The problem is that this statement is mostly contridicary:...Internet users, or 76 percent of active Web surfers, access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application...
Web surfers are people who are surfing the World Wide Web, which is in turn a massive collection of web servers and pages. You by definition must be using a web browser to access a web page! Whether that browser is automated, displaying entire web pages, or just downloading a file, it must be a web browser in some sense.
If you are using a P2P application, then you are not using the World Wide Web or "surfing the 'net".
You are correct that unless there is a victim, there is not crime, but there doesn't need to be a victim for a law to be broken. It all depends on how the statute/ordinance is written. If it just requires that an act be performed for a fine to be assesed, then she's in deep. It the law requires the complaint of a victim for charges to be filed, then she'll be aquitted.
I know little about the circumstance, or the law of the town. In all it seems like a photo radar ticket: no officer saw you speeding, but the camera did. In this case the accused provided the camera instead of the government.
The page you linked to is the best selling music players of 30GB in size or larger. Strangely the 20GB iPod is listed there. Amazon can't do basic numerical comparisons I guess.
Anyway... When you go to the "all MP3 players" page and sort by "best selling", you'll find the first iPod at position #116, and it's the 10GB model. The top 5 best sellers are all 256MB or lower flash based players.
iLove the iPod as much as anyone (First gen 5GB still 8 hours on the original battery), but Amazon just ain't selling a whole lot of them apparently. But then again, they don't exactly explain the parameters of what "best selling" means, ie: since when, in units or dollars, etc.
Your survey is very accurate for the type of batteries on most cordless phones. NiCad batteries do indeed last longer when allowed to mostly discharge then be recharged.
Lithium based batteries (like the one in the iPod) tend to last longer when kept more fully charged, much like lead acid batteries in cars.
Why is it that they promote these things as providing more security, be we only see them as taking away our privacy and security? Because you assume that they mean YOUR security, not their security. It makes their bottom line more secure, their lack of competition more secure, etc.
Yes, but the author continually mixes and interchanges the concepts of color space, compression, video signal encoding and cabling. As others have pointed out, he knows enough to be dangerous. The article sounds quite informative, but is misleading, incomplete, and just plain wrong on many points.
That's actually kinda funny. Red-light disctricts were for the low income and lower class, the blue-light districts were for nobles and officers in the military.
The problem is that you are over simplifying. The iPod battery is replaceable, and for quite some time there have been $50 replacements available from third parties. The reason there aren't any services doing the replacement yet is that the battery issue isn't an issue for 99% of the iPod population yet.
Okay... so lets sat the iPod DID have user replaceable off-the-shelf AA batteries. Ignoring the fact that the form factor would be completely blown and the iPod would be a bloated POS, lets look at that from a cost standpoint:
Alakaline AA batteries, approximately $0.70 each. The iPod would probably use two and last about 1 day on them. Used 5 days a week, that's 10 batteries per week, $365 per year. $584 in the time that the brothers' iPod battery lasted. Using rechargables would be cheaper, lets say $2.25 each for NiMh, four sets used every year. $18 for batteries plus $12 for a charger. $30 for the first year, $18 for the second year. $48 for the time that the brothers' iPod battery lasted.
Now compare that to the third party battery prices for iPods: $50, every 1.5 years (probably at worst) to 2 years (probably much more realistic). If you want Apple to replace the thing for you it will cost another $49 for labor.
May electric shaver, my electric toothbrush, my cordless screwdriver, my cordless vacuum. None of these things have user replacable batteries. All of these devices will fail in between 1.5 and 5 years depending on use.
The iPod is not sealed at the factory. It is rather trivial to open one. I'm told you can easily do it with just about any plastic credit card type thing. Personally I've found a $0.95 spark plug gap gauge from AutoZone to be the ideal tool. It takes me less than 2 minutes to open the iPod and I leave no marks on it. It's certainly no harder to open the iPod than to find and replace the air filter on most modern cars.
The reason Apple has no competition for repairing the iPod seems simple to me: Most iPods have either not failed (despite the brothers' noismaking), or have failed under warranty. If/when we get to a point where there are a large number of iPods on the market needing repair out of warranty, then third parties will start offering services. When VCRs came on the market no-one could fix them but the factory. Same with camcorders, CD players, etc. In a capitalist society you don't get a market until you have a demand and a supply. I can tell you from experience that any sufficiently low-volume product does not garner much third party repair support.
