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Apple is working on a new digital music format

30 points by lalmachado 12y ago

veidr 12y ago
There's no chance whatsoever that this is a new DRM-encumbered format[1]. None. So some people need to take a breath. (And there's almost as little chance that it is going to matter any more than the Apple/Bandai Pippin @WORLD.) If Apple is actually involved in a more significant way than grudgingly acting as fluffer to Bono's fantasies of heroically saving a nonsensical[2] industry that briefly emerged as an artifact of technological limitations of the previous century, I would guess it is some kind of super-metadata-laden format that includes art/video/interview/extras, maybe including built-in remixability or something, that is designed (but unlikely) to entice users to buy even more DRM-free $1.29 songs than they already do in MP3/AAC. [1]: http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_posts_rare_open_letter_thoughts_on_music/ http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_post... (Was astonished that Apple doesn't still host this, btw. But it's not gonna change.) [2]: “Cole Porter wouldn’t have sold T-shirts. Cole Porter wasn’t coming to a stadium near you.” Right. So he would have sold his songs to somebody who was -- or else not made much money from it. So what. There are homeless drummers in SF better than Cole Porter, and no new media format is going to change any of that, nor should it.
higherpurpose 12y ago
If it's going to be a proprietary DRM-locked file format - just don't bother, Apple.
- Nicholas_C 12y ago
  I would bet money that it will be.
  - rustynails 12y ago
    Some potential ideas - pay per listen, local cache - embedded lyrics, photos - extra sound bytes (exclusive to track owners) - optional videos - asynchronous Comms with the band: FAQs. News, interviews, etc There are many things you can do that link purchased content with other content. Adding lyrics that appear in realtime would also be handy. My ideas are now patented. Pay me 5% of all future sales please... Isn't that how patents work? State the obvious and rake in cash for doing very little?
    - squeaky-clean 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure mp3/aac can already store lyrics in the metadata. Most of the songs on my iPod have lyrics with them that show up while playing, though they don't sync with the music, it's just the full text. And these are songs from other sources like Bandcamp or CDs, so it's not some iTunes/Apple specific feature.
    - dcarmo 12y ago
      Embedded lyrics please
    - izacus 12y ago
      Hmm, I distincly remember my iPhone 3G supporting lyrics embedded into MP3 and AAC audio files... isn't that the case anymore?
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  That and/or "high definition", "above CD quality" digital audio. There's a lot of noise in the digital music industry about high quality audio at present. U2 may be following in Neil Young's PONO footsteps. There may be doubt whether high quality audio can deliver what it promises - i.e. an improvement over MP3 320 that is noticeable to normal people's ears. But the Pono kickstarter proves beyond any doubt that there's money it it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-soul-rediscovers-music https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-wh...
  - dagw 12y ago
    The recording industry have tried the "above CD quality" thing to get people to re-buy their music several times before. Each time it flopped, and I fail to see why this time will be different.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
      I don't disagree. To generalise a lot: The older members of the music-listening public are more likely to be audiophiles and have more money to throw at kickstarters from classic rockers. They are a bit slower to adopt new technologies, but are now fairly well on board with iPods and MP3s. However their ears aren't always high definition any more. The younger members of the music-listening public don't really bother so much with the concept of "owning" music. It's like fresh air – so long at it's streaming at you, it's good and who cares about owning it. No mass market for buying high-definition audio downloads is to be found in either category.
- antimagic 12y ago
  I doubt they're talking about a new encoding format or anything like that. If I had to guess, I would be thinking more about something like the recentish NiN album that came with Garageband files so that you could remix the music yourself. Or which provides synchronised lyrics embedded in the music, or something like that.
- stephenr 12y ago
  Why would it be? iTunes tracks started transitioning to DRM-free 7 years ago - as far as I can see from some quick research they were one of if not the first music store offering DRM free music from any of the major labels, and absolutely gave immense weight to the DRM-free push before many of the current competing services even existed. So, if your comment is going to follow the typical apple bashing, history ignoring model, just don't bother.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  Not to mention sales of music downloads are tanking through the floor. Consumption is predominantly streaming now, and that's the way people like it. I simply don't see any static, local file format succeeding regardless of DRM-encumbrance. It's simply less useful to mainstream users than the streaming equivalent. The battle isn't about which format your files should be in, it's about whether or not you have any files at all.
