New iPods [edit: and Music Downloads]
Apple introduced its anticipated, downloadable music service, under development for over a year, and new iPods today. The music service has a library of 200K, USD $1 per song.
The new iPods - 10GB, 15GB, 30GB, same high prices starting at CDN $460. Slightly re-designed layout, now has four buttons in horizontal row, and still the scroll disc and central button. New audio format, AAC, is now a capability of the iPod. It also comes with three games - Brick, Solitare, and Parachute. USB2.0 capability added, dock comes standard on 15GB and 30GB models. All models are thinner and lighter, I think around 1 Ounce ligher per iPod. The 30GB is now $50 lower and the 15GB model is $40 less CDN. These lower prices are likely only due to the higher CDN exchange rate, for the US prices are identical to previous models.
Unfortunately for the more economically starved Apple fans, this still means the iPod is too high in price. There are three possibilities Apple has available for a smaller iPod - the IBM 1" 4GB micro-drive and a miniature iPod design for a premium price, the 5GB Toshiba/IBM 1.8" drive in the same iPod size for a reduced price, a 5 or 10 GB 2.5" drive in a larger and heavier iPod at a substantially reduced price.
Personally, I'd love to see Apple go to the IBM Micro-Drive, and I have to believe that this form factor has some appeal to Steve Jobs, being a lover of small things that he is.
Apple also updated iTunes to version 4, QuickTime to 6.2 and other software to utilize the new services, available on OSX only.
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new ipods
This new move to all color iPods is very disheartening. With the Photo iPods, Apple decided to sacrifice sound quality for video capabilities.
It has been confirmed (even unofficially by Apple) that color iPods have a serious audio flaw which causes certain music (primarily classical piano) to be distorted. There are hundreds of postings on Apple's iPod discussion forum about this. (Not everyone will hear the distortion, however). I am forced to live with 40 GB on my 3G iPod, because I cannot listen to classical music on these new color iPods. Ironically, the sound on the iPod mini and shuffle is far superior than on the more expensive color iPods (the defect is caused by a hardware problem involving the audio/video input).
I am now seriously considering getting another 40G 3G iPod, before they completely disappear, just in case my current one breaks or gets stolen. RadioShack still sells the HP version. Otherwise there is no more listening to classical music on an iPod for me.
Who needs proper reviews?
Jade over at Ars Technica does the coolest non-reviews in the universe. Read his take on iTunes Music Store.
Steve Jobs blesses DRM...
and nothing happens.
Previously: Linus Torvalds blessed DRM, and nothing happened either. It's the unstoppable force.
Plus: iTunes for Windows.
Why EMusic gets it (and Apple doesn't).
Critical Section post
A walkthrough of the iTunes Music Store experience:
Sigh
No Dream Theatre. No Liquid Tension Experiment. What's a drummer to do?
Never heard of
So here are the links:
unless you can get the uncompressed
16-bit stereo WAV files, I consider that a rip-off price. I expect a lower price for the lower-quality lossy-compressed files. 16-bit PCM is bad enough, now they want you to accept AAC as product. CA$0.50/song is what I'd pay for AAC.
An observation from UK.
Dealbreaker: Winer mentions that the artists aren't paid(!) from sales via this service. If true that's utterly insupportable.
Dave on crack?
I would hate for this to be true. I looked at Dave's little piece, and thought he might have got the information from his link to Karlin's blog. Also no mention of this mysterious "artists don't get paid".
The comments have some discussion about how "oldies" probably don't get much in the way of royalties.
My guess is that Dave is on crack -- he skimmed the comments and saw something.
he is so self-absorbed
most of the time he sounds all coked up, but then you can't code on coke. He's smokin' some maybe.
Apple engineers could also be on crack.
I remember reading how most musicians don't have rights to collect royalties on their works sold online because older contracts didn't address that distribution channel. In last two yrs they've fixed that loophole.
There use to be something called a "45"...
You got 2 songs for a buck on a small vinyl disc with a large hole in the center. If you liked it you can go buy the whole "album". The "single" was a marketing wonder and drove pop music promotion for 3 decades.
And BTW, does anyone remember this?
Andy sent me an email about this
Andy sent me an email about this today, although he focused more on the new music service -- a good description for those that don't have Macs/don't have OS X:
I totally agree. Kate quite often buys albums if there are one or two songs on it that she likes. She would be quite likely to pick and choose tracks, especially with the 30 second preview.
Of course, this makes me want to put all our music back on the Mac, to have it all in one place. Having it mounted via SMB or AppleTalk from the Linux box doesn't seem to work, or at least, I haven't really looked extensively. My current thinking about this revolves around an external FireWire enclosure into which I will install the 80GB drive where the music lives. Or maybe just get an additional, 80GB external firewire drive.
Greg probably has lots of things to say on AAC vs MP3 (nudge, nudge).
Sure...
"The AAC codec in QuickTime 6 builds upon new, state-of-the art signal processing technology from D0Iby Laboratories and brings true variable bit rate (VBR) audio encoding to QuickTime."
