iPod Users Buy CDs, Shun iTunes 550
twitter writes, "The BBC's summarizes a Jupiter Research study, 'iPod fans shunning iTunes store.' From the article: '83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly... only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites... [T]he only salient characteristic shared by all owners of portable music players was that they were more likely to buy more music — especially CDs.' This is despite years of iTunes promotion and apparent success. Given the outright failure of other music services, it is clear that users prefer DRM-free music, and are willing to pay for it and take the trouble to rip it."
Re:most of us have a cd collection. (Score:4, Informative)
For those looking to rip CD's, but not learn how the command line LAME encoder works, check out audiograbber [com-us.net]. Makes quick work of turning a collection into MP3 format.
Free Music (Score:2, Informative)
True, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:most of us have a cd collection. (Score:2, Informative)
Windows: FOR %i IN (*.wav) DO lame -b 192 -h -m s %i
Bash: for i in *.wav ; do lame -b 192 -h -m s ${i} `echo ${i} | sed s/.wav/.mp3/g` ; done
CD Purchases included in the statistics (Score:2, Informative)
FTA:
It's even covered in the summary
Re:DRM is a hassle (Score:5, Informative)
No, but I cannot purchase from the iTMS songs that are encoded at higher rates. That was my point.
Re:most of us have a cd collection. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DRM is a hassle (Score:5, Informative)
Just so you know, there is a button in the iTunes Music Store account information page that lets you deauthorize all the computers that you've previously authorized to play your music. It only lets you do this once a year IIRC, but it's useful if you've reached your limit of 5 computers and can't get to an authorized computer to deauthorize it.
Re:DRM is a hassle (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, WMA has been shown to be the worst (or second worst) CODEC in all the audio tests that have been done.
Second, you can reset the list of computers that are allowed to play your purchased songs. In iTunes, go to the music store and click on your account button. If you have 5 authorized computers in your list, you should have a button next to "computer authorizations" which you can use to reset the list. You can use that feature once or twice a year AFAIK. You then simply re-authorize the current computers that you want to use. You don't need the old computers to de-authorize them.
Third, AAC was developped by Dolby and was shown to be the best or second best CODEC in all the audio tests that have been done. As for the bitrate, AAC is more efficient with 128kbps than MP3 or WMA.
Re:DRM is a hassle (Score:5, Informative)
As it happens, I know quite a bit about digital signaling. I also know that that "bit" you're reading is going to be converted several times from when you read it fro the hard disk, by a variety of independent subsystems which set their own bit levels as high or low, based on their own signaling specifications.
You read some bits off your hard drive. The bits sitting on your drive have no voltage -- they're simply a magnetic field. This field get translated into either a 1 or a 0 bit. The drive controller copies this into a voltage that it then transmits across the drive bus to a bus controller. This bus controller then copies the bit to the system bus. The system bus copies it to the CPU, which copies it to RAM, which is then refreshed thousands of times per second. This is then copied back onto the system bus, and send to your audio hardware, which feeds it through a DAC.
Each of these transmissions is a copy operation on the bit -- not on the strength of the magnetic field, or whatever voltage was being applied to the transmitting component. So signaling in this case makes no difference -- so long as each field or voltage fits within the proper tolerances, it will be treated as a 1 or a 0, and will be raised high or low at the new voltage level as a completely new signal during each conversion. As such, it isn't the case that if the bit is magnetically weak on your hard drive that it will have a lower-than-normal voltage once it finally gets into RAM.
Thinking of it another way, it isn't like using a tin-can-and-string telephone to transmit data. It's more like the telephone game, where someone says something to someone, who then tells the message to the next person, and so on until the recipient receives the message. It doesn't matter if the first speaker is male or female -- the last person to pass on the message is going to state the same message regardless, in their own voice. The only difference in the case of a computer is that most stages have integrity checking to verify that the message is received properly, and in some cases can either request a retransmission if the integrity checking fails, or can receive the data in a manner that it can be reconstructed with mathematical certainty by using appropriate data encodings.
Encryption makes no difference. The system is not analogue -- it is digital. And the system only knows two digits. Each individual subsystem has completely different mechanisms for representing those bits, and that representation is completely independent of other subsystems. Reading an encrypted block from your hard drive causes the encrypted data to be copied into RAM, from which a decrypted copy is placed into RAM. This copy is generated electrically in exactly the same fashion if it had been read unencrypted from the hard drive. By the time it gets to the audio DAC, the data is identical from both a data and a signaling standpoint.
I'm sure you can handily replace the needle on a record player arm, but you know absolutely squat about digital signaling.
Yaz.
Re:but I already have a TON of CD's (Score:4, Informative)
Apple is more than happy to do this. You can go into your account settings in iTunes, and tell it to deauthorize ALL of your prior computers. You then can authorize your current system and listen to all those songs again.
As for old systems, maybe you should consider deauthorizing them before you get rid of them or overwrite the OS. Then this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Re:True, but... (Score:2, Informative)
I can play Ogg files on.......nothing that I own. So....moving on.....
There is support for AAC VBRing. Perhaps iTunes Store should offer 160 AACs with VBR?
New music Tuesday is a good day... (Score:3, Informative)
I look forward to new music Tuesday to listen for new tracks by my favorite artists and for trying to find artists that deserve my attention. With radio being as commercial as possible, iTunes is about my only source for new and fresh music.
Re:DRM is a hassle (Score:3, Informative)
DRMed files are larger or require decryption, that is bandwidth or processing power better used for more quality.
Cost vs Time (Score:4, Informative)
I've been sampling different methods of DVD ripping since yesterday and have discovered the most efficient way to rip a DVD while retaining overall data quality is to go through a series of three different applications... at least on the Macintosh side of things.
- Mac The Ripper [mactheripper.org]
It seems there is a huge issue with trying to rip directly from the optical drive that often results in several hours of time used to obtain potentially buggy and incomplete data from a DVD. By using this utility to copy the raw DVD data directly to your hard drive, you'll find your DVD ripper will function much faster and much more reliably in a single pass, than it would with ripping straight from the DVD media itself. A 90 minute movie can be copied in about 10 minutes, and then ripped in realtime... rather than taking upward of three hours to obtain the same results.
- Handbrake [m0k.org]
This utility converts raw DVD data to a Quicktime-compatible format of your choosing. To ensure easy compatibity with the iPod, try out the new Instant Handbrake software. Despite being a bit buggy and in the beta stages, the results it produces are impressive. When used with raw dvd content stored on a fast hard drive, you can achieve a complete conversion in realtime or faster.
- iSquint [isquint.org]
This utility simplifies the process of ensuring your ripped files are in a format that conforms to iPod-playable standards. Depending on the intended use (portable viewing or viewing on a TV screen) you can store a full 90 minute movie using H.264 encoding within 250-500MB of space with very little loss in visual quality. This may add about 2 hours to the ripping process, but is easily worth it for the assurance you've performed the process correctly on your first attempt.
All three of the above utilities are freeware/open source and readily downloadable at any time.
As for CDs though, the ripping process is so trivial, there's no point in not buying a CD of a band you like, when you might well end up spending just as much on the individual DRM-infected tracks.