sitting with my head right up close is not an enjoyable experience or comfortable.
and how do you enjoy the true dts sound?
so no it isnt nonsense
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iTunes 9 to Include Blu-ray Support and iPhone App Organization?
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sitting with my head right up close is not an enjoyable experience or comfortable.
and how do you enjoy the true dts sound?
so no it isnt nonsense
ummmm, actually CD's never replaced records, I still buy albums on vinyl because is just sounds better.
And CD's will never be replaced by MP3's because again, a quality difference.
I know CD's are a niche market, and record's even more so, but they will never go away completely.
Video media is very different, VHS are not considered 'better' in any way, opposed to records where that unique sound is liked.
The only VHS's that we have left are those old disney movies from childhood, because honestly when you stick a four year old in front of a TV, they cant usually tell the difference between Blu-Ray and VHS. To them, the Lion King is the Lion King
The only sound media I can ever see being 100% are tapes, because they fall short in almost every way, and they don't last long... at least in my house
Wouldn't it be nice if those analog albums were duplicated on DVDs like Blu-Ray and others to capture the non-sampled, non-linear analog curves?
sitting with my head right up close is not an enjoyable experience or comfortable.
and how do you enjoy the true dts sound?
so no it isnt nonsense
you do realize he didn;t mean having your nose right up on the screen.
Sure, but masters are usually 24/96 or 24/48 recordings dithered to 16/44. They *might* use special masters for vinyl, but I wouldn't put it past them to cheat and use the same master they made for the CD.
Furthermore a lot of the digital instruments and effects used on recordings are 16-bit 44k and 48k. You rarely find sample libraries in 24-bit format...
Well, not all of us are tethered to our living rooms. This isn't about the entire family huddling up around an iMac to watch a movie. People watch movies everywhere. There's no 42" TV at hand when you're on a train or in an airplane, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to enjoy full HD picture quality. As for surround sound, there are headphones for that these days.sitting with my head right up close is not an enjoyable experience or comfortable.
and how do you enjoy the true dts sound?
so no it isnt nonsense
I think you're confusing convenience with enjoyment here... People are "happy" with mp3, DivX, YouTube clips and other garbage formats because it's handy and accessible, not because they like the quality. It's like fast food vs. traditional restaurants... sure, it's easy to stop by McDonalds, it's cheap and you don't have to wait for 45 minutes or tip some waiter, you can just get your tray or bag and be on your way. Or you could get a microwave dinner, which is even cheaper and even more convenient. But it's never going to replace restaurants where they serve the real deal.Sushi said:
you do realize he didn;t mean having your nose right up on the screen.
To justify the cost of putting a bluray drive in your mac you had better
look pal stop trying to tell me your mac with a bluray drive will be a match for a 46" tv with a 7.1 Home Cinema system.
Thow talkin bollix son.
To justify the cost of putting a bluray drive in your mac you had better
look pal stop trying to tell me your mac with a bluray drive will be a match for a 46" tv with a 7.1 Home Cinema system.
Thow talkin bollix son.
As long as the resolution is 1920x1080 it will be the same. Only difference is the size of the screen.
So many people act like it'll be forced on you and you HAVE to use it... I'm sure it'll be like that stupid Genius thing. Just turn it off. Done.
DVDs. You can mount an .iso file in OS X and have the image show up as an actual DVD. This lets you play the DVD in its original form (with menus). With .iso support in iTunes, you could import all of your movies and launch them into the menu screen. This would be great for those of us who like to rip our own DVD collections onto our computers, just like we do with our CDs. I believe XBMC already has support for this.
Except for one problem. If you damage DVD-5 or DVD-9 you lose very little compared to what you'd lose with Blue-Ray.
Err. My eyes are generally approximately 2.5ft from my 24" iMac, and I have it rigged up to a DTS Sony surround system through digital optical out, mostly for gaming.. And I have a very comfortable office chair. Definitely comfy and much better for my posture than the couch.sitting with my head right up close is not an enjoyable experience or comfortable.
and how do you enjoy the true dts sound?
so no it isnt nonsense
Oh, no I was agreeing with you.. Just weirdly.