As for the maintenence of the iPod costing 33% of the unit's replacement value every 1.5 to two years, an automobile is slightly higher than that. At an average cost of $24,000, and an average driving distance of 15,000 miles per year at an average cost of about 50 cents per mile, automobile upkeep/operation costs about 50% of replacement costs in 1.5 to 2 years of operation. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/au tos/newcar.h tm http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/costtodr ive. htm
Compared to a car, the upkeep costs of an iPod are low. And my dealer never advertises that the tires or wipers wear out, or that the oil or battery needs to be changed. These things are left as common sense or for the owner to learn about themselves.
Funny... The car you purchased for probably tens of thousands of dollars doesn't have user replaceable tires, or engine or transmission, yet your are guaranteed that all of those things will wear out at some point in the life of the product. Your options are to send the car to the manufacturer's repair shop (or one you chose who will use non-authorized parts for a lower price), or purchase a new car. The replacements will cost you many dollars more than the actual products are worth after labor, disposal, etc.
The reason that Apple will not support WMA is that WMA is a closed and proprietary format. AAC is an open and universally licensable format. Whether Apple will ever license/open the proprietary FairPlay DRM they use is another issue all together.
Yup. Your trying to fight iTunes instead of letting it work for and with you.
Why would you have two instances of the same song on your machine unless they were from different albums, different encodings, or sample rates or such? iTunes just did you a favor, it found you some wasted hard drive space. Delete the duplicate(s) and move on. If they aren't exact duplicates then use the "View Options" to add the appropriate colums to the display so you can discerne the differences between the tracks. iTunes stores enough tag and other meta information that you should never have to sort files manually. Manual and smart playlists are tremendously powerful, especially when you can create smart playlists based on the contents of the "comments" box for each track. For example, I use terms like "male female group solo singing instrumental acoustic live remix" in the comments field. I have several smart playlists that sort on these, such as "live group rock"; this is powerful voodoo.
To backup your comments and such, simply copy the "iTunes 4 Music Library" file. You can later restore it to the appropriate place and all will be well.
Chances are that if you are going to "move my data on my machine to another location" that you would be moving the entire location of your "my documents" folder. iTunes would then look for its file(s) relative to that new location. If you DO just want to move the iTunes database, simply use a shortcut (alias to MAc users, symlink to BSD heads).
Unless you are a geek who wants to tweak, there's little to no reason for iTunes to complicate matters by offering alternate locations for the database. The standard options allow for a centralized store of music, and each user to maintain their own ratings, comments, etc.
The window maximize thing is annoying. It doesn't even work on the Mac like it's supposed to (hold Option, click the window zoom button). To make a maximized iTunes window you have to manually drag the window to size. Apple does occasionally break its own HIG documents, and this is one of those occasions.
To the extent that you can really prove anything, the proof is there that the image is that of a Macintosh computer running MAc OS 8 or 9, surfing the WalMat on-line music store (menu shadowing, color scheme, font, cursor shape, browser form button style,menu location, etc) . The other option is that someone is running a GNOME or KDE theme that accurately emulates even the tinyest detail of the Mac interface.
It's quite likely that the marketing department uses Macs and hasn't upgraded to OS X (probably because they are waiting for a particular app to be updated, or WalMart's IT budget is too thin. Since you CAN successfully surf/browse the site with a Mac, there's every possibility that the screen shots are from a Mac and that due to the all to common "marketing doesn't talk to operations" issue, marketing used the systems they had at hand instead of ones that are actually compatible with the service.
Several of us posted comments pointing out that there are at least three channels that do this now. They are all run by universities and show science lectures, in depth debates, etc. These other stations, though, do also run non-science content, but they are non-commercial so you get fairly true and balanced content.
I REALLY would like to see a channel that focuses on science for the intelligent. TLC used to be nice, then they went all foo foo, so they started the Discovery Science channel. They are now starting to run non science and non educational stuff, plus they are so beholden to ratings and the sponsors that they never run any lectures or shows that actually raise debate or cover controversial subjects.
I'll give this new channel a shot as soon as it comes on my sattellite lineup, but I don't have any high hopes. The first show I see like "The science behind Microsoft Windows XP", the channel comes out of my lineup. Keep the programming more like NASA TV, CSPAN, UCTV, FSTV, Research Channel, etc and you'll keep me as a viewer.
