I fear that in a few years the majority of music will not be availble on
physical media but instead be sold on-line in compressed form!

The move has allready started with Apple's ITunes, TDC's solution here
in Denmark and several others. For now they make deals with the record
labels but soon the musicians will make their own deals with them, and
the on-line shops in effect becoming new record companies forcing the
record labels to minic the model.

Now I'm all for the artists getting a bigger share of the money but I
fear sound quality will get lost in the process of the music
distribution going on-line. My prediction is that getting uncompressed
music will be just as hard as it is to find vinyl theese days!

Am I just over pesimistic or ?

Kind regards

Bruno, Denmark

iddqdATworldonline.DenmarK wrote:

Now I'm all for the artists getting a bigger share of the money but I
fear sound quality will get lost in the process of the music
distribution going on-line. My prediction is that getting uncompressed
music will be just as hard as it is to find vinyl theese days!

Agree entirely.... I hate record companies for the fat profits they take out
of CD sales and pass on a pittance to the artist, along with them churning
out drab pop-crap. So anything online music can contibute towards the death
of a few record companies is a good thing IMO.

But on the other hand there's no way I'd pay for lossy compressed music. I
don't mind downloading the odd MP3 to listen to new stuff, I can live with
the drop in SQ when it's free. But when shelling out over £10 for an album I
want the proper uncompressed audio - hence the attraction of audio CD (and
not bloody corrupt copy-protected ones at that!). I'd be quite prepared to
wait the few hours it takes to download an uncompressed audio CD image on
broadband though.

--
Paul Morgan
Replace nospam with paul_morga to reply via e-mail

"Paul Morgan" wrote in message
...
iddqdATworldonline.DenmarK wrote:

Now I'm all for the artists getting a bigger share of the money but I
fear sound quality will get lost in the process of the music
distribution going on-line. My prediction is that getting uncompressed
music will be just as hard as it is to find vinyl theese days!

Agree entirely.... I hate record companies for the fat profits they take
out
of CD sales and pass on a pittance to the artist, along with them churning
out drab pop-crap. So anything online music can contibute towards the
death
of a few record companies is a good thing IMO.

But on the other hand there's no way I'd pay for lossy compressed music. I
don't mind downloading the odd MP3 to listen to new stuff, I can live with
the drop in SQ when it's free. But when shelling out over £10 for an album
I
want the proper uncompressed audio - hence the attraction of audio CD (and
not bloody corrupt copy-protected ones at that!). I'd be quite prepared to
wait the few hours it takes to download an uncompressed audio CD image on
broadband though.

--
Paul Morgan
Replace nospam with paul_morga to reply via e-mail


128kbps can sound very good if encoded properly with decent software etc
'Lame' or 'Blade',
160kbps is supposed to be cassette quality, 192kbps CD etc.

and I never personaly have come across OGG but its supposed to be better
than MP1 layer 3......

"malcolm" wrote in message
newsQEjb.786893$YN5.777106@sccrnsc01...

128kbps can sound very good if encoded properly with decent software etc
'Lame' or 'Blade', 160kbps is supposed to be cassette quality, 192kbps CD
etc.

256kbps seems to be emerging as the new 'minimum standard' on Kazaa as
people move to broadband.

12-18 months ago, it was difficult to find any downloads better than
128kbps, now I won't even look at anything less than 256 - excepting
non-commercial rarities - but, where possible, go for 320. A decent 256 or
320 rip will produce an acceptable CDR - certainly good enough for normal
day-to-day listening

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 00:14:51 +0100
"Stimpy" wrote:

A decent 256 or
320 rip will produce an acceptable CDR - certainly good enough for
normal
day-to-day listening

320 is known to be able to pass for real in double-blind tests.

That said, LAME does an *extremely* good job of variable bitrate
encoding, the theory being that you only use as many bits as needed to
reach 'indistinguishable' quality.

typically I find that 'normal' music (thats anything from rock to
classical for me, none of this pop crap), that LAME generates an average
of 160kbit/s for a variable bitrate track. Very few tracks average over
224.

Yes, Im a die-hard linux user ;-)

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with
ketchup.

more from the 'Ian Molton school' of uk.rec.audio-ism:


Yes, Im a die-hard linux user ;-)


A die-hard linux user not using ogg as their main format?

