More on iPod and WMA

[fatfish]

Now I hate M$, don't try to disguise the fact, never use their software, use VPC but won't anymore (now M$ have it), Clarisworks for me, Safari and Mail. Only grudge is I have to return my email attachments as word docs and ask for them as pdf's, won't do business if they don't.

Saying this, I'm conservative and never saw any problem with the M$ monopoly with IE and the rest. If a company have a product, why shouldn't they say who buys it, who they will support etc etc.. (And yes I realise this attitude would have put Apple out of business a few years ago - so what market forces rule OK)

Thing are different now and I can proudly say I have the same attitude towards the Apple monopoly on digital music. Whilst it seems Apple are doing things right for the general user, why should they adopt WMA.

He who rules a company shall have the last say, sod the general public, business is business, Apple don't generally sod the public, but if they did, I'd support them.

Too many people have too many rights nowadays, bring back the days when the monarchy was all powerful and the man in the street would loose his head because of the whim of the royal house.

Jesus, I'm a subject not a citizen and wish to stay that way. Power to Apple and the iPod, let it take over the world.

 

[svenas1]

Originally posted by fatfish
Now I hate M$, don't try to disguise the fact, never use their software, use VPC but won't anymore (now M$ have it), Clarisworks for me, Safari and Mail. Only grudge is I have to return my email attachments as word docs and ask for them as pdf's, won't do business if they don't.

Hold firm, it ain't easy.

Too many people have too many rights nowadays, bring back the days when the monarchy was all powerful and the man in the street would loose his head because of the whim of the royal house.

..now you really are looking for an argument.

Jesus, I'm a subject not a citizen and wish to stay that way.

I'm sure her majesty will be pleased at this. I'm glad I'm allowed to be hold a different, more republican, conviction.

 

[desdomg]

So I see that the latest M$ FUD that people are buying into is this whole "loss-less" argument.

So we are all meant to think " oh, that Apple music is just so awfully lossy. I wan't some nice M$ loss-less music please". LOL. Cmon people. I know its a slow runour day and folks are still nursing Christmas hangovers but really, get a grip! Remember most folks seemed happy with MP3's not so very long ago.

As to the choice argument, you can now mix and match three different iPods with the iTMS.😛

 

[fatfish]

Originally posted by svenas1
British ARE european.. ;-P


... or, for the sake of this thread,



I agree.

(your five quid doesn't entitle you to more of an argument...)

I am not european, I am British, I was born a subject of Her Majesty ~The Queen and will die with that honour/duty, I will never be a citizen of Europe and God forbid we ever have to use that wretched currency. I regard the US as our friend and ali (is that how you spell it).

(Last time I went abroad I was detained at customs for nearly 60 hours because I refused to present a current EU passport, instead offering my out of date British passport. My wife and kids were unimpressed as were the customs and transport police, needless to say I won the day and as a subject of the queen was granted special permission to return to my bithplace and released without charge, although I am now banned from travelling abroad, I believe I made my point. Long live the Queen, God save Winston Churchill.

BTW,,, with the same detrmination I will avoid purchasing M$ products.

 

[Trekkie]

Re: WMA = Better Audio Quality

Originally posted by boros
Play a lossy format on a pair of B&W Nautilus with Krell amp and you're in for a real letdown.

I'd think anything but SACD on a system as that might sound off in any format. And I'd bet money 9 out of 10 people wouldn't hear what you hear.

Lossy compression on a "good" soundsystem works something like this... parts of the music are accurate and musical, but there are some instraments and passages that are unrecognizeable. You get wierd thumps instead of drum petals... shrieks instead of symbols.

I have a Sony TA-E9000ES Pre-Amplifier and a Sony TA-N9000ES Amplifier running Klipsch Reference (3 Series) speakers. I play MP3 through TiVo encoded with lame and the --r3mix and VBR with 112KB the lowest allowed. Comparing them to the source through my CX555ES Changer my wife was unable to tell the difference, and she has better hearing than I do because of how loud I listened to my walkman as a child.

I don't think 1% of the Audio-listening population should be allowed to be allowed to pick a codec for the rest of us. We prefer not to support formats that pay someone who for all intents and purposes is attempting to turn and burn all media in and out to them so that in 5 years they can suddenly charge a fortune for it and require all sorts of special licensing to unlock each item you wish to use -- both hardware and software.

