as I said, the prices have dropped while the quality has skyrocketed. Back in the old days about the only way to get good amps was to build them yourself, using math and oscilloscopes to ensure flat response (I had a friend who built a VERY good amp like that).

LPs have the advantage of a better frequency response and lack of aliasing. Frequency response on LPs is so good that the rear channels in a quadraphonic (surround sound) LP are carried on a 40kHz carrier wave. The carrier wave was twice the frequency you can hold on a CD. LP's main disadvantage is noise.

Aliasing comes into play in very high frequencies; you only have three samples in a 15kHz tone, so there's no way to diecern the difference between a square wave, sawtooth wave, or sine wave at higher frequencies, and I believe that audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics (but I know of no studies proving or disproving it).

If CDs were sampled at ten times the rate they are now, LPs wouldn't hold a candle to them.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dgatwood]

I agree that compressing the final track sucks, for multiple reasons. You should never do much (if any) dynamic compression after mixdown, as it tends to result in odd problems where the drum hits cause your vocals to sound different.

That said, you can get the same level of loudness by doing heavier dynamic compression on the individual tracks. The most important decision is choosing the right amount of compression, rather than choosing whether to compress on the way into the mix or on the way out. :-)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[iluvcapra]

While DSD samples higher, the band over 20kHz is definitely subject to much more THD and noise than the lower band (I think in Sony's materials they specifically state that SACDs ho-hum ~90dB THD+N numbers only apply from 20 to 20k), and the higher freqs can create certain impressions of "space around the instruments" and localization, attributes highly prized by audiophiles, there's a lot of debate over wether these effects are completely accurate and not just caused by noise shaping, or if they make much difference at all for any recording made with normal +-3dB 30kHz microphones, or are just artifacts of non-coincident mic capsule mixing.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're worried about "digital dust", just store backups in a format that uses a redundant block coding scheme such as Reed-Solomon, SECDED, or BCH coding. PAR2 is one example. Then you just have to write a script to go through, check for bit errors, and fix those that are found.

I work at a research lab, and 20 years ago, when we stored our data on 32-track open-reel tapes, we used RS encoder/decoder hardware to take care of the inevitable bit errors, such as from actual dust. Ran like a champ. You could even see the "bit error corrected" lights flicker when you read back the tape.

Don't be a victim of entropy. Redundancy is the way to go.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

That's the thing -- CDs are capable of a far greater dynamic range, but the studios don't use it. Not only does digital enable a level of crappy mastering that wasn't possible before, I believe they just don't give a damn these days. Maybe because they don't have to, I don't know.

Well mastered LPs could be loud and have tons of bass, but you couldn't fit as much music on an LP like that. The Beatles managed to fit more than a CD's worth of music (White Album) on two LPs by attenuating the bass. I'd rather they'd just left "Revolution #9 off.

Cream's "Wheels of Fire" had that skipping problem you mention, as did Steppenwolf's first album. It was just bad engineering. But I don't remember very many like that, those two are the only ones that come to mind.

Listen to Van Halen's first album on a high-end system and you'd swear they were in your living room. In fact, once when I moved the new neighbors saw us moving guitars and such in, when we were done we put my brand new Van Halen LP that had just come out that day and cranked it to 9. The next day when I met the neighbors they said "wow, man, your band kicks ASS!"

I simply don't believe the 20db separation figure -- the last song on Led Zeppelin 3 has a singer and a guitar, with the singer on one channel and guitar on the other. Turn the balance all the way over and you don't hear the singer at all, turn it the other way and you don't hear the guitar. It depends on the electronics, of course -- you have both channels in the up and down movement, one channel in the sideways movement (or vice versa, I don't remember which), and the left channel (or was it the right? Been a long time...) was fed in phase with the both channels channel to excise it. If it's a little out of phase your separation will suffer. Again, in the analog days, your equipment mattered a lot more.

As to tubes vs transistors, tubes don't really sound better (or "warmer" as some say), except in a live guitar performance when the amp is cranked to distortion levels. Look at an oscilloscope trace and you'll see the square wave produced by the overdriven tube amp has rounded corners, while the overdriven transistors are almost perfect square waves. Because of this, a lot of guitar players play into a low power tube amp, with a microphone in front of the tube amp feeding a more powerful transistor amp.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Really crappy cables can have moderate impedance paths between conductors without actually being shorted, causing reduction of stereo (L-R) or attenuation of one channel (L-G or R-G). But I have only met 2 such cables in my life though -- they're defective, not just cheap, but still, not "torn or shorted".

Also shielded vs. unshielded, in the presence of 60Hz AC (bad) or ~5kHz switching power supplies without adequate filtering (worse). Not that a $200 cable necessarily is shielded, or that a $12 one isn't...

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[manicb]

The implication here is that the main improvement that comes from high-end audio equipment is that you can tell the difference between different types of compression. This isn't true; it's a subtle side-effect of creating a richer, more immersive experience in general.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bennomatic]

You know what I'd pay for in a set of headphones? Robust enough soldering and case/wire engineering that after a few months of normal use, one of the speakers doesn't start to become intermittent. I can't tell you how many frickin' headphones I've bought that went bad on me the moment I did anything more than sit quietly while listening.

The most expensive pair I've bought were an approximately $150 pair of Sennheisers, and they were GREAT! For about a year. Then the left speaker would go out unless I pinched the wire where it entered the headset, and even then, there was no guarantee. If I could be guaranteed of lasting quality, I'd spend more, but if a $150 name-brand pair doesn't last five years, then I don't have confidence in anything else.

Also, I'd like a pair of cans that allows me to be a tiny bit sweaty and not have the padding peel or crumble to bits. Again, even the Sennheisers weren't much better than cheap-ass Sonys.

As far as sound quality and convenience, I'm OK with Apple-style earbuds. But I feel like I should have a subscription even for those. I find myself buying a new set every few months as one of the earpieces starts to buzz or lose volume. Yes, I know they're $20, but there's no excuse for them to fall apart so quickly: in the five years an iPod stays in use, that means I'm spending $200 on headphones to listen to them, or putting up with broken headphones for some significant portion of the device's life. It's ridiculous.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

wow...your post looks surprisingly like this one --> http://holyfuckingshit40000.blogspot.com/2010/09/final-final-verdict-on-flac-vs-mp3.html

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this too until I heard a difference during an A/B test. Could it have been psychological? Sure but the important thing is that *I* could hear a difference and that difference was worth the $88 upgrade.

I used to make the same blanket statements until I experienced otherwise.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say has elements of truth (though rarely a concern for most people) until near the end.

Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures.

What.

Firstly, no. Secondly, no. Thirdly, also no.

The .wav file will gather more bit-errors than the .flac or the .mp3, for the same reason the .flac gathers more errors than the .mp3 - because the ratio of errors / volume remaining constant, the .wav has the largest volume of any format.

"files who's (sic) anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures" -- I don't even know how to begin correcting this misconception. Files are not "anchored" in any meaningful way. Not even by means of being written to a particular sector on the drive - as time goes on, modern hard drives (less than 15 years old or so) will automatically detect sectors going bad and move data in them to empty blocks which are reserved for that purpose.

Nothing in the compression process damages files in any way (unless you mean lossy compression, in which case the only "damage" is intended.) The original file is still there, untouched except for being read. The compressed version is a TOTALLY NEW FILE, and whatever "anchoring" means to you, it will have its own.

I just re-read your post to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything, and noticed the misconception about archive files. Combining multiple MP3 (or similar) files into an archive for long-term storage on a live disk is worse than useless. Firstly, the files have already been compressed, so absent very very strong similarities among them, the archive format will actually increase the amount of storage needed compared to the individual files (thus increasing the possibility of damage.) Secondly, it makes the files MORE susceptible to damage, not less. If errors occur in the header of the archive you lose, not a single file, but ALL the contents of the archive. What you do with this is actually multiply the possibility of problems by the number of files in the archive.

The good news is that absent damage to the header, checksums in the archive format will probably catch (and possibly correct) any errors at decompression time. But most of these checksums are very weak (IIRC the zip format uses CRC-12) - comparable to the ones that your hard drive is ALREADY DOING on the data.

I would not recommend a .zip (or comparable) file as long-term storage of music (or other data that you wish to actually USE once in a while - especially if it's already compressed, as a FLAC, OGG or MP3 would be.) What I would recommend instead, if your are concerned about data integrity, is to leave the files in place in your music library, and keep said library in a Git repository. Git uses a very strong hashing algorithm as its checksum on the data (SHA-1) so it would be very easy to tell whether there was any sort of damage.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

It just sounds like you are trying *very hard* to maintain that there is an audible difference.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

I used my sennheiser HD-650s daily for 4-8 hours pretty much every day from 2003 until 2010, when I replaced them with a set of Beyerdynamic DT880s pretty much just to try something new, not cause the senns were broken. The velour earpads are very... broken in, but still soft and pliable and if I really felt the need to do so, they're replaceable too.

I went through two stock cables in that time, and the $200 one, which DID break on me. twice. I got the damn thing repaired and it broke again 6 months later. So depending on how you count, 3 or 4 cables. Seeing as how they're replaceable and $12 a pop, didn't bother me too much. The $400 headphones still worked as well as the day I bought them, at least as best I recall.

The only other maintenance I did was to take the headphones apart about once a year and -carefully- use a can of canned air to blow out dust, skin flakes, cat hairs, etc.

You might want to look into the Sennheiser HD-555s. They're supposed to be pretty decent, and I -think- they have replaceable headphone cables like the HD-600/650 series do. Also since the HD-558s came out, the 555s price has been cut in half.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the $200 headphone cable for my $400 headphones

bahahaha I have a $5,000 floppy diskette for you to buy

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

that would be because there was an audible difference.

The reason I keep repeating this is because people don't seem to believe me, thinking I'm one of the snake oil drinkers. I know what the snake oil smells and tastes like. This wasn't it.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[harlows_monkeys]

iTunes Match will be great for audiophiles, at least those that want lossless at home but don't mind lossy to save space on their portable devices. Right now, audiophiles face a dilemma. If they store everything lossless in their iTunes library (easy to do on the computers, which have hundreds of gigabytes of storage), then their library is likely to not fit on their portable devices.

With iTunes Match, you can do all your ripping on your Mac or PC with lossless, and let iTunes Match put lossy versions on your devices.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Skarecrow77]

Why would you want to part with a floppy drive that can obviously give blowjobs?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

Of course mechanical components are the weak link and always have been. But that's not what you originally said - you proposed that it takes a special amp to enjoy an LP when the amp is far from the weak link.

The frequency response of an LP is grossly overrated. Sure there is 40kHz content possible, the first play, and 40 dB down. Since I rather suspect you can't hear 1/2 that frequency, much less that far down, it is moot.

LP's main disadvantages are:
noise
wow/flutter (jitter)
durability
non-linear frequency response
If noise was the only one most of us would never have upgraded to CDs.

Your description of how aliasing comes into play is simply wrong, as it assumes improper filtering before sampling. A square wave is nothing more than a collection of sin waves. A 15kHz square wave can not exist after filtering content below CD's Nyquest, and more importantly can not exist period on an LP. I'd like to see someone draw just how a square (or even triangle) wave would exist on a record groove. Bonus points for demonstrating how a non-theoretical-point stylus can track said groove.

If audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics they were affected in the studio and said effects were recorded. End of story unless we are talking artificially created tones intended to cause interference only upon playback (See The Hafler Trio).

If we are talking supersonic harmonics designed to interfere on playback, ones which did not exist during recording, then we also must assume you have some brilliant speakers to be able to produce these tones in a linear fashion and not just create a bunch of HF noise.

I can show you plenty of LPs with content > 22kHz, but I challenge anyone to show needledrops with signal, not noise, that high.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[SanityInAnarchy]

That comes up to something like $60 USD, so it's not really far off from the $100 I was assuming. Far from "expensive" for headphones. Ludicrously expensive for a cable which doesn't really affect the sound, which was the point.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[SanityInAnarchy]

For digital there is far less reason to have the high end stuff but quality matters.

Only for longevity/durability.

It's digital. Either it works or it doesn't. Either you get a signal or you don't. On or off.

I suppose if it's HDMI, it might matter that there are supposedly certain features present in one but not the other, but still, I laugh out loud when I see HDMI cables starting at $25 or so and often approaching $100, when they're under $10 on Newegg. It just has to show me a picture!

I don't think we actually disagree, but the point is, a higher-end, gold-plated, audiophile-approved, blessed-by-the-tears-of-Baby-Jesus cable is still not going to get you any better audio/video quality if it's really just sending you bits. (I swear I've seen an audiophile Ethernet cable before!) The only reason you'd care about one over another is whether it's going to physically fall out or fall apart, and even with the cheap stuff, I rarely have that happen.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[UnknowingFool]

Read above. I currently have mainly 128 bit MP3s that I ripped off CDs years ago. The newer rips are higher bit. The total collection is 2500 songs. If I wanted to upgrade my collection to higher quality I would have to re-rip the collection. Thats annestimated 200+ CDs. This iTunes match gives me an option of having not to do that.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[UnknowingFool]

The rest of my comment demonstrated my point. The cheap $6 optical cables didn't seem they would last and more importantly, the connector would not stay in the port. The $12 ones worked for me; I didn't buy the $40 monster ones because of the price. If Monster were priced the same, there would be no reason not to get them.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[rockout]

I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to that bitrate, regardless of whether their collection was obtained legitimately or not.

You do? Name them.

I submit that anyone that has downloaded a bunch of 128k mp3's illegally and really wants to upgrade to 256k or even 320k can do so easily, THE SAME WAY THEY GOT THE 128k's.

That is, they'll download them for free.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[shadowfaxcrx]

I think the "audiophiles" being referred to aren't the ones buying a demonstrably superior product, but the ones buying Monster HDMI cables for $80 instead of getting them for 8 bucks on Amazon. It's digital. It either works or it doesn't. The cable does nothing to change the audio quality unless the cable is broken.

"Audiophiles" who brag about buying Monster cable (and similar) don't know what they're talking about, and have more money than sense.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ. a gold plated and shielded cable would produce a better sound quality then a 1$ basement brand that has no shielding and is just a tin plated connector.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bmo]

Congrats, you know how to google.

