> The only thing related to dell that makes it to/. is when they get sued by some customer
That is because Dell's products are stupefyingly uninteresting.
Also this box has OS and apps to match 8-way processing. The reason people want these is not because they have 8 CPU's but because they are 8x faster for running Aperture.
Just because you don't know how to use this particular tool doesn't mean you should sneer at it.
Aperture processes Camera RAW photos in an innovative way that essentially doesn't save anything until the user's edit session is totally over. The rest of the time it is constantly creating new images for you from the data in a Camera RAW file after each and every adjustment you make. If you aren't familiar with how much processing that is, you can peg 4 Xeons and it still feels slow.
Photoshop has the same kind of interactive user-makes-one-move, app-responds workflow. Every second you shave off matters. Adobe is about to ship a new Photoshop that is optimized for this exact machine. Not similar machines, but this exact one.
Apple has been shipping multi-core workstations for the entire of the 21st century, this is not new. There were dual G4's and quad G5's before there were 8-way Xeons.
That is the same as a lot of creative tools that are Mac/PC. I remember seeing a Macromedia survey a few years ago and Dreamweaver was 40/60 Mac/PC.
Adobe makes over 50% of their money on the Mac. They ship more units for Windows, but it is like five $99 Photoshop Elements for Windows for every one $599 Photoshop for Mac.
My favorite statistic like this was when 60% of professional Web designers in the U.S. said they use BBEdit and it is Mac only. It is actually that good, though.
The market share stats you read on the Web for Mac/PC never include the Apple Store or Apple Store Online or Apple's education sales. They are always basically "computers sold at CompUSA (and similar)" and that is where Apple is 1/20th. When you factor in that Macs have double the average working life it is not surprising to see the actual USAGE numbers be much larger, and this explains why sometimes a company drops a Mac product (like Adobe Premiere) and then brings it back a year later (like Adobe Premiere).
I'm pretty sure that for a number of years now Final Cut has been the most popular NLE by volume. The Avid systems cost more but Final Cut runs on a MacBook.
> Those are the kinds of application that should be taking advantage of the hardware, it's true. > Whether the software implementations are actually written to do so, and to do it well, is a different > question entirely.
It is, and that is why Apple builds complete systems instead of specializing in software or hardware.
If you could put all of the 21st century Mac workstations into one big room you would be hard pressed to find one with less than 2 processors. There were dual G4's and quad G5's and now 8-way Core Xeon and every time they adjusted the software to suit and made it easy for third party developers to do the same.
Same principle as if you want to do something trivial like switch processor architectures.
> Why does anyone who needs a $3000 workstation *care* about that fancy anodized case?
The case is a message from Apple to its customers: we give a shit about what we are doing. They are telling us that we can expect to find this level of craftsmanship and detail and quality in every part of the product. It is very hard to explain to most users that 1000 engineers sweated over 30 million lines of code but it is easy to explain that a case builder sweated over every detail of his or her task.
Also the case quality matches the quality of the whole system so that you don't push the power button one day and it falls in, disabling your whole box and necessitating a service call.
Finally, notice that since 1999 there are only two Mac workstation enclosures, each of which was revised a few times, but never really changed. Instead of bolting endless variations of swoopy colored panels onto the standard ATA case again and again and again, Apple took a step back, built one GREAT workstation enclosure and used it for G3/G4 and then built one GREAT workstation enclosure for G5/Core. The cost of each approach is probably the same, but the results are very different. Again, this extends inside the box, or rather the quality of the enclosure is a symptom of the quality of the box.
> Apple doesn't sell Mac Pro cases alone, but I doubt they spend >$100 on 'em.
You haven't even seen one, right? They're made of brushed aluminum plates. I bet just the skin from a Mac Pro costs more than $100. The enclosure is also constructed with much, much, much (much x100) tighter tolerances than the rest of the industry. Tolerances means the tightness of the seams basically, how accurately holes are drilled and components fitted. The box appears to be made of one piece of metal and it performs similarly as one integrated system. It's built like a fine musical instrument not a typewriter.
Also the more I think about your CPU switcheroo the more it stinks. Apple switches to Intel CPU's and ships Xeons and you still want to change the CPU's to avoid a direct comparison?
There is just so much missing from your $1796.91 NewEgg system that to call it a Mac Pro clone is disingenuous. You might as well describe your laundry list of tech parts as a "PlayStation3 clone" that would be just as accurate. Your box is EXACTLY as good a PlayStation3 as it is a Mac.
If that is all the PC you need then good for you. However that is like asking a Mac user to go back in time. There are so many problems with your box that have been fixed on the Mac for years. It is even like going back in time when you just consider the Intel components, because you are proposing that I use BIOS instead of modern firmware and use whatever that ancient partition map is called that Windows and Linux use, the one that is so unreliable and slow but nobody fixes it, instead of the modern one that Apple uses.
Also there is no software on your box while the Mac Pro has a greatest hits of the world's best software collection with all the best GUI software and all the best Unix software built-in. It has the developer tools that were used to create the World Wide Web, and it has a mature 3D interface that is about to go resolution-independent in a few weeks. There is so much stuff already in a Mac Pro that it takes me under an hour to install my 10 apps and 3 drivers and plug in about 10 peripherals and get down to work doing pro audio. Multichannel pro audio in under an hour, out of the box. It's completely different than what you're suggesting with your NewEgg shopping trip.
Don't get me wrong, there are times to raid NewEgg and build stuff from parts. However, purchasing a creative workstation is not one of those times. What you're building there looks like it could be a pretty decent file server as long as you don't put any Microsoft software on it.
When Apple shipped the first Mac Pro line last year there was a thorough deconstruction of the components. The first thing that struck me is how much the CPU's cost. These are not Celerons by any stretch.
> Apple Care will suddenly put $2000 back in my pocket for all that RAM?
Get somebody to teach you how to online shop and you can buy your RAM wherever you like.
One nice thing about Macs is that the models are uniformly constructed and well documented, so you can literally buy the RAM for this machine at many vendors by asking them for "Mac Pro 8-way RAM" and you will get the right thing. You don't need to know about speeds or buffering or whatnot.
Also it should be noted that the RAM you buy from Apple for the Mac Pro includes specially designed heat sinks so your system runs cooler, last longer, etc. If you put 16 GB in there it is not like a couple of 256 MB DIMMs.
