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Apple Says It Doesn't Know Why iTunes Users Are Losing Their Music Files (theverge.com)
Earlier this month, an Apple Music user James Pinkstone claimed that the online music streaming service deleted 122GB of music from his library for no apparent reason. Several Slashdot readers noted they had also faced a similar issue or knew someone who had. The iPhone maker has now acknowledged a bug in iTunes that is apparently causing the glitch, however, it adds that it doesn't really know why "some" users are facing this issue. The Verge reports: The company confirmed that "in an extremely small number of cases, users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission." However, Apple was unable to reproduce the bug, indicating it doesn't really know what's going on here. The company adds: We're taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we're releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.
The person in question is a composer. Further a large amounts of their music is in wav versus compressed audio formats to serve as a master of their work.
Thirty four characters live here.
At one point I calculated it would take a full month of 24/7 listening to go through all of my 80GB of audio files, so yeah, we are talking several weeks worth of music here.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'll have you know I could listen to my collection in only about 4.5 years. Assuming I never slept.
If I fed different streams to each ear and had my corpus callosum severed I could get through it in just over 2.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Blatantly obvious and sometimes severely annoying bugs go on for years and years and years in apple products and on the apple forums without any fixes. They don't care about reliability because bug fixes can't be sold by marketing.
Based on the contents of my 24/96 FLAC folder it averages about 1.2GB/hour. Getting into the hundreds of GB is very doable.
Try MythTV. Although it is really a DVR of sorts, it is also a good music player and cataloguer. If you have your music ripped and tagged proper then this program is pretty nifty.
They're really claiming that they don't know why this is happening?
Note to iTunes software engineers: grep through your code and find all calls to delete(). Investigate the code in those areas. If you can't add some basic debug code - or if you're unsure of what "grep" is - maybe you should consider a move to management.
Try foobar2000, it's minimalist with a low memory footprint and doesn't bog down with large collections in my experience.
If you didn't rip the music with Apple software then when you install iTunes it scans your computer for music it didn't rip and will delete it.
Oh, bullshit. There has never been any such "feature" in iTunes. We're dealing with bugs here, not DRM conspiracies.
I set up an NFS share and use Moode (Rune Audio is another fork) on a Raspberry Pi. This has solved my home audio streaming issues. It will take awhile to load a library that big, but it's a one-time thing.
There's really no point in 96khz ever. You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture. Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's, which means that extra information is effectively just wasted space. 24 bits per sample is also a waste unless you work in a studio type environment and are working with a master copy that you intend on mixing, however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
iTunes has never done what you've said, it is a blatant lie.
You can have it scan directories and it will move files, but it has never identified files as "illegitimate" and deleted them.
What it needs is a really efficient indexing system, client code written by someone with experience using moby datasets and a decent UI to navigate the hierarchy. All the packages I've used so far are miserable, caching nothing and constantly rescanning the server. Understandable for low RAM devices, but nothing is really 'low RAM' these days.
I've considered writing it myself, but figure it has to be a common enough problem. It's worth asking if anybody found a good solution.
Where are you? I'm in N Cal, Sacramento area. It's a good day to copy it at USB3 portable drive speeds. I can just make the copy and swap you for a blank drive.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
i don't care about your corpus callosum. maybe you should take better care of it?
mpd.
lots of cclients to pick from.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
tl;dr; its not about hearing, its about working with DAC chipsets, spdif and i2s inputs, and also brickwall filtering and post DAC i/v stages.
you are somewhat right, but you don't know everything...
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
That's why you'll want 24-bit for a studio master, because it gives you more room to adjust the individual samples and splice audio streams without hearing any kind of pop or static when it's re-sampled back to 16-bit. However going above 44khz still remains pointless, even for that purpose.
Here's Nyquist sampling theorem 101:
Strictly speaking, the theorem only applies to a class of mathematical functions having a Fourier transform that is zero outside of a finite region of frequencies. Intuitively we expect that when one reduces a continuous function to a discrete sequence and interpolates back to a continuous function, the fidelity of the result depends on the density (or sample rate) of the original samples. The sampling theorem introduces the concept of a sample rate that is sufficient for perfect fidelity for the class of functions that are bandlimited to a given bandwidth, such that no actual information is lost in the sampling process. It expresses the sufficient sample rate in terms of the bandwidth for the class of functions. The theorem also leads to a formula for perfectly reconstructing the original continuous-time function from the samples.
Even considering the editing example, if you were to splice two audio streams together, or even mix or transform them, the only reason you'd need more than 44khz is if for some reason you MUST go above 22khz because the intended listener can hear above that range, like say for example you wanted to create a lullaby for your dog, who can hear higher than that. In which case, you'd want to keep it at above 44khz even with the final (mass distributed) copy. However if humans are your intended listening target, there's never a reason to go above that, even for the purposes of mastering.
Or to put it another way, going above 44khz is every bit as silly as using wooden knobs and gold plated Ethernet cables in order to improve audio quality.
my collection is only 215 gigs, but foobar2000 can search and sort it practically instantaneously, and i see no reason to expect it to choke on 5-25x as much data.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Let's start measuring our book collections in cubic meters.
Or board feet per fortnight. Or maybe thickness versus color scale.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Ok, even when doing that, there's still no use for going above 44khz. 24-bit? Maybe, but only if you're doing some serious editing/mixing and want to eliminate sound artifacts (i.e. pops) from the final copy.
one more bit of info that you have obviously not thought about. maybe this will be of general interest to geeks.
some hardware can't accept higher samplerates. I have a crossover that 'stops' at 96k via its spdif-in. this is not uncommon.
some audio files are being released in 176k and 192k and even other stuff, dsd being one. I need to re-code such files if I am to send them digitally to my playback system.
having the CONSUMER files (not masters, but stuff you and I get) be as high res as possible, in both directions (time and amplitude) makes any resampling much better. I can downsample 176.4 to my 96k (or 44.1k) limit and have ok sounding files, done on the fly, for my mostly-digital playback system (I try to keep things as digital 'numbers' for as long as possible, just before the final D/A phases).
yes, most people don't need that. it does not really hurt, though. 16 bits did not convey enough dyn range to allow digital volume control to be useful (past, say, -10db down). with 24 bits, you -can- do digital volume control a lot further down before the s/n ruins things.