Am I paranoid? I don't think so. For the record I've been a die hard MS user until 2001 when they did just that with the operating system (Windows XP) I'm a MSCE before the testing companies existed that showed you all the questions.

We're not talking sipping scotch and basking in subtle differences here... we're talking your friend's teeneage kids coming over and saying your system sounds horrible... it is that bad.

It *is* sipping scotch and calling things you don't pay lots of money for inferior. It's like the 200 MPH car. You spend so much money on a negative logarhytmic return by the time you get the 200MPH mark you've spent millions on the engine.

Again, this is a high-resolution audio system... think blowing that 2MP JPEG up to a poster sized image... it looks fine in 4x6, but crappy as a poster.

Your system? Absolutely. The rest of the world? No way. Otherwise Best Buy would sell Krell, B&W, Martin Logans, etc. They sell $500 all-in-one systems with speakers smaller than a deck of cards and people think they're wonderful. WHen they want to get a 'real' system the walk over to the Bose section and through money at cardboard & window screens and think they're buying a killer system.

This creates a real dilemma as, though I love the iTunes interface, I'm forced to archive in huge WAV format files. At least WM9 supports lossless compression. Now I'm stuck with .APE archives, WMA9 Archives and WAV Archives. I have to use utilities to copy and convert batches of my files into MP3 format so they're portable. I also have to maintain seperate archives - not to mention backups of teh primary archives. This process is a complete organizational and disk-devouring nightmare...

No. Offer WAV for people like you and let the hard disk vendors thank you. You make it sound *oh* so burdensome but your love for high end audio makes you need to use these and MS sees you coming a mile away.

There are plenty of alternatives that don't require a *closed* architecture. I would expect from you comments that you'd be a *huge* support off Ogg Vorbis, not WMA. If anything that would be a format we could all live with supportin on the iPod. You'd be happy, and it'd be a royalty free open standard that anyone can tweak to their liking.

The belief is that MS is out to get you, and you may think I'm wearing a tinfoil hat. I've been in the Intel computer industry since 1989 and I've seen what they do. They target a subject, marginalize the competition, and move on.

Their subjugations have been

1988 - 1992 DOS/Windows 3.x vs Mac
1990 - 1995 Windows 3.x vs. OS/2

In parallel we had

1995 - 1999 IE vs Netscape
1995 - 1998 Windows NT vs. Netware
2000 + Windows vs. The Media Industry

They've been trying to get WMA on DVD players over the current MPEG-2 standards. They've bypassed all Anti-Trust legislation by getting a new president elected and getting a slap on the wrist for it instead of true forcing of open standards on them.

IF there was any teeth into the ruling of the MS vs. the world there would have been open, unrevocable access points in things like SMB, and other connectivity options. But as it stands right now they can revoke access to anything in the name of 'security'

So if samba becomes too much of an interoperability threat you'll bet their next version of longhorn breaks all non-MS clients.

Like their old 80s mantra. DOS isn't done until lotus won't run.

 

[killmoms]

Can we please end the stupid WMA lossless compression support argument? No matter what, Apple will not support ANY form of WMA unless the iPod and iTMS are absolutely DYING.

If you want lossless compression on your iPod, get Apple to support FLAC or APE, both FREE, OPEN-SOURCE audio codecs that losslessly compress. Much better choice than WMA lossless, because FLAC and APE aren't controlled by anyone, don't require license fees, etc.

I love MP3, LAME VBR with --alt-preset standard is plenty for my iPod (iTunes VBR being equally as good, I can't tell the difference). I'd like OGG support so Linux nerds would buy the iPod and stop bitching to me about how Apple is lame for not including it, but it's not keeping me awake at night. FLAC and APE are a higher priority for me, since they're lossless compression that have more than a snowball's chance in hell of seeing their way into iTunes. Unlike, say, a certain codec made by Microsoft.

--Cless

 

[elgruga]

Re: Re: Hello

Originally posted by sw1tcher
The iTunes Music Store is merely a loss leader to selling the very profitable iPods. Apple probably knows that they'll never, in the end, dominate the paid music download services, despite the fact that they're doing so now.

Most music services use WMA, and with Microsoft's eventual entry into the music download business, it'll be even more difficult.

