There's also iTunes Match, so if you waited long enough you could upgrade from 128 KBit with DRM to 256 KBit DRM-free at no extra cost. So there is some hope.
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A Look at Apple's 'Mastered for iTunes' Program and its Effect on Sound Quality
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There's also iTunes Match, so if you waited long enough you could upgrade from 128 KBit with DRM to 256 KBit DRM-free at no extra cost. So there is some hope.
Because Apple and "Proprietary" are abused to the point where I wonder if people really understand what the word means anymore.
Any proper functioning lossless codec is going to function the same which means if I'm a FLAC or APE honk I can simply burn a CD and then convert it back into whatever I feel more comfortable with.
Grin. Hey I'd take 24/192 as well. Makes for a great archival format. Not sure how cheap a "good" DA converter is.
Bingo! We have a winner.
Once you've heard that file format, there is no going back. It's that good.
Am I right in thinking that you can only convert to 128kbps? There's no option to change that to 256?
I certainly wouldn't mind an ALAC option in the iTunes store.
Someday I'll have my Martin Logan's and I'll want to feed it nothing but the good stuff.
Besides it helps the music industry get more revenue and keeps them from complaining all the time.
I see this eventually happening.
You'll buy some songs in ALAC and have the right to stream AAC+ to your mobile devices.
Someday I'll have my Martin Logan's and I'll want to feed it nothing but the good stuff.
Besides it helps the music industry get more revenue and keeps them from complaining all the time.
I see this eventually happening.
You'll buy some songs in ALAC and have the right to stream AAC+ to your mobile devices.
You used to be correct, but no longer are. There now exists an option in iTunes to select between 128, 192, and 256 for the bitrate for automatic compression when syncing. I have mine set to 192, I find it to be the sweet spot between quality and ability to cram music onto a 16 GB device.
That's right. As of right now it's 128Kbps only for tracks being loaded onto an iPod or iPad if you use that feature.
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Edit: Oops! Apparently I'm wrong. I haven't checked for a while so I'll defer to Seinman's more recent experience.
Agreed. I did that using a guide that upgraded lower than 256 tracks and trashed the replacements without touching higher bitrate tracks. That was worth the price, but iTunes Match in general has been very buggy. Some songs don't play and skip to another track, some weren't matched properly, and playlists are a mess. I gave up on it, but I'm glad it updated some tracks.
There's absolutely no point in transcoding an audio file to a higher bit-rate from a lower bit-rate. At *best* it will sound exactly the same, and take up more disk space.
Take an 8-bit image image, and boost its color depth to full 16-bit/channel RGBA, and save it in the same format. The image will appear completely identical on-screen, but the file will be significantly larger. It works the same way with audio.
Really think about that, though. Think about the AVERAGE user. They have to be made aware of this setting and many will want to know what the numbers mean/mean to them. Most people are very, very untechno-savvy. I think you are assuming way too much about people just because Apple happens to include these options. Apple builds them in for more advanced users, even if they seem to be fairly low-tech solutions.
Giving people lossless music isn't "pleasing most of the people most of the time." It's giving most people a format they won't/can't use and then asking them to figure out how to make do with it while a very, very small minority dance around with glee at getting something they want.
The biggest problem music faces is not whether it's lossy, it's what atrocities have been committed upon it in the mastering stages.
You're ******** me. Guess it's time to delete my 256k tracks and go back to the ALAC sitting somewhere.
Ooooh! Are they originally sourced material? Can I buy copies somewhere? Feel free to email me, if you prefer.
One thing I should mention I was able to consistently tell was that re-encoding from any compressed codec to another often came out with discernible artifacts. If the history of your material is unknown then it could possibly have been compressed (indiscernible?) and converted back to WAV/Lossless. Then a re-compression would show artifacts. I suppose history is always slightly unknown unless you are the recording artist and have followed a track all the way to production.
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I have hundreds of gigs of lossless music on my Mac, but I use compressed files on iOS devices.
Sorry, I didn't make that very clear. I wasn't suggesting converting 128 up to 256 - I know that won't increase the quality - I've been thinking about re-ripping my CDs (the ones I still have) to lossless then converting them to 256 when syncing to my iPhone, but all the guides I've found online show 128 as the only bitrate. Seems though from another reply that there is now a choice
Amazing superhuman hearing you have to get up to 96khz, while the rest of us mortals top out at 22khz. 24/192 is unnecessary, and 24/96 is more then adequate.
I'm a huge music enthusiast and own thousands of cds and vinyl since the late 70s when I started collecting.
I encoded my entire cd library over the course of a few years...at 192k. One day I noticed a few random songs (I listen to a lot of remixes) that simply dropped some of the beat and mangled some of the effects that were used in the mix (such as flange effect or the process of altering the bass/treble continually on a segment of the song). I listened to the source cd/WAV and it was fine. I re-encoded at 192k and the problem existed still. I encoded at 256k and the problem existed. Then again at 320k and it disappeared.