on the wire, 16bit vs 24 bit takes no extra space; as the extra 8 bits were already just header bits and crap that was not needed, anyway. going from 44.1 to 96 does take up more wire bandwidth but even simple opto toslink blocks and - mostly - handle 96k.
clock recover at the higher bitrates is also more reliable than resynthing clock from, say, 44.1 streams.
anyway, most of the reasons are tech and not about human hearing.
fwiw
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
read further, young padawan.
there's more to it.
lots of bad hype and bad info; and that confuses the issue. but once you remove the bad info, the good info does make sense.
i2s, spdif, receiver chips, dac chips, file processing and DSP on the files.
if I'm going to 'do things' to photo files, I do it at raw and full bit depth. well, audio is becoming like that and even vol control is a dsp math operation. you want high bit depth for doing math on files.
what I agree with you on is: at the final stage, you COULD pump out audio at 44.1k rate and even at 16bit res, once all the maths are done. but there's no harm in leaving the vol-controlled or eq-fixed audio in high bit rate. dacs and stuff like it that way and there's just no down side to leaving it in high res format.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
http://www.cnet.com/forums/dis...
http://9to5mac.com/2014/12/03/...
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/0...
It appears they have in several iterations over the years. The GP is likely conflating several instances but i cannot find fault with it. I am somewhat concerned about your strict denial without even a simple Google search that brought up the links i posted and more.
iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.
No. 'Library of Congress' remains the standard unit for book collections.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Offtopic?
Perhaps.
Finding a good music player is exactly 'On topic' when discussing iTunes IMHO.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's cute. When you're a DJ, 44khz isn't enough. 16 bits is fine. Do you know why? Should I bother telling you?
It has to do with that Fourier transform thing. When you have two different tracks that are in different keys and have different tempos, you need more samples than 44khz to do the pitch and tempo shifting to match the two tracks.
Keep feeling smug, though. Clearly I must be wrong.
He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."
I don't think anything I said conflicts with any of that. Go to your comment 'volume control is a DSP math operation' for example: Consider if your source started at a low bit rate but you needed to i.e. increase the volume. What do you get? Basically a lot of noise that sounds like static, kind of like 80's era cassette tapes when played at higher volume. Hence using a higher bit rate makes sense for that application.
But again as I stated, higher sample rate (NOT bit rate, these are two different things) is pointless for any application. Why? Quite simply, the Nyquist limit.
Then iTunes sent me to look for my music. I suppose I am guilty of skipping a few of the many iTunes version updates.
Actually, there is a very good reason. Anything above half the sample frequency will create aliases in the hearable range. To prevent that, you must use a low-pass filter to remove those higher frequencies but low pass filters are not perfect. They begin cutting before their set frequency. You can use multiple low pass filters, but then you introduce other distortions. Keep in mind, these are analog filters.
So high quality gear is sensitive well into the ultrasonic and uses a cutoff high enough that they begin cutting the signal above the threshold of hearing and so the cutoff is in the ultrasonic range. The sample rate needs to be double that frequency.
Consumer grade gear such as CDs use a "brick wall" cutoff and sample at 44K knowing that the audio won't typically be further mixed and that very few people have headphiones that go anywhere near a frequency response that would reveal the distortions, but that's consumer gear.
Actually 96 kHz makes sense in a mixing setting too if you're altering the pitch of a recording like autotune, then you're effectively stretching/compressing the samples causing interpolation errors in the time domain not just the amplitude. But yes for a final mix 48kHz/44.1kHz is enough, though since both systems are in use another advantage is that you can get perfect sound both for a 44.1 kHz CD and a 48 kHz soundtrack for a movie while a conversion between them would be slightly lossy. But to audiophiles "studio grade" has become a thing like "military grade" is to crypto.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just like they didnt know why 'some of users laptops GPU died' for almost 4 years before admitting fault and reluctantly being forced to a recall.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
From what I read from those links you posted was music being deleted from the apple devices them self (iPod) when music was put on them through other software or that was using a hacked version of apple's DRM. I actually remember that Real Networks had figured out a way to put a hacked version of apple's DRM on music purchased from them in order to keep their music protected while still being compatible with apple's devices. Apple was able to detect this. But from what I recall and what those links say, it did not hut through the computer and delete them. It would remove them from the device or inform the user of the music with invalid DRM and ask them to restore the device. I have never seen or heard of iTunes simply deleting MP3s or any other audio (or even video) format for simply not having been ripped by it.
CD audio sampling rate is exactly the same as vinyl quadraphonic encoding rate. They selected it in an attempt to make it possible to put an old school analog quad signal on the CD. They never did though, good choice, just use 4 digital tracks.
Must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Weasel words. When I worked in support, if something failed 100% of the time we officially described the problem as "under some circumstances...".
He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."
Except it doesn't move them to the iTunes library - it copies them. So unless you delete the originals yourself, you've got another copy of the file... but I can imagine a lot of people would do exactly that, because why would you want two copies on your computer?
I am not really sure how much I agree or disagree with the gp post. People do need to take some responsibility, and we tech-heads know better than most what can go wrong with tech. But most people aren't like us; and all of these companies sell their hardware and software with the message that it'll magically take care of everything for you - Apple perhaps more than most (it "just works"), although Google and Microsoft are certainly not hubris-free.
#DeleteChrome
My music collection is almost exactly that size, most of it originally bought on CD over about twenty years. If I was to play all of it non-stop, it would take about 80 days.
As others have pointed out, the person in question is a composer, so I expect a lot of his collection would be recordings of his own compositions, at the highest available quality (uncompressed or losslessly compressed). There might be multiple takes or versions of them. If he recorded them as multitrack recordings (each performer or instrument is recorded into a separate file, so he can mix and edit later), that really adds up. 192kbit/s MP3 occupies about 1.5 megabytes per minute. Uncompressed 96kHz 24-bit audio occupies about 15 megabytes per minute in mono, double that for stereo.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.
I suspect he had iTunes to listen to shit he bought, and pro-grade software to deal with his own compositions, but a) as a composer the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person, and b) it's not unlikely iTunes found his work stash all by itself, and then when he clicked the wrong dialogue on the "cleaning space" screen it decided "why does he need 6 separate versions of this one song we have on the iTunes cloud" and deleted his originals.
