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A rather grumpy Neil Young isn't giving up on the idea (video) that a new music player can be...
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012, 12:44 PM ETA rather grumpy Neil Young isn't giving up on the idea (video) that a new music player can be created that cuts into the sub-optimal way of listening to music that Apple (AAPL), Pandora (P), and Amazon (AMZN) has pushed the masses toward. He notes that MP3s and streaming music lose 95% of the data originally recorded in the studio and contends that a market exists for a higher-end device that allows listeners to hear music the way they artist intended. His answer to who will make the player: "Some rich guy."
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As an audiophile, I still listen to CD's for detail and brightness, and to vinyl for warmth and presence. Steve Jobs still listened to vinyl at home, not his iPod, and that is good enough for me.
And of the 1% that can tell the difference, 99% of them don't actually care about quality losses in 99% of use case scenarios.
Such a product would be for a niche industry, not for the masses.
(I hate the 1%-ers term in every sense - and I'm not even close to it)
It would be like making soda cans out of thick steel instead of thin aluminum -- so that the cans could survive being driven over by a car, just in case some consumers want that. And these new cans are much heavier, a lot more expensive, and almost impossible to open.
Coincidentally, 99.99% of consumers have no need or desire for their soda cans to survive being run over by cars -- they just want the can to hold their soda in their hand or on a shelf, and the thin aluminum works fine for that.
Similarly 99.99% of consumers have no desire to hear lossless audio, especially when it's 10x the size of compressed audio, takes 10x as long to stream, would probably be 10x as expensive, and sounds exactly the same to them.
It doesn't add value.
And as we all know, the only way to make money by not adding value is to be a large financial institution. :)
1) Bandwidth isn't free for users, especially mobile bandwidth. There's a reason there are caps on data plans.
2) Mobile bandwidth isn't fast enough. Average 3G speed is less than 1Mbps, so that 50MB song would take more than 6 minutes to download -- most consumers would have tuned out 10 times by then.
3) Storage is cheap, but not necessarily so cheap that people would upgrade to 10x the amount of it. Especially the portable market. How much would a 320GB iPhone cost over a 32GB one? $200 more? $400 more? $600 more? Better hope there are no more floods in Thailand!
4) Hosting costs go up with size. More data means more storage, more backups, more servers, more power, more heat, and of course more server-side bandwidth -- all of which cost money for hosting providers.
There's no free lunch. :)
2. Selling songs at 256 kbps (for a premium over lower end encoded songs) allowed the music industry to extract more profit from their songs than they were getting.
1) for mobile devices on the 3G or 4G network you would just keep the streaming of audio the lower quality it is now, no need to stream high quality audio, its more for listening on your nice head phones or on your nice home stereo speakers or in the car cd player.
2) Again no need to stream these songs on 3G on 4G it would load in a min just like your home internet line
3) I have a 500 GB macbook and most of my audio is in WAV and all my shitty music is at 320 kbps i have 26,000 songs in my itunes library with 50 GB left over. so storage is not an issue
4) Look, were heading into the future. Companies like Apple will inevitably have to buy more server farms like their ones in north carolina. Higher quality audio is an inevitability and as long as you can torrent lossless FLAC files for free while still having to pay a dollar for shitty 256 kbps the music industry will loose and keep loosing.
There is a free lunch if you're willing to look for it.
As far as Neil goes, he needs to put down the maryjane and really listen to what's being passed off as music today in the pop world.
Maybe Neil could help by addressing lurid, debasing hip-hop, and the trash music that pervades our culture. Just shake the neighbors windows, that's all about quality in our culture, right?
And try Linn loudspeakers instead of the ones from the supermarket - enjoy
Marantz sells a lossless CD player, and there's freeware that can improve the quality of CD rips (EAC, exact audio copy is one).
For those who demand it, you can always A/D capture your vinyls with lossless compression and listen it on your iPod Classic. But please don't waste VC money on this.
good luck asking people with 2GB capped data plans on their phones to stream CD bit rate audio files, if not larger.
and stop calling everyone ignorant. no one pays respect to you like that.
FLAC has a lot more non-apple support than ALAC has at this time. I already have much of my music in FLAC and none in ALAC for that reason. I didn't want to be tied to itunes which I have on only one of my five regularly used devices.
The Apple iPhone supports the following audio formats:
AAC (16 to 320 Kbps)
AIFF
AAC Protected (MP4 from iTunes Store)
MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps)
MP3 VBR
Audible (formats 2-4)
Apple Lossless
WAV