The Man Who Broke the Music Business
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It's an internet-TV show the follows a group (not a documentary, it's all staged) that releases movies. The first "season" was very good and I highly recommend it. The second has yet to really interest me. I watched a few episodes but it's different from the first.
I still buy lots of music, since I prefer to own my collection and don't want to rely on a streaming service. However these days I find myself to be much quicker to hit the skip button and enjoying a new album is more often than not a short lived pleasure. The downside of modern conveniences I guess.
I couldn't figure out why the cops never came and shut them down. Same goes for the gas stations or convenience stores that sold obviously bootlegged movies for $3 on the check-out counter.
Now I want to read an article on Adil R. Cassim, the guy behind that whole ring.
I'd imagine the bootleg movie selling would be similar. The police don't really care until someone above them puts out the order to deal with it.
At one Dutch internet marketplace, you still see people selling Garmin maps (topos) which are clearly copies. They even have the gut to say 'one topo for 25 Euro, two topos for 40 Euro'. Nobody seems to care.
As someone who buys them legally, I am quite appalled these businesses (since the people who purchase them legally are paying higher prices to compensate the profits of these crooks).
He shouldn't have taken the deal, I guess he is the only one who went to prison, not even the guy he testified against went to jail.
The thing is, MP3 _isn't_ “just as good”. A rendering in lossless compression from a CD still sounds different than a 320 kBPS MP3. Which is why I just can't get over the iTunesStore selling sound in 256 kBPS. Much too bad. Amazon does 320 kBPS, but it's still not good enough.
* http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=70598
* http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=100256&...
All lossy codecs have some problem samples and cranking up the bitrate isn't a guarantee of transparency. Newer codecs tend to do better than MP3, and at lower bitrates. The only point in lossy encoding is to save space, so it makes sense to do it as efficiently as possible, and considering that, 320 CBR is actually the worst of both worlds because it always wastes space, and is often overkill anyway.
An AAC file from a good implementation of the encoder (e.g. Apples, or either from Fraunhofer including the Open Source FDK-AAC from Android) will usually (for most people, with most music) achieve transparency in the mid to high hundreds of kbps.
The material listened to always makes a difference, therefore unqualified arguments about "can always tell" or "never can tell" are always flawed.
I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a" difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there.
I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but 99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.
Vinyl playback, in the pre-CD days, had consumers interested in a whole different kind of audio fidelity. The noises in the record were largely ignored, and nobody tried to get past them. Now, all listeners notice the sound of a vinyl record immediately, and people either love it or hate it.
The point I'm making here is that audio fidelity and quality are separate topics, but while fidelity is an objective measurement of audio, quality is a subjective one, and it shifts with the culture of the day. The problem with the MP3 and other lossy audio formats is that they are taken to be the same as their lossless origins. Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
192kb/s is definitely good enough for the vast majority of people. There are always going to be audiophiles and artists who make derivative works, but those aren't the people who are served by the widespread piracy of media.
I'm not sure if that's really a fair comparison. The difference in both video and sound quality between a VHS tap and a DVD is easily noticeable. There is also improved cost and improved convenience. Cost and convenience won't vary much with the higher quality or lossless digital formats, so you're solely relying on quality, which most people seem to have a hard time distinguishing between.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of: DVDs don't need to be rewound, discs take up less space than tapes, DVDs don't degrade with repeated viewings, you don't have to futz with tracking when watching a DVD (I totally forgot about tracking until now! Good riddance!), DVDs come with multiple audio and subtitle tracks (anime fans especially love these), DVDs can be watched on a computer without specialized equipment (seriously, this was the main reason I switched to DVD as a teenager: I could watch one on the same screen I did everything else on!), DVDs can have all kinds of special features...
If it was a simple matter of a quality difference that was barely perceptible to the human ear, especially on consumer-grade equipment, DVDs would have never replaced VHS.
Oh, and audiophile equipment still hasn't trickled down to the consumer level yet. Every other technology that starts as a high-end professional thing trickles down to the consumer, but audiophile equipment stays right in the ultra-high-end so-expensive-your-wallet-cries sector forever and ever and ever.
Also, there are some interesting audio cards for the Raspberry Pi that are quite reasonable and offer great sound. I've set up an old Model B with the Wolfson card and RuneAudio, and plugged in my monitors. Outstanding sound from a box that cost less than $100.
Audio is engineering, not magic. Sure, people can spend big bucks on AudioQuest cables with Extra Bling, but I'm not one of them. I even consider Monster to be a ripoff.
He would show off, too: dude had his apartment wired with Monster outdoor cables, just because he wanted to show off that his employee discount was so good that even a broke-ass college student can afford to buy Monster outdoor cables on it and use them everywhere.
