Originally posted by maczrool
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For essentially full price as compared to CDs, you are giving up quite a bit in my opinion. |
Several people just pointed out that it's not essentially full prices as compared to CDs. $9.99 vs. $18 ("full price" for a CD). So it's half the price as compared to CDs when you buy as an album. Sure, you can get CDs on sale for $13, and if you want the entire CD, maybe that's a better buy for you personally. But, again, most people don't buy entire albums. The great thing about iTS is that I can buy the only song I want off an album for $.99 and save myself $12.
As for sound quality, I listen to MP3s/AACs on my portable players, and on my computer. In these two environments, AAC 128 sounds great. Even when I rip at home, I use AAC 160 and nothing more.
The thing that people don't seem to get is that NONE of the legitimate music services for downloading music are aimed at "audiophiles" -- they're aimed at the average consumer, for whom 128k AAC is great sound quality. Even using 160k AAC would increase the costs of running the iMS significantly. People are already complaining about $.99 being "too expensive," yet they want Apple, in this case, to increase their costs in order to provide "better sounding" AACs. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so the saying goes.
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The iTunes AACs sound okay, but what if you want to play them on an incompatible device? |
The iTunes Music Store was designed to sell iPods. It's really that simple
So, yeah, if you have a Nomad player, you're going to have to convert the AACs to MP3 until the other players support AAC (which is, by the way, a standard).