Granted it was only a few tracks that I noticed, but then I wondered about what % of my collection also had problems like this that I had not listened to recently or caught (and I have excellent ears). So I have begun to re-encode everything at 320k. It will take a long time but there is no lossless format supported by iTunes other than ALAC and I will have investigate that now that folks say is it open source...and I want to be sure it is truely lossless.
I'm very weary of ripping all my music into a file format created by Apple. It needs to be decoded/played on a variety of OSes as well as shareware/freeware/paid apps. 320k isn't lossless but it is better than 192k and also offers all the meta-tagging that WAV does not. I just wish iTunes supported APE/Monkeys Audio which has been very popular on Windows for well over a decade.
At the end of the day, however, the sound is only as good as your equipment (including your ears). To truly appreciate anything better than current CD quality, even the folks who have incredible ears won't hear a difference until they spend thousands of dollars upgrading to equipment that can reproduce the newer quality. And...even with CD technology as it exists today, 90% of the consumers can't even appreciate the quality due to their inferior stereo systems/setup...they would need to invest in at least $3000 for a quality sound system. Let's not also forget, sadly, that a very very high percentage of the world population think that MP3 format is "good enough" if not "great" in quality....so seeing any kind of better quality recordings (aimed to the masses) down the road is unlikely.
It's not so much that I'm assuming too much about people, but more that I don't subscribe to the idea of catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator. While I appreciate that most casual users won't be inclined to educate themselves on the differences between encoding formats and the problems of double-encoding a lossy file, that is their prerogative. If they are happy/satisfied with lossy encodes and small file sizes, then by all means let them continue to buy their music in those formats from the Store, but at least give people the option.
Most people, and by most I mean the vast majority, appreciate the difference in quality between taking a photograph of a scene, and taking a photograph of a photograph of that scene. It's pretty much the same principle at work here, and likely the only differentiating factor between that example and the lossy encode issue is that photography has been around for longer, so the average person's sensibilities have become more attuned to it. People's ears will likely become more sensitive to this stuff as time passes and experience is acquired. Even comparative luddites are quite likely to be able to tell the difference between one of the earliest low-bitrate MP3 encodes from the mid 90s and a modern encode available from iTunes, yet this same person probably would have thought that file sounded just like the real thing 15-20 years ago.
I would then have to say that you could come rather close
That seems ok. Not more.However, most don't even come close to that piece of compromise.
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I'm just heading out for the evening, but when I get home I'll take a look through my library and see if I can find some examples. They are all from commercial releases, though some may be on boutique labels. Either way, I'll do my best to get some names and albums over to you
I guarantee you, however, that the original sources in every case were 16/44.1 Red Book CDs, losslessly ripped to FLAC.
What "Mastered for iTunes" does
Just a quick summary what it does, and why it improves the sound (unless you start with rubbish music, where nothing will help):
First, it encodes from 24/96 masters directly to AAC, instead of going 24/96 -> 16/44.1 -> AAC. There isn't much loss in the first step, but there is some. And the loss is noise, which is harder to compress than music, so not having to compress that noise should make the AAC a little bit better.
Second, it avoids "clipping": Clipping happens when your music goes above the limits, and sounds awful. Many record companies convert music to CDs so that it is just short of clipping, using 99.9% of the available space. But lossy compression like AAC won't reproduce the music exactly, so sometimes the AAC might go to 100.1% and get clipped. "Mastered for iTunes" gives the recording studio tools where they can look for clipping in the AAC file, so they stay about further away from the limits, just enough that the conversion to AAC will not give clipped results.
There were some reports where "Mastered for iTunes" didn't sound any better, and it turned out the music was already clipped before it got anywhere near "Mastered for iTunes". In that case the damage is already done, there is nothing you can do.
Just a quick summary what it does, and why it improves the sound (unless you start with rubbish music, where nothing will help):
First, it encodes from 24/96 masters directly to AAC, instead of going 24/96 -> 16/44.1 -> AAC. There isn't much loss in the first step, but there is some. And the loss is noise, which is harder to compress than music, so not having to compress that noise should make the AAC a little bit better.
Second, it avoids "clipping": Clipping happens when your music goes above the limits, and sounds awful. Many record companies convert music to CDs so that it is just short of clipping, using 99.9% of the available space. But lossy compression like AAC won't reproduce the music exactly, so sometimes the AAC might go to 100.1% and get clipped. "Mastered for iTunes" gives the recording studio tools where they can look for clipping in the AAC file, so they stay about further away from the limits, just enough that the conversion to AAC will not give clipped results.
There were some reports where "Mastered for iTunes" didn't sound any better, and it turned out the music was already clipped before it got anywhere near "Mastered for iTunes". In that case the damage is already done, there is nothing you can do.
I would then have to say that you could come rather close
slim pickens lol. I wish we saw more quality speakers in the Apple Store. Even the supposed higher end Bowers and Wilkins stuff is good but lets just say other high end companies are not worried.