Interesting article on music download quality

[j-madd]

Apple presses pause on high-def music, says Neil Young - CNN.com

Justin

[wado1942]

Yeah, forget HD music for now. I'd be happy if we could just get audio back up to the quality we had 15 years ago.

[Franco]

Why does everyone act like if it's not HD in iTunes, it doesn't exist?

https://www.hdtracks.com/

(most people who care about high quality in audio downloads know about the above site, right?)

[Joelistics]

Originally Posted by Franco

Why does everyone act like if it's not HD in iTunes, it doesn't exist?

https://www.hdtracks.com/

(most people who care about high quality in audio downloads know about the above site, right?)

Yes but the artist library on the above site is not even a fraction of the size of iTunes..

[Franco]

Originally Posted by Joelistics

Yes but the artist library on the above site is not even a fraction of the size of iTunes..

No question, what I was referring to (assuming you read the article linked above) is comments such as this one:

"My goal is to rescue the art form that I've been practicing for about 50 years," said Young, whose Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career spans six decades, from Buffalo Springfield to his rich solo career to his work with Pearl Jam and beyond. "The problem is that there's no alternative."

The problem is Neil Young (and most media outlets) don't know that there are smaller distributors who take high quality downloads more seriously than iTunes. it's up to the consumers and record companies to realize there's a demand. BTW, I think the HDtracks catalog has nearly doubled in the last two years, hopefully they'll continue to expand and record companies as well as consumers start to realize that yes, there are alternatives to iTunes for high-quality music.

EDIT: Here's another one (regarding Hardware):

"CNN first reported a year ago that Apple, along with other digital music retailers, were talking with executives in the record industry about selling high-fidelity tracks in iTunes and retooling iPods to be compatible with them."

I imagine that Apple won't be sending all of us who one one or more iPods some free "retooling" kits for them to play back high-quality audio files, so expect to see Apple marketing these new iPods as if they are ground-breaking devices, while my HTC Incredible has been able to play FLAC files since 2010.

[Adam Dempsey]

Indeed. The article was also published locally here. Neil Young: Steve Jobs listened to vinyl
And the video interview here: http://allthingsd.com/20120131/neil-...mission-video/
I believe there will always be a (growing) market for full-res music. The greater issue being purely choice, along with respect for the artists'/producers' sonic vision, and in terms of the iTunes store there is no choice.

[Joelistics]

Originally Posted by Franco

No question, what I was referring to (assuming you read the article linked above) is comments such as this one:

"My goal is to rescue the art form that I've been practicing for about 50 years," said Young, whose Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career spans six decades, from Buffalo Springfield to his rich solo career to his work with Pearl Jam and beyond. "The problem is that there's no alternative."

The problem is Neil Young (and most media outlets) don't know that there are smaller distributors who take high quality downloads more seriously than iTunes. it's up to the consumers and record companies to realize there's a demand. BTW, I think the HDtracks catalog has nearly doubled in the last two years, hopefully they'll continue to expand and record companies as well as consumers start to realize that yes, there are alternatives to iTunes for high-quality music.

EDIT: Here's another one (regarding Hardware):

"CNN first reported a year ago that Apple, along with other digital music retailers, were talking with executives in the record industry about selling high-fidelity tracks in iTunes and retooling iPods to be compatible with them."

I imagine that Apple won't be sending all of us who one one or more iPods some free "retooling" kits for them to play back high-quality audio files, so expect to see Apple marketing these new iPods as if they are ground-breaking devices, while my HTC Incredible has been able to play FLAC files since 2010.

I understand your point and encourage sites like HDtracks, but to ME they're no alternative to iTunes because i feel like every time I enter the site there's a 70% chance that they don't have the titles I'm looking for. Sadly illegal sites make it so incredibly easy to download high quality tracks that they (for many) become the alternative to itunes...

[Waltz Mastering]

iPods have always been able to play 16/44.1,.. so there's always those old fashioned high res cd'z that can be imported.

Originally Posted by Joelistics

illegal sites make it so incredibly easy to download high quality tracks

What are considering high quality in this instance?

[Joelistics]

Originally Posted by Waltz Mastering

iPods have always been able to play 16/44.1,.. so there's always those old fashioned high res cd'z that can be imported.

What are considering high quality in this instance?

