Niveus and MusicGiants Offering HD Music Downloads

Apple and EMI stole the spotlight earlier this month with their DRM-free music announcement, but now Niveus and MusicGiants are teaming up to bring you the first joint HD music store. The store will let audiophiles listen to and download music in the Lossless WMA format at rates up to 1,100 kbps. You'll also be able to download "Super HD" songs—tunes remastered in DVD Audio or SACD in 5.1 surround or 2.0 stereo with sample rates at 11,000 kbps. More »

Gemei X21 Portable Audio Player With Monkey's Audio Support

Chinese manufacturer Gemei is coming out with the X21, an otherwise run-of-the-mill portable audio player save for its ability to play Monkey's Audio files. Monkey's Audio format files can be identified by their file extension, .APE. It's a lossless audio codec like FLAC, meaning you shrink the size of the song files without any hit on sound quality. These files are bigger than the average MP3 file, which is why it's so puzzling that the X21 only ships with 512MB of storage space (enough for about 1.5 CDs). Oh, wait, it's cheaper that way. Silly me. More »

MusicGiants Among Men

At a press conference at the Sony Studios in Manhattan yesterday MusicGiants announced its music download service, the first to use the Windows Media Audio Lossless format. To access the service users must download the free MusicGiants Network software and pay a $50 yearly fee (which is redeemable in credit towards purchasing music) created to discourage the online musical bandit demographic from getting their sticky hands on the high-end service. Audio Lossless downloads reproduce music at up to 1100 kbps versus the 128 to 192 kpbs of your standard download services. More »