So much of the HD optical media/BD media hate is based on wonky logic. There is no drawback to supporting it at all, so I dont see why people are against it. It's not as if they're adding a 5.4" floppy or laserdisc drive, this is totally backward compatible and harms *nobody*. (other than HD-DVD fan pride)
Err. My eyes are generally approximately 2.5ft from my 24" iMac, and I have it rigged up to a DTS Sony surround system through digital optical out, mostly for gaming.. And I have a very comfortable office chair. Definitely comfy and much better for my posture than the couch.
Oh, no I was agreeing with you.. Just weirdly.
So much of the HD optical media/BD media hate is based on wonky logic. There is no drawback to supporting it at all, so I dont see why people are against it. It's not as if they're adding a 5.4" floppy or laserdisc drive, this is totally backward compatible and harms *nobody*. (other than HD-DVD fan pride)
oh my bad
If you use it as a full system backup method then yes I agree, but neither BD or DVD are really ideal for that.
But the size of files is increasing over time. I can imagine some users filling a BD with a couple of pieces of work. Like people filled DVDs and CDs and Floppies and tapes with a couple of pieces of work in days passed. That's why it's important that Apple support it in the MacPro if they want to remain competitive for creative users, and I don't think they're abandoning us yet.
Huh?
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Don't encourage him.,,,, he is losing creditability with this asinine comparison to HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
What is this Clunky business?
I remember that I tunes used to run really SLOW. But one of the updates in the last year greatly increased performance. How would a re-write drastically better that?
I remember that I tunes used to run really SLOW. But one of the updates in the last year greatly increased performance. How would a re-write drastically better that?
What I's like to see
is software other than iMovie that will allow me to import, view, edit my HD movies made with my Canon movie camera - AVCHD. Put THAT in QT, Apple.
After copying video files onto my computer, I cannot open them. THAT is ridiculous. And I suppose the same can be said of BluRay ... for the time being.
is software other than iMovie that will allow me to import, view, edit my HD movies made with my Canon movie camera - AVCHD. Put THAT in QT, Apple.
After copying video files onto my computer, I cannot open them. THAT is ridiculous. And I suppose the same can be said of BluRay ... for the time being.
BD's have an excellent scratch resistant coating, i haven't scratched any of my 100+ collection and that includes my kid playing around with them!
Well... there's nothing wrong with the UI as such, I like how it looks and how it's structured... but it takes quite a long time to start up. The file management is kind of old school. In Windows Media Player you just tell it which folders to consider part of your library, and it keeps track of the contents automatically. in iTunes you have to add and remove content manually, which is a pain in the neck if you have your library in a centralized location shared by multiple computers. Also, iTunes doesn't like it if your library location is on an external drive, and it REALLY hates it if that drive is a NAS drive. WMP doesn't care either way.
It can't play anything that isn't part of your library, yet it's set as the default app for opening audio files such as AIFF. So when you double-click on some AIFF, WAV or MP3 file on your desktop, the stupid ass computer imports it to your iTunes library before playing it back. As if you wanted some random audio file there.
Apart from these issues, I think Apple should try to figure out what iTunes really is supposed to be, because right now it's this weird Swiss army knife that tries to be everything at once. It's a music/video store, a music/video player, an application store/manager, a sync central for calendars/bookmarks/photos/address book... if I didn't have beforehand knowledge of the weird rules of the Apple universe I would instinctively fire up an app called "iSync" thinking it probably handles synchronization between my iPhone and my computer, but iSync doesn't want to touch the iPhone with a 40 foot pole. If they're serious about selling the iPhone as a business smartphone, they might wanna ask themselves how it's supposed to make sense to some Dilbert's boss type guy that he must install a frickin' music player to sync the phone with Outlook...
So you're suggesting iTunes 9 will allow you to rip/burn Blu-Ray discs into iTunes??? LOL. Not in a million years. The industry would crucify Apple. Apple hasn't even dared to let DVDs be ripped into iTunes. I have to use things like DVD Decryptor (Windows) or MacTheRipper (Mac) plus Handbrake (both) to achieve that effect. Don't get me wrong. I would love if Apple would offer ripping services directly in iTunes. I simply don't believe anyone has that kind of clout to implement and get away with something like that. CDs generally aren't copy-protected and they've been copied so long no one even notices anymore. The industry has embraced "digital copy included" programs that simply give a code to download a digital/mobile version from someone like iTunes. That's fine and dandy for near-DVD copies in iTunes, but they generally do NOT have Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks with them which means they SUCK. My own rips have DD5.1 plus commentary tracks even. There is no reason Apple could not include them so it's Apple's fault.