Why dont we just close Apple down now, after all, eventually M$ or someone big will crush us anyway?

No offence, buddy, but could you stop the 'inevitability of bad people taking over' rap?

How about M$'s eventual and inevitable downfall?

Apple CAN change the music business, and they can beat M$ - they do now, for crying out loud!

 

[sushi]

Originally posted by boros
Ahhh.... so you haven't yet discovered all of the lossless audio online... Tons of it! I agree, however, that a clean LP is still the best format. SACD comes close. CDs are actually quite good, when played from a good CD player.

I saw one for about USD 12,000.

I forget the brand.

But it was a single disc player -- loaded from the top. Only had buttons for play, pause, stop, track forward and track backward.

It was sliver about the size of an 80's audiophile turn table.

Would this qualify as a good player? 😀

Sushi

 

[elgruga]

Originally posted by fatfish
I am not european, I am British, I was born a subject of Her Majesty ~The Queen and will die with that honour/duty, I will never be a citizen of Europe and God forbid we ever have to use that wretched currency. I regard the US as our friend and ali (is that how you spell it).

(Last time I went abroad I was detained at customs for nearly 60 hours because I refused to present a current EU passport, instead offering my out of date British passport. My wife and kids were unimpressed as were the customs and transport police, needless to say I won the day and as a subject of the queen was granted special permission to return to my bithplace and released without charge, although I am now banned from travelling abroad, I believe I made my point. Long live the Queen, God save Winston Churchill.

BTW,,, with the same detrmination I will avoid purchasing M$ products.

You are kidding right?

 

[Trekkie]

Originally posted by sushi
I saw one for about USD 12,000.

I forget the brand.

But it was a single disc player -- loaded from the top. Only had buttons for play, pause, stop, track forward and track backward.

It was sliver about the size of an 80's audiophile turn table.

Would this qualify as a good player? 😀

Absolutely, it meets the 3 qualifiers for 'high quality audio'

1) You can't find it at Best Buy
2) It is huge and only does one thing
3) It costs 100 times any other player on the market.

 

[Wonder Boy]

good.

 

[d-fi]

aac wma

Ok I have to say this normally I’m a lurker on forums, because most of the time someone else says what I’m thinking sooner or later. But on this subject I feel I have a couple points to speak out about.

If you are playing music on your home pc (as in personal computer Mac or “pc”) and you’re ripping and encoding from your own cds does it’s not going to matter what format you are using if suits your quality needs and you can play your music without a problem?

Personally I have duel-boot win/Linux desktop that store’s my Flac archive of my mere 400 cd’s. But I also have an iBook so multiplatform compatibility is a huge issue. Now I can play Flac files on my iBook (airport extreme is great) but I tend not to want to fill up its hard drive with 20 meg+ files just so I can listen to then through tiny headphones or speakers. So I’ve made a bunch of v.b.r. mp3’s (debated between this and ogg) from my original source files for the iBook and my future to be mp3player and I’m happy with my choice. But worse comes to worse I can always make some ogg files from my source files

And guess what this all works great for me.

Now the majority of people don’t care what format it’s played in as long as it plays easily and sounds good to them.

Why is mp3 the defacto standard on the internet? Because people keep choosing to use it.

The legal download market (the consumers who use the service) will decide on the format is best for them and right now that seems to be AAC but in a year and a half or so we’ll all know.

Microsoft and others are spreading FUD about choosing AAC will result in a lack of choice for them.

Ultimately if consumers choose AAC businesses will be bending over backwards to sell them set top box’s and heaps of other multimedia gadgets that use AAC as a standard, Microsoft might have an edge in this department at the moment but that can change REAL FAST.

(note how most people call them “MP3 players” not WMA or ACC players)

 

[whodatrr]

Originally posted by Trekkie
Absolutely, it meets the 3 qualifiers for 'high quality audio'

1) You can't find it at Best Buy
2) It is huge and only does one thing
3) It costs 100 times any other player on the market.

Wow! ... and all of this bashing directed at people that pay attention to the quality of sound from folks that use an OS that garners only 3-5% of the market (Hopefully growing). I, for one, choose to at least shop at Good Guys, vs. Best Buy... OK, I'll admit I sometimes shop a bit higher than that, but I'm sure that 3-5% of audio enthusiasts do... 🙂 Also, you can get pretty good CD player or Universal Palyer (DVD-A, SACD, DVD, CD, etc.) for under $500 now. Not great, but pretty good. One that'll blow away any lossy format.

