Hehe, I've never noticed that before, but it's also on the Mac version. I suppose that's a *design* choice, indicating the fact that you have changed focus and therefore signaling to iTunes that it should change focus too.
What *I* have been doing that totally made me miss this issue: Create a smart playlist of the songs you want to play. Or any playlist or source other than Library. Changing focus then doesn't exhibit the questionable behavior you noticed.
If I play my 'Favorite music, Not country' playlist, and then switch around focus in the Library, the songs continue uninterrupted. So if you wanted to listen to your "K-PAX" soundtrack, you can quickly create a smart playlist "All songs in soundtrack K-PAX", hit play, and then go about your business in the library.
You can create a playlist with Winamp/CDex as such?
Smart playlist composed of: Songs not played in the last 2 days Songs played less than 4 times Songs in the genre 'country' Songs not with the artist 'Garth Brooks'
Or do a live search for 'Floyd' against your library?
Maybe you don't find value in a central and queryable database?
It was polite enough to ask if you wanted it to sort your music library; when you said YES it went ahead!
On a different note... why do you have to rename all your files and reorganize all of them? What's wrong with a hierarchical structure based on artist-album + track number-track name?
Winamp is a tool with it's own usage iTunes is a tool with a different usage
Here's something I can do in iTunes I can't do in Winamp:
Play all my Techno songs not played in the past three days Play all the songs I've never listened to Play the songs I listen to the most, but not the ones I've heard in the past days Play my favorite songs, but not the country songs Play all the country songs except those by Garth Brooks
Each of those playlists takes about 10 seconds to compile. And I can generate more.
To abstract them, I would say Winamp is akin to a playlist manager and iTunes is a music database.
You you the Windows Explorer for navigation and file management: You use folders, hierarchies, and filenames to manage your music, and Winamp as a front end to it.
With iTunes you use iTunes as your navigation and file management. Instead of folders, hierarchies, and filenames, you navigate using ID3 tags: Genre, Artist, Track Name, as well as ratings, playcounts, and a search feature. Not only that, but because it's a database, you can create queries; something you can do using Windows Find feature, except iTunes is optimized for music.
Now if you're proud of the effort you put into creating your own hierarchy and file/music management system, and want to keep doing that, then Winamp is the way to go. If you want to spend zero effort in doing that, iTunes is the way to go: In creating a database, you can browse your iTunes library the same way you browse the web! You can search, browse, and sort. You can also make playlists, like you're used to, if you want.
Really though, all my evangelizing is to one point: There is the possibility that iTunes is the better solution, but it doesn't fit with your usage model, and therefore you (not me, since I use iTunes and switched away from Winamp) lose in the comparison.
I hate that none of these services allow me to play the tunes I have purchased where I wish to!
If I buy a tape, I am allowed to burn myself a CD from it in order to play it in my computer. But I am not allowed to convert these files to, say, mp3 so that I can play them in my car.
As soon as one of these services is not so draconian with their DRM, I will join them.
Then, realdpk said this:
You may want to re-read what iTunes is. You can copy the files to a CD, as a regular music CD, and then do whatever with 'em - such as conver them to mp3 for your car.
That's what I'll end up doing, anyways. (Car mp3 players are cool;)
To which Kenja replied:
There are quicker ways to degrade the sound quality then converting it twice. Why not just poke some holes in your speakers?
To summarize: downix complained you can convert a tape -> CD, but you can't convert an aac -> mp3
realdpk corrected him, saying iTunes allows you to both burn to CD (as downix's tape->CD example) and convert to mp3 (as his aac->mp3) example
Kenja then retorted that converting it twice caused sound quality loss.
My reply was that from converting a downloaded AAC into CD or MP3 was only converting it ONCE
YES I KNOW AAC IS A LOSSY FORMAT YES I KNOW APPLE HAS ALREADY THROWN AWAY DATA BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD THE AAC FILE
THAT ISN"T THE POINT
I was correcting Kenja. There is not two levels of conversion in getting an AAC file into a CD or MP3; only one level.
AAC->MP3 is identical to AAC->CD->MP3; and hence only one generation of loss. That's all I've ever said. I've said it multiple ways; that AAC->CD is a perfect transfer, a lossless transfer, etc.
