[CUBE] itunes 4-Where to now?

[Benjamin Ing]

On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 09:22 AM, Sean Terrill wrote:

> No compressed
> format will ever truly have CD quality either, so hardcore audiophiles 
> will
> probably continue to buy CDs until the technology catches up to their
> expectations.

This is an interesting point, since most audiophiles prefer analog 
(vinyl) to any digital format - mainly because of the compromises in 
the original standardization to 44.1kHz.
In the past few years, high end audio has tried to market to 
audiophiles with higher sample rate digital recordings (especially now 
that the DVD gives much more data space) with extremely limited success.

I am someone with very good ears, and yes, I can hear the difference 
between MP3's/AAC/CD's/Analog/Vinyl. Still, the limitation to me is the 
portability and convenience of the medium - for the most part, the 
differences can only be heard on high resolution systems in high 
resolution environments. Add in the fact that (as your statement has 
shown), we are now dealing with a generation that is conditioned to the 
artifacts not only inherent in digital recordings, but now with MP3 
compression and the question about the acceptability of the sonic 
quality vs the portability of the format becomes a major one. In the 
end, the explosion of the music industry in the last few years as a 
result of MP3's as opposed to higher quality audio is probably an 
strong indication that portability and/or cost is a much bigger factor 
than audio quality.

My view on itunes-4 and the Apple Music Store has gone from the initial 
excitement about the ease of purchasing online music and the higher 
(than MP3) quality of the digital audio, to one about practicality. At 
home, I have a TIVO Home Network which allows streaming of my iTunes 
library through my 2  TIVOs (they are hooked up to my Home Theater 
setups). Unfortunately, they still only support MP3, so to have access 
to my iTunes library, I need to have my music server running MP3's. 
Still, I was thinking of using one Mac to serve the TIVOs with MP3, 
while running AAC on my iBook that I usually attach my iPod to. Then, I 
realized that I occasionally dump my music to an SD card to have music 
available on my Palm Tungsten|T, meaning that I would also want MP3 on 
my iBook. The final nail in the coffin is that I am one of those guys 
that continually reconfigures his computers, often moving data between 
the different computers and reformatting my drives to get the cleanest 
operation possible on each machine. I am not sure how that is going to 
affect my ability to actually retain the original AAC files when I am 
having to continually put it onto a freshly installed drive.

Now, I realize that I am not the typical music purchaser, but being a 
tech-head, I would think that I would be a prime market for this type 
of effort. Perhaps I have too much technology that I am trying to 
integrate, but I simply want my music to be omnipresent in my life and 
not have to worry about mistakenly erasing my only copy of music files 
that I have purchased. For now, the whole concept of on-line music 
still doesn't make sense to me and I will continue to purchase CD's.