With the digital music explosion, the issues of copyright, authorship and ownership have never been so important. Tune in to hear a re-broadcast of Jim and Greg’s interview with legal expert Lawrence Lessig. Listen
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National Hockey League games are among the first programming to be offered through Apple’s iTunes video download service to launch Wednesday, Apple Canada has announced.
CBC: Apple launches video downloading in Canada with slate of TV programs
full story
While I’m at it, here’s a link to the Podcast 101 piece done by Kevin Rose and Dan Huard of Systm. Take notes, there’ll be a quiz tomorrow.
A quickie post/homage on the occasion of the re-mastered Led Zeppelin re-issues of last week. Check out this great BBC interview with Robert Plant and John Bonham on, among other things, the death of the cult of personality. Yeah, right.
Prompted by the release of Apple’s iPhone in the UK, yesterday the BBC announced an optimized download directory of BBC podcasts for the iPhone (and iPod Touch).
Now, that’s moving fast.
The BBC also say they plan to release versions for other mobile devices soon.
For now, point your iPhone or iPod Touch to:
bbc.co.uk/podcasts
LibriVox has added a really cool new feature. You can now download chapters of their public domain audio recordings via an RSS feed; Meaning you can easily grab Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, for example, by clicking on the RSS link, or even the Subscribe in iTunes link — The files will automagically be moved to iTunes or your podcatcher of choice. Neat-o.
Hello, Apple?
Please, please, please let iTunes use .Mac sync services (formerly iSync) to synchronize podcast subscriptions across multiple machines. Individual podcast episode’s “new/not new” status should also be synced.
Isn’t this a no-brainer?
I’m flying between Winnipeg and Ottawa, listening to a favourite Coltrane recording. I thought I’d get down a few musings (laments?) on digital music and audio fidelity prompted by the EMI/Apple announcement.
Dynamic range, warmth and depth have all but disappeared it seems in today’s music recordings. Music is compressed in recording, in mastering, in broadcast; often at all three stages. The loudness effect is ubiquitous. Broadcast audio is so pumped that it never seems to vary more than a few db. What results is music that is shallow, cold, harsh and without any kind of imaging or space.
Our new formats don’t help things. We have gone from vinyl (with its many short-comings, granted), to cassette tape, to Compact Disc, to MP3. Even though CDs have potentially more bandwidth than vinyl, it’s not used.
For most people MP3 and AAC files compressed at 128k have become the way they listen to music. Add to the mix iTunes EQ settings (which usually counter, or undo, any ‘psycho-acoustic’ EQ inherent in the MP3 and AAC file compression) and the result is unlistenable.
Do our ears not know any better anymore?
Has the convenience of iPods, iTunes Music libraries and huge hard drives won out over sound fidelity?
Has the requirement to sell music on the radio, in movies, in video games and on the web over crappy computer speakers made the dumbing down of recordings necessary?
Has the focus on computer rigs done away with the concept of home audio systems?
Maybe the music that’s being consumed as 128k MP3 files doesn’t need — or deserve — better engineering or more bandwidth.
Is anything likely to reverse this trend, or will high quality audio become even more of a niche interest?
ps. It’s often said that we are now more discerning with video than we are with audio, what with the prevalence of gigantic plasma and LCD displays and “surround sound” in home theatre systems.
I don’t think so. Check out a TV retailer, where the colour on the display models is so saturated and overblown the reds almost make your eyes bleed. Or what about the stretching of a 4:3 aspect ratio image to cover a wide panel display? Every bar’s got’em. And what about the compression artifacts in a digital cable or satellite-to-home? A fast-moving image sequence is horribly chunky. People don’t seem to mind watching the ridiculously distorted images, over-saturated colours, and overly compressed video. I can’t bare it.
As with music, it probably doesn’t help that most of the broadcast “content” is shite.
In today’s Big News™, EMI announced that it will make high-quality, DRM-free music available in the iTunes Store.
From MacNN:
The Cupertino-based company will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads and without any digital right management (DRM technology). Pricing will be $1.29/€1.29/£0.99; however, iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied. Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price. The new higher-quality, DRM-free songs will be available in May.
I haven’t bought much music from the iTunes Store lately because in my opinion tracks encoded at 128k sound awful. The fact that EMI/Apple are keeping the per-album cost of the higher-fidelity, DRM-free music the same as the lower-quality DRM version, means they probably just got a customer back.
As for people who buy single tracks here and there, will they be motivated to buy a higher-priced version of the same song to get higher-fidelity without DRM? I don’t think so. They’ll likely be happy buying the cheaper, standard-quality DRM version.
So, on the one hand Apple can offer listeners like me higher quality, DRM-free music without a price hike (for full albums), while on the other hand, they can continue to offer the single track buyer songs at the same 99¢ (which the major labels have been pressuring Apple to raise for some time).
All ’round, probably a smart move for Apple.
Knowing that other major labels and indies are likely to follow suit, what are you thinking today if you manage the Zune Store?
UPDATE: Post and comments from Michael Geist
‘Back in Ottawa after a quick trip West, and I feel oddly compelled to to keep postings here going, so here’s a ‘content quickie’:
ArtsJournal.com maintains a page of arts and culture videos culled from YouTube. Clips rotate through the page over the course of a couple of weeks and you can find some really great stuff. And those videos will lead you to other videos in the same vein, and, can you say, “where did the afternoon go?”
Currently featured are a wide range of clips; from Donald Byrd and Stan Getz in 1957 to David Sedaris on Letterman. Check out the hilarious Rachmaninov Had Big Hands clip.
Link: artsJournalvideo
Don’t forget about TubeSock if you want to move some of this video to iTunes, your iPod, or simply save them to your computer.