You can, but you're not going to get any increase in quality as the algorithm to up the sample rate essentially has to interpolate some "missing" samples. So in fact, you could argue that you will decrease the quality (although to be honest you're unlikely to hear any difference with a decent app doing the conversion - in fact even the iapps like iMovie/iDVD do this kind of rate conversion pretty transparently.
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iTunes Plus Expanded, Becomes Largest DRM-Free Catalog
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Windows coverts everything to 48000hz before it sends it out unless you go to great lengths to stop it.
os x doesn't do that, which is nice. 44.1khz stays 44.1khz
os x doesn't do that, which is nice. 44.1khz stays 44.1khz
Ive not been able to get into the itunes plus section on uk store all afternoon so maybe there updating it so there 79p for us
I've never really used iTunes music store for much more than sampling songs that I may like, or finding out the names of songs stuck in my head. I rip all my music in Apple Lossless.... I don't even like the degradation in 256k encoding... I'll wait till they start selling Lossless music at 1.29
Does bitrate really matter? Not as much as you'd think. It's really just psychological. If you're an "audiophile" you're going to pretend you can hear the difference.
isn't the title of this thread wrong?
how many songs does apple have without DRM?
because amazon has just a hair less than 2.4 million right now...
how many songs does apple have without DRM?
because amazon has just a hair less than 2.4 million right now...
Great, let the "Who's got the biggest ?" contest begin. I get a feeling that this is a desperate move on Apple's part to compete with other media-stores. The sad part is that all Universal et al have to do now is cancel their contract with iTunes and it is left with millions of indy-songs great!
The could do that...but would it really be smart for them to stop selling through the third biggest music seller in the country? It would hurt universal more than it would hurt apple.
Apple doesn't give a specific number, just "over 2 million". They claim they have more than amazon, either they have over 2.4 or they're lying.
International?
I read the press release but couldn't determine the answer (and I'm not on an iTunes compatible system right now)
Is this US only? Or do the international stores get DRM free music as well?
I know specifically Nettwerk has no objections to it being DRM free everywhere.
I read the press release but couldn't determine the answer (and I'm not on an iTunes compatible system right now)
Is this US only? Or do the international stores get DRM free music as well?
I know specifically Nettwerk has no objections to it being DRM free everywhere.
??I picked up an MP3 album form them 2 odd weeks ago and it looked like a real mp3. What DRM do you think CDBaby has?
Interesting thought. Just pondering that many of the new services (emusic, cdbaby, etc) are a "buy once, download forever" services, while itunes remains 'buy once, download once". I can see that policy if your thoughts on throughput were correct. Not sure if they've ever given thought to lifting the download restrictions on bought songs. Although the itunes store still drags some days, so probably not... (Amazon is also a download-once service...)
Apple has to cough up money to EMI for every upgrade. Do you think EMI allows them to give you a DRM free song for free?
That and better disk-read error handling (CDs as a medium aren't really "lossless" in the strictest sense; even a fresh-from-the-factory disk will have many "incorrect" bits scattered throughout that need to be identified and "reconstructed" as best as possible by the hardware).
But, yes, the primary difference is the device used to translate discrete samples of waveforms into accurate and smooth waveforms again.
Question for those who know: does this same D/A processing happen (or similar processing) in the transition from PCM -> MP3 or AAC? Or, do the codecs work directly on sampled data without paying explicit attention to the represented waveforms?
Second question for those who know: how does the average Mac or PC, used to play a CD or other PCM audio source, compare to the 2k-10k CD players?
I don't know but when I click on "iTunes Plus" link in the Canadian store, it tells me "It can't connect to the store, it's busy, try again later", although, I can click on any other links without any problem... strange...
[edit]
I see people from UK having the same problem... feel better now!... Way much better!
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[edit]
I see people from UK having the same problem... feel better now!
... Way much better![/edit]
So if your hard drive gets wiped somehow you have to repay for all those songs? I've never used any online store, but I'd have figured the songs were tied to your account and it would know to let you download them again. I mean, if my music gets deleted for whatever reason I have the cds to rerip them.
Yes but it would be like converting a JPEG in a TIFF format... bigger size, same quality.
Or if you prefer, it's like converting a FLV (flash player) file in Quicktime to a HD QT movie... bigger size, same quality (as the original).
If you didn't back up your CDs and they got stolen, you don't get a replacement disk from Best Buy.
If you don't back up materials which you buy online, you are treading on very thin ice. I backup everything I create, and I back up everything I purchase. The latter takes much less effort and backup media than the former.
eMusic will allow you to re-download songs you've purchased online; they are one of the very few with this policy. It's great. Still, if you're relying on that ability instead of backing it up yourself, what happens when eMusic changes its business model or gets bought or just plain fails? Do you really want the security of your purchased music tied forever to the solvency of a particular business (the same argument which is made against DRMed music purchases, although I'm a bit more confident in Apple's continued solvency than in eMusic's!)
