Back in July, Stephen Kruiser mentioned his experiences with Amazon’s Cloud-based music app, which I began experimenting with right around then as well, but quickly ran into a snag. Most of the music I had ripped over the years was in Windows Media Audio, and the Amazon Cloud player only accepts MP3s and the iTunes-oriented m4a formats.
Recently though, I began to wonder if somebody made batch processing software that could automatically copy the whole hulking lot of WMAs I had already ripped over the years into MP3s. Naturally, there are dozens of choices available online; this piece of shareware came recommended via a decent review, so what the heck. I created a new directory on my hard drive for all the MP3-ed versions of WMA versions of CD versions of classic albums I already had ripped, and then let the computer do its thing.
Something like ten or 11 hours later, during which time I was blogging, went to the gym, went to sleep, and then woke up, it was done (I think it smoked one of Mark Block’s cigarettes afterwards). Then it was time to upload them to the Cloud. That only took another four or five hours, but then my initial 200 or so albums were now in Cloud city.
The Amazon Cloud isn’t perfect; I wish there was more control over album art images and organizing the data once it’s online. But the idea of all of my music being available in my computer browser, on my Android, and in my car is a powerful one.
Ripping all of these tunes to CD, I couldn’t help but think back to my father’s enormous collection of big band records and began to understand better the powerful feeling of nostalgia they conjured up for him. Recorded music is inherently nostalgic; each recording is fixed to a moment in time when it was completed and released to the public. Or in some cases re-released — many of the CDs I was burning to my hard drive came from that first initial rush in the mid-1980s when the CD debuted.
We take the ‘80s for granted, but the compact disc was released during a time that in its own way, was as revolutionary as the birth of the Web a decade later, at least for pop culture. In rapid succession in the early 1980s, cable TV reached critical mass and took off, MTV was born, digital synthesizers started becoming affordable to musicians, well-off musicians could purchase the Fairlight, which could both sample new sounds, and had astonishing presets (just ask Jan Hammer, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush), and the compact disc was introduced. All in the space of about three or four years. Whoosh! Welcome to 1985, MTV, Miami Vice and the ‘80s as we know them.
Awesome story. Thanks for the memories. Yes, the kids nowadays don’t know how easy they have it. In my day the Tamagotchis were, literally, rocks (Pet Rocks). But Tamagotchis are so last century nowadays, right? I guess y’all have your current Pet Rocks named iPods and iPhones to keep you amused.
I think CDs will still be around for a while, for the simple fact that not everybody today is either computer literate or has access to a computer. I know, I know, this may sound impossible to today’s “plugged in” generation, but for a lot of older people who are literally terrified of owning a computer, let alone ordering music on line, the CD is the only option available to them. And there are A LOT of those people out there. We may actually get to a point where the Internet and computers may actually shut people out from music, rather than give them greater access to it. And THAT would be a shame.
Its not that I am terrified of computers. Records and CD’s have a certain solidity to them, a confidence that I actually OWN the music I am listening to.
When online music services were first starting, I signed on to Virgin Music. I think this was just before the iTunes store started. Once Virgin shut down, all of my ‘licences’ for playing the music were lost (about $250!). I vowed to never let that happen again. All of my music I buy on CD. I then rip it to OGG format. I had a rio player that I loved, but it wouldn’t play OGG, and converting was a hassle.
When Pepsi was running a Pepsi points campaign, my kids could download MP3′s from Amazon. Not bad until our computer was replaced and then the files would not open on the new machine, something about needing a licence…
I still have records that I can listen to although they are about 40 years old, I have CD’s that are going on 25 years old, try that with digital media.
My first CD was REM-Murmur followed by The Jam-Compact Snap. I still have them both.
What happens when (and if) Google cloud services decides you have violated their ‘terms and services’ agreement, and without warning, locks you out of all your Google accounts? How do you appeal?
Plus there are the liner notes and Album art. Also, picture disks…
Great story. And, in the 70s, your dad took TV for granted similar to how we take the cloud for granted. What is truly exciting is to try imagining what, in 30 years, they will take for granted that which today, we don’t even know about!
This latest reality, the movement to the cloud, still hasn’t sunk in for me. I have it, I use “Subsonic” for my own cloud-like music storage, but my mind hasn’t really caught up yet. Still, like most musicians I never liked CD format, and don’t mind a bit saying goodbye.
It is worthy of comment that today’s youth are not all that interested in the highest possible fidelity. Until the advent of digital music, great effort and much money were spent on high priced turntables, cartridges, electronics, and speakers in order to produce the greatest dynamic range and signal to noise ratio, plus the lowest distortions of different types from the analog records and amplifier circuitry of the day.
When CDs came out, the big thing was how QUIET they were! It was truly amazing to be able to listen to music without the inevitable noises associated with even the best records. We take this for granted now, but, at first, this was quite the rush! But, this quietness overshadowed other things that were lost in the process of digitizing the music.
Everything has a price, and the price of digitized sound coupled with the new solid state storage capabilities and compression schemes inherent in modern mp3 players has actually been a lessening in sound quality in some ways since the days of records. By necessity, there are spaces between the sampling frequencies and limits at both the high and low ends of the bandwidth imposed by the economics of the market and the mathematics of digitizing sound waves, which as they travel in air are essentially analog in nature. Where records had limits in frequency response somewhere around from 5Hz to 40KHz (…they actually developed 4 channel records which utilized the high frequency capabilties of records as carriers for two channels of information per stereo channel!) and no spaces between discrete sampling frequencies as do CDs, modern music sampling limits the frequency to the range of about 20Hz to 22Khz by mathematical definition.
