Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iTS
What those thirty cents buy you
Earlier today, Scott posted details of the new EMI upgrade pricing. It's going to cost you thirty cents to upgrade your music to the new higher-quality DRM-free tracks. So what do those thirty cents buy you? Here's a quick run down of the highlights.
Music Quality. First and most obviously, you're buying better quality music. The new 256 kbps AAC tracks offer twice the bitrate of the current DRM'ed selections. More bits mean that the music will be more faithful to the original audio quality. Can your ears really tell the difference? It depends on the kind of listener you are. My sister buys high-end speakers and goes on about the audio experience. Me, I still listen to audio tapes I've ripped to iTunes.
Interoperability. No DRM means that your music will play back on many more platforms, like the Zune. Of course if your media player doesn't support AAC, you're kind of out of luck unless you want to convert your music or buy a better player (which the lack of DRM makes possible). Interoperability also means you can better take advantage of fair use in other media like videos.
Best of both worlds. For your thirty cent upgrade, you will presumably own both the original track you downloaded as well as the better quality larger track you upgraded to. If you own a small shuffle as well as a larger nano, iPhone or video iPod, you might be able to create separate syncs to take advantage of the space-versus-quality versions of your tracks. This means a lot of extra work and it means you will need to buy your music twice. At least until Apple discontinues its 99-cent DRM pricing model, which is a door that these new $1.29 tracks opens.
Convenience. It's not exactly a secret that you've long been able to burn your iTunes purchases to CD and then rip them back without DRM. But for thirty cents, you can now skip the burn/rip step and save yourself a bit of time. If DRM-free music has an intrinsic value to you, perhaps those thirty cents isn't too high a price to pay to skip the work of doing it all by hand.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
hmurchison said 5:14PM on 4-02-2007
Sounds like Quid Pro Quo here.
I pay $.30 more (still lower than CD singles) and I get better quality and less hassle. Yet I still have the option to buy the DRM'd $.99 track. That sounds like a solid business deal.
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Aron Trimble said 5:39PM on 4-02-2007
One might want to recommend users make back-ups of their DRM'ed originals in the (likely) event that upon "upgrading" Apple replaces them with un DRM'ed / higher quality (read: larger) files.
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Fyodor said 5:43PM on 4-02-2007
How about giving users what they really wanted: same quality, no DRM. This nonsense about appealing to "audiophiles" is bizarre. Is the logic that us lay people are more prone to piracy than those who shell out the big bucks(/cents)?
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nate said 5:47PM on 4-02-2007
Down side. It's AAC. For those of us that wish to purchase these songs to use within music software it's pretty much useless. You're gonna lose quality converting to mp3. It sucks but understandable that apple doesn't want people to use anything but the iPod.
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Ken Walker said 5:54PM on 4-02-2007
My 2-cents, or rather my 30 cents here:
http://ken.walker.name/index.php?p=130
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nate w said 5:58PM on 4-02-2007
what i'm interested in is what this "higher bitrate" is really going to do. if they're just ripping from a cd at a "higher bitrate", that's not saying much. but, if they're getting these compressed directly from the studio, that's a whole different ballgame. i'd love to hear stuff at studio quality rather than cd quality. that would be awesome.
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Aaron Gyes said 6:16PM on 4-02-2007
Fyodor: I don't think that is what is being construed. I can't imagine why you'd want to buy the low quality music? The two biggest complaints have always been the DRM and the crappy bitrate. Now they're closer to decent as far as bitrate goes, and the DRM is gone.
I'm still waiting for lossless.
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DWBjr said 6:20PM on 4-02-2007
Nate, Nate. You say: "Apple doesn't want you to use anything but an iPod?" Goddamn. I thought we'd gotten past that. Of course they don't, but that's not the reason why the music is in AAC format.
Apple chose AAC, an OPEN format, as its standard for iTunes because its simply BETTER than Mp3 for customers and business. Many players/programs now support AAC. Not only does mp3 require content distrubtion licensing (mp3 gets ugly), a 128kbps song in AAC is the rough equivalent of a 196kbps Mp3, so it compresses better. What music software do you use that doesn't have support for AAC? Might be time you upgraded, mate, and stop being an Eyeore.
Google "why aac" and see Apple's rationale. Try wikiing it too.
Read this:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/sound_preferences.shtml
Watch mp3 get weeded out in short order. Let it go.
