Apple promises an unforgettable iTunes announcement coming Tuesday - Page 5

We've been through this before.

Don't get your hopes up, mate. Apple's home pages in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and all of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe show the MacBook Air info, rather than the teaser announcement.

Beyond the rumors sites. Way beyond. \

That's a beautiful song and one of my all-time favourites, but I think this suggestion really makes no sense.

"Another Day" is a song about a depressed young woman and evokes feelings of suicide or despair more than anything. I think it an unlikely tie-in to an Apple event that won't (presumably) be about suicide or specifically (we hope) aimed at young women or women who were young in the 1960's.

The times on the clocks are also the times that the announcement is being made so there is no reason to make up "extra" explanations (like the Help! album cover) for their appearance in the ad. That's a classic case of providing an answer to a question that wasn't asked, which is a type of reasoning more prevalent in conspiracy theories than factual situations.

I grew up with the Beatles and have as high opinion of them as anyone, but the idea that Apple is making a world-wide announcement, carefully timed (apparently), around the stock markets opening times in various countries, and that it's all about the Beatles catalogue is just not likely at all.

The Beatles are just not that important. They broke up before most current employees at Apple were even born, and the only consumers that remember seeing them play live would be so old now, they probably missed the computer revolution altogether.

This is true, but how many times have we seen American companies use the song American Woman as if it's a patriotic song?

Or Ronald Reagan wanting to use Born In the USA, obviously clueless as to the meaning of the song.

Close. Lossless is lossy relative to theoretically perfect analog. Unfortunately, there has never been a physical format that was even close to theoretically perfect. I'll take the expanded dynamic range of CDs over vinyl any day.

Except that the "he's pointing at 3:00 London time" thing is completely coincidental and silly.

I found this snippet on another website:

"Originally, the album cover showed The Beatles spelling out the word "Help" using the semaphore system of communicating with flags, which was usually used by ships. The photographer didn't like the pose, so he had them hold the flags in a way that looked good, but didn't spell anything."

Well, we move backward, to an audio quality on par with vinyl. Please. I am over 40 and low vision all my life. So, I should not be interested in HDTV? My hearing does not extend over 16KHz, and that was tested by a radio engineer in 1980. The roll-off over 12KHz was big. So I have 8-track ears. I am not an audiophile either, but know mush when I hear it. As for moving on, I HATE digital video and audio both. Too many times, the capabilities are grossly abused.

For anyone who uses Windows 7, go to your Public Music folder and listen to, "Kalimba" by Mr. Scruff. A little something called "dynamics" is like gone. It might as well be TV sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_Walling

I am not here to fault the iTunes Store. They can only encode what they are given. Gee, guess I have to fault Barry (I Write The Songs) Manilow, the King of analog compression.

It's not lossless music, I'd bet my right nut on it, but will a beer suffice?

Streaming and AirPlay to all devices, just not the AppleTV would be nice.

I agree they are not important. This is why I think there is just going to be a website announcement on the home page and not a big media event or keynote. The tease just makes sense to me ... as a Beetles announcement, but I hope I'm wrong. I would love an iTunes subscription model or cloud service, but I remain convinced that this will be a Beetles announcement. I admit that i sound like a conspiracy theorist ... and this is a reach, but come on! Paul pointing at 3:00 in the third position from the left that happens to be London time! Just another day song possible reference! iTunes speculation about adding them to the catalog at almost every itunes event announcement.

Well, we'll find out at 10:00 eastern.

That's not a bad guess but if that was the case wouldn't the Chinese or Korean websites have announcements?

Both sell iPhone/iPod Touch with China selling the iPad.

Then they would have said 'Tomorrow is Yesterday.'

They gonna take some of that 50 Bil and buy out Sony just to get the Beatles catalog? ........cause they gotta yen for it!

Another possibility: The announcement of iOS 4.2 -- which we know is coming sometime this month -- with emphasis on wireless syncing of playlists to you iPhones and iPads running iOS 4.2. Seems like I recall an AppleInsider feature roundup a few months back saying wireless syncing of iTunes purchases is likely to be in iOS 4.2.

Not having to sync your iPhone/iPad would be something "you'll never forget" to do because your device will do it automatically.

Developer types: If the announcement involves a massively updated iTunes desktop application and/or iPhone/iPad app with new streaming or subscription features, wouldn't we have heard about Apple testing that in the wild?

Am I the first one to notice that the new iTunes logo looks like a music note sitting in a white cloud in the blue sky? Hence, iTunes is moving to a cloud service, because iTunes is now in the cloud in the sky in its icon.

That's the point. It SHOULD be lossless.

The option for AirPlay, especially for music, will keep growing. It will be standard somewhat.

ITMS may sell music in other formats, but iTunes has always done mp3.
I have a MacBook Pro with 4 days worth of mp3's ripped at 320 kbps in my iTunes.

Hmmm...I'm leaning more towards this the more I think about it.