Regarding WMA, I'd prefer it was an open format... Lossless AAC. The real issue is I want my audio "future-proof" after I'vee gone through the touble of ripping it. Once an open losssless format comes out that iTunes supports, you can believe I'm running a batch process to convert all of my WMAs to that standard!!!

Hmmm.... if I'm settling for mediocre sound, maybe I should just get one of those PCs that the other 90% use??? 🙂

 

[sushi]

Originally posted by Trekkie
Absolutely, it meets the 3 qualifiers for 'high quality audio'

1) You can't find it at Best Buy
2) It is huge and only does one thing
3) It costs 100 times any other player on the market.

😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

BTW, the stereo that the CD Player was attached to cost around USD 250,000. Even the short cables between the pre-amp and amp were expensive (about 12 grand)!

...just a bit out of my price range! 😉

Yet I am sure there are some who could explain that they can hear the difference between this system and one that only costs a mere USD 50,000. To each his own.

Sushi

 

[hulugu]

Originally posted by boros
Wow! ... and all of this bashing directed at people that pay attention to the quality of sound from folks that use an OS that garners only 3-5% of the market (Hopefully growing). I, for one, choose to at least shop at Good Guys, vs. Best Buy... OK, I'll admit I sometimes shop a bit higher than that, but I'm sure that 3-5% of audio enthusiasts do... 🙂 Also, you can get pretty good CD player or Universal Palyer (DVD-A, SACD, DVD, CD, etc.) for under $500 now. Not great, but pretty good. One that'll blow away any lossy format.

Regarding WMA, I'd prefer it was an open format... Lossless AAC. The real issue is I want my audio "future-proof" after I'vee gone through the touble of ripping it. Once an open losssless format comes out that iTunes supports, you can believe I'm running a batch process to convert all of my WMAs to that standard!!!

Hmmm.... if I'm settling for mediocre sound, maybe I should just get one of those PCs that the other 90% use??? 🙂

Now don't say anything you will regret. 😉

But, I agree the songs you can buy from the iTMS are not the best quality of what's out there and if you're a music lover who owns a higher end stereo, for now the iTMS is not going to suit your needs. Futhermore, the iPod should support FLAC and Ogg Vorbis for no other reason than it's simple and cheap to do so with a minor firmware update.
But, WMA is a mediocre set of codecs except for its ability to create lossless files. However, for the digital music arena the size of lossless files, not to mention the troublesome complications of the RIAA's involvement mean that lossless files will not appear here as of now.
So, with that in mind you must admit that the iTunes/iTMS/iPod using AAC w/ Fairplay is the best system right now.
And by getting involved with WMA as a standard you immediately get involved with WMP which dooms the Mac community to second-class citizens always under MS sword of damocles so to speak. That's why I disagree so much with WMA going onto the iPod because it creates a situation where MS holds the cards and stops innovating and starts charging or adding DRM schemes. To see the possibilities just look at the .doc format. Has it gotten any better, cheaper, faster in the last 5 years? Would WMA be any different without the threat of Mp3 and now AAC (Mp4).
I think there's a lot at stake here, both for the consumer and for the Macintosh as a viable platform. So for now, I've got an iPod, I'm buying from the iTMS and I'm encoding music at the highest levels AAC will allow. My music sounds very good and I have a nice stereo.

 

[applefans]

Originally posted by Spades
Does iTunes for windows rip CDs to AAC? If that's the case, they're not forced to use WMA any more. Technically they never were force to use WMA, but ripping to MP3 took extra effort (i.e. finding a program besides WMP). If iPods were to add another format, I would want it to be flac. Sure the files will be big, but it's an improvement over plain wav files. And the quality is exactly the same as the original file. My second choice is ogg, just because I have a collection of those, and it's taking time to re-rip to AAC.

What does WMA stands for? Weapons for Mass Assassination?

 

[greenstork]

Originally posted by Cless
Can we please end the stupid WMA lossless compression support argument? No matter what, Apple will not support ANY form of WMA unless the iPod and iTMS are absolutely DYING.