Hmmm. the one "official" piece of evidence (the rest is hear say, anonymous and/or mysterious in origin) talks about the MEK. The MEK seems from the information to be a group of Iranians that are fighing the Iranian government. These aren't terrorists, they are freedom fighters. Saddam has commited the error of getting involved in a civil dispute. I don't see any evidence in that report that MEK was targeting American property or citizens, hence I don't see how Bush can use Saddams funding of MEK as a matter or national security.
I think that at least one of the reports you mention (the one about the Niger shipment) was later shown to be a fabrication, either by Saddam/Bathists to give the illusion of strength, or by someone else to discredit Saddam and his leadership. In either case I've heard that the Niger shipment of uranium never happened (this from Pentagon/State Department briefings). To me that also places serious doubt on the other claims of memos from dubious sources.
Again, I must base my opinions on publicly released and verified documents. I think that basing decisions to go to battle and invade a soverign nation against world opinion upon documentation of dubious credibility is scandelous at best and criminal at worst.
Logistically? nothing. Apple is once again relying on the end user's personal ethics. I know it's a hard thing to grasp in todays world, but Apple just trusts that you aren't going to start giving copies of albums to everyone you pass on the street.
The license says you can use the content for "personal non-commercial use". You decide what "personal" means. Steve has mentioned on stage during key-notes that giving copies to friends/family would fall under that allowed usage.
...In your process, you've done a single encode, and then multiple header changes - which of course, don't affect the audio data....
No, I did re-encoding. As I stated, quicktime was taking too long to simply copy the data, it must have been decoding then re-encoding. Just to prove that, I took the intermediate step of exporting each newly compressed AAC file as an AIFF, then opening that AIFF and exporting it as another AAC.
I did this for 10 generations again and, again, experienced no perceptible degredation of the audio.
If you would like to hear some of these clips and compare them for yourself, be my guest. The page also links to the answers as to which clip is which generation. I did not put up the original AIFF imort from CD, as the initial quality degredation was not in argument, AAC compression will add distortion and artifacts that are not in the CD/AIFF version.
My conslusion is what I origionally wrote: If you use the same codec with the same settings to decode, then re-encode an audio file, the subsequent generations will not suffer degredation.
I will again state that there was no statistical or bitwise comparison of these files. Just listening to them on my above average computer speakers, there is no degredation, and any compression differences seem to be limited to low-order single bit errors.
I was not wrong. I stated that what the poster outlined was impossible (transcoding without loss). What I specifically stated would not cause loss would be essintially an obfuscated digital copy.
I have tested this with AAC. I dragged a track from a CD to my desktop, thus creating a 55.4MB AIFF file. I then opened the file with Quicktime player and exported it to AAC ("low complexity", 160kbit, 44kHz, 16bit, stereo, "best"). The resulting file was 6.4MB. That file was then opened in Quicktime and exported to AAC with the same settings. I continued this process (open AAC, export to AAC) until I had 10 generations encoded.
The end result was that I could hear no difference in the 10th generation compared to the initial AIFF import. I don't have software at hand to do a wave form or statistical analysis of the tracks, and perhaps the lack of difference is a limitation of my computer, small speakers or my slightly aging ears. I would use some of the Unix utilites to compare the bits, but given time stamps, file names and such there are certain to be bit differences between any two of the tracks. I suppose the number of differences would be indicitive of something, but I'm not going to go try to figure that out right now. There is also the small possibility that I should have done an export to AIFF from each AAC generation, then encoded back to AAC for the next generation just to ensure that the encoder wasn't smart enough to notice the same input and output settings and just pass the data through. I tend to discount this though since the AAC encoding took about 2x longer than a simple AIFF export.
I would leave this experiment to people with better equipment than I for final judgement. I can say this for certain: the 10th generation copy of AAC is almost infinitely better than any 10th generation audio or video tape I've ever seen. Even a 3rd generation analog recording is quite noticeable degredaded.
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So you don't use passwords or encryption on your network?
Where abouts are you again?
The problem is that this statement is mostly contridicary: ...Internet users, or 76 percent of active Web surfers, access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application...
Web surfers are people who are surfing the World Wide Web, which is in turn a massive collection of web servers and pages.
You by definition must be using a web browser to access a web page! Whether that browser is automated, displaying entire web pages, or just downloading a file, it must be a web browser in some sense.
