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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Apple needs higher quality classical music in the iTunes Music Store

Sangsara.net:

The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) UK this morning added a new recording of the J.S. Bach Cello Suites ... The list price is £15.99 for what is usually a 2 CD affair. The price is consistent with regular album releases on iTMS UK, £7.99. Unfortunately, so is the quality.

Apple has maintained since Day One of the iTMS' North American inception that a bitrate of 128kbps offers sufficient (near-CD) quality for music downloads ... 128kbps does the job, if only just. It has not stopped Apple selling literally several hundred million songs in this format, perhaps the lowest-quality of all Digital Rights Managed songs sold on the internet.

That's true, though Napster's 128 Kbps WMA songs are just as shabby.

But there is one thing that can be done, and that is for Apple to acknowledge that Classical, and to a lesser extent, Jazz music, present exceptional cases. Their listeners are more likely to be audiophiles. The material itself, full of subtleties that must be preserved, is more demanding on codecs, and is done a disservice by poor encoding and low bitrates. This is a fact beyond dispute.

Curiously, Microsoft encodes its classical music at higher bitrates where needed, using VBR-based WMA. These songs can range from 160 Kbps to 256 Kbps, based on the needs of each song. So if Apple does go this route, will it simply be copying yet another great idea from Microsoft? That shouldn't stop it from doing the right thing. 128 Kbps is a joke.

[ Posted at 8:49 AM | Permalink ]