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256bit rate has never bothered me. I have issues with storage at my home. The only time I buy cds now is when it's not avail at iTunes or Amazon. I've actually gotten to the point to where all the older cds I bought I'm rebuying little by little on itunes or amazon and selling my cd. I am now collecting music, tv shows, and movies all digitally now. A couple of hard drives to me is so much better than having hundreds to thousand of cds and dvds laying around the house.
 
Most "popular" music these days is so heavily processed, I challenge anyone, (even you "golden ear" types) to tell the difference in a properly conducted blind test. Classical music and the rare unprocessed CDs are another story, but these are becoming rarer and rarer as time rolls on.

The lion's share of the current music market will sound pretty much the same if you keep it on your computer (& iPod) in lossy or lossless formats.

That having been said, I agree that the iTunes LP concept ought to come with lossless files. At least there will be some perceived extra value for the extra $$$$.:rolleyes:
 
Most "popular" music these days is so heavily processed, I challenge anyone, (even you "golden ear" types) to tell the difference in a properly conducted blind test. Classical music and the rare unprocessed CDs are another story, but these are becoming rarer and rarer as time rolls on.

The lion's share of the current music market will sound pretty much the same if you keep it on your computer (& iPod) in lossy or lossless formats.

That having been said, I agree that the iTunes LP concept ought to come with lossless files. At least there will be some perceived extra value for the extra $$$$.:rolleyes:

Agreed. Although a lot of classical music, especially piano music is actually much easier to compress without any degradation in sound quality than complex popular music. Just as an example:

32he


Anyway...How about actually writing some more metadata to the song's tags as well, like, let's say the lyrics ??? That would add more value for me than some photo slideshow or added "credits" or lyrics that I can only see as a picture once I've opened the iTunes-LP and used its interface to navigate to the particular song.

I wonder whether some of these music execs would want to buy (and use) their own products... :rolleyes:
 
With a modest 4 Mb/s connection, that would take 10 minutes. It's still faster than picking up the physical CD.

The only thing is that with AAC 256 kbps VBR encoding (the iTunes Plus format), the sound quality is so good that to hear the difference compared to the Compact Original requires audio equipment only a very small percentage of us could afford. :)

I sometimes wonder why Amazon.com doesn't offer a choice of MP3 256 kbps VBR or AAC 256 kbps VBR for its digital music downloads--server storage is dirt-cheap nowadays. Given how commanding Apple owns the portable music player market and the fact many newer portable music players now support non-DRM's AAC files, I'd like to see Amazon offer AAC downloads as an option.
 
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