The bottom line is that listening to an iPod, or even mp3s over a top notch sound system introduces distortion and missing music which is definitely audible to a discriminating listener. The sad part is that for all their modern sophistication in things electronic, most of our young people don’t even realize that the music they are listening to is not the complete range of sound that exists before the engineers digitize and compress the daylights out of it! Many of them have their heads in the cloud, I fear.
I think you’re confusing digitalization with compression. Of course now music nowadays is digitalized, but so are in CDs too. As far as I know, CD music is digital music and therefore subsampled and limited by the analogical/digital conversion.
On the other hand, MP3, AA3, etc are conversion formats. Yes, still digital, but this is the part where most of distortion is introduced, because there is actually some information suppressed.
It’s the same with images: a raw digital image from a camera is digital, but as soon as you introduce a compression (let’s say in JPG format) you lose some information.
So, the users should decide about a trade-off, but as you said now there is no such a worry about the quality, but about the storage. And lot of space can be saved via compression.
errata On the other hand, MP3, AA3, etc are conversion formats
should read: On the other hand, MP3, AA3, etc are compression formats.
To X, no, I am not confusing digitization and compression. I wrote:
“Everything has a price, and the price of digitized sound coupled with the new solid state storage capabilities and compression schemes inherent in modern mp3 players has actually been a lessening in sound quality in some ways since the days of records. By necessity, there are spaces between the sampling frequencies and limits at both the high and low ends of the bandwidth imposed by the economics of the market and the mathematics of digitizing sound waves, which as they travel in air are essentially analog in nature. Where records had limits in frequency response somewhere around from 5Hz to 40KHz (…they actually developed 4 channel records which utilized the high frequency capabilties of records as carriers for two channels of information per stereo channel!) and no spaces between discrete sampling frequencies as do CDs, modern music sampling limits the frequency to the range of about 20Hz to 22Khz by mathematical definition.”
The very act of digitizing the music introduces a product that has “spaces” in the music due to the discrete sampling process. The analog nature of the original sound is converted into a series of individual pieces and the resulting waveform is a series of step functions which approximate the original continuous analog wave. The accuracy of the digitized product is limited by the sampling frequency which, I believe for commnercial CDs is 44KHz. This absolutely limits the highest frequency able to be produced (or reproduced) by a CD to 22KHz. Records and analog tape, on the other hand, have a higher frequency response. The problem with them is that the S/N ratio and dynamic range are inferior to the CD’s. So, we get a tradeoff, and for most purposes, the CD is the obvious choice. But, there are those who say that isn’t true and that by eliminating the music in the spaces, so to speak, that digitized sound lacks the warmth of high quality records played on good equipment, and they do have a cogent point because the fact is that the commercial sampling rate most definitely causes a loss of some of the information which was present in the original analog wave, by mathematical definition.
The distortion caused by compression in making mp3s, wma’s or other compressed formats is an entirely different subject.
I hope that clears it up for you.
The one problem with transcoding from wma to mp3 is both are lossy compression methods, so the resulting mp3 file will be of lower quality.
There is an open-source project called Subsonic that lets you run your own music server on your own PC (Windows, Mac and Linux supported). Yes, you have to leave a computer on, but it supports a wide range of audio formats. It has a web interface, both iphone and Android apps, even supports Blackberries. It’s basically free but the author asks for a donation to use the Iphone/Android apps. A little odd, but well worth it IMHO.
See http://www.subsonic.org/ for details.
So let’s say everyone goes cloud with their music collections eventually. Now there are tens of millions of ther same copy of “Hotel California” stored up there with maybe 100 being accessed at any given moment. I realize storage is abundant and cheap (and getting cheaper) – but it still doesn’t sound like the right metaphore for the future.
I do not use Amazon Music Player (although I will try it based on this article) but is there anythiing that prevents you from sharing (listening and/or downloading) your music with others? Can a group automatically enjoy their total aggregated collections? Doesn’t this bother the music industry?
not sure why my first reply did not get posted but look at AudiGalaxy
use your existing pc as the cloud and don’t upload your items.
http://www.audiogalaxy.com
works well for me running off server 2008r2 (SBS2011) streaming to pc and android devices.
Given a choice between a large data file that sounds good and a smaller data file that does not sound as good, I’ll take the wav file over the mp3. In fact, I’ll take the LP.
Some tech notes: The easiest way to convert a batch of WMA files for people who have iTunes on a Windows computer, is to simply drag the files to the iTunes library. iTunes (at least the more recent versions) will tell you that you can’t add WMA files, but will offer to convert the files to MP3 or M4A. Agree and convert the files to MP3 (don’t choose M4A files because they also refuse to play on some audio players). iTunes will start and convert and add the new MP3s to the library. The original WMA files are not deleted. This will take some time. Be patient. Also, if you have M4A files that you would like to convert to MP3, simply highlight them in your iTunes library, right click on the selection, and click the “Create MP3 version” menu option. This will create a new copy of the files, but leave the original M4A.
Before you start, make sure your rip settings in iTunes are set to the quality level you want. I typically use 192kbps, but for highest quality, use 320kbps, and for smaller files with still fairly reasonable sound quality, use 128kbps. Having your collection in FLAC format is the best for maintaining all sound quality from a CD rip. But this takes much more storage space. Having MP3 files is best compressed format, for portability.
for windows/android user who hate itunes doubletwist syncs and converts too.