[ethank]

This is fantastic. Apple uses AAC partly because of the patent royalty (http://mp3licensing.com/) which they have to pay on every iPad/pod/etc sold, as well as because it is just a better format.

MP3 is a total racket held by Thompson Technicolor, on top of being a pretty crap format.

Hopefully this is a portends Apple offering lossless through ITMS on top of the 1080p rights they are hunting down right now.

[DarkShikari]

This is fantastic. Apple did AAC because of the patent royalty (http://mp3licensing.com/) which they have to pay on every iPad/pod/etc sold

Since when did Apple "do AAC"? AAC is a standardized format that makes up part of MPEG-4, contributed to by dozens of companies and organizations. The patent licensing is handled by Via Licensing, not Apple. AAC has patent licensing fees too; over a dollar per device (albeit with a very low cap, IIRC).

, as well as because it is just a better format.

MPEG-4 AAC was the successor to MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3), by the same organization, so this is no surprise.

ALAC was -- for many years -- a proprietary FLAC-alike. There was no real reason to use it except for compatibility with Apple devices, as the two use nearly identical compression methods and the incompatibility is purely gratuitous.

[ethank]

Sorry: USE aac.

AAC has no patent for streaming or distribution. When we did direct-to-consumer digital sales this is why I used this rather than Mp3, and ALAC for lossless over FLAC because of the support issue.

AAC does have a patent fee for codec usage (i.e., devices).

[djeikyb]

Nitpick: AAC (right now) has no patent fee for streaming or distribution. What's to stop them from levying such a fee in the future?

[ugh]

MP3 was great for its time. It’s not a crap format, there are merely better formats available today. They weren’t when MP3 came to the market. (Specifically AAC was developed as a successor to MP3.)

I’m also not sure whether this tells you anything. Apple started selling AAC encoded music at a time when no† music player could play it. Many mistakenly thought that AAC was some sort of proprietary Apple codec and it might as well have been.

Today more people than ever have an iOS device or an iPod. There is no need at all for Apple to play nice and make sure that others can also use the ALAC. Why should they?

Also: What’s the incentive for offering lossless music? No one† can tell the difference. Do you really think Apple will start catering to audiophiles? Because of the switch to flash memory space is limited, Apple’s current devices are not a good match for lossless music.

—

† Don’t be pedantic.

[ethank]

Lossless music - there is an audience for it, and it creates the ability to stratify prices, which the labels/rights-holders/distributors like. See the vinyl boom, hdtracks.com, http://www.becausesoundmatters.com/, etc.

So will Apple cater to audiophiles? No. Will they cater to margins? For damned sure they will if it serves them and those they entice to sign over content. Why would they switch to 1080P otherwise?

Also: given device sizes it would be nice to have raw uncompressed/lossless and I could downsample at will to suit specific devices/systems.

[splicer]

I only buy lossless music. I usually end up buying WAV/AIFF/FLAC direct from the artist, from their record label, or from Beatport. Once in a while, if I can't find something, I'll buy it on CD. Earlier today, I actually bought vinyl because I couldn't find a lossless digital version of this track anywhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwsUfEvmKwI

Lossy formats are useless to me since I can't remix them without it sounding like crap. I also feel I'm getting ripped-off when they charge near CD price for lossy tracks.

Also, 20 years from now I'm going to want to convert my music to whatever fancy lossy codec has supplanted MP3 and AAC. By archiving in an open lossless format like FLAC (or now ALAC), I can do this without introducing artifacts.

[sjwright]

> Earlier today, I actually bought vinyl because I couldn't find a lossless digital version of this track anywhere

Two things strike me as astonishing. The first is that anyone remains unconvinced that vinyl has any redeeming technical aspects whatsoever, other than the touchy-feely emotional stuff, and self-deception.

The second is that the music you referenced is so unashamedly digital, that the notion of purchasing it on a vinyl record is like buying a copy of Angry Birds printed on tree bark.