That's not the only place it's been. I think it originated on 4chan /g/ but I can't be entirely sure. I believe it came into being during one of the many "mp3/320 vs FLAC" battles.

I have other stuff in my buffer. I assume you are familiar with jerryleecooper?

--
BMO

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[xded]

Had this audiophile friend who had a jack-to-jack premium/shielded/whatnot cable that got a damaged end. He immediately bought a new one, but gave me the old one to fix it and keep it around as a spare.

I shorten it a bit and splice the thing open to solder a new jack. Can you guess the insulator color of the 3 inner cables?

Brown, blue, and yellow-green.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[b0bby]

With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player.

This I have to question. When I was a student and buying my first CD player back in the dark ages, I had plenty of time and ended up going around & listening to lots of different players. They all had different digital/analog converters, and that really did make a difference. Even though I didn't have much money I ended up buying the $500 one rather than the $200 one (there were no $20 ones then). I could hear the difference, but I couldn't hear the difference between the $500 one & the $1000 one. Now, it may be that you just can't buy a bad DAC these days, and I know that a $20 T-amp can give amazingly good sound, but there's certainly the CHANCE that a lower end DAC may affect the "digital" sound you hear.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but cheaper cables tend to go bad sooner. As a kid, I probably went through 10 $5.00 Radio Shack cables for my musical instrument in the time I would have gone through 1 $25.00 decent cable. So I spent less money per visit to Radio Shack, but spent more money overall. Both probably sounded as good, but the Radio Shack cables always developed shorts soon after purchase. Live and learn.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[arth1]

The shielding is important.
I have a halogen lamp at my nightstand. Before I upgraded my cable, there was a quite audible hum whenever the headphone cables were stretched across its base (i.e. whenever I put my laptop on the nightstand).
Others pick up cell phone noise, or their neighbor's ham.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

1. Headphone cable. 4-12 feet with few tens or hundreds ohms of load.
2. Interference you can hear in speakers is picked at the input of an amplifier, or over power rails. Computer speakers are amplified, with high input impedance and bad power filtering -- this has nothing to do with cables.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hb79]

> Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality

All good points, but the main problem so to speak is that keyword: quality. To large parts of the population it's an unknown, and they dwell around on the bottom, perhaps never even experiencing anything above the 50% mark on your scale.

Some examples: MP3s become popular many years before there was any discussion about them sounding utterly crap; at 128 kb/s, with poor encoders, and decoded on computers which hardly could keep up. Then we got YouTube, taking that right down to 64 kb/s for many years. And in many European countries we now have Spotify, with fucking audio ads in the middle of the tracks. People still listen, and don't care.

That's all on the serving side. On the receiving end, things get even worse: YouTube or Spotify will typically be played back on shitty portable speakers, built-in laptop speakers, or even mobile phones. You're no longer listening to music, but a rather bizarre distorted stream of noise. If you're really lucky, somebody will have the TV on in the background as well.

Now, of course not everybody takes an interest in audio quality, or even music in general for that matter. However, it is still polite to serve your guests something vaguely decent. Rotten food or flat beer is generally not acceptable. Yet, Spotify over the laptop somehow is. It's beyond me.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital dust... I have to memorize this BS so I can use it to taunt audiophiliacs. Cruel, yes, but having worked in a "top end" home cinema shop for several years, I can assure you that audiophiliacs deserve whatever happens to them: Knowing obscure and largely (or entirely) fictitious "facts" about sound reproduction, and spending thousands of dollars more for a piece of equipment with the right name plate on the front, is what gets them off.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing the article missed was the fact that iTunes match will allows users to download 256kbps versions of the music in their libraries, regardless of the bitrate the user originally had. I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to that bitrate, regardless of whether their collection was obtained legitimately or not.

Some say upgrade..... But I'm yet to see how moving to AAC 256k is a 'upgrade' from my current MP3 320k files I have created myself.

I don't see either moving to '256k' or AAC as an upgrade!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

> I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida.

Really? Sounds more like you have a BS from the University of Bologna.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Agripa]

Interference you can hear in speakers is picked at the input of an amplifier, or over power rails.

Or picked up at the output of the amplifier. Shielding the low level inputs from interference is obvious. Shielding and filtering the power amplifier output is not and who uses shielded cable between the output and the speakers?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[stewbacca]

More importantly, all their torrents will now be available for sync via iCloud to all their devices.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[stewbacca]

In defense of iCloud, you can dismiss it all you want, but you'll miss out on its greatest strength -- synching all your stuff in the iCloud to all your iDevices (assuming you have iDevices). I know my old-ass iMac will be retired as soon as iCloud comes on line. All it does is serve my wife and my iTunes libraries (consolidated into one account) wirelessly to our Apple TV. It'll be nice to pull down any song in my iTunes library to my phones and laptop without actually having to have them all on every device I own.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm somewhat of an anti-audiophile, but there is a measurable difference in cables and it can have audible impacts. Length is a factor, as is the properties of the insulation etc, cable resistance and impedance. If you have a very short cable, no difference is likely to be heard, but stretch that out to a few meters, it's possible that the overall impedance of the cheap cable can result in it behaving as a filter, and starting to attenuate higher frequencies, and if it's resistance is high, it alters the impedance matching of the amp/headphones, reducing efficiency and introducing other undesirable performance characteristics. As an earlier poster said, once you hand out a reasonable amount of cash (but not paying audiophile rates for super OFC etc), you're getting into the ballpark of not being able to tell the difference.

Try cutting open a $2 lead, and examining the wires inside - you'll be luck to spot them they are so thin. Compare that to a similar purpose 'reasonable' cable at your electronics store. It will be many times more expensive (say 5x), but have many times more copper. Go to the hi-fi specialist, and you'll pay 10x again, but not be able to see 10x the value in components, and probably not be able to detect (or even measure) any performance difference without very, very good instruments.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Smurf]

In addition to what Artifakt said, if you read the GP carefully you should understand that a 50 MB FLAC file is going to gather WAY more dust than your typical Word file of less than 500 KB.

Oh, by the way: Whooooooooooosh !!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

Or picked up at the output of the amplifier.

Through what? Both amplifier output and speaker have very low impedance. Anything that picks interference through capacitance is an equivalent of connecting another low-voltage (wires are close to each other, they pick difference in potential between their locations) and very high-impedance (low capacitance, audio frequency) output in parallel. Induction depends on magnetic field going through cross-section of the loop formed by wires -- if that was noticeable, speaker wires would be twisted.

who uses shielded cable between the output and the speakers?

People who don't know Ohm's law?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

If you have a very short cable, no difference is likely to be heard, but stretch that out to a few meters, it's possible that the overall impedance of the cheap cable can result in it behaving as a filter, and starting to attenuate higher frequencies, and if it's resistance is high, it alters the impedance matching of the amp/headphones, reducing efficiency and introducing other undesirable performance characteristics.

Headphones have input impedance from tens to hundreds ohms. "Matching" of the output for such load amounts to keeping it below 120 ohm. Do you seriously expect 4-12 feet of wire -- any wire that is not an unrolled capacitor, Christmas tree decoration, metal-coated thread or something equally ridiculous -- to have resistance and capacitance that forms any kind of meaningful filter with that?!

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[AJH16]

Wow. I guess I opened up a can of worms. I agree with both of you really. I also happen to be an audio engineer and have done some recording work. I agree that a lot of stuff is currently over-compressed and unfortunately that is largely done because of the devices it is going to be playing on. It is the boombox mentality of playing it loud at the point where detail would be lost if the level of compression was not set where it is. You can even see this in the way that a fair number of live shows are mixed or the way that an average person will mix their sound for their living room speaker setup. That said, compression is a really critical tool to getting an appropriate sound on individual tracks and keeping proper balance between parts of the sound. In the right hands it can do very nice things like giving a rich dynamic range for soft stuff while not blowing away other parts at louder times.

  Also, even with over-compression, really good DACs and speakers (particularly in-ear headphones) do make a difference in being able to pick out some of the details that are almost lost from the compression. (My original reference to compression was simply to the data storage algorithms though, but I like the discussion on acoustic compression as well.) I use a pair of Shure SE535s that I got as a warranty replacement of my old E5s. The 425s would have really been a bit better for technical work (the 535s have a slightly warm balanced sound due to the dual woofers) but it still isn't that far from level. Using them with my Galaxy S gives a pretty decent setup for phone based audio playback. (I also like the DAC on the Asus Transformer.) I've also got a Creative Professional 0404 for doing actual real audio work on my desktop.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

upgraded my cable

You replaced headphones cable without replacing headphones themselves? Really?

(i.e. whenever I put my laptop on the nightstand).

Laptop picked it, not headphones. If your halogen lamp has a stand that affects anything sound-related, it must be a low-voltage lamp with transformer in the base. Magnetic field from transformer is picked up by the amplifier in the laptop. Results may vary depending on the impedance and sensitivity of the headphones, or position of gain/volume control. I have cheap amplified speakers with analog volume control knob that is absolutely useless thanks to the poor choice of the potentiometer for that knob -- when it is not at maximum, its input impedance is too high, so it picks up all kinds of interference. Set it to maximum, and lower impedance of power amplifier shorts the interference while keeping the signal.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[hairyfeet]

But the whole problem is you shouldn't want that level of loudness as it ruins the music! What makes music so wonderful, and one of the things I love about playing with guys who I'm able to read well, is the swells and falls is what makes the music "breathe" for want of a better term.

Let me give a little example: Brian my singer/guitarist knows my playing like the back of his hand and can read my mood just by feel, and I can do the same to him. What that allows us to do is on a completely improvised piece the music flows like a tideit is the silences in between that help to build a mood, and it is this that sadly gets lost in "musical compression".

But don't take this to mean I'm against an effect when it fits the piece on the contrary, I personally have a Zoom B1X just so I can be as nasty or as sweet as I want, and it'll probably take us until winter to get this first album out because not only do we have an abundance of songs to pick from but we want each song to have the right sonic "tone" and if it takes us all day in Audacity and Cubase just to get the right sound for a particular spot then so be it. Nice thing about being the bassist, with the exception of a few rare spots all I need is a nice clean dark tone with light compression to even out the volume across the strings. It is the guitar and vocals one sometimes have to really fuss with to get them in the right sound envelope if you know what I mean.

What I AM against, and what I hate about most commercial CDs, is this cookie cutter compressed through a tin can all midrange tone that is the signature of the loudness wars. It may give you the illusion of more volume but it is like I tell those that are thinking of doing it "You might find a Sparkomatic you can crank to 11, but would you really want to hear a Sparkomatic cranked to 11?". I don't care how sweet your rig is, how beautiful your guitar sings or your vocals soar, by the time they are run through that musical compression crap it is nothing but midrange in a can. The flip side is what I've been hearing on the newer hip hop albums of late, where they run everything off but the low end to make the subs thump, sounds like a frog farting.

So I guess what I'm saying is the difference between music and processed crapola is like the difference between a good cheese and cheese whiz, it is all in the moderation of the processing. One should not be afraid of lower volume parts of a song as those will simply make the loud parts have more impact and just because cheese whiz sells more than a nice premium cheese doesn't mean the world should have nothing but the canned crap.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[penguinchris]

If you use a decent pair of earbuds, you can hear the difference *better* than on most other speakers or headphones - I use etymotic ER-6 earbuds with my phone (nexus one, with mediocre sound output quality) and I can always roughly tell how each track was recorded. Those aren't that expensive, either. Neither are my Grado SR-60 headphones I use at home, with which I can also tell how music was encoded if there's not much background noise.

However, I know what you mean about the difference being accentuated on cheap gear. It's pretty bad sometimes :)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, headphone cables have a huge effect on sound quality. It's called microphonics, cheap headphone cables transmit every vibration and movement into sound in the headphones. Not too noticeable with over the ear headphones but with earbuds and especially canalphones it makes much more difference than going from mp3 to flac.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

It took me far too long to realise you weren't talking about actual data corruption.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

lol

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[penguinchris]

I'd say you have some sort of problem with over-stressing your headphones, but more likely is that you've just been unlucky :)

Here's my counter-anecdote:

I have Grado SR-60's that I bought in 2004 or so. I use them all the time, and have traveled all over the place with them, including moving cross-country (twice) and air travel etc. etc. They are a little beat up in appearance, but they still work and sound fantastic. They sell replacement foam covers for the earpieces, but while mine definitely aren't fresh-looking, they're still perfectly fine - and I do often have the problem you describe with sweat etc. causing excessive wear on things.

Next, I've also got Etymotic ER-6 earbuds. Similar price of $60 or so. They sound fantastic, and came with several different ear pieces to ensure a good fit. They feel fragile in the hand at first, but have held up wonderfully. I've had them since 2006 or so, traveled all over the world with them, used them while biking (not actually a good idea since they seal off outside noise) and running etc. I also often fall asleep with them, and they get wrenched and pulled at when I roll around. Still running fine. Again, they sell replacement ear pieces, but they're easy to clean (soak in H2SO4) to be essentially good as new.

My point is... quality headphones do exist. I used to always end up with the problem you have, with wires going bad, when I didn't choose my headphones carefully. Since getting the good stuff, it just hasn't been a problem. It's the same as with most things... yeah you can spend $200 over five years for the shitty Apple earbuds, or you can pay $60-100 for something that will both sound ten times better, and last several times longer at least. But with audio products, you don't always get what you pay for - sometimes you get a lot less than what you paid if you're not careful.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Eivind]

Indeed. What people don't get is that audio is -REALLY- low bandwith. You're talking of a frequency-band that is more narrow than 25Khz, and a data-rate on the order of one megabit/s.

That is beyond puny for the electronics of today - it wasn't a lot when CDs where introduced, but since then, electronics-performance has gone up by several orders of magnitude.

