Apple needs higher quality classical music in the iTunes Music Store

Long entry ahead. Nothing that hasn't been said before, but I just need to get it off my chest. ---- The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) UK this morning added a new recording of the J.S. Bach Cello Suites (six suites for unaccompanied cello) by Jian Wang, on the Deutsche Grammophone label. iTMS link. The list price is £15.99 for what is usually a 2 CD affair. The price is consistent with regular album releases on iTMS UK, £7.99. Unfortunately, so is the quality. Apple has maintained since Day One of the iTMS' North American inception that a bitrate of 128kbps offers sufficient (near-CD) quality for music downloads in the superior-to-MP3 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. For many, the difference in quality between a 128kbps AAC file and a 192kbps one is noticeable, but not a point of contention for standard pop music. 128kbps does the job, if only just. It has not stopped Apple selling literally several hundred million songs in this format, perhaps the lowest-quality of all Digital Rights Managed songs sold on the internet. Sites like emusic.com sell their files in superior LAME-encoded Variable Bit Rate (VBR) MP3 files, unprotected. The DRM competition, in the form of Microsoft and its Windows Media Technologies licensees, generally offer 192kbps WMA files. These are at least equal to 128kbps AAC, and likely better in almost every regard (from an audio standpoint). Firstly, it would be good if Apple could suddenly re-encode their library and start offering higher quality files. But this is unlikely to happen for two reasons. One, the stance that 128kbps is sufficient is hard to go back on, especially when it's as entrenched in the company's marketing, product literature, and software as it is in the case of Apple. In the iTunes application, under encoding options, 128 AAC is described as “High Quality”. There is no other option. Under MP3 settings however, there are 3 presets, ranging from 128kbps to 192kbps, and descriptions from “Good”, to “High”, and “Higher”. The implication is that there is no need for a “Higher” version of AAC to be used (although such an operation is possible via the Custom settings). The second reason why we shouldn't expect a paradigm shift at Cupertino is the entrenchment of the format within the user base. The iTMS does not allow customers to redownload songs previously purchased. Sales are a one-off transfer of data. While not on the same scale as the mid-80s rush to replace albums formerly on LPs, 8-tracks, and cassettes with new CD versions, the potential for customer dissatisfaction to run high is significant. But there is one thing that can be done, and that is for Apple to acknowledge that Classical, and to a lesser extent, Jazz music, present exceptional cases. Their listeners are more likely to be audiophiles. The material itself, full of subtleties that must be preserved, is more demanding on codecs, and is done a disservice by poor encoding and low bitrates. This is a fact beyond dispute, and one that the CD's success helped affirm. Classical record companies like Deutsche Grammophone are the motive forces behind innovations in the fields of audio recording and reproduction. To encode and digitally distribute their products at a quality setting designed to only handle popular music, at full CD prices, is to sell a product that does not perform as advertised. It does a disservice to the artists, their art, and to consumers. In the early days of internet streaming radio over dialup connections, Spinner.com broadcast all its streams in RealAudio, in 8khz or 11khz stereo. All except for its classical channels, which were broadcast in mono. The reason for this was that the bandwidth saved by using a mono stream over a stereo one was used to deliver the music at a higher frequency rate, of 11khz or 22khz (my memory fails me). That Spinner (now a subsidary of Netscape/AOL) recognized the needs of genre was applaudable. It is the sort of bending-the-rules-for-the-good-of-the-customer policy that one expects from Apple, a company whose image is strongly tied to music these days. Microsoft has claimed over the last 3 generations of its audio compression format WMA that it offers near-CD quality at 64kbps. I believe with the latest generation, the claim is that 48kbps is sufficient bandwidth for their technology to store a CD quality sound recording. Certainly this is purely the marketing department at work; exaggeration is the expectation de jour for Redmond fans (such as a recent claim by Paul Thurrott that Windows XP is now secure). But for all their posturing, they don't make the fatal mistake of believing their own hype. We don't see the MSN music store selling 48kbps WMA files. They use a VBR setting that averages somewhere in-between 160kbps to 256kbps, depending on the requirements of the music. Even the Realaudio music store, which also sells music in AAC like Apple, encodes their content at 192kbps AAC. I would really love to download and buy the new Jian Wang recordings tonight, but not at 128kbps. Somewhere in between the casual listener who can accept 128kbps classical music, and the audiophile who would never buy lossily-encoded music, only SACDs and the like, is a large pool of potential customers such as myself, currently holding out for Apple to recognize them. So this is an open plea of sorts to Apple asking for a little love, understanding, and an extra sixty-four kilobits per second. -- Technorati: Apple, iTunes, iTMS, Classical, Jazz, AAC, Fairplay, Codecs, Audiophile, Music, MP3, Microsoft, WMA