- zamalek 12y ago
  Whatever it becomes it's going to have iTunes lock-in. So glad I never bought into that walled garden.
- tmuir 12y ago
  From TFA, it sounds like they might finally understand the dynamics of piracy and drm: "Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music" Stopping piracy isn't accomplished by punishing users, its done by making legitimacy easier/more appealing in the first place. However, if it's truly irresistibly exciting, but $1.29 per song, that implies DRM, as one can safely assume the exciting aspect is not the act of purchasing the music.
hockeybias 12y ago
Thrill me.
imaginenore 12y ago
> Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music Bono, I will tell you a secret. It's the good music that's irresistible, not some DRM garbage which you don't even have the balls to discuss.
- pain_perdu 12y ago
  Well-put sir, thank you for this.
  - zeruch 12y ago
    This is the band with the most sociopathhic manager since Peter Grant, who has been trying to push DRM before: http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507 http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507 (disclosure, the link is my own write up of a speech by Paul McGuinness at a Medem conf)
snowwrestler 12y ago
I am fully supportive of the idea that musicians and songwriters should get compensated for their work in proportion with its popluarity. Just because people love to make music, that doesn't mean they don't want to save for retirement, buy a house, send kids to college, maybe do some investing, etc. If you pirate an album you like, instead of buying it, you're taking advantage of those artists. [steps off soapbox] That said, I have a hard time seeing how a new digital music format is going to affect piracy at all. AAC is already technically superior to MP3, but everyone still trades MP3s. And I really hope this is not a veiled reference to a new DRM format.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  You're right - it seems popular even on HN where people make a living that musicians are exempt from earning a living through recording and selling music. Wrapped in daft phrases like "music wants to be free", it seems fashionable to engage in copyright infringement for music, and I think it stinks. Arguments that record labels ("fat cats") get a cut of the earnings are not relevant - the musician signed with the label (correct) but does this mean that the musician said his recorded music is free? (incorrect!) We have disgust for software piracy here (particularly if it something we have written), yet the same disgust DOES not translate to music or musicians. It is wrong. I think it is an attitude that needs to change. And the argument that "if I like it, I'll buy it" is wrong too; do we all pirate Microsoft Office and decide if we'll buy it after using it for a while? I don't! I buy Office if I need Office / enjoy using Office (not likely with that daft ribbon interface!).
  - MeadowTheory 12y ago
    No, no, no. Emphatically no. I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living". Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money off of recordings. The only exceptions are "manufactured" pop stars, like Miley Cyrus or Ariana Grande, who get big contracts right away through high-powered connections and nepotism. And yes, the record "fat cats" earnings are perfectly relevant in this situation. They are exploiting musician's work to become wealthy, and by supporting them, you are implicitly supporting their actions. If you want to support a band, go see their shows and buy their merchandise.
stevekl 12y ago
Great, another proprietary format. While I want everything to be open and interoperable, I personally work in a startup that aims to make profit. So I also understand the commercial reasons of proprietary technologies. So, I am torn, what should be proprietary and what should be open?
- drivingmenuts 12y ago
  Open: anything required to survive. Prop: anything optional to survive.
- Slackwise 12y ago
  Formats should never be proprietary. That's just holding user data hostage. Really, nothing should be proprietary, or at least not proprietary forever.Take note of Id Software's approach of open-sourcing their engines X years after release of the accompanying game. If we keep releasing proprietary systems, nothing will be archived or usable in the future, if the source is never released. Hundreds of video games are going to be inaccessible in the future due to DRM servers, or proprietary backends. I mean, I can ramble on forever, but it's pretty clear that non-free[1] software is bad for the future of people and society. Snowden proved RMS right. [1]: Free as in freedom: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html (You can still charge money for free software or related services. Not everyone can run their own Google, even if they open sourced it all. But that's a whole 'nother set or arguments.)
startupfounder 12y ago
Apple should buy Pono, Neil Young & Jon Hamm's music "high-resolution" 24-bit 192kHz audio company and have Neil play some real Rock & Roll at Apple events.
- tmuir 12y ago
