Nope. You're right. The Cherry-Pickers are the ones that pay more. I bought Paul McCartney's "Back to the Egg" yesterday and got the Plus Version and got all 17 songs for $9.99. They're 256kbps from the REMASTERED version -- sounds awesome.

There are obviously some albums on iTunes that are more than $9.99 but generally they have a lot of songs on them. Paul's "Wingspan" is $16.99 BUT it has 40 songs on it.

Generally, I buy USED CDs because I want a decent copy for cheap so that I have complete total control and the perfect backup -- but generally I give into impluse purchase and go iTunes. Basically, I just wanted to hear what the quality was like for an album I've been wanting and support Apple/McCartney/EMI all at the same time. I like what they're doing.

JGowan

sultan

I usually enjoy 3 or 4 songs from an album and not more, in these cases I I buy from iTunes (and would pay the extra .30 for the DRM free 256k-btr)

If I like most of the songs from the CD or when talking about a compilation or "best-of" then I buy the CD.

JcMarin

eakius

I tend to think (and most people outside the RIAA seem to agree) that making a copy of a CD for personal use/archiving falls under fair use. But, that isn't the question.... The question is whether *retaining* that copy violates the law when, under the first sale doctrine, you sell the original. Look at the Act--you violate copyright by infringing on the author's rights in Section 106. Holding onto something your already own isn't on the list. It's not a derivative work, you aren't copying it (the copy was already made), you aren't distributing it... I'm not sure I see where the violation is. Surprising, huh?

You might find this discussion interesting--hosted by William Patry, former copyright counsel to the US House of Rep. Judiciary Committee:

http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2005/10/first-sale-hard-c...

Bottom line, however, my reading--or even Patry's--of the Act isn't going to help you when the RIAA comes after you. I think you'd ultimately win, but probably after spending a quarter million bucks going to the court of appeals. Keeping the CDs strikes me as a pretty good defense. As well as a backup. As well as a way to treat artists fairly.

As a closing note, I think it's fair to say that the collective **AAs and ESA have, in fact, been screaming bloody murder to Congress for quite some time...

Thud

Well, it stops me. Sorry - guess I'm just as law-abiding as I can be. If I want it, I buy it. If I can't justify the price, I do without. *shrug*

-p-

psxndc

>> written, it's the act of copying that is the
>> infringement, and if the act of copying at the
>> time is fair use, it doesn't suddenly become not
>> fair use if you--for example--subsequently lose
>> the CD. Or, arguably, if you sell it.

Copyright also controls how the works are distributed. Of course you can sell your copy, but the rights transfer with the sale. Otherwise you would be determining how the work is distributed. Your losing-the-CD hypothesis assumes that someone else has not acquired the rights to the CD. If it turns up at the record because someone else found it and sold it, it does not fall under "fair use" for you to keep listening to your copy because you don't "own" the original anymore.

There is no statute that says "ripping CDs is fair use" so I was taking the medium-shifting from archiving. Sony v. Betamax is a time shifting argument and is is what is generally quoted for fair use. There is however, a difference between time-shifting and medium-shifting and the right to archive is more in line with medium-shifting.

If rip-resell was expected and allowable, do you really think the collective **AAs and ESA would quietly allow EB/Gamestop et al to sell used DVDs and games? At least wouldn't they scream to Congress to ban rip-resell for destroying their business?

psxndc

@psxndc - It might be copyright infringement but when has that ever stopped people from breaking the law? At least when ripping and re-selling the CDs the RIAA has no way of tracking you as opposed to those dumb enough to still be using p2p appz.

Will_USA

Where can I buy one of those "250 million GB" hard drives you speak of?

jeffj-nj

I expected this from a few, since via some mysterious process the DRM from these files had vanished. But there's one that stubbornly hangs onto its DRM, yet iTunes says it doesn't exist.

Yes, album costs remain $9.99 because that's what I bought last night to see if there was an audible difference. I think there is, but that could be a function of my player, my speakers, my ears, and that I prefer instrumentals. FWIW, on that same system I can't tell the difference between FLAC, wav, or VBR mp3...which is why VBR is my preferred format.

And because I prefer VBR, I prefer to eMusic over iTunes, even with its more limited library, so add me to the chorus calling for iTunes to convert now or fall forever.

