Neil Young was interviewed by Walt Mossberg about digital music, and made a number of statements where he expressed a desire to see more high-resolution audio files. He claims that only “5 percent of the data present in the original recording” is present in MP3 files – though he doesn’t specify what bit rate. He also suggests that vinyl LPs or cassette tapes reproduce nearly all of the 24-bit, 192 kHz files used to master recordings.
Well, I take exception to these claims, which are a bit off the cuff. First, comparing 24/192 files to anything is ludicrous. In order to get all of the “data” from those files, you need very high-end stereo equipment. Even if you do have a standalone DAC (digital audio converter) between your source and amplifier, the majority of these devices only go up to 96 kHz. Next, recording artists listen to their recordings in studios on equipment that is even better than what most obsessive audiophiles have in their homes. I’m sure there is a difference in sound in a recording studio: not only do you have the best studio monitors, but you also have acoustically perfect rooms in which to listen.
But suggesting that LPs, with their clicks and scratches, or tapes, which are notably known for problems at high frequencies (remember Dolby noise reduction on cassettes?) is just disingenuous.
It’s interesting that Neil Young became famous during the time of AM radios. Even those with stereos had equipment that was light years behind the average stereo today. He got famous because of his music: his songs, his lyrics and his voice, not the quality of the sound. Yet he says “we have 5% of what we had in 1978,” which is just a lie. Analog recordings did not approach the 24/192 benchmark that he cites, and the sound quality of the average stereo then was crappy compared to today’s iPods. (It’s worth noting that Neil Young suffers from tinnitus, or at least he did in 1995 – it generally never goes away – so how much of that 24/192 does he actually hear?)
He wants people to be able to buy high-resolution files more easily. There are many vendors who sell these files, and he seems to not realize that this is possible. He calls for a “device” that can play high-resolution files, but says that it takes 30 minutes per song to download these files. (I don’t know what he means by this; with my Internet connection, I can download a high-resolution “song” – a file just a few minutes long – in just a few minutes.)
Young claims that he and Steve Jobs were “working on” such a solution, but I think this is not true; if they were discussing it, it was most likely just an idea in the air. There were rumors of Apple offering 24-bit files via iTunes last year, but the source of this was never clear. My sources have told me that this is very unlikely, at least in the near term, for a number of reasons: bandwidth, price, playback, etc. The audiophile market is too small for Apple to provide high-resolution files for all the music they sell. It is entirely possible that, in the future, they offer high-resolution files for a limited selection of music, but even that seems unlikely, as it would confuse average users.
Neil Young does say that he looks at the Internet, and piracy, “as the new radio.” “That’s how music gets around.” It doesn’t bother him that people download his music, saying “it’s acceptable.” It allows people to discover music, and for him this is a good thing. Of course, he makes enough money on royalties and back catalog that he doesn’t need to worry about income…
While I understand Mr. Young’s desire to have better quality music files, you must remember that this idea comes from someone who can afford the hardware to listen to them. The 99% of music listeners who don’t have that hardware simply don’t care. They buy music for music, not for audio quality.
Posted: 2/1/2012 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes, music | 2 Comments »
Note: please see Update 2 below. I am leaving the entire article as it was published. Wired UK has updated the article, correcting the errors, and it is available here.
In some ways, I’m a public figure. I write a lot about a small part of the tech industry: Macs, iPods, iTunes and digital music. I’m a senior contributor to Macworld, where I’m “The iTunes Guy,” and I write regularly about music and iTunes.
In September, 2010, I wrote a Macworld article, How to rip CD box sets in iTunes. Imagine my surprise when, today, I got a Google alert for my name leading me to an article on the Wired UK site, How to rip CD box-sets in iTunes. This article was published in the February, 2012 print issue of Wired UK, and appeared on the web on January 12, 2012.
While the title is only a hyphen away from my Macworld article, it’s obvious that the content is different. Yet it suggests that I had some involvement in it:
Ripping large collections of discs to iTunes is a laborious process. Make it easier with these tips by Kirk McElhearn, author of Take Control of iTunes 10.
To be fair, if Wired had approached me, offering to plug my latest book about iTunes, I would have been happy to offer them something. But instead, a “journalist” ripped off bits and pieces from several Macworld articles without asking either me or Macworld. Also, he makes me look like an ass. In the first tip, “Format,” he says:
To save hard-drive space, go to iTunes > Preferences, then click on Import settings. Choose Custom from the Settings pop-up menu; for Stereo bit rate, choose 64kbps; leave the sample rate at Auto and, from the Channels menu, choose stereo or mono — mono is fine for audio books.
The thing is, I never said the above about ripping CD box sets. I said that in a different article about ripping audiobooks. No one rips music at 64 kbps, and anyone reading it, who knows anything about music, will obviously avoid my book, thinking I’m a cretin.
The other quotes in the article are cobbled together from bits and pieces of various Macworld articles, written at very different times. (In other words, they don’t come from the article I wrote about ripping CD box sets in iTunes.)