I routinely have 250gb of music files and projects on my working laptop. As a musician I keep that much music. My iTunes library is about 10gb though. So it's not totally uncalled for that someone would have a huge amount of music if they are a composer.
Here's the thing: In modern music production, there's a lot of processing that goes on in the box, and outside the realm of human hearing. Working at higher resolutions and bitrates that are outside the spectrum of human hearing can make a big difference. There are good reasons that 24-bit 128khz is a standard resolution for professional music production. Of course, the file that's going to be distributed won't be at that resolution, but during production, it helps.
For example, with a high-quality EQ plugin, or delay, you can hear an audible difference if it's printing at 96khz than at 44.1khz.
It's the same reason movies are shot in HD even though they might eventually viewed at 480i. Because stuff has to be done to that signal before it gets to you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apple admitted there is a problem, and that "some" users were affected.
When you take into account Apples tendency to pretend there are never any issues, and silence everyone who tries to talk about them, and when they finally do say anything they downplay it to the extreme, this immediately makes me think it's a HUGE problem they can't suppress simply because they admitted it happens and there were actual users that got nailed.
(Is that an award length run on sentence, or does it not even qualify?)
Personally I banned itunes from my machines back when they started taking over other things and installing unwanted shovelware on the box without even asking permission. There are plenty of alternatives, even if they don't access the itunes store.
More important, all those digital processing tools that are in the chain, from EQs to delays and dynamics processors and pitch correction, etc can most definitely tell the difference between a 16-bit signal and a 24-bit signal.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You just gave me an idea.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because if we can label enough things as PC we can fulfill our claim that there's much PC.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I have been noticing some random iTunes tracks disappearing, much to my annoyance when I want to listen a specific album. Well, as a savy user, I kept thinking it was my fault, that I somehow made some mistake when importing the tracks. Apple owes some kind of apology and compensation to those users affected. Especially since it's going to be very hard to identify which specific tracks iTunes has deleted.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
Or if you were Commander Data, you could listen to 900 of them simultaneously and get through it in half a day. :)
This seems like neither a bug nor a DRM conspiracy, just a typical iTunes misfeature. Some dumb manager at Apple had a little scrum with four other guys who hadn't slept in a week.
"We paid a lot of cash for these streaming licenses and we're barely using them! Why should our customers have their hard drives clogged with music files they can just stream from here? It just makes them run out of disk space trying to install the next version of iTunes, which means we get complaints from our product support team! Now fix it, and if it's not done by sunrise I'll cut your balls off."
These two videos are an excellent introduction to audio signal theory.
Highly recommended to all readers enjoying this thread.
If they really don't know, then they've got to be incompetent. It's not enough to say what they are incompetent at, but at least at quality control.
Of course, they could be lying about not knowing, or the spokesman could be kept intentionally ignorant.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The classic case for things going wrong was when you plugged your iPod into someone else's computer.
It could go wrong in a few different ways. Either iTunes would sync to the iPod and accept the *iPod* as the master copy, thus deleting all of that person's music from their computer. Or it would go the other way, and wipe the iPod and sync up the song (or whatever else) was selected from that person's computer.
There was basically no way to just mix and match files (like every other portable player) without using 3rd party software.
I thought this was common knowledge, among my friends at the time it was well known to *never* plug your iPod into someone else's computer or bad things would happen...
Well, that truly sucks then. Thank God I've never used the iTunes store. I feel bad for those users who are affected. I know I'd be more than upset.
i've never really used apple products, but my wife does the macbook iphone thing. we've had two experiences with it randomly deleting her shit.
first time (this was about a year ago, not sure what itunes version):
she got a new iphone, all was well. we wiped the old iphone. one day she dug up her old iphone, and decided to start using it to play music in her car. plugged it into the macbook.
itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files.
plugged her new phone in, it acted as if it had never seen it before, and asked if she'd like to sync. it then deleted all of the music on her new phone as well.
second time:
she'd been using iphoto to organize all of her pictures (many thousands of them)
fired up iphoto one morning, and all of her shit was gone, it was like she'd never used iphoto in the first place.
no sign of the monolithic 'iphoto store' file, or anything. no original pictures. gone.
there are two things my wife loves, pictures and music, and it systematically fucked her entire collection without warning. unfortunately many of these items had not been backed up. these are just my observations, i don't know why it would do these things, and i don't care. i no longer trust that peice of shit operating system or any of its devices, and i use incremental backups of her entire laptop using rsync now (not time machine, i don't trust it either)
I could never quite comprehend the shear insanity of designing your software to delete the user's files with no warning or confirmation. I think it's unique, even among Apple apps that love to manage your stuff for you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
+1 for Foobar2000. I have 167GB of music and Foobar is pretty much instant. You could also set up a mini-server using Daphile which lets you control playback over a web interface or Logitech client. Both have options for bit-perfect playback. Nice toys.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture.
That is wrong. Double sampling frequency is the minimu you need to sample the signal. It is not enough to reproduce it accurately. How do you come to that idiotic idea?
Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's
That is nonsense, too.
Everyone can hear if a 16kHz base tone has a 32kHz and/or a 64kHz overtone added ir not. You don't need to be able to 'hear' 32kHz or 64kHz to notice if the sound is mixed in or not.
however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
A person like you, on a consumer device, likely not. But from proffesional sound engineers it is expected that they can.
No idea where you got your nonsense from ... plenty of the anove is common sense. You don't need a physics degree to graps that.
I really doubt anyone can actually hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit samples. The distinction and use comes in when mixing multiple samples together to preserve maximum accuracy in the result. (And yes, I have professional studio gear) You might also use higher resolution like 32bit+ these days because it's possible.
The frequency range of human hearing is more interesting, have you ever listened to music on studio gear for longer periods of time?
Apple has too many managers who suck at product design. They're also spooked that iTunes for Windows is the only Apple program that gets installed on PCs, so they try to cram as much crap as possible into it.