I'm still happy with this tiny step, though. Even tagged with my name, I can play the music anywhere I damnwell please. I can copy my purchase from my desktop to my laptop and don't have to worry about "authorizing" anything, or even being forced to use iTunes (Winamp handles AAC's quite well, thank you). And if someday I actually buy a PMP I can opt not to buy one that supports the AAC file format. I'll just use iTunes to convert the files to VBR mp3, voila.

bvorka

rohan1

nidolke

agentmckay

That said, it isn't a practice I engage in. For one, CDs are nice as the ultimate backup, even if I store my rips on a 1TB RAID. Even more importantly, it seems ethically wrong, since you are effectively depriving the artist of income. Yeah, rant about record companies and all that, but the reality is that most artists get damn little from sales, but proliferating copies of their works around gets them nothing. If you want good music, you need to support musicians.

Thud

QWERTYthon

Only the people who buy one or two songs will pay 30cents more, but that's not really a big deal.

Why would you buy stuff from iTunes? I usually buy individual songs that i can't need right now and that i can't find elsewhere. Also if i need an album right NOW, i can get it from iTunes. Amazon would probably take a couple of days.

Personally i think iTunes is pretty sweet. I just wish i there would be even more music on there.

SicMX

>> It has been said many times before. Buy a brand
>> new CD ($12) and burn it at the highest quality
>> you can stand. Take the same CD and sell it on
>> eBay for $6-$8. The result is you only end up
>> paying 1/3 the price of iTunes for a far superior
>> product.

And in doing so you commit copyright infringement, numbskull. Fair use allows you to make archival backups, which is what you are effectively doing when you rip a CD. When you sell that CD, the right to make copies disappears as if you never had it, so you should actually delete all your mp3s, etc. made from that CD. Doing otherwise is outside fair use.

-p-

psxndc

Then again, making the music sound better on your iPod or in iTunes wasn't the problem that Apple was trying to solve.

The challenge for Apple wasn't the small percentage of audiophiles - there's not a large enough market if that was the focus.

The challenge is that the majority of new cars (and aftermarket car stereos) have CD players with integrated MP3 players - either a memory card slot or the ability to read MP3 files off of a CD. This, in comparison, is a massive market.

Re-encoding 256-bit AAC into an MP3 file sounds significantly better (at least to my ears) in the high ranges than a 128-bit AAC file. Once there is a significant amount of DRM-Free music available on iTMS, I would expect a new button available in iTunes to "Burn MP3 CD" and to set a default to load external (non iPod) memory cards and music devices in MP3 ONLY, converting audio on the fly before processing.

SZ_Editor

Let me preface this by saying I've never heard a McIntosh, but I work in the field and the specs on it's DAC aren't too hot. They're decent, sure, but I'm sure your Parasounds stomp it in clocking. This is in no way due to any inherent fault in HDD technology though, it's all due to varying levels of quality in conversion. CD is a digital sampling format, and Red Book even contains an error-correcting spec. Those 1's and 0's are absolutely the same whether they are on the underside of a CD or they are stored magnetically on a hard drive. There is no delta. Where the differences come in are when we start converting that same information using different converters, clocked by different clocks. If you have access to a good dealer, do the following:

Separate the conversion from the source. Get a nice transport with a SPIDF, toslink, or AES out.

Do the same with the HDD: Use a computer and a mastering soundcard like an Apogee, RME, or hell even Digidesign. Again use an unconverted out like SPIDF/AES.

Run them into the *same* DAC. Use an Apogee DA16X or a Benchmark DAC1 or a Lavry. Run the DAC into the amplification of your choosing. They will sound exactly the same. The reason is because CD and HDD are both digital storage formats, and the digital information piping out of the laser or out of the HDD's read head are, literally, exactly the same. The differences you hear are due to differences in conversion. A dell ntoebook with some cheesy SPIDF out on the back will, given proper error correction in the SPIDF bus, sound exactly the same as the sickest CD transport with a digital out. This is the same reason why spending money on high end cables *before* DA conversion is folly. A 300 dollar monster HDMI cable *will* sound the same as some clunker from monoprice as long as there is error correction on either end, which there always is, because it's built into the spec.

anonymous

Vinyl is unambiguously a distro format. No one records straight to vinyl these days. Waaaay back with horns it was also a recording format, but that hasn't been the case since the rise of tape after the war.

My point isn't to say that CD is "better", but that vinyl is not inherently superior to sampling in general. Anyone that says a 33.5rpm on 200gm is superior to 24/96 is just being contrarian.