For example, there’s this one:
“Compilation tracks won’t show under the name of the artist,” says McElhearn. A way round this is to check the Composers tag under the View > Column browser submenu. “In the same submenu, check Group compilations, and a Compilations entry appears on the Artists column.”
Do you understand that? I certainly don’t. There’s no “Composers tag;” it’s a menu item; you select it. And the Composers menu item – which displays a Composers column in the column browser – has nothing to do with compilations. What the journalist did was take the following quote from this article:
…tracks in compilations won’t show under the names of their artists, unless you have other, non-compilation albums by the artists on the compilation. If you have the Composer tag filled, however, all tracks from compilations will show up in the Composer column of the Browser. A practical option in iTune’s Advanced preferences lets you group compilations at the top of the browser: check Group Compilations When Browsing, and you’ll see a Compilations entry at the top of the Artists column so you can find your compilations easily.
With a bit of slicing and dicing, he managed to come up with a text that makes no sense at all.
I’m pretty amazed that the journalist, Matt Hussey, would rip off content like this, mention my name, plug my book, and not even contact me about it. It’s standard practice that when you attribute something more than just a quote to someone you have them vet it.
The Wired UK website editor has said that this is magazine content, and they just published what gets into print. I’m waiting to hear back from Wired UK magazine; I got an e-mail from the editor, who is contacting the writer. But no matter what, this is some piss-poor excuse for journalism.
In the broader scheme of things, it’s just a blip, but I spend a lot of time honing my expertise in the areas I cover. I don’t appreciate being made to look like I don’t know what I’m talking about. The damage to my reputation caused by this article may be hard to quantify, but it is certainly not negligible.
Update: thanks to all the friends and colleagues who have been tweeting and retweeting this. It’s obvious, from those tweets and e-mails that I’ve received, that my outrage is valid. Fellow journalists are insulted by this type of activity.
Update 2: It turns out that I may have overreacted. The journalist did, indeed, contact me four months ago, and sent me a draft – very different from what was published; it contains three sections, not the five in the article – but the mistakes in the final version are all his (or, perhaps, his editor’s). I never heard back from him, and it slipped my mind, as one generally sends a note to someone when something is published (at least I do, every time I quote someone in my articles, or even review products). So I am working with Wired to rectify the errors in the online version of the article. Until the article is corrected, I will leave this article online.
I do apologize to Wired UK, and to Matthew Hussey, for my overreaction. Given the number of contacts I have, and the amount of articles I write, four months is a very long time. I should have been contacted when the article was published, or when it went on the web site; as I say above, I contact everyone I quote, and every company whose software I review when I write, as soon as articles go live.
Posted: 1/31/2012 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes, Miscellanea | 3 Comments »
My friend Doug Adams, who runs Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes sent me an e-mail yesterday asking if there’s any way to have an iPod sync with iTunes automatically. He has one old device connected to a dock that he uses as a clock radio. It made me realize just how useful auto-syncing would be.
Not everyone needs this. Doug wants his podcasts to update, and it’s true that unless you listen to podcasts, or download content frequently (such as, for example, an iTunes season pass to the Daily Show), you won’t need daily syncing. But for some of us, it would save a step. Instead of having to go to iTunes to sync a device, there should be a setting whereby you choose periodic auto-syncing. You should be able to choose days and times; for example, you might want to sync every day at, say, 7 am, before you head off to work, but on the weekends, you might not want to sync at all, or, perhaps, later in the day.
This would be easy to implement: it would happen on the iTunes side, not on the iOS device. iTunes would simply have a daemon that checks for the next scheduled sync and runs it when that time comes, if the computer is on (or the next time the computer is on). If the iOS device is not found, then it stops and waits for the next time.
Note: Doug is looking into whether he can script this. So I hope to be able to update this article soon with a solution to this problem. This wouldn’t work directly with iTunes, but would probably use an AppleScript to set up and activate.
Update: here’s Doug’s solution.
Posted: 1/26/2012 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | 3 Comments »
To correspond with the release of my Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition, I sat down (virtually) with Chuck Joiner and talked about iTunes and music on the MacVoices podcast. It’s just under an hour, and you can listen here.
Posted: 1/13/2012 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | No Comments »
A number of people have found that iTunes Match sometimes matches incorrect tracks; not that the songs are wrong, but that the versions might be wrong. This seems to happen especially with music that has been remastered. iTunes may match either an original or remastered track, and the user who matched the track may have tho one that iTunes doesn’t have. This can be a problem, if, say, you prefer an original album over a remastered version, or vice versa.
But I today I found, for the first time, a bad track coming from iTunes Match, one with an audible problem. It’s one of an excellent set of Bill Evans recordings, The Last Waltz, from the summer of 1980, just before his death, made at the Keystone Korner; the song is Your Story, While iTunes matched these tracks, I was listening to some of this music today, and found a bad track. There’s a gap of about a half-second at one point in the track. Looking at it with Rogue Amoeba’s Fission, you can clearly see the missing chunk of music:
If this happens, you’re basically screwed. Who can you complain to? Contact the iTunes Store? I doubt anything will happen. The only way to have a good copy of the track is to take your original and make sure it stays in your library; if you ever have to download it again, you’ll get the track with the gap. It’s worth noting that this track is not available on the iTunes Store. This makes me wonder exactly how they match such tracks; do they match them to tracks that other people have uploaded?
