On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 11:26 AM, Mark Schieldrop wrote:
How is iTunes anyway? How is the selection? I'm still partial to the album concept. Rarely a musician I like only produces one worthy track on a CD, so I'm usually quite fine with buying the whole thing. I trust my encoding skills a bit more, too. I've yet to find good quality encoding online. It's usually CBR or too low a bitrate.
I like the Apple Music Store. I've spent perhaps $200. I found out that some (all?) of the AAC files are encoded from master tapes. To my ears they are quite nice. As we know there is a cult of loudness and bright shiny sparkliness among modern studio engineers (or is it their pointy-haired bosses) which means that a lot of older albums are not nice on CD. Compared to this then, the limitations of the compressed apple format (Dobly I guess I should call it) are no worse. I bought one album that sounded a bit rough, but perhaps it always was. The one thing I don't like is I can't send the files to other mp3 devices, such as my SliMP3 (www.slimdevices.com). I had to turn off the "one-click shopping" feature though, after I accidentally bought an Ace of Bass album. Chris -- http://homepage.mac.com/mihalis68/PhotoAlbum6.html