Universal to test $10 price for new CDs

[TallMomof2]

Originally Posted by chainring

Others have addressed the DRM and lossy aspect of digitized music, so I won't touch on that other than to agree 100% with not wanting those in my archive.

Now, that silly piece of plastic, well, I have plenty of music CD's bordering on 20 yrs old and no sign of degradation. I've ripped, and re-ripped some of my discs over the years with no problems at all. Rip once with a good drive and something like EAC on the PC, or XLD on the Mac, to a lossless format and you're good to go for years.

I also haven't seen any degradation in my older CDs which are approaching 25 years of age. All are ripped to a lossless format. Before WMA lossless was around I ripped to MP3 and still do for use on a cheap Sansa Clip that I use when I exercise.

If I'm just interested in a track or two from an album I will buy the mp3 but most of the time I buy the CD.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Bremen Cole

Your DRM free digital song will play fine in 20 years,. A silly piece of plastic...... not so much....

A CD-ROM (not CD-R) has a very long lifespan. Moreover, there is no physical wear on the playing surface, warping is only a result of external physical forces (i.e. sitting on them) and oxidisation is only an issue for CD-R's, not CD-ROM's

All you need to read a CD is a spin mechanism and a laser. Comparing them with older mechanisms which suffer from a great number of issues stable optical media don't is simply inaccurate.

You may believe they're obsolete from a philosophical perspective, but from a technical one...

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

No, no, NO!

MP3 is a licensed format, so I would not expect companies to continue paying...

They won't have to. Patent protection of decoding on the MP3 standard expires in early 2012, and encoding by 2015.

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

They won't have to. Patent protection of decoding on the MP3 standard expires in early 2012, and encoding by 2015.

That sucks, that format needs to die already.

[DawnFalcon]

Heh.

Audiophiles.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Logseman

$10 is still a ripoff, particularly if, as rcuadro says, you can get only the songs you like in iTunes. Aside of that, a CD of 700 mb's can be filled with 150 songs or more, and they tend to pack a dozen or less in every disc.

But say you have a CD of 12 songs and you want the entire CD, you cannot get it from iTunes for less then $10 at 99 cents a track. Plus, you get ALL the bits and not just some of the bits.

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Heh.

Audiophiles.

Oh, I've lost too much hearing to be an audiophile. Besides, I don't care about the oxygen content of my wires, jitter, or the supposed superiority of tube amps. Nor can I tell a difference between SACD and regular redbook.

However, even I can hear clipping in most MP3s on my crappy computer speakers. Hence, I refuse to pay more for an inferior codec vs a CD.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Heh.

Audiophiles.

of they really want to do it right for lossy audio, MP3 and AAC both need to die and die now. Ogg Vorbis blows both away.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

However, even I can hear clipping in most MP3s on my crappy computer speakers. Hence, I refuse to pay more for an inferior codec vs a CD.

Mm-hum. What sound card do you have, for reference, and what MP3 decoder do you use?

JSWolf - Bluntly, Ogg Vorbis has not achieved anything like mass market penetration for playback - if you're distributing music, you're far better off using LAME-encoded MP3's.

[Ben Thornton]

I use LAME mp3s at 320kbps, and I can't hear the difference compared to FLAC. I settled on that because most things will play mp3s, but other formats would require multiple rips and I can't be bothered. I took a number of tracks where I could hear "artifacts" of the encoding at 128kbps, and upped the bitrate to find out when they disappeared. For me, 256kbps was indistinguishable from CD, so I went for 320.

On CD life, my experience is that every 100 CDs or so, one will have degraded somewhat (or, at any rate, becomes fussy to rip) over time.

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Mm-hum. What sound card do you have, for reference, and what MP3 decoder do you use?

I use an HT Omega Striker, for reference, with Audacious as the player. I used to have it hooked up via S/PDIF passthrough to a Harman Kardon, and while that sounded much better, I decided it wasn't worth the wires.

[DawnFalcon]

Ah, one of C-Media's midrange. And the card's quality is, as you note, considerably better over S/PDIF - it's designed for use with that. The other output's s/n ratio, bluntly, sucks.

"Clipping", right.

[MovieBird]

While not the best you can get, 116 dB hardly sucks. Bluntly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about here, as with so many other subjects.

To borrow a phrase "plonk"

[DawnFalcon]

116 dB only applies to the cards S/SPIF outputs, the others are 98. Try actually reading a professional review of the card next time, before you buy. But hey, don't let these inconvenient facts distract you from ranting about how MP3's are crap!

Oh, and it's *plonk*. Can't even get that right.

[Ben Thornton]

Any idea whether this $10 price will be reflected in a UK equivalent price (or even a £10 "psychologically equivalent" price)?

Presumably, they will be 9.99