What's the point in releasing innovative products when you've got the entire market stitched up? I bet they've got a whole raft of secret uber projects just waiting to soak up any unsuspected change in status. They're a company in it to make money, so of course they play their cards close to their chest.
How do you get a higher average bitrate into a file with the same size and playtime?
Using VBR?
Of course Apple test their software, you don't get to produce a complete forward-thinking system like OS X by accident... however, I would have thought the testing procedure was simple, take various raw WAVs, ALAC compress, decompress, perform binary diff on source vs. result. Am I missing something?
As regards Apple 'inventing their own codec', I believed AAC was simply the audio portion of MPEG4, and ALAC the uncompressed (but as yet not a ratified standard) equivalent. It's in Apple's interest to attract the attention of people in the business by using recognised standards of the like created by Dolby, as opposed to (and with respect) a bunch of hackers who, in the eyes of any blinkered music exec, will be considered in the same subset as p2p pirates.
Given that the difference between the codecs in question is subjective at best, and is pretty irrelevant when applied to the iPod, being fairly unlimited in its relative storage size (a 160k AAC will be better than a 128k anything), this was a business decision, Apple always have to ensure that they're not going to find their stuff embraced and extended by Microsoft. This goes for pretty much anything they do. Who knows what Apples long-term plans are for ALAC? I'm betting that the iTunes store will be involved somewhere...
Musepack doesn't consistently beat AAC in quality listening tests, the only tests I've seen have been using equivalent filesize as the control, leading to higher average bitrates for the VBR encoders, hardly a fair test, as file size comparisons are largely irrelevant on hard drive players. I believe Apple are working on VBR so the situation should be revisited properly soon.
iTunes ripper has an error correction mode. I've never used it. Quality of the GUI is subjective. I'm not really sure what you mean by labelling Apple's lossless encoder 'sub-par', it seems perfectly fine to me, losslessly encoding my CDs into files smaller than.wav. Again labelling a lossless encoder untested is also strange, given that it's job is to merely replay audio files exactly as the CD would, but with a smaller filesize. How much testing do you think it needs?
In terms of support, ALAC is just a very high bitrate VBR AAC without the psychoacoustic and other stuff dropping parts of the audio afaik. People talk about ~900k rates. If Player X doesn't support it, but does support regular AAC, I would imagine it wouldn't take long for support to be extended to cover ALAC too. As for truncating samples, that's a bug in the Windows version, which they've been a bit tardy fixing. FLAC is/was guilty of the same thing, as they only losslessly encode the audio, and not any null or header data that can exist within the confines of certain CD tracks or uncompressed audio formats.
No. In blind tests where they let the Ogg Vorbis VBR bitrate to creep up beyond 130-odd kbit/s, Ogg beats out AAC by an incredibly slim margin. Tests were performed by people listening to samples via their computer. The results were so close as can be considered entirely subjective, and in general the average computer owner would have been evaluating them on a crap factory fitted Creative soundcard using possibly a stereo connected by a jack lead, but more likely a speaker/subwoofer system that would make an audiophile cry. The tests were also about 'which one sounds best' as opposed to which one sounded the most like the original recording, which was not made available. Certainly nothing to do with the portable players that we're discussing here, and more than likely not good even to really allow a properly neutral evaluation.
All formats have artifacts and different people are bothered by them in different ways.
AAC is high quality format. Apple also recently introduced a lossless version. A true audiophile wouldn't even consider anything less than lossless compression.
In terms of 'dumping your music on your player', iTunes is the single simplest and best piece of ripping software I've ever used, although perhaps you know something better than a piece of software that can quite literally be turned into a ripping production line (automatically gets the cddb info, rips, and ejects the disc). The default encoding method is an adequate 128k AAC, but you can change it to whatever you prefer, out of AIFF, AAC, Apple lossless, mp3 or wav.
In terms of comparing an iPod to a 20 quid flash player, you really aren't speaking as an Audiophile now, are you? The iPod is more than just a 20 quid flash player with a built-in hard drive, as a real audiophile.