  I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but Pono is bound to fail. Throughout the evolution of widely adopted audio formats, the sound quality has always decreased. The average listener doesn't care about fidelity. They can't tell the difference. They care about convenience. Cassette tapes were better than vinyl records, because they were more portable. CDs were better than tapes, because you could skip tracks. Mp3s were better than CDs, because you could fit thousands of them in your pocket. But at each step of that progression, the sound got worse. Young's testimonials are from professional musicians, the extremely small subset of the public that actually cares about the quality of the sound. These are not the people he needs to convince. This is obviously aimed at the general public, who have proven time and time again that convenience is king. The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The sound got worse when going from tapes to CDs?
  - ssharp 12y ago
    >The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file. I don't think the vast majority of people could either tell the difference or care about the difference between much larger compression gaps than that. I received three free months of Sirius radio when I purchased a certified used car. After a few minutes of flipping through the channels, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to such highly compressed music with tons of artifacts, yet lots of people pay for subscriptions.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  Neil Young was born in 1945 and has been rocking since 1960 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young If his ears can still tell the difference between "high-resolution" audio and MP3 320, then it is a miracle of geriatric audiological medicine. Seriously, medicine should get on that, there's something unknown to science going on there.
sp332 12y ago
I'm betting on Freemium DRM. Listen to the crummy version for free, or plug the file into a totalitarian DRM system to pay for and decrypt the good version.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Given the big deal Apple made about dropping DRM, I doubt that. It'll probably be something to support extended content. iTunes has some packages that come with video, PDF, etc. content as well as the music already.
adamnemecek 12y ago
hockeybias: you are shadowbanned and have been for the last 5 years
dandelany 12y ago
Here's something I've always wanted: A consumer music file format that preserves all of the underlying tracks ('stems') so that they can be adjusted while you listen to the song. Imagine listening to a recording and going "ooh, that bassline", and then turning up the bassist and turning down everything else to hear it better. Or easily "remixing" while you listen by eg. applying a filter to only the drums. You could even save presets to listen to "your" mix of the song again. Maybe this only appeals to hardcore music fans, but I know it's something I'd love to play with. Of course it would have to be supported by major user-friendly software like iTunes, and would have to implement a nice interface for interacting with a tracks. But I've always thought Apple was very well positioned to take this on, if they wanted to.
- ssharp 12y ago
  This could be interesting. Especially for artists using the Apple toolchain, namely Logic. It seems like a lot of stuff could then be duplicated on the desktop / mobile to give interested listeners control over various song elements. I don't know how many people would actually be interested in that, though. It would be targeting a segment of music listeners that are extremely engaged with their music. I don't know if that market is really big enough to overcome the growing preference for streaming services.
- dubcanada 12y ago
  That would be awesome...
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  I imagine this being greeted with fury and lawsuits from the artists. I remember a company in Utah that made family-friendly cuts of popular movies being sued for the modifications.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  There are tons of formats like that. Midi, old tracker ones (s3m, xm, mod). But very few artists are willing to publish the "source code" of their work.
chiph 12y ago
I liked the new U2 album, but the amount of compression used was absurd. A new high-resolution format won't be able to fix poor decisions made in the mastering booth.
tonysuper 12y ago
This might be proprietary, but Apple's other major codec is open.[1] Hopefully this will be as well. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless
- gillianseed 12y ago
  It was proprietary was most of it's existence and was not opened until 2011, which in turn was likely as a result of everyone using FLAC instead. I have no doubt this new codec will be proprietary, and only if it fails to gain any traction is there a chance of it becoming open.
shaggy 12y ago