The upper limit of the sickest vinyl cutter head is going to be "around" 50khz. The upper sampling limit of 24/96 is 48khz. The difference is that the reproduction ability of a vinyl has non-constant degradation characteristics once you start getting above 20khz and below 400hz. This means that the higher (or lower) you go, the more difficult it is on the format for the cutter and the playback stylus. With sampling, the medium has the exact same ability to reproduce a 40khz tone as it does a 4hz tone.

It's odd to hear someone say that vinyl is better at producing extended highs than a CD, since vinyl's "home turf" is midrange. Vinyl was designed for midrange information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

Extremely low frequencies (god forbid stereo low frequency information) and extremely high frequencies are difficult for the format to reproduce. RIAA phono amplification was designed with a spec in mind: 20hz - 20khz. If that number looks familiar, it's because that is the general range of human hearing, and it's also what the CD spec was built on. 44.1khz sampling reproduces 2hz to 22.5khz. The RIAA EQ curve mandates that vinyls have to be cut with a preset EQ boost in the highs and a cut in the lows, then the reverse of that curve is applied in the amplifier on playback. This is no gentle sweep either; it's almost 40db from the top of the curve to the bottom. Seems like quite the workaround. Unfortunately it's necessary because of the physical limitations of scratching little nanometer-sized grooves into plastic. Read up here (this is by a pro-vinyl engineer, btw) on some more of these limitations:

http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm

I do not doubt that some of your vinyls sound better in your house than some of your equivalent CDs. For most audiophiles this is because they have spent their time and money into the vinyl playback and not the CD playback. It 's not surprising that the vinyl rig sounds better. The DAC in most DVD decks and CD turntables is pretty atrocious. It's comparable to hooking up a (gasp) belt drive turntable to you tricked out amplifier. Rip the CD, uncompressed to solid state or HDD, then play it back through a Benchmark Media DAC1, and it's going to sound pretty ridiculous. The low quality of the high end information you're hearing is most likely not a limitation of the medium, but of your converters. Shitty clocks on shitty converters will produce shitty transient detail and high-end smearing, harming separation. Your bad CD, however, will sound just the same after 100 plays of the music you love so much. The RIAA vinyl specification, on the other hand, has a built in statue of acceptable losses. Cutters and vinyl stock work under the *assumption* that high end information will be lost after certain amounts of plays: down to 20khz after the *first* play, 18khz after three plays, 17khz after five, etc. This is mitigated by high quality equipment and stock, but not resolved. You are, quite literally, harming your music every time you enjoy it. Not so with CDs.

There's a bigger, more noble point to sampling though, beyond all of it's inherent advantages over vinyl. I love music. I love making it, I love recording it, and I love listening to it. I am a recording engineer that specializes in recording young/poor bands on the cheap because I truly believe that local and economically disadvantaged bands have amazing music that needs a broader audience. Magnetic tape recording and vinyl distribution and playback are *directly* contrary to this mindset. Miniaturization is the key to letting more people listen to more music, as the Walkman, CD, and iPod have proven. There is no future in miniaturization of non-sampling technologies. Sampling is also the key to the recording revolution. There has been an explosion of local and independent music since the mid-90's because of one thing: recording is getting cheaper. This is possible because of sampling. Admittedly, some of those early digi masters sounded pretty raw. Fortunately, someone is always driving technology forward, and there no longer *needs* to be a compromise between digital and reproduction. The future of more people enjoying more music is digital, straight up.

anonymous

The editors at The Absolute Sound and Stereophile would agree with you. Well produced vinyl with a top notch player (Avid, VPI), tone arm, and cartridge will outperform CD.

davekaybsc

I had the opportunity to test CD v. WAV v. FLAC at a dealer on a McIntosh MS300 music server. The rest of the system was a pair of Wilson WATT/Puppy 7s and Krell electronics - intensely revealing. I couldn't detect any difference betwen WAV and FLAC, but hdd vs. CD wasn't even close.

The treble from the hdd sounded dull and recessed, and there was a certain "hardness" to female vocals that was rather unpleasant, but most importantly, the ability of the speakers to "disappear" and to fool you into thinking that the musicians are playing in the room with you was lost.

My Aerial 10Ts and Parasound gear aren't near as brutally honest as the Wilson\Krell combo, but I'm not giving up my CD player. I have yet to hear a music server that can match it.

davekaybsc

I can tell you from personal experience that a European record is pressed differently and with more fidelity than an American one (I have two copies of one Booomtown Rats record to prove it). So, vinyl is not 'just a distribution format' and quality even in vinyl is variable. CDs are cheaper to create, cheaper to ship, it's no wonder the labels forced the changed to CD.

