Jason Preston
Writing

The forward audio problem

Jason Preston · 2 min read ·

There’s an article at Wired about how our audio quality sucks in this age of digital music.

It’s right about that. If you’re truly into listening to your music and listening to it in good quality, you shoud buy the vinyl. Apparently they still make LPs for most of the new albums that come out, and sales are actually up several million from the last fiscal year.

But more concerning to me is what we’re losing in the digital music area. I personally think that I fall into the larger category of music listeners who consider mp3’s to be essentially “good enough.” That doesn’t mean that I’m going to be satisfied with mp3 compression for the rest of my life, or that I don’t think there’s a need to advance digital audio technology. But the combination of consumers like myself and digital music distributors like Apple and Microsoft will lock us into bad formats for years to come.

Why? Because of proprietary formats and DRM.

Despite the fact that iTunes has the capability to rip music into at least four other, higher-quality formats (including variable-bitrate ones) than mp3’s, I have iTunes set to grab and convert all my music to mp3. I do this for two very important reasons:

  1. Everything reads mp3. I don’t have to worry about playing the file on Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, MusicMatch Jukebox, Someone’s ZEN, my iPod, whatever, wherever, it plays. Stupid tactics like iTunes locking out wma and Windows Media player locking out aac will forever limit the usablility of either of those (better quality) compressions.

  2. It has no restrictions. If I have an mp3, I don’t have to worry about what I’m playing it on, how many times I copy it, backing it up, etc (the only reason I have any music out here is because I had all of my music both on my iPod *and* on the portable hard drive I brought with me. Ironically, the hard drive crashed, so now the only way for me to listen to music is on my iPod because Apple in its idiocy made sure that I cannot remove MY OWN music from MY OWN ipod). Basically, mp3 doesn’t have any hidden account settings (like the music you download via the iTunes music store) or various copyright issues that though they might be well-intentioned, usually end up being an incredible inconvenience.

Until and unless the RIAA gets these issues cleared up, I fear we will be trapped into older, lower quality formats.