If you are using a P2P application, then you are not using the World Wide Web or "surfing the 'net".
You are correct that unless there is a victim, there is not crime, but there doesn't need to be a victim for a law to be broken.
It all depends on how the statute/ordinance is written. If it just requires that an act be performed for a fine to be assesed, then she's in deep. It the law requires the complaint of a victim for charges to be filed, then she'll be aquitted.
I know little about the circumstance, or the law of the town. In all it seems like a photo radar ticket: no officer saw you speeding, but the camera did. In this case the accused provided the camera instead of the government.
Any my Syquest 44MB cartridges and my 5.25" floppies, and my MFM 10MB hard drive, and my digital 16 color RGB display, etc.
Yup, Amazon seems to have some very screwey information. I get the same thing. Two lists show two different sortings of the same information.
No, that's not at all what that page shows.
The page you linked to is the best selling music players of 30GB in size or larger. Strangely the 20GB iPod is listed there. Amazon can't do basic numerical comparisons I guess.
Anyway... When you go to the "all MP3 players" page and sort by "best selling", you'll find the first iPod at position #116, and it's the 10GB model. The top 5 best sellers are all 256MB or lower flash based players.
iLove the iPod as much as anyone (First gen 5GB still 8 hours on the original battery), but Amazon just ain't selling a whole lot of them apparently. But then again, they don't exactly explain the parameters of what "best selling" means, ie: since when, in units or dollars, etc.
And when you are doens looking at that, go to ipodbatteryfaq.com and read the truth of the matter.
Your survey is very accurate for the type of batteries on most cordless phones. NiCad batteries do indeed last longer when allowed to mostly discharge then be recharged.
Lithium based batteries (like the one in the iPod) tend to last longer when kept more fully charged, much like lead acid batteries in cars.
Why is it that they promote these things as providing more security, be we only see them as taking away our privacy and security?
Because you assume that they mean YOUR security, not their security.
It makes their bottom line more secure, their lack of competition more secure, etc.
I don't begin to understand what you mean that Apple doesn't make a "workhorse". What do you consider the PowerMac line to be? The XServe?
Yes, but the author continually mixes and interchanges the concepts of color space, compression, video signal encoding and cabling.
As others have pointed out, he knows enough to be dangerous. The article sounds quite informative, but is misleading, incomplete, and just plain wrong on many points.
That's actually kinda funny. Red-light disctricts were for the low income and lower class, the blue-light districts were for nobles and officers in the military.
The problem is that you are over simplifying. The iPod battery is replaceable, and for quite some time there have been $50 replacements available from third parties.
The reason there aren't any services doing the replacement yet is that the battery issue isn't an issue for 99% of the iPod population yet.
Okay... so lets sat the iPod DID have user replaceable off-the-shelf AA batteries. Ignoring the fact that the form factor would be completely blown and the iPod would be a bloated POS, lets look at that from a cost standpoint:
Alakaline AA batteries, approximately $0.70 each. The iPod would probably use two and last about 1 day on them.
Used 5 days a week, that's 10 batteries per week, $365 per year. $584 in the time that the brothers' iPod battery lasted.
Using rechargables would be cheaper, lets say $2.25 each for NiMh, four sets used every year. $18 for batteries plus $12 for a charger. $30 for the first year, $18 for the second year. $48 for the time that the brothers' iPod battery lasted.
Now compare that to the third party battery prices for iPods: $50, every 1.5 years (probably at worst) to 2 years (probably much more realistic). If you want Apple to replace the thing for you it will cost another $49 for labor.
May electric shaver, my electric toothbrush, my cordless screwdriver, my cordless vacuum.
None of these things have user replacable batteries. All of these devices will fail in between 1.5 and 5 years depending on use.
The iPod is not sealed at the factory. It is rather trivial to open one. I'm told you can easily do it with just about any plastic credit card type thing. Personally I've found a $0.95 spark plug gap gauge from AutoZone to be the ideal tool. It takes me less than 2 minutes to open the iPod and I leave no marks on it. It's certainly no harder to open the iPod than to find and replace the air filter on most modern cars.
u tos/newcar.h tmr ive. htm
The reason Apple has no competition for repairing the iPod seems simple to me: Most iPods have either not failed (despite the brothers' noismaking), or have failed under warranty. If/when we get to a point where there are a large number of iPods on the market needing repair out of warranty, then third parties will start offering services. When VCRs came on the market no-one could fix them but the factory. Same with camcorders, CD players, etc. In a capitalist society you don't get a market until you have a demand and a supply.