CD quality, 44.1Khz 16bit / FLAC

[MOBMastering]

Originally Posted by kelofibrase

I want optional FLAC downloads in all online stores. Amazon, Apple, etc.

Would be just perfect. Played by Apple would be more than perfect

[Solidtube]

Originally Posted by Joelistics

I understand your point and encourage sites like HDtracks, but to ME they're no alternative to iTunes because i feel like every time I enter the site there's a 70% chance that they don't have the titles I'm looking for. Sadly illegal sites make it so incredibly easy to download high quality tracks that they (for many) become the alternative to itunes...

I doubt it's Apple who are refusing to sell high quality download, it's more like the big record companies are reluctant to license them to Apple or Amazon to sell.

[huejahfink]

Originally Posted by Solidtube

I doubt it's Apple who are refusing to sell high quality download, it's more like the big record companies are reluctant to license them to Apple or Amazon to sell.

So what about the record labels that are happy to sell lossless via those portals? They can't.

I honestly think it is store policy.

[Joelistics]

Originally Posted by Solidtube

I doubt it's Apple who are refusing to sell high quality download, it's more like the big record companies are reluctant to license them to Apple or Amazon to sell.

Why do you think that?? What would a record label get out of refusing to release HD versions of their music? They would be earning more on .wav downloads than mp3s and the manufacturing costs = 0

[Waltz Mastering]

I think Apple wants to sell what they can make proprietary to the iPod, like AAC.. They make more money that way. Is it licensing agreements that are preventing Warner, Universal and EMI from selling 16/44.1 or Flac direct to there clients from their own sites. Cut out the middle man.

[SweetLossy]

From the article:
"Industry-standard MP3 files have only about 5% of all the sounds that were contained in the original recording..."

"Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music," Young said. "But when he went home, he listened to vinyl."
Paradox: vinyl clicks and crackles are not important but the transient smearing of an MP3@320 or an AAC is killing the music...


"Lossy" haters?

[Jerry Tubb]

Mega kudos to Neil Young & John Nowland at Redwood Digital for championing high resolution audio!

Best, JT

[Peaks]

lol high-def music. Just cause it's lossless doesn't mean it's high-def by default. HD is such a used and abused word and this is yet another case. Start producing non earsplitting things then the term might be relevant. But IMO Redbook standards alone prevent it from being high def in the first place. As technology improves, so should the standards so we can utilize the best. But Redbook hasn't.

Maybe I'm setting the bar too high but I think that 24/96 with dynamic range of 8 minimum in bx_meter/standard in a lossless container would be real high defintion.

Originally Posted by Waltz Mastering

I think Apple wants to sell what they can make proprietary to the iPod, like AAC.. They make more money that way. Is it licensing agreements that are preventing Warner, Universal and EMI from selling 16/44.1 or Flac direct to there clients from their own sites. Cut out the middle man.

Second. Why can't they sell their own music directly? Makes the most sense.

[kosmokrator]

you guys are funny. This is a non-issue for 99% of music listeners (and buyers).
From the article:

Despite the availability of high-quality music sold by niche e-commerce websites, consumers so far have expressed little interest

Now why again would Apple want to store 10 x the amount of data and pay for much more traffic for something there's almost no interest in?

This is a business and the costs of providing wavs or flacs stands in no relation to the additional income it would generate Apple.
The IP carriers would be happy about it, though. As they are not happy about the crackdown on piracy sites. They generate lots of traffic, after all.

[Adam Dempsey]

Originally Posted by kosmokrator

Now why again would Apple want to store 10 x the amount of data and pay for much more traffic for something there's almost no interest in?

I'd argue simply that the sheer absence of choice at the iTunes store being fundamentally undemocratic & ignorant of artists' intent is mutually exclusive to the fact that many of their customers are yet to realise this, and don't know what they're missing. The rest is education ("HD" video doesn't answer to such "why bother?" arguments). The bandwidth is there. The storage is there.

To me, HD music means 24 bit & native sample rate. It's the the absence of further processing (SRC, dither, truncation, lossy codecs) that makes the difference.

Bandcamp seems to be doing well, at least here. Doesn't seem to be much mention of it in the US, unless I'm mistaken? It offers FLAC & other formats, artwork, credits, a simple interface, SEO benefits, the streaming sounds far better to me than Soundcloud, and economically is a better deal for artists than iTunes & many others.

