[Ti] [OT] Applemusic.com - is the price right?

[Tarik Bilgin]

On Monday, April 28, 2003, at 10:19  pm, Don wrote:

> Who knows in the "big picture" but I for one would like to be able to 
> purchase select
>
>
> Now a question for you techies: Am I correct in assuming that the 
> audio quality of
> downloaded music is lower than that found on a commercial CD?

the answer to that is "it depends".

There are 2 stages to getting a CD to a compressed format.

1. Ripping  -- grabbing the bit by bit data from the CD (digital data 
as on the CD)

2. Using an encoder algorithm to encode the digital data into a 
compresssed (lossy) format such as Ogg Vorbis or MP3 or AAC.

The second stage is the most important (as long as the rip was done 
cleanly from a clean CD).

For example, by using "lame" to encode my CD rips, I can produce mp3's 
that are smaller in size _and_ sound noticeably better (more true to 
the sound of the original CD playing on my system) than the same track 
encoded to mp3 in iTunes from the same original rip.

I am looking for more information about the AACs that they have created 
and what they sound like -- but as the music shop is USA only at 
present, will be a while I suppose.


--
Tarik Bilgin
Opalblue
tarik at opalblue.com