I would agree with you (I tend to like all-in-one functionality as it's easier to maintain and control everything from one centralized database), but there is a very large contingency of Mac users that think iTunes is already WAY too bloated for its own good and is trying to be too many things for too many programs and has become slow, bloated and bug-ridden in the process and has updates coming constantly to address them. These people would prefer the current iTunes be broken up into a bunch of little programs (i.e. iPhone get its own program to control/update/sync it), etc. I think that could be done and iTunes could still be the control panel (i.e. the programs talk to each other and share information), but that would just make for MORE updates (imagine seeing DVD player, iPhone Control, Application Center, Radio World and iTunes all in the software update thing every other week. It'd get MORE messy, not less, IMO).
Sadly, that's very true of pop/rock/rap/hip-hop music, although it's called dynamic compression. The goal is to make the music "loud" for radio because "loud" always gets better ratings/attention/whatever on the radio than more dynamic stuff. This is partly due to the fact the car is on average a noisier environment than the home and most people do most of their listening in the car or with headphones, etc. It's ironic too because there was more of a "need" for such things in the 1980s and the '80s and earlier were much better behaved in their mastering techniques. Although another problem existed then and that was most material was mastered for the LP and thus sounded anemic and crappy on CD and thus we saw the vast remastering for CD process while the vinyl folks claimed that CDs sounded like crap compared to the LP. That WAS TRUE to some extent, but it wasn't due to the limitations of the CD medium, but had everything to do with the mastering process.
What's sad is today dynamic compression can be done at the radio station on-the-fly without having to butcher the actual album recording, but sadly they compress the heck out of music more today than ever. Some albums get it worse than others and some are so badly butchered they actually CLIP LIKE MAD (e.g. Take the Red Hot Chili Peppers album "Californication" and just listen to it. It's so compressed (no dynamic range) that it's almost flat sounding and worse yet, it clips like MAD all over the place. In short, it sounds AWFUL and that's sad because it has some of their best songs on it. The thing is almost NO ONE NOTICES. And that is because most people have the worst sounding crap excuse for audio equipment you can imagine. And it's not getting better. Places like Best Buy are taking over towns smaller shops and where Best Buy at least used to have listening rooms (albeit poor ones, IMO) for full sized loudspeakers, they now have gotten rid of them in most stores to make room for most flat-screen TVs and the such (TVs used to take up like 2-3 aisles there and now they take up 1/3 the store). The point is you have to go out of your way to even FIND (let alone listen/preview to in a good environment) good speakers these days, let along convince people they NEED them. Sadly, most people think Logitech computers speakers are GOOD SOUND (shakes head). I've had people almost soil their pants listening to my modified Carver ribbon setup. They still don't think they'd want to pay that kind of money to get good sound (or more likely their wives wouldn't let them keep them anywhere in the house due to their size). Even so, it's easy to get caught up in the high-end audio snake oil because there's a fine line between art, science and nuts when it comes to hi-fi. The high-end knows the good equipment, but they also believe in nonsense, so it's a double-edged sword. They waste money on things that don't matter and look down on others that don't have that stuff. It's a very snooty environment. Many Mac fanatics can be snooty, but some of these people take it to a whole different level.
Of course, if you like classical type music or even jazz, there ARE a lot of very good quality recordings out there and many are available on SACD. While SACD is largely overkill on the playback end, the multi-channel version is nice for live recordings if you have a really good surround setup. More importantly, it usually means the people that are making recordings available for it are paying attention to the quality on the recording end of things, where it matters more than anywhere else. So SACD type recordings DO typically sound better than an average CD, but it's due to mulit-channel and well mastered recordings more than the playback medium. A high quality SACD master in stereo that is then mastered properly to CD will sound just as good.
