finally a new format for music

[mkelly]

My big problem? I can't listen to a 30 second snippet of a music song, and decide if I like the song.

This was why I loved OiNK. Anything I heard about I would download, and audition it, in full, at a minimum of 192kbps. If I liked it, I bought the CD. If I didn't like it, I deleted the files. I ended up spending more on music than I'd ever done before. It was illegal, but to this day I don't think there's an illegal track in my collection.

I know DRM is bad, m'kay, but surely they could have done something like this with it: make the tracks freely downloadable. The DRM enabled software-player says "hmmm, this track is fresh, I'll play the track." You get 30 days to listen to it to see if you like it. After 30 days, it stops playing back, OR, the software-player says "this is out of the free play period, I'll play back only a label defined 30-second sample" - that way if you went back after 6 months to re-audition the song, you can still hear a bit of it. If you decide you like it, you pay up through the online store, and your song is unlocked.

It might have worked if they'd been a bit more consumer friendly from the start but no - they treated us like criminals and we kicked back against DRM so hard they totally lost the battle

Maybe that could still work for try-before-you-buy stuff from places like Beatport. You download a free DRM'd version. When you decide you like it, you pay up, and re-download a non-DRM version?

[mkelly]

from what i can tell, folks don't really want physical media that isn't a) of superior fidelity to the stuff they can download off the internet or b) something collectible ie. vinyl, elaborate box sets, big artwork, posters, DVD included, stuff like that.

Maybe I'm unusual (no maybe about it, some would say) but I still buy CDs over downloads simply because it's a physical media. I like to get something tangible for my money. It doesn't have to be elaborate or whatever - I'll buy the regular CD.

I'll happily switch to those little cards that I could accidentally inhale if I'm not careful if they took over. My wife would love it - she's already lost a perfectly good wall in the sitting room to CDs, and she doesn't want to lose any more.

[j2j]

Maybe that could still work for try-before-you-buy stuff from places like Beatport. You download a free DRM'd version. When you decide you like it, you pay up, and re-download a non-DRM version?

That would work for me.

I'm guessing there are plenty of people buying music from 30 second snippets. I'm guessing not enough care that for the most part, even at clubs and parties, they are listening to crap mp3s....



Seems to be a world that has really devalued music, and the pleasures of listening to great music.



Cheers Mate

[mkelly]

Seems to be a world that has really devalued music, and the pleasures of listening to great music.

It's not a new thing - the same people didn't take care of their vinyl, and didn't care when CDs started skipping. Now they just don't give a shit what format it's in.

Not just related to music either. I recently had to have a tyre replaced on my wife's car - it had deformed and the resulting uneven wear caused the metal core of the tyre to become exposed. It wouldn't have been long until she'd have a dangerous blowout. Of course the tyre was only replaced cause the first time I drove the car in months I instantly heard there was a problem. She's been driving on it for weeks hearing the same noise and ignoring it.

Some people take time and car to appreciate things - some people are just ignorant to everything around them

[Machinate]

physical media = fail

Disagree - I will always want a physical media of some sort. Call me fussy.

I won't be calling you fussy, I'll just ask you.... Why?

Things aren't like they used to be, as I'm sure you've noticed; music is easily disseminated across multiple machines and made permanent this way. So "security of your purchase" can't be it.

Is it a comfort thing? Do you take out your cds and leaf through the insert booklet thing (if there is one)?

cheers

[adventurepants_]

not a great idea.

CD is permanent storage, SD cards can be wiped by strong magnetic fields. Of course some labels would like to use this, it would lead everyone to re buy music yet again! CDs do degrade over time, but theyre not wipeable.

i love buying physical product, as its the smart purchase at the moment. downloads are far too expensive for a low quality product, (even 320k) an mp3 download simply isnt worth more than 20-50c to me at the most. If its music I think Ill be listening to in 10 years, i just go and buy the CD.

when i can buy a download in FLAC, for about a third to half of the physical media price, then ill switch to downloads mostly. Paying full CD price for non archival quality data is simply, banana cuckoo.

and why would a usb album cost 40-60$? you can buy a crate of 1gb sticks wholesale for cents each. of course theyll be crap, but in general so will the ones they charge you $40 for. And again its a format that can be wiped by accident, thats hardly archival quality.

same old shit year after year. maybe in 2015 the major labels will discover using torrents to their advantage, then theyll claim they invented it.