Above CD quality has been tried many times. Currently, the service with the most to offer in terms of catalog is https://www.hdtracks.com/faq https://www.hdtracks.com/faq. You do have to re-buy albums you might already own, but the choices are ever expanding and include a lot of great stuff. The point in the article about the new format helping lesser known artists really shows just how little U2 and Bono actually get about the current state of the music industry. Artists are getting completely screwed by labels and must tour by necessity to make money. In fact, with the huge growth in the festival industry, small acts (and large acts of old) can make significant chunks of money they otherwise wouldn't. To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible. A new digital format isn't going to change that.
- tzs 12y ago
  > To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible Was Cole Porter a performer? What I see after a bit of searching indicates he was a songwriter/composer, so what would be the attraction of a Cole Porter tour?
  - shaggy 12y ago
    He was not a performer. He was a songwriter and composer mostly for Broadway and he was a great one. The draw would be something like "an evening with Cole Porter and his music" or "Cole Porter and his Broadway orchestra play his hits". You can imagine the marketing around hearing the music live, standing on its own. That kind of stuff makes money today, and lots of it.
mbesto 12y ago
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  Can we please stop linking to this whenever there's a discussions about a new standard? There are other reasons for creating a new standard besides unification of the current standards.
  - mbesto 12y ago
    Why? The conclusion is always the same. I'm genuinely curious as to what these "other reasons" are.
    - adamnemecek 12y ago
      There is literally 1 billion possible reasons why that could be. Smaller size. Higher bitrate. Simpler format. Faster/more power efficient decoding. More than 2 audio channels. Separation of single tracks within a song (so that e.g. you can mute vocals). These just off the top of my head.
Pxtl 12y ago
The way Bono talks about it it really sounds like bringing back DRM, since he's focused on career songwriters in his little quote. Maybe improving the way albums and additional metadata are bundled for the non-audio content. Hopefully the audio files themselves will remain as-is. One thing that disappoints me is the way folders have stayed un-typed in OSes. I've always wished that the Reiser concept of "a file that contains files" had caught on, as that would be much more appropriate for packing metadata and other information unrelated to the main audio stream into an audio file container.
- colanderman 12y ago
  "a file that contains files" How does this differ from a ZIP file? (Keep in mind all modern OSes support treating ZIP files like directories.)
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    First, because folders are far more performant for accessing child objects. That's mostly an implementation detail, but a big one - there are tremendous optimizations made on the filesystem that are not accessible for something like ZIP. Particularly relevant to bulk searching/listing - the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files. Second (and this is more a problem in Windows where the 3-letter extension is more important) the OS needs to know which tools it can associate with which type. If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music archive). But not both.
    - colanderman 12y ago
      the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files. The problem with this is the concept of "files with subfiles" is not a thing outside of ReiserFS. Sure, if people used ReiserFS, they'd have this feature, but how would you transport such files between machines? You'd have to serialize them somehow: this is exactly what ZIP is. (Remember HFS resource forks? Me neither. They suffered from exactly the same issue: ambiguous transport semantics.) Optimizations around such things are exactly that – optimizations – and should not affect the semantics of the objects involved. The proper way to approach this is to decouple data storage from indexing from file semantics. Hence a better approach would be to permit access to contents of ZIPs using FUSE (on Linux) or what-have-you, and index the contents in a database like Spotlight (on OS X). If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music archive). But not both. Ignoring that OOXML (.docx etc.) already takes this approach (zipped XML files), the problem of allowing multiple different programs to access the same type of file is a minor enhancement to the OS. (I'm pretty sure you already can configure Windows to allow .docx to "Open With..." a ZIP program.) Supporting files-which-are-also-folders requires breaking quite a few more assumptions in OSes.
bequanna 12y ago
I am having a tough time understanding this whole Apple + U2 'partnership' (or whatever it is). It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant. Hell, I'm almost 30 and few of my friends have any interest in U2. I just asked my 21 year old cousin and she can't name a single U2 song. Maybe some of my contemporaries think this is interesting or cool, I just find it odd.
- Mandatum 12y ago
  It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant. I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Apple circa 2004 nailed marketing. It seems recently they've stopped 'evolving' and are looking to past concepts that have worked, but no longer relevant. Beats was cool because Dre is a legend and a celebrity. I hope Apple starts using some of Beats' marketing people for their own brand.