I really resent it when people say Apple is gouging for add-on RAM because ALL MAJOR PC MAKERS charge more for add-on RAM than do vendors who specifically sell RAM. It is not gouging to sell something at the same price as competitors. Also Apple has been as good as anyone in building machines with easy access RAM doors so the user can get in there to add RAM. If they have made it easy enough to add RAM to most systems that a high school student can do it and combine that with online shopping it is hard to see what's stopping people from purchasing RAM in precisely the way that suits their needs.
I'm sure Apple would love to just put the maximum RAM in every box but that is not how the industry works either because you would no longer have a $599 machine and the user will not get it that the Gateway has 256 MB and the Mac has 2 GB. If you don't like how this shit works, do not blame Apple, simply start your own maverick PC company and change the rules. Apple is alone against the Windows hardware cartel and they are doing enough progressive shit as it is.
> So at the least buy a bare bones Mac Pro and add your own parts, you will save a ton.
He wasn't talking about adding RAM or more disks. Not only do users do that themselves, but the very Mac Pro we are talking about has four SATA slots inside... you unlatch the door and push a SATA disk into the slot and there are no cables. That is a perfect example of where Apple spent extra time and money and the user spent a little more money at purchase time but they will see that back later because you can put 2x500 in today and a year from now replace with 2x1000 and there is no IT overhead at all. It is also good for backup, i.e. a Time Machine disk in slot two, a RAID in 3-4, and pull a RAID disk and replace to back it up. This is the kind of stuff your typical Photoshop artist can do because Disk Utility is so easy to use.
But you are not going to tempt a guy who is going into the Apple Store to buy a Mac Pro to build his own PC entirely from the cheapest parts he can find on the Internet. That is not the point of a Mac Pro at all. It is a very known quantity, a Mac workstation. In a lot of professional environments it is like a grand piano in a music studio, the center of the creative work and has certain features you expect. It is a feature that at no time during the life of the machine will somebody say "where's the FireWire port?" and you go "FireWire! Hrumph! I saved $30 by leaving that out 2 years ago!"
Almost all 21st century Mac workstations have at least two processors. There were dual G4's and quad G5's before there were 8-way Xeons. Having more than one CPU is not considered exotic and software authors have been working with multiple CPU's for a long time now. Similarly, 64-bits is already yawn. If you need it at all you have been using it for years.
If you run one of these workstations in a situation where it is running basically one app then it is very likely that app can not only peak all your CPUs but may even use the rest of the network for distributed procesing through XGrid. Adobe Lightroom can peak all four processors on a 4-way box, probably does the same on an 8-way box.
Apps that can only peak one or two processors don't expect to have the box to themselves and probably don't, but they are spread across the CPU's by Mac OS X. These apps are the kinds of things that even if they could spread their work out better they wouldn't need to. Like Microsoft Word can get by on one Xeon.
Because they don't count Apple Stores, including the online Apple Store, you will find market share statistics such as this woefully inadequate for coming up with bigoted defenses for the sorry state of the Microsoft PC.
I would like to see some numbers on this because every copy of iTunes for the past four years has been importing CD's in AAC. And iTunes has more users than Windows Media Player which comes on every PC. Further, Apple sold 90% of all iPods since 2004 that is long after the MP3 buzzword days and it seems like there would be very little incentive for those users to specifically go into iTunes Preferences and look under Advanced and then negotiate audio encoder settings just so that they could get lower quality audio playback.
We would also have to consider the idea that you can ask many iTunes users "what format is your music ripped in?" and if they don't go "huh?" they will likely say "MP3" but then if you go and look at their iTunes it will be MP4 almost for certain.
> If the majority of online sales happen in AAC format
This has already happened long ago. The vast majority of online music sales are iTunes Store and it has ALWAYS been MP4 only.
> If... then hardware manufacturers will simply add support for AAC
AAC shows up in your MPEG-4 decoder hardware without having to satisfy any conditions other than it is part of MPEG-4. Hardware makers would have to specifically leave out AAC, not specifically put it in. If you were to for example watch a Blu-Ray or HD DVD movie without AAC it would be silent.
The movie that is on a DVD is MPEG-2 with DV video and MP3 audio. What comes after that, whether you are using optical disc or file download, is an MPEG-4 with H.264 video and AAC audio. The "MPEG-3" name was skipped. MPEG-4 is the direct successor to MPEG-2, from the same people and solving the same problems plus new ones with even higher quality. Unless you crawl into a cave and abstain from digital media you are going to consume a shitload of AAC no matter how you slice it.
This is true whether you accessorize your DVD player with a PlayStation3, Xbox, Wii, or AppleTV. They all play MPEG-4, they all have AAC.
> I'm sure by "much higher sound quality than mp3" you meant "hardly discernible from mp3." You can only tell AAC from MP3 > at, say, 160kbps with repeated critical listening on excellent equipment in a prepared setting. Most people can't tell the > difference at all.
No, by "much higher sound quality than mp3" he means that you can literally achieve a much higher sound quality with AAC. The very best MP3 you can make at the fattest bitrate of 320 kbit/s simply does not sound anywhere as good as a 256 kbit/s AAC, which is what Apple is selling now.
Of course you have to use a good encoder and the right settings. It is possible to make shitty sounding audio in every format. However the quality ceiling is much, much lower with MP3.
> You're right, but it's perception that makes the format, and now everyone perceives mp3 as the format that's everywhere. > The point of this article is to be propaganda to make people think AAC is more pervasive than it is.
The perception is that the format is "iPod". What is "everywhere" is the iPod.
Most people do not even know how to begin to conceptualize an "audio file format". Try and explain that there is a difference between "MP3" and "MP4" that they should care about and you will not be sleeping with that person tonight.
I know this is Slashdot and we are more likely to think of ourselves as "people who make audio codecs" rather than "people who make audio" but in this discussion we are talking about "the Music Industry Standard" in lossy audio codecs for distribution of original content to consumers via iTunes Store and similar. We are not talking about the development of audio players on Linux and what challenges may be faced there by those developers when they want to support the newest technologies.
The royalty that matters THE MOST when you're talking MP3 versus MP4 is the "content tax". This is not a problem that stops developers from developing codecs, rather it is a problem that stops audio producers from producing audio.
Why isn't the music industry breaking down your door to sell you MP3? It is not because of DRM. It is because MP3 has a lawyer who follows it around demanding a cut of every dollar the consumer pays for music bought in MP3 format. MP3 is the audio layer from a DVD and has DVD-style licensing structures and costs. It is neither music friendly nor indie friendly, nor Internet friendly. The fees are made for movie studios and their accountants and their per-unit costs.
