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Higher Encoded Songs in iTunes?

Answer staring me in the face

Well of course everyone welcomes higher bit rates with open arms. It's obvious we all want the best quality we can get. I personally think the way Apple is doing it is stupid. The obvious way to do it is to simply offer two versions of the music store. It wouldn't be that much money and effort to do it considoring all they've done so far with the music store (like opening it internationally). All they would have to do is open up a high-fi music store for customers with broadband. Not only would this increase sales but also keep customers who can't afford broadband. This would also help to increase widespread broadband. Customers would see the benefits of having such a connection and upgrade because of this reason. To me the answer is clear and logistical. There is no sense in keeping down the higher connections because of the lower connection customers. This is just not good business. If anything it should be the other way around (i.e. not allow customers w/o broadband to access). But I think it is very logistical to offer both stores - one low connection and one high connection. The higher connection store should offer nothing but lossless encoding - possibly Apple Lossless seeing that that is Apple's lossless codec built in already to iTunes. The low connection store would simply continue to sell the small 128kbps aac songs.

The answer is staring me right in the face. I don't know what would stop Apple from doing this. Eventually, Apple would just do away with the low connection version of the store because the broadband user base would be so large it wouldn't be worth funding anymore. Can anyone explain to me why Apple wouldn't do this or more accurately why they aren't doing this now? Lower fidelity is the main reason I withhold a lot of my purchases on the music store. Why pay for an album at the music store when I can purchase the same album for the roughly the same price at a store and get much higer fidelity. I am getting more bits for my money. WAY MORE.

Granted the AAC 128kbps is not bad. I give them credit for tapping into the best sounding compressed format available today. But this should be for the lowly 56kers still out there. Those 56kers shouldn't keep us broadband users from enjoying higher fidelity.
 
I just downloaded it from the posted link in the US store and can confirm that the bit rate is 290kbps and it was encoded with "FAAC 1.24+".
 
Interesting, I wonder if Apple is going to formally comment on this. Higher bitrates songs would definitely be welcome! Well, I guess by everyone except those on dial-up. ;)
 
I bought that album a while ago...
 

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GrannySmith_G5 said:
The real question is who in the world would actually originally download Snap's "Rhythm is a dancer"?
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Agreed.

The Power - well, I could get behind that... but Rhythm is a dancer? :rolleyes:
 
narco said:
I think iTunes should give you an option, similar to allofmp3.com. I still would choose 128 because I prefer quantity over quality, but I know a lot of people who would rather have the higher bitrate.

Fishes,
narco.
Click to expand...

I second this idea. I love the way allofmp3.com offers choice of bit rates. Or, Apple should bump the bit rate on everything to 192kbps and keep them at $0.99. But that probably won't ever happen as the labels would probably oppose it.
 
I say it's just an anomaly. There are others scattered around the store, as has been posted here before (example).

Based on what was reported when Apple first met with indie labels, apparently the record company is in charge of doing the actual encoding. Then they send the encoded files to Apple. So if they encode at a higher bitrate, then that's what Apple sells.

I posted about this in the thread linked above, and I think my points still stand:

There's a lot more info on the whole process on this page. Specifically, it says:

  • It's up to the partner/label to submit all the metadata (artist name, release date, song tiles, etc.), do the audio encoding, and upload the materials.
  • You have to use their special Music Store Encoder tool for Mac OS X which will be released in 90 days or so.

I always thought it seemed a bit surprising that Apple has the labels do the encoding. Maybe the labels demanded that just because they wanted more control, who knows? The problem with the current situation is that most of the labels probably encoded once, sent the 128 kbps songs to Apple, and that's it. That means it would be a massive undertaking to move the whole store to 256 or whatever. Everyone would have to re-encode, and there may be cases of songs where it's difficult to get the label to do it again. It would certainly be a long a drawn out process, even assuming they could convince the labels to do it again.

