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xthreadWell, part of the music industry, at least.
EMI has announced that they will begin offering their collection without DRM, through iTunes, recorded at 256kbit AAC, beginning in May.
This is cool in a handful of ways - first and foremost, it means that a major music label is finally getting the clue that selling your customers what they actually want to buy (music they can play anywhere, anytime, can share with their friends, etc) is a better bet than trying to retain the ability to control what your customers do with their IP once they leave the room with it. Or, at any rate, if you plan to fight your customers to the death about it, prepare to die horribly.
Secondly, it's cool because the rips that EMI is going to make available are higher quality than the average customer's MP3 rip of their own CD would be, and in fact higher quality than the DRM'd versions (which will also continue to be available). Which makes this a fairly pure test of the proposition that 'DRM-free music is worth more than encumbered music.'
So, I think this is really cool (personally) because it now makes sense for me to buy good, archival-quality copies of tracks from iTunes when I have a spur of the moment desire to fill out my music collection with singles, because I know that I can buy a copy that's of sufficiently high quality that it's worth owning. This makes me happy.
The only remaining question is how EMI will be generating the 256kbit AAC tracks - will they be re-encoding them from digital and analog masters, or from already compressed cd masters? I hope it's the former, but that's probably rank optimism...
EMI has announced that they will begin offering their collection without DRM, through iTunes, recorded at 256kbit AAC, beginning in May.
This is cool in a handful of ways - first and foremost, it means that a major music label is finally getting the clue that selling your customers what they actually want to buy (music they can play anywhere, anytime, can share with their friends, etc) is a better bet than trying to retain the ability to control what your customers do with their IP once they leave the room with it. Or, at any rate, if you plan to fight your customers to the death about it, prepare to die horribly.
Secondly, it's cool because the rips that EMI is going to make available are higher quality than the average customer's MP3 rip of their own CD would be, and in fact higher quality than the DRM'd versions (which will also continue to be available). Which makes this a fairly pure test of the proposition that 'DRM-free music is worth more than encumbered music.'
So, I think this is really cool (personally) because it now makes sense for me to buy good, archival-quality copies of tracks from iTunes when I have a spur of the moment desire to fill out my music collection with singles, because I know that I can buy a copy that's of sufficiently high quality that it's worth owning. This makes me happy.
The only remaining question is how EMI will be generating the 256kbit AAC tracks - will they be re-encoding them from digital and analog masters, or from already compressed cd masters? I hope it's the former, but that's probably rank optimism...
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 06:01 am (UTC)I would argue that the compression that is on CDs is not a limitation of the format. 96dB (the dynamic range of a CD) is a LOT of dynamic range. It's usually more dynamic range than is available between the noise floor of a typical room and the threshold of pain. It's definitely more dynamic range than typical music.
However, there is compression on most music that we find on CDs. This is usually done on purpose because most consumer audio systems don't sound "good" with that much dynamic range. For that matter, many recordings also have the bass EQ'd out so that it won't over stress systems that have no hope of reproducing it in the first place.
An annoying trend that I have seen in the last decade or so has been digital clipping. Grab any recent pop CD, rip it to a lossless format and check it out with a wave editor. You'll notice that the peaks are clipped. Big nasty digital clipping! With the dynamic range available on CD, this is totally unnecessary. Grumble.