Everything I've been saying is in response to Kenja. There isn't a two loss conversion. It's two steps if you burn to CD, but it's only one level of loss.
I'm not missing any point. I perfectly understand that AAC is a lossy format. But in converting AAC -> MP3 you only introduce *one* generation of loss. Read the parent poster; he talks about two generations of loss into the process. Master -> AAC -> MP3 is two generations of loss, but all we've ever been talking about is AAC -> CD -> MP3. That's one generation of loss.
They rip from master: Which is generally 96KHz and 24bit multichannel/stereo; so there is no CD->AAC loss.
Besides which, the parent poster wasn't talking about CD->AAC, so that's not part of the equation. He was complaining about quality loss in transferring downloaded/purchased songs into MP3. Or in other words, AAC->CD for his car, and then CD->MP3 for his Nomad or something.
Right, just like there was a generation of loss when a 96KHz 24bit stereo (or even multichannel) audio file is downsampled into a 44KHz 16 bit stereo CD.
Generation loss according to the parent is transferring music from online stores into other formats: AAC -> MP3 in this case. We aren't talking about master to CD or CD to AAC.
I never said AAC was lossless. I said the AAC->CD transition process suffered no loss. I admit it may be confusing that I used the term lossless, but I said very clearly that:
You just reiterated my point: the parent poster was incorrect that AAC->CD->MP3 is two generations of loss. It is in fact one generation of loss:
AAC->CD == 0 loss == lossless (just by technical definition) CD->MP3 == 1 generation of loss So AAC->MP3 by *transitivity* is 1 generation of loss
Now, as per getting *truly* lossless data, we'd need 96KHz and 24bit audio from master; CD is not 'lossless' data, as it's been downsampled from master already, for the most part.
Grab iTunesPC; it costs you nothing, you get to use it or drop it as you like, you can buy or *not* buy on a per song basis as you like, it steals nothing from your SoulSeek, Kazaa, WinMX or Overnet habits, and you may be able to find songs on it you can't find on the other networks.
No loss, essentially.
You *may* find your music habits substantially improved with smart playlists, song ratings, library sharing and the jukebox... so possible gains.
Expose is not 'integration' or 'integrated'. It's a feature built into the OS using previously existing facilities.
It's an extension, not an integration.
Safari is both an extension-app and an integration. WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore are integrations; Safari is the extension application written with those technologies.
In a similar vein, QuickTime is an integration, while Quicktime Player is the extension-app. Or iTunes is the extension-app (of Quicktime) or Help Viewer or Mail is the extension-app of WebCore/WebKit.
Apps are Apps; you can delete Safari, Quicktime Player, iTunes, Help Viewer, and Mail, and the OS is not affected. Also note as has been said many other places, integration has not slowed down the OS, and the OS continues to get faster with each release.
Likewise, the extension-apps get faster, more featureful, more powerful, and more useful with each release.
I will certainly agree with you then. I have an excellent car sound system, and okay home theater, and okay computer speakers. My iPod is better than my computer speakers, but not better than my car system. The tape converter in the car is a bigger audio degrader than the AAC encoding.
AAC is convenient, and an iPod with 1,300 songs is also convenient. There's no substitute I'd rather use, and all things taken into account, it's good enough; and the tracks I purchase from iTMS is also 'good enough' when I consider I listen to most of my music on my computer, via iPod, and in the car.
So you too subscribe to "In theory and in practice."
So in *theory* an AAC sampled from master can be of higher quality than the same CD from the same master... the real question of course is have you *practiced* this before you claim an AAC from the iTMS CD quality? You have your own experience with 45s and 38s, and can claim that 45s will often sound worse than 38s.
*I* have my experience with my equipment, and an AAC is imperceptibly different than a CD.
Except for Photoshop, PCWorld *wasn't* comparing apples to apples.
Their Premiere test, for example, was comparing the Classic on Mac vs the Native on Windows. There are several major problems with this: The test results were 3 and 4 seconds. Meaning error was *tremendous*. With Photoshop the advantage on the Mac was 17 or 18 seconds, so even a 1 second error, or a 2 second error, can be ignored because the Mac won hands down.