If you want lossless compression on your iPod, get Apple to support FLAC or APE, both FREE, OPEN-SOURCE audio codecs that losslessly compress. Much better choice than WMA lossless, because FLAC and APE aren't controlled by anyone, don't require license fees, etc.

I love MP3, LAME VBR with --alt-preset standard is plenty for my iPod (iTunes VBR being equally as good, I can't tell the difference). I'd like OGG support so Linux nerds would buy the iPod and stop bitching to me about how Apple is lame for not including it, but it's not keeping me awake at night. FLAC and APE are a higher priority for me, since they're lossless compression that have more than a snowball's chance in hell of seeing their way into iTunes. Unlike, say, a certain codec made by Microsoft.

--Cless

Where do I sign up 😀

 

[elgruga]

One day M$ wont exist, but then I suppose we'll have to invent it again so we have something to fight against.

I believe it was Jean Genet, the famous French cheese-eating surrender monkey writer, who said:

"Life without resistance is meaningless"

So lets all give it up for M$, the worst software company you can imagine, but wouldnt we be bored without them.

 

[desdomg]

Originally posted by fatfish
I am not european, I am British, I was born a subject of Her Majesty ~The Queen and will die with that honour/duty, I will never be a citizen of Europe and God forbid we ever have to use that wretched currency. I regard the US as our friend and ali (is that how you spell it).

(Last time I went abroad I was detained at customs for nearly 60 hours because I refused to present a current EU passport, instead offering my out of date British passport. My wife and kids were unimpressed as were the customs and transport police, needless to say I won the day and as a subject of the queen was granted special permission to return to my bithplace and released without charge, although I am now banned from travelling abroad, I believe I made my point. Long live the Queen, God save Winston Churchill.

BTW,,, with the same detrmination I will avoid purchasing M$ products.

You sound like a bit of a radical, which is fine. But if you were really a loyal subject as you say you would have respected the fact that the UK joined the EU a number of years ago, approved by none less than her very royal Majesty. So actually you are starting to sound like a very disloyal subject, after all. Personally I think you are a looney. Oh, and by the way, the british Royal family is of German descent.

 

[Squire]

This has been beaten to death, I know. But I have a couple of points to make:

1) I don't think Apple should support WMA. Sure, it might bring a few more iPod/iTMS users on board. However, I think a lot of people who are reluctant to use AAC could quite possibly be just reluctant to do anything the Apple way. (That's one reason I believe that the HP deal is so significant. It dispels the myth that there's still a cross-platform problem.)

2) For those of you dissatisfied with the quality of compressed audio, why don't you just keep everything in .WAV format? Even with the large file sizes, a 300 GB external hard drive is a drop in the bucket when you're comparing it to the price of any high-end audio equipment.

Look:
-------------------

Mark Levinson No. 36s 20 bit D to A converter
MSRP $6495

B&W Nautilus 803 Main
MSRP $5000

Krell 201 CD Player
MSRP $9000
--------------------

Maxtor 300GB external firewire drive $399
-------------------
Big difference. For that matter, you could even opt for an Xserve RAID with 1 TB of storage for $ 5999. 😉

Squire

 

[Trekkie]

Originally posted by boros
Wow! ... and all of this bashing directed at people that pay attention to the quality of sound from folks that use an OS that garners only 3-5% of the market (Hopefully growing).

I wasn't intending that to be bashing at an individual person about paying attention to the quality of music. However I did find it rather flooring that someone would support a closed, proprietary standard over something like Ogg Vorbis.

However I maybe got a bit testy in regards to picking apart the earlier post about how AAC in any form sounds horrible on the rather high end system. There have been enough car comparisions, vacuum comparisons and others tossed out to show why I didn't agree with it and felt it was unfair.

Regarding WMA, I'd prefer it was an open format... Lossless AAC. The real issue is I want my audio "future-proof"

Then I'd say for sure stay away from Microsoft. They'll do something (history proven again) that will make you have to upgrade or re-do to your satisfaction what you've already done.

Sorry if it appeared I was bashing. I meant the three criteria thing as a joke.

 

[McToast]

Originally posted by fatfish
I am not european, I am British, I was born a subject of Her Majesty ~The Queen and will die with that honour/duty, I will never be a citizen of Europe and God forbid we ever have to use that wretched currency. I regard the US as our friend and ali (is that how you spell it).

