It doesn't matter what the "official" standards are, when you're rolling ou something new you want to be as simple as possible, and that means using the defacto standard
Later, once people are used to it, and understand and have experience with music downloads as such, then introduce things such as superior codecs and other options.
I think ascii is still pissed about buying a BetaMax.
First of all there are several dozen audio compression formats out there. MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) · MPEG-1 Layer II · MPEG-1 Layer I · AAC · HE-AAC · HE-AAC v2 · AC3 · Apple Lossless · ATRAC · FLAC · iLBC · Monkey's Audio · μ-law · Musepack · Nellymoser · OptimFROG · RealAudio · SHN · Speex · Vorbis · WavPack · WMA · TAK.
Take your pick. Yes MP3 has mindshare but has become genericized. Had Sony been smart about it, they would have either made ATRAC free open source or licensed it very cheaply. If they had we would have called them ATRAC players, not MP3 players. The ATRAC format was around before MP3. The technology underpinnings don't matter. The format doesn't matter. People don't have to understand how an engine works to drive their car. They just have to know how to start it and drive it. Same thing for Digital Audio Players. They just have to know how to import their music to their computers and then download those resulting files to their music player of choice. Downloading one format to your player is exactly the same as downloading another format to it. It is the same difference as putting regular gasoline into your gas tank vs. putting in premium gas. Same process, slightly different product. Same result, when you push the gas pedal your car goes.
By your logic, start with something simple and then get more advanced, then MP3Pro would be the next step. MP3Pro for all intense a purposes is dead. Format wars are always going to happen. What Apple did was to choose an ISO standard open source format (AAC) that is 5 years newer and superior technology than MP3(also an ISO standard format), also giving them the ability to appease the RIAA with DRM. "AAC is promoted as the successor to the MP3 format by MP3?s creator, Fraunhofer IIS." Quote from Wikipedia.
Microsoft wants WMA to be the standard, they also want to sell it to you. AAC is open source, no one is trying to sell it to you. It's also already a standard. An ISO standard. Microsoft even lobbied to have WMA become an ISO certified standard. They know how important it is to have that certification. (By the way, they didn't get it.)
So who wins the format war? Which ever becomes most common. Is AAC most common? Yes and No. MP3 is the most common because anybody can RIP music to MP3. AAC is the most common DRM format by the fact that Apple sells more DRM download music than anybody else. And because I can now RIP my CDs to AAC just as easily as I can to MP3, and AAC gives me better quality, AAC wins for me and has become my standard format.
Does the average consumer care about all this BS. No. All they care about is that they have an easy way to download Digital music to their Digital Audio player of choice.
MP3 is absolutely the current standard for digital audio files. Car stereos, other portable devices, home theatres, etc, all universally support this format. Most online sources of digital music outside of iTunes are MP3. I just bought Radiohead's new album direct from their site. Guess which format it is in? Even most podcasts that I download directly through iTunes are supplied in MP3 format, not AAC. I have dozens of subscriptions, and I'm pretty sure that Macworld's podcasts are the only ones that are AAC.
Had Apple shut out MP3 for iTunes and iPods, they's never have gotten anywhere near the market share they have now. They probably wouldn't even be a major player. With both having no DRM, and the price being equal, Amazon now has a big advantage over the iTunes store in that they use MP3s. If Apple wants to keep their lead, they have no choice but to follow suit. Even Macworld's own staff have admitted in a recent podcast that they prefer to use Amazon over the iTunes store now.
It's pretty clear that when Apple started iTunes Plus with EMI, the agreement was to charge higher prices to the consumer (and EMI charged Apple more). But when others (Universal and the independents) charged less to Amazon, EMI had to match it. After that, EMI couldn't charge Apple more than they charged Amazon (and more than the independents would charge Apple), so EMI lowered the cost to Apple.
Do you really think Apple was making the extra .30 per song? I would guess maybe .05 at most.
Apple negotiated the original deal with EMI many months ago. I don't think Amazon could ever have done this themselves. At the time, Jobs said he wanted to have 50% of iTunes songs DRM-free by the end of the year. It looks like right now it's around 33%.
This is embarrassing, please stop it right now. Even the silliest of fanboys would be embarrassed by this. Ha.
Not to change the direction of this really interesting discussion, but If you read to press statement closely, it sounds like Apple is only pricing the new songs at .99.
"Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents".
It doesn't sound like Apple is going to be changing the whole "plus" catalog.
Not to change the direction of this really interesting discussion, but If you read to press statement closely, it sounds like Apple is only pricing the new songs at .99.
"Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents".
It doesn't sound like Apple is going to be changing the whole "plus" catalog.
What do ya'll think?
It's easy enought to just go and look!
But, how can you lower the price of something that you have not had in your catalog, and so has had no price?
MP3 is absolutely the current standard for digital audio files. Car stereos, other portable devices, home theatres, etc, all universally support this format. Most online sources of digital music outside of iTunes are MP3. I just bought Radiohead's new album direct from their site. Guess which format it is in? Even most podcasts that I download directly through iTunes are supplied in MP3 format, not AAC. I have dozens of subscriptions, and I'm pretty sure that Macworld's podcasts are the only ones that are AAC.
Yes, one of the common (but not essential) hallmarks of a legacy technology.
MP3 is out there, is well known and widely deployed. And on its way to being obsolete (i.e., obsolescent), by virtue of the fact that its successor (AAC) is already on stage, clearly better (in this case, both technically and financially) and (gradually) becoming the norm.
The significance of (properly) classifying a technology as obsolescent is for planning purposes, esp. when extending the field/market into new areas as the iTunes music store did (not that it was the absolute first digital download music store ... just the first one that really mattered).
Does it mean anyone should (or will) drop support for MP3? No, of course not ... witness the fact that the iPod and the iTunes music player (vs. the store) have supported MP3 all along, and still do.
But it's still important to discern which is the legacy (and obsolescent) technology and which one is worth building on anew.
I don't see what was embarrassing about his post at all.
Actually you're right, I may have took him up wrong at the time or something (I had some wine in me, lol), I thought he was saying Apple makes no money from iTunes. I take it back.
I just checked the upgrade page and noticed that upgrade prices in Canada are still at 40 cents per song. How ridiculous. Our dollar's worth more now, and U.S. customers can upgrade for what? 20 cents per song? That I could understand, but not 40 cents.
I just checked the upgrade page and noticed that upgrade prices in Canada are still at 40 cents per song. How ridiculous. Our dollar's worth more now, and U.S. customers can upgrade for what? 20 cents per song? That I could understand, but not 40 cents.
DRM free is how it should have been from the beginning. And it should have been MP3 not some alien format no one had ever heard of.
Quote:
There are several limitations inherent to the MP3 format that can not be overcome by any MP3 encoder.
Newer audio compression formats such as Vorbis and AAC no longer have these limitations.
In technical terms, MP3 is limited in the following ways:
* Bit rate is limited to a maximum of 320 kbit/s (while some encoders can create higher bit rates, there is little-to-no support for these higher bit rate mp3s)
* Time resolution can be too low for highly transient signals, may cause some smearing of percussive sounds although this effect is to a great extent limited by the psychoacoustical properties of the Musicam polyphase filterbank (Layer II). Pre-echo is concealed due to the specific time-domain characteristics of the filter.
* Frequency resolution is limited by the small long block window size, decreasing coding efficiency
* No scale factor band for frequencies above 15.5/15.8 kHz
* Joint stereo is done on a frame-to-frame basis
* Encoder/decoder overall delay is not defined, which means lack of official provision for gapless playback. However, some encoders such as LAME can attach additional metadata that will allow players that are aware of it to deliver seamless playback.
Nevertheless, a well-tuned MP3 encoder can perform competitively even with these restrictions.
Shhh... you hear that? That's the sound of Mp3 dying, and clinging to the coat-tails of the newer formats while the inevitable march of innovation moves on. If you want a picture, imagine a really old man with a rocket pack and cybernetic armor strapped on to him. He's got a really snazzy helmet too... with the visor and sun glasses so you can't see the wrinkles all over his face. You begin to pat his shoulder and he slaps your hand back... "Hey! Can't touch me without a license fee. How many times I gotta tell you punks!?" And then he stares off into space and chuckles to himself. "Open source hippies..."
You just keep looking at him, wondering how he can keep going on (tough old coot, familiar and peppy), and then you notice the morphine drip with the label "metadata", and you start feeling queasy.
i agree. mp3 is the "lowest common denominator" and normal people (read: not us, appleinsider geeks, gizmodo readers, etc) understand it.
for normal people ipod = mp3 player.
I know this is in no way relevant to the actual topic, but I laughed a bit while reading that. I absolutely agree.
In the town where I live (in Australia), people not only think that an iPod is merely an MP3 player. They actually think that 'iPod' is another name for 'MP3 player', rather than the name of a specific product. "Hey, I just got my new iPod Classic", "Oh cool, what brand iPod?", "Say what?".
