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SanDisk, Music Publishers Push DRM-free SlotMusic Format
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 22, 2008 02:30 AM
from the doomed-to-fail dept.
from the doomed-to-fail dept.
Strudelkugel writes "The LA Times and others are reporting the music industry is working with SanDisk to try unrestricted music files on microSD memory cards to improve sales of physical media: 'In addition to music, the slotMusic cards will come pre-loaded with other things, such as liner notes, album-cover artwork and sometimes video.' The important part: 'The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection, so it can be used on almost all computers, mobile phones and music players — but it won't play on an iPod, which doesn't have a micro-SD memory slot. It has one gigabyte of memory, and the music tracks are played back at high quality.' Could it be the labels have finally recognized that providing features and convenience to customers is preferable to suing them?" Most computers also don't have microSD slots; according to EMI's press release, there will be a "tiny USB sleeve" packaged with each card, and the "high quality" format means up to 320kbps MP3. From the given description, it seems like it would be no harder to transfer the tracks to an iPod (via a computer) than to most other players.
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I want real High Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want a memory stick containing lossy 320kbit songs, I can get that easily enough off the CD (they are still giving you a real CD, right?).
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format, and maybe something in 5.1 instead? DVD-Audio and SACD didn't take off because no one adopted the players, but it might take off if you made it easily playable. I might even pay a slight premium.
Re:I want real High Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably to minimize the space required. They don't want half the price of the card be the cost of the card itself after all. Also a 320kbps mp3 can be played by pretty much any mp3 player out there, unlike most lossless compression formats.
Besides, most people (including me) can't hear the difference between 320 kbps lossy and lossless.
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Re:I want real High Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Audio CDs are generally encoded as 48khz, 16bit, 1411kbps PCM audio
Minor correction, audio CDs are encoded with a sample rate of 44.1khz, not 48khz.
Around the time of the initial development of CDs, audio was often stored using video recorders, since hard drives were an impractical choice back then. 44,100 samples per second suited both the NTSC and PAL formats, so this format was common at the time, and that's why this non-round number was originally chosen for the CD format too.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I want real High Quality (Score:5, Informative)
"But pretty much anyone with decent equipment *can* hear the difference between 24bit and 16bit, or 48khz and 96khz."
Lots of people who pay large sums for audio equipment _claim_ they can hear such differences despite the fact that the original source signals from the best microphones in the world don't produce any useful information above 22KHz and have signal / noise ratios of 90db or less, so there won't be any extra musical information that requires the higher frequency response and dynamic range provided by more bits and higher sampling frequencies.
Studios use high sampling rates and word sizes (192 KHz 32-bit) because multiple tracks can act as input to other tracks, which means that noise accumulates, and positional differences of high frequency bits in lower sampling rates can combine to produce artefacts (both of these can and do also occur when mixing multiple tracks down). Neither of these is a factor in domestic listening however, because _any_ system below the native studio resolution of 192 KHz 32-bit will end up being dithered down using the same algorithms (often on the same hardware).
"That is a pretty well established fact"
Established by whom? Double-blind listening tests indicate that there's no objective difference between them on any level of equipment when they're only being used to play back pre-recorded sources, irrespective of the musical genre being used to evaluate them. There's plenty of psycho-acoustical information to indicate that rise-times in waveforms above the upper threshold of human hearing can have a notable effect on the way it's perceived, but the inability of microphones used in music recording applications to transduce those frequencies into useful signals means that it's of academic rather than practical interest (some microphones such as the ones used in bat detectors can respond to extremely high frequencies, but they have other characteristics that make them useless for recording music signals).
"Audio CDs are generally encoded as 48khz, 16bit, 1411kbps PCM audio"
The audio on digital video is recorded at 48KHz. CDs are 44.1 KHz.
"For comparison, get one of the few albums available in DVD Audio and compare them to the CD - especially at high volumes. "
You'll need one of the even fewer DVD Audio albums that isn't up-sampled and re-mixed from a 44.1 KHz 16 bit master, and therefore actually has some chance of containing real extra musical information that isn't on the CD version to make such a comparison valid, otherwise any perceivable differences will be nothing more than artefacts of the up-sampling and re-mastering process.