A darn-close-to-free DAC-chip can do this transform with a noise-floor low enough that it won't be the weakest link unless your speakers are excellent and your room suitable and very silent. (furthermore, it'd still be darn-close-to-free even if the bandwith and data-rate where both 3 orders of magnitude higher)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[thegarbz]

Do not confuse a component with the entire system. You compare a $10 CD player with a $500 CD player and you'll often find they may even include the same DAC. Now the cheap one will often be followed by one or two OPAMPs in a horrendously setup I/V converter and if you're really unlucky a lovely class B emitter follower with all the shithouse distortion and zero noise immunity that entails. The $500 CD player on the other hand may have a lovely Class A biased circuit, a properly designed filter, and may even be able to achieve the noise floor figures quoted in the DAC's datasheet. I say may because the difference in price does not determine the quality.

A lot of people seem to forget that digital is only digital to the DAC. Once you're at the DAC there's a lot of analogue voodoo that has been subject to 50 years of refinement in some cases, compared with a shitty circuit some elec101 student in China came up with. There is a lot of scope to screw things up on the analogue side of the DAC.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[thegarbz]

upgraded my cable

You replaced headphones cable without replacing headphones themselves? Really?

This shows you haven't seen many high end headphones, nor obviously the community at www.head-fi.org which will debate ad infinum which aftermarket cable for their headphones sound best. :-)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[coolmadsi]

Oh, by the way: Whooooooooooosh !!

You're right, a good "whoosh" will clear out any digital dust, how kind of you :)

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

That's needless speculation. Testing this shit is quick and easy.

A bloody $30 DAP (Sansa Clip for example) can demonstrate better than -90 dB noise floor, better than 90 dB of channel separation, frequency response flat to within a hair of a dB, and distortion numbers which would make an 1990's recording engineer cry.

Fact is competent audio is EASY, and commonly done with the cheapest of components today. I am sure there are examples of failure readily available, for when there are thousands of examples on the marketplace it is no wonder dozens are broken.

Point is your claim of "often" finding broken components is just wrong. Show me some numbers, I can point to hundreds of competent RMAA tests of commodity components and systems to argue my point.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

This shows you haven't seen many high end headphones

Oh, I have seen headphones with replaceable cables, I just never seen headphone cable type affecting interference (save for "cables" made of individual wires thrown all over the desk).

nor obviously the community at www.head-fi.org which will debate ad infinum which aftermarket cable for their headphones sound best. :-)

Last time I have seen that community, when they didn't discuss aftermarket cables/burn-in time/..., they always recommended nothing less than a separate external DAC and desktop power amplifier for any attempt to play music on a computer. Onboard adapter in a laptop on a night stand would be seen as a blasphemy.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Now *that* is an awesome troll. Pay attention kids, this is how it's properly done. I applaud you sir, that wrapped around into magnificent.

You're applauding the wrong person. All he did was copy and paste it.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

But that's not what you originally said - you proposed that it takes a special amp to enjoy an LP when the amp is far from the weak link.

If it seemed like I was saying that, my communication skills were poor, although forty years ago all electronics were inferior to today's and the amp did make a difference, but nearly so much as your speakers (still the weak link) and turntable.

Wow and flutter (jitter is different, you get that with digital sound sometimes) were a problem with affordable turntables, but a good $300 Dual or even Panasonic didn't have that problem. But that was the point of the comment -- with analog, price mattered. With digital, not so much.

As to durability, that's just not so. Sure, you couldn't play frizbee with one and expect it to not pop and skip, but I have LPs that are 45 years old and still have little noise. I have had a LOT of completely unreadable CDs that were well cared for but became entirely unplayable. That is actually one of the disadvantages of some digital media -- if your LP gets scratched it wll pop and if scratched badly will skip, if a CD or DVD gets scratched it won't play at all. A weak analog TV signal was noisy but watchable, the same digital signal won't play at all.

As to non-linear frequency response, I think you misunderstand the RIAA equalization curve. Low frequencies were attenuated when recorded and strengthened on playback, but what came out of the speakers was a flat response. However, very cheap turntables with ceramic cartriges did have non-linear response, but we're talking about the very lowest end here, record players you bought for your small children.

A 15kHz square wave can not exist after filtering content below CD's Nyquest

Bingo! LPs have no Nyquist limit; Nyquist only applies to digital sound.

...more importantly can not exist period on an LP

Simply not true. I've seen recordings of such waves displayed on oscilloscopes (the class I took was in 1976, well before the digital age) and I assure you they were indeed not only possible but were common.

If audible tones are affected by supersonic harmonics they were affected in the studio and said effects were recorded.

Again, that was part of the point. They were in fact recorded in analog. With CD's 44k sampling rate, the highest possible frequency you can record is 22kHz, and they filter out everything above 20kHz to remove the noise that attempting to record above the Nyquist rate introduces.

The speakers I bought in Thailand (USAF, very high end stuff and very low prices) had what they called "super-tweeters" in addition to tweeters. The speakers had a rated response of 20Hz to 30kHz. The super-tweeter's response was 18kHz to 30kHz (four way speakers with six drivers in each enclosure, fifteen inch woofers).

If we are talking supersonic harmonics designed to interfere on playback, ones which did not exist during recording

This was used for what they called "quadrophonics" back then and we call "surround sound" now. The rear channels were modulated with a 40kHz tone, mixed with the front channels, and demodulated on playback. Without the ability to record a 40kHz tone on an LP, quadraphonic LPs would have been impossible.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[dwightk]

just remember that iTunes doesn't have all music. If you have any tracks that you cant get iTunes Genius to start on, those tracks won't be included.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, right?

Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

Now where's my PhD?

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

You made my panties wet.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

Jitter, wow, flutter, are all the same thing - error in the time domain. Jitter is not unique to CDs.

I'd like to see said square waves, as I implied cutting one is impossible without a theoretically perfect (monopoint) stylus which has no momentum. Forget about even getting close when reading with an elliptical or other stylus of any physical dimension.

You also appear to be confusing where and when the filtering for CDs takes place. I am not arguing 44 is an appropriate sampling rate for recording, but rather distribution. If ultrasonic frequencies causing audible interferences exist in the studio then the audible tones will be recorded and survive downsampling to 44.

As for durability, I can show you the spectrum of a progression of needledrops proving one play decreases HF response measurably and one play with improper (as little as one gram) anti-skate ruins channel balance. Permanently.

They may sound ok to your old ears, but that only proves my point that 44 is plenty for humans.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[mcgrew]

Wow and flutter are analog tape distortions. Wow is caused by a stretched tape, flutter is caused by wrinkles in the tape or defects in the capstain roller. I heard a similar distortion in some music from a local radio station that seems to be an error in the DAC -- there is no distortion in frequency as there is on an analog tape, just in the speed of the music. Don't know what causes it/ There is a similar distortion in some turntables with belt driven platters.

There was often also bleed-through; a reverse echo of the first few notes before the song started. It was caused by a strong signal on thin tape magnetizing the next layer on the spool.

If ultrasonic frequencies causing audible interferences exist in the studio then the audible tones will be recorded and survive downsampling to 44.

It's impossible for a sample at 44ksps to have ultrasonic frequencies, even if frequencies above 20jHz weren't filtered out; the Nyquist limit prohibits it. As I said, anything above the Nyquist limit becomes noise. The filter is applied at the master, not on your CD player.

And yes, a cheap turntable with a heavy arm will ruin the high frequencies. Some tone arms weighed as much as 25 grams, but high end turntables are all less than a gram. My old Dual weighed in at a quarter gram. And yes, lateral forces, especially on turntables without anti-skate or poorly performing anti-skate will degrade separation. IIRC it was the late sixties before turntables had anti-skate technology.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[woolpert]

Your definition for wow, flutter, and jitter are too narrow. They are all errors in signal timing.

Who cares if CDs throw out ultrasonics? You keep coming back to this and it is irrelevant. You can not hear ultrasonics. You hear the effects of ultrasonics which are beats and harmonics in the audible range. CDs can capture that perfectly. As I said in the original reply unless we are talking synthetic signals designed to interfere only upon playback the effects of ultrasonics are created in the studio, not your living room. CD delivers this perfectly

No, it does not take cheap turntables to cause noticeable groove wear.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, cables (all kind of cables) do have effect on sound in a certain degree. Is it worth large bucks? Probably not... but there's differences and that's what the audiophiles talk about. That's what I call the rule of the "Last Tens"... The last 10% of quality improvements will cost you at least 10 times more. In the other hand, when you sacrifice 10% here on a cable, 10% here on speakers, 10% here on audio converters, etc... You end with a probably 10 times less good global result.

PS: I don't own PhD, but I'm sound engineer and aware enough to have done cabling stuff by myself for my studios.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Alex Belits]

Well, cables (all kind of cables) do have effect on sound in a certain degree. Is it worth large bucks?

Specifically headphone cables. Specifically an effect that can be perceived by a human ear. The answer is no, and you are trying to weasel out and add unrelated issues. It's not a matter of cost, it's a matter of having no effect on the sound that can be heard.

Probably not... but there's differences and that's what the audiophiles talk about.

Most of things that "audiophiles talk about" are figments of their imagination, and they go as far as rejecting the idea of testing those things in any reliable manner. What they are saying is absolutely irrelevant.

That's what I call the rule of the "Last Tens"... The last 10% of quality improvements will cost you at least 10 times more. In the other hand, when you sacrifice 10% here on a cable, 10% here on speakers, 10% here on audio converters, etc... You end with a probably 10 times less good global result.

First of all, even if it was true, you fail math. Second, your assumption is crap because, as I have mentioned before, there is no effect.

PS: I don't own PhD, but I'm sound engineer and aware enough to have done cabling stuff by myself for my studios.

You are a shit sound engineer if you don't see a difference between microphone and headphone cables.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[GauteL]

"If you can't tell the difference between CD/SACD, it doesn't matter to me."

I haven't even heard a SACD being played. This is utterly irrelevant though. What I was attempting to convey to you, is that mentioning a couple of buzzwords is not an argument. It is obvious that SACD has more resolution, it is not obvious, however, that this resolution actually provides any noticeable improvement. And as I pointed out to you with the Denon cables, providing an actual improvement is not the only reason corporations will create a product.

I understand you can hear the difference. That's fine, I'm not calling you a liar, but when it comes to your buzzwords, you don't really appear to know what you are talking about and you'd be better off not mentioning them.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[Agripa]

Through what? Both amplifier output and speaker have very low impedance.

They are not low impedance at RF frequencies. HF and MF typically get in through the unshielded and unfiltered power amplifier output leads and get rectified by the output or driver stage changing the amplifier bias. Shielding and filtering the line level and lower level inputs is obvious. Doing the same for the outputs is not.

At least this is the case with linear output stages. I have not seen this happen with class D amplifiers yet.

Induction depends on magnetic field going through cross-section of the loop formed by wires -- if that was noticeable, speaker wires would be twisted.

Induced common mode RF can be just as big a problem. Twisting or not will not matter in that case.

People who don't know Ohm's law?

What does Ohm's Law have to do with it? High power shielded cable is available for these applications although some marginally stable power amplifiers may have trouble driving the additional capacitance. If you want to be clever, you can even wire every other conductor together in a ribbon cable which being flat goes under rugs really well but it is a lot of work.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bennomatic]

Thanks for the pointer! Looking into the 555s now.

Re:Useful for audiophile pirates, though

[bennomatic]

Thanks... but I'm not sure I'd call anything you clean by soaking in H2SO4 "easy to clean". I wouldn't even know where to get sulphiric acid. Was that a typo, a joke, or something else? Hell, H2SO4 is, IIRC, the only acid known to etch glass. I can't imagine why you'd have to soak anything in that.

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a rats ass? Seriously.

Re:So?

[PopeRatzo]

Who gives a rats ass? Seriously.

They'll give a rat's ass when they figure out that with iCloud in OSX 10.7 Apple is building the walled garden around you. Further, that this iCloud is the entire reason there's even going to be an OSX 10.7.

I hope you didn't think it was for the users' benefit...

Re:So?

[node 3]

OH MY GOD! Apple is walling us in with DRM-FREE MUSIC!!!

Forgiveness?

[Pharmboy]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Repossessed]

I don't see how doing this would relieve the guilt in the first place. You still haven't payed for the music. And people who pirate don't fear lawsuits.

Re:Forgiveness?

[dotancohen]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

I'd pay, but not for forgiveness. I download music illegally because that is the only way to get music where I live. The stores don't stock non-mainstream stuff, so if I want Pantera I need to go online for it. Amazon now sells MP3 files that will run on my Linux computer and I buy them, but before Amazon I had to download illegally. I have in fact purchased albums that I once downloaded illegally, now that I can. But I'm doing it slowly, one a month or so. I still have quite a bit to catch up.

If the *AA's wanted to prevent illegal downloading, they would have provided a legal option years ago.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how doing this would relieve the guilt in the first place. You still haven't payed for the music. And people who pirate don't fear lawsuits.

Except for the $25 a year you're paying to take advantage of this service.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Repossessed]

0$ of which goes to the artists.

Re:Forgiveness?

[TheRaven64]

Where do you live that you can get Internet access but can't get CDs delivered? In most of the world, the roads are built before the network cables...

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

0$ of which goes to the artists.

[citation needed]

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"?

Only the Catholic pirates.

Google tells me there are 614 of them (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22catholic+pirates%22+-greek) once you exclude the "Greek Merchants".

Re:Forgiveness?

[gumbi west]

I'm always surprised by this argument. Most of the rest of the money goes to working stiffs, most of whom are in IT making the transactions possible. I guess the Slashdot IT people don't like getting paid.

Just because you don't like the middle man doesn't mean that you don't need him, or are not him.

Re:Forgiveness?

[yarnosh]

Well, you haven't paid the original artists for the music, but you've paid someone. And apparently that's all the law really cares about it. So long as that "someone" has some kind of agreement with the record labels to be able to grant "licenses" all willy nilly on their behalf. The whole system is ridiculous.

As someone who does download illegally, I don't fear lawsuits so much as being permanently banned from my broadband provider. But they don't care if at some point I buy a legal copy of something. They only respond to letters from content owners saying my IP was used to download some content from bittorrent. They're not going to care if I say "Oh, but I paid Apple $25 to make it legit. Please turn my internet back on!"

Re:Forgiveness?

[Repossessed]

That's true for paying the people who provide the iCloud service in this case (and if you want iCloud that's great). But this isn't a purchase service at all, you don't get music you don't already have out of it. So it might be de jure legit to pirate music then get it from iCloud*, but it's still de facto piracy, and has the same moral issues as going to pirate bay in the first place.