With a ONE second delta, that suggests a faster hard drive, or specially partitioned hard drive, or a RAID system, can change the results. Heck, network activity could change the results. Or maybe someone just inserting a CD-ROM will change the results.
A second problem: Premiere on the Mac was run in Classic. The equivalent in Windows is running Premiere for Windows under VMWare. It is in no way "comparable". If you want to test similar functionality across both platforms, use Premiere Pro for Windows and Final Cut Express for Mac and then use the same footage to render the same output.
Then of course they test Microsoft Word... so if your goal is to write documents faster, get an Athlon 64. If your goal is to do graphics faster, get a Mac.
Boiled down, if you believe this benchmark, all the Athlon is good for is... games and productivity. All the G5 is good for is... math and rendering.
My point is you can't claim sight unseen that 128kb AAC from the iTMS != CD quality.
You can claim that 128kb AAC ripped from the CD is not CD quality, because it is necessarily lossy.
If you want to imply one thing or another, you need something to *bolster* that belief; you believed AAC from iTMS CD *before* this article, and then you used the statement to "prove" that 128kb AAC from Apple is not CD quality.
The claim is that the 128kb iTunes file is from MASTER quality!
What you *want* to compare is a Master -> 128kb AAC to a Master -> CD; what you *are* comparing is a Master -> CD -> 128kb AAC, and claiming the Master -> 128kb AAC don't sound as good as the CD.
You have no grounds for claiming that; the article itself doesn't talk about the iTunes Music Store; you bring that into the discussion without admitting that you are comparing one generation of loss (Master -> AAC) with two (Master -> CD -> AAC)!
I love how this is off topic! I thought the article was about how standards beats proprietary protocols? Except of course when everyone uses a standard protocol and their solutions still don't talk to each other!
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, I've never noticed that before, but it's also on the Mac version. I suppose that's a *design* choice, indicating the fact that you have changed focus and therefore signaling to iTunes that it should change focus too.
What *I* have been doing that totally made me miss this issue: Create a smart playlist of the songs you want to play. Or any playlist or source other than Library. Changing focus then doesn't exhibit the questionable behavior you noticed.
If I play my 'Favorite music, Not country' playlist, and then switch around focus in the Library, the songs continue uninterrupted. So if you wanted to listen to your "K-PAX" soundtrack, you can quickly create a smart playlist "All songs in soundtrack K-PAX", hit play, and then go about your business in the library.
You can create a playlist with Winamp/CDex as such?
Smart playlist composed of:
Songs not played in the last 2 days
Songs played less than 4 times
Songs in the genre 'country'
Songs not with the artist 'Garth Brooks'
Or do a live search for 'Floyd' against your library?
Maybe you don't find value in a central and queryable database?
Enter Serial Experiments Lain!
Japanese watch too much Anime!
Of course, so do I!
ARGH
When did I *EVER* say master->AAC was a perfect copy?
NEVER
It did exactly what you told it to.
It was polite enough to ask if you wanted it to sort your music library; when you said YES it went ahead!
On a different note... why do you have to rename all your files and reorganize all of them? What's wrong with a hierarchical structure based on artist-album + track number-track name?
Winamp is a tool with it's own usage
iTunes is a tool with a different usage
Here's something I can do in iTunes I can't do in Winamp:
Play all my Techno songs not played in the past three days
Play all the songs I've never listened to
Play the songs I listen to the most, but not the ones I've heard in the past days
Play my favorite songs, but not the country songs
Play all the country songs except those by Garth Brooks
Each of those playlists takes about 10 seconds to compile. And I can generate more.
To abstract them, I would say Winamp is akin to a playlist manager and iTunes is a music database.
You you the Windows Explorer for navigation and file management: You use folders, hierarchies, and filenames to manage your music, and Winamp as a front end to it.
With iTunes you use iTunes as your navigation and file management. Instead of folders, hierarchies, and filenames, you navigate using ID3 tags: Genre, Artist, Track Name, as well as ratings, playcounts, and a search feature. Not only that, but because it's a database, you can create queries; something you can do using Windows Find feature, except iTunes is optimized for music.