MP3's actual success has been where no money changes hands. It is the money part of MP3 that is broken even more than the ancient crufty technology.
With MP4, there is no content tax. The model is the same as CD or QuickTime. You pay for your tools and what you make with them continues to be your own, just like with CD or QuickTime, whether you have 1000 users who paid $1000 each or a million users who each paid one penny.
This is a HUGE issue that probably cannot be appreciated fully if you are not in the industry, or if you have not produced your own original digital content for sale. The MP4 file format is the QuickTime file format, and Apple committed years ago to converting from Sorenson to the new standardized MPEG-4 codecs, but even so, when MPEG-4 first came out with a content tax Apple halted QuickTime development and there was a standoff for some months that ended with the content tax being dropped. The MPEG lawyers got greedy and almost sank the whole ship. If they had not capitulated then iTunes Store and iPod would be all QuickTime instead of being all MP4 and there would be a QuickTime vs Windows Media war going on.
This is years ago. You understand that the MP3 vs MP4 debate is not only long over in the industry, but it never really happened. MP3 never ever had a chance of replacing the CD for the distribution of original content unless its licensing was dramatically modernized or expired. You can't make the case to a record company or even a songwriter that they should start paying a new kind of fee on downloads that they didn't have to pay on a physical media. There is no way to force us, because we'll just continue to ship CD's and let Apple enable the user to do the encoding themselves.
By the way, MPEG is a patent pool. It is infested with patents by definition and by design. The "pool" part of "patent pool" means "sharing". Therefore you could also say the MPEG patent pool is infested with satisfied users.
> and so [AAC] will never capture the market share that mp3 based hardware (chip) players have.
That is what I said about the 5G iPod. The 4G iPods were everywhere, how will the 5G iPods ever capture the market share that 4G iPods have? Turns out the 5G iPod is a NEWER VERSION of the 4G iPod... people stopped buying the 4G ones entirely and the 5G really took off.
So it was when MP1 gave way to MP2, gave way to MP3 (delightfully unofficially), gave way to MP4 (AAC). The decoding chips in the hardware you have today may already have AAC decoding in them. It is many years old now. Any device that plays MP3 but not MP4 will be superseded in the future by a very similar device that plays both. Not only will that happen, it is almost over.
If you have PSP, or PlayStation3, or Wii, or XBox, or many phones and set-top boxes, then you have AAC. Of course both HD DVD and Blu-Ray are MPEG-4 all the way, that means AAC. Even the shit-brown Zune plays AAC.
> mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.
Sorry, but MP4 is going to make MP3 and even MPEG-2 (DVD) look like beta tests. In the first place, MP4 is Internet-savvy: smaller resolutions and much lower file sizes. In the second place, there is no content tax so you can produce audio and sell it in MP4 and you only have to pay for the encoder rather than pay a vig on every sale as with MP3 (#1 complaint about MP3 from the people who MAKE content). In the third place, it is easier to author MP4 than either MP3 or DVD. MP4 is going to do for audio and video on the Internet what JPEG did for photos. It's QuickTime that plays outside of the QuickTime player, it is exactly what the doctor ordered right after he complained he couldn't play Sorenson video on Linux in 1999. Not only is the tech industry excited to make MP4 players, content producers are excited to make the content for MP4 players. This is what content creators are talking about for the past couple of years, not HD DVD or Blu-Ray that is yawn.
Almost 90% of all iPods were sold after January 1, 2004, which is well after MP3's notorious phase and long after the file format itself stopped mattering. What matters is that lossy encoding enabled your whole music collection in your pocket. The average iPod user either doesn't know what MP3 is, or thinks he/she is actually using it on their iPod however they are not, they are using MP4.
> iPods do not use MPEG-4 SLS, but rather Apple's own propietary format, Apple Lossless.
MPEG-4 SLS was published about the same time as the 5G iPods were released. Unless Apple has also invented a proprietary time machine they are going to be hard pressed to fit MPEG-4 SLS into the current iPod.
Further, since Apple actually shipped over 100 million Apple Lossless codecs so far and as yet nobody has even built an MPEG-4 SLS codec I would say Apple Lossless is a better choice for industry standard. The next most popular lossless codec has less than a million users also.
Finally, lossless encoding is almost entirely useless and almost nobody does it. I have yet to see a situation where the user isn't better served by storing the raw audio waveform (AIFF). The encoding and decoding computational overhead for AIFF (or its WAV clone) is zero and it is universally compatible. Any lossless codec requires encoding time, computing power to decode it, and although it takes half the disk space of AIFF it is also only 1/1,000,000,000,000th as compatible. AIFF is universal and standard and mature (and also can contain 32-bit audio and 192 kHz sample rates if required) while every lossless codec is the complete opposite. From either raw audio or any lossless audio codec the waveform is the SAME and both files are too big for iPod so you are talking entirely about saving disk space on a desktop or notebook computer. It is completely ridiculous.
And if you want to send an AIFF over the Internet, put it in a Zip file. You won't miss the 10% better compression of a lossless audio codec. The person on the other end will be guaranteed to play the AIFF also.
> Don't really have an easy way to try AAC at 256K but I'd bet it is still distinguishable from a CD/flac.
No, it really isn't distinguishable. I have very well-trained and experienced audio producer ears and I can't tell the difference unless I actually listen for it, and even then I have to look through a few frequencies before I find something. They are too close to care about in most cases. You would do better to worry about your headphones or speakers which in most cases suck ass.
AAC was designed to give "near CD quality" even at 64 kbit/s. The encoder will not reduce the sample rate of audio until you go below 64 kbit/s, so even at 64 kbit/s you are listening to 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio, same as CD, albeit with lossy encoding, stuff thrown away. It sounds a bit thin... translucent. The low-end of the bass is chopped off, but the highs are there, although they show the most artifacts. Still listenable, though. Most especially when streaming over the Internet because it is so lightweight and yet sounds so good.
When you go to 128 kbit/s it is supposed to be "CD quality" (not "near") and what you get is much thicker, more bass, less artifacts in the high end, and you feel more like you are listening to a CD, especially if you just listened to the 64 kbit/s version of the same song. This is the bitrate that was supposed to provide a CD quality experience in a file size that is small enough to be truly dangerous. This is the bitrate that most AAC is at, whether it is an iTunes Store music download or the audio track of a movie on HD disc. While it is not quite CD quality it is better than most of the audio most people hear most of the time.
