Why You'll Never See Lossless Audio For Sale
Paul's post yesterday about why he pays for music made me realize something: no legitimate online music store will ever sell music in a lossless format. I originally posted this as a comment to his post, but I think it was important enough to share here:
Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever see DRMed lossless music without serious CD-burning restrictions (read: no burning whatsoever). Once you get into the lossless realm, burning/ripping to/from CD doesn’t cause any degradation like it does with lossy formats, so it would be trivial to strip the DRM from a lossless file at the cost of a CD-R (and maybe not even that if you want to get fancy with disk images and such).
So while I do think we might get incremental upgrades in quality from iTunes et al (a small bump to 192kbps), we won’t see lossless from them because lossless = DRM-free.
Technorati Tags: music, digital, DRM, piracy, lossless, FLAC, SHN, Apple, iTunes, iTunes Music Store
mthorn wrote:
You can actually just burn any track to a CD now and rip it to mp3 to remove any protection. Lossless can still have DRM protection.
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 12:01 am | Permalink
Martin wrote:
Yes, the so-called "analog hole" exists today, but in the process of getting an unprotected mp3 from a protected mp3 via CD, you lose quality. The uncompressed audio you burned to the CD is going to have just as much audio data as the mp3. When you rip it back to mp3, your mp3 encoder will compress the CD in a different way and data is discarded. So while you certainly can go from a DRMed 128kbps file to a non-DRMed 128kbps file, the non-DRMed file is going to sound worse.
Compare this to a lossless format where no data is loss in compression/decompression. Burning a lossless file to CD won't make it any better, but by definition, the lossless file will be just as good as the original CD it came from. Once that CD is burned, under current DRM schemes, you'd be able to rip the CD normally back to a lossless format without any loss of data, and that's where the difference lies.
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 12:13 am | Permalink
mthorn wrote:
True. However CD quailty is a loss of quality from what the studios record if you want to get down to it. The question really is what quality is good enough for a particular person. I would think most people are happy with a 192kbps file burnt to CD and then ripped sense that is what most people deal with.
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 12:23 am | Permalink
Martin wrote:
In the sense that it's impossible to get a perfect digital reproduction of sound, then yes, you're right. But it still stands that there is a huge difference between a lossless file and an mp3. Live concert recording communities are very particular about this fact. 100% of shows are distributed in lossless format and tapers are very strict about individuals sharing their shows in the lossy mp3 format.
As to what is good enough for a particular person, the 1B+ songs sold on iTunes show that 128kbps AAC is "good enough." In that case, there really is no reason to offer lossless audio for sale and my assertion still stands (albeit for a different reason). In the case that there is demand for lossless audio, and I do believe there is, then the argument I made in the original post stands; I don't think it would be offered even if there was demand for it.
Oh, and by the way, what online store are "most people" getting 192kbps files from? ;)
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 12:43 am | Permalink
mthorn wrote:
Heh, maybe the 192Kbs per second was a wish slipping through. I suppose most are 128Kb. I agree that they will never release lossless. But I stick to my thoughts at http://mthorn.net/articles/Why_I_Dont_Pay_For_Music.html. I won't buy track individually until I can own the music with lifetime upgrades.
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 5:52 am | Permalink
James Deville wrote:
I did want to run something by you. If you burn to CD then re-rip in a lossless format, then you don't lose anything else. I also think that eventually the studios will realize that DRM is going to hurt them more than anything else. As more and more people encounter the restrictions, more and more people are going to be upset.
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 11:37 am | Permalink
Chris Ovenden wrote:
I was under the impression that you could get lossless AACs from iTunes. If yoou cuould/can, they might actually be worth buying. Of course there is an analogue hole, even if such files were never allowed to be burned to CD: Virtual Aduio Cable, for instance. (http://spider.nrcde.ru/music/software/eng/vac.html)
Conversely, using FLAC or similar, it is possible to make unprotected compressed files whose quality is no worse than the original DRMed download.
Posted on 26-Jul-06 at 11:56 am | Permalink