Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store

DrJenny writes "C|net UK has up an interesting blog post predicting that within 12 months Apple's iTunes Store will include a download center for lossless audio. This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music — they could finally take advantage of legal digital downloads. The article goes into details on how Apple's home-grown ALAC lossless encoding relates to FLAC, DRM, and the iPod ecosystem."

they make money on the razors

[User 956 (568564)]

Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store

Lossless? I thought the iTunes store was a loss leader?

Re:they make money on the razors

[flyingsquid (813711)]

Lossless? I thought the iTunes store was a loss leader?

No clue. I refused to read the linked article, because I'm a graphics snob, and they used JPEG graphics instead of lossless TIF files.

I'm sure I'll be modulated for saying this, but

[User 956 (568564)]

As much as it hertz, their loss results in your gain.

"Lossless"? Such BS

[timster (32400)]

Forget "lossless" when you've already lost so much of the original wave by mixing it down to 16-bit 44khz stereo in the first place. I'd rather have something that started out with a higher sampling rate/etc, but with good lossy compression to pull it down to something that doesn't require DVD-type storage for a single album.

Re:

[croddy (659025)]

My kingdom for a mod point.

Re:"Lossless"? Such BS

[Hatta (162192)]

Sorry, Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. Assuming you are a human and not a dog [lib.unb.ca], you can not hear frequencies above 22khz. As for 16 bit, nobody uses all that dynamic range anyway. So 16bit/44.1khz is entirely good enough for listening.

Now 24/96 has its uses if you're mastering something, so that any errors introduced in the mixing process are below the quantization error in the final 16/44.1 product.

Re:"Lossless"? Such BS

[ChrisA90278 (905188)]

Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. That is 100% true. But in the real world, if you are sampling a digital recorder at 44Khz how do you ensure that NOTHING above 22Khz gets to the analog to digital converter? You need a strong analog filter but there are no filters that have an exactly square cut off Maybe let's say you have a 24db per octave filter. This mens you will have only attenuated the higher frequencies, not eliminated them. Same on playback. You need a theoretically perfect analog filter to playback. Such analog filers do not exist. The way they get around all this is to sample at 96 or 128Khz. If you do this then real-world analog filters can be used.

Re:

[Hatta (162192)]

Easy, a square wave(or any wave) can be represented (through fourier transforms) as a sum of sine waves of increasing frequency. If you have a 22khz square wave, what you really have is a 22khz sine wave, and a bunch of sine waves with frequencies greater than 22khz. Those higher harmonics cannot be accurately represented with a 44.1 khz sampling rate, but since you can't hear anything above 22khz anyway it doesn't matter.

Re:

[marcello_dl (667940)]

> Those higher harmonics cannot be accurately represented with a 44.1 khz sampling rate, but since you can't hear anything above 22khz anyway it doesn't matter.

"The ear can't pick fundamental sounds at more than around 20 khz" != "the ear does a fourier transform and discard all harmonics above 22khz." The signal processing that a ear does to localize and identify sounds is a little more sophisticated.

I didn't do a double blind test, but even a seemingly small difference between a DAT recording at 44.1 a

Re:

[jabuzz (182671)]

Except you are presuming that the human ear perceives a 20kHz sine wave, and a 20kHz sine wave plus a whole series of harmonics identically.

The problem with that notion is that the standard test for hearing perception is to play pure sine waves of varying frequencies and ask the listener if they can hear them. However over the millions of years of human evolution, it was not until the invention of the tuning fork in 1711 that any human ear had heared a pure sine wave. Up until that point it had evolved to d

Re:

[rtechie (244489)]

You do know that most studios record on 16bit 48khz equipment, right? That 4khz doesn't make much of a difference. In fact, most studio masters are slap-dash affairs. Bad mikes, bad recording equipment, inadequate space, etc. All that crap puts all but the very best masters far below what CD Audio is capable of. In this real-world context, there is no point at all to formats like SACD and DVD-Audio. What people actually WANT is pretty clear. People want CDs with a 5.1 Dolby Digital mix, or an equivalent sur

Re:24/96?