Actually you're right, I may have took him up wrong at the time or something (I had some wine in me, lol), I thought he was saying Apple makes no money from iTunes. I take it back.
So go back and change your post cos YOU look like an idiot.
The text of the link you provided was talking about the $0.99 normal US iTMS price elroth was talking about the $1.29 iTunes plus price in other words the extra 30 cents. So you lose majorly (or some other childish 'net phrase)
Whether apple make/made extra or not on the 30 cents is moot now thank goodness.
I just downloaded that George Harrison track, its in the PLUS format and it cost 79p !! same as the usual UK pricing on DRM tracks. I might now be inclined to buy a few more, way to go Apple!
So go back and change your post cos YOU look like an idiot.
The text of the link you provided was talking about the $0.99 normal US iTMS price elroth was talking about the $1.29 iTunes plus price in other words the extra 30 cents. So you lose majorly (or some other childish 'net phrase)
Whether apple make/made extra or not on the 30 cents is moot now thank goodness.
I just downloaded that George Harrison track, its in the PLUS format and it cost 79p !! same as the usual UK pricing on DRM tracks. I might now be inclined to buy a few more, way to go Apple!
Going back and changing posts isn't good. People don't mind if a correction is made later, but we can't change the reality of the past, because then all of the later posts make no sense.
This whole discussion about DRM-free tracks, pricing, and Amazon Unboxed is the best example of missing the point that I have seen in some time. This is all about companies like Universal trying to kill the goose that continually lays golden eggs. Do not take the focus off of the RIAA. Universal wants a share of the iPod revenue. They are upset that they can't have it so that a taking their ball and going elsewhere. Amazon Unboxed only exists because certain music labels want to bring Apple and iTunes down. Why do you think they are giving these deals to Amazon and not Apple? This is not about competition. It is not about Amazon negotiating a better deal and treating the consumer better. This is only about hurting iTunes.
As far as competition is concerned, overrated. SJ practically this market and has been a rather benevolent dictator. We have all benefited from what he has done. He is the most influential mover and shaker in the entertainment business. I am no SJ fan, but in this, he deserves his laurels.
This whole discussion about DRM-free tracks, pricing, and Amazon Unboxed is the best example of missing the point that I have seen in some time. This is all about companies like Universal trying to kill the goose that continually lays golden eggs. Do not take the focus off of the RIAA. Universal wants a share of the iPod revenue. They are upset that they can't have it so that a taking their ball and going elsewhere.
Universal didn't really leave iTunes, they are the only one that's going the equivalent of month-to-month.
Comments
It doesn't matter what the "official" standards are, when you're rolling ou something new you want to be as simple as possible, and that means using the defacto standard
Later, once people are used to it, and understand and have experience with music downloads as such, then introduce things such as superior codecs and other options.
I think ascii is still pissed about buying a BetaMax.
First of all there are several dozen audio compression formats out there. MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) · MPEG-1 Layer II · MPEG-1 Layer I · AAC · HE-AAC · HE-AAC v2 · AC3 · Apple Lossless · ATRAC · FLAC · iLBC · Monkey's Audio · μ-law · Musepack · Nellymoser · OptimFROG · RealAudio · SHN · Speex · Vorbis · WavPack · WMA · TAK.
Take your pick. Yes MP3 has mindshare but has become genericized. Had Sony been smart about it, they would have either made ATRAC free open source or licensed it very cheaply. If they had we would have called them ATRAC players, not MP3 players. The ATRAC format was around before MP3. The technology underpinnings don't matter. The format doesn't matter. People don't have to understand how an engine works to drive their car. They just have to know how to start it and drive it. Same thing for Digital Audio Players. They just have to know how to import their music to their computers and then download those resulting files to their music player of choice. Downloading one format to your player is exactly the same as downloading another format to it. It is the same difference as putting regular gasoline into your gas tank vs. putting in premium gas. Same process, slightly different product. Same result, when you push the gas pedal your car goes.
By your logic, start with something simple and then get more advanced, then MP3Pro would be the next step. MP3Pro for all intense a purposes is dead. Format wars are always going to happen. What Apple did was to choose an ISO standard open source format (AAC) that is 5 years newer and superior technology than MP3(also an ISO standard format), also giving them the ability to appease the RIAA with DRM. "AAC is promoted as the successor to the MP3 format by MP3?s creator, Fraunhofer IIS." Quote from Wikipedia.
Microsoft wants WMA to be the standard, they also want to sell it to you. AAC is open source, no one is trying to sell it to you. It's also already a standard. An ISO standard. Microsoft even lobbied to have WMA become an ISO certified standard. They know how important it is to have that certification. (By the way, they didn't get it.)