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G said 6:29PM on 4-02-2007
Even the Zune and my Sony Ericsson phone play AAC. I wish my car did, but I suspect the entire navi unit is based on WinCE (it plays WMA, whoopee).
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aaron said 6:34PM on 4-02-2007
Maybe the higher bit-rate was done so that when you down-convert the file to mp3 you still get a good quality file?
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register said 6:49PM on 4-02-2007
"Down side. It's AAC."
And what is wrong with AAC? It's a standard that any manufacturer can implement, and it provides better quality and smaller filesizes at the same bitrates as MP3. Any recent/decent music software will handle it.
Regarding the higher bitrate, it's just that, a higher bitrate. Not a higher sample rate or bit depth as you might get from a studio master, but just ripped with less compression from the CD -- so less artifacts in the output. I've been ripping all my CDs to 256kbps AAC for some time now, and with a number of tracks (though by no means all) I can definitely tell the difference when compared with 128kbps. The downside is that my (60GB) iPod can only fit about 9,000 tracks on it now.
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Jon said 7:05PM on 4-02-2007
I won't be paying the extra .30 for the higher quality un-DRMed songs. Why? Because I only have an iPod and I only use it in my car (which has a crappy stereo) and on the plane (where I can barely hear it over the engine anyway). I'm really grateful that Apple left the option for people like me who have no need for the more expensive songs.
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Tony said 7:16PM on 4-02-2007
"How about giving users what they really wanted: same quality, no DRM."
Because that's NOT what users really wanted. One of the biggest (and loudest) complaints about the iTunes Store (aside from DRM) has been the relatively low bitrate. Users have been SCREAMING for higher bitrates for a long time...pretty much since day one.
Higher bitrates and no DRM is one of the reasons eMusic is so popular...
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Bryan Walls said 7:31PM on 4-02-2007
It strikes me that this makes "Complete My Album" a lot more attractive for EMI content. I get the high quality version of some favorite songs from a particular album, plus the other songs on the album, also DRM free and higher quality, for just the difference in cost from what I already paid.
It would sound better if I'd actually ever paid for an iTunes song. My 7000-odd songs are all either from CD, or free downloads.
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Galley said 7:43PM on 4-02-2007
The only way there gonna get me to buy full albums if if they offer lossless files for $9.99. Even then I can usually buy the CD (new) for less.
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Chris L said 7:48PM on 4-02-2007
iTunes will automatically convert everything to 128kb/s for iPod shuffles if you want that.
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matt said 11:46PM on 4-02-2007
You can convert ACC to MP3 from within iTunes. Click Preferences, Advanced, Importing and change Import Using: to MP3 encoder. Change the settings around to what you want. Then right click a song in the iTunes library and click Convert Selection to MP3.
matt
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rdas7 said 3:38AM on 4-03-2007
For 90% of material, there is no appreciable difference between AAC at 256kbps and 16-bit, 44.1KHz PCM (CD-quality) audio. To hear the difference you need high quality equipment and a trained ear.
That said, even the current 128kbps AAC is very high quality audio and sufficient for the built-in audio components of every iPod/Mac out there.
So, I'm not sure who the 256kbps AAC enhancement is catering to. This might foreshadow the rumored iTunes/BitTorrent engine in Tiger (I'm not sure 30¢ covers the increased bandwidth Apple will face at doubling their data throughput). That aspect of it is clearly a marketing angle (after all, people need to be getting *something* for the extra money!).
Interestingly, if you purchase EMI albums (not singles) they will default to the higher bitrate for no extra charge (an incentive to purchase albums?).
On the other hand, the whole package: no DRM, higher bitrate, "upgradability" is a great step forward.
Ironic that it's taken 10 years to get here, I guess JT was right.
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Patrick said 2:45PM on 4-03-2007
Higher quality is nice, but what I REALLY, REALLY want is a subscription model... I wan to pay less for all-you-can-eat rental access to the lower 128 kpbs AAC tracks, and pay more to own the higher-quality tracks.
Maybe this is Steve's endgame?
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JeffDM said 4:03PM on 4-03-2007
If your software only plays MP3, then upgrade to better software or transcode it. If you already have hardware that only plays MP3, then you can still transcode it. Even my Tapwave PDA can play AAC, if not natively, through a third party program. iTunes can transcode it to any bitrate that you like, to several different CODECs. Transcoding should take less than a minute per track on any useful machine.
MP3 is good mainly because it plays in just about anything, but bit for bit, it's got the worst audio quality for bit rate ratio short of Sony's ATRAC.
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