Steve Jobs' Open Letter ... succeeded? - by Navyhacker006
flexbuster on 2/6/2007 at 00:29
Sorry, but I for one would rather not have any of my personal information inexorably embedded into my music files. Just seems kind of creepy, from a privacy-paranoia point of view.
David on 2/6/2007 at 08:50
Quote Posted by flexbuster
By the way, I'm pretty sure these non-DRM songs are something like $1.30. If that's true, an album of ten songs purchased this way costs 13 bucks. This is barely less than what you would pay in a store for the actual CD, new, and instead you're just getting individual tracks with no case, physical CD, liner notes, artwork, or anything else, and they're still encoded using lossy compression.
Album prices have not changed - only individual songs.
Matthew on 2/6/2007 at 12:10
Quote Posted by flexbuster
Sorry, but I for one would rather not have any of my personal information inexorably embedded into my music files. Just seems kind of creepy, from a privacy-paranoia point of view.
A name and an email address? Hardly a huge data harvest. Besides, I'd be the only one seeing them in my music files.
Martek on 3/6/2007 at 02:10
Quote Posted by flexbuster
Sorry, but I for one would rather not have any of my personal information inexorably embedded into my music files. Just seems kind of creepy, from a privacy-paranoia point of view.
I kinda feel the same way.
It isn't so much that they imbeded "identifier" info; it's the form that it takes - a person's email.
If was say, some encoded number not identifiable except to Apple, then it would not be as bad. That would be a better way for them to go - embed something encoded; and not an email address.
Still, I may buy an album or two; the prices aren't too bad for full albums and some are on sale.
Yet I'd rather have MP3's and so still pretty much plan on seeing what Amazon has cooking.
flexbuster on 4/6/2007 at 21:54
I'm still wondering why you'd rather have MP3s than a more high-quality format that pretty much every decent player can use anyway.
Aerothorn on 4/6/2007 at 23:12
The latest issue of PC Magazine had a column on this that I agree with.
Basic gist is that the record companies make a ton of money off special editions/bonus tracks/etc. This whole "pay us more money for a song you already bought" thing is just another scam. You should be able to freely upgrade, and the lack of DRM and higher bitrate in no way justifies a 30% price increase.
You have to get Apple's PR department credit for spinning this price-gouging into something that's beneficial for consumers.
EZ-52 on 5/6/2007 at 19:33
The way i see it is why bother paying extra (when us in the UK pay more anyway) to get a DRM free track, when you can buy the normal tracks, burn to a CD, which has no copy protection, then rip the tracks to the format you want.
Fair enough, its a bit of effort just to get a few drm free tracks, but if you want to do it the legal way and get it in the format you want without any embeded information or copy protection, its the way to do it.
When you look at it that way, what is the point in these drm free tracks in the first place, when the iTunes software itself provides a way to get around it? :confused:
flexbuster on 5/6/2007 at 21:38
Quote Posted by EZ-52
The way i see it is why bother paying extra (when us in the UK pay more anyway) to get a DRM free track, when you can buy the normal tracks, burn to a CD, which has no copy protection, then rip the tracks to the format you want.
Erm.
Lossy encoding -> CD -> Other lossy encoding = Worse quality than either the original, or the end format if done straight from a CD-quality audio file (or CD audio itself).
Say you have an AAC file. This isn't CD quality. Then you burn it to a CD. It's still the same quality. Then you rip it and encode it in MP3 (or any other lossy format) - the quality loss of the AAC encoding AND the MP3 (or whatever) encoding are going to basically compound and give you more compression artifacts and other data/quality loss than either alone.
And that's why you don't do that.
Martek on 6/6/2007 at 01:34
Quote Posted by flexbuster
I'm still wondering why you'd rather have MP3s than a more high-quality format that pretty much every decent player can use anyway.
Because I have a (possibly misguided) belief that MP3's are way more "universally" supported by the players of the world (including stand-alone players like the iPod, PC software players, and various other players incorporated into other devices like my home theater DVD player), as well as having way more utilities available for them, from file management to ID tag editors, etc.
I may be wrong on the above, but that's my reason and I'll stick with it until shown otherwise. :thumb:
Martek
flexbuster on 7/6/2007 at 02:39
Er, most things should play AAC by now.
A DVD player certainly should, since AAC is what's USED on DVDs to compress the audio. No reason why iPods wouldn't, since that's what their music store does, and most any software player should as well.
Not even sure what you mean by "file management". AAC tagging is just as easy as with MP3 or any other decent format, and should be edited just as easily in whatever you use, provided you use something that isn't made out of death.
It would probably do you some good to actually look these things up when you decide what your opinion is about something, rather than waiting to be "shown otherwise" by someone who does. Just saying.
