iTunes Music Store: Best Value?
iTunes Sold One Billion Songs In The Past Six Months
That’s averaging over 41 million songs per day. That’s a lot of music. But the superiority of CDs keeps me from purchasing all but the occasional single from iTunes, for a few reasons:
Losing My Religion (I Mean Music)
When you buy a song from iTunes, a copy is made to your hard drive, and that is it – the transaction is finished. From this point on, it’s my responsibility to keep a working backup of the song available if I want to play it. Though I’m careful to make regularly scheduled backups on various media, etc., I simply don’t feel comfortable enough trusting an entire music library to the whims of various hard drives and backup software, prone to fail sooner or later. It’s possible that with an unfortunate series of events, I could lose my entire iTunes library and backups. It’s just an extra stressful potential for disaster that I would rather avoid. When I buy a CD, I rip it into iTunes, and then it sits on my shelf as a backup. CD: 1, iTunes: 0.
Musics Of Quality
When I rip a CD into iTunes and re-encode the data into Apple Lossless format, I usually end up with a file in the 500-600kbps range. That’s plenty of data and to my ears sounds as good as the CD (as it should, especially with error checking during the rip process. Turn this on through Preferences->Advanced->Importing and check the box for “use error correction.”). The CD itself is not perfect – it has probably been dithered down to a lower data rate during the mastering process in order to accommodate the red book audio standard, but mastering engineers are very good at this. Now let’s check out a song downloaded from the iTunes music store – ouch, only 128kbps. That’s a small fraction of the amount of data I get from a CD, and even with all of the psychoacoustic knowledge we have, the algorithms still cannot perfectly decide which information to keep and which to throw away. Sure, walking down the street you might be hard pressed to tell the difference between this and a CD, but sitting at home on a quiet evening with monitoring headphones, compression artifacts will rear their ugly head and obfuscate the listening process.
Recently, iTunes worked out a deal with EMI to provide tracks with twice the usual bitrate – 256kbps – on the music store. In order to see this, you need to find an EMI album (like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon) and click the link for iTunes Plus. The higher bitrate gets pretty close to CD quality - thanks to psychoacoustics, more than “half way” as the numbers may suggest. But it’s still not quite as good as a CD, and currently is only available on a limited selection of tracks. Pretty much any tune I am interested in is not available at the higher bitrate. CD: 2, iTunes: 0.
Digital Restrictions Management
Music bought on the iTunes music store can only be played in iTunes, or an iPod, or some other Apple-blessed product. There are loopholes, but they are inelegant. For example, you could burn the music you buy onto a CD, and then rip it back into iTunes. But then you end up with either a much bigger file for the same quality product, or a lower quality file of similar size. This is not only inelegant and inefficient, but it’s the same sort of tedious backup work and low quality I am trying to avoid by simply buying a CD in the first place! It is also conceivable that Apple could at some point close shop or otherwise de-authorize iTunes, which would then no longer play the tracks you purchased. Recently, as part of the deal with EMI, the iTunes tracks at 256kbps do not have DRM, so they will play anywhere as long as a player exists to play them. However, once again, this is only available on a limited selection of tracks. CD: 3, iTunes: 0.
Duh Winner
Now you know why I still buy CDs- an automated backup, high quality, restriction free media. But iTunes could be all this and more!
Automated backup: iTunes could simply allow you to re-download any music you buy, in case a hard drive or backup fails or is destroyed.
Higher bitrates: iTunes could not only match, but even exceed the bitrate of CD audio, supplying end users with mastering-grade 192khz files, and beyond.
Digital Restrictions: This one’s easy: take away the restrictions. Give me a format I can play anywhere, anytime, and losslessly transcode to other formats.
Market Lieder
As the iTunes Music Store continues to make incremental improvements at the mercy of an industry that’s collapsing on itself, determined to shoot itself in the foot and run itself into the ground, competitors lurk in the midst. Like most Apple products, the iTunes store seems annoyingly mediocre and depressingly underpowered, frustratingly on the brink of achieving excellence, but not quite getting there. Though no one can yet match iTunes’ impressive array of popular labels, another store is potentially only a contract away from doing so. Indie is on the way in, as musicians produce and market their own work. Lastly, with an increasingly large library of legally free music available online, will the sales of digital recordings survive the twenty-first century? There is so much free content available and constantly being released that you could spend your entire life listening for free and never hear the same thing twice…