The digital format can be as high-fidelity as you want, but except among a small minority of us "audiophiles" (a term of contempt for most people) music reproduction is a lost art, and any remaining true high-fidelity audio equipment is stratospherically expensive.
40 years ago, 0.1% Total Harmonic Distortion was entry-level for cheap receivers. Nowadays these (not-cheap) "Home Theater™" setups run typically 9%! High Fidelity was originally defined as <2% and that was in 1939, I think.
Of course, Apple is largely to blame for this—they discovered that people were willing to pay money for 128 kbps noise and ran with it.
Edit. Added a zero so nobody would miss the decimal point in front of that "1"
Even losslessier music. Music so lossless the actual band will come to your house to play it for you. Or jog behind you. Or sit on the subway with you.
If the music industry REALLY wanted to make money, they'd engage in micro-licensing. Rather than charge a buck to listen to a piece of music, charge two bucks to license it for other uses, like inclusion in a podcast, home video, or small production (maybe three bucks if you do it without including a link to the content).
The fact of the matter is that they now operate in an environment where anyone can be a producer of content, but the byzantine music licensing regime more or less rules out legal licensing to use music except on the scale of a media conglomerate or multimillion dollar production.
Screw DRM and these crazy schemes to preserve the status quo - micro-license so that every twit with a camcorder can spend < $10 to add a decent soundtrack to their indie documentary on nose hair clippers.
If this is true, it now may put the U2 Album and distribution into perspective. Put the Album into everyone's hands with the current AAC encoding. Come out After the October deadline with the same album but the new format. If its a high fidelity format, now offer users to re-download that song in the higher fidelity format so they can hear the difference for themselves.
The real money is in merchandising, touring and licensing music rights for advertising and entertainment. There is typically very little profit in the actual sales of music to consumers unless one has a massive hit. Why? Competition. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people with millions of songs competing for attention.
COMPLETELY wrong.
Money has always been in merchandising, touring etc. The competition has always been the same.
it's actual music sales that are down. Teens in the 50's through the 90's bought their own music and whole albums. Nowadays if a kid wants to listen to a song he just finds it on YouTube which most likely was uploaded by another teen claiming "I do not own this song". It's a pool of free content, not just music, some people upload whole shows on there.
Other options include illegal downloads which the government has done nothing about.
You have pandora who plays one commercial for like every 4 songs. Old school radio of the 90's was half music half commercials and everyone tuned in. Today people are cheap and have the attention span of a fish!
Now there's streaming services and pirated CDs. Things that didn't exist before.
The music industry is getting RAPED.
Apple has Dr. Dre who is probably the biggest perfectionist in the industry, he can eork in sound fidelity, they also have Jimmy Iovine who has crazy clout and has been looking for a resolution to dying sales. If Jimmy and Dre can get Will.i.am, who has also voiced his opinion on the current state of music(you should see what he had to say about google), Kid Rock and other artists and engineers together they can really shake up the Industry.
I AM PISSED. because the artist is getting screwed. Today you have artists who would have been on world tours in the 90's playing night clubs at night and flipping burgers during the day.
We have artists doing reality TV shows because music sales are so unrewarding.
I was talking about the Jimmy Iovine aquihire to an artist and told him if Apple makes a record company where artists indie and pro can upload music directly to iTunes and cut out the middle men that I would go %100 into the music industry which has gone from good Music to media and controversy.
Today artists like Kanye West and Justin Bieber are selling because they crashed a sports car, acted stupid on camera or appeared on TMZ while other good artists are selling hardly anything and busting their ass on tours for pennies on the dollar. Why? because selling good music is a lot riskier, has little return so act stupid on Twitter first.
Sound fidelity can be improved. Dre is an awesome and picky engineer. But sadly the same people who use YouTube as a jukebox wouldn't notice. but every bit counts.
Buying music isn't as rewarding as albums were. Apple has failed miserably in this department. I have digital albums from iTunes that I cannot view on my iDevice WTF?
I dream of the day where I flip through the liner notes and album booklet on an iDevice. I thought this was the intention.
Inagine how nice the album booklet would look on an iPad!
Apple needs to make music ownership feel good again.
TL;DR
The current industry is f**ked and needs a shakeup.
Apple has the people to do this.