Me. Most of my music was in 192k mp3 when I bought my Gen 2 iPod, but as soon as Apple introduced AAC I re-ripped it all, as it allowed me to get more music on the player at a lower bitrate.
Luckily iTunes makes this incredibly easy. Tidied up my information tags too. Being on a Mac, I barely even noticed it was doing it as I went about my day-to-day stuff and fed it a regular supply of CDs in the process.
Personally, I wouldn't use any portable music player as a source for my home stereo, as there are so many compromises that any half decent stereo should show up easily, even if the source music was a lossless codec. Cars are hardly a good listening environment either, you've got some guaranteed loud background noise that makes whatever supposed difference in quality between AAC and Ogg Vorbis utterly redundant.
I can't even fill my 10GB iPod at a quality that seems high enough given the amount of background noise I'm pretty much guaranteed to get when I'm out and about anyway, so even if Ogg Vorbis is better bit-for-bit (I don't personally think it is) I could just turn up the bitrate.
Of course fidelity is important, but it will always only be maximised within the desired specifications of the player.
My point really is, that Ogg Vorbis has some issues which can prevent it getting into a fairly standard device like the iPod. Given that there is very little actual demand, coupled with the ever increasing size of storage (I believe Hitachi are now making 60GB drives?) and the recent emergence of lossless codecs (Apple added it in the last update, I believe the Rio has it too, and the dense optical formats have had it a while), I don't think Ogg's time will ever come. By my quick estimation you could fit 100+ albums losslessly compressed on a 60GB iPod. If it's fidelity you require, then there's this option, otherwise, just wind up the bitrate. All the blind tests use fairly low bitrates, because there's really nothing to choose at higher rates.
I don't think I'll really look back on the 32-bit boxes with much fondness. They represented the birth of many of the franchises we now expect to see modern versions of, and many of these titles are completely and utterly replicated and extended by the modern hardware. For me that generation was the first forays into 3D, and many titles were released and sold purely on the basis of a new or interesting graphical technique that would just look horrifically dated today.
I'm not denying that there weren't some great games, but nothing like the breadth that the SNES offers the retro player, and what there is has been watered down by remakes for the modern hardware.
Yeah, or 'trade storage space for battery life? No thanks!'
Or 'seriously, 99% of people don't care',
or 'it's still compressed you fools, so what if it supposedly sounds 1% better',
or 'Rio thinks using ogg will make them cooler than Apple'.
I feel a bit better now. Seriously now though, portable devices are mainly designed to be portable and easy to use. Musical fidelity, albeit important, is really not going to shine through with the crappy little in-ear headphones that people will invariably choose to use. The fidelity is irrelevant and this claim by the Rio chap is more of a drawback of Ogg Vorbis than the iPod in my eyes.
Nope. Quite happy with AAC and a nice user interface thanks.
iTunes is also a pleasure as well, but then I prefer most software that Apple produces to anything anyone else can muster. Mark 2 iPod still going strong:)
Exactly, and even if for some reason, Linux suddenly chomped 50% of the desktop market share, you'd still never see Ogg Vorbis widely used. Microsoft and Apple would be straight there with their formats.
It'll be a moot point before that state ever exists, because storage size won't be an issue.
No! EA perform a very important function - ruining film licenses and pointless incremental updates on official sport licenses. What if a good developer got their hands on things like this? Have you seen the videos for Chronicles of Riddick? I'd be broke in no time!
It's halfway between a demo and a full game, 64 cars, and a few choice tracks. It's probably as much game as some of the poorer titles offer, but it's pretty ridiculous to charge GBP 25. The PS2's launch schedule has severly flagged in 2004 IMO, so maybe they think that releasing this will prop it up a bit until Christmas.
I wrote a letter to my MP and MEP and all I basically got back was a nice parliamentary compliment slip and a letter with the lowest signal to noise ratio ever. They're all toeing the party line.