But at 256 kbit/s you are getting the Cadillac of perceptual encoding. There is no MP3 that can match a 256 kbit/s AAC or even come close. A 320 kbit/s MP3 (total maximum) is just not nearly as good as 256 kbit/s AAC. The MP3 still has all kinds of artifacts at 320 kbit/s that are nowhere to be found in the AAC even though it is a smaller bitrate. Some of the artifacts you hear in MP3 are just MP3 artifacts that are there at all bitrates, but AAC starts better at the low end and gets better all the way up as you increase the bitrate. 256 is plush, thick, focused, tight fast highs.
> Why are we STILL paying for songs that aren't even CD quality?
Because CD-quality songs will overtax today's technology. If you replace the AAC on a typical iPod with a lossless codec you will end up with 1/4 of the song selection and 1/4 of the battery life and if it is a hard disk iPod the hard disk will run all the time and wear out much sooner.
However Apple just announced a trade-in program. You can trade-in your AAC 128 kbit/s plus 30 cents for a 256 kbit/s version of the same song. You lose nothing compared to buying the 256 kbit/s one fresh today. In the future they will obviously upgrade people all the way up to the CD, and then go beyond that.
In music studios it has been common to work at 24-bits for a long time now, and sample rates are up to 192 kHz even in small studios. Since most of the music you bought on CD over the past 10 years is actually a degraded 16-bit copy of the true 24-bit master (it's dithered to lose the extra bits) there is no point in holding up the CD as some sort of ideal. The actual audio content is degraded to fit into your CD player just like audio is degraded in a different way to fit into an iPod.
Even mixing 64 audio channels down to 2 is a way to fit the actual audio content into consumer gear. There are compromises everywhere.
> Why are we taking several steps BACKWARDS in the development > of digital music?
No, it is not a step backwards. The mistake you're making is that you're defining "audio quality" too narrowly, only looking at specs such as bit depth, sample rate, lossy/lossless encoding, etc. and imagining them in a best case scenario that does not exist in the real world. It is a common mistake. What is always compared is a 16-bit/44.1 kHz raw audio file and a 16-bit/44.1 kHz perceptually encoded audio file, in a music studio or a good listening room, with associated graphs and spectrograms to prove just how much "better" the raw audio file is.
The problem with the above comparison, though, is that no CD's are actually involved, and no CD players. When you put your 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio file onto a CD, right away you have greatly degraded its quality because the bitstream that the CD player sees will not be the same due to the CD's unique and funky volume format and massive error rate. Therefore the CD player will make up the missing bits (so-called error correction) which dramatically degrades audio quality.
What's more, if the CD skips even once during playback you have blown your entire advantage over an iPod. It is gone. The slight improvement in quality that you might have from the CD is gone as soon as it reminds you it is spindles and gears and little whirring parts and lots of 1980's technology. CD's wear out... the older a CD is the worse it sounds due to scratches that become errors or skips and you probably don't have a backup copy either. Your iPod tracks will play the same way forever and you can back them up more easily also.
If you consider other factors like power requirements, you can easily imagine a situation where user A plays their iPod LOUD all day long, enjoying every feature of every song they listen to, while user B is playing their portable CD player at half volume in order to not run out of battery life. The way the human ear works, a loud iPod is better quality audio than a soft CD player no matter what the authoring specs.
Consider a person listening to an iPod with 10,000 songs on it, shuffling away by itself, and they are deeply into the music between their headphones, not having to even lift a finger to change a song or pick a song because it is all playlists, and compare them to another person who is manually shuffling a smaller selection of CD's into and out of a player. Who will perceive the better audio quality during their listening session?
Finally, consider that the iPod did not in fact replace the CD, but rather it replaced the portable and mixable audio cassette. iTunes is two years older than iPod, and iTunes has a CD in
> And, unlike mp3, AAC can be taken all the way up to lossless in quality.
No.
An MPEG-4 movie can contain audio in various codecs. The default for perceptual encoding is AAC. Perceptual encoding is when the encoder throws away data that it thinks the listener won't notice is missing in order to create a file that has about 1/10th the data size of the original. Perceptual encoding is always "lossy" by definition. AAC tops out at 320 kbit/s bitrate just like MP3, however the audio quality is DRAMATICALLY better than MP3. I'm an audio pro but I find the 256 kbit/s AAC to be really delicious. You can put your CD's in storage if you have them all in 256 kbit/s AAC at least for the next five years before you could go lossless and then maybe not notice the downsides (due to immense 10G iPod storage for example).
At the other end of the spectrum you could make an MPEG-4 movie with raw audio waveforms in it, basically CD audio in there, with no data compression, so the audio tracks would be HUGE in file size, however they would play on MPEG-4 players because raw audio is really easy to decode.
In the middle, you have "lossless compression" where you compress the audio data just like it is a Zip file... don't throw any data away, but rather use an algorithm to stuff 30 MB of data into 15 MB at the expense extra computation to decompress the audio before playback. The funky thing with lossless is that some 30 MB audio files will compress to 15 MB but some will only compress to 25 MB depending on the audio material. So it is not just a matter of losing disk space to a much larger music collection, but also you ask a lot more of your music player as it plays, more data, bigger files, more data per second. Any 256 kbit/s AAC will have a bitrate of 256 kbit/s but your lossless tracks will all have their very own unique bitrates. For the EXTREMELY MINUTE improvement in audio quality that most people cannot even detect over 256 kbit/s AAC it is generally not worth it to do lossless today, except for a single archive copy such as a stored CD after a AAC rip. Or you could buy music online in a lossless codec and then "rip" it to AAC and use the AAC on an iPod or elsewhere and backup the lossless copy for future use.
The main thing is that between lossy and lossless you have a factor of about 10. So if you are using your iPod today with lossy files and you decide to go lossless you either have to get a 10x bigger iPod with 10x the serial bandwidth and 10x the battery life or you have to put up with your entire digital music experience being 10x slower. What makes perceptual encoding so attractive and why it has been such a world-changing thing is that a lossless track does not have 10x the audio quality of perceptual to match all the other dimensions. "FM" to "CD" is a much bigger jump in quality than AAC 256 kbit/s and lossless CD audio. Again, most people (like 90%) can't even tell a CD audio track and an AAC 256 kbit/s apart even when A-B'ing on a great system. It is the same to their ears. That's the point.
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> The only thing related to dell that makes it to /. is when they get sued by some customer
That is because Dell's products are stupefyingly uninteresting.
Also this box has OS and apps to match 8-way processing. The reason people want these is not because they have 8 CPU's but because they are 8x faster for running Aperture.
> My frustration with Apple is the mid-range,
They could call it "Mac". I imagine it would be in the shape of a cube.