Jobs generation were brought up on the Beatles, so to him it would be a fantastic announcement. And, if what you say is true about high school kids loving the Beatles, then by adding to the iTunes catalogue would help keep the memory alive, hence the "never forget" bit.

No but your the first to mention it. iCloud is where my heart is, but my head is now starting to doubt it.

True enough.

still think it isn't the Beatles though.

I'm currently leaning towards ... "ZOMG! They bought Sony!"

but that's mainly because of the speculation that the times involved would be perfect for the stock markets (the announcement could therefore have bottom line implications).

It could be a lot of things. we'll find out tomorrow

now you can see very well how apples PR works:

- they announce something totally advanced - magical, radical bla bla.

- people are writing about it! blogs, pages like this etc.

- people switch on their imagination. they imagine the weirdest things (for example that all songs are uncompressed) and have hopes, hopes and even more hopes!

- it isn't important anymore what they show tomorrow. the most important thing is that you WISH and your imagination goes wild. does it go wild already? good! PR worked!

- and tomorrow we will all be very lucky that an event starts, or that we read something. it won't be radical, magical or a breakthrough. it will probably be something that is there already from other companies, but apple has put a red sticker which shiny golden letters "N E W" on it, so we all believe it! new! apple! magical!

i guess they will announce that you can stream your music library. all your BOUGHT songs will be there in their cool datacenter and everything is magical and modern.

we will forget, that apple is now controling IF we hear something, and when the bloody internet line collapses, we will ALSO not hear our songs. it's actually a step backwards, but hey - it FEELS so futuristic and modern! and it is from apple!

It's not the beatles, or anything remotely associated with cloud.

The announcement will be that for one day only, there will NOT be an iTunes update

It is a new ad to counter the ridiculous MS 'to the cloud' TV spots. We've been drawing those Internet cloud illustrations in Visio and the like for 10 years or more. The marketing folks are just now latching on to it as a buzz word.

While "a day you'll never forget" is ridiculous overhype for pretty much anything they may announce tomorrow, that doesn't change the fact that the Beatles coming to iTunes would be huge. It would make the mainstream news and make a lot of money for Apple (and the Beatles).



I hate when people make these kinds of stupid statements, it's just a way people use to try and make a personal preference sound like a fact. Digital audio isn't "lossy" compared to analog, if anything ANY recording is going to be "lossy" compared to the original performance.

My apologies if you were being sarcastic, hard to tell with posts.



Actually "Tomorrow is another day".

Yeah, having your music backed up on the cloud would be a step backwards... oh wait.... no it wouldn't.

Your iPod will still have storage space, and your music will still be on your hard drive, so you can still listen to your music the way you do now.

What this would allow you to do is listen to your music at work or a friends house (sans iPod or copying the files to another computer), play additional music you don't have room for on your iPhone/iPod/Macbook Air, and presumably re-download your music should you somehow lose it.

It would totally be a bad thing...

I think you guys are missing the point of Pembroke's complaint. Maybe he shouldn't have framed it as solely a grammer problem.

The headline really is atrocious: there's a beat missing between the sentence and the dangling clause, and the punctuation and capitalization do nothing to 'heal' the dissonance. We can see the American ad-writing fetish for incomplete sentences treated as sentences carried way too far here, to the point of awkwardness, and Apple should be called out for it.

It should have been something like:

Tomorrow is just another day.
One you'll never forget.

The 'One' carries more weight rythmically and doesn't carry any relative-pronoun baggage like the 'That' has, which is what is causing the syntactic tension. (With the break they have here, the pronoun should be 'which,' but that would never fly.)

Getting 'people to turn their heads' by wrenching syntax is ok, but it shouldn't be done gracelessly or amateurishly. Pembroke is right. Apple's usual classiness in their PR took a break for a minute.

Now it spells "Jobs." How deep does the rabbit hole go?

You're no fun.

Insane Apple announcement forensics FTW!

Hehe! I'm just loving it.

Go to apple.com. The version there is animated so there IS a beat between the two. (And for the record, I don't like your alternative as much as their version.)

i'm sorry, but i still think it would be a bad thing because i am sure that one day this will be the ONLY way to operate itunes. i don't like this "forced to do" thing.

i also don't like the idea that someone else is probably judging what part of your mp3 library is bought the correct way, and what other part might be given by your friends and therefore not a 100% legal on your mac.

ask yourself: how many songs do you have in your itunes? and how many have you BOUGHT in the itunes store or ripped from your own cds? how many of your mp3s are "inbetween"? if you can say 0 then you can positively look into the cool cloud itunes. if there is some amound of songs that are not bought from itunes and not ripped, you might probably google how people the record industry treats people for listening to such songs.

so don't be surprised if one day you can not listen to your cool apple cloud music library. this is a really great step forward, isn't it?

One of the technologies from Lala was recognising the song you'd ripped from a CD, but instead of uploading it it makes that song available from its own library. So still just one copy of the digital asset stored in the cloud.

Not sure if that's feasible from a licensing standpoint, but it is somethng Lala did (for streaming).

