Thursday, April 29, 2004


Good To Know I'm Right, Occasionally


iTunes 4.5 was released yesterday, and I’ll defer to Sven-S. Porst’s breakdown of the good and the bad, since he’s done a convincingly thorough job of looking at the details. One thing he didn’t mention, though, is that the AAC encoder has apparently been updated.

One feature he wasn’t able to try out, being in a non-iTMS nation, was the new “free song” feature. Apparently there will be one new free promo song per week going forward. For this current week, as a “birthday celebration”, they’re giving away one free song per day. Yesterday’s song was from the Foo Fighters, and it was pleasant enough, though I can’t remember a single thing about it now that it’s over. Today’s song is from Avril Lavigne, and, ye gods, it is awful. I could spend aeons telling you why, starting with her infinitely irritating nasal whine and progressing on through the sub-diary-entry lyrics, but that’s ultimately beside the point. And no, I don’t care how old she is. Alex Chilton was even younger when “the Letter” hit, so deal. Sometimes it’s just good to know you’ve been ignoring a musician for all the right reasons.


:: Dave Walker 11:06 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Comments:

Mike wrote:

Title: AAC format

Date:

Response:
Why would you switch to the AAC format (from MP3)? Doesn't this mean that we will eventually have to pay for the digital version of the CD's that we've burned to MP3 format?
d.w. wrote:

Title:

Date:

Response:

Mike — I don’t understand what you mean about having to pay. As far as why I’m ripping most things as AAC these days, there are two reasons:

  1. The iTunes AAC encoder is, currently, the one that’s best optimized for my hardware. Even with error correction turned on, I routinely get encoding speeds as high as 22x. In contrast, LAME (in APS mode) encodes at about 6x speed. If you extrapolate this over hundreds of discs, it really adds up.
  2. Equivalent quality at lower bitrates. This saves disk space, both on my local machine and the iPod.



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