[Applekid (993327)]

24 bits per sample, cool. With you all the way.

But, 96 KHz sampling? You do know the Nyquist theorem [wikipedia.org], don't you? You are aware that top human frequency tops off around 20 KHz, right? That 48 KHz, even with 24-bit precision, should take care of all sounds possible for the human to hear?

I've had audiophiles* just snub their noses at mathematical proof and regrettably inform me that I do not have "the golden ear." I wonder if there have ever been any research on whether self proclaimed audiophiles REALLY have magical hearing.

(* You didn't say you were, don't take it personally. When I see super-high sampling rates bandied about I get a little red.)

Re:24/96?

[by Anonymous Coward]

That 48 KHz, even with 24-bit precision, should take care of all sounds possible for the human to hear?

Human being the key thing here. What makes you think that parent is human?
On the internet nobody knows you're a dog...

let's take a tour of the Nyquist sampling theorem

[krog (25663)]

Nyquist's theorem states that a wave of frequency f must be sampled at the rate of at least 2f in order for information not to be lost. So, yes, a 44.1kHz sampling rate can accurately reproduce signals up to 22kHz without loss of information, and since that's all we can hear, we should be fine. Right?

Well, not entirely. You see, if the source material contains frequencies above 22.05kHz, they will end up "aliased" onto another part of the frequency spectrum. In short, the extra high-end becomes noise. Information is lost.

Here is the important part, in practical terms. In order to prevent aliasing, the source material must be low-passed to remove the unrepresentable high frequencies. Low-pass filters are not perfect; in order to toss out the frequencies we don't want, we end up attenuating some of the frequencies we do want. Thus it is not uncommon for high-frequency rolloff to begin in the mid-teens of kilohertz, even though we're aiming for 22kHz as the corner frequency.

This causes a real, human-audible difference in the finished product, and it is practically impossible to avoid.

Now, with a 96kHz sample rate, we aim to squash all frequencies above 48kHz, and our non-ideal low-pass filter starts to work in the 30kHz range. The imperfections in the low-pass filter are only apparent at frequencies humans can't hear. The finished audio ends up sounding like the source material, with no human-detectable loss in fidelity.

This is why 96kHz is a good idea.

Re:let's take a tour of the Nyquist sampling theor

[evanbd (210358)]

Very well put. It's one of the things that makes the delta-sigma modulation at very high sample rates used in eg SACD interesting. Of course, it would help if the data stream were easier to work with, which is why I think 24/96 or even 24/192 is superior overall.

The problem gets even more obnoxious if you care about the flatness and phase response of your filter. The one time I've done data acquisition work that cared about such things at 20kHz, we ended up using a 250kHz sample rate in order to give t

For a studio

[pavon (30274)]

That is a good argument for why a studio should sample at a rate that accommodates the roll-off in their analog low-pass filters. However, once that is done you can use a can use a digital lo-pass filter / downsampler which can easily be designed to have very sharp cut-off rates. There is no reason at all for a consumer format to be more than 48kHz.

Re:

[pavon (30274)]

Like bentcd said, that is a completely adequate waveform. If you output that using a perfect zero-order hold and a perfect anti-imaging filter, you will get a perfect 24kHz sine wave. Of course, you can't build a perfect hardware, and having more points than the Nyquist limit will relax the requirements on your D/A circuit. However, if you filtered and sampled the data correctly to begin with (ie no aliasing occurred), then upsampling will give you a waveform that is identical to what you would get by overs

Re:

[iluvcapra (782887)]

I wish I could find the link, but there's reasonable evidence from blind listening tests that people, though they would not necessarily report any quality difference, were able to report things about the recording like "I can tell the cello is sitting in front of the viola" and other things that are very subtle and spatial. This of course depends on headphones and careful binaural recording, so on most end products it wouldn't make much of a difference.

In my line of work, most sound designers are recordin

Re:24/96?