> So that leaves an 8-core Mac for what again...?
Just because you don't know how to use this particular tool doesn't mean you should sneer at it.
Aperture processes Camera RAW photos in an innovative way that essentially doesn't save anything until the user's edit session is totally over. The rest of the time it is constantly creating new images for you from the data in a Camera RAW file after each and every adjustment you make. If you aren't familiar with how much processing that is, you can peg 4 Xeons and it still feels slow.
Photoshop has the same kind of interactive user-makes-one-move, app-responds workflow. Every second you shave off matters. Adobe is about to ship a new Photoshop that is optimized for this exact machine. Not similar machines, but this exact one.
Apple has been shipping multi-core workstations for the entire of the 21st century, this is not new. There were dual G4's and quad G5's before there were 8-way Xeons.
> Avid is closer to 40/60 Mac/PC.
That is the same as a lot of creative tools that are Mac/PC. I remember seeing a Macromedia survey a few years ago and Dreamweaver was 40/60 Mac/PC.
Adobe makes over 50% of their money on the Mac. They ship more units for Windows, but it is like five $99 Photoshop Elements for Windows for every one $599 Photoshop for Mac.
My favorite statistic like this was when 60% of professional Web designers in the U.S. said they use BBEdit and it is Mac only. It is actually that good, though.
The market share stats you read on the Web for Mac/PC never include the Apple Store or Apple Store Online or Apple's education sales. They are always basically "computers sold at CompUSA (and similar)" and that is where Apple is 1/20th. When you factor in that Macs have double the average working life it is not surprising to see the actual USAGE numbers be much larger, and this explains why sometimes a company drops a Mac product (like Adobe Premiere) and then brings it back a year later (like Adobe Premiere).
I'm pretty sure that for a number of years now Final Cut has been the most popular NLE by volume. The Avid systems cost more but Final Cut runs on a MacBook.
> Those are the kinds of application that should be taking advantage of the hardware, it's true.
> Whether the software implementations are actually written to do so, and to do it well, is a different
> question entirely.
It is, and that is why Apple builds complete systems instead of specializing in software or hardware.
If you could put all of the 21st century Mac workstations into one big room you would be hard pressed to find one with less than 2 processors. There were dual G4's and quad G5's and now 8-way Core Xeon and every time they adjusted the software to suit and made it easy for third party developers to do the same.
Same principle as if you want to do something trivial like switch processor architectures.
> Why does anyone who needs a $3000 workstation *care* about that fancy anodized case?
The case is a message from Apple to its customers: we give a shit about what we are doing. They are telling us that we can expect to find this level of craftsmanship and detail and quality in every part of the product. It is very hard to explain to most users that 1000 engineers sweated over 30 million lines of code but it is easy to explain that a case builder sweated over every detail of his or her task.
Also the case quality matches the quality of the whole system so that you don't push the power button one day and it falls in, disabling your whole box and necessitating a service call.
Finally, notice that since 1999 there are only two Mac workstation enclosures, each of which was revised a few times, but never really changed. Instead of bolting endless variations of swoopy colored panels onto the standard ATA case again and again and again, Apple took a step back, built one GREAT workstation enclosure and used it for G3/G4 and then built one GREAT workstation enclosure for G5/Core. The cost of each approach is probably the same, but the results are very different. Again, this extends inside the box, or rather the quality of the enclosure is a symptom of the quality of the box.
> Apple doesn't sell Mac Pro cases alone, but I doubt they spend >$100 on 'em.
You haven't even seen one, right? They're made of brushed aluminum plates. I bet just the skin from a Mac Pro costs more than $100. The enclosure is also constructed with much, much, much (much x100) tighter tolerances than the rest of the industry. Tolerances means the tightness of the seams basically, how accurately holes are drilled and components fitted. The box appears to be made of one piece of metal and it performs similarly as one integrated system. It's built like a fine musical instrument not a typewriter.
Also the more I think about your CPU switcheroo the more it stinks. Apple switches to Intel CPU's and ships Xeons and you still want to change the CPU's to avoid a direct comparison?
There is just so much missing from your $1796.91 NewEgg system that to call it a Mac Pro clone is disingenuous. You might as well describe your laundry list of tech parts as a "PlayStation3 clone" that would be just as accurate. Your box is EXACTLY as good a PlayStation3 as it is a Mac.
If that is all the PC you need then good for you. However that is like asking a Mac user to go back in time. There are so many problems with your box that have been fixed on the Mac for years. It is even like going back in time when you just consider the Intel components, because you are proposing that I use BIOS instead of modern firmware and use whatever that ancient partition map is called that Windows and Linux use, the one that is so unreliable and slow but nobody fixes it, instead of the modern one that Apple uses.
Also there is no software on your box while the Mac Pro has a greatest hits of the world's best software collection with all the best GUI software and all the best Unix software built-in. It has the developer tools that were used to create the World Wide Web, and it has a mature 3D interface that is about to go resolution-independent in a few weeks. There is so much stuff already in a Mac Pro that it takes me under an hour to install my 10 apps and 3 drivers and plug in about 10 peripherals and get down to work doing pro audio. Multichannel pro audio in under an hour, out of the box. It's completely different than what you're suggesting with your NewEgg shopping trip.
Don't get me wrong, there are times to raid NewEgg and build stuff from parts. However, purchasing a creative workstation is not one of those times. What you're building there looks like it could be a pretty decent file server as long as you don't put any Microsoft software on it.
> quad-2.66s, which are $1,189 each
When Apple shipped the first Mac Pro line last year there was a thorough deconstruction of the components. The first thing that struck me is how much the CPU's cost. These are not Celerons by any stretch.
> Apple Care will suddenly put $2000 back in my pocket for all that RAM?
Get somebody to teach you how to online shop and you can buy your RAM wherever you like.
One nice thing about Macs is that the models are uniformly constructed and well documented, so you can literally buy the RAM for this machine at many vendors by asking them for "Mac Pro 8-way RAM" and you will get the right thing. You don't need to know about speeds or buffering or whatnot.
Also it should be noted that the RAM you buy from Apple for the Mac Pro includes specially designed heat sinks so your system runs cooler, last longer, etc. If you put 16 GB in there it is not like a couple of 256 MB DIMMs.
> It's still gouging,
No, it's really not.