[Joelistics]

Originally Posted by kosmokrator

you guys are funny. This is a non-issue for 99% of music listeners (and buyers).
From the article:



Now why again would Apple want to store 10 x the amount of data and pay for much more traffic for something there's almost no interest in?

This is a business and the costs of providing wavs or flacs stands in no relation to the additional income it would generate Apple.
The IP carriers would be happy about it, though. As they are not happy about the crackdown on piracy sites. They generate lots of traffic, after all.

I agree, most people don't care at all..
Having said that, Beatport and other sites charge slightly more for .wavs in order to make it a profitable business to sell HD tracks.. My suggestion would have been to at least allow the functionality for those labels who are interested in it.. I'm sure that with the right marketing this could be a profitable...

But apple seems to be interested in AAC only for other reasons than server space as people have mentioned..

[RRCHON]

The cost of the space and bandwidth is not an issue for Apple or any other large company modern servers.

4Mb per song as MP3 AAC per song vs 10 MB as FLAC seems significant but when you consider how much space companies like Apple and Google just give away with iCloud services or Google web apps, it is about 10gigs per person 20gigs online storage for to use as you see fit on Goggle's servers is 5 dollars a year.

Sooner or later someone is going to make a serious attempt at HiFi digital audio only, but right now people think that HiFi digital audio is attached to units like BlueRay players new hardware ect....

Publishing houses are not going to let the public in general get back to HiFi without a new and substantial investment in hardware, maybe a few divergent investments in hardware and allow some sort of evolution of the market to happen. There is also no reason that they should. Sure you can play FLAC or even the next generation codecs on the processing power of a modern iPod and any smart phone can handle it without getting sweaty balls, but that is not anyone's interest right now since you do not really have medium saturation.

A large player like Apple could force the market up, if it wanted to be a visionary for the sake of being visionary. Alas, I think those days are past apple now, only time will tell; I think they still have some re-arranging to do before we know if apple will go back to being the craptastic apple of the mid 80s while Jobs was building up NeXTSTEP and OpenStep. They are mourning if companies are capable of such things who knows what will happen but sooner or later someone will take the plunge and it will be best for both consumer and distributor if it is a unilateral step, it will be better for publishing houses and hardware manufacturers if it an agreed upon standard that will only work on agreed upon hardware. Next Gen DRM or whatever when it comes out it will come with it and of course none of it will work but for a while it will be all the rage and the buzz will be cool. Everything worth listening to will be re-mastered and re-released ect....

None of it is evil, its just business.

Music lovers pursue technologies to return to high fidelity – USATODAY.com

This is what the feed people that don't know any better - and that is what they tell them they need - if they want better sounding music.

[flatfinger]

Originally Posted by wado1942

Yeah, forget HD music for now. I'd be happy if we could just get audio back up to the quality we had 15 years ago.

I have a few mp3's and they are made from source tracks from a two or three decades old productions .

and ...... they sound dam good; sometimes better than some of my 16bit cd's !!! . It has allot to do with what gets fed into the codec folks .

I'd welcome production values again , but until the mob cries out for it , it ain't happening boys

[Adam Dempsey]

"I’m reasonably happy with the quality of CDs, but I’d really like to see high-resolution downloads become more widely available. It is encouraging to see people listening to high-resolution audio. Eventually it’s going to be an all-download world … computers dominate our lives these days. We are just going to have to be tolerant of the longer download times. It’s just the way it is. ...The majority [of consumers] are happy with MP3, but they don’t know what they are missing..." - Alan Parsons Recording: Beatles, Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles - Pro Sound Web

[Jerry Tubb]

Originally Posted by Adam Dempsey

"I’m reasonably happy with the quality of CDs, but I’d really like to see high-resolution downloads become more widely available. It is encouraging to see people listening to high-resolution audio. Eventually it’s going to be an all-download world … computers dominate our lives these days. We are just going to have to be tolerant of the longer download times. It’s just the way it is. ...The majority [of consumers] are happy with MP3, but they don’t know what they are missing..." - Alan Parsons Recording: Beatles, Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles - Pro Sound Web

Quoted for truth, agreement, and brotherhood.

