dont forget - 'complete my album' has just been released in iTunes as well. So you can purchase some songs then get credit for those if you decide to purchase the rest of the album DRM free @ 256 AAC!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple/EMI Press Conference Coverage
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
dont forget - 'complete my album' has just been released in iTunes as well. So you can purchase some songs then get credit for those if you decide to purchase the rest of the album DRM free @ 256 AAC!
I've just watched a report on this on ITV News (U.K) and it said that although Apple are shouting from the rooftops that you can now play your iTunes downloaded music on other MP3 players, they can only be ones that support AAC!
Is this true? Are the DRM free tracks able to be converted from either iTunes or Quicktime Pro? If so, to make it useable on other MP3 players just takes one click of the "Convert to MP3" button!?
Must admit it was quite weird seeing our local news people interviewing Steve Jobs!
Is this true? Are the DRM free tracks able to be converted from either iTunes or Quicktime Pro? If so, to make it useable on other MP3 players just takes one click of the "Convert to MP3" button!?
Must admit it was quite weird seeing our local news people interviewing Steve Jobs!
Yep, DRM free content in iTunes can quickly and effortlessly be converted into a number of other formats.
Go to Preferences - Advanced - Import Using ;
Just select from a number of formats - mp3, WAV, Aiff, AAC etc
You can set the bit rate if you want.
Then back to your library right click the track(s) and select 'convert to < your set import choice > and it will convert the track for you.
Super quick and effortless.
Apple can't change prices for iTunes products on their own, and EMI certainly wouldn't have gotten on this no-DRM bandwagon if it meant making less money per track than their competitors. Why shouldn't they raise the price? You're getting more out of the deal (higher quality, greater freedom). iTunes prices are already lower than they were when the iTMS launched thanks to the declining dollar and ever-present inflation, so I don't really see the need to lower prices any further. (I'm not saying I'm opposed to the idea; that doesn't make it good business, though.)
And anyway, individual songs have historically cost more than $1, normalized to today's dollars. If anything, the higher price is more appropriate for the catalog as a whole. Look at the price of milk--a gallon used to cost as much as one song on a 45. It's obviously a bit of a stretch to track those two prices, but a gallon of milk today is $3 and a song is just $1.29.
You lose a good bit of sound quality converting from AAC to AAC or MP3. Even starting at a 256 bit rate, you'll lose quite a bit of quality.
I'm excited about the upgrade-single option.
No, there are several players which support AAC. That newscast, like many idiots, are confusing AAC with Fairplay.
Ah. I guess it's just a sign of the times--singles used to be the way music was acquired, and they brought out and popularized albums because they were a cheaper way to get music (sort of the Costco "bulk discount" mentality).
It looks like that has reversed. Albums are so commonplace that you think singles are marked-up extractions. (Two minute songs also used to be the norm for lots of pop [e.g. the Beatles--but I'm not that old]).
No, you loose some quality converting from 256 bit AAC to 256 bit MP3. If you let the MP3 bit rate go up you can preserve the quality. You are best off converting to variable bit rate MP3
Don't know if this has been posted but it's a video clip off the BBC website showing the great steve (yes, you won't be dissapointed he is in black turtleneck) and his new buddy at EMI discussing this...Steve's looking mellow and upbeat!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6516189.stm
(top right - click 'watch')
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6516189.stm
(top right - click 'watch')
AAC == MPEG4. Which IS a standard. Hell WMP even plays it as long as the extension is .mp4. Its not Apple's fault that no other player has bothered to support the codec until now. and really there is one reason for this....fairplay has made AAC support pretty much pointless. This could change now that you can download an iTMS track and theoretically play it on any player.
As for MP3. MP3 is the poor mans codec at this point. it was great at the turn of the century but things have changed. MP3 needs to be put out to pasture.
There are products out there that can fool most people...most, not all. Expert virtuoso players can usually pick out sampled and synthesized instruments from real ones. But even with digital replication and modeling of physical sound, I can assure you that most audio and music industry professionals (for the most part those who actually do more than research)
will be able tell the difference between any modeled (to a "T" even) instrument @ AAC 256kbps and a true instrument recorded @ 24-bit 96KHz PCM. And I am confident most would prefer the "true" track. Total speculation I understand, but to live solely in the realm of numbers and whitepapers can really put one out of touch with practical reality.
The main reason digitally synthesized and sampled instruments (such as Synthogy's Ivory, for instance) sound so good is that they were recorded at very high bitrates and bit depths. You would have to be crazy to or just stupid to believe that 256kbps audio is good enough for even the crappiest multitrack demo recordings.