[ResonanceMan]

Companies like Apple are smart, because they know that one day they will upgrade to CD quality

ResonanceMan - I'm not disagreeing with what you say but I find this interesting (in a tangential way) so I've quoted it out. It's weird the way we talk about CD quality like it's the holy grail of digital audio quality, yet it's just a standard really. If you take away the limitations of the physical medium you're just left with a line in the sand.

People think that when bandwidth is no longer an issue, everyone will start downloading 16-bit 44.1kHz uncompressed audio - but if bandwidth isn't an issue why don't we go further and take 24-bit, 88.2kHz, or even higher?

EXACTLY. I knew someone would respond with this point. Which is absolutely true. But then, we'd all have to get monitors that can reproduce sounds above 20khz, and don't forget mechanical ears, because the human ear can only hear up to 20khz, and CD quality reproduces sounds at 22khz. Truthfully, HD audio is a wonderful thing for apps like Live that rely heavily on time stretching and pitch shifting. As Long as the algorithms are good, like Serato uses. They have excellent algorithms for shifting and stretching which is no surprise Ableton chose to partner with them. In the future, stretching and shifting will have almost no artifacts, which will be an amazing time to live in. But yes, I do agree that HD is eventually gonna take foot, but not until the majority of the population is using Fiber. But, how long is it gonna take before everyones CD players can play this stuff? They'll actually have to be DVD players instead. Hopefully soon, everyone will just have solid state storage drives, and that will solve all the problems. Well, almost all. Kiss the CD store goodbye. You'll probably end up buying a piece of paper with artwork, and the files will come to you through the internet. I'd say about 10-15 more years, and HD could be the standard. But, I would say that other than Vinyl, CD quality actually has been the holy grail for about 20 years now. Vinyl is still better in my opinion. And why are we all listening to MP3s? Cuz, slow bandwidth, and companies like Apple. While the recording industry has been making billions on up-selling to HD, the distribution industry has been up-selling on down graded product. Everyone has actually gone backwards, and wasted a ton of money in doing so.
BTW, NIN has taken a brave step forward, and offer their music in HD for free. I think a few others have also done this. I think that's the way to go. Set up a server, give your music away at what ever quality you want, and then ask for donations. Ya get a lot more bee's with honey.

[crumhorn]

Companies like Apple are smart, because they know that one day they will upgrade to CD quality

ResonanceMan - I'm not disagreeing with what you say but I find this interesting (in a tangential way) so I've quoted it out. It's weird the way we talk about CD quality like it's the holy grail of digital audio quality, yet it's just a standard really. If you take away the limitations of the physical medium you're just left with a line in the sand.

People think that when bandwidth is no longer an issue, everyone will start downloading 16-bit 44.1kHz uncompressed audio - but if bandwidth isn't an issue why don't we go further and take 24-bit, 88.2kHz, or even higher?

EXACTLY. I knew someone would respond with this point. Which is absolutely true. But then, we'd all have to get monitors that can reproduce sounds above 20khz, and don't forget mechanical ears, because the human ear can only hear up to 20khz, and CD quality reproduces sounds at 22khz. Truthfully, HD audio is a wonderful thing for apps like Live that rely heavily on time stretching and pitch shifting. As Long as the algorithms are good, like Serato uses. They have excellent algorithms for shifting and stretching which is no surprise Ableton chose to partner with them. In the future, stretching and shifting will have almost no artifacts, which will be an amazing time to live in. But yes, I do agree that HD is eventually gonna take foot, but not until the majority of the population is using Fiber. But, how long is it gonna take before everyones CD players can play this stuff? They'll actually have to be DVD players instead. Hopefully soon, everyone will just have solid state storage drives, and that will solve all the problems. Well, almost all. Kiss the CD store goodbye. You'll probably end up buying a piece of paper with artwork, and the files will come to you through the internet. I'd say about 10-15 more years, and HD could be the standard. But, I would say that other than Vinyl, CD quality actually has been the holy grail for about 20 years now. Vinyl is still better in my opinion. And why are we all listening to MP3s? Cuz, slow bandwidth, and companies like Apple. While the recording industry has been making billions on up-selling to HD, the distribution industry has been up-selling on down graded product. Everyone has actually gone backwards, and wasted a ton of money in doing so.
BTW, NIN has taken a brave step forward, and offer their music in HD for free. I think a few others have also done this. I think that's the way to go. Set up a server, give your music away at what ever quality you want, and then ask for donations. Ya get a lot more bee's with honey.

Also consider that for a given amount of bandwidth a compressed format will always be superior to an uncompressed format. Imagine what 128Kbps uncompressed digital audio would sound like!