I can tell you from experience that any sufficiently low-volume product does not garner much third party repair support.
As for the maintenence of the iPod costing 33% of the unit's replacement value every 1.5 to two years, an automobile is slightly higher than that. At an average cost of $24,000, and an average driving distance of 15,000 miles per year at an average cost of about 50 cents per mile, automobile upkeep/operation costs about 50% of replacement costs in 1.5 to 2 years of operation.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/a
http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/costtod
Compared to a car, the upkeep costs of an iPod are low. And my dealer never advertises that the tires or wipers wear out, or that the oil or battery needs to be changed. These things are left as common sense or for the owner to learn about themselves.
Funny... The car you purchased for probably tens of thousands of dollars doesn't have user replaceable tires, or engine or transmission, yet your are guaranteed that all of those things will wear out at some point in the life of the product. Your options are to send the car to the manufacturer's repair shop (or one you chose who will use non-authorized parts for a lower price), or purchase a new car.
The replacements will cost you many dollars more than the actual products are worth after labor, disposal, etc.
The reason that Apple will not support WMA is that WMA is a closed and proprietary format. AAC is an open and universally licensable format. Whether Apple will ever license/open the proprietary FairPlay DRM they use is another issue all together.
Yup. Your trying to fight iTunes instead of letting it work for and with you.
Why would you have two instances of the same song on your machine unless they were from different albums, different encodings, or sample rates or such? iTunes just did you a favor, it found you some wasted hard drive space. Delete the duplicate(s) and move on.
If they aren't exact duplicates then use the "View Options" to add the appropriate colums to the display so you can discerne the differences between the tracks.
iTunes stores enough tag and other meta information that you should never have to sort files manually. Manual and smart playlists are tremendously powerful, especially when you can create smart playlists based on the contents of the "comments" box for each track. For example, I use terms like "male female group solo singing instrumental acoustic live remix" in the comments field. I have several smart playlists that sort on these, such as "live group rock"; this is powerful voodoo.
To backup your comments and such, simply copy the "iTunes 4 Music Library" file. You can later restore it to the appropriate place and all will be well.
Chances are that if you are going to "move my data on my machine to another location" that you would be moving the entire location of your "my documents" folder. iTunes would then look for its file(s) relative to that new location. If you DO just want to move the iTunes database, simply use a shortcut (alias to MAc users, symlink to BSD heads).
Unless you are a geek who wants to tweak, there's little to no reason for iTunes to complicate matters by offering alternate locations for the database. The standard options allow for a centralized store of music, and each user to maintain their own ratings, comments, etc.
The window maximize thing is annoying. It doesn't even work on the Mac like it's supposed to (hold Option, click the window zoom button). To make a maximized iTunes window you have to manually drag the window to size. Apple does occasionally break its own HIG documents, and this is one of those occasions.
To the extent that you can really prove anything, the proof is there that the image is that of a Macintosh computer running MAc OS 8 or 9, surfing the WalMat on-line music store (menu shadowing, color scheme, font, cursor shape, browser form button style,menu location, etc) . The other option is that someone is running a GNOME or KDE theme that accurately emulates even the tinyest detail of the Mac interface.
It's quite likely that the marketing department uses Macs and hasn't upgraded to OS X (probably because they are waiting for a particular app to be updated, or WalMart's IT budget is too thin. Since you CAN successfully surf/browse the site with a Mac, there's every possibility that the screen shots are from a Mac and that due to the all to common "marketing doesn't talk to operations" issue, marketing used the systems they had at hand instead of ones that are actually compatible with the service.
Several of us posted comments pointing out that there are at least three channels that do this now. They are all run by universities and show science lectures, in depth debates, etc. These other stations, though, do also run non-science content, but they are non-commercial so you get fairly true and balanced content.
I REALLY would like to see a channel that focuses on science for the intelligent. TLC used to be nice, then they went all foo foo, so they started the Discovery Science channel. They are now starting to run non science and non educational stuff, plus they are so beholden to ratings and the sponsors that they never run any lectures or shows that actually raise debate or cover controversial subjects.