Nope, it doesn't work like that either. You can't get two comparable laptops for the price of a powerbook, and even if you could the powerbook would still be worth more after 3 years anyway. Apple laptops don't give away much on price at all anyway. Did you ever wonder why there were that many Mac fanatics? It's because the overall experience and sense of value for money is there in spades. I'm betting I'll still get over 1/3rd of the original purchase price for this powerbook I'm typing on right now. The same will definitely not be said of anything with x86 in it.
Oh, and it's about $400 on eBay. Try getting an Apple system with an XGA screen for that price.
And once it's reached the end of its practical life for you, try selling it on eBay again. What's that? It's not worth shit now? Shame.
Sounds like someone's bitter at how Apple laptops hold their value to me, there's a reason for that you know;-)
Hope you enjoy using Windows or Linux on that. I wonder if the modem works in Linux? I wonder if having a wireless card sticking out of the side will get on your nerves after a while? What, those battery figures didn't include when using wi-fi? Shame!
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Erm, Windows is hardly a secret.
What's the point in releasing innovative products when you've got the entire market stitched up? I bet they've got a whole raft of secret uber projects just waiting to soak up any unsuspected change in status. They're a company in it to make money, so of course they play their cards close to their chest.
Of course Apple test their software, you don't get to produce a complete forward-thinking system like OS X by accident... however, I would have thought the testing procedure was simple, take various raw WAVs, ALAC compress, decompress, perform binary diff on source vs. result. Am I missing something?
As regards Apple 'inventing their own codec', I believed AAC was simply the audio portion of MPEG4, and ALAC the uncompressed (but as yet not a ratified standard) equivalent. It's in Apple's interest to attract the attention of people in the business by using recognised standards of the like created by Dolby, as opposed to (and with respect) a bunch of hackers who, in the eyes of any blinkered music exec, will be considered in the same subset as p2p pirates. Given that the difference between the codecs in question is subjective at best, and is pretty irrelevant when applied to the iPod, being fairly unlimited in its relative storage size (a 160k AAC will be better than a 128k anything), this was a business decision, Apple always have to ensure that they're not going to find their stuff embraced and extended by Microsoft. This goes for pretty much anything they do. Who knows what Apples long-term plans are for ALAC? I'm betting that the iTunes store will be involved somewhere...
iTunes ripper has an error correction mode. I've never used it. Quality of the GUI is subjective. I'm not really sure what you mean by labelling Apple's lossless encoder 'sub-par', it seems perfectly fine to me, losslessly encoding my CDs into files smaller than .wav. Again labelling a lossless encoder untested is also strange, given that it's job is to merely replay audio files exactly as the CD would, but with a smaller filesize. How much testing do you think it needs?
In terms of support, ALAC is just a very high bitrate VBR AAC without the psychoacoustic and other stuff dropping parts of the audio afaik. People talk about ~900k rates. If Player X doesn't support it, but does support regular AAC, I would imagine it wouldn't take long for support to be extended to cover ALAC too. As for truncating samples, that's a bug in the Windows version, which they've been a bit tardy fixing. FLAC is/was guilty of the same thing, as they only losslessly encode the audio, and not any null or header data that can exist within the confines of certain CD tracks or uncompressed audio formats.
It's still a mini-jack, sorry.
All formats have artifacts and different people are bothered by them in different ways.
In terms of comparing an iPod to a 20 quid flash player, you really aren't speaking as an Audiophile now, are you? The iPod is more than just a 20 quid flash player with a built-in hard drive, as a real audiophile.
Luckily iTunes makes this incredibly easy. Tidied up my information tags too. Being on a Mac, I barely even noticed it was doing it as I went about my day-to-day stuff and fed it a regular supply of CDs in the process.
Personally, I wouldn't use any portable music player as a source for my home stereo, as there are so many compromises that any half decent stereo should show up easily, even if the source music was a lossless codec. Cars are hardly a good listening environment either, you've got some guaranteed loud background noise that makes whatever supposed difference in quality between AAC and Ogg Vorbis utterly redundant.