[mkelly]

physical media = fail

Disagree - I will always want a physical media of some sort. Call me fussy.

I won't be calling you fussy, I'll just ask you.... Why?

Things aren't like they used to be, as I'm sure you've noticed; music is easily disseminated across multiple machines and made permanent this way. So "security of your purchase" can't be it.

Is it a comfort thing? Do you take out your cds and leaf through the insert booklet thing (if there is one)?

You've pretty much nailed it. I do like a physical entity that I can appreciate - the artwork, the production information. Yeah I can look at these things on a screen but it's not the same to me.

I bought my own house about 3 years ago, and I quickly got set up with my NAS-type machine upstairs sharing MP3s out to the whole house. I chipped an Xbox and had it hooked up to my surround amp in the living room and at first it was brilliant - I was able to use XBMC to listen to any of my music whenever I wanted to. I now have a standalone CD deck beside the amp again, because I found the convenience of all that music at the press of a button distracted me from the music. With the CD player, I go to my 800-strong CD collection and browse a bit more, pick something out, stick it in the deck, make a cup of tea and kick back listening to the album. No distractions.

Even browsing music using a load of album names is a less interactive experience than looking through the CD spines. The CDs on the shelves are also a talking point with friends - they all look through them when they visit and ask to listen to stuff they wouldn't normally. Cover-flow technology is helping, but it's still not physically interactive enough yet.

Those microSD cards would be a different experience, especially if the packaging shrinks also. If all you got was a tiny plastic case, with no other packaging, I probably wouldn't be keen.

Don't get me wrong though - I have MP3s everywhere in my life. But 99.9% are still sourced from an original CD. I still get a buzz from walking to the record store on a Monday and picking up a new CD.

Anyone know what the craic is these days with insurance for digital downloads. I keep backups but they're still in the house - not offsite - so if the house burns down, I lose all my backups too. With a physical product like a CD, I imagine a lot of insurance companies are more prepared to pay out than for downloaded music.

Anyway - I'm off to watch High Fidelity again

[mkelly]

EXACTLY. I knew someone would respond with this point. Which is absolutely true. But then, we'd all have to get monitors that can reproduce sounds above 20khz, and don't forget mechanical ears, because the human ear can only hear up to 20khz, and CD quality reproduces sounds at 22khz.

Did you read my subsequent post on this subject. Just because the frequency is above the limitation of the human ear does not mean it's not important.

I think it's similar in a way to mixing an audio track. Conventional wisdom says that we should roll off certain frequencies from tracks cause they interfere with the mix. For example you probably want to cut out low frequencies on tracks for high hats to get rid of things like mic rumble etc. You might not hear the rumble, but over numerous tracks it can build up and muddy your mix. I should again stress that I'm not an expert - even if I am coming across as a smart-arse know-it-all - but I've read about speakers that if you have too much going on at different frequencies, a speaker cone can struggle to reporduce everything. i think this is why you get a tweeter and a woofer in most speakers - so you create separation between low and high freqs and can reproduce both more accurately.

Anyway - this ramble brings me to the point that, just because the human ear can't hear the >20kHz sounds, doesn't mean the frequencies don't affect the sounds we can hear. I think I read once that a lot of speakers can reproduce higher frequencies, they're just not necessarily accurate at them.

[snakedogman]

i think using smart cards for music distribution instead of cd's is not a bad idea at all. (smaller size, no more scratching cd's etc) Where they fail epically is putting mp3's on it when they've actually got more storage space than a cd

[8O]

Now if they released SACD quality music as pure digital format - what's that, roughly 4GB per album? - that'd be interesting. Much higher quality music, without a physical medium to tie it to a physical player. I'd consider that...

[lapieuvre]

Make the new standard 48/24... then This card could sell... there would be a reason to buy it: sound quality.

[kaffein]

Make the new standard 48/24... then This card could sell... there would be a reason to buy it: sound quality.

But didn't you hear?
They want to sell you this ultra spiffy 320kbps MP3 instead!

[forge]

doomed to failure and really quite bizarre.

In the wireless age somebody who is trying to sell music on a medium that requires a physical trip to a shop to buy something that was encoded in MP3 format - which was specifically invented for online distribution - is really not doing their homework or thinking this through.

even if they sell 192kHz/64bit audio files on them it would be utterly pointless

I just can't believe how behind these media companies are - people in the real world regularly download multi-gigabyte files such as entire feature films, if they really want 192kHz/64bit audio quality I'd wager most people would still much rather download it in the comfort of their own home than go out and buy a stupid little SD card