30 points by lalmachado 12y ago

veidr 12y ago

There's no chance whatsoever that this is a new DRM-encumbered format[1]. None. So some people need to take a breath. (And there's almost as little chance that it is going to matter any more than the Apple/Bandai Pippin @WORLD.) If Apple is actually involved in a more significant way than grudgingly acting as fluffer to Bono's fantasies of heroically saving a nonsensical[2] industry that briefly emerged as an artifact of technological limitations of the previous century, I would guess it is some kind of super-metadata-laden format that includes art/video/interview/extras, maybe including built-in remixability or something, that is designed (but unlikely) to entice users to buy even more DRM-free $1.29 songs than they already do in MP3/AAC. [1]: http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_posts_rare_open_letter_thoughts_on_music/ http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_post... (Was astonished that Apple doesn't still host this, btw. But it's not gonna change.) [2]: “Cole Porter wouldn’t have sold T-shirts. Cole Porter wasn’t coming to a stadium near you.” Right. So he would have sold his songs to somebody who was -- or else not made much money from it. So what. There are homeless drummers in SF better than Cole Porter, and no new media format is going to change any of that, nor should it.

higherpurpose 12y ago

If it's going to be a proprietary DRM-locked file format - just don't bother, Apple.

Nicholas_C 12y ago
I would bet money that it will be.
- rustynails 12y ago
  Some potential ideas - pay per listen, local cache - embedded lyrics, photos - extra sound bytes (exclusive to track owners) - optional videos - asynchronous Comms with the band: FAQs. News, interviews, etc There are many things you can do that link purchased content with other content. Adding lyrics that appear in realtime would also be handy. My ideas are now patented. Pay me 5% of all future sales please... Isn't that how patents work? State the obvious and rake in cash for doing very little?
  - squeaky-clean 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure mp3/aac can already store lyrics in the metadata. Most of the songs on my iPod have lyrics with them that show up while playing, though they don't sync with the music, it's just the full text. And these are songs from other sources like Bandcamp or CDs, so it's not some iTunes/Apple specific feature.
  - dcarmo 12y ago
    Embedded lyrics please
  - izacus 12y ago
    Hmm, I distincly remember my iPhone 3G supporting lyrics embedded into MP3 and AAC audio files... isn't that the case anymore?
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
That and/or "high definition", "above CD quality" digital audio. There's a lot of noise in the digital music industry about high quality audio at present. U2 may be following in Neil Young's PONO footsteps. There may be doubt whether high quality audio can deliver what it promises - i.e. an improvement over MP3 320 that is noticeable to normal people's ears. But the Pono kickstarter proves beyond any doubt that there's money it it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-soul-rediscovers-music https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-wh...
- dagw 12y ago
  The recording industry have tried the "above CD quality" thing to get people to re-buy their music several times before. Each time it flopped, and I fail to see why this time will be different.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    I don't disagree. To generalise a lot: The older members of the music-listening public are more likely to be audiophiles and have more money to throw at kickstarters from classic rockers. They are a bit slower to adopt new technologies, but are now fairly well on board with iPods and MP3s. However their ears aren't always high definition any more. The younger members of the music-listening public don't really bother so much with the concept of "owning" music. It's like fresh air – so long at it's streaming at you, it's good and who cares about owning it. No mass market for buying high-definition audio downloads is to be found in either category.
antimagic 12y ago
I doubt they're talking about a new encoding format or anything like that. If I had to guess, I would be thinking more about something like the recentish NiN album that came with Garageband files so that you could remix the music yourself. Or which provides synchronised lyrics embedded in the music, or something like that.
stephenr 12y ago
Why would it be? iTunes tracks started transitioning to DRM-free 7 years ago - as far as I can see from some quick research they were one of if not the first music store offering DRM free music from any of the major labels, and absolutely gave immense weight to the DRM-free push before many of the current competing services even existed. So, if your comment is going to follow the typical apple bashing, history ignoring model, just don't bother.
potatolicious 12y ago
Not to mention sales of music downloads are tanking through the floor. Consumption is predominantly streaming now, and that's the way people like it. I simply don't see any static, local file format succeeding regardless of DRM-encumbrance. It's simply less useful to mainstream users than the streaming equivalent. The battle isn't about which format your files should be in, it's about whether or not you have any files at all.
zamalek 12y ago
Whatever it becomes it's going to have iTunes lock-in. So glad I never bought into that walled garden.
tmuir 12y ago
From TFA, it sounds like they might finally understand the dynamics of piracy and drm: "Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music" Stopping piracy isn't accomplished by punishing users, its done by making legitimacy easier/more appealing in the first place. However, if it's truly irresistibly exciting, but $1.29 per song, that implies DRM, as one can safely assume the exciting aspect is not the act of purchasing the music.