Don't these people ever go home and realize that everyone in their family is bewildered by iTunes? "Hey, I just updated my iTunes and the UI is all different- how do I play music now?" "I don' know, I'll ask so-and-so on Monday."
speaking as I have an over 4 TB music collection,(luckily, I've kept every cd I ever bought, except a few stinkers, and ripped them as original .wav file using EAC or CDparanoia) audacious does a good job of playing everything I throw at it, except some of my very first .wav's I ripped or composed back in the early 90's, before MP3 was out.
Of course, back then I only had a 10 Meg hard drive, so I could only rip 5-10 second pieces of music from Cd's... but it's still funny as hell when Joe Walsh's intro to Meadows pops up inverted (I ripped the first 10 seconds where he does his vocal theatrics, then reversed it)..
now, if you want to include mp4/mkv video files, then you'll need to go to VLC, it seems to handle my 24 TB film collection being served as UPnP via mediatomb just fine.
just because xx size is overkill to you, doesn't mean someone else doesn't have a valid reason why they need it.
p.s. I also rsync (always using append) my entire collection over to two different backup servers on a weekly basis... to lose everything I've ever done on computer from music, to film, to documents, to photos, to .... would be catastrophic.
p.p.s. fuck Itunes. Never used it, even when I had an Ipod, it was always a bloated piece of crap. It sure was a PITA to hack the Ipod to install an os that allowed me to drag and drop music files on it, instead of that Itunes bullshit filesystem (those who know, know, those who don't, just ignore this)
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
You've got it mostly right, but not completely right. Any sort of digital manipulation introduces noise into the audio stream due to the nature of floating-point math. The more accuracy (or "headroom") you have in both domains (frequency and amplitude), the closer the final mix will be to the original waveform. That's why many studio engineers use 24bit / 192khz source material... not because you can actually hear any difference in the original source, but because it preserves the pristine quality of the source longer as it moves through arbitrary numbers of digital filters and mixing stages.
It's moderately useful for masters as you stated, because those masters can still be digitally manipulated without introducing any additional audible artifact. As indicated by vel-ex-tech, you actually do need additional samples for clean pitch or tempo shifting, but I wouldn't call that a typical "consumer" application.
Of course, for consumer tracks (simple listening), it's utterly pointless, much like the ridiculous Pono player. No one can actually hear the difference, and nearly all reputable double-blind studies confirm this. It's just a "bigger numbers are better" fetish among audiophiles or people who don't understand the science of audio. And frankly, the "loudness wars" have actually decreased the require dynamic range for most consumer music by pumping up the volume and compressing the shit out of it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You can hear it when you play with the volume, or listen to typical artifacts.
Ofc you don't here it when some transformation process calcs it down to 16 from 24 to simply make the output in the amplifier. But it is a huge difference if a hobbyist plays with sounds on 16 bit level and plays the end results or if you process the same sounds with 24 bits and only transform them to 16 bit in the final stage.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
When itunes became a thing I was already an avid fan of winamp. I used it to manage all of my music and edit tags as needed. I think I tried itunes once because, well why not, but something about it scared me. Either all the software it was installing on top of it or I was too afraid of it screwing up all my id3tags. Though I never expected it to actually delete your music. Considering the number of unreleased and white labels, I could see it screwing up all my music.
any application
Unless you're a DJ. After shifting that track an octave and a half down and slowing that other track down about 50 bpm or so to match, you're really going to wish you had those extra samples. This is an exercise you can do on your own with free software like Audacity. Get a piece of music. Two exercises. 1.) Lower its pitch without affecting its tempo by at least an octave. 2.) Lower its tempo without affecting its pitch by at least 30 bpm. Both of these exercises should give you a hint what will happen if lower by more. It will sound like shit. You will quickly see that those extra samples you think are only for "audiophiles" really do come in handy.
Now, what's truly confusing to me about your posts is that you seem to believe that you need more than 16 bits to adjust volume. If boosting the volume on something with 16 bits makes it sound a worn cassette that's a recording of a recording of a recording, what you're running into is compression. The way a lot of shit gets mastered these days, it's well, shit. You're not getting 16 bits of loudness. You're only getting 5 or 6 bits of loudness at most. At that point, using 24-bit for playback is a soggy band-aid because that waveform that only has 5 bits of loudness with 16-bit is only going to have, what, 7 or 8 bits of loudness in 24-bit.
Please educate yourself. For listening, a 16-bit 44.1khz recording is more than enough. People do more things with recordings than just listen to them in their room or work with them in a big corporate production studio. Well, who knows. You've probably never met a modern live DJ at a bar or rave. They do more than announce the weather and the next few songs like the ones the radio. I doubt an actual DJ would have any reason to wind up in your mom's basement.
Either iTunes would sync to the iPod and accept the *iPod* as the master copy, thus deleting all of that person's music from their computer.
Bullshit. iPod was the hub. The iPad was the copy of all or part of the music on that hub. If you changed the computer an iPod was synced to, then it would reflect the music on the new computer. But no music would be deleted off the old computer, nor the new one. That was not how it works.
Um. Fuck Off all over your apple shaped face I will. Lick the dill, apple shill.
Switched to plex and never looked back. Works streamed to your cell, and then on to a bt stereo in the car also. Joy. Ripping though, I still use itunes, and then move the media to the plex server.
H.
Unless you're a DJ. After shifting that track an octave and a half down and slowing that other track down about 50 bpm or so to match, you're really going to wish you had those extra samples. This is an exercise you can do on your own with free software like Audacity. Get a piece of music. Two exercises. 1.) Lower its pitch without affecting its tempo by at least an octave. 2.) Lower its tempo without affecting its pitch by at least 30 bpm. Both of these exercises should give you a hint what will happen if lower by more. It will sound like shit. You will quickly see that those extra samples you think are only for "audiophiles" really do come in handy.
No, this really won't work the way you think it will. It might make sounds that otherwise have a higher frequency come to within your audible spectrum, however anything that was already in your audible spectrum is inevitably going to sound different. This only has scientific applications, and is otherwise worthless for a DJ.
This all comes down to how fourier transforms work, by the way, which are the basis behind the Nyquist theorem. It's also analogous to making ultra-violet light visible to human eyes.
Now, what's truly confusing to me about your posts is that you seem to believe that you need more than 16 bits to adjust volume. If boosting the volume on something with 16 bits makes it sound a worn cassette that's a recording of a recording of a recording, what you're running into is compression.