Along with higher fidelity files, how about when you buy the full LP (old school term, I know) you get a separate file (free of charge) that includes all of the music videos, photos, liner notes, accurate lyrics and sheet music for all the instruments for all of the songs.
a) Apple almost does (almost) exactly that for some albums, and b) why would that be "free of charge?" 99% of consumers have no interest in the sheet music and the ones that do are willing to pay for it, so why should everyone pay a little for something only a few people want (or conversely, why should the song writing give up royalties that someone is willing to pay)?
Though details are nowhere to be found, U2 frontman Bono believes that the new format will spur a resurgence of buying music, rather than streaming or illegally downloading tracks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Negafox
Good luck with that.
I tend to agree. People generally are not that bothered about better sound quality and if the file size remains small or even smaller this would do nothing to combat streaming. Album sales (bundled and inseparable tracks) may help to work against streaming but if the album is good people will continue to download. I can't see how a new file format can really make a big difference.
Why on Earth would Apple think that U2 would have any relevant experience whatsoever in designing a new audio format?
That's work for audio engineers and technologists. Not old rock bands.
This makes no sense whatsoever.
Wonder if Apple's got Bono coding some sick new lossless audio compressor in Swift while visiting Cupertino... Maybe he hums "Still haven't found what I'm looking for" while debugging. Maybe he'll finish up on "New Year's Day". Maybe Bono's value to Apple might actually pertain to his gigantic music industry stature, as a famous, respected & influential music industry insider.
But there's still got to be some reason why Apple has U2 designing their new audio format... Maybe the Edge is doing the coding... This isn't making any sense whatsoever...
With that said, Apple may become irrelevant as newer companies transform technology. Not too long ago, you could keep up with technological changes, but these days it is overwhelming. There is going to be tremendous disruption in business due to the tons of technological discoveries. It would not be a surprise to see Apple impacted like IBM and Microsoft.
For me, I don't watch the keynotes anymore. I see Tim Cook becoming too self-reflective of Apple and the company becoming staid.
I disagree. Apple will continue to be disruptive as long as their implementation of new technologies continues to be innovative and intuitive. Microsoft rested on its laurels. Apple is not. Regardless of how we may feel as consumers, I don't think Apple is overwhelmed.
We have ALAC. What else could the world possibly need?
What application encodes in ALAC? I was reading about Logic Pro file formats but I could not find much online. I don't own the app, does it export .m4a files?
One thing I found interesting is that Logic supports up to 24 bit/192 kHz compared to the old Soundtrack Pro, which I still use occasionally, has up to 32 bit floating point and 192 kHz. I'm not an audio engineer but it seems odd that music can be both lossless and compressed. Not that I could ever hear the difference, but it why not just make networks faster and SSDs bigger? Then we could listen to completely uncompressed AIFF files without worrying about how big they are.
Wonder if Apple's got Bono coding some sick new lossless audio compressor in Swift while visiting Cupertino...
I had the same laugh as well.
However, purely technical people who only look at compression, bitrate, algorithms, and the like are also missing the point. There is a real experience of hearing a live band that we're trying to recreate. The positioning of the microphones, the type of microphones used, your position relative to the speakers, open air/closed auditorium/recording studio, the shape of the auditorium/studio, etc, etc. It takes someone who has years of experience in the industry to understand all of these little details. Combine such a person with people who know the details of creating audio codecs as well as people who understand the components in your headphones/speakers and how they recreate sound in your ears, and you can make magic. If you only focus on one part of it, then you lose sight of the big picture.
The real money is in merchandising, touring and licensing music rights for advertising and entertainment. There is typically very little profit in the actual sales of music to consumers unless one has a massive hit. Why? Competition. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people with millions of songs competing for attention.
This is an oft repeated, boneheaded canard from those with little knowledge of the overall music business. Further, it's a ridiculous assumption.
Some bands sell more merch, some more shows, some more licensing and some more music. There is equal competition in all those areas, across several different genres and there's real money to be made in each. For brain: please insert more than Mashable and Rolling Stone.
What application encodes in ALAC? I was reading about Logic Pro file formats but I could not find much online. I don't own the app, does it export .m4a files?
One thing I found interesting is that Logic supports up to 24 bit/192 kHz compared to the old Soundtrack Pro, which I still use occasionally, has up to 32 bit floating point and 192 kHz. I'm not an audio engineer but it seems odd that music can be both lossless and compressed. Not that I could ever hear the difference, but it why not just make networks faster and SSDs bigger? Then we could listen to completely uncompressed AIFF files without worrying about how big they are.
