Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I love covering music software because the pace of evolution is so fast. I guess everybody's looking for the next billion-dollar business (after iTunes) to help replace declining CD sales.

Last week, I blogged about Spotify, a free and legal music player that offers a massive library of music on demand. Unfortunately, Spotify's library has some big gaps because of legal disputes with rights-holders, and it's not available in the U.S.

A couple days later, software developer David Nelson contacted me about Muziic, a company he started with his dad--he's 15(!) and has gone from public high school to online private high school to pursue this project. After checking it out for a few days, I think it's got just as much of a chance of revolutionizing how we listen to music as Spotify does.

Great selection, but black-on-black doesn't get high marks in most usability tests.

Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.

How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007.

Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them.

With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.

Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept.

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CNET News' Greg Sandoval is already covering the story, so I won't belabor it, but kudos to Apple and the three holdout record labels--Sony, Universal, and Warner--for reaching an agreement that will result in more than 8 million songs being available on iTunes with no digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. (EMI has made DRM-free songs available on iTunes since last spring, but only 10 percent of the music sold in the U.S. comes from EMI.) As Greg reports, Apple will also let users with existing DRM-encrusted downloads upgrade to a DRM-free version at a higher bitrate--256kbps--for an extra 30 cents.

For only 60 cents, I can upgrade both of my iTunes Store music purchases to DRM-free versions.

To remind everybody why this is important: this now means that most of the songs you buy on iTunes will be playable on devices and software produced by other companies. Yes, the files are still going to be in Apple's preferred AAC format rather than the more widely supported MP3, but a lot of recent digital music products from other companies do support AAC, including Microsoft's Zune (software and device) and the next version of the Windows Media Player, as well as Sony's most recent Walkman digital media players. SanDisk's popular Fuze and Clip, however, don't support AAC--a failing the company will hopefully fix with a software update.

This truly means that DRM for single-song downloads is dead. iTunes is the No. 1 distributor of digital music by a huge margin, and in fact is the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S., ahead of all brick-and-mortar outlets. DRM will live on in subscription-based services--the record companies aren't going to let you download unlimited music for one month's $15 subscription, then cancel and keep all that music--but otherwise fuggedaboudit.

My only gripe: the news comes six days too late to make my No. 1 prediction for 2008 true. Apple is also making music downloads for the iPhone available over 3G cellular networks in addition to Wi-Fi--another prediction that I made for last year.

Update at 5:10 p.m. PDT: Changes were made based on a draft version of the Windows 7 Reviewers' Guide.

Microsoft took the wraps off the next version of Windows Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference, and the Web's abuzz with first impressions and previews--most of which are positive.

It looks like Microsoft is making the right moves to counter some of the problems with Vista: application and hardware compatibility are top priorities, and most of the UI tweaks I've seen so far seem helpful rather than arbitrary, as many of the changes in Vista seemed to be. But the release of Windows 7 is still a year away, and there will no doubt be modifications between now and then.

But forget the big picture...what's in store for digital audio in the next version of Windows? Here's a quick rundown of what in known based on the very early pre-beta shown in Los Angeles:

The Media Center interface in Windows 7 will scroll through album covers in your collection when you play a song.

(Credit: Charlie Owen, Microsoft)

• Media Player not dead. Windows 7 will ship with a new version of the Windows Media Player. This is somewhat surprising, given Microsoft's complete neglect of the Media Player since Vista's release and its emphasis on the Zune PC software, which has its own playback and organizational features. But apparently Microsoft has realized that native playback of digital media within Windows is too important to force people to download an application separately. This is not the case with some other applications--for instance, Windows 7 will not come with Mail/Outlook Express, Photo Gallery, or Movie Maker--instead, users will have to download Windows Live versions of these applications. (Or PC makers will have to pre-bundle them.)

• Non-Microsoft formats supported. Microsoft is at long last capitulating to the inevitable and natively supporting AAC audio (as well as H.264 video--both are parts of the MPEG-4 standard), which has become a dominant format thanks to Apple's AAC support in iTunes. For years, Microsoft used the Player to promote its own Windows Media format--for instance, it didn't support full-bitrate ripping of CDs to MP3 until Windows Media Player 10, released in 2004--but apparently the Media Player team is following Zune's lead here.