I wonder... how high a bitrate would an (stereo) ogg vorbis file need
before it surpassed CD quality? Obv you would have to be encoding not from
a CD to start with, but I think the point would be well below CD bitrate,
assuming humans can actually distinguish better-than-CD audio.

If ogg takes off there's a very interesting technology - bitrate peeling;
for a given hosted file with bitrate X you could download a copy with any
quality upto X without re-encoding. This would allow the musicians to
encode at very high bitrates, but still make the music avaliable to 56k
users. I believe there is a BitTorrent plugin in development to do this
transparently.

If you really must have 1:1 audio, there's always the lossless codecs -
FLAC, BONC etc. Although audiophiles seem to be unnecessarily wary of data
compression - AFIK SACD/DVD-A formats don't even employ lossless data
compression.

--
Jim H jh
@333
.org

more from the 'Ian Molton school' of uk.rec.audio-ism:


Yes, Im a die-hard linux user ;-)


A die-hard linux user not using ogg as their main format?

I wonder... how high a bitrate would an (stereo) ogg vorbis file need
before it surpassed CD quality? Obv you would have to be encoding not from
a CD to start with, but I think the point would be well below CD bitrate,
assuming humans can actually distinguish better-than-CD audio.

If ogg takes off there's a very interesting technology - bitrate peeling;
for a given hosted file with bitrate X you could download a copy with any
quality upto X without re-encoding. This would allow the musicians to
encode at very high bitrates, but still make the music avaliable to 56k
users. I believe there is a BitTorrent plugin in development to do this
transparently.

If you really must have 1:1 audio, there's always the lossless codecs -
FLAC, BONC etc. Although audiophiles seem to be unnecessarily wary of data
compression - AFIK SACD/DVD-A formats don't even employ lossless data
compression.

--
Jim H jh
@333
.org

"Ian Molton" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 00:14:51 +0100
"Stimpy" wrote:

A decent 256 or
320 rip will produce an acceptable CDR - certainly good enough for
normal
day-to-day listening

320 is known to be able to pass for real in double-blind tests.

Hmmm... I've been pretty pleased with most of the many 320 tracks I've
downloaded/burned so I can believe that. It'd be interesting to read the
studies though - any references on the WWW?


That said, LAME does an *extremely* good job of variable bitrate
encoding, the theory being that you only use as many bits as needed to
reach 'indistinguishable' quality.

Hmmm... (again). I've never used variable bitrate and always rip at 320 -
easy option I guess :-). Have you tried a back-to-back variable vs fixed
rate rip? I might have a play over the weekend. I think my concern is
that, for file sharing purposes, people often search for tracks at a
specific bitrate (i.e. minimum 256). Although variable bitrate ripping
might save a little space, the lower bitrate won't do anything to raise the
average bitrate used for sharing

"Ian Molton" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 00:14:51 +0100
"Stimpy" wrote:

A decent 256 or
320 rip will produce an acceptable CDR - certainly good enough for
normal
day-to-day listening

320 is known to be able to pass for real in double-blind tests.

Hmmm... I've been pretty pleased with most of the many 320 tracks I've
downloaded/burned so I can believe that. It'd be interesting to read the
studies though - any references on the WWW?


That said, LAME does an *extremely* good job of variable bitrate
encoding, the theory being that you only use as many bits as needed to
reach 'indistinguishable' quality.

Hmmm... (again). I've never used variable bitrate and always rip at 320 -
easy option I guess :-). Have you tried a back-to-back variable vs fixed
rate rip? I might have a play over the weekend. I think my concern is
that, for file sharing purposes, people often search for tracks at a
specific bitrate (i.e. minimum 256). Although variable bitrate ripping
might save a little space, the lower bitrate won't do anything to raise the
average bitrate used for sharing

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 00:14:51 +0100
"Stimpy" wrote:

A decent 256 or
320 rip will produce an acceptable CDR - certainly good enough for
normal
day-to-day listening

320 is known to be able to pass for real in double-blind tests.

That said, LAME does an *extremely* good job of variable bitrate
encoding, the theory being that you only use as many bits as needed to
reach 'indistinguishable' quality.

typically I find that 'normal' music (thats anything from rock to
classical for me, none of this pop crap), that LAME generates an average
of 160kbit/s for a variable bitrate track. Very few tracks average over
224.

Yes, Im a die-hard linux user ;-)

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with
ketchup.