If Apple retained a full quality copy of each song as part of the package sent by the label, then they could make this kind of switch at any time. Just throw a few dozen machines at the task and let them crunch for a few days/weeks or whatever it takes. Instead, it's pretty clear that they expect to offer 128 kbps as their standard for many years to come.

Kinda makes you wonder, when the first competitor comes out with higher quality downloads, will that be the turning point when iTMS starts to lose major market share?

Then again, maybe the labels are demanding no more than 128 kbps quality because they fear that higher quality would attract more piracy. Gotta love an industry that fears its customers!
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timster said:
Any encoding would be fine when you've got none at all.

WHERE'S THE DAMN AUSTRALIAN STORE?

It's the 28th, but still no go for Australia... "iTunes Music Store is not available in your country."

Does that mean Russell my-ego-is-too-large-to-fit-in-New-Zealand Crowe LIED to us?

(Not that I'm bitter or anything!)
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I think we have seen WAY too much evidence of an Australian iTunes store to believe that Crowe lied to us. Maybe it has been slightly delayed. It definintely doesn't look like today is the day, but tomorrow certainly could be.

But on topic. I welcome higher bitrates. When your home connection is 1.5Mbps ADSL, 8MB a track is not too big a deal. That's about 30 seconds or so.
Here's hoping
 
Phat_Pat said:
iTms is pissn' me off. 2 minutes to load a page with 2MB download speed is rediculous. And all those damn broken link symbols. :mad:
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i haven't had problems with the store in months! :confused:
makes me wonder what the problem is
 
Random higher encoded songs are nice, but I would venture to say an ultra high number of people (99% plus) don't really care all that much about it. That might be off since a lot of iTMS users are techies like us, who may indeed care about it. Damn audiophiles. :D

BTW, Happy 2nd iTunes Anniversary guys!
 
I'm not sure this is a sign of anything. There has been some threads on this forum regarding similar behaviour before, and I think it was some kind of partial download problem.
 
PlaceofDis said:
i haven't had problems with the store in months! :confused:
makes me wonder what the problem is
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They are adding at least 4 new stores today, according to rumors, that's probably the cause of the problems.
 
I want higher bitrates. And lower bitrates.

My preference would be for Apple to offer higher bitrate songs as standard, but also include a lower-bitrate version with each download. Say, both 192K and 96K. Here's why.

My Mac HD is huge, so space isn't an issue. When playing over good speakers or high-end headphones I like the quality.

But when mowing the lawn or in an airplane, I can't tell the difference between a 256K and a 64K song. And if I'm trying to load up a small iPod (my original 5GB that I still use sometimes, or a shuffle I'll eventually buy), I'd prefer greater capacity over greater quality. My cell phone can play MP3's - the quality stinks but it's always with me so I'll sometimes use it. Certainly don't need anything great there.

The real, real way to handle this is to have iTunes be able to downsample on the fly when copying to a music player. Sure, store it as a 192K or 256K AAC. But have an option to downsample (and change format to MP3) when copying, and life will be good.
 
Two more Radikals...

arn said:
Guess Radikal Records may be the label who submits highly encoded songs :)

arn
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Well, I just blew my two remaining credits on two random songs on the Radikal label: "We Know What You Did..." by Svenson & Gielen from 'Radikal Party Mix', and "Phuture Vibes" by Mellow Trax from 'Radikal Techno, Vol. 5'. (Yes, I picked them because they were the longest songs I could quickly find. They may have been 'free' songs, but I still want to get my download's worth.. ;) )

Both are higher-than-128 kbps (The first 283, the second 254.) So, yes, it does appear to be that Radikal Records decided to encode the files themselves with FAAC 1.24+at greater-than-128 kbps. My guess is that they are VBR, but that iTunes doesn't know what to make of a VBR protected file, so it just displays the average rate.
 
bignumbers said:
The real, real way to handle this is to have iTunes be able to downsample on the fly when copying to a music player. Sure, store it as a 192K or 256K AAC. But have an option to downsample (and change format to MP3) when copying, and life will be good.
Click to expand...