• Networked music. Microsoft promises major ease-of-use improvements for home networking in Windows 7 (hallelujah), and streaming home audio is no exception. You'll be able to stream media from any Windows 7 PC to any network-connected device that supports version 1.5 of the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard, and vice-versa. The Windows Media Player will even transcode your media on the fly to the appropriate format for each device on your network. This sounds great on paper, but of course the devil's in the implementation details. Still, it's a great step forward from Windows Media Connect in XP and Vista, which only supports the Xbox 360 and a handful of other devices.

• Bluetooth audio. Windows 7 includes a Bluetooth audio driver, meaning it will natively support Bluetooth speakers and headphones--no installation required. (The lack of support for Bluetooth audio in Vista drew lots of complaints.)

• Intelligent routing. Microsoft promises that audio will flow more reliably to the proper devices--for example, a song will naturally play over your speakers, while a Voice-over-IP call will flow to your headphones. Again, nice idea, but wait to see if the implementation works.

• Libraries. A new feature, Libraries, will arrange similar types of files from across your PC--and across all the PCs in your network--within a single virtual folder. So all your music, even files you've neglected to put in your MyMusic folder, will appear in this virtual Music Library, which should make it easier to organize and find songs outside the context of the Media Player or Zune (or iTunes) libraries.

• Music Wall. It looks like the Media Center team has borrowed a trick from the Zune PC software: when you're listening to an album in Media Center, the background will gradually scroll through images from all the album art in your collection.

CNET's MP3 Insider blog posted a fascinating entry the other day on how CNET Labs tests the audio response of different MP3 players. They load several files of the type that are used to test traditional stereo equipment, such as white noise and pure sine waves, then plays them back into an audio analyzer, which reports numbers for qualities such as signal-to-noise ratio and total harmonic distortion. Two Creative players come out on top, the iPod Classic in the middle, and Microsoft's Zune in seventh place due to fairly mediocre harmonic distortion scores.

Hardware isn't the only factor in how good an MP3 player sounds.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

As Donald Bell correctly points out, numbers lie: some of the best sounding MP3 players actually boost or depress certain frequencies to make up for the fact that you're probably listening to a digitally compressed file through a middling audio processor and cheap earbuds, with lots of ambient noise around you. (Good audio engineers tell you the same thing: level meters, for example, aren't the final arbiter of whether there's unacceptable distortion on a recording--your ears are.)

But putting aside the subjectivity of hearing, I'm curious about the effect of different codecs--the specific technology used to create a compressed digital sound file. Presumably, CNET Labs uses uncompressed WAV files to check the hardware. But I wonder if they've ever done tests--subjective or objective--of different types of compressed files against one another, like SoundExpert has done. I've long read that MP3 offers the lossiest compression, but is there a noticeable difference between AAC and Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Ogg at the same bitrate? And one step beyond that: does one player sound better with a particular codec than others?

Subjectively, I prefer WMA files over AAC files on my Zune. My iPods (a new Shuffle and fourth-generation 20GB unit) can't play WMA files, but when I convert those files to AAC using iTunes, they don't sound as good as the AAC files I rip from scratch, even though the converted files have a higher bitrate. MP3s don't sound as good as either AAC or fixed-bitrate WMA, but actually seem to sound better than variable-bitrate WMA. And MP3s seem to sound best on my fourth-generation iPod. Go figure.

I had a problem. Years ago, I bought Microsoft's now-discontinued Digital Media Plus Pack for converting my LP records into digital files. Because it's a Microsoft product from back in the day when Microsoft was gung-ho about Windows Media, it only rips to Windows Media Audio. And of course, it's Windows only. (Other than that, it's a great tool--very easy to use, never messes up line leveling, and has a good algorithm for removing pops and scratches.)

Back when I used iTunes and my iPod exclusively, I'd simply rip the album into WMA, then import the folder from MyMusic into iTunes. It would ask me if I wanted to convert to AAC (the default--it can also convert to MP3), I'd accept, then delete the WMAs so as not to clutter my hard drive with duplicates.

dBpoweramp lets you convert just about any audio file format to any other.