[Brett Buck (811747)]

There is an advantage to higher sampling rates, but it has nothing to do with the frequency content of the recorded material or Nyquist's theory . If you sample at 44.1 khz (CD standard) you get 44.1 khz noise in the output. That has to be filtered out somehow, without affecting the in-band audio signal. Rolling off many DB in a short frequency span (factor of ~2) takes quite a filter, which depending on how it's done, introduces phase shifts of the in-band signal. The sound quality from CD players it largely determined by how, and how well, the D-A conversion (which has a frequency response all it's own determined by the guts of the converter)and analog filtering are done.

      Sampling at higher frequencies makes it easier to build a good output filter. That's a very secondary or tertiary level effect, so it doesn't really make much difference, but it theoretically could.

      Note that this is assuming the standard PCM encoding. "Single Bit"/streaming encoding (like SACD runs at fantastically higher sample frequencies, but the frequencies aren't really comparable (and it's not a good way to go because you introduce other issues (like tons of quantization noise).

        The only identified issue with the standard red-book CD format is the dynamic range, but there are so few sources that need more than 16 bits and certainly very few playback systems/environments that will let you take advantage of it, it's essentially a non-issue. HDCD (which is a 20-bit PCM format) addresses this but hasn't and probably won't become common.

    Bottom line - the guys who came up with the audio CD sampling format pretty well knew what they were doing and there aren't any practical limitations in the recording format. Everything else in the system (from microphone to engineering to speaker) is the limiting factor.

        Brett

Re:24/96?

[Divebus (860563)]

I know two audiophiles - professional audio mixers, to be exact, who absolutely have golden ears. They listened to a CD of an album master and frowned like something was wrong. The "image" wasn't right; "smeared" somehow. Turned out they could hear the difference between a master CD and a copy of the CD. The difference? Clock jitter. Yes, they could hear the effects of clock jitter. Both of these guys are legally blind which apparently sharpens other senses.

Re:

[krog (25663)]

You're hearing the horizontal scan [wikipedia.org], which is usually around 15kHz -- quite high, within an octave of our upper limit.

Re:

[Grishnakh (216268)]

No, it comes out as a sinewave, just as it went in. A triangle wave at 22.05 kHz is composed of sine waves at 22.05 kHz and then many higher harmonic frequencies. Only the fundamental will be reproduced of course.

Go read about Nyquist's Theorem before spouting falsehoods.

Re:24/96?

[Reverberant (303566)]

What about 24bits/sample, 96K samples/second?

Enough with the 24/96 wet dreams. Yes, 24/96 does offer real advantages for mixing houses in terms of being able to normalize levels generated by different sources and reducing the complexity of filters. But 16/44.4 is perfectly fine for home audio playback.

What does >16 bits get you? More dynamic range. BFD. 16 bits gets you (realistically) 90+ dB of dynamic range. Unless your listening room has a background noise level of 20 dB or less (trust me, it doesn't), you're not even enjoying the true benefit of the 16-bits you have now.

What does > 44.1kHz sampling give you? Wider frequency response. BFD. Let's assume that most people have good hearing beyond 20 kHz (very few do). Let's assume that most music/movie content has lots of information above 20 kHz (some do, most don't). Let's assume that your speakers can reproduce signals above 20 kHz (some can, most can't). There is still the issue of how you get that > 20kHz info on your recording on the first place. You see, most microphones don't record signals out that high, and of those that do, they only do so over a very narrow angle. When we have tech that can produce mics that are omni-directional above 20 kHz for reasonable costs then maybe you'll have an argument.

Let's deal with the loudness wars before we start worrying about 24/96.

Re:24/96?

[krog (25663)]

Once, when my band was recording to a digital medium (a RADAR 24-track hard disk recorder, for those keeping score), we captured some tracks at 16bit, and some at 24bit. All other parameters in the signal chain were held constant.