Now if you're proud of the effort you put into creating your own hierarchy and file/music management system, and want to keep doing that, then Winamp is the way to go. If you want to spend zero effort in doing that, iTunes is the way to go: In creating a database, you can browse your iTunes library the same way you browse the web! You can search, browse, and sort. You can also make playlists, like you're used to, if you want.
Really though, all my evangelizing is to one point: There is the possibility that iTunes is the better solution, but it doesn't fit with your usage model, and therefore you (not me, since I use iTunes and switched away from Winamp) lose in the comparison.
Then, realdpk said this:
To which Kenja replied:
To summarize: downix complained you can convert a tape -> CD, but you can't convert an aac -> mp3
realdpk corrected him, saying iTunes allows you to both burn to CD (as downix's tape->CD example) and convert to mp3 (as his aac->mp3) example
Kenja then retorted that converting it twice caused sound quality loss.
My reply was that from converting a downloaded AAC into CD or MP3 was only converting it ONCE
YES I KNOW AAC IS A LOSSY FORMAT
YES I KNOW APPLE HAS ALREADY THROWN AWAY DATA BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD THE AAC FILE
THAT ISN"T THE POINT
I was correcting Kenja. There is not two levels of conversion in getting an AAC file into a CD or MP3; only one level.
AAC->MP3 is identical to AAC->CD->MP3; and hence only one generation of loss. That's all I've ever said. I've said it multiple ways; that AAC->CD is a perfect transfer, a lossless transfer, etc.
Everything I've been saying is in response to Kenja. There isn't a two loss conversion. It's two steps if you burn to CD, but it's only one level of loss.
I'm not missing any point. I perfectly understand that AAC is a lossy format. But in converting AAC -> MP3 you only introduce *one* generation of loss. Read the parent poster; he talks about two generations of loss into the process. Master -> AAC -> MP3 is two generations of loss, but all we've ever been talking about is AAC -> CD -> MP3. That's one generation of loss.
They rip from master: Which is generally 96KHz and 24bit multichannel/stereo; so there is no CD->AAC loss.
Besides which, the parent poster wasn't talking about CD->AAC, so that's not part of the equation. He was complaining about quality loss in transferring downloaded/purchased songs into MP3. Or in other words, AAC->CD for his car, and then CD->MP3 for his Nomad or something.
Right, just like there was a generation of loss when a 96KHz 24bit stereo (or even multichannel) audio file is downsampled into a 44KHz 16 bit stereo CD.
Generation loss according to the parent is transferring music from online stores into other formats: AAC -> MP3 in this case. We aren't talking about master to CD or CD to AAC.
I never said AAC was lossless. I said the AAC->CD transition process suffered no loss. I admit it may be confusing that I used the term lossless, but I said very clearly that:
AAC->CD is lossless
Now if you want *lossy*
DAT->CD is lossy
I never said AAC was a lossless compression scheme.
I said AAC->CD is a lossless transfer. You lose zero data (except by bugs) in the process.
You just reiterated my point: the parent poster was incorrect that AAC->CD->MP3 is two generations of loss. It is in fact one generation of loss:
AAC->CD == 0 loss == lossless (just by technical definition)
CD->MP3 == 1 generation of loss
So AAC->MP3 by *transitivity* is 1 generation of loss
Now, as per getting *truly* lossless data, we'd need 96KHz and 24bit audio from master; CD is not 'lossless' data, as it's been downsampled from master already, for the most part.
Grab iTunesPC; it costs you nothing, you get to use it or drop it as you like, you can buy or *not* buy on a per song basis as you like, it steals nothing from your SoulSeek, Kazaa, WinMX or Overnet habits, and you may be able to find songs on it you can't find on the other networks.
No loss, essentially.
You *may* find your music habits substantially improved with smart playlists, song ratings, library sharing and the jukebox... so possible gains.
AAC->CD is lossless, as AAC is 44KHz 16 bit, and the CD can encode that perfectly.
CD ->MP3 is lossy, but blame that on MP3 ^^
iTunes for Mac, at least, and I am extrapolating to PC, allows purchased AAC files to be used in:
:)
Quicktime
iMovie
iTunes
iPhoto
I can also use it on my iPod
I can burn audio CDs
I have streamed it across the network
I can burn data CDs
I can convert/transcode to AIFF/MP3/etc
So download the iTunes4PC and give it a shot
Sadly?