A 256 kbps AAC file (as sold by iTunes) is so very nearly transparent, only a small fraction of 1 percent of people would be able to identify the vanishingly minute differences. The difference is so small, it would be comprehensively outweighed by meaningful factors such as your choice of speakers, the shape of your room, and the presence of any ambient noise.

Whereas vinyl has crackle (unless you're playing a pristine copy in a dust-free environment), clicks, pops, rumble, wow distortion, and intentionally limited dynamic and tonal range. Fidelity progressively reduces as you move to the inner grooves, and high frequencies are literally scratched away as the stylus scrapes past -- every time you play a vinyl, it will sound poorer than the last. You can mitigate some of these problems, but generally at great effort or expense.

Of course, to make that music useful, you'll need to rip it back into your computer. You'd have to be mentally ill to believe that a [Lossless > AAC-256 > Lossless] conversion is more detrimental than [Lossless > equalisation > analogue mastering > lathe cutting > vinyl stamping > stylus scraping > pre-amplification > ADC > Lossless].

[cies]

one thing lossy formats do really bad at: speeding it up and down. (because they remove 'unhearable' sound artifacts -- that become hearable at different speeds)

big slowdowns also sound 'ugly' with lossless formats (a 44kHz sampled track at half the speed is only 22kHz).

but who plays a track at halfspeed..? :)

i dont want to make a case for vinyl -- sjwright has given a nice overview of arguments against it, that i can all underline.

but there is one thing that a physical soundwave, pressed in a disc of vinyl, never needs to do: anti-aliassing. but since the tracks usually get delivered digitally to the vinyl-press; it is the vinyl press that does the anti-aliassing for you :)

[sjwright]

There's nothing the vinyl pressing process can do to a digital sound source that can't be modelled in a purely digital environment.

[polshaw]

> Digital music is technically superior to bumps on a plastic disc

What you completely failed to realise, is that technical superiority is not the only factor as to how music sounds.

CD mastering these days is almost invariably awful. The real advantage to vinyl (which comes partly because it is a niche format, and partly because of how it is made) is that it has better mastering. This is not subtle on anything better than PC speakers.

[sjwright]

> What you completely failed to realise

...is that you're going to invent quotes? Nice.

> [Vinyl] has better mastering

A common myth -- google it. For music produced in the past decade, it's exceptionally rare for a vinyl mastering to be superior to the 16/44.1 digital release. Of course there's always exceptions to prove the rule, but the rule is definitely not as you assert.

> partly because of how it is made

Because of how it is made, a vinyl release is often the same master as the CD but with an additional pass through a multi-band limiter. This unquestionably degrades the quality of the vinyl master, and is done to stop the cutting head coils from literally burning up.

[ugh]

I'm fairly certain that devices in twenty or fifty years will still be able to play MP3. It's too pervasive and supporting it is too easy for it to disappear just like that. It might not be supported in hardware (like it is today in many devices to save battery life) but there will be plenty of software.

You tend to not be able to use formats because hardly anyone used them in the past. MP3 is too popular for that to happen. (As is JPEG, PDF and probably AAC.)

[Duff]

The other factor is that the patents that serve as a disadvantage for MP3 will be expiring sometime around 2015-2018.

[Samuel_Michon]

Do you really think you could hear the difference between 256kbps AAC and Lossless? Even if your hearing is way above average, most audio players and earphones aren't that good.

(Also, given the less-than-subtle music you linked to, I doubt that it really matters.)

[splicer]

No, I can't; and I wasn't claiming that I can. However, as I stated, if I use an MP3 or AAC in a remix, then compress my remix using a lossy codec like AAC or MP3, the result will sound like crap. It's similar to working with JPEGs in Photoshop (rather than RAW), then trying to re-compress to JPEG: you usually get artifacts.

I've been playing classic violin since the age of 3, and I'm very sensitive to details. Just because you don't find a particular genre of music "subtle" doesn't it's not susceptible to the compression artifacts I'm talking about.