That isn't even close to what I was pointing out.
Well, who knows. You've probably never met a modern live DJ at a bar or rave.
On the contrary, I've helped a few develop their tracks.
iTunes never accepted the iPod as a master copy. In fact, one of the main complains about iTunes is there's no way to copy songs off a device. iTunes only copy files to devices (although they eventually added the ability to copy only purchased songs off a device).
iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions
That's an understatement. It's the Nero Burning ROM equivalent [0] from Apple, this vast bloated mass of crap hacked over and over with every imaginable feature ever dreamed up by every marketing manager ever thrown in and partially implemented by different developers without any coherent plan or interface.
[0] According to the Nero web site, Nero Burning Dumpster requires 5GB of disk space to install. 5 fucking gigabytes to burn a CD. I don't know what CDBurnerXP requires for install but the download is 5MB, so Nero is approximately one thousand times the size of my usual app for doing the same thing.
Yes for Nyquist but no in the real world. Nyquist theorem assumes that you have a theoretically perfect ADC and DAC stage with theoretically perfectly filtering. That is not the case. In reality in order to properly filter the HF image post conversion you would need an incredibly sharp impossible to achieve filter just above the audible range. While filtering in the frequency domain is easy enough, doing so sufficiently to avoid distortion but without phase shifts below 20khz is impossible in practice.
The simple solution, increase the sample frequency to give you more headroom. You can do this in the recording stage or you can do this in the digital domain. That's why pretty much every piece of equipment has an oversampling DAC and then does the final conversion at 192khz even if it doesn't take source material with those specs. It makes the following circuit design simpler and does actually make a measurable improvement (arguable if it's audible) within the range of human hearing with no gold plating required.
Exactly. It's like RAW images from your camera.
You don't see any difference between RAW and JPGs until you have to save blown highlights, change contrast/shadows/white balance.
A friend of mine wiped a part of my music collection 10 years ago, when he wanted to copy some mp3s from his ipod to my computer. He installed ITunes and selected "synchronize". Well, it synchronized the Ipod and my computer just fine, deleting all my mp3s that weren't on his Ipod. I had backups and original CDs, but I really couldn't believe how shitty the Ipod/Itunes design was.
I had about 62GB in my music library. iTunes (which i only use to sync music on my iPod) deleted everything except the 10GB or so that was purchased on Apple store. .
I had a huge vinyl/cd collection to start with; when I liked an artist I used to buy the entire discography. So I grew my digital library and saw it as my own private Spotify. Put it on random and it's like a commercial-free radio that will never play Kanye West or Celine Dion.
I have a backup on Glacier and could re-rip stuff if I really wanted, but I probably won't. It's easier to use Google Play Music and it makes my whole iTunes/iPod setup obsolete. Live and learn.
Also: fuck Apple.
lucm, indeed.
The original comment is still there.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No iTunes actually deletes the files. If you want them again you are supposed to redownload them from apple music. But it will also "match" your song to its internal database, and if there is a match then the file doesn't even make it to the cloud, they just serve you the version they have. On top of it, if you stop paying for apple music, you loose access to the files you stored in the cloud.
But, iTunes Match is a completely Opt-In service. Not that losing ones' data is ever cool...
One of the links leads to a story where a guy complains about Apple Music (not mere iTunes). When you subscribe, they actually remove files from your machine and store them in "their cloud", playing you back whichever song they deem a match for your file. And you lose it all when you stop paying.
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com...
lucm, indeed.
iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.
I suspect he had iTunes to listen to shit he bought, and pro-grade software to deal with his own compositions, but a) as a composer the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person, and b) it's not unlikely iTunes found his work stash all by itself, and then when he clicked the wrong dialogue on the "cleaning space" screen it decided "why does he need 6 separate versions of this one song we have on the iTunes cloud" and deleted his originals.
While your comments are kind of off-mark, it did make me think of the "De-Duplication" feature in iTunes. The user has to invoke it manually; but I could see someone doing that without thinking it through, and trashing large sections of their iTunes Library.
Several years back, I made the mistake of checking the option on my iPhone to "sync subscriptions" for podcasts. I later deleted a podcast from my phone, as I was all caught up with it and needed the screen real estate to make looking for other podcasts easier. When I next synced with iTunes, it deleted all past episodes I had stored on my Mac -- years worth of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. No warning, no recycle bin. Gone. And I wasn't backing up audio files via Time Machine because of their size. Hundreds of files gone. I posted on the Apple forums about what a huge hole this was (seriously, deleting hundreds of user files without warning with no undo is a major UX/UI failing). Never any response from Apple. I'm still angry about it. Even if I were to download all those files again (and since they're no longer in the iTunes feed, I would literally have to grab each one from the website, one by one, and then import them into iTunes, which would probably take days of clicking...), I would still have lost the metadata (play dates, counts). Plus there would be considerable bandwidth for both the Escape Pod site and me, in this age of looming data caps...
I'll have you know I could listen to my collection in only about 4.5 years. Assuming I never slept.
If I fed different streams to each ear and had my corpus callosum severed I could get through it in just over 2.
You don't see a correct Corpus Callosum reference everyday. Kudos!
There's really no point in 96khz ever. You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture. Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's, which means that extra information is effectively just wasted space. 24 bits per sample is also a waste unless you work in a studio type environment and are working with a master copy that you intend on mixing, however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
You're wrong. And 16 bits is an even worse restriction.
There's this thing called "aliasing". You might want to look into it.
The devil is literally in the details, or lack thereof, in under-sampled signals. Listen to some music with some percussion instruments like Triangle, Bells, Tambourine, or some Cymbal-Types. I have gotten really sick and tired of 44/16 music with cymbals that sound like escaping steam, and tambourines with aliased "undertones" down into the upper-BASS regions.
That's why I buy my music on DVD-A whenever possible. Even my 60-year-old Male ears can DEFINITELY hear the difference. And as far as the bit-depth goes, whip out an oscilloscope and the Philips Test CD, and watch what happens with the -60 dBm Sine wave. Spoiler alert: It comes out as a SQUARE wave...
How stupid do you have to be to store your data on someone else's system? The cloud is a stupid idea. Store your files on YOUR property, then YOU can make sure it's safe and backed up.