I did not expect to hear as big a difference as I did. 24b absolutely crushed 16b in the oh-so-unscientific terms of listening enjoyment. Everything, especially the cymbals, sounded clearer, less harsh and brittle, more defined. We had to throw away some good 16b takes because they sounded so much worse than the 24b recordings.

Don't be so quick to discount the difference that a little extra dynamic range can make. Sure, you might not notice when you're listening to your iPod in your 89 Chevy Cavalier with the burned out left rear speaker, but it's not as hard to tell as you might think.

Re:

[soleblaze (628864)]

Meh, since when does the post -90s (or post 80s for that matter) music industry care about something as silly as dynamic range? You need to hear our music without having to turn up your radio! 3dB of dynamic range should be enough for anyone.

Re:

[Grishnakh (216268)]

That said... the sampling frequency shouldn't be mixed with the signal frequency in the way you mention; e.g. 44.1KHz, divide by 2 (yay Nyquist), ~22KHz is the maximum frequency you can sample. ergo: 96KHz allows you to sample 48KHz signals and nobody can hear 48KHz anyway so what's the point.
Ah, true, but...
A 400Hz sine wave is now -also- sampled at the 96KHz level. Suddenly, that sine wave is looking twice as smooth.

No, it's not. If a 400 Hz sine wave is sampled at a mere 800 Hz, it can be reproduced per

Finally...an archive format

[TimSee (765338)]

Hope this happens. After transcoding my CD collection to FLAC to arhive it, I now regularly batch re-encode to smaller and smaller bit rates using new releases of lossy encoders. AAC has gotten much better (esp AAC-HE) over the years to the point for a portable player, 48kbs is perfectly acceptable to my ears. With a 16GB iPod Touch, I could see buying music from the iTMS in some lossless format and transcoding to get my entire collection all on a small, flash memory player.

Re:Finally...an archive format

[Mr.Ned (79679)]

If you're converting to mp3, and have an operating system that supports FUSE (GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are the ones I know about), take a look at mp3fs - it's a virtual filesystem that will encode from lossless to lossy on the fly. It's great for putting stuff on a small flash memory player.

Any chance of better-than-CD?

[neuro.slug (628600)]

Linn Records [linnrecords.com] offers downloads of 24-bit 96kHz songs. It would also be great to see DSD [wikipedia.org] files available sometime. Those formats would really bring interest.

It's good to see the possibility of lossless music nevertheless. :)

Let me translate...

[Anita Coney (648748)]

From the blog:

"And now I have an inkling Apple will add lossless music downloads to the iTunes Store within the next 12 months."

Translation:

I have no fricken clue that this will ever happen, but because I think it'd be cool if it did, I'll go ahead and blog about it.

The reasons I'll never adopt DRM lossless audio...

[garcia (6573)]

Other than selection, which is arguably a non-issue these days, why would I bother downloading something as large as lossless audio when there's no real benefit to doing so? I could just as easily go to the store and pickup the original CD for only a small bit more than or, more than likely, the same price as the download. I get the physical media and it doesn't cost much more, this is a no brainer for me.

The ease of access argument is null, in my mind, because it has DRM and any ease is negated right the

Re:The reasons I'll never adopt DRM lossless audio

[Grishnakh (216268)]

Personally, I'm beginning to wonder if the real reason for dynamic range compression is so that customers aren't surprised by how crappy some manufactured idol bands and singers sound in person without heavy studio voice processing.

Watch out, you're about to start an argument with all the people who think that it's normal for good bands to make albums with only one good song.

So...

[Seakip18 (1106315)]

This would be a massively positive move for people who spend thousands of dollars on hi-fi gear, but refuse to give money to stores that only offer compressed music

So....this is for all 17 of them? I figured since they have that much money for equipment, most would just get the CD's and rip them via those means. If you can afford a $20k speaker, you can afford a a few TB Hard drives to keep your music.

Re:

[P3NIS_CLEAVER (860022)]

Maybe because CDs suck? Hate storing them, hate ripping them. And I don't like music stores.