I'll give this new channel a shot as soon as it comes on my sattellite lineup, but I don't have any high hopes. The first show I see like "The science behind Microsoft Windows XP", the channel comes out of my lineup. Keep the programming more like NASA TV, CSPAN, UCTV, FSTV, Research Channel, etc and you'll keep me as a viewer.
Hmmm. the one "official" piece of evidence (the rest is hear say, anonymous and/or mysterious in origin) talks about the MEK. The MEK seems from the information to be a group of Iranians that are fighing the Iranian government. These aren't terrorists, they are freedom fighters. Saddam has commited the error of getting involved in a civil dispute.
I don't see any evidence in that report that MEK was targeting American property or citizens, hence I don't see how Bush can use Saddams funding of MEK as a matter or national security.
I think that at least one of the reports you mention (the one about the Niger shipment) was later shown to be a fabrication, either by Saddam/Bathists to give the illusion of strength, or by someone else to discredit Saddam and his leadership. In either case I've heard that the Niger shipment of uranium never happened (this from Pentagon/State Department briefings). To me that also places serious doubt on the other claims of memos from dubious sources.
Again, I must base my opinions on publicly released and verified documents. I think that basing decisions to go to battle and invade a soverign nation against world opinion upon documentation of dubious credibility is scandelous at best and criminal at worst.
Logistically? nothing.
Apple is once again relying on the end user's personal ethics. I know it's a hard thing to grasp in todays world, but Apple just trusts that you aren't going to start giving copies of albums to everyone you pass on the street.
The license says you can use the content for "personal non-commercial use". You decide what "personal" means. Steve has mentioned on stage during key-notes that giving copies to friends/family would fall under that allowed usage.
...In your process, you've done a single encode, and then multiple header changes - which of course, don't affect the audio data....
No, I did re-encoding. As I stated, quicktime was taking too long to simply copy the data, it must have been decoding then re-encoding.
Just to prove that, I took the intermediate step of exporting each newly compressed AAC file as an AIFF, then opening that AIFF and exporting it as another AAC.
I did this for 10 generations again and, again, experienced no perceptible degredation of the audio.
If you would like to hear some of these clips and compare them for yourself, be my guest. The page also links to the answers as to which clip is which generation. I did not put up the original AIFF imort from CD, as the initial quality degredation was not in argument, AAC compression will add distortion and artifacts that are not in the CD/AIFF version.
My conslusion is what I origionally wrote: If you use the same codec with the same settings to decode, then re-encode an audio file, the subsequent generations will not suffer degredation.
I will again state that there was no statistical or bitwise comparison of these files. Just listening to them on my above average computer speakers, there is no degredation, and any compression differences seem to be limited to low-order single bit errors.
I was not wrong. I stated that what the poster outlined was impossible (transcoding without loss). What I specifically stated would not cause loss would be essintially an obfuscated digital copy.
I have tested this with AAC. I dragged a track from a CD to my desktop, thus creating a 55.4MB AIFF file. I then opened the file with Quicktime player and exported it to AAC ("low complexity", 160kbit, 44kHz, 16bit, stereo, "best"). The resulting file was 6.4MB.
That file was then opened in Quicktime and exported to AAC with the same settings. I continued this process (open AAC, export to AAC) until I had 10 generations encoded.
The end result was that I could hear no difference in the 10th generation compared to the initial AIFF import. I don't have software at hand to do a wave form or statistical analysis of the tracks, and perhaps the lack of difference is a limitation of my computer, small speakers or my slightly aging ears. I would use some of the Unix utilites to compare the bits, but given time stamps, file names and such there are certain to be bit differences between any two of the tracks. I suppose the number of differences would be indicitive of something, but I'm not going to go try to figure that out right now.
There is also the small possibility that I should have done an export to AIFF from each AAC generation, then encoded back to AAC for the next generation just to ensure that the encoder wasn't smart enough to notice the same input and output settings and just pass the data through. I tend to discount this though since the AAC encoding took about 2x longer than a simple AIFF export.
I would leave this experiment to people with better equipment than I for final judgement.
I can say this for certain: the 10th generation copy of AAC is almost infinitely better than any 10th generation audio or video tape I've ever seen. Even a 3rd generation analog recording is quite noticeable degredaded.
I didn't say they were your complaints, I said they were your points. My responses didn't single you out as the respondent/target.