(Last time I went abroad I was detained at customs for nearly 60 hours because I refused to present a current EU passport, instead offering my out of date British passport. My wife and kids were unimpressed as were the customs and transport police, needless to say I won the day and as a subject of the queen was granted special permission to return to my bithplace and released without charge, although I am now banned from travelling abroad, I believe I made my point. Long live the Queen, God save Winston Churchill.

BTW,,, with the same detrmination I will avoid purchasing M$ products.

Total Loony Bin

 

[Iroganai]

Mr/Ms fatfish,

I thought the Anglo-Saxons came from Germany... very European I think.
I'll apologize you if you're Welsh or some Celtic origin.


On WMA/AAC,
I think the losslessness is not the issue because those stores selling WMA are selling WMA with loss.

I hope the iTMS come to Japan soon and I can buy music online! As I don't think 128k AAC is not so bad for me, the losslessness is really non-issue. at least for me.

 

[whodatrr]

Advantages of Lossless...

OK, Just a few more advantages of a losless format to think of...

1. WAVs do not work well with airport extreme... oddly-enough, WMA 9 lossless does. As it tend to average ~40% of the stream size, this does the trick for my LAN.
2. Lossless will save you OVER 50% of drive space... this becomes significant when - like me - you make backups of your files (EVERYONE SHOULD DO THIS). So, as I said in an earlier post, this has kep me from having to buy an additional 3 250GB external hard drives... (BIG SAVINGS FOR ME... at least $800 for my 1,200 CDs!). One does not have to own a $10,000 system to tell the difference, just a system that is musical vs. HT-Only focused. (See last point).
3. There are many good lossless compression formats out there... the problem is that the best player in the world, iTunes, supports none of them (reasons posted throughout this thread).
4. While there is an Internet music revolution about, there is also a return to high resolution music (DVD-Audio and SACD will become defacto standard by the RAAC, to ccompat MP3, AAC, etc.). Also, digital amplification will soon make frighteningly-good audio attainable by the masses.
5. Apple, having just released Garage Band, is supposedly targeting musicians - a demographic that is typically more finicky about theeir sound than the general public.
6. People reading this thread should be aware that, should they ever get a good-sounding musical soundsystem, those lossy AACs will actually sound worse on the good system than they did on a poor one. This is the real problem... high-resolution systems are revealing. Just like "garbage-in gargabe-out" in the computer world, high-resolution audio systems tend to amplify and accentuate the "loss" in lossy music. So, you're faced with music where some pieces of a song sound great and other pieces have mysterious and obviously artificial sounds (artifacts) eminating from your speakers. It's not a case where it's not as good as it could be - it's a case where it's complete crap.
7. I think about that person SJ refered to at Macworld - the sucker that spent $29,500 on the iTMS. Almost all of his music would sound horrible on my sub-$5,000 stereo (OK, many components used). I suspect it would sound horrible on many $1,500 stereos (i.e. Rotel integrated with low-end B&Ws... a British soundsystem 😉.

So, I'll end by saying...
1. If you're taking the time to rip your own CDs, do so in a lossless format (i.e. APE, WMA9 lossless, etc.). Once ripped, you can use toools to batch convert & copy them to any format you like (i.e. WMA Workshop on Winblows). If WMA goes bust, I can batch convert to WAV with no loss! The problem is that, if I rip them into AAC today, I've already lost a lot of data.
2. If you spend money on the iTMS, you may be wasting money down the road. With higher-resolution audio formats coming down the pike, your ear will get better. This will be akin to having a lot of hissing cassettes sitting around, when re-mastered SACDs are available... actually, it'll probably sound a lot worse than casssettes on many systems.

Sorry to emphasize these points, but I just can't believe M$ does a better job at high-end audio than Apple - what with the Garage-Band thing and all. M$ delivered lossless compresssion over a year ago! Apple could fix this now by enabling APE plug-ins... I suppose, however, this would open up a whole new can of worms (iTMS bandwidth & storage, etc.).

 

[pkradd]

No WMA on HP Digital Music Player

From Wired News:

HP Spokesperson says NO WMA support.

Article here:

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61897,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1