I really resent it when people say Apple is gouging for add-on RAM because ALL MAJOR PC MAKERS charge more for add-on RAM than do vendors who specifically sell RAM. It is not gouging to sell something at the same price as competitors. Also Apple has been as good as anyone in building machines with easy access RAM doors so the user can get in there to add RAM. If they have made it easy enough to add RAM to most systems that a high school student can do it and combine that with online shopping it is hard to see what's stopping people from purchasing RAM in precisely the way that suits their needs.
I'm sure Apple would love to just put the maximum RAM in every box but that is not how the industry works either because you would no longer have a $599 machine and the user will not get it that the Gateway has 256 MB and the Mac has 2 GB. If you don't like how this shit works, do not blame Apple, simply start your own maverick PC company and change the rules. Apple is alone against the Windows hardware cartel and they are doing enough progressive shit as it is.
> I've considered AppleCare, but I don't care for shipping computers via UPS or FedEx
You can just take them into the Apple Store also.
> So at the least buy a bare bones Mac Pro and add your own parts, you will save a ton.
... you unlatch the door and push a SATA disk into the slot and there are no cables. That is a perfect example of where Apple spent extra time and money and the user spent a little more money at purchase time but they will see that back later because you can put 2x500 in today and a year from now replace with 2x1000 and there is no IT overhead at all. It is also good for backup, i.e. a Time Machine disk in slot two, a RAID in 3-4, and pull a RAID disk and replace to back it up. This is the kind of stuff your typical Photoshop artist can do because Disk Utility is so easy to use.
He wasn't talking about adding RAM or more disks. Not only do users do that themselves, but the very Mac Pro we are talking about has four SATA slots inside
But you are not going to tempt a guy who is going into the Apple Store to buy a Mac Pro to build his own PC entirely from the cheapest parts he can find on the Internet. That is not the point of a Mac Pro at all. It is a very known quantity, a Mac workstation. In a lot of professional environments it is like a grand piano in a music studio, the center of the creative work and has certain features you expect. It is a feature that at no time during the life of the machine will somebody say "where's the FireWire port?" and you go "FireWire! Hrumph! I saved $30 by leaving that out 2 years ago!"
> Not trolling
Sort of.
Almost all 21st century Mac workstations have at least two processors. There were dual G4's and quad G5's before there were 8-way Xeons. Having more than one CPU is not considered exotic and software authors have been working with multiple CPU's for a long time now. Similarly, 64-bits is already yawn. If you need it at all you have been using it for years.
If you run one of these workstations in a situation where it is running basically one app then it is very likely that app can not only peak all your CPUs but may even use the rest of the network for distributed procesing through XGrid. Adobe Lightroom can peak all four processors on a 4-way box, probably does the same on an 8-way box.
Apps that can only peak one or two processors don't expect to have the box to themselves and probably don't, but they are spread across the CPU's by Mac OS X. These apps are the kinds of things that even if they could spread their work out better they wouldn't need to. Like Microsoft Word can get by on one Xeon.
Because they don't count Apple Stores, including the online Apple Store, you will find market share statistics such as this woefully inadequate for coming up with bigoted defenses for the sorry state of the Microsoft PC.
> Most people have ripped their music to MP3
... then hardware manufacturers will simply add support for AAC
I would like to see some numbers on this because every copy of iTunes for the past four years has been importing CD's in AAC. And iTunes has more users than Windows Media Player which comes on every PC. Further, Apple sold 90% of all iPods since 2004 that is long after the MP3 buzzword days and it seems like there would be very little incentive for those users to specifically go into iTunes Preferences and look under Advanced and then negotiate audio encoder settings just so that they could get lower quality audio playback.
We would also have to consider the idea that you can ask many iTunes users "what format is your music ripped in?" and if they don't go "huh?" they will likely say "MP3" but then if you go and look at their iTunes it will be MP4 almost for certain.
> If the majority of online sales happen in AAC format
This has already happened long ago. The vast majority of online music sales are iTunes Store and it has ALWAYS been MP4 only.
> If
AAC shows up in your MPEG-4 decoder hardware without having to satisfy any conditions other than it is part of MPEG-4. Hardware makers would have to specifically leave out AAC, not specifically put it in. If you were to for example watch a Blu-Ray or HD DVD movie without AAC it would be silent.
The movie that is on a DVD is MPEG-2 with DV video and MP3 audio. What comes after that, whether you are using optical disc or file download, is an MPEG-4 with H.264 video and AAC audio. The "MPEG-3" name was skipped. MPEG-4 is the direct successor to MPEG-2, from the same people and solving the same problems plus new ones with even higher quality. Unless you crawl into a cave and abstain from digital media you are going to consume a shitload of AAC no matter how you slice it.
This is true whether you accessorize your DVD player with a PlayStation3, Xbox, Wii, or AppleTV. They all play MPEG-4, they all have AAC.
> I'm sure by "much higher sound quality than mp3" you meant "hardly discernible from mp3." You can only tell AAC from MP3
> at, say, 160kbps with repeated critical listening on excellent equipment in a prepared setting. Most people can't tell the
> difference at all.
No, by "much higher sound quality than mp3" he means that you can literally achieve a much higher sound quality with AAC. The very best MP3 you can make at the fattest bitrate of 320 kbit/s simply does not sound anywhere as good as a 256 kbit/s AAC, which is what Apple is selling now.
Of course you have to use a good encoder and the right settings. It is possible to make shitty sounding audio in every format. However the quality ceiling is much, much lower with MP3.
> You're right, but it's perception that makes the format, and now everyone perceives mp3 as the format that's everywhere.
> The point of this article is to be propaganda to make people think AAC is more pervasive than it is.
The perception is that the format is "iPod". What is "everywhere" is the iPod.
1960's : LP, cassette
1980's : CD, cassette
2000's : CD, iPod
Most people do not even know how to begin to conceptualize an "audio file format". Try and explain that there is a difference between "MP3" and "MP4" that they should care about and you will not be sleeping with that person tonight.
> Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested:
NO YOU FOOL.
I know this is Slashdot and we are more likely to think of ourselves as "people who make audio codecs" rather than "people who make audio" but in this discussion we are talking about "the Music Industry Standard" in lossy audio codecs for distribution of original content to consumers via iTunes Store and similar. We are not talking about the development of audio players on Linux and what challenges may be faced there by those developers when they want to support the newest technologies.
The royalty that matters THE MOST when you're talking MP3 versus MP4 is the "content tax". This is not a problem that stops developers from developing codecs, rather it is a problem that stops audio producers from producing audio.