hockeybias 12y ago

Thrill me.

imaginenore 12y ago

> Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again into buying music Bono, I will tell you a secret. It's the good music that's irresistible, not some DRM garbage which you don't even have the balls to discuss.

pain_perdu 12y ago
Well-put sir, thank you for this.
- zeruch 12y ago
  This is the band with the most sociopathhic manager since Peter Grant, who has been trying to push DRM before: http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507 http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507 (disclosure, the link is my own write up of a speech by Paul McGuinness at a Medem conf)

snowwrestler 12y ago

I am fully supportive of the idea that musicians and songwriters should get compensated for their work in proportion with its popluarity. Just because people love to make music, that doesn't mean they don't want to save for retirement, buy a house, send kids to college, maybe do some investing, etc. If you pirate an album you like, instead of buying it, you're taking advantage of those artists. [steps off soapbox] That said, I have a hard time seeing how a new digital music format is going to affect piracy at all. AAC is already technically superior to MP3, but everyone still trades MP3s. And I really hope this is not a veiled reference to a new DRM format.

72deluxe 12y ago
You're right - it seems popular even on HN where people make a living that musicians are exempt from earning a living through recording and selling music. Wrapped in daft phrases like "music wants to be free", it seems fashionable to engage in copyright infringement for music, and I think it stinks. Arguments that record labels ("fat cats") get a cut of the earnings are not relevant - the musician signed with the label (correct) but does this mean that the musician said his recorded music is free? (incorrect!) We have disgust for software piracy here (particularly if it something we have written), yet the same disgust DOES not translate to music or musicians. It is wrong. I think it is an attitude that needs to change. And the argument that "if I like it, I'll buy it" is wrong too; do we all pirate Microsoft Office and decide if we'll buy it after using it for a while? I don't! I buy Office if I need Office / enjoy using Office (not likely with that daft ribbon interface!).
- MeadowTheory 12y ago
  No, no, no. Emphatically no. I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living". Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money off of recordings. The only exceptions are "manufactured" pop stars, like Miley Cyrus or Ariana Grande, who get big contracts right away through high-powered connections and nepotism. And yes, the record "fat cats" earnings are perfectly relevant in this situation. They are exploiting musician's work to become wealthy, and by supporting them, you are implicitly supporting their actions. If you want to support a band, go see their shows and buy their merchandise.

stevekl 12y ago

Great, another proprietary format. While I want everything to be open and interoperable, I personally work in a startup that aims to make profit. So I also understand the commercial reasons of proprietary technologies. So, I am torn, what should be proprietary and what should be open?

drivingmenuts 12y ago
Open: anything required to survive. Prop: anything optional to survive.
Slackwise 12y ago
Formats should never be proprietary. That's just holding user data hostage. Really, nothing should be proprietary, or at least not proprietary forever.Take note of Id Software's approach of open-sourcing their engines X years after release of the accompanying game. If we keep releasing proprietary systems, nothing will be archived or usable in the future, if the source is never released. Hundreds of video games are going to be inaccessible in the future due to DRM servers, or proprietary backends. I mean, I can ramble on forever, but it's pretty clear that non-free[1] software is bad for the future of people and society. Snowden proved RMS right. [1]: Free as in freedom: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html (You can still charge money for free software or related services. Not everyone can run their own Google, even if they open sourced it all. But that's a whole 'nother set or arguments.)