In any case, it costs close to nothing to back up your data. You should be backing up your data anyway, or you have much more major concerns than if you'll be able to listen to last year's Kelly Clarkson single after your drive crashes. Adding purchased music to any reasonably organized backup system should cost you no more than 15 minutes. Apple's own Backup even has a preconfigured option just for this, which takes about thirty seconds to open, activate, and verify that it's set up correctly.
All that having been said, Apple has a non-public policy of allowing redownloads of purchased music. However, moreso than eMusic's public policy, this could change at any time, and is quite specifically not a part of the agreement you make when buying music from them. Don't rely on it. But, Apple's bent over backwards to help people out after a crash in the past.
Error correction doesn't vary much between CD players, there's some pretty robust error correction included in the format itself. There's a huge amount of redundant data, and even big chunks of missing or incorrect bits can be completely corrected. A disk has to be in pretty bad shape to require anything beyond that standard error correction, so 99% of cds will end up reading the same numerical data to any CD player.
The D/A converters are the main difference between different players, and while there are differences, these days even cheaper converters are pretty darn good. Some of the really expensive players have extra things that will color the quality of the sound like tube amplifiers.
For compressed audio, the software sends a version similar to uncompressed audio to the D/A converter. The converter itself doesn't look at data that is still compressed.
Sounds like you know what you are doing and have excellent reasons for doing it.I will admit that my all-Lossless collection means I don't fit a lot on my iPhone... but as years go by, storage will increase. I am creating a master digital collection. I don't want to deal with CD's, I loathe physical media. I want everything digital and lossless at the press of a button on my Apple Remote.
Honestly though, Lossless on an iPhone just makes you become a smart playlists expert, which isn't so bad really
Apologies if I came across as overly chastising/critical of your choices. It's just that so many people don't seem to think rationally about this stuff at all.
Answer to question #1: Let's use iTunes as an example. iTunes will take any audio format that it can read and spit out decompressed audio samples to the OS for processing. Essentially, everything gets taken and read as a PCM stream. AAC gets interpreted, mp3 gets interpreted. itunes then sends this information to the OS for output. the OS doesn't know that the original source material was compressed if it was. Everything essentially looks like a WAV file. If you output directly to speakers from your audio output jack, then your computer's D/A converter processes the waveforms from the PCM stream and does the D/A conversion.
If you use digital optical output, the PCM stream is thus sent to your audio processor for conversion from digital to analog. You can verify this by buying a DTS-encoded CD (there are quite a few of them) and importing a track to iTunes with Apple Lossless. If you connect to speakers directly, you'll get static. If you connect to a DTS-capable receiver through optical audio output, you'll get DTS-decoded goodness. The only possibly issues here are the quality decoding of the compressed audio source. So your MP3 or AAC audio quality is only as good as the codec that "converts" that information to waveforms. If you go lossless, it's easy to verify that you're getting 100% perfect sound by doing the DTS check. If it plays DTS, it's a bit-perfect representation of the original.
Answer 2: This question is actually partially answered by my last paragraph. The important thing here is to determine if you are getting the exact bits that are on the CD when you rip a disc with a computer-based player. I won't comment on on-the-fly playback (playing a disc that's not been ripped) as it is a contentious issue for some audiophile types. But in theory, if you get digital output to an audio processor/amp, then you're going to get the same experience whether that audio comes from a 10K stand-alone CD player or a macbook with iTunes.
If you use windows, then some problems are introduced because windows molests the audio signal on the way out the door...everything is converted to 48000hz. This allows things like discrete surround sound with analog outputs that you can't get in a Mac without a 3rd party card/software, but for people not interested in 3d sound effects in games, etc, it isn't really worth the trade-offs in sound. Vista introduced some new technologies that make it a little more appealing, but you still can't play DTS-encoded CDs through iTunes and hear anything but static.
at least not without doing some major low-level work on the system...look up kmixer and ASIO for some enlightening conversation.
Losing cds is so ten years ago. With iTunes and iPod I can now import my entire catalog and safely store cds in my closet so that they cannot get lost or stolen easily, so they are only subject to a house fire. So technically importing my cds to iTunes is a form of backing them up, and is just as easy as backing up files, but with less hd space. Files are easier to lose than cds nowadays. If my hard drive crashes the music is the only thing I'll be concerned about. My computer doesn't contain any other files I really need need.
It would be even better if Apple dropped the DRM'd music to 89 cents, but one step at a time.
So back it up, I'd recommend doing that anyway even with ripped tunes. One dvd can hold hundreds if not thousands of songs.
No, but iTunes can convert on the fly to a compatible format when syncing the shuffle.
It would be even better if Apple dropped the DRM'd music to 89 cents, but one step at a time.
It would also be better if Amazon switched to the better quality AAC format, but you can't have everything. I'd love it if Apple had better quality for the same price, but I'm willing to pay the extra ten cents for a better sounding track. I'm more concerned about album pricing, which has some much bigger pricing differences.