Why isn't the music industry breaking down your door to sell you MP3? It is not because of DRM. It is because MP3 has a lawyer who follows it around demanding a cut of every dollar the consumer pays for music bought in MP3 format. MP3 is the audio layer from a DVD and has DVD-style licensing structures and costs. It is neither music friendly nor indie friendly, nor Internet friendly. The fees are made for movie studios and their accountants and their per-unit costs.
MP3's actual success has been where no money changes hands. It is the money part of MP3 that is broken even more than the ancient crufty technology.
With MP4, there is no content tax. The model is the same as CD or QuickTime. You pay for your tools and what you make with them continues to be your own, just like with CD or QuickTime, whether you have 1000 users who paid $1000 each or a million users who each paid one penny.
This is a HUGE issue that probably cannot be appreciated fully if you are not in the industry, or if you have not produced your own original digital content for sale. The MP4 file format is the QuickTime file format, and Apple committed years ago to converting from Sorenson to the new standardized MPEG-4 codecs, but even so, when MPEG-4 first came out with a content tax Apple halted QuickTime development and there was a standoff for some months that ended with the content tax being dropped. The MPEG lawyers got greedy and almost sank the whole ship. If they had not capitulated then iTunes Store and iPod would be all QuickTime instead of being all MP4 and there would be a QuickTime vs Windows Media war going on.
This is years ago. You understand that the MP3 vs MP4 debate is not only long over in the industry, but it never really happened. MP3 never ever had a chance of replacing the CD for the distribution of original content unless its licensing was dramatically modernized or expired. You can't make the case to a record company or even a songwriter that they should start paying a new kind of fee on downloads that they didn't have to pay on a physical media. There is no way to force us, because we'll just continue to ship CD's and let Apple enable the user to do the encoding themselves.
By the way, MPEG is a patent pool. It is infested with patents by definition and by design. The "pool" part of "patent pool" means "sharing". Therefore you could also say the MPEG patent pool is infested with satisfied users.
> and so [AAC] will never capture the market share that mp3 based hardware (chip) players have.
... people stopped buying the 4G ones entirely and the 5G really took off.
That is what I said about the 5G iPod. The 4G iPods were everywhere, how will the 5G iPods ever capture the market share that 4G iPods have? Turns out the 5G iPod is a NEWER VERSION of the 4G iPod
So it was when MP1 gave way to MP2, gave way to MP3 (delightfully unofficially), gave way to MP4 (AAC). The decoding chips in the hardware you have today may already have AAC decoding in them. It is many years old now. Any device that plays MP3 but not MP4 will be superseded in the future by a very similar device that plays both. Not only will that happen, it is almost over.
If you have PSP, or PlayStation3, or Wii, or XBox, or many phones and set-top boxes, then you have AAC. Of course both HD DVD and Blu-Ray are MPEG-4 all the way, that means AAC. Even the shit-brown Zune plays AAC.
> mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.
Sorry, but MP4 is going to make MP3 and even MPEG-2 (DVD) look like beta tests. In the first place, MP4 is Internet-savvy: smaller resolutions and much lower file sizes. In the second place, there is no content tax so you can produce audio and sell it in MP4 and you only have to pay for the encoder rather than pay a vig on every sale as with MP3 (#1 complaint about MP3 from the people who MAKE content). In the third place, it is easier to author MP4 than either MP3 or DVD. MP4 is going to do for audio and video on the Internet what JPEG did for photos. It's QuickTime that plays outside of the QuickTime player, it is exactly what the doctor ordered right after he complained he couldn't play Sorenson video on Linux in 1999. Not only is the tech industry excited to make MP4 players, content producers are excited to make the content for MP4 players. This is what content creators are talking about for the past couple of years, not HD DVD or Blu-Ray that is yawn.
Almost 90% of all iPods were sold after January 1, 2004, which is well after MP3's notorious phase and long after the file format itself stopped mattering. What matters is that lossy encoding enabled your whole music collection in your pocket. The average iPod user either doesn't know what MP3 is, or thinks he/she is actually using it on their iPod however they are not, they are using MP4.
> iPods do not use MPEG-4 SLS, but rather Apple's own propietary format, Apple Lossless.
MPEG-4 SLS was published about the same time as the 5G iPods were released. Unless Apple has also invented a proprietary time machine they are going to be hard pressed to fit MPEG-4 SLS into the current iPod.
Further, since Apple actually shipped over 100 million Apple Lossless codecs so far and as yet nobody has even built an MPEG-4 SLS codec I would say Apple Lossless is a better choice for industry standard. The next most popular lossless codec has less than a million users also.
Finally, lossless encoding is almost entirely useless and almost nobody does it. I have yet to see a situation where the user isn't better served by storing the raw audio waveform (AIFF). The encoding and decoding computational overhead for AIFF (or its WAV clone) is zero and it is universally compatible. Any lossless codec requires encoding time, computing power to decode it, and although it takes half the disk space of AIFF it is also only 1/1,000,000,000,000th as compatible. AIFF is universal and standard and mature (and also can contain 32-bit audio and 192 kHz sample rates if required) while every lossless codec is the complete opposite. From either raw audio or any lossless audio codec the waveform is the SAME and both files are too big for iPod so you are talking entirely about saving disk space on a desktop or notebook computer. It is completely ridiculous.
And if you want to send an AIFF over the Internet, put it in a Zip file. You won't miss the 10% better compression of a lossless audio codec. The person on the other end will be guaranteed to play the AIFF also.
> Don't really have an easy way to try AAC at 256K but I'd bet it is still distinguishable from a CD/flac.
... translucent. The low-end of the bass is chopped off, but the highs are there, although they show the most artifacts. Still listenable, though. Most especially when streaming over the Internet because it is so lightweight and yet sounds so good.
No, it really isn't distinguishable. I have very well-trained and experienced audio producer ears and I can't tell the difference unless I actually listen for it, and even then I have to look through a few frequencies before I find something. They are too close to care about in most cases. You would do better to worry about your headphones or speakers which in most cases suck ass.
AAC was designed to give "near CD quality" even at 64 kbit/s. The encoder will not reduce the sample rate of audio until you go below 64 kbit/s, so even at 64 kbit/s you are listening to 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio, same as CD, albeit with lossy encoding, stuff thrown away. It sounds a bit thin
When you go to 128 kbit/s it is supposed to be "CD quality" (not "near") and what you get is much thicker, more bass, less artifacts in the high end, and you feel more like you are listening to a CD, especially if you just listened to the 64 kbit/s version of the same song. This is the bitrate that was supposed to provide a CD quality experience in a file size that is small enough to be truly dangerous. This is the bitrate that most AAC is at, whether it is an iTunes Store music download or the audio track of a movie on HD disc. While it is not quite CD quality it is better than most of the audio most people hear most of the time.