One of the links leads to a story where a guy complains about Apple Music (not mere iTunes). When you subscribe, they actually remove files from your machine and store them in "their cloud", playing you back whichever song they deem a match for your file. And you lose it all when you stop paying.
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com...
This is fast becoming an urban legend. But it just isn't true. Neither iTunes Music nor iTunes Match (two entirely separate services) delete ANYTHING from your computer/iPhone/iPad.
I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.
Oops, forgot a link.
Your logic is impeccable. 'It has never happened to me, so obviously it doesn't happen to anyone'.
By that thought process... I've never been shot, so I can say with authority that shootings never happen.
What it needs is a really efficient indexing system, client code written by someone with experience using moby datasets and a decent UI to navigate the hierarchy. All the packages I've used so far are miserable, caching nothing and constantly rescanning the server. Understandable for low RAM devices, but nothing is really 'low RAM' these days.
I've considered writing it myself, but figure it has to be a common enough problem. It's worth asking if anybody found a good solution.
Where are you? I'm in N Cal, Sacramento area. It's a good day to copy it at USB3 portable drive speeds. I can just make the copy and swap you for a blank drive.
But I really don't like Moby. I only have a couple of his songs...
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
No iTunes actually deletes the files.
My post, and the one to which I was responding, was referring to iTunes ability to search your local computer and add music files to its library on the device. That's a completely different thing than what you're referring to... and it copies rather than moves/deletes the originals.
#DeleteChrome
I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.
I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?
lucm, indeed.
I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.
I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?
No, and if you'd get your head out of your ass, perhaps you would have heard of it. it's Apple's Streaming Service; and although I generally hate streaming services, this is pretty cool. They have the typical "channels", which I ignore; butmwhat is quite unique is that you have unlimited access to virtually the ENTIRE iTunes MUSIC Catalog, with no frickin' AI deciding what you " want" to hear. Just do a MUSIC search in the iTunes Store, click the Play icon, and voila! Even works on cellular (you have to enable that specifically in iOS).
And the Biggest Shill of the Day award goes to you!
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
No iTunes actually deletes the files.
My post, and the one to which I was responding, was referring to iTunes ability to search your local computer and add music files to its library on the device. That's a completely different thing than what you're referring to... and it copies rather than moves/deletes the originals.
And, it isn't automatic, either. It requires opt-in.
I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.
I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?
No, and if you'd get your head out of your ass, perhaps you would have heard of it. it's Apple's Streaming Service; and although I generally hate streaming services, this is pretty cool. They have the typical "channels", which I ignore; butmwhat is quite unique is that you have unlimited access to virtually the ENTIRE iTunes MUSIC Catalog, with no frickin' AI deciding what you " want" to hear. Just do a MUSIC search in the iTunes Store, click the Play icon, and voila! Even works on cellular (you have to enable that specifically in iOS).
That mysterious "iTunes Music" of yours sounds a lot like "Apple Music", except of course that everybody knows that not the entire iTunes store is available on Apple Music. Even Apple marketing, which is famous for bullshit, doesn't lie about it.
Since you're such a big iSheep maybe you have access to a special VIP service called iTunes Music, it could be some kind of reward for being part of the Apple volunteer sales team. I mean, even your Slashdot username is an Apple ad, that's impressive. There's just no way such a dedicated unpaid salesperson would not know the real name of an Apple product and would be so badly misinformed about it.
lucm, indeed.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but doesn't it still matter for artificial waveforms like square waves, since they're a composition of sine waves going up to infinite frequencies?
That mysterious "iTunes Music" of yours sounds a lot like "Apple Music", except of course that everybody knows that not the entire iTunes store is available on Apple Music
My mistake: I read "iTunes Music", and my brain "saw" "Apple Music". Yes, everything I said about "iTunes Music" actually pertains to "Apple Music". My apologies.
Having said that, I didn't "lie" about the "Entire Catalog" being available for streaming through Apple Music. If you will care to read more carefully, I said virtually the entire iTunes MUSIC Catalog is available for streaming through [Apple] Music." A few (very few) of the more "Top of the Pops" songs are not available. These are usually the same ones that are not available for single-song purchase. That isn't Apple's doing. It's the record labels that are controlling what is, and what isn't, available.
But in about 3 months of searching for, and listening to, many, many songs on Apple Music, I have only encountered about one or two songs that were in the Catalog; but weren't available for streaming. So, I consider it a pretty damned good deal to be able to pick and choose what I want to listen to from NEARLY the entire iTunes MUSIC Catalog, instead of having some stupid AI DECIDE FOR ME.
That's where Apple Music whips all over other streaming services; that is if you are in the U.S.A. (I think Apple Music may still be U.S. only). And I am not sure it is available on Android. I run iTunes on my work Win 7 laptop, and it does work there, though.
And no, 16 bits isn't fine for anything more critical than listening to a portable music player on the train.
Uh, yes it is.
16 bits gives ~96dB of dynamic range. That's larger than the difference between a very quiet room (~20dB) and a chainsaw going full tilt at a distance of 1 meter (~110dB). Now tell me, which music do you listen to that actually needs that much dynamic range?
Keep in mind that the average room has about 30dB of background noise, so to use 16 bit audio to its full extent, the peaks would have to be over 126dB. That's louder than the peak SPL at most rock concerts. Considering most popular music is mastered for maybe 5-6dB of dynamic range at the most, and even well-produced classical recordings are somewhere around 20-30dB. There are a few recordings out there with upwards of 40-50dB of dynamic range, but that's about it.
And then you have to take into account that with proper noise-shaping dither, you can move the noise floor to frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, and get an effective dynamic range of over 110dB when taking the studio masters down from 24 bit to 16 bit, anything beyond 16 bit for listening is absolutely ridiculous and a waste of storage space and processing power, even in a very quiet room on a very good stereo.
So please, stop the audiophoolery.
Eat the rich.
You're 60 years old, and you claim to be able to hear the distortion from high-frequency sounds?
First of all, it's exceedingly unlikely that you can even hear anything at all above ~12-14 kHz or so, due to completely normal age-related hearing loss.