Expose is not 'integration' or 'integrated'. It's a feature built into the OS using previously existing facilities.
It's an extension, not an integration.
Safari is both an extension-app and an integration. WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore are integrations; Safari is the extension application written with those technologies.
In a similar vein, QuickTime is an integration, while Quicktime Player is the extension-app. Or iTunes is the extension-app (of Quicktime) or Help Viewer or Mail is the extension-app of WebCore/WebKit.
Apps are Apps; you can delete Safari, Quicktime Player, iTunes, Help Viewer, and Mail, and the OS is not affected. Also note as has been said many other places, integration has not slowed down the OS, and the OS continues to get faster with each release.
Likewise, the extension-apps get faster, more featureful, more powerful, and more useful with each release.
Isn't it hard to accuse Apple of bloating the OS when every release gets *faster* and *more* efficient?
Or the features are *more* effective?
Like better Samba, and thus Windows, networking? Or better printing? Remote volume protocols? Etc?
I will certainly agree with you then. I have an excellent car sound system, and okay home theater, and okay computer speakers. My iPod is better than my computer speakers, but not better than my car system. The tape converter in the car is a bigger audio degrader than the AAC encoding.
AAC is convenient, and an iPod with 1,300 songs is also convenient. There's no substitute I'd rather use, and all things taken into account, it's good enough; and the tracks I purchase from iTMS is also 'good enough' when I consider I listen to most of my music on my computer, via iPod, and in the car.
So you too subscribe to "In theory and in practice."
So in *theory* an AAC sampled from master can be of higher quality than the same CD from the same master... the real question of course is have you *practiced* this before you claim an AAC from the iTMS CD quality? You have your own experience with 45s and 38s, and can claim that 45s will often sound worse than 38s.
*I* have my experience with my equipment, and an AAC is imperceptibly different than a CD.
Oh, I'm also curious, do you listen to MP3s?
Except for Photoshop, PCWorld *wasn't* comparing apples to apples.
Their Premiere test, for example, was comparing the Classic on Mac vs the Native on Windows. There are several major problems with this:
The test results were 3 and 4 seconds. Meaning error was *tremendous*. With Photoshop the advantage on the Mac was 17 or 18 seconds, so even a 1 second error, or a 2 second error, can be ignored because the Mac won hands down.
With a ONE second delta, that suggests a faster hard drive, or specially partitioned hard drive, or a RAID system, can change the results. Heck, network activity could change the results. Or maybe someone just inserting a CD-ROM will change the results.
A second problem: Premiere on the Mac was run in Classic. The equivalent in Windows is running Premiere for Windows under VMWare. It is in no way "comparable". If you want to test similar functionality across both platforms, use Premiere Pro for Windows and Final Cut Express for Mac and then use the same footage to render the same output.
Then of course they test Microsoft Word... so if your goal is to write documents faster, get an Athlon 64. If your goal is to do graphics faster, get a Mac.
Boiled down, if you believe this benchmark, all the Athlon is good for is... games and productivity. All the G5 is good for is... math and rendering.
You misunderstand my point then if you disagree.
My point is you can't claim sight unseen that 128kb AAC from the iTMS != CD quality.
You can claim that 128kb AAC ripped from the CD is not CD quality, because it is necessarily lossy.
If you want to imply one thing or another, you need something to *bolster* that belief; you believed AAC from iTMS CD *before* this article, and then you used the statement to "prove" that 128kb AAC from Apple is not CD quality.
The claim is that the 128kb iTunes file is from MASTER quality!
What you *want* to compare is a Master -> 128kb AAC to a Master -> CD; what you *are* comparing is a Master -> CD -> 128kb AAC, and claiming the Master -> 128kb AAC don't sound as good as the CD.
You have no grounds for claiming that; the article itself doesn't talk about the iTunes Music Store; you bring that into the discussion without admitting that you are comparing one generation of loss (Master -> AAC) with two (Master -> CD -> AAC)!
I love how this is off topic! I thought the article was about how standards beats proprietary protocols? Except of course when everyone uses a standard protocol and their solutions still don't talk to each other!
MSN uses SIP, iChat uses SIP, but can they all talk to each other yet?