[sjwright]

> if I use an MP3 or AAC in a remix, then compress my remix using a lossy codec like AAC or MP3, the result will sound like crap

Or far more likely, it won't sound like crap.

> trying to re-compress to JPEG: you usually get artifacts.

This argument is akin to suggesting that a very very very minimally JPEG compressed screenshot of a website is inferior to plonking a film camera in front of your LCD and exposing a frame. After all, big analogue artefacts don't matter nearly as much.

The reality is, AAC at 256kbps is such a light touch that it could probably survive four or five rounds of offset re-encoding before the artefacts would compound meaningfully.

[prodigal_erik]

Codecs like AAC apply psychoacoustic rules that were only correct for the overall piece being encoded, not samples taken from it. If a song has two overlapping sounds and the human ear physically can't hear both, a lossy codec looks for that and conserves space by completely omitting the sound that was masked, leaving you with no way to recover it if your postprocessing takes away the sound that had been masking it. A lossless codec preserves the sounds you might be able to hear after sampling or remixing, though of course it takes more space to do that.

[nitrogen]

My guess is that a lot of the psychoacoustic models used by lossy codecs aren't tuned for electronic music. The resonant distortion on the bassline of the linked track, for example, might sound different in the original. I have one song in which I can tell a difference for sure: Who Said by Planet Funk, about 1:30 in, has a rising modulated treble sound that sounds awful in 320kbit MP3 compared to the original.

[astrange]

Psychoacoustic models are very good, but MP3 has unavoidable coding weaknesses. Use a modern audio codec and you won't have this problem nearly as much.

[buro9]

I can.

It depends on how well you know the album, what the music is.

Try Paper Tiger by Beck off of Sea Change... strings and bass at the same time is challenging to lossy compression.

Try Page One by Charlatans off of Between 10th and 11th... same problem.

I don't use an iPod for that reason. I have an external sound card and use Fidelia on my Mac for that reason. I own good headphones for that reason.

When you listen to music you think you know and your heart skips a beat as you hear something new and it moves you... why compromise ever again?

Isn't this the superlative experience that Apple used to deliver? The ability to make you experience something that moves you. Music really can, but when you compress you deaden it, you kill the sound stage, some of the noise is lost.

Listen to a compressed Double Dutch by Malcolm McLaren the skips sound like a synth, listen to the lossless on a capable system and you can hear the distinctiveness of every rotation and hit of the rope on the floor. The latter puts you there, you picture it more.

Sound is even more important than vision. We are all rushing to 1080p and hopefully better, but sound is what fires the imagination more. Film directors have long known this, music producers have long known this... sound is the thing to get right, and when it's right, you fall in love every time you hear the music.

If you're buying any music equipment, find a good retailer and do a blind test of the equipment. I would be very surprised if most consumers would pick compressed audio and poor equipment... more likely they will settle for the point at which they no longer perceive a noticeable difference, but that point is after you've discovered lossless.

The main reason compression is accepted is that on crappy computer speakers, when listening on headphones whilst you have high background noise (commuting)... you could not hear the difference. Everywhere else, the difference is almost black and white, chalk and cheese.

[sjwright]

Try doing a double-blind ABX test and then you can discuss your ability to do what has flummoxed all but the most insanely acute 'golden ears'.

[AndyKelley]

I can... easily. And it matters to me. My hearing is average, and I have HD280Pro Seinheisers which are pretty standard headphones. Maybe it has something to do with the music genre that I like - techno, trance, dubstep, elecronic, etc. This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio and I can tell when the sound isn't reconstructed well upon playback.

I'd love to do a blind hearing test if you can set one up - but you have to do it with a song that I enjoy. I suppose I could even set one up myself as a study. It would be pretty interesting.

[sjwright]

> This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio

And football is the sport of delicately manoeuvring your opponent onto the grass.

And heroin is a drug that delicately shifts your brain chemistry.