Most programs can encode in any format. The problem is that when it's time to distribute music it becomes compressed to whatever format the distributor wants.
I know GigglePlay has very low quality music downloads and I *think* iTunes is set to low bit rate mp3 default and %98 of consumers dont tinker with the settings. Pandora and other apps are also low quality. So you can encode your music in 32bit 192k but by the time it reaches the listeners ears it doesn't matter.
This is so 1999. We have larger hard drives and faster computers now. There's no excuse to still support overcompressed low quality music today.
Along with higher fidelity files, how about when you buy the full LP (old school term, I know) you get a separate file (free of charge) that includes all of the music videos, photos, liner notes, accurate lyrics and sheet music for all the instruments for all of the songs.
I sort of agree, except for the sheet music. Sheet music? LOL. No matter what sort of DRM they use, the music will get pirated anyway. If they sold a really nice big booklet with lots of photos, etc, you know, like the old days of vinyl, they might offer a product with some pride of ownership or reason to buy the whole album, not just some bytes on a device. On the other hand, I haven't listen to any really good albums lately. A few good songs maybe but the rest of the tracks are usually sort of mediocre. My U2 aficionado friend says the new album doesn't have any good songs. I have not listened to it. I've never been a U2 fan. I don't hate them. Their music just does not appeal to me.
However, purely technical people who only look at compression, bitrate, algorithms, and the like are also missing the point. There is a real experience of hearing a live band that we're trying to recreate. The positioning of the microphones, the type of microphones used, your position relative to the speakers, open air/closed auditorium/recording studio, the shape of the auditorium/studio, etc, etc. It takes someone who has years of experience in the industry to understand all of these little details. Combine such a person with people who know the details of creating audio codecs as well as people who understand the components in your headphones/speakers and how they recreate sound in your ears, and you can make magic. If you only focus on one part of it, then you lose sight of the big picture.
Yeah, couldn't refrain from having some fun with that, ha ha... (just in fun Jeff, nothing meant by it dude)
I believe Apple's involved with U2 for the clout, legitimacy & press the band's involvement presence lends. Whatever it is they're planning, it's aim will be to shore up both their reputations as a movers & shakers in the music industry. Have you seen U2 on Time's cover? Glowing reviews there. Cook said there's lot's going on at Apple right now and these recent movements seem like this secret plan could turn out to be the kind of total incomprehensible surprise iTunes was when first announced. Seems something profound's a foot...
Personally, I'm getting sick of Apple coughing up U2 hairballs. There are other artists out there that do just as much, if not more than what U2 has accomplished.
This is an oft repeated, boneheaded canard from those with little knowledge of the overall music business. Further, it's a ridiculous assumption.
Some bands sell more merch, some more shows, some more licensing and some more music. There is equal competition in all those areas, across several different genres and there's real money to be made in each. <span style="line-height:1.4em;">For brain: please insert more than Mashable and Rolling Stone.</span>
Try extracting your head from your posterior first.
Individual artists and writers (just like actors and screenwriters) working in the current system face a lot of competition. Most make very little money. This is a simple fact. The musicians I know and have known, plus knowing how most labels structure their deals informs my comment.
There aren't very many millionaires in the music business unless they expand into other markets. Why do you think Britney Spears and Lady Gaga sell their own lines of perfume, clothing, jewelry, etc. and seek out corporate sponsorships?
Music is a business and artists are not usually well-versed in the fine points of contracts, licensing and upfront fees for music videos and the like.
<span style="color:rgb(63,69,73);font-family:'helvetica neue', arial, sans-serif;font-size:14.166666030883789px;line-height:15.833333015441895px;">Personally, I'm getting sick of Apple coughing up U2 hairballs. There are other artists out there that do just as much, if not more than what U2 has accomplished.</span>
Comments
40 years ago, 0.1% Total Harmonic Distortion was entry-level for cheap receivers. Nowadays these (not-cheap) "Home Theater™" setups run typically 9%! High Fidelity was originally defined as <2% and that was in 1939, I think.
Of course, Apple is largely to blame for this—they discovered that people were willing to pay money for 128 kbps noise and ran with it.
Edit. Added a zero so nobody would miss the decimal point in front of that "1"
And what band would that be?
Even losslessier music. Music so lossless the actual band will come to your house to play it for you. Or jog behind you. Or sit on the subway with you.
