Neil Young Archives

neilyoungarchives.com

37 points·Tomte··6 comments

I love this. Such a perfect web presentation for a man who has both experimented with cutting-edge technology (e.g. drum machine, vocoder and synclavier in 1981, the ill-fated Pono player) and been a near-luddite in his approach to digital music. Skeumorphism is due for its return!

Probably everyone reading HN in the last 8 years has seen the excellent video by Monty / xiph.org specifically addressing Neil Young and sample rates/bit rates (for delivery, 44.1kHz/16-bit is really truly all you need), but one thing very appreciated with this website’s audio streaming is the option of uncompressed audio, which is much more significant than any high-sample-rate file would be. And they even have a 320kbps fallback! Finally even Neil Young can see the benefit of being 12x more data efficient for 99.98% of the perceived quality.

Whats the benefit? --With todays bandwidth and storage prices, do we really need to compress audio for delivery over the net?

If you are on a cell phone or a cellular hot spot, data caps are still a thing. I pay $10/GB for my hotspot bandwidth ($5/GB when it is on sale).

40 minutes of streaming music at 4 Mbps is 1.2GB, so up to $12 for me.

Comcast has a cap on my cable modem. I keep my music files local so I don't need to pull them from the internet.

SoundCloud is barely scraping by on some low bitrate streams.

Maybe the user can afford it, but the streaming company has margins to keep.

Holy skeuomorphism, Batman!

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