"Which is audible they say" is my point in a nut shell. "They say" you can hear these kinds of differences, but can YOU? Most just believe what the high-end magazines say as gospel and yet magazines have a reason to support high-end DACs and jitter reduction equipment, etc. etc. because those are the people paying them big bucks to advertise in their magazines. That's just a fact. I remember and incident back in the late '80s or early '90s involving Stereophile and Bob Carver and his "transfer function modified" amplifiers. Engineering states that a transfer function describes EVERYTHING there is to know about a given system so long as it's written correctly. Bob modified reasonably priced amplifiers to sound like ones that cost a lot more by matching up their characterisitics little by little until they had the same transfer function. Stereophile admitted in a blind test that it worked, but when the actual factory product came out, they gave it a bad review, saying the magic was somehow gone, but with no proof or testing to confirm anything. In short, how would they sell ads for $10,000 amplifiers if this one that costs $1200 sounded identical to it? In a business sense, they would shoot themselves in the foot. If some company pays them big bucks to advertise magic jitter reducing green markers, they have every reason in the world *NOT* to test that product or give it a bad review because it keeps the money coming in. You'd see things like, "I don't know how it does it, but it DID SOUND BETTER to my ears". And how can you question an opinion? You cannot. That's just a short sample of the problems of the so-called "high-end".
Um...no. You can TEST response right up to 20kHz. Most people buying that gear have their hearing fall off around 15kHz yet they are the ones making wild claims about super-tweeters. Will going to 5Hz improve response at 30Hz? No and it might just screw it up royally sine the requirements for the drivers in those ranges are very different. Besides, less is often more. My ribbons cover from 250Hz to 20kHz. There are no crossover aberrations (that even the best conventional loudspeakers cannot fully eliminate) along the way beacause there are no crossover points. Carver sold the AL-III for $2000 a pair. Genesis used the identical ribbon from Carver in its $50,000 a pair Genesis II with a different cabinet and woofer. Was it actually worth 25x the price? I don't think so, but I'm sure many did as they were Class A Stereophile reviewed. Stereophile would not review the Carver speakers after the first prototype so I guess we'll never know their thoughts. It was not in their best interests to compare $50k speakers to $2k speakers when they used the same drivers.
So are we talking about "high end" as in high end PRICE or high end SOUND? The two are not necessarily related in those ranges. As I've said, there is a LOT of snake-oil being sold in "high end" audio and most of it is just that, nonsense. Once you get to a certain point in speaker quality and have ample power to drive it, your money is best going to be spent on treating your *room*, not buying $20k DACs that sound identical to a $5 DAC in a blind test. Listening rooms can have just as much if not more effect than your loudspeaker on the sound you get. A $50,0000 speaker in a bad room can sound worse than a $500 speaker in a good room. It doesn't take much to screw up frequency response (actual room plus speaker) or get standing waves, resonance, etc. These Carvers sound better in my current house than they ever did in my old one. This house has much better room acoustics to start with and I damped out most of the remaining problems. Downstairs, I have a very dead room and made a home theater with a mere $2500 worth of speakers. But these speakers are +/- 1dB from 80Hz to 27kHz. I've seen speakers that cost 100x that price that had +/- 3dB response in the same range. That's just one measurement, but it's an important one. Of course, how the room then affects that response is just as important. OTOH, the truth is most people prefer speakers that are NOT flat. They want inflated bass, etc. and that's why graphic equalizers became popular. Even Genesis offers a high-end "sound palette" to color their sound to suit your taste. The worst part is that you are the mercy of the recording itself, no matter how good your rig is. The Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication album will still sound like crap on a $100k rig as they do on a $1k rig because the album is screwed up on the mastering end with no dynamic range and clipping. It actually often sounds better on cheap systems that mask the problems it has. Many pop/rock albums are that way. Very few are very good recording quality. I used to maintain a web site that rated the sound quality of rock albums in addition to their musical content. Very very few got anywhere near the "A" quality range for sound. Ironically, people will say something like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" is too quiet and not dynamic, when in fact it is just the opposite. It's VERY dynamic and so you have to turn UP the volume (it plays in the noise floor; you cannot make louder louder than maximum, so the more dynamic albums are quieter sounding at the same volume settings as a less dynamic album). It was analog mastered. It STILL sounds better than most albums today because it's not compressed to death.
Of course, if you like classical, you'll have little trouble finding good quality sound recordings of your favorite classical music (the performance is another issue).
Actually, high quality headphones are more revealing than even the highest quality loudspeakers because it takes the room out of the equation entirely.
