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Apple Lossless in the iTunes Store


CSMatt
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I'm quite honestly not fond of not being able to select bitrates for my purchased songs and am even more annoyed that Apple did not compress the audio as well as they could have (an 128kbs AAC file form the iTunes Store sounds worse than a 128kbs MP3 version of the same song from its CD). This isn't too much of a problem when I listen to my songs on headphones or computer speakers, because the compressions for both MP3 and MP4 were designed with them in mind, but the sound is just terrible when played in my car stereo or a decent speaker system. The bottom line; I want to see Lossless tracks in the iTunes Store, even if just for the music (a lossless video MP4 codec probably doesn’t exist anyway). Yes, the size would be reasonably large, but if Apple has enough room for movies on their servers they can spare enough room for Lossless tracks. Its not like bandwidth is an issue either; most people probably use the Store on broadband connections anyway, and the lossy tracks can still reside in the Store for those who don't want to sacrifice space.

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gotta agree with you

 

aac is an inferior standard when it comes to burning cds for listening on mid to high end systems... hell, even on my bose triports listening to my ipod aac tracks sound hollow

 

i have all my cds ripped in lossless.. it's a pain in the ass to convert them to aac or mp3 to put on my ipod (lossless on ipod murders battery time)

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i want to rip my songs in lossless, but i dont think i have either the time to go backand rip everything again. i dont even have the cds for most, i used rhapsody back awhile ago and it made a decent quality wma. its not lossless. i cant get them again. i decided on ripping in high quality mp3, they are upwards of 10mb per file.

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At the very least, Apple should take a lesson from the LAME developers and produce a superior AAC encoder for its iTunes Store and iTunes' built-in encoder for CDs. AAC audio, at least from a technicial standpoint, has a lot of potential when compared to the MP3 format, but it is up to the codec manufactors to produce a worthwile encoder in order to take advantage of this potential.

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I thought AAC as implemented in iTunes are actually not bad, google for blind listening tests, I saw a few tests on Hydrogenaudio that shows AAC to be comparable to the current LAME and Ogg encoder, and Apple's AAC encoder is better than Nero's.

 

The only issue with ITMS is that they only sell 128kbps AAC, which is not really good (it's still better than 128kbps mp3, but not much better), I think even if they up the bitrate to above at least 192kbps or so it would make a big difference in quality. At higher bitrates AAC, like LAME or ogg can archive transparency. For them to sell lossless, 1) the bandwidth cost would increase significantly, and customers would get tired of waiting, 2) they will need to make new deals with the record labels, possible increase in price to be comparable with actual CD?

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