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Re:I want real High Quality (Score:4, Funny)
You've got to leave room on the card for at least 500MB of advertising media and bloatware players.
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Re:I want real High Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because most people don't care. People who listen to ipods, buy from itunes, rip their own cds with crappy compression, and mainly listen to their music with $5 headphones, can't tell the difference between a lossless format and the common, lossy formats. That applies to the majority of consumers. Very little demand for anything better than 320kbps mp3 or aac or whatever. I like flac for archiving, personally, but I also often convert to a mediocre mp3 format for portability with my Palm Treo.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why not include a 24-bit 192 or 96 khz lossless format
You cannot hear the difference between a 16-bit recording and a 24-bit because in 16-bits per sample the SNR already is 96 dB. There's nothing a sampling frequency higher than 44.1 kHz will bring you since you cannot hear anything above 22 kHz. DVD Audio never took off because its target niche is the same fools who buy gold connectors, $500 wooden volume knobs or even put CDs in freezers to soften the sound (I kid you not).
Re:I want real High Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
There's nothing a sampling frequency higher than 44.1 kHz will bring you since you cannot hear anything above 22 kHz.
Using 96kHz allows you to use a rather stupid filter which starts at say 30kHz and does 100% filtering only at 45kHz. Such a filter is almost certain to not cause any distortion below 20kHz. In contrast, with CD you have to use a filter which only has the range 20kHz to 22KHz to play with, which means you have to use a rather sophisticated filter (or make the cut-off frequency lower).
You can of course do the recording at 96kHz (or higher) and then downsample to 44.1kHz using a perfect digital filter.
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Re:5.1 ? (Score:5, Interesting)
excuse me but are you clueless about music?
Insulting people (by stating or implying they are clueless) is generally not a good way to get positive moderation. Just thought you might want to have more karma to burn ;)
Also, the question you're addressing is not music (composition and performance), but recording, playback and auditory perception (production, HiFi, sound).
The number of speakers, or surround do not determine the quality of music.
True. Because music is composition and performance. In fact, the two are orthogonal; I've recently auditioned for a band and I quite liked their recorded songs even though the production on average was (gently put) not on par with commercial music.
The number of speakers does affect some dimension of the quality of what you're going to perceive. I've found that I even when I'm just listening to stereo, I want to have sound coming from behind me in addition to in front; whether it's the bigger, better speakers in the back (should be easy to test) or just the sound coming from all directions, it is subjectively more pleasant to listen to.
Also, if you do have real surround sound (even just 4.0), you can do nifty tricks like putting the drummer in the back, guitar and base subtly to either side and vocals in center/front. I'd think this makes each instrument more distinguishable while not destroying the integration into one auditory whole.
But I'm not audiophile, I just like having four speakers and sound coming from all directions.
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Children's music. (Score:5, Funny)
But I'm not audiophile, ...
They all say that until someone finds children's music on their computer!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, but it adds to the experience.
I would love to have some 5.1 surround music.
Classical music would kick ass if you could hear where the violins were and so on.
Normal rock would also benefit to a degree.
Re:5.1 ? (Score:4, Funny)
Tell that to the people mixing albums from the ground up for 5.1 listening.
What, to all five of them ?
That's too much work !
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have a porch. If only I could afford a porsche though! ;-)
Re:not at all (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there comes a point where it becomes ABSOLUTELY ridiculous. I am very keen on my sounds, and have some high end equipment in my living room.
As you said, to get the best out of it, you NEED high end throughout, no point having a "weakest link". So the source should be good quality well recorded CD/SACD/DVD-Audio/Other LossLess format. No point using a "high end" system with low quality MP3s.
Where the source is digital, ideally keep the signal digital, and unprocessed to the receiver, via TOSlink/SPDIF/HDMI(BluRay), and use the same transmission as the source, so if the source is CD, ensure the transmission is 44.1khz, 16bit,stereo. I have seen so called "Gold Plated TOSlink Optical cables" begin sold for a huge premium. This is ridiculous, as the gold plating has absolutely no effect on an optical cable. Instead, you want to know the quality of the glass used. Again, this is somethign that makes more of a issue with distance. For a 1m Cable, the absolute top quality may be overkill, as signal degradation will be lower than the tolerances of the error correction system. Again the key here is that Digital degrades differently to analogue, and may be up to a point far more forgiving.