*If there was ever an argument that our IP laws need to be burned, pissed on, and rewritten from scratch that even the content providers would listen too this has to be it.

Re:Forgiveness?

[DigitaLunatiC]

I can't speak for the parent, but I live in Myrtle Beach (not exactly a ghost town) and it's unbelievably hard to find metal albums here. Same thing in the upstate of South Carolina. Stores stock what the majority of their customers demand - pop, rap, classic rock, country, top 40 type stuff. If they can't move Pantera albums what do you think the chances of them stocking the shelves with some of the more obscure European power metal bands are?

Anyone who has different tastes from the majority of the other patrons is going to have a hard time finding music. Yes, there are probably roads near him, but if he has to drive to a different city (likely not very nearby) to purchase an album I can't say I'm in the least bit surprised he wouldn't be willing to.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Skarecrow77]

I think GP was saying "go to amazon. order the CD you want. it'll get delivered in a few days".

When I lived in DC (major metropolitan area with millions of residents), there was only one store I was aware of that stocked european metal, and the sold for $18 apiece. I eventually just started ordering from amazon. Even with shipping they were coming in significantly cheaper, and I had a selection that was way way better. The only downside was the wait.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

trololololol

Re:Forgiveness?

[TheRaven64]

Which doesn't answer my question. Amazon has been delivering CDs for over a decade, and their range is pretty much anything that's still in publication. So, where can you get enough bandwidth to download songs, but not get deliveries from Amazon or a similar company? The argument that people pirate music because music that they like is not available doesn't really make sense. Not available at a price that they agree with, or in a format that they want maybe, but 'local shops don't sell it' doesn't really make sense as an argument for piracy.

Re:Forgiveness?

[EastCoastSurfer]

0$ of which goes to the artists.

Just like if you bought a CD. Apple has paid most (all?) the labels in order to provide this service. If the labels refuse to pay their musicians that's not Apple's problem.

Re:Forgiveness?

[jasonq]

self righteous prick

Re:Forgiveness?

[js_sebastian]

I download music illegally because that is the only way to get music where I live. The stores don't stock non-mainstream stuff, so if I want Pantera I need to go online for it. ... If the *AA's wanted to prevent illegal downloading, they would have provided a legal option years ago.

I stole my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I stole it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town. When you pirate a track, you do not take it away from someone else. So your car analogy (or the shoplifing analogyin the *AA ads) fails, and screams troll to anyone on slashdot (I guess I just took your bait). And one reason piracy is so widespread is that for once, the rest of the population mostly has the same gut feeling as the slashdot crowd. It does not feel like stealing. It is not stealing. Is it illegal? In most jurisdictions. Is it unethical? Sometimes. But it is not theft.

The *AA ads try to equate it to stealing (with the slogan "you would never steal a ..." repeated for a bunch of items) precisely because most of the population disagrees, and because they know that if they did perceive it as theft, many people would stop pirating.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

>non-mainstream stuff
>Pantera

lol

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

And... when is the music industry going to admit its part in the decline of music sales?

Constantly pushing garbage suited to the musical taste of 11 year olds while not investing in adult-oriented music (not to mention anything even slightly eclectic or lo-and-behold... original), all the while maintaining an artificially high CD pricing structure. When the prices crept ever upward for a typical 12-track CD, they claimed: "we have to cover our R&D costs for the new CD format." Those prices kept creeping, and as of writing are mostly unwarranted and quite honestly, plain greedy.

While I don't consider myself a music pirate (yeah, I fork out plenty of cash for CDs), there have been a few cases where I simply have to download "pirated" music simply because it is no longer available in any shape or form other than in someone's collection.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Repossessed]

There's no reason for the artists to get paid for this, its not meant to be a service to provide new music, its a data availability service for music you already own. The money Apple is paying the record labels is basically extortion money.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Zerth]

China, Outer Mongolia, Best Korea, etc.

Re:Forgiveness?

[node 3]

I don't see how doing this would relieve the guilt in the first place. You still haven't payed for the music. And people who pirate don't fear lawsuits.

A sense of guilt and legality status are not as strongly reason bound as you seem to be implying.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Repossessed]

Implying that was not my intention, the legal status part is a totally separate statement about a different possible motive for pirates to use the service.

Re:Forgiveness?

[harperska]

I replicated my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I used my matter replicator to create a copy of it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town.

FTFY.

That's the only way for the car analogy to really apply to music sharing. As many others have said, when you pirate a track, the original still exists.

Re:Forgiveness?

[node 3]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

I think you are overestimating the number of people who hate Sony such that it's an automatic justification for "piracy".

Sure, this might not be a big concern to many (most?) hard core, focused and purpose-driven pirates, but for every one of those, there are a thousand casual pirates who just wanted a bunch of songs they could remember the names to when they first found limewire. Many of these people have since found iTunes worth using. It's easier, quicker, more reliable and of consistent quality. Well worth the price. But they still have a back catalog of tracks of dubious origin.

iCloud's Match service will take these tracks and clean them up, both making them of higher and more consistent quality, while also scrubbing away at least the appearance of these tracks' nefarious origin. It's hard to predict what level of of impact this will have in the motivations of people to use the service, but it doesn't seem rational to so completely discount it.

Looking at it as a one-time charge of $25 to "wash" one's complete music library? It may not be perfect, or of iron-clad logic, but I do think there are plenty of people who will find it to be a compelling part of what the service offers.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you live that you can get Internet access but can't get CDs delivered? In most of the world, the roads are built before the network cables...

Ahh, but that is making the presumption that he is connected by a cable and not using a satellite link. And of course power his power could be provided by solar cells.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

But then plenty of people who don't download illegally have been wrongly accused, and since most ISPs just need a strongly worded letter to bend over, innocence is no longer a defence against being cut off.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Abstrackt]

Probably in Canada. Our postal workers must have found a way to strike retroactively.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where he lives, but I can tell you of a place like that:

Cuba. Non-functional mail service (to the point that the government charges you for /not/ sending documents by post - very infuriating). No legal way to pay for online products (credit/debit cards don't exist there). Crappy selection in the stores (only what can be sold to tourists, and most of them are illegal copies anyway - they don't care about "piracy" that much). Assuming that you have enough money to spend on music, it is /much/ easier to get an internet connection than to acquire music legally. And you don't even need internet... sneakernet works wonders there (I used to carry a debian repository around in my external hard disk, in case someone wanted to copy it).

In my case, I left my whole "collection" there. I don't even know what I had there - it was easier to copy the entire folder than to select what you actually wanted). Now, I use jango

Re:Forgiveness?

[bruno.fatia]

I don't know where he lives but I'll tell you what happens here in Brazil. If I want to buy some non-mainstream music I pay 100 USD for Fedex delivery (I don't do cheap delivery anymore because of stolen packages at the mail) and a 50-100% tax on imports over 50 USD (that includes shipping). So if I order 3 CDs it would cost around 150 USD or about 1/3 of brazillian's minimum wage. If I want to download music (illegal) those 3 CDs cost around 1.50 USD (electricity/internet access). Plus there are no penalties for downloading music in Brazil, as in you can't be sued for it.

Re:Forgiveness?

[dotancohen]

I stole my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I stole it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town.

That's cute. I happened to have actually stolen the car I drive, so it fits. Of course, my wife is a kidnapped slave and I massacred the people living here before me to steal their land.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, where can you get enough bandwidth to download songs, but not get deliveries from Amazon or a similar company?

Maybe he's an astronaut living on the ISS. Or maybe he works on an off-shore oil rig. Or he's a marine biologist studying penguins in Antarctica. How about a circus performer with no permanent address? He's protecting a tree from being cut down by living in it while, all the while, mooching Wi-Fi from a nearby Starbucks.

It's gotta be something like that. That's much more likely than just not wanting to pay for the music, right?

Re:Forgiveness?

[dotancohen]

Where do you live that you can get Internet access but can't get CDs delivered? In most of the world, the roads are built before the network cables...

Be'er Sheva, Israel. I can get a CD delivered, for twice the price of the CD and then pay again for the customs. Or not.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pantera qualifies as anything but mainstream, you must really be far out in the boonies o.O

Anyway, I call bullshit. I was getting online and paying a premium to have CDs of obscure music I was into that wasn't available here imported over from Europe back in the late '90s, the bands and the labels have online presences, the whole "i haz to p2p to gets mah muzak" schtick is tripe. You like the music, support the artists or gtfo.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sealand

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

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called "Not wanting to pay extra for postage and packaging"

Re:Forgiveness?

[Selfbain]

The amount of guilt I feel for pirating can be expressed as 1/x where x represents the number of music files pirated. So while the amount of guilt I feel is not actually 0, the limit of the function is and I can get as arbitrarily close to 0 as I wish.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Artifakt]

What you say is technically true, but let's look at that 'price you may not agree with' part. Sometimes, we're not just talking about 2x Walmart standard prices, plus Amazon shipping added, but about dealing through Amazon with someone who runs a small collectable store, who bought up some copies of a rare performance, and now wants triple digit pricing, plus 20% for shipping. The 'price' you pay can include all sorts of indirect prices, such as dealing with someone who is charging unrealistic luxury prices, but doesn't want to bother with the sort of service that normally goes with that luxury pricing. It's one thing to pay a premium for a rare item, another to pay a $20 shipping and handling surcharge on sending a single CD - in the latter case, wouldn't you feel like you were doing business with someone who thought you were a sucker? They might charge you the same total whether they put some of the costs over in the shipping and handling column or not, but just maybe you prefer to deal with people who are honest about how they make their profit. That's not a cash price, but it's a price.
        Meanwhile, the people who originally made the CD may be reluctant to press new copies because they don't think there's enough demand - you're part of that demand, but they don't know about you, or don't care to find out. Part of the prices you pay may be that they don't become more clued in to their potential market, or that absolutely none of that extra you pay goes to the original artist.

Re:Forgiveness?

[yarnosh]

My provider gives 3 strikes, but there's no due process. I suppose one rationalization might be that if you can't lock down your network after 2 violations, maybe it is time to cut you off regardless of your personal guilt or innocence. We're not talking about fines or jail time here. Merely a violation of ToS and disconnection. It isn't entirely unfair or unjustified but it would certainly suck to be at the business end of a clerical error 3 times in a row.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Vanderhoth]

At Sea. I spent two months on a ship for a data acquisition mission. We had a satellite connection, but no mail delivery. Some of the people I work with spend up to 6 months a year at sea.

Another reason I can think of to download instead of order is the postal service is completely unreliable. I ordered a game once that never arrived, I called the vender who said they had mailed it. I called the post office it was mailed from that had on record they had received it. I call the local post office that claimed it was never sent. I'm guessing there's some delivery driver out there enjoying the game. Of course this is obviously the exception to the rule and the mail ALWAYS goes through with no issue.

Re:Forgiveness?

[jedidiah]

This reminds me of something that JUST happened to me. I managed across a DVD that is out of print in the US. You can buy it used but at "collectors" prices. Supply and demand rears it's ugly head. So I decided if I could get this thing at amazon UK since it was originally a BBC production. I was pleased to find out that yes it is still in print in the UK but Amazon won't ship it to me for some strange reason.

The physical media for this work is "out there" but not in my locale and a big web merchant that has this work doesn't want to ship it to where I happen to be.

When imports are available quite often their prices are jacked up accordingly.

I wouldn't fault a guy for being disinterested in buy an overpriced grey market option assuming that such a thing is even available.

Re:Forgiveness?

[Weedhopper]

Most of the developing world. Outside of the OECD countries, huge portions of the population that have internet access get it through non-wired means. In the past five years, this has shifted to mobile data networks. And it most of these countries, the postal system sucks.

Re:Forgiveness?

[stewbacca]

Not true. 4 studios have signed on. $5 for every subscriber every year to each studio is a good deal, especially if they are making $5 per user on music they never sold to them.

Re:Forgiveness?

[node 3]

Well, the implication is rather strong, but even ignoring the legal side of it, the sense of guilt side still remains. It's quite reasonable that having the outward appearance of piracy washed away will still make some people feel better about it. Especially since it involves a payment, which can also give a sense of recompense for past transgressions.

Re:Forgiveness?

[MareLooke]

I hear more and more regularly of bands that quit because they get squished like a citron by their record labels, the latest victim was Oceans of Sadness and their number one tip to newly starting bands was "DON'T sign a record deal EVER" (we actually asked). So no, I don't feel bad at all "pirating" music from the music mafia, I figure stealing from the bad guys isn't stealing.

(note I do still buy loads of music, but I try to make sure the bands at least see a reasonable amount of my cash before I get out my wallet)

Re:Forgiveness?

[Nyder]

Exactly how many pirates really care about "forgiveness"? While greater than 0, /me thinks they are overestimating the crushing guilt caused by pirating music from Sony and others.

I waiting for my apology from the music industry still...

Re:Forgiveness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you probably never live on any other country... For instance, even in US you can't buy some CDs that are distributed in Europe only.

The only two solutions I know:
1) You create two iTunes accounts (one in US and one in EU) and use the other account to access to stuff not available in US. (that's what I did)
2) You illegally download the stuff you can't get

Launder?

[betterunixthanunix]

Have I missed something? Why would someone who downloaded their music want to "launder" it? Maybe in world where we are forced to prove that our music was legally obtained, but I have not heard of anyone being put in that situation.

Re:Launder?

[gutnor]

Agree, and I would like to add, if you downloaded you music, you can still be sued for that regardless if you "legalized" it somehow. Except than now, you can also be sued to falsely claim that you owned the music when uploading it.

All you have with iCloud, is a little bit more chance than some copyright holder will want to have a closer look at your collection.

Re:Launder?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to break in on your collected fits of paranoia but the music industry has proved time and again that they can only legally go after individuals that have been clearly demonstrated to be sharing music files. There is no legal precedent for suing an individual because they can't prove they purchased a product. Imagine that someone knocks on your door and asks to see a receipt for your microwave oven? Who keeps that shit around the house?

I'm not saying it won't happen, just that it's unlikely and hasn't yet.