The fact of the matter is that they now operate in an environment where anyone can be a producer of content, but the byzantine music licensing regime more or less rules out legal licensing to use music except on the scale of a media conglomerate or multimillion dollar production.
Screw DRM and these crazy schemes to preserve the status quo - micro-license so that every twit with a camcorder can spend < $10 to add a decent soundtrack to their indie documentary on nose hair clippers.
COMPLETELY wrong.
Money has always been in merchandising, touring etc. The competition has always been the same.
it's actual music sales that are down. Teens in the 50's through the 90's bought their own music and whole albums. Nowadays if a kid wants to listen to a song he just finds it on YouTube which most likely was uploaded by another teen claiming "I do not own this song". It's a pool of free content, not just music, some people upload whole shows on there.
Other options include illegal downloads which the government has done nothing about.
You have pandora who plays one commercial for like every 4 songs. Old school radio of the 90's was half music half commercials and everyone tuned in. Today people are cheap and have the attention span of a fish!
Now there's streaming services and pirated CDs. Things that didn't exist before.
The music industry is getting RAPED.
Apple has Dr. Dre who is probably the biggest perfectionist in the industry, he can eork in sound fidelity, they also have Jimmy Iovine who has crazy clout and has been looking for a resolution to dying sales. If Jimmy and Dre can get Will.i.am, who has also voiced his opinion on the current state of music(you should see what he had to say about google), Kid Rock and other artists and engineers together they can really shake up the Industry.
I AM PISSED. because the artist is getting screwed. Today you have artists who would have been on world tours in the 90's playing night clubs at night and flipping burgers during the day.
We have artists doing reality TV shows because music sales are so unrewarding.
I was talking about the Jimmy Iovine aquihire to an artist and told him if Apple makes a record company where artists indie and pro can upload music directly to iTunes and cut out the middle men that I would go %100 into the music industry which has gone from good Music to media and controversy.
Today artists like Kanye West and Justin Bieber are selling because they crashed a sports car, acted stupid on camera or appeared on TMZ while other good artists are selling hardly anything and busting their ass on tours for pennies on the dollar. Why? because selling good music is a lot riskier, has little return so act stupid on Twitter first.
Sound fidelity can be improved. Dre is an awesome and picky engineer. But sadly the same people who use YouTube as a jukebox wouldn't notice. but every bit counts.
Buying music isn't as rewarding as albums were. Apple has failed miserably in this department. I have digital albums from iTunes that I cannot view on my iDevice WTF?
I dream of the day where I flip through the liner notes and album booklet on an iDevice. I thought this was the intention.
Inagine how nice the album booklet would look on an iPad!
Apple needs to make music ownership feel good again.
TL;DR
The current industry is f**ked and needs a shakeup.
Apple has the people to do this.
Along with higher fidelity files, how about when you buy the full LP (old school term, I know) you get a separate file (free of charge) that includes all of the music videos, photos, liner notes, accurate lyrics and sheet music for all the instruments for all of the songs.
a) Apple almost does (almost) exactly that for some albums, and b) why would that be "free of charge?" 99% of consumers have no interest in the sheet music and the ones that do are willing to pay for it, so why should everyone pay a little for something only a few people want (or conversely, why should the song writing give up royalties that someone is willing to pay)?
Though details are nowhere to be found, U2 frontman Bono believes that the new format will spur a resurgence of buying music, rather than streaming or illegally downloading tracks.
Quote:
Good luck with that.
I tend to agree. People generally are not that bothered about better sound quality and if the file size remains small or even smaller this would do nothing to combat streaming. Album sales (bundled and inseparable tracks) may help to work against streaming but if the album is good people will continue to download. I can't see how a new file format can really make a big difference.
Wonder if Apple's got Bono coding some sick new lossless audio compressor in Swift while visiting Cupertino... Maybe he hums "Still haven't found what I'm looking for" while debugging. Maybe he'll finish up on "New Year's Day". Maybe Bono's value to Apple might actually pertain to his gigantic music industry stature, as a famous, respected & influential music industry insider.
But there's still got to be some reason why Apple has U2 designing their new audio format... Maybe the Edge is doing the coding... This isn't making any sense whatsoever...
I disagree. Apple will continue to be disruptive as long as their implementation of new technologies continues to be innovative and intuitive. Microsoft rested on its laurels. Apple is not. Regardless of how we may feel as consumers, I don't think Apple is overwhelmed.
We have ALAC. What else could the world possibly need?