How the hell did the parent get modded "Informative". It's standard audiophile drivel with a tiny hint of awareness of the ridiculousness of the phenomenon...
Let's start with the complete bullshit notion that the composition of digital cables can in any way affect their performance. If a digital signal gets through a $5 Walmart cable, it's as good as a signal that goes through a $5,000 audiophile cable. Period. End of story. Analog degradation of a digital signal makes absolutely no difference as long as the signal is recovered at the other end.
For analogue (and electrical based digital cabling), you need impedance matched "OxygenFree" cabling, where the connectors are electrically/chemically and mechanically matched. No point using a Cable with Gold Plated connectors, if the sockets on the source, or receiver is normal steel (this is a BAD thing, to mix gold plated and non gold plated, especially silver).
The same thing applies to speaker wires/connectors, make sure they are matched to the speakers, and the source.
Oh, goody. Now we move onto the bullshit about analog cables and how audiophiles think they can hear tiny anomalies in the conductance of wires that can hardly be detected by sensitive lab instruments.
Being an audiophile is all about self-delusion and elitism as far as I can tell. There is not a shred of evidence that they can actually tell the difference in carefully controlled double blind listening tests (which tend to really piss them off). This NYT article about high-end speaker wire is pretty funny: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E1D61739F930A15751C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all [nytimes.com].
If I ever find myself out of work, and lose all self-respect and sell my soul, I know I'll be able to make a living inventing bullshit audiophile products and peddling them with a straight face. Like a rock that sits on top of your CD player and adds "sonic purity" to its output. Oh wait, that one already exists.
For a good refutation of "subjectivist audiophile" BS by a respected audio engineer, read this: http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm [pipex.com] (WARNING: Contains actual testable scientific arguments.)
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Re:5.1 ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:5.1 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the audiophile world is even more based on pseudoscience than is the alternative medicine world.
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Re:5.1 ? (Score:5, Informative)
Stereo, for example, was invented to create more space for sounds in a recording.
No, it wasn't. Stereo is used to recreate the spatial component of music: when you record a number of instruments sitting at different positions in the studio, you should be able to hear where those instruments are. That has nothing to do with 'too many waveforms ...cramped together on the same output'.
In fact, in a stereo recording, most of the information will be played back by both speakers.
It is possible to make a recording where the left and right channels have nothing in common, but you'll find that those sound very unnatural, so these recordings are (thankfully) rare. It's like having half the musicians on the far left of the stage, and the other half on the far right, with nobody in the center.
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Re:No they dont (Score:5, Informative)
you need different ranges assigned to different speakers that can give out that frequencies. but, there has to be more of the same speakers assigned to a particular frequency range - lets say, you got a certain size of tweeter. if there are 4 of this, and you divide a small incremental range of high frequency sound to four of these in small increments, you'll have, say, seperated two sopranos' (each soprano will have differences in their frequencies, even if minute and hardly identifiable by human ear) voices to two tweeters of the SAME kind, but while playing these two sopranos' voices, each of their voices will come from the different tweeters. this will increase the distinctiveness of each sound. here, the quality of the tweeters matter VERY much.
Nonsense. No audio system works like that.
1. you can't separate two voices or two instruments like this, because each voice produces a range of frequencies that mostly overlaps. They'll sound different because their harmonic spectrum (the relative volume of each harmonic) differs a bit, but there is no filter that can separate them.
2. A loudspeaker box usually contains a few drivers of different sizes, because the driver size needs to be matched more or less to the frequency. A 12" bass driver is too heavy to produce 10 kHz, conversely a 1" tweeter can't move enough air to produce convincing bass. The challenge is to use no more drivers than necessary, because dividing the frequency spectrum like this introduces all kinds of problems. The holy grail of loudspeaker design is the point source: a single point that can produce the entire spectrum.