Now, they will push for online downloading because the shipping costs are... You guessed it- $0!

rsquared

AliceKK

Why spin it at all? 44.1/16 CD audio is a digital format, and there's no need for a transport. Rip the WAV, losslessly and with no conversion, to your HDD then spend all that money you saved by not having a transport on higher and higher end DACs.

anonymous

A ) "For great voice quailty, put down your RAZR2 and drive over to your friend's place!" No shit, Sherlock.

B ) Way to name drop vinyl. I could never guess that you're a "trained musician". It's just a distribution format. Most of the vinyls you're going to buy from a modern artist were simply pressed from the digital masters. Way to toss a D/A in there that you have control over. If a label is eclectic enough to be pressing vinyl in the new millennium, chances are they aren't exactly a financial giant, and they're doing reproduction with some val-U company that probably has a shitty cutter anyways. Never mind all that though, because the gate fold sleeve says I've got archival-grade 200gram stock!

I'm all for higher grade distro formats. I would love to pay 2 bucks a track for the 24/96 stereo bounces of my favorite records. But vinyl? This is supposed to be Giz-fucking-modo, and you're supposed to believe in technology and progress. Who let the Luddite out?

anonymous

Discountanimedvd.com, you name it, they've got it, and you can buy an entire series for the price that FYE charges for a single DVD of 5 episodes.

@Manboy

Just about every high end music server, whether its ReQuest, Escient, McIntosh, etc. has support for flac. It's supposed to be "identical" but it isn't.

@Windhawk

Depends on the CD player that Red Book master is being played on. There's no way mp3, ogg, m4a, or wma can compete with an Esoteric spinning a disc.

davekaybsc

Mario

TuxRug

fragglepac

Suggesting that 5.1 is a better barometer than 2.0 for comparing music tells me that you don't know much about true high fidelity audio. Especially when the suggested audio file is 2.0 and not specifically encoded in high-def 5.1 channel like DVD-A or SACD formats. If you are conducting a listening test like this, it should be done with nothing other than 2.0. If the listener cannot test these files with a setup that is capable of reproducing audio signals relatively uncolored (remember, an audio system is only as good as the weakest link) it should be conducted with a good pair of cans like a Sennheiser HD580 or the like matched with a good headphone amp.

Nipponese

As strider_mt2k perceptively asked, where is the VBR option. It turns out that VBR is what makes 160 kbps sound so good, using the extra bandwidth when needed. Beyond 160 kbps we can't really hear the difference.

Maybe Apple is trying to split the difference by having 256 kbps CBR.

Windhawk

J3k

I used to hit the Off the Record on University pretty regularly, not the gay one in Hillcrest. I'd just ask what sounded good today. You can trust a recomendation like that, where Amazon seems to think I'd really like the latest Maroon 5, but no Costello to be seen... Wierd.

vince77

It has been said many times before. Buy a brand new CD ($12) and burn it at the highest quality you can stand. Take the same CD and sell it on eBay for $6-$8. The result is you only end up paying 1/3 the price of iTunes for a far superior product.

Wake up people cut out the middle man Steve Jobs!!!

kibets

Manboy

I'm old fashioned in one regard: I REALLY prefer to buy music at a record store.

I used to feel the same way. Until one night in 2003, I came home late from work, exhausted. Got ready for bed. Then I remembered, I was going to swing past Tower Records to pick up an album from one of my favorite groups that had been released that day. Damn, I forgot.

I wonder if it's on iTunes?

Ten minutes later I am LISTENING to the album on my iPod and thinking, "Wow, this is the future... I didn't have to get in the car... fight traffic... find a parking space... buy a piece a plastic that will end up in a landfill..."

In general, my experiences browsing and buying music in the iTunes store are MORE enjoyable. You can sample EVERYTHING in the store. You can pick-and-choose individual tracks. I've discovered an amazing amount of new music by browsing my favorite bands, and then looking at the top iMixes people have made that include those bands.

If I am feeling cheap, I can always find new podcasts for free. The number of video and audio podcasts is AMAZING.

Granted, the local Tower Records did have an awesome anime DVD section, and Ghost in the Shell hasn't made it to the iTunes Store yet.

The only thing I miss about browsing at Tower Records is browsing through vinyl LPs and coming across album art like this:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbu...