Why watch keynotes then? Just read the headlines after the (or during for that matter) event. If you don't want details then whats the point of watching?

Um... digital IS lossy compared to analog. Digital samples - there are points, however miniscule, that are left out. Analog does not sample. Or if you want to use sampling as an example, the analog sample rate is infinity.

Yes, analog may cut out frequencies, but it doesn't cut out actual parts. Digital does.

Imagine 48k. There are small parts in between each of those sample that digital does NOT record. Analog doesn't do that. It samples everything.

(I'm NOT arguing which sounds better - that may have been an argument 10 years ago, but notsomuch today.)

Aha. It does work as a two-bar animation. So now I have to agree that I like it better than my alternative, which was too literary anyway. Apple PR redeemed!

Pembroke? What say you?

No, no, no. Right there, you just showed a profound misunderstanding of how digital recording works. People just think it's like a digital photo where there are little samples/pixels that are small enough that you hopefully can't see them but that's not the case at all, some sort of stairstep waveform or connecting the dots.

The limitation of sampling is that the sample rate dictates the highest frequency that can be recorded (and analog has that same limitation). There are no "points left out", if a frequency is less than half the sampling frequency (22 if you're recording at 44.1) then that frequency is captured. Nothing missing from that frequency, period. The only thing that is gained or lost from higher or lower sampling rates is the ability to record higher frequencies - the lower frequencies that are recorded don't improve in quality at all from a higher sample rate.



Come on, aside from the fact that it makes no sense, something with a sample rate of "infinity" would be able to record infinitely high frequencies, and that's not the case at all with analog recording.

There are no "parts between the samples", that's just an assumption that comes from speaking about a technology with no understanding of it.

If you really want to understand how digital recording works, there are plenty of good books on the subject. But if you're not going to really understand it, please don't spread misinformation, there's enough garbage "info" about digital audio online already.

We're talking about two different things.

Sound frequencies of sounds - the wave (like 20kHz, etc)

Sampling frequency - how often a recording is made per unit of time.

Yes, digital and analog both cut out sound frequencies - either high end or low end or wherever in between.

However, digital samples say at 48k - analog doesn't. Analog is a continuous sample - hence "infinity." It doesn't drop anything. Digital does. That's lossy.

And if you don't think there is anything between the samples in 48k, please explain why DVD Audio samples at 96k and above...

MP3 didn't ruin our hearing, it ruined what was there to be heard. But it was only the 2nd or third wave.

The history of audio recording was going for better and better for decades, culminating in fragile LP's and reel-to-reel tape played thru analog tubes on huge heat throwing amps.

Then we got the downscaling of audio quality to serve lower-maintenance more mass markets. 8-Tracks and cassettes were NOT designed to advance the cause of "all the music" at your fingertips - but even cassettes kept improving, added Dolby, etc.

The Rubicon was truly crossed, tho', with the audio CD, deliberately crippled from any frequency below 20 HZ and harmonics/sonics above 20 K - we don't directly "hear" those ranges, but they add a lot to the timbre, warmth, depth and ambiance. And the sampling and bit rates of CD's are nothing for a true audiophile to write home about either. But America (and the world) just wasn't ready to run out and buy a few billion new SACD or DVD-Audio players. So they died on the vine.

So the more ultimate digital mp3/aac formats just degraded an already degraded format - and the public - including me, alas - has embraced the many conveniences gained in the trade-off. And now, even while computing speed and memory and the net have made great strides, we're stuck with a device infrastructure based on these.


According to what I've read, the superiority of AAC is only clear at lower rates - especially 128K and below. I rip my albums in 320K mp3 format because it's more universal, and occasionally in lossless.


It would. And you're dreaming.

Meanwhile, apropos of whatever, since I don't replace working equipment that often, really glad I waited for 1080p before jumping to HDTV, and still haven't picked my "box" solution, e.g., AppleTV, the Boxee Box, etc.

Seriously, PLEASE get a good book on sampling theory. To anyone who actually understands it you sound like the guy who said the internet is a series of tubes.

Digital and analog both have limitations on the high and low end of what frequencies are recorded. But there is nothing cut out "in between". The notion that analog is continuous and digital somehow isn't shows that you haven't the foggiest idea how digital recording works. You basically are assuming that digital recording/playback is just spitting out the graph of the waveform to the speakers when in reality it is putting out a signal that is just as continuous as what went in (and just as "continuous" as an analog signal).

And I DID explain why DVD audio uses a higher sampling rate - it is to record higher frequencies (96k can record up to 48 instead of 22). That is the only advantage to higher sampling rates. It does NOT improve the quality of how the lower frequencies sound. At all. You won't hear a difference, you won't see a difference if you compare the two on a scope. Because at the lower frequencies there is no difference - sampling more often does nothing more than give you redundant information and makes no difference in the actual sound.

I didn't say I didn't want details, I just don't pay that much attention during the keynote. I go to the website and then absorb, if it interests me, after the event. My choice.