The only reason loudspeaker arrays are used, is volume. Multiple parallel drivers can produce more volume than a single driver.
There are some interesting side effects to arrays. The dispersion pattern changes a bit, which can be beneficial if done right. But 'a sound stage that encompasses you'? No. That's due to the surfeit of power which sets up reverberations in the hall. You get the same effect cranking up your non-array home stereo.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Care to provide proof? What you suggest is impossible.
Re:No they dont (Score:4, Informative)
I have. Interestingly, the elements in an array are usually full-range loudspeaker cabinets (ignoring subwoofers for the moment). Again, it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices. If you think otherwise, provide an example. JFGI isn't going to cut it.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
gain, it is physically impossible to take a recording that has two sopranoes on the same track, and seprarating that track into two individual voices.
Actually this is non completely impossible. Using special DSP techniques (adaptive filtering and SVD) a digital system can try to decompose a stream into several sources. This doesn't work perfectly, e.g. if the two sopranos would be producing exactly the same sinusoidal tone, they cannot be isolated. Similar techniques are being used in hearing aids (not talking crap here, I worked as a phd student in a DSP lab where similar things were being done).
This aside, it is indeed impossible to do such separati
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
conclusion : positioning is not only unimportant, but also deteriorating to the sound quality after 2.1 (or stereo), because noone ever sits in the middle of an orchestra or a rock band while listening to music.
Only because they *can't* sit in the middle of a rock-band while listening to music. It's just not practical to do so, particularly in a crowd of more than five people.
Given that it *is* practical to have more than two/three audio channels, and that human ears are able to sense direction in more than left to right (ever seen someone look behind them when there's a loud bang?), why not have more than two/three channels?
Directional audio certainly enhances a film, there's no reason it can't enhance music eith
Re:I want real High Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I'm in my mid forties and I grew up with scratchy LP's and compact cassettes. I recall buying LP's and "ripping" them to tapes so that I didn't have to keep handling and playing the LP in an attempt to maintain them in "pristine condition". I've still got those LP's too.
The trouble was that compact cassettes sounded like crap, even when you lashed out and bought the "metal" ones. But we had no choice. You couldn't use LP's in the car so cassettes it was (8-Tracks never caught on in Australia so please refrain from telling me about how they were much better than CC)
Fast forward 30 years and my main problem with music these days is that IT IS MOSTLY CRAP!
To my aging ears, MP3's sound way better than cassette tapes ever did even at 128Kbs. Most of my 120Gb collection is ripped in 128-192K MP3 and I don't care. Most of the music I like was recorded in the analog days anyway, and besides, I'm sure my old ears aren't what they used to be.
128K MP3s still sound better than any cassette tape ever did so I'm happy.
Listening to 50 fucking cent pose and preen in 5.1 lossless audio? All I can say is not in my lifetime buddy.
I'll take an antique recording of Canned Heat, Peter Green or Alvin Lee @ 128Mb any day thanks.
Now, get off my damn lawn you goddamn whippersnappers!
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Weird (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Weird (Score:4, Funny)
Won't play on iPods like a cd won't play on an iPod. Awesome reporting. Wasn't biased or anything, right?
--mike
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think cluelessness is usually considered a bias.
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Funny)
Shhh... Don't tell them how easy it would be for someone like Apple to create an SD dongle for legacy iPods then integrate support for new iPods (glad their Dock Connector doesn't support USB or you could even take advantage of the aforementioned tiny USB sleeve). A small software update for support and you can listen to that music as you're walking out of the store.
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EMI is a pioneer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:EMI is a pioneer (Score:4, Insightful)
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Still the same problem with buying CDs (Score:4, Insightful)
But the biggest problem, he said, may be that Apple's iTunes and other download services have made customers used to buying a song at a time, not an album, and making their own compilations.
The horror! Now we don't have to pay for the album fillers that comes with the one song that we want?
Re:Still the same problem with buying CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, even bands with talent has record labels stuffing crap to fill up their CDs. Extremely few artists have 100% control of what is put on their CD.
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Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
At least they're finally trying to make something we want rather than forcing us to buy buggy whips though.