Doesn't have quite the same impact when it's the size of a postage stamp on your iPod. LOL

bunny_rabid

I, for one, am totally amped for this situation - the new tracks will be ever so slightly better on my nice headphones (let me take this moment to recommend Sennheiser 565s), I can buy the tracks for the same price, cause I like albums, I don't have to deal with this DRM crippleware and we all get to have a recording artists 10 years from now. I'm sorry, but ya'll who somehow think we can all steal music and people will still make good music have your heads in the sand. And, if you think those of us who follow the rules think you're cool for cheating, I hope you like it when people cut you in line, throw their trash in your park, buy up all the Wiis to resell them at markup...

gStar

One of the saddest days of my life was when Tower Records closed its doors. I used to love to peruse the too narrow isles of the Tower on Sports Arena here in San Diego, or take in the veritable freakshow at the Tower in Westwood (LA) when I was a kid. As a consumer I'd spend more, too. I'd go in for a specific disc and almost invariably leave with one or two more purchased on impulse. If I buy online now (I buy discs and rip, BTW, almost never download), it's only the disc I was looking to buy.

Buying music today just isn't same. EVERY online option is a sterile, weak experience in comparison. Sure, there are still some cool mom'n'pops out there, like Lou's or Off the Record here, but there'll never be another Tower and that's just a damn shame.

Brian B

For casual listening, I rip my CDs with LAME to 256 VBR mp3. For serious listening, there is no substitute for CD period. Not even flac.

davekaybsc

Let's just say word got out.

DaveExile

Okay, done now...

XtremeCamera

XtremeCamera

But then again, all my Smiths and Cure tunes sound just as whiny as ever no matter what the bit rate...

vince77

You may still be right about price, but you are forgetting the whole convenience thing, not to mention the vastly increased selection over a real store. As for Amazon, no instant gratification. Thats the reason I buy music online. I want to listen to the music now. Not in a few days. But I also want to play it anywhere I want. I like the convenience, and I am willing to pay a very small amount more for that.

moo083

MegaZone

Wait... I swear that was the way it was originally announced, but it is hardly ever talked about and now I see it's not mentioned in today's press release.

Did I hallucinate that?

itchytooth

Burning a CD and ripping it back can potentially degrade the audio further. So you could go from 128 bit DRM to slightly less than 128 bit DRM Free. A true audiophile will not hesitate to spend a buck or two more for the increased quality because a true audiophile will have the speaker hardware to make it worth their while.

What it comes down to is personal preference. I'm an audio nut. I can tell the difference between an audio CD and a high quality rip from that same CD. If burn and rip works for you, that's wonderful but some of us want the higher quality regardless of the markup.

It's like the difference in getting a VHS movie for $1.99 or the DVD version for $9.99.

bgplpshep

RiceBandit

strider_mt2k

Please dont lump all hispanic music into one category, like "Salsa", after all Rock is not the same as rap is not the same as pop is not the same as country music.

cduran02

But i dont know.... i mean look at this, i want to buy Korn: Take a look in the Mirror, i got it for 10.99. I rip it at ANY bit-rate i want, ANY format i want.. ANY NUMBER OF TIMES.

OR

I can buy a 9.99 iTunes Korn - Take a look in the mirror, but it has 13 tracks, so i gotta add 13*.3 which basically adds 4 dollars.. (assuming iTunes even offers Korn for EMI).. so i can get a 14 dollar CD which still has a USER-COPY embedded into it, OR i can get a 11 dollar CD that i can copy any number of times, and rip into any style.... Ill take the CD thankyou very much.

I dont know why people buy off iTunes.. I mean pay an extra dollar or 2 (Amazon.com is THE BEST for CDs, as well as a local Used retailer or Craigslist.org) and you get the CD artwork/lyrics, the case, and the physical CD, as well as ANY format, ANY bitrate, ANY number of times.
What happens if your Harddrive fails and you bought your 4,000 song collection all off iTunes... what do you do then? You cant just re-rip the CDs...

I dont think i will ever, ever consider downloading online. Just the other day i found 8 used CDs (on Craigslist) for 25 dollars... 25 dollars. And they werent shitty ones either, they were some good stuff. Used CDs, in my opinion, is THE best way to go, their prices average from 3-6 dollars a pop, sure you may have a scratch or 2, but with my experience a CD has to be pretty darn scratched up for it to be deemed "unreadable".

Mario

dambo29

Aubin

If you're doing the headphones test, you're probably not going to hear a difference.

domerdel