And possession of a physical product is no proof either. Before we went digital their were people who would steal physical product from stores or other sources. Additionally, as happened to me, what happens if you rip your CDs and they are subsequently stolen? Are you legally obliged to destroy the copies? The law is too much of a minefield in this regard. The person that invents a reliable (and backward compatible) system to store information regarding what media someone has purchased will be richer than Bill Gates and Google combined.

Re:Launder?

[sootman]

I'm personally looking forward to "laundering" my music, but mainly in the technical sense: I'll be converting all of my low-bitrate, badly-tagged songs, many of which are incomplete or with audible flaws, to properly-tagged, professionally-mastered, quality-checked 256kbps files--complete with album artwork!

Re:Launder?

[jedidiah]

If you have such a hardon for products of big corporations, why haven't you done this already?

There's really not a lot for Apple to do here and likely nothing worth inspiring any sort of brand/corporate worship.

Re:Launder?

[Anonymous Coward]

Laundered, in this case is more like the original meaning, "to clean".

It may be pretty compelling to take a bunch of MP3s that are 128kbps (or less), some of which may never completely downloaded, or have errors, have missing artwork, missing or incorrect ID3 tags, and convert them to 256kbps AAC with high quality artwork and proper and complete ID3 tags. All for $25.

For me, it's worth the $25 for the simple fact that I originally ripped all my CDs when hard drives were much smaller. I kept the CDs knowing I'd want to re-rip at a higher bit rate some day, but iCloud will be a much faster and easier method for the albums that it has.

Re:Launder?

[stewbacca]

Pirate your music, pay $25 a year to use iCloud to sync your library to all your devices. The $25 is for the convenience of syncing tunes to all your computers, your iPhones, and any other iDevice. There's the added bonus of getting good versions of the crappy pirated versions you may have in your library as well.

Re:Launder?

[cthulhu11]

Exactly! A significant fraction of what's out there on the net are indeed low-bitrate, done with crappy encoders, and often with senseless -- if any -- metadata. I wonder, though, if this would confound the matchup process. I also wonder if correct distinctions would be made for albums with remasters (which are not always desirable), bonus tracks or other differences between editions. Seeing how miserable iTunes is about finding cover art (I get maybe a 30% hit rate for CD's I rip) I have a suspicion that in practice this service might prove to be woefully incomplete.

Re:Launder?

[socrplayr813]

Oh dear god don't give them anymore ideas. The last thing we need is for some sympathetic government entity to start checking peoples' collections. (I realize it's unlikely, but we've been surprised and burned too many times in the past...)

Re:Launder?

[jafac]

Yeah, seriously - like: "I ripped 2000 CD's, which I legally purchased, back in 1997, and then I had my CD's stored in a shed in the back yard, there was a fire, that shed, and the CD's burned down, so now all I have are the digital copies." completely plausible - and if true, completely legal! Never mind the issue of Vinyl, where perhaps, I digitized them, and destroyed the Vinyl copies, because I didn't want to store them (due to the bulk - etc.); this is completely legitimate (even if from an "audiophile's" point of view, it's attrocity.) There is no need for any "laundering".

Unless they have your verifiable IP address on a server log offering downloads. (and even this is a fairly sketchy evidence in most courts now)

o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[haxwk]

This iCloud thing (haven't heard much about it, I don't follow apple products) just sounds like a way for Apple to legally collect information on stupid music pirates (and probably who has ripped back-ups on their computer) that they can sell to record companies. It's like Steve Jobs saw the South Park episode "Human CentiPad" and figured it would be a good idea to coax people into unknowingly agreeing to let Apple screw over. This program is going to scan your files with the pretense that everything is legal. But of course if it finds anything that doesn't have a proper license it's probably illegal, and therefore Apple would be "inclined" to report to the authorities.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[jessecurry]

I'd be shocked if that were the case. I think that this is really just a way for Apple to reduce storage costs. They've got this great new data center, but they don't want to fill it up with 500 copies of every song in their music library, encoded in all different formats and bitrates.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

This iCloud thing (haven't heard much about it, I don't follow apple products) just sounds like a way for Apple to legally collect information on stupid music pirates (and probably who has ripped back-ups on their computer) that they can sell to record companies. It's like Steve Jobs saw the South Park episode "Human CentiPad" and figured it would be a good idea to coax people into unknowingly agreeing to let Apple screw over. This program is going to scan your files with the pretense that everything is legal. But of course if it finds anything that doesn't have a proper license it's probably illegal, and therefore Apple would be "inclined" to report to the authorities.

So, by your rationale, if I bought a CD, ripped it to iTunes (all legal so far) and then had iCloud "scan"my library, they would tell the record companies that my ripped (and legally bought) copy of the album, in fact isn't legal, because it wasn't purchased form iTunes?

Next time, read the subject matter that is being discussed, b/c your point it totally invalid.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't verify that you did not rip from a CD you own.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Gaygirlie]

That's exactly what I thought. Apple most likely has already made a deal with MAFIAA et. al. that whenever Apple runs into tags like "riPpeD by AsTROturF" it's a definite proof that it's an unlicensed copy and they'll submit the tags, filename and the person the files belong to to MAFIAA. Most people don't realize that these rippers almost always leave a tag of their own behind for some unfathomable reason, and thus when these people upload their files somewhere they're just exposing themselves to legal proceedings.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Yvan256]

The computer can't see the difference between a tune that you downloaded from some random website/via P2P/torrent , a tune you bought from a competing service, a tune one ripped from a CD you borrowed and a tune ripped from a CD you bought.

And since users can mess with the metadata, you can't use those to detect anything either.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[JosKarith]

Ah, but buying that copy of the album doesn't entitle you to rip a copy. You licensed a CD version of the album, not a data file. The media company would want to be able to sell you a second copy (possibly at a bit of a discount so as to seem less ridiculous) for your MP3 player.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[haxwk]

My argument simply stems from my distrust of cloud computing. You're right that what I'm talking about doesn't have much to do with the actual article, I was just talking about the idea of iCloud in general. And I already said I don't know much about iCloud or what it actually does. I just know that Apple is not going to launder music for people. If there's some way to verify a file's licensing, they will. And if some kind of incriminating information comes up from checking these files, Apple is going to definitely take advantage of it. It's the equivalent of letting a cop into your home just talk and then him busting you because he found something illegal. And he would have every right to; in fact, he would see it as his "duty". I'm just saying that it's probably not a good idea to let Apple anywhere near the pirated music you may have on your computer.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Yvan256]

How can they check for a file's licensing? I may have bought an MP3 file from Amazon (messing with the metadata, which I can do, will screw up the signature of the file), I may have downloaded it from "another source" (random website, P2P, Torrent, etc), I may have ripped it from a CD that I borrowed and I may have ripped it from a CD that I bought.

There's also plenty of CD-ripping software out there, so there would be thousands of valid file signatures, even if you limit your search to "legal rip from purchased CDs". Different metadata also screws up the signatures, so it's basically impossible to distinguish legal files from non-legal ones.

The only thing that I know for sure is that all the tracks I downloaded from OverClocked ReMix won't be upgraded to AAC@256kbps.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Skarecrow77]

step 1. get foobar2000, load up any music you own, open file properties, delete extraneous meta tags. (hell empty out the comments tag if you're really paranoid).

step 2. save.

step 3. breathe a sigh of relief. nobody can prove where anything you own came from as it no longer has any identifying tags and the file size is now different than any existing pirated copy.

you can even do it on every file at once if you're careful about which tags you modify.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Yvan256]

Laws differ for each country. And if it was such a big problem for the media companies, CD ripping would have disappeared from iTunes in earlier versions.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[haxwk]

Is it even legal to alter the data of a licensed file? If Apple were to use the metadata to identify the file, then changing that metadata could be seen as a form of "circumventing copy-protection software". I'm not saying this is reasonable at all. But I'm sure that most /.ers are aware of some of the exploitation of vaguely defined laws that goes on in copyright court. If it's possible, and it generates profit, then there's reason to fear it.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[gumbi west]

This will not happen.

News flash: Steve Jobs is very, very good at business.

Getting your clients sued for 100 times their net worth is very, very, very bad for business.

QED.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Yvan256]

The only thing that iTunes won't let you do is re-encode an older 128kbps, DRM'ed iTunes-bought file into another format such as MP3. But you can still burn to an audio CD. If they wanted to prevent the alteration of the metadata of a licensed file, iTunes would be the first program to block it.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[mcgrew]

How would they tell whather or not it "had a valid license"? (I put that in quotes becuse I don't license music, I buy CDs). It isn't illegal to rip my CDs and store them on my hard drive or play them on an MP3 player, and the numbers burned into a copied CD are exactly the same numbers as the numbers on the factory CD it was copied from.

And I have a boatload of analog music, both LPs and CDs, that I sample and burn on CDs. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that -- I paid for the LPs and cassettes and the use of the content already. And some CDs that were originally recorded in analog and remastered for CD sound like utter crap; a Led Zeppelin Presence CD burned from an unscratched LP sampled from a high end turntable will have better frequency response, separation, and dynamics (especially the dynamics) despite the fact that CDs are capable of superior dynamics and separation than LPs. The guy from the band Boston really blasted the digital mix of their first album, last I heard he was re-mixing it. The CD of that album is REALLY short on dynamics, which seem to be completely missing on today's music (ironic since CDs are capable of better dynamics than analog).

I just don't see how they could tell if it was legal or not.

However, I personally see no use for iCloud; I have wifi, bluetooth, and cables so interdevice operability isn't a problem. I just can't see paying to have someone else store my digits when on-site storage is so cheap.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.Actually, you are wrong! It is completely legal to copy any music that you have "licensed", that is why CD burners and MP3 rippers are not illegal, the only thing that is illegal is to copy the music and give it to someone else. That is why pirates get busted and not just anyone who owns an mp3 player. I mean if it were illegal to rip MP3s from a CD that one legally purchased then I would be in big trouble because I don't buy MP3s I rip them from CDs and records that I already "licensed". So, before you go and make ridiculous statements like copying music is illegal please actually know something about the law. :p

Thanks, and have a nice day.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[JosKarith]

In the United Kingdom, making a private copy of copyrighted media without the copyright owner's consent is illegal: this includes ripping music from a CD to a computer or digital music player.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/6457369.stm

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[srh2o]

The record companies disagree with you. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster Ltd. http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/04-480.pdf "The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their Website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[EastCoastSurfer]

Yes, that makes complete sense for Apple to kill iCould day 1.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply gibberish! Just because a music file does not have the embedded metadata showing that it was downloaded from a legitimate music site means nothing. There was a world of music before MP3...it was called CD. And many people like myself took all of those CD's (mine were around 700) and ripped them to some digital format for play on the newer platforms (iPods, Zunes, computer systems). Apple is certainly not going to compile a list of every track that does not show where it was purchased and sick the RIAA on you. That would be total suicide. And to what end?

Apple found a way to get the labels on board. You are now technically paying (albeit at a huge discount!) for those illegal downloads with your $25. It is a way for the labels to save a little face and feel that they are at least getting something from those pirated songs now. So iCloud/iTunes Matching is performing two decent services. It is making your (almost) entire music collection available to you on any of your Apple devices in a somewhat friendly format (AAC 256 is not lossless, but it is more than fine for most "normal" ears) while charging you a minimal amount that gets filtered in some percentage back to the labels/artists. I honestly do not see any real negatives in this scenario.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really true. iTunes purchased songs are in a format that is easily recognized as an iTunes download. If you do not do some sort of conversion on a purchased track, it will be easily identified by whatever device is trying to play it. This is not something that can be simply masked by editing some portion of metadata. Thus, iTunes songs do not play on any MP3 players. Only iDevices.

Now Amazon and many others sell very generic MP3 tracks that may fit your analogy. But Apples servers will be able to differentiate your iTunes purchases from your ripped CD's, Amazon downloads or your P2P illegal tracks.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[biglig2]

Yes, because having ideas like "lets try and get our customers sent to prison" is exactly how Steve Jobs built Apple into a $50 billion company.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

They're just using the tech acquired when they bought Lala.com. Lala offered this service to add your music to your "web songs" long before Apple. Sadly I still think the Lala services were better than what apple is doing with them. http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/19/apples-secret-cloud-strategy-and-why-lala-is-critical/ "[...]What is of value is the personal music storage service which was an often overlooked component of Lala’s business. As Apple did with the original iPods, Lala realized that any music solution must include music already possessed by the user. The Lala setup process provides software to store a personal music library online and then play it from any web browser alongside web songs they vend. This technology plus the engineering and management team is the true value of Lala to Apple."

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[node 3]

This iCloud thing (haven't heard much about it, I don't follow apple products) just sounds like a way for Apple to legally collect information on stupid music pirates (and probably who has ripped back-ups on their computer) that they can sell to record companies.

Actually, it sounds like a way for Apple to offer a cloud storage service for people to store things like their entire music collection, to, you know, make owning an iOS device more compelling and thus driving sales. Yeah, too obvious, right? There's gotta be something dodgy going on, this *is* a discussion related to Apple on slashdot after all!

The idea that Apple will turn you in is completely laughable. That would instantly kill the service, and critically damage Apple's reputation with its hundreds of millions of non-slashdot nerd customers. There's no way Apple would do this. To get people to use the cloud, they need people to place trust in the cloud and its provider. You don't accomplish this by making your customers afraid they might be sued or go to jail for using your service.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[harperska]

Apple doesn't need to detect iTunes purchases in your library, as they already have a record of those purchases on the iTunes servers. And that's not even what this is about. Parent is just talking about differentiating all of the sources OTHER than iTunes purchases, which is what matters. There is no way to reliably differentiate between an mp3 downloaded from Amazon, ripped from a CD you own, or obtained in any other way. The important thing, and why we are even talking about this, is that Apple is providing this service for all of your music that isn't purchased from iTunes as well as for your iTunes purchases.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[node 3]

My argument simply stems from my distrust of cloud computing. You're right that what I'm talking about doesn't have much to do with the actual article, I was just talking about the idea of iCloud in general. And I already said I don't know much about iCloud or what it actually does.

Exactly, your argument is based on ignorance.