FINALLY! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but the idea of buying music without in some way being able to damage the environment has been KILLING me.
Way to get on that EMI. Thank god!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's a good job that there's no ready-made distribution method for digital data that doesn't involve physical media, or those guys would look pretty stupid about now.
I hear the next version will have album-art printed on the back of a panda using the tears of dolphins.
It's amazing how so many people can spend so much time and money pussy-footing around and coming up with a million different ways to not just sell a normal MP3 file at a sensible price. Ahhh, progress.
awesome but... (Score:5, Funny)
"Tiny USB Sleeve"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Great. More crap to throw out. Isn't one of the big selling features of digital distribution that it produces less crap to landfill?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the difference? (Score:4, Insightful)
No copyright protection == public domain (Score:5, Insightful)
No copyright protection? So they are only releasing music that is in the public domain!?
Or did the newspaper screw up, and mean to write "no copy protection"?
Another Physical Distribution Method? (Score:5, Insightful)
Kudos to EMI for doing something digital without DRM, but how is this better than what Amazon.com offers us now?
I can download DRM-free songs from Amazon for less than a buck, and albums at about $8. Windows Media Player downloads the album art, and a plug-in gets me lyrics. I can transfer the song to other devices, friends, or burn to CD. Amazon's library is HUGE.
And internet distribution doesn't impact the environment.
About the only advantage I see to this is the "up to 320k", whereas Amazon's are 160k I believe. But, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference.
Physical distribution is dead. If they want to cater to impulse buyers at a retailer, install a kiosk with a variety of ports, card readers, BlueTooth, etc and let people download stuff instantly.
in the age of the internet... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, watching these guys over the last decade has been like watching a retarded child learning to go poo in the toilet. They're six years old when they finally get it right, and then they look at you like they've just won the Olympics.
No disrespect to retarded children intended.
Re:in the age of the internet... (Score:5, Funny)
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Uninformed Journalist (Score:5, Informative)
Ms. Quinn, the author of the Los Angeles Times article, is not a very good technology writer. She not only quotes that it won't work with iPods (which is terribly misleading; the microSD card won't, but the contained DRM-free MP3s will be very easy to work with), but she also refers to this as a "new music format".
Medium, yes; format, no. Distributing on the microSD cards is new, but seems like something people may latch onto quickly. MP3 is old and a de facto universal format, which is what makes this even better.
They have a vested interest in physical media (Score:3, Interesting)
Is Micro-SD the right choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I thinking about the same micro-SD as everyone else? Smaller than my little finger nail?
It's small enough to get lost in your pocket, sucked up by a vacuum cleaner or whatever. They're also fiddly to handle: can you imagine picking through your album collection with a pair of tweezers, squinting at the 3mm x 5mm labels to find the one you're after?
It seems a bizzarre choice for a portable music medium. If they're not intended for carrying around but supposed to be used only once, to get the music onto your player/computer, why not just sell the download?
Re:Is Micro-SD the right choice? (Score:4, Insightful)
MicroSD cards are sold in ~5x4x1 cm cases. Less easy to lose. Maybe SlotMusic will come in larger cases so they can actually have cover art. In any way you won't have a dozen MicroSD cards just lying around.
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And what else ? (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to music, the slotMusic cards will come pre-loaded with other things, such as liner notes, album-cover artwork and sometimes video
And advertisements, rootkits, DRM schemes, spyware ...
Why is it every keydisk manufacturer thinks I want their crappy software to run every time I put a disk in the USB slot ? Sick of this nonsense, meaning your 2GB memory is actually only 1.8GB plus some non removable crap, and not one but 2 drive letters to deal with :-(
Re:And what else ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What format is it distributed in? (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow I am a little doubtful, given that the article does not state which format the songs will be distributed in.
From the article:
Music, Retail and Tech Leaders to Offer "slotMusic(TM)": High Quality, DRM-Free MP3 Music on microSD(TM) Cards
My guess is, this is yet another "plays on most devices" that the record labels always cooks up
And your guess is wrong. This is genuinely good news, they're finally realizing that certain people will pirate regardless how inconvenient they make it.
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