JT

[acorneau]

Caught the tail end of this story on NPR:

According to Rolling Stone magazine, sales of vinyl albums continue to grow, setting a new record in 2010. Does vinyl reproduce sound better, or is it just a trend? Two audio experts join guest host John Dankosky to talk about the science of audio, and how perceptions can shape the sound experience.

Why Vinyl Sounds Better Than CD, Or Not : NPR

[Jerry Tubb]

Originally Posted by acorneau

Caught the tail end of this story on NPR:

Why Vinyl Sounds Better Than CD, Or Not : NPR

new revelations for magnetic tape as well:

Physicists 'record' magnetic breakthrough

JT

[SweetLossy]

Originally Posted by Jerry Tubb

new revelations for magnetic tape as well:

Physicists 'record' magnetic breakthrough

JT

It's about binary-digital information not analog information. The aim is to create faster hard drives.

Originally Posted by acorneau

Caught the tail end of this story on NPR:

Quote:
According to Rolling Stone magazine, sales of vinyl albums continue to grow, setting a new record in 2010. Does vinyl reproduce sound better, or is it just a trend? Two audio experts join guest host John Dankosky to talk about the science of audio, and how perceptions can shape the sound experience.

Why Vinyl Sounds Better Than CD, Or Not : NPR

In my opinion vinyl sounds "different" but not better than a direct wav from the master.
A 24 bit wav is perfect, it reproduces what the producer or artist listen in the mastering studio. A CD it's "almost" perfect.
A vinyl adds special preprocessing (compression, EQ), noise, clicks, cracks, a lot of distortion, inertial-physical variations... If you like it, OK, good for you.
Each to is own taste.


Some comments from the article:
Scott Metcalfe: "if I'm listening in the car and there's a lot of noise there, I'm not terribly concerned about it. I go into my home to listen.
I listen in the recording studio, and it's blatantly obvious to me"
OK. That's the point of lossy audio: portability.
There is no point to compare a CD with MP3 or AAC, because the first purpose of lossy audio is not sound quality but file size.
If you have a good listening room or a studio, with good equipment, please, forget lossy audio. Lossy audio is not created for "sound quality pleasure".

But if you listen music in normal-cheap speakers or earphones from your phone there is no point to have "high resolution" audio, because the second purpose of lossy audio, after file size, it's to be the closest to its original... or better than the original "adapting" the sound to the listening-technical circumstances: think about broadcast-netcast processing.
Vinyl also "adapts" the original master to its technical circumstances: elliptic EQ, RIAA EQ, compression.

Scott Metcalfe: "what I did was took the excerpt, the original excerpt, and I inverted the polarity"
OK, a null test. A CD vs MP3 null test.
It will be very interesting to do a CD vs Vinyl null test, or a CD vs "Audiophile-expensive tube amp" null test.

In a CD vs MP3 comparison a null test don't tell you what is lost, au contraire, it's what is added: modulated noise. Lossy audio adds noise, lossy sound tends to "spectral entropy". This null test is a good exercise, also for mastering engineers, to understand better what happens when you convert to lossy audio. Start with drum loops and simple instruments, continue with simple-transparent mixes (ie: a jazz trio) to complex rock mixes.
Don't think you have less "audio information" with lossy audio, in fact you have a lot more.

Sean Olive:"We are working out some algorithms that will try to improve low-quality MP3 so it sounds closer CD quality." Wise...

[strdsk]

Here are the sad facts. If you're on this forum, it's likely that you care something about audio quality. Most folks sadly don't know better or care. How far or seriously you take your referencing preference is up to you and varies from person to person. To me for example...MP3s are grotesque...but again, that's just me. Audio manufacturers are designing, marketing, and selling gear that can record as accurately as ever. Yet, consumers listen just about as lousy as ever. It is something that should be addressed...and it kind of is. But like it or not folks want everything these days good, fast, and cheap....and it's simply not possible. So if you can't beat em'....I say join em'. I cringe at the thought of even bothering to master an MP3...but guess what...I'll do it. The customer is always right...

[windmillsound]

I have to admit I can see why a record company wouldn't want hi-def files for download. Copyright is nigh on impossible to enforce in the digital age. And a digital copy is identical to the master.

I guess they could put up with people getting pirate copies of MP3s, knowing that only genuine customers got the real thing.

But if you make the hi-def version available for digital download - well you no longer posess the master - every pirate has the identical product as you.