freeform goodness

I’m late to the party when it comes to talking about Apple’s new music initiatives, I suppose. I’ll try to avoid well-trod ground and add a few fresh (hah) observations.

• New iPods: everyone knew these were coming, of course. They seem like an (incremental) improvement — even slimmer form-factor, higher capacities, etc. I would probably stand pat, but my little 5-gigger is looking long in the tooth compared to these 15 and 30-gig monsters so maybe now is the time to move. The docking station is an obvious win, and the USB2 support should make PC folk happy.
• iTunes 4: the already superb app improves in a lot of small ways and a few big ones. Most heartening is that, for all the smoke some vendors blow about web services, Apple has been at the top of the heap as far as making them work in very real ways in their mainline applications. The completely fluid integration of Apple’s music store into iTunes is a perfect example. There are the usual interface niggles, but there are people far more qualified than me to take those on.
  • Library sharing: initially, many expected the library sharing features would apply to LANs only, but clearly, they work across teh Intarweb as well.
  • Digital “Rights” Management: I really hate DRM. My previous experiences with it, pertaining to music, have been pretty horrible. The DRM Apple has implemented seems to be fairly unobtrusive, but time will tell.
  • MPEG4 AAC: Big ups. I generally encdode everything w/ LAME using alt-preset standard (~192kbps VBR), which is perfectly spiffy to my concert and club-wounded hearing. I’ve tried 128k and 160k AAC files, and the 160’s sound at least as good and encode in about a third of the time on my box. Win win. That said, MP3 will remain my primary format, at least for awhile, because of the massive amount of tools available for working with MP3 files, and the fact that Live365 compatability is ultimately the dealmaker/dealbreaker with me with any new format. If Live365 can deliver versions of its “Studio” apps that work with AAC, I’ll be all over them.
  • Artwork/album covers: It seems like the actual picture data is embedded into the MP3/AAC files. Yes, this is probably wasteful of a few kilobytes per file, but it also is probably pretty bulletproof. Most of the other options (e.g. embedding references to external image files, etc.) are potentially more trouble than they’re worth (what happens when relative references break or cross filesystem lines, etc.) Hard drive space is cheap these days, right?
• The Store: Undoubtedly the biggest news of the day was the new music store. I’d heard all sorts of rumors — some early reports were talking about songs at 25 cents per track, which would have obviously been stupendous. 99 cents is something I can work with. I do have some concerns, though.
  1. Selection: I’m not going to be too critical here, as they’ve stated up front that they are still adding music to the service. I can only expect that the available catalogue will both broaden and deepen as time goes on. Still there are some things that definitely need attention:
     1. More labels: The “Big Five” labels were obviously the most important to sign for mass appeal to the service, but a beefy selection of indie labels will be crucially important when it comes to attracting serious record buyers (kooks like me who buy hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of music per year). Minimally, the “major indies” like Matador, Warp, Caroline Distribution, etc. need to be included, not to mention pacesetters like Thrill Jockey, Sympathy For The Record Industry, Morr Music, etc.
     2. Catalog ‘Breadth’: Many artists with major label affiliations are not present in the store at all. I went searching for old Human League and Midnight Oil records, for example, and found nothing, and these are bands that had #1 singles on majors! I imagine this will only get better, though.
     3. Catalog ‘Depth’: Many artists with large catalogs (e.g. Kraftwerk, OMD) are represented by skinny greatest hits compilations or sketchy “partial albums”. One of the great promises of electronic distribution was that it would allow consumers access to out-of-print recordings and scarce recordings, since no physical stock would have to be maintained in inventory by retailers. Please open the vaults!
  2. Focus: I suppose they were responding to the oft-heard (but to my mind disingenuous) call of the file-sharer: “How many times have you bought an album only to find there was only one good song” (presumably the radio-saturated “hit single” - ugh, but that’s another rant…), but the initial iteration of the store seems to be unnaturally tilted towards the person who wants to cherry-pick songs from album and much less so towards the more sophisticated [ OK, it’s a presumptuous value judgement, but this is my blog and I can make them here :-P ] consumer of albums as complete artistic statements. There are far too many “partial albums” and greatest hits comps, and not enough complete artist catalogs for my taste. Hopefully this tilt will equalize somewhat as time goes on. Along these lines, it might be cool for Apple to partner with the All-Music Guide (and Downbeat and Trouser Press and Urb, Pitchfork Media etc.) to present artist profiles, etc., in the context of the store.

:: Dave Walker 01:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

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