I just know that Apple is not going to launder music for people. If there's some way to verify a file's licensing, they will. And if some kind of incriminating information comes up from checking these files, Apple is going to definitely take advantage of it.

Oh really? You "just know" this, do you? How so?

It's the equivalent of letting a cop into your home just talk and then him busting you because he found something illegal. And he would have every right to; in fact, he would see it as his "duty".

Apple is the police now? When did this happen?

I'm just saying that it's probably not a good idea to let Apple anywhere near the pirated music you may have on your computer.

Right, because up to now, people have *never* put pirated music into iTunes or synced it onto their iPods!

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[kimvette]

Musicbrainz Picard to the rescue in that case!

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Yvan256]

You are right that if you don't edit the metadata, iTunes could recognize the file based on its signature since they have the same copy on their servers.

But music bought on the iTunes store has been DRM-free for some years now. You can play those files on any player that supports the AAC format.

The point being that just because the signature of the AAC file I ripped from a CD that I bought differs from the signature of the AAC file on Apple's servers doesn't match, doesn't mean that I acquired my AAC file illegally.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[node 3]

That's exactly what I thought. Apple most likely has already made a deal with MAFIAA et. al. ...

Right, because the "most likely" thing Apple will do is make their customers afraid to use their products. It's completely brilliant! I just need some small bit of clarification... what possible reason could Apple have to do something like that? It would effectively kill iCloud, and cripple Apple's reputation.

But, surely there's some upside to this company-killing scheme, right?

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[delinear]

Sure, and you can still technically shoot a Welshman in Hereford on a Sunday, with a longbow, in the Cathedral Close, but try it and see what the repercussions are. The legal landscape is littered with laws that are either no longer enforced or have been overruled by subsequent law or legal precedent. Sure, technically it might be illegal to make a copy, it didn't stop the sale of video recorders and video casettes back in the 70's/80's and it's not stopping the sale of digital devices today. It might be letter-of-the-law illegal, but it's the de facto position that format shifting is generally acceptable.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[bsane]

Getting your clients sued for 100 times their net worth is very, very, very bad for business.

Tell that to the RIAA...

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[lpp]

They can't tell the difference between a legal rip and an illegally shared rip though.

I own plenty of CDs from before I started purchasing digitally from iTunes on a regular basis. Plus a few I picked up because there weren't versions available online. In any event, the rips I made could easily be copied over to someone else or even re-ripped from the same CD (not that I would do that). Digitally identical. So when they get uploaded, how the hell would the RIAA know whether mine was illegally obtained or not? If they attempted to go after folks purely on this basis, they would have so many suits overturned they would begin getting laughed out of court by the judges.

Don't conflate interaction with the iCloud matching service with interaction with P2P services. With P2P, RIAA presumes you do not have the right to provide that copy. With iCloud matching, it's presumed that you do.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[acohen1]

This is perfectly legal in the US. The only reason the same thing doesn't apply to DVDs and Blu-rays are laws against circumventing encryption, but it is fair use to format shift unencrypted media you own for personal use. Its no longer personal use when I rip a CD then give the original to a friend or sell it, but if I keep the CD, then the mp3s, flacs, accs, or whatever are fine.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[greyhueofdoubt]

Except that iTunes has been uploading what music you have for years, via the Genius feature. There have been no legal repercussions for users, afaik.

-b

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[slimjim8094]

For all of Jobs' many faults, he doesn't seem to have any problem telling the RIAA to go fuck themselves. Hell, Apple has enough money to just buy up any particularly pesky label.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point--Apple has a long history of doing what's best for their customers, particularly in terms of freedom. Oh wait......

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes already sends Apple a catalog of your music library when Genius is turned on. It doesn't have the ability to check 'proper licenses', in fact I've been buying LPs and CDs for 40 years and don't have any 'proper licenses' stored in iTunes for any of the CDs it ripped for me.

What I want to know is how it will handle my nice, clean metadata. I've fixed the public database typos and misspellings, normalized the metadata's titlecase to my standards, added group and genres to my tastes, and applied quality artwork to most all my tracks. I don't want my 320kb AAC files upgraded to 256kb with random metadata.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[gumbi west]

If the RIAA is after you, it is because (they think) you are not a customer.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

depends on how much of a cut Apple gets. Think about it, how much revenue would they get from every user, how much would they get as a percentage of a cut of a lawsuit?

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[gumbi west]

I'm just realizing, for lots of iTunes users, Apple already has their catalog information.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[gumbi west]

Do you seriously think RIAA makes any money on its lawsuits?

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this differ from how they currently scan your entire library and upload the results in order to generate "Genius playlists" ?

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[stewbacca]

Woah, that's quite the large tin-foil hat you're wearing. Apple says "don't pirate music". They don't say "we're selling your name to the feds if you try to upload bullshit copies to our cloud".

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because up to now, people have *never* put pirated music into iTunes or synced it onto their iPods!

I see you can't fathom the difference between adding files to iTunes and letting Apple scan your computer.

Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother

[node 3]

Right, because up to now, people have *never* put pirated music into iTunes or synced it onto their iPods!

I see you can't fathom the difference between adding files to iTunes and letting Apple scan your computer.

Um, by definition, using iTunes means letting Apple scan your music. That's fundamental to how it works. Apple presently has a system which uploads song information, completely voluntarily and opt-in as opposed to opt-out, as part of the Genius feature. The very same idiotic nonsense about "Apple will turn you in for piracy" surfaced when that feature was announced, yet somehow not a single person has been turned in to the RIAA.

Can this possibly be secure?

[Zone-MR]

So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.

I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy. Or maybe if the threshold is low enough we'll get a Shazam-like app - that records snippets of music then presents them to iTunes as a ripped track for replacing with a HQ version.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[sgbett]

And Apple bills each of those users $25 per year...

Thats the whole point. The new music model is not pay per $file, it's charging by association. They (apple) don't care whether you listen to 1 tune or a million. Provided you pay your annual fee.

Of course they run a side business in making it pretty easy/convenient to get whatever tune you want added to your 'available library' for just cents. They've priced it to the point where ill often just buy instead of going to the trouble of scouring newsgroups for a decent copy.

Seems to be working pretty well for them, and the record industry *still* hasn't caught on. Talk about stupid...

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[JeremyBanks]

AFAIK it doesn't let you download the song, it just lets your stream it, if you pay an annual fee.

A bit less abusable.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[alen]

i don't know how much of the cut the RIAA companies are getting but in this case it's more than $0

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Zone-MR]

According to the announcement, once music is added to iCloud it can be downloaded onto iTunes and mobile devices, in DRM-free 256kbps AAC format. They don't support streaming.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[rjstanford]

"The haven't announced yet whether their future unreleased service will, at launch or at some point in the future, support streaming."

FTFY

They may well not support it on day one - Apple has a long history of playing it relatively safe on release-day. They probably will support it at some point in the future, because its both an obvious advantage and a reasonably trivial technical feat to do so. But that's nowhere near as sensational/interesting a comment, is it?

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[dq5 studios]

The RIAA are getting $150 million upfront and 56% of the $25/yr fee.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understood it. If you upload music and it can be matched to something that is sold in iTunes then it doesn't go towards your iCloud space. Nothing in relation to the legality of that file came up. If anything I would guess you are more likely to be found out using this part of the system.

The other part was the streaming service. It would read your local files and match them to files that are up in the iCloud. You can then stream those files for an annual fee. At the end of the fee you can no longer stream and you still have the same local files you started off with. If your local files are low quality you still get access to the high quality streams while paying for it.

So this allows the Music companies to get money from people who stole the music.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[gumbi west]

No, it doesn't even get uploaded. It is probably based on just the meta data.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get this. Does anyone really think there's not an Apple database hosted in NC that will not contain a list of music you own if you use this service? It will list what you purchased, what was matched, and what was uploaded. Probably with hashes of each. One judge's order and you'll have to justify your "acquired" music.

That said, I don't care, and will still use the service.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[hypergreatthing]

Sigh.

Basically if you really want to go this route, bulk convert all your mp3s to 32k thus destroying any hash/watermarks/etc checks that are on your pirated music, then use apple's icloud service to get a fresh new copy.

Why would you want to? Beats me. Who cares if it's 256k.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[b.emile]

Assuming it's based on what they purchased from LaLa, it's fairly trivial to get them to give you a good copy of an arbitrary track. I tried this when LaLa debuted their "cloud music service", which would scan your library, matching tracks by, as far as I could tell, tags only. I took a random MP3 file, re-tagged it to a track that I didn't own, and ran the Lala scanner. Sure enough, it showed up on Lala as a track that I owned and could listen to an unlimited number of times online. Of course at that point Lala didn't let you re-download matched tracks as Apple will, so it was limited. But I'm forced to assume that if you have the patience, you could get Apple to give you 256Kbps MP3s of albums you don't actually own.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[b.emile]

Wrong, Apple will let you download any track that it has "matched" in your library in 256 Kbps AAC, which should be quite abusable. See my response to the OP.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. It's reported Apple use ID3 tags to do so. Presumably I edit the ID3 tags on any MP3 and watch Apple place a legit copy in iCloud for me. Very exploitable.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously I can't comment on how you would do finger printing but to defeat just uploaded hashes you can just request the client hash the file with a specified salt attached which you can't do without the file. As for audio fingerprints I imagine something similar could be applied to that.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[js_sebastian]

So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.

I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy.

Apple is not the first to offer this "feature". You can do that with dropbox already.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/26/1645200/Dropbox-Attempts-To-Kill-Open-Source-Project

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[uigrad_2000]

If only Z-Company had done the same thing when they launched my.mp3.com.

For a history reminder, look at this case:
UMG vs. MP3.com

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[guruevi]

It is designed to be fixing the issue the music industry is having. People do not want to pay another $10 for your song, some don't even want to pay another $1 for your song they already have, they would rather pay a fixed fee and get all the music they want (see Pandora, Rhapsody etc.) or put it online somewhere so I can always have access to it.

Apple is giving them this, get all the music you already have in a high quality digital download for $25/year in an online storage. The reason iTunes is giving them 'fresh' songs instead of uploading and storing their own songs is purely out of cost. iTunes just has to maintain a database of who has what songs and they have to store them anyway to sell them and doesn't have to waste storage or bandwidth on low-fi and duplicate music.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[yarnosh]

A file hash/sum couldn't work because the new version would most certainly be different. Dunno about audio fingerprinting or how that would work. Who knows, it might be as trivial as looking at the ID3 tags. Now that would be easy to trick.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[ColdWetDog]

It's worse than that. It's reported Apple use ID3 tags to do so. Presumably I edit the ID3 tags on any MP3 and watch Apple place a legit copy in iCloud for me. Very exploitable.

And Apple doesn't give a shit because, for 99.996% of the populace your statement was pure gibberish and they wouldn't know an ID3 tag if it went up and bit them on the nose. The folks who are inclined to do this, RIAA notwithstanding, are just noise in the system. Besides they still get their cut of the $25 / year anyway.

If this actually works (Apple's track record with remote storage systems hasn't exactly been stellar), 'Ol Stevie may have found the One True Compromise in this goofy battle.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[keytoe]

One judge's order and you'll have to justify your "acquired" music.

Copyright restricts the rights of copying, distributing and adapting a work, but makes no mention of possession.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.

I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy. Or maybe if the threshold is low enough we'll get a Shazam-like app - that records snippets of music then presents them to iTunes as a ripped track for replacing with a HQ version.

Wait... so if I'm getting what you're saying right... you can use this to ILLEGALLY DOWNLOAD MUSIC???

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[stewbacca]

As far as you know, you are absolutely incorrect.

Watch the keynote. iCloud scans your .mac account and keeps a list of all the songs you own from iTunes purchases. It then scans your devices (ALL your devices associated with your iTunes account) for any non-iTunes media and tells the iCloud service they exist. You then get the option to ADD those songs to your list of purchased iTunes songs associated with that iTunes account. That way they don't have upload your songs. THEN, with this manifest in place, ANY device you own that is associated with that iTunes account can access ALL the songs in your iTunes account. You can download them individually to each device, or you can automatically sync your devices from the cloud (given enough storage on the target device).

This really isn't that hard to understand, and the amount of misinformation in this thread is astonishing.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[stewbacca]

Call it streaming if you must, but once it's done streaming, there's a physical copy on the target device, pulled down from your iCloud account. That's what's awesome about this service, not the fact you can store stuff "in the cloud". It's that you can store it and pull it down to all your devices.

Re:Can this possibly be secure?

[Zone-MR]

Yeah... I was thinking they could do this. However I'm sure P2P networks will quickly spring up that let you ask peers for a salted hash of a file, then use it to download the full quality file from Apple. More of a ballache though.

We are not the target demographic

[jijacob]

256kbps aac is definitely higher quality than most people would ever need, and professionally ripped audio tracks are probably better quality than what most of the target demographic for this feature will have. Apple is not aiming at the few on private trackers that download flac of V0 MP3s.

Re:We are not the target demographic

[Skarecrow77]

Sadly, you are probably 100% correct.

Most of the target demographic probably isn't even really sure what "256kbps" means only that it's higher than what they have now, and "higher means it sounds better, right"?

Luckily, 256kbps AAC (when done right, which we have no proof apple is doing of course) sounds transparent to the vast majority of listeners on the vast majority of songs, even on good equipment. the fact that most of the target demographic is probably listening on stock civic speakers with a 500w subwoofer, or even (god forbid) the stock white earbuds, they probably couldn't tell the difference between 256kbps and

I wonder if it's true CBR 256kbps or if apple is actually leveraging the power of a modern codec and doing something like Q 0.66 VBR (~256kbps). I'm rather inclined to believe the former rather than the latter, even though there isn't a whole heck of a lot of a good reason for anybody to use CBR for anything anymore (use ABR if you absolutely must have a target file size for some random reason).

Re:We are not the target demographic

[arth1]

256kbps aac is definitely higher quality than most people would ever need, and professionally ripped audio tracks are probably better quality than what most of the target demographic for this feature will have

That depends on your definition of "most". How encompassing is that, exactly? Those who like to listen to Jazz and high hats don't really like the sound of crushed glass (which is one of the most common artefacts of MP3s, and one of the hardest to avoid).

