I'm in Santa Monica. AKA Waxy's hood.
A swanky Apple employee (he's wearing a fedora and an Orange Apple Camp t-shirt) is trying to demonstrate the Apple Music Store. I'm here for the free WiFi connection.
Most of these presentations are carried out with how-to questions by a curious and well intended audience.
This afternoon however, the Santa Monican audience contains two individuals who are trying to argue the value of Apple, the music store, Betamax, stealing, Napster, and world history with Mr. Fedora.
Despite his attempts to just move along, the antagonist keep bringing him back in. All he wants to do is show people how to buy a CD online but the guy to my left wants to complain about the lack of physical value an online purchase has. And the guy in front of me is convinced that digital music is inferior to CD quality (which is also digital but this guy doesn't believe it).
The whole scene is making the Apple Security Guard a little uptight. I thought she was flicking the cover off her sidearm but it just turned out to be an iPod case. Maybe the gun is on the other side.
I knew Santa Monica has a lot more color (no, not the skin kind) than Orange County, I just didn't know how much.
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Technically MP3 is a lossy compression so it sounds 99.9% as good as a CD but that is what you pay for the 10 to 1 data compression . You need a 10,000 stereo to hear the diffreance but it is there.
Now if Apple would get off their ass and make a Windows version I would be happy.
Ah but Apple Music Store uses AAC, not MP3. I doubt there is much difference but in the spirit of things I thougt I would just point it out.
>Now if Apple would get off their ass and make a Windows version I would be happy.
Amen, Jack.
Maybe Mr. Gates should get off his ass and make something for windows that can compete with Apple. If you want the ipod, invest in an apple. They are yummy!
The fedora should have been a warning sign. Give people who wear hats for style [indoors] a wide berth, as calamity often follows.
I've recently re-encoded my music collection at 192 AAC, and while it sounds good enough for in-the-car or walkabout audio, it's definitely not as good as the CD. When I'm at home or in my digital audio studio, I listen to CDs. If I'm coding, in the car, or walking around, I listen to AACs.
Don't mistake me for a purist. Purists seem to believe that AAC is an attempt to replace CDs. Not so. For most people, AAC is probably good enough. But to the people who make or produce music, they don't spend hours mastering in ProTools, monitoring on speaker systems which cost as much as nice cars to have bits thrown out the window at the receiving end. AAC (and MP3, for that matter) is great for what it's intended--casual and/or portable listening--and I love these formats for that.
While the music industry may be heading downwards in terms of musicial quality, there's far too much at stake on the production for the industry as a whole to head downards in terms of audio quality. CDs will be around for quite some time, and by the time they go away, bandwidth and/or audio file formats will rival the sonic quality of CDs.
And yeah, don't trust anyone wearing a fedora--especially those wearing fedoras in Apple Stores.