Personally: D0Iby has been ruining sound for 30 yrs since out-marketing a much better tape noise-reduction system from a company called dbx. All their codecs sound bad. If you listened to any track of music with the same compression as used with AC3 in videos, you'd be utterly aghast. D0Iby licenses are a marketing imperative but a sound quality negator.
Windows Media Audio 9 is more comparable to the slightly more advanced aacPlus in terms of compression/quality tradeoff, supposedly sounding better at smaller filesizes than AAC, but I haven't heard aacPlus 1st hand.
AAC (Fraunhofer) and aacPlus are covered by the MPEG4 license, which gives you the privilege of paying mandatory fees to use "standard" codecs. Little to choose between that rock and the hard place of WM9. But at least most engineers I know will tell you that the WM9 au and vid codecs perform better.
MP3 and OGG are now a generation behind in performance of lossy codecs. Lossy compressors are all compromises and I would never consider archiving anything with lossiness.
Aren't you losing at every level?
Technically, though, Greg, you are losing sound quality with CD-Audio even. Even at DVD, you're still not getting the highest audio quality possible, because it's still sampling on a Hertz-based input mechanism.
So... where's the line? I listened to AAC stuff on Apple's site and it sounds spectacular, much better than MP3 would at that level. That counts as a step forward in my books. Of course, I won't be using the Apple system for all manner of reasons. First, I want CD-quality audio, minimum. Second, I want it stored on hard-copy, not electronic copy. Third - it isn't available in Canada. Apple treats non-US countries (which account for 47%+ of its sales) like Wintel companies treat the Mac - second hand, so of course Canada doesn't have the music service, and I wonder if we ever will, given the number of Mac users that have the capability in this country.
What I would much rather prefer is to be able to buy custom burned CDs. That would probably increase my music buying, because there are a lot of bands who have a good song or three, but not the entire album. I find out if the album is good by sampling some songs online. If it sucks, I only want to buy the good songs. Sometimes those one or few songs are so good, the album is worth the price. Other times, I just want them individually, and CD Singles (biggest ripoff ever) are much too expensive.
Nobody has yet to try this solution, except for Listen.com, but they claim "CD Quality" is that CD Audio, or a lossy compression that is "good enough"?
lossy codecs...
make arbitrary choices for us as to which sounds are not audible and are left unencoded during the calculations, you can never recover them, you won't even know they were there originally. That's lossy encoding, au or vid.
Newer codecs are smarter as to what they neglect.
In audio, many sounds can be audible via better equipment which would not be on lesser gear. Thus IMHO the codec is throwing out stuff which would be audible on some systems. ABX done on high-res systems will reveal lossy encodings reliably.
While there are many logical applications for compressed media, archiving (as in the CDs we collect) isn't one of them. I believe lossy-encoded content is inferior to source and therefore should cost less.
"CD-quality" is usually defined as 2-ch 96db S/N 20-20KHz passband. That's a definition so loose as to be meaningless because there are numerous ways to achieve those parameters while trashing your sound. If that's acceptable to consumers then it's OK but they don't understand what they're sacrificing.
You're not always losing quality. If you buy an SACD, you are getting the exactly the same audio data which is on the highest-resolution master (archival) tapes which are stored cryogenically for posterity by the studios. If you buy a DVD, you're getting exactly the same bits as on the MPEG2 master. If you buy a CD, you're getting the same bits as on the 2-ch 16-bit PCM master tape. Since the CD is so well-accepted as a distribution format, I see it as a reference for pricing, and any lesser-quality data should cost less as well. In fact, SACD's cost same or not much more than CD's and contains far higher-res audio data, it's the preferred format to spend your hard-earned $$$ on.
No reason to change
The iPods are selling like hotcakes. Apple has no reason to dilute their brand with an el-cheapo version.
Everything I've read about other hard drive based MP3 players makes me want to wait until I can afford an Apple one. I like purchasing the BMW of mp3 players/computers. Tough tittie that I can't afford one yet.
Don't buy any coffee for a year and you can afford one :p
The reason I bought my first...
cappucino machine 4 years ago was Derek pointed out to me one day that I spent ~$8/day at Starbucks & 2ndCup. At that rate making my own latt
Cheap, or lower cost?
Actually, it really doesn't matter what hardware Apple sells - they will make phat money on it. Apple has cut margin they give to resellers for years, to the point where I can make more on a keyboard than I can on an eMac, or more on a $400 piece of software than a PowerBook. In fact, the margin on Apple hardware is so small for us, that it's probably the lowest margin stuff we sell. If I sold seven USB cables in one day, perhaps $150 in sales total, I will make more money selling something that takes 10 seconds to find, than something I may spend up to 4 hours on with a customer. And they ask for a discount all the time!
So ... Apple won't sell an el-cheapo iPod? Steve Jobs won't, but Apple would still make its nice margin. Look at it this way - why keep HD-based MP3 players priced above Flash players, when Flash devices are effectively ripoffs? Flash players may likely never be realistic with the way hard drive densities are increasing over the next five or six years.
Better yet, that Micro-drive option. I bet Steve would love that one. A 1.5" wide and 3" long and .5" thick device with 4GB of storage - that would rawk.