Secondly, what you're mentioning has nothing to do with inherent limitations in 44.1 kHz digital audio. It's much more likely to be a result of bad recording practices, bad production or bad equipment on your end.
You say you can DEFINITELY hear the difference. Have you put it to a double-blind test? Because it's extremely likely that you're simply deluding yourself.
Eat the rich.
You can hear it when you play with the volume, or listen to typical artifacts.
Ofc you don't here it when some transformation process calcs it down to 16 from 24 to simply make the output in the amplifier. But it is a huge difference if a hobbyist plays with sounds on 16 bit level and plays the end results or if you process the same sounds with 24 bits and only transform them to 16 bit in the final stage.
Well, technically you're correct, you would be able to distinguish 16bit to 24bit with enough volume. What I'm not entirely sure if your ear drums would still function after it... possibly. This is certainly something I've contemplated, but fortunately my current audio interface allows me to select the line level and also specifies the specific dynamic range for it.
But I will not question the plausibility of the placebo effect in audio.
I don't know what would change the setting (in the Advanced tab of iTunes preferences) behind your back, but I can tell you that whatever that selected behavior is, holding down the Option key when dragging files to iTunes from the Finder will reverse that preference for that drag-drop operation. A copy into the media folder will show a green + sign once you drag to iTunes (before your drop). A link to the existing location will not.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
You're 60 years old, and you claim to be able to hear the distortion from high-frequency sounds?
First of all, it's exceedingly unlikely that you can even hear anything at all above ~12-14 kHz or so, due to completely normal age-related hearing loss.
Secondly, what you're mentioning has nothing to do with inherent limitations in 44.1 kHz digital audio. It's much more likely to be a result of bad recording practices, bad production or bad equipment on your end.
You say you can DEFINITELY hear the difference. Have you put it to a double-blind test? Because it's extremely likely that you're simply deluding yourself.
I freely admit my personal frequency response ain't what it used to be. I'd say 12-14k with speakers is a pretty fair assessment. But that seems to go WAY up with good earbuds. Don't really know why; but it does. I'm sure it still isn't as good as it was in my teens, when I could clearly hear up to nearly 30 kHz (no, really); but especially with earbuds, it is still pretty good overall.
But frequency response does not correlate directly with accuracy, especially with a brain in the mix ( no pun). Hearing loss isn't exactly a simple low-pass filter. It's kind of hard to describe, actually; because the brain is so wrapped-up in the whole "hearing" process, you're just going to have to trust me that I really CAN still "hear" the difference between mediocre, good, and great audio recording and reproduction, with a few limitations, honestly, or ask other older males you know that would pay attention to this. Some day, you'll understand. Now, get off of my lawn!!!
But all kidding aside, yes, I have had friends help me conduct A/B/X tests; and with a very good recording, and very good reproduction, you can actually hear the difference between 44/16 and 96/24 (anything higher is probably not discernable by most humans), especially in instruments with high frequency harmonics (some of which extend well past 20 kHz).
This NOT about "music for dogs", or "AudioPILE voodoo"; the fact of the matter is, the "frequency foldback" of the 44 kHz sample frequency "beating against" the near-ultrasonic and ultrasonic overtones of some percussion and a few other natural instruments, and probably even more so for some electronic ones, creates "undertones" that extend WAY the Hell down into the audible frequency band, where NO filtering is really practical (at least not until there is a big leap in DSP speed), and where age-related high-frequency hearing loss plays ZERO part.
So, yeah, I can CERTAINLY hear the BY-PRODUCTS of insufficient sampling rate/depth, even if my ability to hear the raw frequency-response has somewhat diminished.
But in about 3 months of searching for, and listening to, many, many songs on Apple Music, I have only encountered about one or two songs that were in the Catalog; but weren't available for streaming.
I see. That's how you came to the conclusion that "virtually" the entire iTunes music catalog is available on Apple Music. Just like the fact that you personally didn't lose files means that there's no way it happened to someone else.
I wonder if your thinking comes from using Apple products, or if you started buying Apple products because of your thinking. Either way those Apple conferences must be fascinating if they're full of people like you.
lucm, indeed.
No, you probably couldn't hear up to 30 kHz, since that sort of thing is only possible under ideal laboratory conditions, with very loud signals. The human auditory system simply doesn't have any kind of meaningful receptors for frequencies that high. If you actually could hear frequencies that high under normal conditions, you are either a dog or a genuine medical curiosity. What you probably heard is distortion manifesting itself in the audible range, due to equipment that was unable to either handle ultrasonic content correctly and didn't remove it using a low pass filter.
This can happen with non-oversampling DACs in some cases. But given your age, you were probably listening to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, which did have some ultrasonic capability, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise floor. And even if you did hear anything that high up, it would have been more like a sensation or feeling, not an actual identifiable sound. Either way, it would have been completely drowned out by the actual musical content, which obviously has a ton more energy in the audible frequency range.
The stuff you're talking about with frequency "foldback" etc. (aliasing) is only applicable to shitty equipment without properly implemented low pass filters, such as NOS and filterless DACs, but only simple-minded audiophiles use those. Either that, or ultra-shitty production with bad downsampling from the master to the final CD-quality product.
Eat the rich.
Pro tip: Don't try to act smart if you don't know what you're talking about :-)
The decibel is a logarithmic unit. When I say a dynamic range of 96 dB, that is the different between the noise floor and a full-scale signal. 96 dB of difference is simple a relative value. Talking about dynamic range in decibel-milliwatts as you're doing, makes absolutely no sense at all. DBm is a measurement of absolute power, so you can't use it to talk about relative dynamic range.
Quantization error exists everywhere, even in analog media. But unless you're editing the audio, 16 bit audio puts the noise floor due to quantization around -96 dBFS, which is more than good enough and very very small indeed. A -96 dBFS noise floor is equivalent to Total Harmonic Distortion less than 0.002%. In other words, completely inaudble. The inherent noise from devices such as microphones is a lot higher and exists in all recordings of non-artificial music. And no, it doesn't turn a sine wave into a stairstep, it just makes it "fuzzy". You can see this with a sufficiently good oscilloscope.
You're either delusional, or you've completely forgotten everything you should have learned about analog and digital signal theory.
Eat the rich.
You are assuming your subjective impressions are objective, which is patently not the case... Your A/B/X tests don't mean a lot if you don't provide the methodology behind them.
