One last link

[andrewducker]

EMI starts selling non-DRM downloads. Which is _great_ news if they weren't putting the price up by 30% at the same time. And only making them available in AAC format. And only at 256kbps. Which means it'll take up twice as much space on my MP3 player. I don't actually _want_ them that high quality when it means I only get half as many songs to carry around with me. It's a plot, I tells ya, a plot to make us all go out and buy bigger iPods!

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

The price is only going up for individual tracks; per-album price is the same. My view is it's still great news. More precisely, it's that I might now become an iTunes customer for the first time.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely, it is great.

To me it's largely great because it means the opening up of music sales, and a sea-change in the way it's sold. I'll be watching the market in fascination for the next while.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I don't know., Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I see too many people buying things just because they're cheaper, and I wonder if the Cartel is using EMI as a stalking horse...

And so, a few months down the line, I see EMI saying "Well, the consumers carried on buying DRM files even when we gave them an alternative. So DM isn't an impedement to purchase after all..."

And then the locks come on even tighter.

I hope not, but it's just too like the way they've behaved in the past for me to trust them now

[drplokta]

Allegedly, EMI did some discreet internal customer testing, and the higher quality/DRM-free/30% more expensive option outsold the DRM option by about ten to one.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

My experience is that people *do* understand DRM -- or at least, they understand the only working on particular computers, the inability to transfer it to different devices, and so on. It's well documented that not only were sales lower of the DRMed CDs, but the level of customer complaints and queries were spectacular. And reducing customer service interactions really saves you money.

[drplokta]

You can always recode them to smaller MP3s for your portable player while keeping the original higher quality files.

[andrewducker]

Which is what someone on Slahdot suggested to me as well. Encoding a 256kbit AAC to a 128kbit AAC isn't likely to give the same quality as encoding a CD to 12kbit AAC though, is it?

Still, better than nothing. Especially considering that AllofMP3 is no longer an option :->

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Like you're going to be able to tell on your portable player*. People are very arsey about encoding rates and with very little reason.

I should disclose here -- for years I recorded live music in ATRAC and re-recorded into MP3. And people still really like some of that stuff...

*NB: if you're listening in a library through high-end portable headphones I'll allow you as an exception. But 99% of all portable use is in environments too noisy to be fretting about bit rates -- cars, public transport, gyms, offices.

[andrewducker]

I agree in certain respects - except that it's not actually audible quality that I'm too worried about ( I could live with pops and crackles) it's that music sounds somehow flatter and less interesting at lower bit-rates. I find myself getting generally bored of it more easily.

I started out with a teeny MP3 player with 16MB in it (back in the 90s), and all of my music was at 64kbps, which really brought this out (but it took me a while to realise). 128kbps seems fine to me - but I am worried that 256kbps re-encoded to 128kbps might suffer the same problem.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I like the higher quality. And, the lack of DRM means I might actually buy some. However, what I don't understand is why the cost actually needs to go up at all - I think it's just a nice bribe straight to EMI, one that bears no regard to the actual cost involved in production.

That all aside, I wouldn't complain about large AAC files :-). It's an open format - it's mpeg-layer 4 audio - and you can transcode it to anything at any quality you wish quite easily. VLC does it well.

You're probably right about the bigger iPods though!