What application encodes in ALAC? I was reading about Logic Pro file formats but I could not find much online. I don't own the app, does it export .m4a files?
One thing I found interesting is that Logic supports up to 24 bit/192 kHz compared to the old Soundtrack Pro, which I still use occasionally, has up to 32 bit floating point and 192 kHz. I'm not an audio engineer but it seems odd that music can be both lossless and compressed. Not that I could ever hear the difference, but it why not just make networks faster and SSDs bigger? Then we could listen to completely uncompressed AIFF files without worrying about how big they are.
Wonder if Apple's got Bono coding some sick new lossless audio compressor in Swift while visiting Cupertino...
I had the same laugh as well.
However, purely technical people who only look at compression, bitrate, algorithms, and the like are also missing the point. There is a real experience of hearing a live band that we're trying to recreate. The positioning of the microphones, the type of microphones used, your position relative to the speakers, open air/closed auditorium/recording studio, the shape of the auditorium/studio, etc, etc. It takes someone who has years of experience in the industry to understand all of these little details. Combine such a person with people who know the details of creating audio codecs as well as people who understand the components in your headphones/speakers and how they recreate sound in your ears, and you can make magic. If you only focus on one part of it, then you lose sight of the big picture.
The real money is in merchandising, touring and licensing music rights for advertising and entertainment. There is typically very little profit in the actual sales of music to consumers unless one has a massive hit. Why? Competition. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people with millions of songs competing for attention.
This is an oft repeated, boneheaded canard from those with little knowledge of the overall music business. Further, it's a ridiculous assumption.
Some bands sell more merch, some more shows, some more licensing and some more music. There is equal competition in all those areas, across several different genres and there's real money to be made in each. For brain: please insert more than Mashable and Rolling Stone.
Most programs can encode in any format. The problem is that when it's time to distribute music it becomes compressed to whatever format the distributor wants.
I know GigglePlay has very low quality music downloads and I *think* iTunes is set to low bit rate mp3 default and %98 of consumers dont tinker with the settings. Pandora and other apps are also low quality. So you can encode your music in 32bit 192k but by the time it reaches the listeners ears it doesn't matter.
This is so 1999. We have larger hard drives and faster computers now. There's no excuse to still support overcompressed low quality music today.
Along with higher fidelity files, how about when you buy the full LP (old school term, I know) you get a separate file (free of charge) that includes all of the music videos, photos, liner notes, accurate lyrics and sheet music for all the instruments for all of the songs.
I sort of agree, except for the sheet music. Sheet music? LOL. No matter what sort of DRM they use, the music will get pirated anyway. If they sold a really nice big booklet with lots of photos, etc, you know, like the old days of vinyl, they might offer a product with some pride of ownership or reason to buy the whole album, not just some bytes on a device. On the other hand, I haven't listen to any really good albums lately. A few good songs maybe but the rest of the tracks are usually sort of mediocre. My U2 aficionado friend says the new album doesn't have any good songs. I have not listened to it. I've never been a U2 fan. I don't hate them. Their music just does not appeal to me.
Yeah, couldn't refrain from having some fun with that, ha ha... (just in fun Jeff, nothing meant by it dude)
I believe Apple's involved with U2 for the clout, legitimacy & press the band's involvement presence lends. Whatever it is they're planning, it's aim will be to shore up both their reputations as a movers & shakers in the music industry. Have you seen U2 on Time's cover? Glowing reviews there. Cook said there's lot's going on at Apple right now and these recent movements seem like this secret plan could turn out to be the kind of total incomprehensible surprise iTunes was when first announced. Seems something profound's a foot...
The problem is that when it's time to distribute music it becomes compressed to whatever format the distributor wants.
The distributor probably wants it in some container that supports DRM.
Personally, I'm getting sick of Apple coughing up U2 hairballs. There are other artists out there that do just as much, if not more than what U2 has accomplished.
Try extracting your head from your posterior first.
Individual artists and writers (just like actors and screenwriters) working in the current system face a lot of competition. Most make very little money. This is a simple fact. The musicians I know and have known, plus knowing how most labels structure their deals informs my comment.
There aren't very many millionaires in the music business unless they expand into other markets. Why do you think Britney Spears and Lady Gaga sell their own lines of perfume, clothing, jewelry, etc. and seek out corporate sponsorships?
Music is a business and artists are not usually well-versed in the fine points of contracts, licensing and upfront fees for music videos and the like.
Name them.