Or they could just stick with CDs

[the_humeister (922869)]

Most CDs have about 10-19 songs and range in price from $10-$15 (at least the mainstream ones). That works out to usually $0.99 a song. The last album I bought was Timbaland: Shock Value. 17 good songs for $12.

Re:Or they could just stick with CDs

[Vegeta99 (219501)]

You might like all the songs. Since I listen mostly to rock/alternative genres, I probably only want his singles. Can I buy them cheaply, like my dad could in the 70's? He's got a stack of 45's that probably reaches the ceiling of my apartment.

I do realize they still sell them, but are they $0.99 per song cheap?

Re:

[michaelmalak (91262)]

I do realize they still sell them, but are they $0.99 per song cheap?

I assume you're referring to 45's. Adjusting for inflation, $0.99 in 1979 (the year I bought the 45 of the song "Funkytown" at Woolco) would be, according the the BLS calculator [bls.gov], $2.87 today.

Around 1990, there were CD singles. Granted, they were intended to be replacements for 12" maxi-singles and not 45s, but they were $5. And the record companies killed them because they thought CD singles were "too cheap" -- that they were canibalizi

Finally! DRM free, lossless, digital music!

[Lord Byron II (671689)]

Isn't it amazing that 25 years after the release of the CD, we're excited to finally have a way to buy DRM free, lossless, digital music? If this happens, we'll be back inline with 1982 technology.

Re:

[Traa (158207)]

Who says that the lossless offer will be DRM free? (Didn't RTFA)

Also, it will be digital, so any self respecting audiophile should instantly dismiss this format because the quantum fluctuations that are part of the original audio are not represented to a high enough precision turning the recorded audio into near white noise useless garbage (aka pop). ;-)

iTunes won't get any more sales from me...

[BUL2294 (1081735)]

Forget Apple... I updated my iPod's firmware to Rockbox (which natively offers several lossless formats, and a slew of other features) and haven't looked back.

I did this for 3 reasons... 1) iTunes stopped supporting Windows 2000. (Yes, I know it's old, but I don't have to deal with the stupid BS Microsoft has built into XP, like WGA). 2) The 1.2.1 Apple firmware for iPod Videos gave me trouble with a bunch of my MP3s--cutting off the song at the 75% marker and refusing to seek within the track. (Of course, the catch-22 is that I can't get a newer iPod firmware from Apple since they refuse to support W2K). 3) I never liked the way iTunes worked in the first place...

I don't hold out much hope that a lossless format sold thru iTunes will truly be lossless. After all, converting an LP to 16-bit 44.1KHz WAV is, by definition, lossy (but outside of the perceptions of 95+% of the people out there)... To add, part of the reason that iTunes even sells DRM-free music is because the record companies can say "if you want higher quality, buy the CD or, better yet, vinyl!" So, I doubt many record companies will be selling uber-high-quality lossless tracks through iTunes...

DRM silliness

[spiritraveller (641174)]

So they lock down these files with DRM. Then DVD-Jon (or someone else) comes up with a DRM-stripping program for the files.

Then people can re-encode the files to their format of choice. But by then, most consumers have said "fuck it" and decided to just download their format of choice directly from p2p or usenet because it's easier and simpler than paying Apple and still violating the DMCA just so the music they paid for will work on the audio player they own.

Oh wait, that's already the status quo... Never mind.

If you wish they'd just adopt FLAC...

[Josh Coalson (538042)]

...make some noise; here's one place to start: http://flac.sourceforge.net/itunes.html [sourceforge.net]

almost everyone else distributing lossless (except musicgiants) is using FLAC [sourceforge.net] and/or WAV. it's supported by almost all s/w except itunes, hell you can even get wmp to play FLAC with some work.

re:TFA, lossless is not directly about quality, mp3 and aac both can be perceptually transparent for the most part, it's about (depending on your personality) perceived quality or format independence -- i.e. being able to transcode to the format you need without quality loss.