Sadly, this is one area that Sony's Connect store/software bests iTunes. I have an ancient Sony Music Clip music player (about the same size overall as the shuffle, but less stylish,) that only has 64MB of flash. Just for fun, I decided to see if it worked with their Connect store. It does, but you MUST use the 'downsample' option to drop it to 64kbps for the Music Clip to play them. (If I try to use a non-downsampled file, the Music Clip freezes when I play that track, yet imported 128 kbps files play just fine. Only the purchased ones need downsampling.) It does the resampling on the fly, as it's copying over to the player. (It also uses this method to transcode any WMA or MP3 files, which the ancient Music Clip can't natively play.)
 
hrm, fishy. What normally appears where it says FAAC etc.? do we know what FAAC is?

Of course, I'd support a music store with the ability to download at a higher bit rate, but I don't understand all the moaning about the bit rate. There's a bit more to it than bandwidth and apple not caring about quality. How many hours will you get on your ipod, or, gasp, ipod shuffle, if you go with an uber-high bit rate? How does it look, too if the ipod will only store 45 songs from the store that works with it, whereas a cheap samsung player can hole 4 times as many songs, but actually has half the size? You have to remember, the store isn't about the music, and certainly not about computers-it's about the ipod.

Now, when itunes easily supports multiple copies of a song, without double listing and all, such that i could have lossless on my external HD, when I'm unplugged have 176, and on my ipod, 128, and only see one thing in the itunes library at any given time... then, it would be smart to sell high bit rate, and not cut down on the usefullness of what's actually making the profits. Even then, they might not choose to, because apple would always rather be spare with features if it makes it easy to use, than to overload the user. And how am I, uneducated and uninterested consumer going to know what version to download. Heck, I, regular of macrumors and particularly music threads, don't even know what's best-high quality sounds nice, but can I tell the difference on my stereo equipment? if I have the space now, and encode at a high rate, but my collection expands beyond my capacity at that bitrate, that's ugly, too. Apple's motto is simple. Visually simple, practically simple, the less to think about the better. so, 128, for now. When they figure out how we can have it all, and not know it, we'll have it all.
 
bignumbers said:
The real, real way to handle this is to have iTunes be able to downsample on the fly when copying to a music player. Sure, store it as a 192K or 256K AAC. But have an option to downsample (and change format to MP3) when copying, and life will be good.
Click to expand...

Actually iTunes already does this, but the option is only enabled for the iPod shuffle. And the bitrate is locked to 128 kbps.

I wish they'd enable that feature for all iPods and allowed us to control the format/bitrate (or at least the bitrate, I don't mind being locked to AAC).

It would be nice to use 80-96kbps on my 10GB iPod (that OverClocked ReMix library just jumped right over the remaining space I had left) and 64kbps on my iPod shuffle. Heck, 32kbps in HE-AAC for the iPod shuffle. :D
 
The most disturbing aspect of this report is that someone actually paid to download "Rhythm is a Dancer"

Here's to hoping that it was at least a Pepsi cap!
 
Yvan256 said:
Actually iTunes already does this, but the option is only enabled for the iPod shuffle. And the bitrate is locked to 128 kbps.

I wish they'd enable that feature for all iPods and allowed us to control the format/bitrate (or at least the bitrate, I don't mind being locked to AAC).

It would be nice to use 80-96kbps on my 10GB iPod (that OverClocked ReMix library just jumped right over the remaining space I had left) and 64kbps on my iPod shuffle. Heck, 32kbps in HE-AAC for the iPod shuffle. :D
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that would be sweet, the key though is getting HE-AAC out and working for us first! downsampling would be great for me, especially in that format for my Shuffle and Mini, then i would have my library lossless or AAC 360 for sure
 
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