(no subject)

[jfb]

MSNBC says up with the iTunes Music Store, down with AAC:

The AAC cuts had a complete lack of air around the singer and instruments in the band. The sound quality was somewhat dynamic, but dull sounding. When I compared the downloaded songs to the real CD it was no contest. The uncompressed CD .AIFF files sounded much, much, much better.

This might not matter to most people, but consider this: The Wallflowers CD cost me $11.99 when I bought it. I can make as many legal copies as I like for my personal use — and those copies all sound great and play on any device I can think of. I can also rip the songs onto my MP3 players and the iPod. The Wallflowers download from iTunes cost me $9.99, is limited in where I can play and store it — and the sound is inferior.

Last night I ran into an old coworker from Liquid Audio--where we tried to sell downloadable AAC tracks back in the 1000s--who asked if all the IMS news was giving me painful flashbacks, too. It is.

But I wish Apple well. They seem at least to have made some headway with the labels. Prices are lower (if not low enough), copy protection is more reasonable (not saying much). Maybe it'll work out this time.

Comments

[dongle.livejournal.com]

I've never been an audiophile, but I've listed to PAC, ACC, MP3, WMA, Read Audio, and Liquid files over time, and I'd be hard-pressed to identify any substantive differences in the listening experience between any of them (at sufficient bandwidth) and listening to a CD. Of course, it's hard for me to tell the difference between a CD and FM, except for asstastic (Chris's term) stations that do lots of compression and remixing. Am I just a philistine? I have a similar problem telling good wine from bad....

[jfb.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much with you on this. I listen to a lot of lo-fi recordings anyway--so I'm generally more focused on the songwriting and the emotion than on the audio quality. That said, when I got my iPod, I started ripping CDs in earnest for the first time, and a couple of weeks later discovered that I really could dislike the audio quality of MP3s at sufficiently low bandwidth. I had to re-encode everything I'd done so far.

I haven't heard any of the IMS tracks myself--I can't, since I don't own a Macintosh. It may be that Krakow's problem is actually not with AAC but with the encodings that IMS is doing. Perhaps they're not encoding "at sufficient bandwidth", or they're using a bad algorithm or something.

For the conspiracy theorists, a Newsweek blogger (http://www.msnbc.com/news/767146.asp?0si=-) suggests that this is intentional:

That’s where the problem arises. As soon as that digital media hub is set up, millions of users will start hearing that their entire music collection (downloaded over the years in streaming formats) really doesn’t sound that good coming out of a system that’s otherwise used for listening to ultra-high-quality sources like surround-sound DVDs or Super Audio CDs.

But come to think of it, that’s really nothing new. Look at what happened when CDs replaced LPs: it was a bonanza for the music industry, as everyone had to upgrade their music collections to the better-sounding format. Maybe, in fact, the streaming music vendors know exactly what they’re doing. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss?

[tombking.livejournal.com]

You are a philistine. What I really notice (and it may be more the computer) is how playback pauses all the time when trying to do other things on the pc. It seems to be fine with playing CD's and doing other stuff but not playing mp3's and doing other stuff. That drives more nuts than a loss in sound quality. There is you have good headphones/speakers. Though I think that one would not tell much difference in a car or a walkman/iPod thingy due to all the background noise or over most speakers that people have for thier pc's.
But I am with you on the wine, give me a decent cheap Chianti and I am happy.

Re:

[dongle.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I have a fairly high-end audio card (M-Audio Audiophile Delta 2946) in my current system, which also is a 2.4ghz AMD-based computer. I rarely notice dropouts, except when streaming stuff, and that's usually network-related. If your PC plays CDs ok, but chokes on MP3s and such, it's probably because your CD audio is being fed directly to your soundcard (and probably it's an analog feed at that.) The usual check for this, if you run Windows, is to play a CD with Windows Media Player. If the visualizations won't work for CD-audio, then that's the case. And if that's so, your CD playback could conceivably continue even if your PC crashed, as long as there was power to the CDROM drive.