As for "professionally ripped", do you think that Apple hires audio engineers to do the ripping, or do you think they set up an automated ripping program and let a minimum wage slave feed it CDs?

Anyhow, 256 kbps is just silly. The file size difference between 256 and 320 is so small that you might as well go with 320. 1 hour of music will grow from ~113 MB to ~140 MB. Even with the smallest MP3 players of today (2 GB), that means fitting 17 hour-long albums instead of 14.
I do not think that difference will cause anyone to not buy from the service - I expect that the number of people who will avoid the service because they can't get 320 or FLAC is going to be higher.

Re:We are not the target demographic

[Skarecrow77]

What makes you think that 320 is much better than 256? because the number is higher? hell VBR 256kbps is overkill for most music.

-discounting codec artifacting-:
with LAME mp3, the changeover between "this sounds lossy" and "is this the original? I can't tell" happens around 192kbps or so. (more specifically, -v2 through -v0)
with AAC, I believe it is around 160kbps or so, although I have not spent much time with AAC.
with Ogg Vorbis, the changeover is also around 160kbps for most people on most music, specifically -q 5. Me personally, I have a hell of a time ABXing Q4.

As I said though, that is discounting artifacts that are inherent to the codec. you're going to get those at pretty much any bitrate. If you get a codec artifact at 256kbps, the chance of it still showing up at 320kbps is very high. in other words, with any of the modern codecs, 256kbps is already more than good enough for almost everything, and the few instances where it isn't good enough, 320kbps isn't very likely to fix the problem.

Re:We are not the target demographic

[arth1]

What makes you think that 320 is much better than 256? because the number is higher?

In short, yes. 320 will always be better than 256, unless there is something wrong with the codec. Whether it's so much better that it makes an audible difference is debatable, but it will always be better.

A 320 kbps file is also a better choice for transcoding - if you do have limited space on a device, and need to transcode to, say, 160 kbps, using a 320 kbps as the source is far preferable to using 256 kbps.

Of course, with disk space being as cheap as it is today, it makes more sense to buy music as FLAC and transcode to whatever you like without loss caused by multiple lossy transcodings.
It's like the difference between faxing from an original or faxing from another fax.

Re:We are not the target demographic

[Skarecrow77]

I'll agree that 320 is better for transcoding, but as you obviously know you shouldn't be transcoding lossy in the first place if you can possibly help it, no matter what bittrate you start at.

For any other use, I stand my statement that there shouldn't be an audible difference between 256 and 320 on modern codecs for anybody but the statistical outliers of human hearing (and they're already probably listening to lossless anyway, and annoyed with the mastering errors they hear in THOSE). The codecs have already "worked their magic" before you get to 256kbps, and they're just throwing in more data that you likely (statistically speaking anyway) can't hear only because you're asking them to do so.

See, my statement on the subject isn't "if you're willing to download 256kbps, then 320kbps is only a little bit more", it is "if you're already willing to download 320kbps lossy, then lossless starts at about twice that and comes with the benefits of archival quality and no transcoding artifacts, so if you're willing to get 320 you should be willing to get lossless." I mean seriously, with modern internet connections, you're usually talking about something the difference between 5 minutes (320kbps lossy) and 10 minutes (lossless) for a full album.

Basically I look at it like this:
No reason not to use lossless for archival quality/home listening.
No reason to go above ~192 lossy for portable listening

At the rate we're going, in another generation or two, storage sizes on portable devices will be so good that we may just go lossless there as well for convenience, and lossy may go the way of the floppy drive.

I don't think this is the studio's real concern

[elrous0]

I would bet that the studios aren't nearly as concerned with any faux legitimacy this gives to already pirated songs as they are with the possibility of users sharing username/passwords for their iCloud accounts (sharing their entire music collections en masse). Jimmy re-downloading a song he's already ripped isn't nearly as bad for business as Jimmy sharing his 8,000 song music collection with all his friends.

Re:I don't think this is the studio's real concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that you are limited to about 10 devices that can be associated with a single iCloud account. So people will have to be more clever than just handing around usernames and passwords.

Re:I don't think this is the studio's real concern

[Lehk228]

Only 8,000? Kid needs to get some work done on that collection

Re:I don't think this is the studio's real concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Jimmy re-downloading a song he's already ripped isn't nearly as bad for business as Jimmy sharing his 8,000 song music collection with all his friends.

When all of Jimmy's freeloading friends start buying songs from the iTunes Store using his username and password (hey, it's not THEIR username and password, so the songs are "FREE", right?), he's going to run up quite a credit card bill.

The first time he sees one of those bills, hello new password, and bye-bye mooching "friends".

Re:I don't think this is the studio's real concern

[Anonymous Coward]

I would bet that the studios aren't nearly as concerned with any faux legitimacy this gives to already pirated songs as they are with the possibility of users sharing username/passwords for their iCloud accounts (sharing their entire music collections en masse). Jimmy re-downloading a song he's already ripped isn't nearly as bad for business as Jimmy sharing his 8,000 song music collection with all his friends.

Why wouldn't it have the same restrictions that your ITMS account has now? Jimmy can already share his entire library with at least five of his friends, or his own computers. The RIAA is getting paid to not care.

Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[pla]

As a non-"Audiophile", but someone who appreciates decent quality rips, I can see a simple enough use for this...

Downloaded tracks often have questionable origins and quality - I've heard things that someone clearly recorded straight off FM radio, complete with censoring bleeps; Songs that sounded almost like they'd come from vinyl (hisses and pops); Songs that fade in and out at random; Songs with tags that look like a native speaker of 1337 just discovered the wonders of Unicode.

Now personally, if I like a track enough to care about any of the above, I'll just buy the album (not just a CYA comment - I violate copyrights not only shamelessly, but with outright pride; I very much believe in supporting artists I like, however). But as a way of converting a crappy rip into a nice shiny clean reasonably HQ and properly tagged file? My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[Snocone]

> My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.

One note here, it seems from initial reports that your $25 gets you 20k songs max. I would suspect that's probably a licensing limitation, along the lines of iTunes allowing you to only burn 5 copies of a playlist to CD back in the day.

Still, I'm with you, $25/yr to keep more music than I can plausibly listen to in adequate for mobile quality handy in the cloud sure strikes me as a massively worthwhile deal for time saved compared to backing up and syncing to my half-dozen iDevices myself; and I'm pretty darn sure it's likely to strike a lot of other iDevice users the same way. Even leaving completely aside the whole amnesty debate.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a flipside to this of course; many CDs produced containing older music are low quality transfers of tape masters made 30+ years ago, I've hit quite a few "home made" transfers that have quite amazing sound quality simply because the hobbyist sound engineer took the time to lovingly bring back some great music from near death.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[MMC Monster]

It's true that the initial mp3 ripped more than six years ago were fairly low quality. The stuff that's available now is quite good quality (and some are ripped at rates too high to be of additional benefit).

I occasionally re-download stuff that I notice has skips in them. They're invariably songs that I had downloaded or personally ripped 6 or 7 years ago.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[greed]

There's been tracks from the iTMS that have skips in them....

(I mainly buy CDs and rip them myself, but I do have about 80 tracks from the iTMS. Two had skips, but the album they were on was removed from the store. Maybe it had other problems....)

Oh, and Lite-On BD-ROM/DVD+-RW combo drives are terrible for ripping audio; they don't report uncorrected errors, so unless you've got a full cdparanoia session going, you get junk if you even breathe near the drive. I had to re-do 50 rips. (cdparanoia crashed the drive.)

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[Anonymous Coward]

the 20k song limit is to songs you upload... nothing that is already in the iTunes catalog counts against that number.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[Anonymous Coward]

My collection contains quite a few self digitized from well worn Disney records vinyl that have never made it to any official digital media. They are crappy by the usual standards but listening to them brings back fond memories of my now grown children dancing to them. I'd love clean copies but iTunes is no help there.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[oldmac31310]

But I like vinyl rips!

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[Anonymous Coward]

You get 25k songs max, not 20k. Check Apple's site. Somehow the interwebs have been echoing the 20k number until it has become a fact.

It probably started because Apple talked about 5k, then 20k tracks in comparing it to other services. The truth is in the fine print.

Re:Sounds like a good deal, IMO...

[jaysones]

Not only this but, for $25 a year, I never have to think about my work iTunes and my home iTunes having any library differences at all? That alone is completely worth the price of a Starbucks coffee each month!

AAC? Meh.

[eager_b]

I get that I can replace my huge collection of VBR MP3s with nice shiny 256K AACs. Since I am one of the few people in the world who does not own an Apple music player, however, why would I want to?

Re:AAC? Meh.

[LoganDzwon]

iTunes music is 256kbps ABR AAC. You didn't mention your bit rate, so I'll assume you have 256kbps VBR mp3 encoded in LAME. AAC is a little better quality them MP3 at the same bit-rate. At the time old iTunes DRMed 128kbps AAC files were generally comparable to 192kbps MP3s. For info; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#AAC.27s_improvements_over_MP3 However, 256kbps VBR lame encoded MP3s are not going to sound any different then 256kbps ABR AAC. Also, I think your confused. AAC is not an Apple thing. It is an industry standard. Every digital music player I can think of plays AACs. To answer your question though, if you don't use iTunes, don't have any iOS devices, then you'd get nothing out this service.

Re:AAC? Meh.

[EastCoastSurfer]

Um, because AAC is superior to MP3 and any modern portable player/phone/device will play non DRMed AACs (like you find in in ITMS or the new iCloud) just fine. From wiki (other portable players):

Archos
Creative Zen Portable
Microsoft Zune
SanDisk Sansa (some models)
Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
Sony Walkman
Nintendo DSi
Any portable player that fully supports the Rockbox third party firmware

Re:AAC? Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

VBR = Variable Bit Rate

Re:AAC? Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Though not featuring the iTunes AAC encoder, http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=36465 clearly shows that AAC is not automatically better than MP3, but it's highly dependent on the encoder, and LAME is damn good. This test is rather old, and probably Nero AAC has been improved considerably since then, but the same can be true for the LAME encoder.

Re:AAC? Meh.

[jedidiah]

No. AAC is not worth the trouble here. It's of limited potential benefit.

Quit swimming in the cool-aid.

Re:AAC? Meh.

[UnknowingFool]

AAC is considered the successor to MP3 and was created by the same group. It has been standardize by ISO and IEC and is part of MPEG4-Audio. At the same bit rates, AAC has shown to be better and AAC has corrected some of the flaws of MP3s.

As for the general consumer, they really may not see much of an advantage. If you're happy with MP3, you don't need AAC but you are incorrect in that Apple is the own player that uses it. Apple may have been one of the first to embrace it, but there are many others that do including Sony, Creative, Sansa, Microsoft, etc. All players still support MP3.

(1) The Law (2) Trying not buying.

[cpu6502]

(1) "iTunes Match, which, at a cost of $24.99, matches a userâ(TM)s existing music library against the 18 million tracks held in iTunes store, will work on the basis of assuming that you have a legal version of the music on your disk. It will have to do this to stay in keeping with the copyright laws in the US which are similar to that in Australia. "

I don't see how Apple will know whether my MP3 rip is legal or not. The author's reasoning is flawed, because I suspect iTunes will treat copied songs the same as legal songs. But I agree with (2). Most people, including myself, are merely testing stuff before buying it, in order to avoid buying crap. Like Transformers 3. If downloading is stopped, they won't suddenly run to the store and buy thousands of songs.
.

>>>I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay $25 to upgrade their entire music collection to 256k

You may be right, but I don't fit into that category. As long as the song is equal to the quality I'm used to hearing (analog FM radio), less than 256k is fine with me. If it falls below 128k MP3 or 32k AACplusSBR, then it gets annoying but most of the time the quality is "good enough" for casual listening.

Plus if I really want quality, CD is the way to go. It's lossless and if it's a Greatest Hits CD you get ~15 songs for less than a dollar a piece.

Re:(1) The Law (2) Trying not buying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus if I really want quality, CD is the way to go. It's lossless and if it's a Greatest Hits CD you get ~15 songs for less than a dollar a piece.

Yeah, I've had enough CD's fail me that I don't buy them as lossless. Or did you mean in a purely theoretical way, if everything goes right, no scratches, etc?

Re:(1) The Law (2) Trying not buying.

[cheeks5965]

Most people, including myself, are merely testing stuff before buying it, in order to avoid buying crap.

I'm going to blow your mind.

with iTunes you can listen to 90 seconds of a track, which for most songs is more than half. this should be more than sufficient to "test before buying". So you'll need to make up another excuse for stealing stuff.

you're welcome.

The one thing I fear - more prosecutions

[SengirV]

How many of us have receipts for the music we purchased years ago? I've given/thrown/sold away most of my CDs I could once I ripped my CD collection. Once my collection goes in the cloud, and the powers that be match some of my songs to be EXACTLY the same as some other people, I'm sure there is a chance I get a knock on the door asking me to produce the receipt for the song(s) in question, as well as all the other songs in my collection. If I can't, then BOOM, I"m getting sued.

This is going to a be a prosecuting attorney's wet dream - Everyone's music collection to sift through, in order to find similar songs and thus, people to prosecute.

I don't see how this is going to end well for the users of this service.

Re:The one thing I fear - more prosecutions

[Anonymous Coward]

If you throw/give/sell your CD, you can't keep your digital copies. Period.

Re:The one thing I fear - more prosecutions

[EastCoastSurfer]

Great conspiracy and all, but just not going to happen. Apple has paid the labels in order to do the matching. I'm guessing the contract with the labels has some terms that specifically prevents the labels from attempting to use any of this data to go after people. Think about it. If Apple lets the labels go after users then their iCloud is dead hours after the first lawsuit.

This isn't about Apple being altruistic, it's about Apple wanting to do whatever it takes to move people into the iCloud (and of course start those 24.99/year fees).

Re:The one thing I fear - more prosecutions

[SengirV]

I'd like to see the contract. My guess is that the suing won't begin for quite a while. Not until lots of people have already moved their collections over.