But at 256 kbit/s you are getting the Cadillac of perceptual encoding. There is no MP3 that can match a 256 kbit/s AAC or even come close. A 320 kbit/s MP3 (total maximum) is just not nearly as good as 256 kbit/s AAC. The MP3 still has all kinds of artifacts at 320 kbit/s that are nowhere to be found in the AAC even though it is a smaller bitrate. Some of the artifacts you hear in MP3 are just MP3 artifacts that are there at all bitrates, but AAC starts better at the low end and gets better all the way up as you increase the bitrate. 256 is plush, thick, focused, tight fast highs.
> Why are we STILL paying for songs that aren't even CD quality?
... the older a CD is the worse it sounds due to scratches that become errors or skips and you probably don't have a backup copy either. Your iPod tracks will play the same way forever and you can back them up more easily also.
Because CD-quality songs will overtax today's technology. If you replace the AAC on a typical iPod with a lossless codec you will end up with 1/4 of the song selection and 1/4 of the battery life and if it is a hard disk iPod the hard disk will run all the time and wear out much sooner.
However Apple just announced a trade-in program. You can trade-in your AAC 128 kbit/s plus 30 cents for a 256 kbit/s version of the same song. You lose nothing compared to buying the 256 kbit/s one fresh today. In the future they will obviously upgrade people all the way up to the CD, and then go beyond that.
In music studios it has been common to work at 24-bits for a long time now, and sample rates are up to 192 kHz even in small studios. Since most of the music you bought on CD over the past 10 years is actually a degraded 16-bit copy of the true 24-bit master (it's dithered to lose the extra bits) there is no point in holding up the CD as some sort of ideal. The actual audio content is degraded to fit into your CD player just like audio is degraded in a different way to fit into an iPod.
Even mixing 64 audio channels down to 2 is a way to fit the actual audio content into consumer gear. There are compromises everywhere.
> Why are we taking several steps BACKWARDS in the development
> of digital music?
No, it is not a step backwards. The mistake you're making is that you're defining "audio quality" too narrowly, only looking at specs such as bit depth, sample rate, lossy/lossless encoding, etc. and imagining them in a best case scenario that does not exist in the real world. It is a common mistake. What is always compared is a 16-bit/44.1 kHz raw audio file and a 16-bit/44.1 kHz perceptually encoded audio file, in a music studio or a good listening room, with associated graphs and spectrograms to prove just how much "better" the raw audio file is.
The problem with the above comparison, though, is that no CD's are actually involved, and no CD players. When you put your 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio file onto a CD, right away you have greatly degraded its quality because the bitstream that the CD player sees will not be the same due to the CD's unique and funky volume format and massive error rate. Therefore the CD player will make up the missing bits (so-called error correction) which dramatically degrades audio quality.
What's more, if the CD skips even once during playback you have blown your entire advantage over an iPod. It is gone. The slight improvement in quality that you might have from the CD is gone as soon as it reminds you it is spindles and gears and little whirring parts and lots of 1980's technology. CD's wear out
If you consider other factors like power requirements, you can easily imagine a situation where user A plays their iPod LOUD all day long, enjoying every feature of every song they listen to, while user B is playing their portable CD player at half volume in order to not run out of battery life. The way the human ear works, a loud iPod is better quality audio than a soft CD player no matter what the authoring specs.
Consider a person listening to an iPod with 10,000 songs on it, shuffling away by itself, and they are deeply into the music between their headphones, not having to even lift a finger to change a song or pick a song because it is all playlists, and compare them to another person who is manually shuffling a smaller selection of CD's into and out of a player. Who will perceive the better audio quality during their listening session?
Finally, consider that the iPod did not in fact replace the CD, but rather it replaced the portable and mixable audio cassette. iTunes is two years older than iPod, and iTunes has a CD in
> And, unlike mp3, AAC can be taken all the way up to lossless in quality.
... don't throw any data away, but rather use an algorithm to stuff 30 MB of data into 15 MB at the expense extra computation to decompress the audio before playback. The funky thing with lossless is that some 30 MB audio files will compress to 15 MB but some will only compress to 25 MB depending on the audio material. So it is not just a matter of losing disk space to a much larger music collection, but also you ask a lot more of your music player as it plays, more data, bigger files, more data per second. Any 256 kbit/s AAC will have a bitrate of 256 kbit/s but your lossless tracks will all have their very own unique bitrates. For the EXTREMELY MINUTE improvement in audio quality that most people cannot even detect over 256 kbit/s AAC it is generally not worth it to do lossless today, except for a single archive copy such as a stored CD after a AAC rip. Or you could buy music online in a lossless codec and then "rip" it to AAC and use the AAC on an iPod or elsewhere and backup the lossless copy for future use.
No.
An MPEG-4 movie can contain audio in various codecs. The default for perceptual encoding is AAC. Perceptual encoding is when the encoder throws away data that it thinks the listener won't notice is missing in order to create a file that has about 1/10th the data size of the original. Perceptual encoding is always "lossy" by definition. AAC tops out at 320 kbit/s bitrate just like MP3, however the audio quality is DRAMATICALLY better than MP3. I'm an audio pro but I find the 256 kbit/s AAC to be really delicious. You can put your CD's in storage if you have them all in 256 kbit/s AAC at least for the next five years before you could go lossless and then maybe not notice the downsides (due to immense 10G iPod storage for example).
At the other end of the spectrum you could make an MPEG-4 movie with raw audio waveforms in it, basically CD audio in there, with no data compression, so the audio tracks would be HUGE in file size, however they would play on MPEG-4 players because raw audio is really easy to decode.
In the middle, you have "lossless compression" where you compress the audio data just like it is a Zip file
The main thing is that between lossy and lossless you have a factor of about 10. So if you are using your iPod today with lossy files and you decide to go lossless you either have to get a 10x bigger iPod with 10x the serial bandwidth and 10x the battery life or you have to put up with your entire digital music experience being 10x slower. What makes perceptual encoding so attractive and why it has been such a world-changing thing is that a lossless track does not have 10x the audio quality of perceptual to match all the other dimensions. "FM" to "CD" is a much bigger jump in quality than AAC 256 kbit/s and lossless CD audio. Again, most people (like 90%) can't even tell a CD audio track and an AAC 256 kbit/s apart even when A-B'ing on a great system. It is the same to their ears. That's the point.