Actually, it's not likely to be night and day better. This is due to the law of diminishing returns. The more you spend on the high-end, the less results you will get. You can get a system that is 95% of the way there for $5000 if spent wisely compared to a system that costs $50,000. You're getting into the range of small improvements. A $10k DAC probably only sounds marginally better than a $1.50 DAC (if anything at all). That's because the differences are so small on such items. That's why I say speakers (which does include their cabinets BTW) and room treatments are the primary areas to spend money. Of course, you need clean power to the speakers for a given load (some speakers offer easier loads than others and this has nothing to do with price or quality), but the idea that a high-end amp is good for the sound itself is a misnomer as amplifiers should be completely neutral. Vinyl aficionados think they sound better than CDs, but in reality a lot of analog gear has euphonic distortions (even-order) that make them pleasant sounding just like a tube distortion effect for a guitar sounds pleasant. That doesn't make it ACCURATE. There's often a very real difference between "pleasing" and "accurate".
I've seen quite a bit of progress in driver manufacturer. Mid-range is all important. You do realize there are types of drivers out there than the piston-box woofers and mid-ranges and cone type tweeters that you see on "typical" loudspeakers, right? Check out Magnepan for planar, Martin Logan for electrostatic, etc. Apogee used to make some nice ribbons and Carver once made the famous ribbon for the Genesis speakers. Not everything has been a piston over the years.
I'm really tired of iTunes updates being about integrating with Apple's latest product. Yes, they've made a few structural and UI improvements over the past couple years, but mainly it's the same old beast with all its user experience flaws.
The main feature I've been wanting forever is tagging. Why is tagging present in iPhoto, but not in iTunes? I'm not really into suggestions of adding tags to some ID3 tag. It's this managing of very large libraries of music that needs addressing, and allowing users to apply their own tags would go a long way to solve this.
The main feature I've been wanting forever is tagging. Why is tagging present in iPhoto, but not in iTunes? I'm not really into suggestions of adding tags to some ID3 tag. It's this managing of very large libraries of music that needs addressing, and allowing users to apply their own tags would go a long way to solve this.
why, oh why???
sometimes i really don't understand apple this is another example.
so bluray should be supported now in itunes? what does it mean that itunes plays blurays now? or does it "ripp" them onto the disk and make them playable on ipods, iphones and even the apple tv?
very nice, but why wasn't such feature included since a long time but with the support of DVDs? it would be so logical to be able to "read and import" dvds to itunes, but it never happened (for some really strange reason). and now this shall be possible with blurays? i don't understand why they didn't do this with DVDs as well...
sometimes i really don't understand apple this is another example.
so bluray should be supported now in itunes? what does it mean that itunes plays blurays now? or does it "ripp" them onto the disk and make them playable on ipods, iphones and even the apple tv?
very nice, but why wasn't such feature included since a long time but with the support of DVDs? it would be so logical to be able to "read and import" dvds to itunes, but it never happened (for some really strange reason). and now this shall be possible with blurays? i don't understand why they didn't do this with DVDs as well...
iTunes is already way too huge, bloated, and cluttered. It may be time to split it into more than one app - one for just playing music & video, and one for the iTunes store/iPhone & iPod syncing.
I didn't "suggest" anything.
You said "Since when does iTunes have ANYTHING to do with ANY disc media?"
I said "Ripping and burning audio CDs sounds like disc media to me"
It was a response to your apparent caps-locked outrage over the notion that iTunes would ever touch "ANY" disc with a ten foot pole. It was not a suggestion that they would allow ripping video content.
Yes. That's why I said they should make DVD/Blu-ray playback a part of QuickTime X, not iTunes, so what are we disagreeing on? I agree that iTunes is too bloated, but I also don't see the point of having two different apps (QT Player and DVD Player) that do the exact same thing (play back video) just because one deals with discs and the other with files. Windows Media Player handles music, videos and DVDs -- it's kind of like iTunes, QT and DVD Player all rolled into one -- but it still feels light. If I launch a video file from the desktop, WMP instantly gives me a video window with just a play/pause button and volume control... I don't get that iTunes overkill feeling of taking an armored tank down to the grocery store to get some bread and milk.
That's the goal, but they're kidding themselves... when everything else is just as loud, brickwall mastering isn't going to help anyone stand out. And besides, radio stations tend to squash everything with their own compression anyway. If you stick another compressor/limiter/maximizer/whatever on top of material that's already been pushed up to unholy levels of forced loudness by the mastering engineer, you get a wimpy, flat sound devoid of energy and probably a good deal of distortion too.