If you ask most digital photographers, what it is that contributes the most to their image quality, they will often list optics the highest, then CCD quality, and then megapixel count. And while, sure a 3MP picture through a 2500 dollar lens will probably look pretty damn good compared to a 8MP picture shot through the same lens downsampled to 3MP, perhaps even indistinguishable, the fact of the matter remains, @ 3MP you are stuck @ 3MP. You will never be able to retrieve that data back. While the eye might be more sensitive to dynamic differences than the ear, the analogy ports over ok. A 256kbps track using today's encoder's will never sound as "good" as a PROPERLY gain staged and mixed hi resolution recording, despite today's advanced codecs.
Sadly though, the over-discussed "loudness wars" have degraded the quality and dynamic range of most commercially available recordings to the point that yes, that Madonna track bought off iTunes is likely completely indistinguishable from the CD cut, even on the highest of hi-fi component systems.
Through your iPod headset, forget it. Youll never tell the difference in a thousand years of blind testing.
US, EU, and British currencies were mentioned, so that would lead me to believe the offer is available worldwide (plus, EMI isn't even a US company; they're British).
This is a big turning point. I hope the RIAA looks at this and see how bad they are to the industry.
This is a great move forward for Apple and EMI! I hope this can show other recording companies to press forward with less DRM and higher kbps.
I can definitely hear the difference between 128 kbps AAC and higher bit rate levels (frankly to those who claim they can't I guess you need to buy better speakers)
The 30 cent cost increase makes sense since Apple has to double the bandwidth capacity for each song and more than double it's storage capacities since they will now have to have each song on their data banks in two versions, at least only for EMI songs right now.
I can definitely hear the difference between 128 kbps AAC and higher bit rate levels (frankly to those who claim they can't I guess you need to buy better speakers)
The 30 cent cost increase makes sense since Apple has to double the bandwidth capacity for each song and more than double it's storage capacities since they will now have to have each song on their data banks in two versions, at least only for EMI songs right now.
It could be a big step forward yes, ...but what's missing today is artists who value the concept of an album...and music lovers who value artists who value the concept of an album...
Excellent, the 5 Zune users can play iTMS content on their players without burn -> rip!
Given how we can pick and choose which songs to play, in any order, and set our iTunes and iPods on shuffle, we've gotten away from the idea that an album is a cohesive work of art. Albums are moreoften just a way to package the latest songs.
Given the Complete My Album option and the "free" higher quality and lack-of-DRM on albums, my habits of buying tracks one at a time are likely to evolve more toward album purchases.
I agree. However it's pointless to talk about this in a non-pro enviroment. Spinning on CDJs or Serato in a club - any MP3 format isn't as good as wav or Vinyl. The songs just don't get the true power they could get from the master.
Keeping that in mind I would have wished for a lossless format. I even would wish I have an option of 256, 320 or wav. I would pay up to 2 bucks for the songs.
Over on beatport.com you pay 1 buck extra for wav downloads.
I'd lose Media Centre. I can't think of any other feature in Home Premium that isn't in Business. As far as migrating from Home Basic to Business, I can't think of a single solitary feature I'd need to sacrifice.
But in either case, I'd gain improved data encryption. I'd gain enormously improved networking flexibility. I'd be able to join a domain (as opposed to a workgroup). I'd gain the ability to login to a Novell Netware client.
I think I'm not alone in being in the position of placing much more value on the things I'd gain than the things I'd lose, in such a trade-off.
Basically, as it stands right now, if I want to be able to take a brand new Vista Home Premium laptop into work, I'd need to upgrade the networking subsystem. Vista Business contains that upgrade.
In Windows XP, there was a clear upward migration path from the lowest edition (Home) through the intermediate (Pro) and the full-featured (Media Centre). In Vista, there is a nonsensical path of trade-offs with features coming and going at random as you move "up" the price path (from lowest to highest: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate).
But because of a braindead marketing decision by MS, there's no path to migrate from any Home editions to Business despite value-added features being introduced through such a migration. I'd need to shell out twice as much to go to Ultimate.
Apple definitely has it right with its one-size-fits-all Mac OS X. XP's migration path was liveable. Vista's scheme is worthless.
What the hell? If I can hear a difference, I can hear a difference - it's not about understanding it or not. At the end of the day, lossy audio compression takes away information, and that will affect the sound. At 128kps the codec takes away quite a lot, and although the AAC algorithm is loads better than the MP3 one (in general), it's still going to have a considerable impact if you have decent equipment.
Are you seriously saying that 128kps AAC is indistinguishable from a CD?
It's really not. 'AAC' stands for Advanced Audio Coding (as in, a codec). AAC and Apple Lossless files sit in an MPEG4 container. Apple Lossless is not related to MPEG at all, apart from the MPEG4 container it is usually used in.
edit: and yes, apple lossless really is lossless *sigh*
Hooray for people yelling off their head when they don't know what they're on about!