And a chainsaw delicately tickles tree trunks.

[mixmastamyk]

In 2011, it doesn't matter much any more, audio is not very big. In 1996, I guess it made sense. For the few cents of extra space you get the peace of mind of perfect copies, the ability duplicate, remix, and reencode ad infinitum.

Notice you won't see the visual effects industry using JPG's to build their shots ... no, they use very high resolution 4k ~48-bit color depth files, that are then combined and then scaled down in resolution/color to theater/blu-ray output. This maintains the highest quality throughout.

You could also think of it the same way as free software (although not the perfect metaphor). Software may pick up compatibility bugs over the years. You'll want the community to have the ability to make fixes or risk losing it.

All these are examples of "keeping your options open," which people value. Now that the cost is not prohibitive and only getting lower there's not much reason not to.

[matwood]

Do you really think you could hear the difference between 256kbps AAC and Lossless?

All the people who claim to be audiophiles and think that thousand dollar wooden knobs make their music sound more rich certainly do.

[ugh]

Sure it might happen, but it would also confuse consumers. That’s a huge negative point to me. I also don’t see the connection to this.

[bluedanieru]

>Lossless music - there is an audience for it, and it creates the ability to stratify prices, which the labels/rights-holders/distributors like.

Yeah, this kind of thinking is pervasive in the music industry which is why I make sure they never get any of my money. You're always paying for the licensing, not the delivery method (so they don't need to replace your CD at cost), unless they can make a buck by making you pay for that, in which case you are no longer paying for the license, but rather the delivery method.

As such I don't even know what the fuck I'd be paying for if I bought a song on iTunes or whatever else.

[savoytruffle]

ALAC is used in AirPlay streaming (it was first announced along with the AirPort Express in mid 2004). This might be a plan to make AirPlay audio streaming more ubiquitous.

[jsz0]

The nice thing about ALAC with AirPlay is it does not transcode to a compressed format for streaming.

[altrego99]

> Why should they?

Because others already have FLAC?

Isn't it similar to the kid offering to share his bicycle, to his neighbor, with the hope of friendship, knowing fully well that it will do no real benefit since his neighbor already has an equally good machine?

[yuhong]

"Apple started selling AAC encoded music at a time when no† music player could play it"

Not that it mattered at the time as they were DRMed anyway.

[ootachi]

This is incorrect. In the past, Apple has tended to prefer patented formats, because they are the holders of many of these patents and so increasing their use benefits them. If Apple had preferred patent-free formats at the time of the iPod, they would have chosen Vorbis, which has an open royalty-free encoder that is superior to QuickTime's rather poor AAC encoder.

Since the Apache license grants a patent license, this development regarding Apple Lossless would seem to be a reversal of their previous stances. I'm glad to see it.

Edit: That said, I agree with Dark Shikari that it would have been better had Apple Lossless never existed and if they had just used FLAC instead.

[hexley]

QuickTime has a poor AAC encoder? I don't think you'll find anyone credible who seriously believes that.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think it used to be just okay, now I believe it's one of the best.

http://listening-tests.hydrogenaudio.org/igorc/aac-96-a/resu...

Maybe he was getting confused with Quicktime's rubbish H.264 encoder (or the low quality of the open source AAC encoder)?

[ootachi]

Yeah, I was confused with the H.264 encoder (and the MP3 encoder). My mistake.

[rsynnott]

> If Apple had preferred patent-free formats at the time of the iPod, they would have chosen Vorbis, which has an open royalty-free encoder

That would have been a good trick, given that the very first release of Vorbis was only a year before the iPod hit the market.

[colanderman]

This article is about ALAC (a lossless codec developed by Apple), not AAC (a lossy codec developed by the ISO and used by Apple).

[pork]

MP3 may be a crap format, but it's the VHS of the digital world.

[klodolph]

It's the DVD of the audio world, ten years from now. It's supported everywhere. The quality is good enough, but we have better.