Apple in talks to offer 24-bit hi-res audio files on iTunes?
Apple and other digital music retailers are holding talks with record labels to improve the quality of the song files they sell, according to reports in the US on CNN's website.
As any audiophile knows, sound quality crucially depends on the bit-rate at which music files are ripped or downloaded, with most studio recordings being captured in high-resolution 24-bit format.
These are then compressed to make them quicker to download from, or stream over, the internet, so sound quality can suffer.
With the number of music streaming devices rapidly expanding, there's increasing demand for higher quality music files.
Well-known music executive Jimmy Iovine, who has worked with Dr Dre on a range of Beats Audio headphones, is keen to see 24-bit audio made available to the public.
As chairman of Universal Music Group's Interscope-Geffen-A&M record label, Iovine's in a good position to lead the charge.
"We've gone back now at Universal, and we're changing our pipes to 24-bit. And Apple has been great," Iovine told CNN. "We're working with them and other digital services – download services – to change to 24-bit. And some of their electronic devices are going to be changed as well. So we have a long road ahead of us."
To make the jump to higher-quality music attractive for Apple, the company would have to retool future versions of iPods and iPhones so they can play higher-quality files. And no doubt it would charge more for those hi-res tunes.
Apple has upgraded the quality of its music catalogue once before. In January 2009, the iTunes Store began offering most tracks in a bit-rate twice as high (256Kbps) as its previous standard, and free of copy-protection.
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Daveloc, wanting to see Apple 'kicked in the teeth' seems a little more virulent than just wanting to avoid brand loyalty. My loyalty to Apple is only based on their superiority to the competition. Where they are inferior - those jokey white plastic earbuds, or their overpriced Time Capsules, I am quick to buy elsewhere. However, can you really not see that having 24-bit downloads is going to be less wasteful than first putting the music onto a disc, with all the energy and raw materials that requires. Putting the disc in a box - likewise. Carting all those discs in all those boxes to the four corners of the earth, where they are then taken from distribution centres, to individual retailers, to your home, with all the pollution and wasted energy that involves. It does not end there. All the discs which are not bought from HMV, Amazon, Play.Com and wherever, are then carted back to a distribution centre, from there to a recycling plant, or worse - landfill. All that fuel, all that time, all those wages and who do you think pays for all this both financially and otherwise?
Alternatively, record the artist. Keep the file on a server and those who want it download it. No lorries belching diesel and clogging up the roads. No warehouses blotting the landscape (well fewer anyway). New jobs for people in nice clean offices instead of polluting factories and when something superior comes along, delete from your hard drive and replace, instead of dumping one disc in a box which nobody now wants and buying another piece of plastic which has travelled all over the world on its way to you! During the next 10-25 years you may have bought another one or two hard drives and updated your computer will that really be more waste than all the music you have bought in that time. Over the past 20 years, I have bought something like 1200 CDs. They now all sit on a 2TB hard drive which cost £60 and are backed up on one similar. All the discs which do not have any sentimental value, signed by the artist etc are now used as bird-scarers on the local allotment. I gave them away, but kept the booklets. It is not that I am averse to selling the discs I have ripped, but in most cases nobody wants them. New ones, or downloads are so cheap.
Everything I have ripped is uncompressed. Some of my music is 24/92 downloads and a very few are higher than that. They sound considerably better than CDs - like the very best vinyl but without any crackle. I have freed up yards of shelf space for my treasure collection of glass and after a hard day at work I can skim through my library, single malt in hand and unwind, track by track, symphony by symphony, album by album. Or spend ten minutes setting up a playlist for the whole evening. No searching for discs, finding that someone has put Van Morrison in a Joni Mitchell box. I can cook because I do not need to touch a disc. The last thing we want is more plastic boxes.
I just want cheaper, faster, more reliable broadband and cheaper, bigger, solid state drives which last at least 50 years.
The sooner we see 24/96 as a standard for all new downloads the better. However, I expect the music industry will try to pass off plenty of back catalogue that was recorded at maybe 24/44.1 now upsampled to 96 as the real dear.
Modern CDs suffering the loudness war syndrome sound awful, but the 'great unwashed' have never heard anything better, so they think they sound good. They have in fact got used to this brickwalled sound and may have come to prefer it, in the short term. I hope once exposed to real 24/96 they will eventually hear the difference.
Apple has to be congratulated on looking to bring Hires downloads perhaps this might encourage Amazon/HMV and others to follow suit. Has daveloc heard ripped cd's through a Linn DS. They sound much better than the original cd. At present it is quite an extensive process to rip the cd's so hopefully we can look forward to a good alternative download which will give us more time for listening than ripping.
excellent. if it happens.
trefor - Actually, I'm posting from an Apple iMac, it's my 5th consecutive Apple computer in 20 years. I just don't suffer from brand-loyalty or neophilia, or hear the sound quality of downloads, or see the business sense of the music labels capitulating to someone/anyone else's business model when they still have options of their own unexplored.
As for discs being waste, I still have CDs bought a quarter-century ago, years before I got my first computer, and one BluRay would hold the entire output of many groups, or whole symphonic cycles, even at the higher resolutions, for *another* twenty-five years. The true waste is always the players (whatever the format), not the media itself, and downloads don't change that.
Why is daveloc keen to see Apple 'kicked in the teeth'? I do not care who does it, but 24/96 or better is the way to go and digital files, on an iThingy or some other player, will always have the advantage of not having to be stocked on shelves in shops. Every disc-based format involves so much waste - carted from one part of the world to the other when an artist is flavour of the month, carted all the way back again to be recycled, or worse just dumped into landfill. CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray with their attendant boxes are ultimately plastic rubbish which needs to be disposed of. Much better to have one piece of electronics filled with music from the internet than piles of breakable plastic boxes.
But due to the 'loudness war' the 22 least-significant bits are all '1'.
daveloc - not everyone wants to have a millionth super duper edition of Dark Side Of The Moon - where does it all stop? There's nothing stopping Amazon from supplying higher quality downloads, so if Apple wants to do it God bless 'em.
Chisy1 - on new recordings, if done properly, then high-res should be substantially better than the equivalent standard-res.
Everyone's been begging Apple for higher quality audio, and now when they do offer it Jobs is the devil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Still unable to understand why studios haven't moved to 24/96 or better music on BluRay, especially for classic catalogue � format war resolved, unlike SACD vs DVD-A, more difficult to rip at full resolution than either CD or DAD, plenty of space for bonus material, and file sizes large enough (around 35-40MB/min) to make physical purchase/playback still attractive over download/portables.
Throw in CD-quality WAV/AIFF in the ROM sector of the disc and Apple take two kicks in the teeth instead of three-tenths of the price: import without iTMS, only available on non-Apple kit with BD drives...
I tend to buy CDs and rip them at whatever quality i want to. They are almost the same price as a digital download and they act as another back-up. What will the premium be on these downloads, I suspect it will make CDs even more attractive in my eyes. Ultimately will these new higher bit downloads be substantially better than a CD?