startupfounder 12y ago

Apple should buy Pono, Neil Young & Jon Hamm's music "high-resolution" 24-bit 192kHz audio company and have Neil play some real Rock & Roll at Apple events.

tmuir 12y ago
I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but Pono is bound to fail. Throughout the evolution of widely adopted audio formats, the sound quality has always decreased. The average listener doesn't care about fidelity. They can't tell the difference. They care about convenience. Cassette tapes were better than vinyl records, because they were more portable. CDs were better than tapes, because you could skip tracks. Mp3s were better than CDs, because you could fit thousands of them in your pocket. But at each step of that progression, the sound got worse. Young's testimonials are from professional musicians, the extremely small subset of the public that actually cares about the quality of the sound. These are not the people he needs to convince. This is obviously aimed at the general public, who have proven time and time again that convenience is king. The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.
- mikeash 12y ago
  The sound got worse when going from tapes to CDs?
- ssharp 12y ago
  >The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file. I don't think the vast majority of people could either tell the difference or care about the difference between much larger compression gaps than that. I received three free months of Sirius radio when I purchased a certified used car. After a few minutes of flipping through the channels, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to such highly compressed music with tons of artifacts, yet lots of people pay for subscriptions.
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
Neil Young was born in 1945 and has been rocking since 1960 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young If his ears can still tell the difference between "high-resolution" audio and MP3 320, then it is a miracle of geriatric audiological medicine. Seriously, medicine should get on that, there's something unknown to science going on there.

sp332 12y ago

I'm betting on Freemium DRM. Listen to the crummy version for free, or plug the file into a totalitarian DRM system to pay for and decrypt the good version.

ceejayoz 12y ago
Given the big deal Apple made about dropping DRM, I doubt that. It'll probably be something to support extended content. iTunes has some packages that come with video, PDF, etc. content as well as the music already.

adamnemecek 12y ago

hockeybias: you are shadowbanned and have been for the last 5 years

dandelany 12y ago

Here's something I've always wanted: A consumer music file format that preserves all of the underlying tracks ('stems') so that they can be adjusted while you listen to the song. Imagine listening to a recording and going "ooh, that bassline", and then turning up the bassist and turning down everything else to hear it better. Or easily "remixing" while you listen by eg. applying a filter to only the drums. You could even save presets to listen to "your" mix of the song again. Maybe this only appeals to hardcore music fans, but I know it's something I'd love to play with. Of course it would have to be supported by major user-friendly software like iTunes, and would have to implement a nice interface for interacting with a tracks. But I've always thought Apple was very well positioned to take this on, if they wanted to.

ssharp 12y ago
This could be interesting. Especially for artists using the Apple toolchain, namely Logic. It seems like a lot of stuff could then be duplicated on the desktop / mobile to give interested listeners control over various song elements. I don't know how many people would actually be interested in that, though. It would be targeting a segment of music listeners that are extremely engaged with their music. I don't know if that market is really big enough to overcome the growing preference for streaming services.
dubcanada 12y ago
That would be awesome...
ceejayoz 12y ago
I imagine this being greeted with fury and lawsuits from the artists. I remember a company in Utah that made family-friendly cuts of popular movies being sued for the modifications.
imaginenore 12y ago
There are tons of formats like that. Midi, old tracker ones (s3m, xm, mod). But very few artists are willing to publish the "source code" of their work.

chiph 12y ago

I liked the new U2 album, but the amount of compression used was absurd. A new high-resolution format won't be able to fix poor decisions made in the mastering booth.

tonysuper 12y ago

This might be proprietary, but Apple's other major codec is open.[1] Hopefully this will be as well. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

gillianseed 12y ago
It was proprietary was most of it's existence and was not opened until 2011, which in turn was likely as a result of everyone using FLAC instead. I have no doubt this new codec will be proprietary, and only if it fails to gain any traction is there a chance of it becoming open.

