Downloading prog

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Under wrote: The Napster thing with $10/month might be legal, but the artists doesn't gain much from it. The artists don't gain much from CD sales either.

That depends where you buy the CD. At the local store you are probably right.
But at this artist himself....Even an artist can make a good copy of its own music. That with a solid printer for the cover and he is able to sell a nice looking CD with his own music with a limited cost price.

 

Suki wrote: Btw, you keep mentioning the quality difference between CDs and MP3, you have to remember however that to 'normal ears' it takes years of listening to music in order to feel the difference between CD quality and 192mp3..

I don't know if it's me that's talking about quality difference (I don't remember doing so), but any use of CBR wastes space, unless it's 320kbps. If you have a VBR file of average 192kbps, it will sound better than a CBR 192kbps. The generally accepted benchmark for MP3 transparency falls around 210kpbs, depending obviously on sample and person.

The main argument against MP3, and lossy coding in general, though, isn't simply the immediate quality difference. If you download MP3 at, say, 192kbps, and then want to compress to 64kps because you don't have much space, then it'll sound much worse that compressing a CD-quality file straight to 64kps, because you're throwing away data twice. Basically, unless whoever or whatever you download from has exactly the same encoding preferences as you, then you're stuck with something you don't want, or some future loss of quality.


Also, if MP3 becomes obsolete (and, judging from the success of iTunes, this isn't an entirely absurd situation), then all MP3s will have to be transcoded, causing further quality loss. And if AAC becomes outdated, then they'd have to be transcoded again, and so on, and so on.

goose wrote: GoldenSpiral wrote: goose wrote: Well, the iPod doesn't even meet the technical official specification to play MP3, so what do you expect? It does, in fact, play mp3.  pretty much everything I have is in mp3 format at 192kbps or higher.  the only stuff in that god awful .m4a format is the stuff i got from iTunes before i decided i hated it. It will certainly play some MP3s, but will skip playing a VBR encoded one with lots of changes of bitrate (which is the whole point of VBR). On the iPod, I'd imagine you're better off listening to m4a since if I recall correctly that only supports VBR mode, so you don't have to worry about wasting space.

Did some research on the subject....

old iPods did not support VBR, but as of genIII they do support VBR mp3.  i haven't had any problems with playing files.

Well... I download a lot of music, however,  prog is the only music I really appreciate, hence, I started buying CDs.. I've got 3 CDs so far.. :))

Really though, when it comes to buying CDs, I become quite cheap, because there are lots of things of which I need to buy in the money and no budget left for CDs and also a recent question I had is if there is a lifespan for CDs ..

Btw, you keep mentioning the quality difference between CDs and MP3, you have to remember however that to 'normal ears' it takes years of listening to music in order to feel the difference between CD quality and 192mp3..

 

Edited by Suki

Right and wrong; illegal and legal are not black and white anymore nowadays.

The Napster thing with $10/month might be legal, but the artists doesn't gain much from it.
The Russian sites where you can buy songs for $0,10 or an amount per downloaded kb are legal for Russian law, yet they could be considered illegal for other jurisdictions.

If rationality does not give you guidance anymore, go with your feeling.
If you feel you truly wish to support a certain artist, buy it directly from the artist.

 

Manunkind wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: Well, if one chooses to download huge quantities of files illegally, because $10/month is too expensive ... I'll say that much: It's not rational. I understand the iPod issue though. Unlimited downloads for 10$ a month? And the artists actually getting something from the deal? (drools)

The situation for the artist with Napster is relatively similar to that with real CDs. The music industry gets most of the monthly fee. The difference is that not individual sales (downloads) are counted, but playtime of the tracks. playtime statistics are collected my Napster and made available to the music industry, so they can distribute the money ... so playtime relates to album sales.

I like this approach ... and Napster also hosts many independent labels. Essentially you can pick up an instrumen, record some stuff and give it to Napster. If it receives 1% of the total playtime, you'll get 1% of the monthly fees (minus a small provision for Napster).

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Well, if one chooses to download huge quantities of files illegally, because $10/month is too expensive ... I'll say that much: It's not rational. I understand the iPod issue though.

Unlimited downloads for 10$ a month? And the artists actually getting something from the deal?

(drools)

Well, if one chooses to download huge quantities of files illegally, because $10/month is too expensive ... I'll say that much: It's not rational. I understand the iPod issue though.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: @GoldenSpiral: What's weak about the selection? And it's ever growing ... I've only been using Napster for 6 days and I've already downloaded more than 4000 songs, 27 Gigabytes.

 

let me make my excuses!   the real truth is i just dont want to pay for music, so the rest are mostly excuses to cover that (except the .wma thing is true)

If i had money and if i lived in a city with many music stores, i'd buy music. But the reality is another. My downloaded music reaches the 193 bands (2229 tracks, counting with winamp).