The only way any consumer will ever notice that music is from an MP3 is if it's a bad encoding. That's the fault of whoever chose the encoding parameters, or picked an obsolete encoder. But even CDs aren't immune from stupid people. Lots of poor quality CDs are produced. I actually bought a major label CD with a song that clipped! It was mastered so loud that it clipped, and they didn't even bother to fix it. That's the sort of problem you can detect with software -- if you're deaf, because even my grandma could hear the flaw. How that got released, I'll never know. Yuck!
Only music producers may notice the "decay" you speak of. MP3 compression throws away data. It's data that no human ear can possibly hear, but when you're in the business of making music, you want to do things like process samples to change how they sound. It's possible to transform uncompressed audio data to bring out sounds that weren't audible before. Those inaudible sounds are likely to be thrown away by an mp3 encoder, making that sort of processing impossible.
But even CD quality PCM audio isn't lossless. It's perfect for listening to, but it's not great for processing. Music is often recorded and processed at higher bit-depths and frequencies before being compressed down to CD quality. You can't possibly hear the difference among studio quality 24 bit 192 khz, CD-quality 16 bit 44 khz, and a good mp3 encoding -- but the studio quality data gives you more processing headroom.
The photography world has analogous issues. Professional photographers and serious amateurs often shoot "raw". Their camperas are capable of producing normal jpeg files, but they don't use that feature. Instead they shoot and process massive, uncompressed files containing the raw sensor data. They then export the processed raw files to jpeg for publishing or printing. You can't see the difference between a raw file and a jpeg. (Actually, a jpeg straight off the camera often looks better than the raw file because the camera does a bit of processing.) The reason photographers bother with the big, unwieldy raw files is that they have more processing headroom. If a raw photo is too dark and there's a big black shadow in one corner, you can ofter brighten it up in postpressing and reveal the flowers that were there. If you do the same to a jpeg, which has much less information, the big black shadow will often brighten up into a big gray shadow. The "invisible" detail in the flowers has been thrown away during compression. The point is, the original unprocessed images looked the same. The differences are invisible in the same way that the differences between CD audio and good mp3s are inaudible. The differences only matter when you go to process the data.
As an aside, I know producers who have sampled from lossy formats and had those songs put on major labor records. It's not that big of an issue, though I suppose how the sample is used could make in impact on it.
I think you're being overly charitable about how well Beats perform.
For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is selling something else: Samsung's in-ear earbuds sold with Galaxy devices and Apple's earbuds are both somewhere between OK and pretty good.
Or you buy quality stand-alones from Shure, Sennheiser, Beyer Dynamic, or Sony (and many more probably)? I always throw into my e-waste bin the Apple earbuds since they're both really low quality. The Shure SE215s are so much better than any bundled earbuds it's barely an opinion.
The issue is that you can't reencode. I can't take a 256kbps MP3 (or even 320) and then reencode it at 128kbps for my portable media player without significant lossage.
The link above is clearly a biased example where there are barely any real high-end sounds, and therefore it would easily fool an untrained ear. I think if they had more than one example, across a range of music styles, then it would be a fairer test.
It would be incredibly easy to produce a better test. The hard part is getting permission from copyright holders.
Now - I'm sure a lot of people can't hear the difference because they don't know what to listen for.
The issue isn't that the difference doesn't exist or that it's "not audible" in some objective sense.
It's that they're not listening to the sound in the same way a producer or engineer listen to sound.
Listening is an active process. It involves a lot of unconscious focussing on specific elements of the sound/music.
You can argue whether or not this matters, but that's really an economic argument about distribution and storage costs, not an absolute argument about the physics of audio compression.
Saying the difference isn't audible at all is like saying that you may as well quantise all rhythms right on the beat because most people can't tell by ear if beats are early or late.
This is a great analogy that gets to the key point: most of the things that make records sound good are 'inaudiable.' That's why making music is so hard.
If you want something that's more likely to be on an actual track, try cymbals, and listen especially for the moment just before the "actual" sound.
Some sounds compress better than others, and the different codecs (MP3, AAC, Vorbis, Opus etc.) tend to have different problem samples, so take your time and play about. Of course the only point in lossy encoding is to save space (or bandwidth), so it makes sense to do it efficiently hence MP3 CBR320 is rarely the best option, despite it's popularity as a common "go to" solution.
[1]: http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=16295
Due to limitations of MP3 and advances in AAC it's quite likely that 256kbit AAC is higher quality than MP3 would be at 320kbit.
[0] Jonathan Sterne, "MP3: The Meaning of a Format", pg 166
With today's bandwidth and storage capacity, there's no reason to use anything worse than -V2.
Have a read of the FAQ:
Yeah, nah. I'd bet a paycheck or two that no one could tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a CD. And I'd win 99 times out of 100.