So who wins the format war? Which ever becomes most common. Is AAC most common? Yes and No. MP3 is the most common because anybody can RIP music to MP3. AAC is the most common DRM format by the fact that Apple sells more DRM download music than anybody else. And because I can now RIP my CDs to AAC just as easily as I can to MP3, and AAC gives me better quality, AAC wins for me and has become my standard format.
Does the average consumer care about all this BS. No. All they care about is that they have an easy way to download Digital music to their Digital Audio player of choice.
Had Apple shut out MP3 for iTunes and iPods, they's never have gotten anywhere near the market share they have now. They probably wouldn't even be a major player. With both having no DRM, and the price being equal, Amazon now has a big advantage over the iTunes store in that they use MP3s. If Apple wants to keep their lead, they have no choice but to follow suit. Even Macworld's own staff have admitted in a recent podcast that they prefer to use Amazon over the iTunes store now.
i agree. mp3 is the "lowest common denominator" and normal people (read: not us, appleinsider geeks, gizmodo readers, etc) understand it.
Like Windows being the lowest common denominator, or Word, or PowerPoint.
It's pretty clear that when Apple started iTunes Plus with EMI, the agreement was to charge higher prices to the consumer (and EMI charged Apple more). But when others (Universal and the independents) charged less to Amazon, EMI had to match it. After that, EMI couldn't charge Apple more than they charged Amazon (and more than the independents would charge Apple), so EMI lowered the cost to Apple.
Do you really think Apple was making the extra .30 per song? I would guess maybe .05 at most.
Apple negotiated the original deal with EMI many months ago. I don't think Amazon could ever have done this themselves. At the time, Jobs said he wanted to have 50% of iTunes songs DRM-free by the end of the year. It looks like right now it's around 33%.
This is embarrassing, please stop it right now. Even the silliest of fanboys would be embarrassed by this. Ha.
I think ascii is still pissed about buying a BetaMax.....
Excellent rant and first post. Welcome to AI.
"Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents".
It doesn't sound like Apple is going to be changing the whole "plus" catalog.
What do ya'll think?
Not to change the direction of this really interesting discussion, but If you read to press statement closely, it sounds like Apple is only pricing the new songs at .99.
"Offering customers the largest catalog of DRM-free music in the world, Apple today expanded iTunes Plus to more than two million tracks while at the same time lowering the price of those tracks to just 99 cents".
It doesn't sound like Apple is going to be changing the whole "plus" catalog.
What do ya'll think?
It's easy enought to just go and look!
But, how can you lower the price of something that you have not had in your catalog, and so has had no price?
MP3 is absolutely the current standard for digital audio files. Car stereos, other portable devices, home theatres, etc, all universally support this format. Most online sources of digital music outside of iTunes are MP3. I just bought Radiohead's new album direct from their site. Guess which format it is in? Even most podcasts that I download directly through iTunes are supplied in MP3 format, not AAC. I have dozens of subscriptions, and I'm pretty sure that Macworld's podcasts are the only ones that are AAC.
Yes, one of the common (but not essential) hallmarks of a legacy technology.
MP3 is out there, is well known and widely deployed. And on its way to being obsolete (i.e., obsolescent), by virtue of the fact that its successor (AAC) is already on stage, clearly better (in this case, both technically and financially) and (gradually) becoming the norm.
The significance of (properly) classifying a technology as obsolescent is for planning purposes, esp. when extending the field/market into new areas as the iTunes music store did (not that it was the absolute first digital download music store ... just the first one that really mattered).
Does it mean anyone should (or will) drop support for MP3? No, of course not ... witness the fact that the iPod and the iTunes music player (vs. the store) have supported MP3 all along, and still do.
But it's still important to discern which is the legacy (and obsolescent) technology and which one is worth building on anew.
It's easy enought to just go and look!
But, how can you lower the price of something that you have not had in your catalog, and so has had no price?
Variable pricing has arrived!
This is embarrassing, please stop it right now. Even the silliest of fanboys would be embarrassed by this. Ha.
I don't see what was embarrassing about his post at all.
I don't see what was embarrassing about his post at all.
Actually you're right, I may have took him up wrong at the time or something (I had some wine in me, lol), I thought he was saying Apple makes no money from iTunes. I take it back.
I just checked the upgrade page and noticed that upgrade prices in Canada are still at 40 cents per song. How ridiculous. Our dollar's worth more now, and U.S. customers can upgrade for what? 20 cents per song? That I could understand, but not 40 cents.