(Credit: Screenshot)

But since 2006, I've been using a Zune (review unit) as my primary music player. Zune plays both AAC and WMA files, and it automatically reads your iTunes library. I got lazy and stopped converting my vinyl from WMA to AAC.

Now I've got a Shuffle. And a library full of WMA files that it can't play. Of course, I could do what I used to do--import the folders from My Music into iTunes, convert to AAC, then delete the originals. But what if I want to convert those WMAs into MP3s to make sure they can play on any device with any software app? OK, I guess I could change the default on iTunes. But what happens when you add a bunch of downloaded FLAC files into the mix? Or Ogg files? What about converting AAC back to WMA--I can't see any reason why I'd want to do that today, but who knows where Microsoft and Apple are heading with their file format support?

I needed to future-proof my music collection, while still maintaining the best quality-to-size ratio possible. (MP3 is one of the lossiest formats.)

dBpoweramp Music Converter is the solution. $18 for the regular edition. (The $28 reference edition has features for professionals and more serious amateurs.) You can download just about any imaginable codec from the associated Web site. By default it performs file conversion within the same folder as the original files, so you can easily keep track of what's where. (Not like iTunes, which moves every converted file into the iTunes library by default.) Or, if you want to export directly to an iTunes folder, it can do that. It even adds a feature to the Windows Explorer so when you hover over a file, it'll display full ID3 tag information for that file--useful for changing mysterious file names to match song titles.

Highly recommended.

dBpoweramp shows ID3 tags within Windows Explorer. So you can find out the real title of that Track 4.WMA file you've been carrying around..

(Credit: Screenshot)

San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin mourns the loss of audio quality in our iPod-obsessed culture.

He's right: MP3 files and other forms of data-compressed audio, such as AAC (used by Apple's iTunes) and Windows Media Audio, don't contain as much audio data as an uncompressed song on a CD. For long-time music listeners such as Selvin, the difference is striking. (Note that he's talking about data compression, not the audio compression that's misused to "punch up" many modern recordings.)

The first time I heard a CD full of burned MP3 files back in 1999, I was struck at how flat and lifeless the music sounded. It was almost like listening to a Xerox copy of the music rather than the music itself.

The feeling is even worse if it's music you've recorded. After spending weeks getting tones (which includes the painstakingly dull process of hearing the drummer hit the same drum over and over and over again for several hours), fine-tuning the sound of each part with the perfect combination of instruments and amplifiers and offboard effects, playing several times to get the perfect take, overdubbing extra parts and haggling over the perfect mix, you end up with a streaming MP3 that sounds like a radio broadcast from Mars played on a cheap transistor radio.

But I also recall the first time I heard a CD back in the early 1980s, and how sterile it sounded compared with the vinyl records I was accustomed to (and still prefer). And no recording will sound as vibrant as live music.

The point is, music can serve many purposes. When I listen to an MP3 file over my car stereo, it might not sound as good as a clean vinyl record on a high-end stereo system, but the setting's different: maybe it's a sunny day, and there's no traffic, and I haven't heard this particular song in so long that I almost forgot why I liked it in the first place. It's not exactly background music, but it's more of a soundtrack to my day than an activity in itself.

Or, when I hook my iPod up to my small Bose system for a dinner party, it's meant to be a backdrop for food and conversation, the real stars of the show. If it's the right crowd on the right night, we'll end up downstairs, listening to the real thing on vinyl.

I'd feel sorry if I imagined that there were kids who'd never heard anything but compressed music, but I'm not sure that these kids exist or will ever exist.

Like John Cage knew, music exists all around us every day. Natural-born audiophiles will seek out live music, buy CDs and maybe a turntable--and perhaps even learn to play an instrument.

For the rest of the world, music never would have been much more than background material anyway. With compressed audio files, they have access to more of it than ever before. Perhaps one of the countless tracks they've burned from their little-used CD collection will hit them just right one day and spark them to investigate further.