The only real difference between these compression formats is what frequencies have been left out. Now, due to some interesting evolutionary quirks in our brains, we don’t really notice the loss that much, even though the loss is there.
In order to compact the file to approximately 1/10 the size of the raw data file, the file must lose 90 percent of the data that the human ear hears. How will MS get people to rent their music when they are not even buying it to begin with?Īt last, a subject I can rant about, being a former recording engineer.Īll these formats have one thing in common.
The fact is that people are not buying music on the PC side. Their is no app on the PC side as well integrated as iTunes at this time. I’ve looked at most of them and they suck. None of the services on the PC side are that good or worth paying for. The other music services have access to 98% of the computer market yet they can’t generate the sales Apple has even with as much as a year’s head start.
I understand that Apple’s concept may not be new but I think the other music services were taken aback by how many downloads Apple was able to rack up from so few Mac users. Its really strange how people interpret innovation. Already people are saying, “Its about damn time MS rented my music to me and cut me off when I didn’t pay!” Now MS wants people to rent their music collection and if they don’t pay the monthly fee when the clock runs out they have no music. The price of $1 per tune was too much for their cable connected 3GHZ HT P4s with 1GB of RDRAM. I remember the discussion on the iTunes Music Store how people thought it was ridiculous and insane. MP3 is completely unlistenable before I can tell the difference between AAC and CDDA), but I have heard one thing about WMA: it raises the volume a few decibles which creates the impression of better quality to the untrained ear (like mine). I haven’t done enough low bitrate listening to really compare (except AAC vs MP3. It wasn’t even really close, and these were samples hand picked by Microsoft to show off WMA. Odd thing, though a few months later I finally listened to those demo samples side by side… and was actually surprised to find that Real was clearly superior in every featured demo comparison. Microsoft finally caught them.” I didn’t even listen to the samples, but I left the page with a clear idea in my head that WMA 8 really was better than Real. I read the page at that time, shook my head and thought to myself, “Poor Real. Monty (main programmer and ear behind vorbis) wrote a very insightful bit on Vorbis’ “Dare to Compare” page, Ī funny thing about demo pages about a year ago when Microsoft put up a demo page trumpeting how the newly released WMA 8 beat Real 8 in 64kbps quality, they included a number of samples purportedly demonstrating that WMA was now clearly superior. MS does quite well as a silent partner in several fields, and they need to learn to do it more–that’s where the real money is! I’ll bet you could find ten things from GE, Allen-Bradley, or Dow chemical in the next 5 minutes, but you don’t see them raming marketing down our throats do you! Even IBM has had to back off the branding, because people preceive them as too strung-out. Realize that Coca-cola, Phillip-Moriss, GM, pepsi, Disney and others have fingers in all sorts of stuff, but keep their name off it because people burn out.
I think most MS-bashers here are really just tired of the constant attempts by MS to enter every conceivable market and tie it to windows.
When will they learn that too much MS is a bad thing. Why haven’t they cornered this obvious market also? Their name fits right in with the marketing….īut seriously, we don’t really want MicroSoft*** stuff.