I don’t expect this will happen a lot, but the fact that it happens at all shows the weakness of this system. iTunes Match clearly needs an option for tracks that you don’t want matched, ones that you want uploaded, because the matched version may not be the same as yours.
Has anyone else found matched tracks that have similar problems?
(As an aside: if you like Bill Evans, there are two box sets of this run at the Keystone Korner, in San Francisco, between August 31 and September 8, 1980. The Last Waltz is music from the first sets, and Consecration has tracks from the second sets. Just a week before his death, Evans was playing some of his finest performances. These two box sets, together with Turn Out the Stars, recorded at the Village Vanguard in June, 1980, comprise 22 discs of astounding piano music.)
Update: my son came across a bad track today. It’s a match of Philip Glass’s Witchita Vortex Sutra, from the Minimal Piano Collection box set. There are clicks throughout the track, with one big dropout at 4:25:
Posted: 1/13/2012 by kirk | Filed under: Apple & Mac OS X, iPod & iTunes Tags: Bill Evans, iTunes, iTunes Match | 15 Comments »
My ebook, Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ was a best-selling compendium of tips, tricks and explanations about how to use iTunes to wrangle your digital media collection. More than a year has gone by since its release, and, even though Apple didn’t up the version number by an integer, iTunes has undergone enough changes to warrant a thorough update to this book.
Take Control Books has just released Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition. To quote a TidBITS article presenting the book:
Since iTunes 10 originally came out, Apple has revamped its approach to online media, bringing us such new features as iCloud and iTunes Match. This book answers the many questions that users have about these features, including a new chapter dedicated to the Cloud.
At 173 pages for the PDF edition (page counts aren’t relevant to ePub and Kindle versions), there are more than 30 pages of new content in this second edition. Priced at $15 (with special upgrade prices for owners of the first edition), this book helps you appreciate and understand the process of bringing media into iTunes, tagging it, adding album artwork, and organizing it into playlists.
Once you’ve become an import specialist and tagging genius, you can enjoy your music, movies, audiobooks, and ebooks, and more without hassles when it’s time to find a particular item or when you want to do something special like sync a select subset of music to your iPod, create a party playlist, identify music you haven’t heard in a while, listen to the chapters in an audiobook in the proper order, or get the most out of iTunes in the Cloud features, including iTunes Match.
So, if you want to be an iTunes power user, get a copy now – in PDF, ePub or Kindle format, or any combination of the above – from Take Control Books.
Posted: 1/12/2012 by kirk | Filed under: books, iPod & iTunes | No Comments »
Over at Macworld, we’ve just introduced Ask the iTunes Guy. This occasional column will take readers’ questions and explain how to do what you want with iTunes. I’m the iTunes Guy, and I’ll be answering questions over the coming months. So far, response has been well above what we expected, and we have dozens of great questions, so look for a first column with your questions and my answers soon.
Posted: 1/10/2012 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes Tags: iTunes, Macworld | No Comments »
I recently noticed that the Album Artwork folder in my iTunes folder (~/Music/iTunes/) has more than doubled in size. I recall, not long ago, that it was around 2 GB, but it is now around 4.6 GB, for roughly the same amount of music. (About 80,000 tracks, or just over 5,000 albums; the album number is more important, as there is only one cache file stored per album.)
The Album Artwork folder is a cache folder that iTunes uses to quickly display album art in the program’s different views. It contains three sub-folders:
- Cache, which is the cache for album art embedded in files in your iTunes library
- Cloud, which is a local cache for album art embedded in files in the cloud, if you use iTunes Match
- Download, which stores album art that you downloaded from the iTunes Store, either when you purchased content, or when you used iTunes to find artwork for music you ripped (right-click on one or more tracks, then choose Get Album Artwork).
As you scroll through your iTunes library, the program reads the album art in files or linked to them, and displays artwork in the program’s window. All the cache files do is allow iTunes to display art more quickly, rather than having to extract the artwork from the ID3 tags in music files when it wants to display it.
So, at some point, iTunes must have changed the way artwork is saved in this folder. I notice that the majority of my artwork files in the cache folder – these are .itc files – are 969 K. Some of the files are slightly smaller, and some are much smaller, but most end up being the same size. But I’m very careful to keep most of my album art around 100 K or smaller; when I find art on the Internet, I scale it to 600×600 (if it’s larger than that), then save as JPG, and make sure to compress enough to keep the files small.
I have always had this folder excluded from my Time Machine backups, so I can’t see when the size changed. If any of my readers can check in their Time Machine backups, I’d be interested to find out if their folders have increased in size, and, if so, when. My guess is that something was changed in iTunes 10.5 or 10.5.1 which altered the format of cache files, or changed their size.
Posted: 12/28/2011 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes Tags: album art, iTunes | 4 Comments »