I can't even fill my 10GB iPod at a quality that seems high enough given the amount of background noise I'm pretty much guaranteed to get when I'm out and about anyway, so even if Ogg Vorbis is better bit-for-bit (I don't personally think it is) I could just turn up the bitrate.
Of course fidelity is important, but it will always only be maximised within the desired specifications of the player.
My point really is, that Ogg Vorbis has some issues which can prevent it getting into a fairly standard device like the iPod. Given that there is very little actual demand, coupled with the ever increasing size of storage (I believe Hitachi are now making 60GB drives?) and the recent emergence of lossless codecs (Apple added it in the last update, I believe the Rio has it too, and the dense optical formats have had it a while), I don't think Ogg's time will ever come. By my quick estimation you could fit 100+ albums losslessly compressed on a 60GB iPod. If it's fidelity you require, then there's this option, otherwise, just wind up the bitrate. All the blind tests use fairly low bitrates, because there's really nothing to choose at higher rates.
I'm not denying that there weren't some great games, but nothing like the breadth that the SNES offers the retro player, and what there is has been watered down by remakes for the modern hardware.
Or 'seriously, 99% of people don't care',
or 'it's still compressed you fools, so what if it supposedly sounds 1% better',
or 'Rio thinks using ogg will make them cooler than Apple'.
I feel a bit better now. Seriously now though, portable devices are mainly designed to be portable and easy to use. Musical fidelity, albeit important, is really not going to shine through with the crappy little in-ear headphones that people will invariably choose to use. The fidelity is irrelevant and this claim by the Rio chap is more of a drawback of Ogg Vorbis than the iPod in my eyes.
iTunes is also a pleasure as well, but then I prefer most software that Apple produces to anything anyone else can muster. Mark 2 iPod still going strong :)
It'll be a moot point before that state ever exists, because storage size won't be an issue.
No-one's making you buy it! These are clearly designed to appeal to collectors and fanboys.
No! EA perform a very important function - ruining film licenses and pointless incremental updates on official sport licenses. What if a good developer got their hands on things like this? Have you seen the videos for Chronicles of Riddick? I'd be broke in no time!
It's halfway between a demo and a full game, 64 cars, and a few choice tracks. It's probably as much game as some of the poorer titles offer, but it's pretty ridiculous to charge GBP 25. The PS2's launch schedule has severly flagged in 2004 IMO, so maybe they think that releasing this will prop it up a bit until Christmas.
He refers to GT4:Prologue, which is 25 RRP in the UK.
Waste of time, they all have the same policy. In fact, it's a retrograde step because they wouldn't be aware of the existing lobbying.
It's not as if any of the other parties have a different policy, so it's not like you can threaten them with voting for the other guy either.
Not enough people care, so time is probably better spent preparing for when they do come in.
I wrote a letter to my MP and MEP and all I basically got back was a nice parliamentary compliment slip and a letter with the lowest signal to noise ratio ever. They're all toeing the party line.
That's nice, but how do you run Disk Utility/Repair Permissions first?
3. Make the game worth playing through again and again
Nope, it doesn't work like that either. You can't get two comparable laptops for the price of a powerbook, and even if you could the powerbook would still be worth more after 3 years anyway. Apple laptops don't give away much on price at all anyway. Did you ever wonder why there were that many Mac fanatics? It's because the overall experience and sense of value for money is there in spades. I'm betting I'll still get over 1/3rd of the original purchase price for this powerbook I'm typing on right now. The same will definitely not be said of anything with x86 in it.
Sounds like someone's bitter at how Apple laptops hold their value to me, there's a reason for that you know ;-)
Hope you enjoy using Windows or Linux on that. I wonder if the modem works in Linux? I wonder if having a wireless card sticking out of the side will get on your nerves after a while? What, those battery figures didn't include when using wi-fi? Shame!