No, you probably couldn't hear up to 30 kHz, since that sort of thing is only possible under ideal laboratory conditions, with very loud signals. The human auditory system simply doesn't have any kind of meaningful receptors for frequencies that high.
I said ALMOST 30 kHz. I could hear very well up to a little over 22 kHz, and under the right conditions, could "sense" stuff up to about 27 kHz.
BTW, your comment about hearing "artifacts" is exactly what I was talking about with "frequency foldback". In the case of me hearing the old-school ultrasonic traffic-sensors (which operated at around 27 K, and which used a JBL "Ring Radiator" tweeter as the transducer), I was probably hearing my own eardrum producing a subharmonic. In any case, what you are hearing is the "Difference" part of the "Sum and Difference" frequencies produced when two signals are mixed. This is how all AM radios work. It's called "Heterodyning" when speaking in radio-terms, but the same effect is called "Aliasing" when speaking in terms of audio-sampling.
This can happen with non-oversampling DACs in some cases. But given your age, you were probably listening to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, which did have some ultrasonic capability, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise floor.
Actually, the 22 kHz figure is from a true hearing-test, under controlled conditions. I couldn't have quantified my upper hearing-limit by just listening to some musical samples on vinyl or tape. Having said that, vinyl particularly could demonstrably go way higher than 20 kHz, if you could get the signal onto tape. I submit as evidence the short-lived JVC CD-4 Discrete Quadraphonic encoding system for vinyl, that actually used a 38 kHz "subcarrier" to carry the rear channels. This 38 kHz was amazingly able to be picked-up by a production-quality phono cartridge (Audio-Technica "SS" series), and decoded into the rear-channel information. So, that is a system that PROVES that vinyl, at least, doesn't stop at 20 kHz. But I am NOT a vinyl fan: As much as I am whining about 44/16 not being enough (and it isn't) I loves me my CD and AAC collection!
The stuff you're talking about with frequency "foldback" etc. (aliasing) is only applicable to shitty equipment without properly implemented low pass filters, such as NOS and filterless DACs, but only simple-minded audiophiles use those. Either that, or ultra-shitty production with bad downsampling from the master to the final CD-quality product.
You are correct that most mastering equipment has a brick-wall (24 dB/octave or greater) LPF (low-pass filter) to attempt to filter-out the ultrasonics before they are encoded and cause "foldback" into the audio-range. BUT, I have heard MANY, MANY recordings where the tambourine or "hand-bell" (don't know what those are actually called) part is almost unbearable, due to frequency-foldback effects WELL down into the midrange and even upper-bass regions. That HAS to be the result of one of two things: Overmodulation at the recording-end on the original track, or "Aliasing".
And I don't have exactly crappy playback equipment. The system I use at home consists of an Oppo DVD/CD player (which can do at least 24/96 with DVD-A) connected over TOSLink to an Arcam A/V Receiver (which can process at least 24/96 on the TOSLink inputs), and some Avid 103 speakers with Philips-dome mylar tweeters that go up at least an octave above human hearing. Not "TRUE Audiopile" stuff (don't have that kind of $$$); but CERTAINLY not a "Close-n-Play".
With speakers that old, it's possible you're hearing distortion from the speakers due to the capacitors in the crossover being old and crappy, or due to the crossover itself being cheaply made.
If the LPF part of the crossover doesn't work correctly, you get all the treble sent to the woofer as well, which can cause noticeable distortion. And if the HPF part doesn't work, you get all the bass sent to the tweeter, which is likely to kill it.
And there have been significant advances in speaker construction over the past few decades. My late-70s JBL 4410s are wonderful speakers, especially for rock, but they can't hold a candle to my Adam A5Xs when it comes to accuracy and clean sound.
Or maybe you're simply hearing clipping and overcompression, which is a plague on any kind of modern music, due to bad production. But that's not a technical issue, it's a wetware issue that can only be fixed by beating the responsible sound techs with a clue-by-four.
Eat the rich.
With speakers that old, it's possible you're hearing distortion from the speakers due to the capacitors in the crossover being old and crappy, or due to the crossover itself being cheaply made.
Polyester caps used in the mid and high-freq xover section; which are QUITE stable over time and temperature. Don't think there is any significant leakage from the LF section into the tweets; that's a LOT of octaves-away!!! Plus, if it was THAT bad, I would have either wasted the tweets, or been moved to look into it, because the sound would be gnarly, regardless of program source or material. But that isn't the case...
Plus, the effect is sometimes even MORE noticeable with earbuds/phones, where there is no passive crossover involved. Sure, the IM distortion is a bit higher with single-driver configurations; but I am hearing the same thing there, too. And as long as you back-down from "ear-bleed" levels, my Sony headphones (yes, I need to get some Grados) and my Sony earbuds do a pretty good job at accuracy and definition.
Or maybe you're simply hearing clipping and overcompression, which is a plague on any kind of modern music, due to bad production. But that's not a technical issue, it's a wetware issue that can only be fixed by beating the responsible sound techs with a clue-by-four.
Believe me, I know EXACTLY what THAT sounds like!
No, seriously. I have been listening critically to music recording and reproduction since at least my early teens; and I REALLY think I am hearing what I think I am hearing, in all seriousness.
Fortunately, most of the music I like to listen to doesn't fall into the "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" category; so that isn't much of a problem. Steely Dan has always had careful production techniques (and I am sure you know about the legendary Donald Fagen "Nightfly" album), and pretty much anything recorded/mixed/produced by Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree, et al) and most/all Peter Gabriel stuff is well-recorded and well-mastered, with sometimes scary amounts of Dynamic Range, and without ANY of the "Push it to 11" bullshit so popular with the Deaf-as-a-Post Producers of today.
As an aside, I have always been annoyed that, as soon as we got a reproduction format (CD) that was capable of that 96 dB dynamic-range, the frickin' Recording Industry IMMEDIATELY normalized everything up to 0xfffc, and digitally-compressed (which is at least better than analog compression) everything to within 2 dB of THAT...
And THAT, my friend, is a "Don't get me started" topic!!!
It happened because of: too much control
If you want Apple to control everything for you, then don't be upset when they inevitably fail.