Sorry, couldn't resist!
DRM free is how it should have been from the beginning. And it should have been MP3 not some alien format no one had ever heard of.
There are several limitations inherent to the MP3 format that can not be overcome by any MP3 encoder.
Newer audio compression formats such as Vorbis and AAC no longer have these limitations.
In technical terms, MP3 is limited in the following ways:
* Bit rate is limited to a maximum of 320 kbit/s (while some encoders can create higher bit rates, there is little-to-no support for these higher bit rate mp3s)
* Time resolution can be too low for highly transient signals, may cause some smearing of percussive sounds although this effect is to a great extent limited by the psychoacoustical properties of the Musicam polyphase filterbank (Layer II). Pre-echo is concealed due to the specific time-domain characteristics of the filter.
* Frequency resolution is limited by the small long block window size, decreasing coding efficiency
* No scale factor band for frequencies above 15.5/15.8 kHz
* Joint stereo is done on a frame-to-frame basis
* Encoder/decoder overall delay is not defined, which means lack of official provision for gapless playback. However, some encoders such as LAME can attach additional metadata that will allow players that are aware of it to deliver seamless playback.
Nevertheless, a well-tuned MP3 encoder can perform competitively even with these restrictions.
Shhh... you hear that? That's the sound of Mp3 dying, and clinging to the coat-tails of the newer formats while the inevitable march of innovation moves on. If you want a picture, imagine a really old man with a rocket pack and cybernetic armor strapped on to him. He's got a really snazzy helmet too... with the visor and sun glasses so you can't see the wrinkles all over his face. You begin to pat his shoulder and he slaps your hand back... "Hey! Can't touch me without a license fee. How many times I gotta tell you punks!?" And then he stares off into space and chuckles to himself. "Open source hippies..."
You just keep looking at him, wondering how he can keep going on (tough old coot, familiar and peppy), and then you notice the morphine drip with the label "metadata", and you start feeling queasy.
~ CB
i agree. mp3 is the "lowest common denominator" and normal people (read: not us, appleinsider geeks, gizmodo readers, etc) understand it.
for normal people ipod = mp3 player.
I know this is in no way relevant to the actual topic, but I laughed a bit while reading that. I absolutely agree.
In the town where I live (in Australia), people not only think that an iPod is merely an MP3 player. They actually think that 'iPod' is another name for 'MP3 player', rather than the name of a specific product. "Hey, I just got my new iPod Classic", "Oh cool, what brand iPod?", "Say what?".
Actually you're right, I may have took him up wrong at the time or something (I had some wine in me, lol), I thought he was saying Apple makes no money from iTunes. I take it back.
So go back and change your post cos YOU look like an idiot.
The text of the link you provided was talking about the $0.99 normal US iTMS price elroth was talking about the $1.29 iTunes plus price in other words the extra 30 cents. So you lose majorly (or some other childish 'net phrase)
Whether apple make/made extra or not on the 30 cents is moot now
I just downloaded that George Harrison track, its in the PLUS format and it cost 79p !! same as the usual UK pricing on DRM tracks. I might now be inclined to buy a few more, way to go Apple!
throughout all of this no one has mentioned any iTunes stores except the US one.
I did! see my posts above
So go back and change your post cos YOU look like an idiot.
The text of the link you provided was talking about the $0.99 normal US iTMS price elroth was talking about the $1.29 iTunes plus price in other words the extra 30 cents. So you lose majorly (or some other childish 'net phrase)
Whether apple make/made extra or not on the 30 cents is moot now
I just downloaded that George Harrison track, its in the PLUS format and it cost 79p !! same as the usual UK pricing on DRM tracks. I might now be inclined to buy a few more, way to go Apple!
Going back and changing posts isn't good. People don't mind if a correction is made later, but we can't change the reality of the past, because then all of the later posts make no sense.
As far as competition is concerned, overrated. SJ practically this market and has been a rather benevolent dictator. We have all benefited from what he has done. He is the most influential mover and shaker in the entertainment business. I am no SJ fan, but in this, he deserves his laurels.
This whole discussion about DRM-free tracks, pricing, and Amazon Unboxed is the best example of missing the point that I have seen in some time. This is all about companies like Universal trying to kill the goose that continually lays golden eggs. Do not take the focus off of the RIAA. Universal wants a share of the iPod revenue. They are upset that they can't have it so that a taking their ball and going elsewhere.
Universal didn't really leave iTunes, they are the only one that's going the equivalent of month-to-month.