Cool if/when it happens

[Strange Ranger (454494)]

Sure I might buy something in Apple's lossless format from iTunes, but

A - If I'm going to pay extra for DRM'd lossless, I better get the cheap lossy version for free (for my phone, wife's iPod, whatever) because paying them to compress a song for me is ridiculous,and
B - It will be a moot point if the player won't play all the FLAC I already have, because I won't own the player. It's why I don't own one now.

Lossless piracy?

[MMC Monster (602931)]

Am I out of the loop? I was under the impression that most piracy was of the low quality mp3s that suck on any high end audio gear.

Lossless is a great idea and may open up a new market to the iTMS, but I can't image it's going to offset piracy. I'd think it will offset physical CD sales.

why it's not about FLAC+DRM

[Josh Coalson (538042)]

the article claims that apple won't go with FLAC because we're against DRM. I don't think so; if we're to believe Steve then he's against it too. and there's nothing stopping apple from sticking FLAC in an mp4 container with fairplay, we can't prevent that anyway. aside from the principle of it, another reasone we're against it in FLAC is that DRM is doesn't belong in the codec layer, it's a layer on top.

apple's got nothing to fear from FLAC, it can actually be used to their advantage to get a leg up on the competition, since for lossless electronic distribution FLAC is becoming the de facto standard.

I dunno...

[Cleon (471197)]

Lossless audio is going to involve some large file sizes, and with that, comes increased costs--bandwidth ain't free, and storage/delivery of these files is not going to be cheap or easy. This all translates into fairly expensive downloads.

So for Apple to seriously consider this, they're going to have to figure out if there are enough audiophiles out there willing to pay that kind of money for downloads.

Personally, I kinda doubt it.

AIF, AAC, RAW for Audio

[not_hylas( ) (703994)]

The RAW equivalent for audio would nice, but lossless would be what it would take for me (and everyone I know) to buy online.

If any of you remember cassettes, low end MP3s are about equal (IMHO).
I haven't bought / downloaded any music because of this factor - it's just not good enough when I can purchase the CD and deal with it from there.

AAC is pretty damn good, but no, I can tell the difference for the most part and well, really, come on, get real - they already SELL it lossless, it's not like you're twisting knobs to transfer it to the hard drive.
If anyone can get the majority of the Corporate Music above the line brain dead to listen, it'll be Jobs, and Team Apple, both of them.

Re:

[Nyeerrmm (940927)]

True, but you're probably not going to hear all the details on your iPod anyway. The real advantage of this, at least in my mind, is the ability to transcode to a format you want without fear. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between lossless and 192 or 256 MP3, but the idea of taking a 128 AAC and converting it to a 192 MP3 to play on something that doesn't support AAC is problematic, and that is something that can be fairly easy to hear.

So with hard drive sizes getting large enough that a

Re:

[Bertie (87778)]

But that's not the point. I encode my CDs to FLAC, I can re-encode to any lossy or lossless codec I like without any degradation in quality. So it's perfect for archiving music. Or, indeed, buying downloads that I'm going to want to keep indefinitely. I see MP3s and other lossless codecs as something transient, an equivalent of cassette tapes - all right to listen to, but you wouldn't want to keep them forever.

Re:Flac is gay..

[jacksonj04 (800021)]

It's still a lossy format which strips out some of the audio detail. I'm no gold-connector-magnetically-balanced-shielded-cable audiophile, but I do appreciate being able to listen to the entire depth of a piece of music (especially classical).

Perhaps a better way of putting it would be 'the human ear cannot distinguish between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC if listened to on iPod headphones', which is fair enough. There's no need to include everything if all I'm going to do is listen to it on the bus. Which leads to my original point - MP3 is lossy. AAC which is my format of choice is better quality for the space and bitrate, but is still lossy. FLAC isn't, which means I could have my lossless FLAC copy on my desktop where there's easy storage space, then have iTunes automatically create reduced quality versions for carrying around on my iPod. Compression from lossless source is always better than compression from an already compressed copy.

Not to mention that the iTunes store *isn't* 320kbps. 128kbps for the normal content, 256kbps for iTunes Plus.