A little offtopic, but I felt it appropriate

[Sparx139]

Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA

But deep in your heart you know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a permanent scar
'Cause you start out stealing songs and then you're robbing liquor stores
And sellin' crack and runnin' over school kids with your car

So don't download this song
The record store's where you belong
Go and buy the CD like you know that you should
Oh, don't download this song

Oh, you don't wanna mess with the R-I-double-A
They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R
It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven year old girl
They'll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are

So don't download this song
Don't go pirating music all day long
Go and buy the CD like you know that you should
Oh, don't download this song

Don't take away money from artists just like me
How else can I afford another solid gold Hum-Vee
And diamond-studded swimming pools
These things don't grow on trees
So all I ask is, "Everybody, please..."

Don't donwload this song (Don't do it, no, no)
Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong (You can just ask him)
Go and buy the CD like you know that you should (You really should)
Oh, don't download this song

Don't donwload this song (Oh please, don't you do it)
Or you might wind up in jail like Tommy Chong (Remember Tommy)
Go and buy the CD (Right now) like you know that you should (Go out and buy it)
Oh, don't download this song

Don't download this song (No, no, no, no, no, no)
You'll burn in hell before too long (and you'll deserve it)
Go and buy the CD (Just buy it) like you know that you should (You cheap bastard)
Oh, don't download this song

Pirate is defined as ...

[mix77]

What?

Don't Fall For It

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a trap! They'll run reports to find the users with the most "upgraded" songs and will cross-reference each song's fingerprint hash or md5sums to fabricate a piracy timeline of which users have identical illegal songs and build a picture of how pirated songs proliferate; ready to show to a paid-for judge.

Re:Don't Fall For It

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly- if I had any downloaded songs in my library I sure as hell wouldn't let Apple and the RIAA scan it, unless they had a crystal clear indemnification. Hell I may not let them scan them with that anyway- I don't want my legal rips to get caught up in some major push that results in me being the defendant in a frivolous lawsuit.

Re:Don't Fall For It

[ColdWetDog]

Exactly- if I had any downloaded songs in my library I sure as hell wouldn't let Apple and the RIAA scan it, unless they had a crystal clear indemnification. Hell I may not let them scan them with that anyway- I don't want my legal rips to get caught up in some major push that results in me being the defendant in a frivolous lawsuit.

Boy, I think I'm gonna figure out who makes the majority of tin foil in this country and buy some stock. Hats are going on right and left!

Article Author is a giant FAIL

[Greymoon]

Any article that has the phrase "who illegally download music" as part of it's mantra is a FAIL. Downloading music is not illegal. Distributing copyrighted material without permission/license or ownership of said material is illegal. Get it right David Glance, Director Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia or STFU. Your bullshit don't fly.

Re:Article Author is a giant FAIL

[GauteL]

"Any article that has the phrase "who illegally download music" as part of it's mantra is a FAIL. Downloading music is not illegal. Distributing copyrighted material without permission/license or ownership of said material is illegal. "

Apple is a global company and Slashdot is a globally used (albeit US-centric) website, so comments that assume that everyone live in their jurisdiction is a FAIL. There are plenty of places around the globe where downloading music IS illegal and have been for at least a few years.

Re:Article Author is a giant FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the author just further qualified the music downloading; downloading from jamendo.com or archive.org is often perfectly legal. What he said is just short for "download music for which they do not have permission/license or ownership".

I don't like ad hominem "attacks" but:

Originally a physiologist working in the area of vascular control mechanisms in pregnancy,

Professor Glance's research interests are in health informatics, public health and software engineering.

So let's just assume that the associate professor is speaking on personal title. That being said, he does have a point. If your source material isn't legal, the iCloud copy isn't legal either - it's just a matter of proof. Will Apple retain the information the client sends to identify the tracks it finds? I wouldn't be surprised if they do (this might be part of the deal they made with the labels). So if their log files identify the music as C:\downloads\music\jean-michel-jarre.-.oxygene.(1976).[FLAC.CUE.LOG.COVERS]-.-SlashDotters\01-jean-michel-jarre.-.-oxygene-part-1.flac you still might have something to explain. It's a bit like showing up at the airport with a suitcase full of dollar bills; you have to prove you got this legitimately (guilty until proven innocent) or its forfeit.

RIAA Field Day?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you owned thousands of pirated tracks would you really want to open your computer so someone with close ties to all 3 major labels can scan each and every one?

Re:RIAA Field Day?

[keytoe]

If you owned thousands of pirated tracks would you really want to open your computer so someone with close ties to all 3 major labels can scan each and every one?

Who cares?

Long Answer: There is nothing in copyright law that states that owning a copy of some media, no matter the origin, is illegal. There are plenty of provisions to restrict copying, distribution or alteration - but nothing about possession.

You will note that all of the RIAA cases brought to court to date were explicitly about 'sharing music' and not about 'downloading music' or 'having music'. There is a reason.

There is no stream

[SuperKendall]

The other part was the streaming service. It would read your local files and match them to files that are up in the iCloud. You can then stream those files for an annual fee.

For the annual fee you do not stream them; that enables you to download the songs to any device or computer with the same iCloud account.

After the first year I'll simply cancel and I'll just keep my downloaded DRM free AAC files.

iTunes Match is really a lot more useful for people buying CD's (or with a ton of existing songs), so they will not have to upload them all the time... so all are missing the point that it's a huge migration plan to get even more people using iTunes.

Well...

[fitten]

1. "Access" a lot of music
2. Use Matching to get iTunes versions of it
3. Delete original set of music
4. RIAA has to prove that your music files aren't legit.

Useful:

I ripped those CDs and the original CD was
a) destroyed
b) stolen
c) thrown into the sun by Superman
d) all of the above
and no, I don't have receipts for them because I threw the receipts away and paid in cash so no credit card records.

Does it come with a "new" license?

[torako]

I feel like the copies you can download from iTunes via the Match feature are in the same boat legally as rips from CDs, i.e. if you have the physical CD or a legal download, it's legal, otherwise it's just as illegal as if you had a torrented copy. I might be totally wrong, of course, but that's how I understand the situation.

What is the saying?

[Tarlus]

There's a very famous saying by an certain Mr. Ackbar.

I think it describes at least some pirates' attitude about the situation.

Re:What is the saying?

[ginbot462]

It's crap?

Apple have never cared about customers ...

[Anonymous Coward]

why start now?

They implemented fire wire and then decided it was useless and removed it from machines.
they decided no one needed a floppy drive and removed it from machines.
they decided that the 10.6 OS required every software developer to rediesgn exsiting software if they wanted to run correctly, requiring consumers to purchase yet another expensive version of software.

why would anyone not expect to get a letter from Apple and/or MAFIAA saying something like
"You recently matched your music library using iCloud. We were unable to verify the legitimacy of 7250 of the 8000 files you attempted to match. Please use this form to pay us $0.99 per song or face prosecution."

I can totally see this happening.

Backups?

[AntEater]

If someone was pirating music I would expect that they'd go for some lossless format such as flac rather than garbage mp3s so I don't see where this would be that enticing from that perspective. I'm probably pretty strange since I have a music collection of about 1300 albums and none of which were pirated. I'm interested in this service purely as a backup. $25/year for reasonable quality backups for my 130GB collection is not a bad deal.

Re:Backups?

[ColdWetDog]

You can't, like, get a USB hardrive for $100 and copy the files and make your own backup? You say you haven't done this yet?

Hand in your card, please.

Re:Backups?

[jedidiah]

I was making backups of my MP3 collection with optical media before there was any Apple branded store to buy music from.

It's only a backup if you can get your original back. That's clearly not the intent of this service.

Re:Backups?

[UnknowingFool]

He didn't say he hasn't. Like me, he may consider this service as offsite backup.

Re:Backups?

[AntEater]

yes, off-site.

Mismatch

[HTH NE1]

It can be worse. What if Apple matches your copy with the Greatest Hits version, which may have verses omitted? What if your copy has profanities intact and you get "I want to ____ you like an animal" back? Even perusing the copies of "Brimful of Asha" on iTunes, only one of Cornershop's releases available on iTunes was at the correct pitch and duration; all the others are slightly accelerated. (It is apparently quite common for songs be time-compressed to fit the media.) I doubt many would want to risk losing their rare studio tracks by having them replaced with the common mass-media release. Your vinyl rip of Buckner & Garcia's Pac-Man Fever album could be replaced with the CD remastering since Apple doesn't carry ripped vinyl.

Judging by how often iTunes gets downloaded album art completely wrong, I'm not sure I'd want them replacing my content with what they think they have matched by audio fingerprint.

Re:Mismatch

[ColdWetDog]

That's probably the most cogent argument against iCloud that I've heard. And you well may be correct. However, I doubt that the Standard Consumer Unit would really understand that argument or care. Anyone more technically inclined would, ahem, make a backup of the data that they were sending to some giant black box in the sky.

Wouldn't they?

Re:Mismatch

[Em Adespoton]

...who said anything about replacing? You don't have to toss your old copy when you get the new one.

Re:Mismatch

[jaysones]

I'm curious about this too. People seem to think that this is where Apple's purchase of Lala will come in. I never used that service so I can't comment on it but apparently it was good at solving this problem.

I don't want forgiveness

[Stormwatch]

I hate the music industry. I hate their unethical behavior. I hate how they bully people. I hate how they cater to the lowest common denominator. I hate how they try to shove crap down our throats. I don't want any "forgiveness" or "amnesty" bullshit. I WANT THEM DEAD.

The studios got paid for the "amnesty"

[Quila]

Hundreds of millions of dollars up front by Apple, and they will probably get a big chunk of that $25.

I'm okay with it. I have a huge music library that I started ripping in the 90s from 128 kb MP3 to 160 kb AAC, and this is a perfect chance for an across-the-board upgrade to 256 kb AAC. Plus all the metadata should get cleaned up.

Rotational Velocidensity

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're worrying about the mass-to-volume of a velociraptor I think the quality of of our digital audio content is the least of our concern.

The actual limit is 25k songs

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor point, but nonetheless.

http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

Also, it's not really clear, but if that's annually, can you convert 25k this year, and then a different 25k the next year?

Or are the initial 25k always "flagged" in some way by Apple?

More importantly, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...how much of this trickles down to the artists? I bet I know the answer, but wanted to ask anyway...

Don't think download, think streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

In Apple's iCloud advertising, they only use the term "download" in respect to (1) downloading new music purchased through the iTunes Store to all of your devices, and (2) downloading music previously purchased through the iTunes Store to your devices.

With respect to the $25-a-year iTunes Match service, they use the terms "iCloud library" and "listening". This tends to make me think that the $25 a year only gets you streaming access to songs that you can show that you own (or that you can fool the machine into believing that you own). If your copy of the song was illegal, it's still illegal, and when you stop paying the $25-a-year, your access to the streaming version is cut off.

Music selection is too limited for me...

[raynet]

The problem for me in this system is that iTunes music store doesn't seem to offer much of the music I like to listen to in their selection. And to make things worse, from all the music they have available, they only allow me to access a limited section based on the country I live in. I guess I'll keep downloading J-Pop/J-Rock until the silly copyright region enforcement is dropped.

Re:Music selection is too limited for me...

[stewbacca]

18 million songs and you don't like their selection. Good luck with other legitimate services.

Re:Music selection is too limited for me...

[raynet]

Yeah, I tried Spotify and managed to find 5 songs I really liked. There was few songs to listen to if I allowed myself to listen to a-ok songs, like some of Pink Floyd's production. Japanese iTunes music store did have some songs I could listen to, but ofcourse I am not allowed to download those. I guess my music taste just isn't mainstream enough. That might explain why I only own total of 18 music CDs :)

Re:Music selection is too limited for me...

[Riktov]

You know, I think The Onion needs to update their classic article about the man who doesn't own a TV with a new one about the Area Man who constantly mentions that there is absolutely nothing on iTunes that meets his oh-so-eclectic musical tastes. (As well as the Area Man who constantly mentions that he's not on Facebook and franky doesn't understand what's so interesting about it.)

Re:Music selection is too limited for me...

[raynet]

Maybe, but I just say that the iTunes Store is very limited atleast in Finland, it didn't even include the complite works of Mike and Sally Oldfield, Jarre, Vangelis and many other of my favorite artists. And ofcourse doesn't include any Japanese artists. Couple years back we had some (as in thousand or two) iTunes vouchers to spend (they were gonna expire the next day, leftovers from an advertising campaing) and I really really struggled to use all my 50-100 song vouchers.

iTunes Match 'annual fee' ?

[darkjohnson]

As I recall this fee Apple is charging is an annual one. What happens when the year is up? (I've not found this info anywhere yet) Do they turn off access to cloud stash? Also, from what I can tell, other than the improved bit rate - it's just a convenience fee to save you time uploading your library to the cloud (if you have a large library) but that you can't (yet) stream the music from the cloud like you can Google or Amazon, it has to be downloaded back to you device. Not being that much of an audio freak, I'll just copy it directly to my device, I don't carry around my full library anyway. Unless they can convince me otherwise, this seems about as useful as MobileMe or Ping.

Launder? More like "repair"

[Anonymous Coward]

Launder music files? More like repair and reconfigure.

Music manager applications build databases by reading the id3 tags in the files. If these tags are not consistent and complete, the files are next to useless because you can't find and play them. Inbound music files have to be examined with a tool like mediainfo and corrected if necessary with a tool like kid3. "License" and proprietary encoder tags are useless cruft, delete all fields. And of course, you have to set replay gain tags if you intend the music to be used in playlists or compiled collections.

You also have to "launder" music that arrives in the form of full album ape or flac files, using tools like ffmpeg, cuebreakpoints, shnsplit, shntag, etc. unless your intent is to just burn a CD. Lossless audio files that appear to be OK may be encoded at an exotic sample rate that only a few players can handle, and some may have excess tracks that should be discarded or mixed down; mediainfo identifies these cases and ffmpeg transcodes quickly and accurately.

Yes, they do actually. Their customers are happy..

[Brannon]

...you aren't happy--but you also aren't an Apple customer.

See how that works?

iCloud not just storage

[stewbacca]

People WILL upload their peer-to-peer copies of music to iCloud, not to legitimize their copy, but to use iCloud to sync it to all their other devices. And by "people" I mean "me".

um, i share,

[Anonymous Coward]

so tell me again why i need steve and the cloud