shaggy 12y ago

Above CD quality has been tried many times. Currently, the service with the most to offer in terms of catalog is https://www.hdtracks.com/faq https://www.hdtracks.com/faq. You do have to re-buy albums you might already own, but the choices are ever expanding and include a lot of great stuff. The point in the article about the new format helping lesser known artists really shows just how little U2 and Bono actually get about the current state of the music industry. Artists are getting completely screwed by labels and must tour by necessity to make money. In fact, with the huge growth in the festival industry, small acts (and large acts of old) can make significant chunks of money they otherwise wouldn't. To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible. A new digital format isn't going to change that.

tzs 12y ago
> To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible Was Cole Porter a performer? What I see after a bit of searching indicates he was a songwriter/composer, so what would be the attraction of a Cole Porter tour?
- shaggy 12y ago
  He was not a performer. He was a songwriter and composer mostly for Broadway and he was a great one. The draw would be something like "an evening with Cole Porter and his music" or "Cole Porter and his Broadway orchestra play his hits". You can imagine the marketing around hearing the music live, standing on its own. That kind of stuff makes money today, and lots of it.

mbesto 12y ago

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/

adamnemecek 12y ago
Can we please stop linking to this whenever there's a discussions about a new standard? There are other reasons for creating a new standard besides unification of the current standards.
- mbesto 12y ago
  Why? The conclusion is always the same. I'm genuinely curious as to what these "other reasons" are.
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    There is literally 1 billion possible reasons why that could be. Smaller size. Higher bitrate. Simpler format. Faster/more power efficient decoding. More than 2 audio channels. Separation of single tracks within a song (so that e.g. you can mute vocals). These just off the top of my head.

Pxtl 12y ago

The way Bono talks about it it really sounds like bringing back DRM, since he's focused on career songwriters in his little quote. Maybe improving the way albums and additional metadata are bundled for the non-audio content. Hopefully the audio files themselves will remain as-is. One thing that disappoints me is the way folders have stayed un-typed in OSes. I've always wished that the Reiser concept of "a file that contains files" had caught on, as that would be much more appropriate for packing metadata and other information unrelated to the main audio stream into an audio file container.

colanderman 12y ago
"a file that contains files" How does this differ from a ZIP file? (Keep in mind all modern OSes support treating ZIP files like directories.)
- Pxtl 12y ago
  First, because folders are far more performant for accessing child objects. That's mostly an implementation detail, but a big one - there are tremendous optimizations made on the filesystem that are not accessible for something like ZIP. Particularly relevant to bulk searching/listing - the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files. Second (and this is more a problem in Windows where the 3-letter extension is more important) the OS needs to know which tools it can associate with which type. If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music archive). But not both.
  - colanderman 12y ago
    the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files. The problem with this is the concept of "files with subfiles" is not a thing outside of ReiserFS. Sure, if people used ReiserFS, they'd have this feature, but how would you transport such files between machines? You'd have to serialize them somehow: this is exactly what ZIP is. (Remember HFS resource forks? Me neither. They suffered from exactly the same issue: ambiguous transport semantics.) Optimizations around such things are exactly that – optimizations – and should not affect the semantics of the objects involved. The proper way to approach this is to decouple data storage from indexing from file semantics. Hence a better approach would be to permit access to contents of ZIPs using FUSE (on Linux) or what-have-you, and index the contents in a database like Spotlight (on OS X). If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music archive). But not both. Ignoring that OOXML (.docx etc.) already takes this approach (zipped XML files), the problem of allowing multiple different programs to access the same type of file is a minor enhancement to the OS. (I'm pretty sure you already can configure Windows to allow .docx to "Open With..." a ZIP program.) Supporting files-which-are-also-folders requires breaking quite a few more assumptions in OSes.

bequanna 12y ago

I am having a tough time understanding this whole Apple + U2 'partnership' (or whatever it is). It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant. Hell, I'm almost 30 and few of my friends have any interest in U2. I just asked my 21 year old cousin and she can't name a single U2 song. Maybe some of my contemporaries think this is interesting or cool, I just find it odd.

Mandatum 12y ago
It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant. I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Apple circa 2004 nailed marketing. It seems recently they've stopped 'evolving' and are looking to past concepts that have worked, but no longer relevant. Beats was cool because Dre is a legend and a celebrity. I hope Apple starts using some of Beats' marketing people for their own brand.