Next Generation of Digital Music?
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
I was reading about MusicGiants in PC Mag and decided to check out their site. It sounds interesting on the surface but I don't plan on using their service. The way MusicGiants differs from other online music stores is that they sell their songs in a lossless format vs a compressed mp3. Lossless is basically a song at the compression rate of 1100kbps exact cd quality. When you see 128kbps which is what iTunes is at, these are files that sound good but not great. I perfer my mp3s to be at 192 or 320 kbps which is much better but also larger in size. If you encode at lossless expect each song to be between 20-40 megs in size vs 3-5 megs with mp3. Lossless doesn't bode well for an ipod since you would have less room and you would never notice the difference with headphones. Where it is a benefit is on a nice home theatre system with 5.1 surround sound.
MusicGiants rips their files with WMA and you have DRM (digital rights management) so its back to protected files. You will also need a large hard drive to hold all the files. Pricewise you are looking at $1.29 a song or about $15 a cd, more than iTunes. I have seen more and more people move over to lossless format which can also be ripped without DRM but I havn't adopted it yet. Will I, not sure, I have already ripped all my cds twice now and doing it a 3rd time just makes me cringe.
On a side note, iTunes will start selling music from the EMI record label at a 192 bitrate and DRM free this month or next.
http://musicgiants.com/main.aspx
Posted by mardenhill 5/09/2007 01:17:00 PM
Labels: Technology
