I just wanted to alert all the music lovers out there about something that was announced by Apple recently with amazingly little fanfare: all the music on the iTunes store is now encoded at the ‘iTunes Plus’ standard: 256kbps AAC, with no DRM. If you already know what that means, feel free to skip to the last paragraph; if not, keep reading to see how this geekspeak is really important for your ears!
Digital music works by encoding the sound vibrations as streams of data. In order to work well, this requires a lot of data — CD quality music has 44,100 chunks of 16 bits encoded into every second of sound. In the days of antiquity (like, before 10 years ago) there was no practical way to move that many bits down the information superhighway. Bump.
The funny thing is, some clever people figured out that we don’t actually hear everything that gets thrown at our ears. The details get complicated, but the point is that there’s a whole lot going on in our ears and the connection between our ears and our brains that shape the sound that we perceive, and many parts of the sound become practically (or nearly) imperceptible. So then some really clever people put two and two together and thought, ‘What if we made a computer program that could take out the sound we don’t hear?’ Less sound means less data. And that was the birth of compression.
It goes without saying that compression only works as well as the computer is able to guess what we can (and can’t) hear. As soon as it takes out something obvious, it’s no good. After a few earlier attempts, the now-famous mp3 was the first to come close.
I mentioned that compression was designed for the internet, but it soon found another important use: the portable player. If I just copied my cds onto the ipod I own, I estimate it would be full after about 28 cds. With compression on the other hand, I currently have 2643 tracks, or 8.5 days of continuous playback… and it’s only about 2/3 full. So compression was crucial to the ipod revolution.
I mentioned that all this was important, and some people are probably wondering why. Here’s the deal: now that everybody and their pet goldfish has an ipod and is downloading music (legally, I’m sure…) it’s about time that people started paying some attention to audio quality. Bad compression is like junk food for your ears, except it doesn’t even taste good. Kind of like… wet cardboard sprinkled with sand. (Really.) But if you ate sandy cardboard for breakfast every day of your life, you just might think it was normal. (It’s not.) If you’re in the habit of listening to your mp3 collection all the time, you really need to sit down with the cd and listen to both, one after the other. You might be in for a shock.
So now you know you need good compression, how do you get it? First thing first: mp3 sucks. I mean it. Maybe it was enough to make Napster the rage in 2000, but now it really needs to die. If your ipod is full of mp3s that you made from your cds, go and delete them all, and start over. This time your songs will be smaller and better.
If you use iTunes on windows or mac, your answer is AAC. (If you’re a linux geek then you already know ogg vorbis!) In iTunes, go to the Edit menu and click Preferences. Halfway down the page you’ll see an ‘Import Settings’ button. Use the AAC encoder at the ‘iTunes Plus’ setting. From now on, everything you import will sound much, much better.
It’s always been easy to import cds at these high settings, so why am I excited? Until recently, most of the material on the iTunes store was encoded at half the quality. I bought one album and wished I could have returned it. Not only that, but the files had rediculous encryption nonsense attached. Not any more! With the iTunes Plus encoding (256kbps), I doubt I could tell the difference from the cd, especially on normal (consumer) equipment.
What was my first iTunes Plus purchase? An album, from these guys, ‘Congotronics”:
Kudos to Apple for removing DRM and selling 256k aac files. Life is good.
