[lwells]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wnmnkh /img/forum/go_quote.gif 3.) I am already getting buried by a pile of CDs already....

Why don't you rip them lossless? 1.5TB HDD's have come down to 100$.

 

[Azathoth]

The Relapse.com webstore does offer FLAC downloads of some albums for sale. Last I checked Baroness - Blue Record was featured.

 

[SgtPepper]

Sadly, I don't see this ever happening...ever. Fine by me, I'd take a CD any day, especially considering how cheap you can get them off Amazon and the like.

 

[necropimp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wnmnkh /img/forum/go_quote.gif Well, I think I stick to that russian site for a while, then.

the artists see $0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000 from those russian sites

 

[mcmurray]

Quote:

Originally Posted by rawrster /img/forum/go_quote.gif its quite simple as others above me have mentioned. the demand for it is low. theres no point to increase the bandwidth, server costs, etc if the majority which is probably high 90% could care less if its 128kbps or not. It would be great to have a choice of lossy and lossless tracks to choose from but I highly doubt that will happen anytime soon. Although it's not as convenient and easy as downloading buying CDs for cheap from amazon, half.com, etc isn't too bad either. It may be time consuming at first but at the end its worth it and if you ever happen to have a hard drive crash you got the physical CD to back it up.

The demand is currently low yes, but if Apple released Apple Lossless (or ALAC in a different name) in their music store and got the marketing team to talk it up and create a buzz, the general public would absolutely lap it up. Nothing to do with quality, they'd lap it up because the marketing team told them to. We'd get a lossless store, Apple would have a monopoly on high quality audio, win-win situation.

As ipods keep getting bigger I could totally see this happening.

 

[drclaw]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcmurray /img/forum/go_quote.gif The demand is currently low yes, but if Apple released Apple Lossless (or ALAC in a different name) in their music store and got the marketing team to talk it up and create a buzz, the general public would absolutely lap it up. Nothing to do with quality, they'd lap it up because the marketing team told them to. We'd get a lossless store, Apple would have a monopoly on high quality audio, win-win situation. As ipods keep getting bigger I could totally see this happening.

That's a great idea! Espically if they call it "HD Audio" or something similar, instead of ALAC. The general public would lap it up. Then they could sell "HD iPod's" and make a killing.

 

[SirDrexl]

Unfortunately, the problem with iPods getting bigger is that people are filling them up with video instead.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

A major problem that any store selling lossless audio would have to address is the multitude of lossless formats. There is no universal lossless format that will work seamlessly on all platforms and all media players. You'd have to sell ALAC for the Apple people, WMA Lossless for the Microsoft people, FLAC for the people who know better, and CUE files with WAV for the nuts.

With lossy you can get away with just selling MP3. Everything works with MP3. It just works.

On the consumer side it is difficult to deal with lossless files. If you standardize on FLAC and then get an iPod you are up against a wall. Managing an audio library full of different formats is difficult because most media software doesn't do it very well. As soon as you have to start keeping two or more copies of a lossless file just to maintain compatibility with various media players and portables you have lost the compression benefit of lossless compression.

One other thing I don't like about buying lossless (or lossy) digital files is that there is no used market. There is no way to sell or buy used digital files. If a label decides to stop selling a particular digital download there is no way to hit the used market to buy it. If you own $3000 worth of digital downloads there is no way to turn any of that "investment" into cash. The money is sunk.

One thing I don't like about physical CD sales is the artificial scarcity that happens when a CD is no longer published. That doesn't need to be. Hunting around for a particular version of a CD can be a PITA and the prices can be high.

 

[Juaquin]

Apple actually uses 256kbps AAC, ever since they switched off their DRM (essentially making every track an iTunes Plus track). I still don't buy my music there, but it's at least above-average quality and certainly listenable with mid-range gear.

Personally I use a Zune subscription for everyday listening. I have my favorite CDs ripped to FLAC for those times when I really want to listen to something high quality.

 

[SirDrexl]

Right, but the others sell MP3, which will work on any hardware. That's the big issue - Apple can sell Apple Lossless, but the others would have to sell FLAC or something else, and those non-Apple files wouldn't work on the market-leading iPod.

If you ask me, the solution to this is for Apple to just support FLAC on the iPod. They can still sell ALAC on iTunes, and the others can sell FLAC, and everything will work on the iPod. But, they probably won't do that since they want their own codec to be more popular.

They didn't handle lossy that way because MP3 was just too ubiquitous for them not to support, and AAC isn't their own format anyway (it's just the one they happened to choose for the store).

 

[pj_rage]

The problem as I see it is the current capacity of portable players. People aren't interested in filling up their ipods/etc literally 10x faster for a difference they cannot hear with their equipment, or probably at all since they have no idea what they would be looking for.

When the smallest players available evolve to be on the order of 32-64gb or so, we'll see the transition to some lossless codec standard. Itunes will drive the market towards lossless with ALAC of course, and the rest of the market will hopefully agree on their own.

 

[Necrolic]

To be perfectly honest, there is not enough difference between FLAC and 320kbps for it to be worth the stores' while to host the additional size of FLAC.

Millisong.com offers 320kbps MP3s, and I've extensively compared songs I know very well between 320kbps and FLAC, and I can VERY rarely hear a difference.

 

[krmathis]

Two alternatives would be nice.
* Lossy encoded files for the masses, like right now.
* Lossless encoded files for the minorities, like some of us.

I fully understand that they may need to charge a little bit more for the additional bandwidth, storage space, and such. But still keep it reasonable in relative to audio CDs.

 

[mcmurray]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SirDrexl /img/forum/go_quote.gif Right, but the others sell MP3, which will work on any hardware. That's the big issue - Apple can sell Apple Lossless, but the others would have to sell FLAC or something else, and those non-Apple files wouldn't work on the market-leading iPod.

Yes they would. One can easily convert FLAC to ALAC to FLAC to ALAC to WAV to FLAC ad nauseum.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Necrolic /img/forum/go_quote.gif To be perfectly honest, there is not enough difference between FLAC and 320kbps for it to be worth the stores' while to host the additional size of FLAC.

As storage devices continue to grow in size, this won't be an issue.

In the old days we used to use 8 bit text files to save space. Now this practice is laughed at.

 

[SirDrexl]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcmurray /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yes they would. One can easily convert FLAC to ALAC to FLAC to ALAC to WAV to FLAC ad nauseum.

I think you're overestimating the technical knowledge of the average person though. Sure, it's easy for us, but many people won't know how to do the conversion, especially in a way that preserves the tags. The files have to be sold in a form that's ready to play immediately and works on their devices without any alteration or fuss.

That's why iTunes (the program) is made the way it is - it's meant to be easy to use for novices.