Is the iPod ruining music?
 

When I first got my iPod a few years ago, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. The ability to hear whatever song you want to hear, whenever you want to hear it.

But recently, I haven't been taking it in my car with me, instead, I'm just listening to CDs.

It's really been an enlightening experience. Being "forced" to buy an album, front to back, has some real benefits. I've found that had I had the choice 5 or 10 years ago to just buy the particular songs I wanted, not the entire album, I would have missed out on a ton of songs that I ended up really really liking. Because they are songs I didn't particularly like on a first hear. And also because they "fit" into the theme and tone of the album.

I'd probably have missed out on 80% of the songs I like if I didn't have to buy the whole album/CD, going back 20 years. Some I recently listened to front to back and rediscovered - Jackson Browne - Running on Empty, 10,000 Maniacs - Our Time in Eden, Dream Academy's self titled album (there's an oldie from the 80s), and even more recent things like Social Distortion's recent CD from a couple of years ago.

Do people still buy whole CD's anymore, or is the majority bought song by song now? Isn't this going to hurt music? Great songs that don't have instant appeal in the first 10 seconds are going to be tough to sell or package.

I buy CDs. No Ipod. Love to hear certain artists and have collected everything they have recorded, giving me (IMHO) more insight into their range of talent.

I won't touch iPods.

I don't like the compression. (I will hear minor things missing when I listen to songs I know.) To me, the MP3 is a step backward in audio quality, I'm waiting for the next step forward.

I still buy whole albums on CD because my favorite song usually ends up being one not played on the radio. Jet and Franz Ferdinand come to mind. I've had some dissapointments. I bought an album from the Darkness and quickly realized they were a one-hit wonder.

hate to tell you but cds are compressed as well. AAC sounds much better than mp3, so that gets you back to almost indistinguishable with cds.

You can still buy a whole album for your ipod. And listen to it front to back. What is the big problem here? The ipod gives you *choice* in how you listen.

Everything is cyclical. In a few years, someone will come out with something higher quality than CDs and package them into albums, and the masses will flock to the higher quality and being able to hear more than one song from an artist...

What do you mean by this? In 'my world' of transferring dats>cds, they aren't, nor are any commercial cds that I'm aware of.

Chris -
Further to nostatic's point, it may be the means/machinery by which you're listening to AAC that makes the difference.

As far as compression/cleanliness. If it's material that there's a need for cleanliness, I'll buy the CD. I don't think I need the subtle, nuanced clarity of higher definition audio for the car, especially "Shinedown" or "Disturbed".

The lament for a long time was paying $15 for one good, catchy tune, a couple of listenable tunes and a bunch of crap. Perhaps the a la carte music menu offered today will force bands/producers to make an album full of good music, not two songs to which 45 minutes of crap is attached.

Life in a Northern Town. Great song; good album. The album that convinced me to buy albums rather than singles was Love & Rockets' "Earth Sun Moon".

MP

you're right things are cyclical, but I don't see your scenario happening. being able to buy single songs harkens back to "singles" of the 50's and 60's. That concept has been around since recorded music started being commerciallized (78s could only contain limited amounts of music).

Higher definition audio formats have been around for quite some time. We do 10.2 surround sound mixes for some of our work. But in the real world it is about lowest common denomonator and consumer choice. You will likely see better compression algorithms, but until multidimensional headphones get better, plain old stereo will continue to rule, and CD is "good enough" for 99.9% of the market. Hell, look at sat radio. I listen to it for the choice even though the fidelity is worse than FM.

I know, but in this instance, choice may not be a good thing, that's my point. I know it isn't for me! I hear a new song, sounds good, so I look it up on iTunes, listen to the 30 second blurbs of the other 9 songs on the album, think "ahh, not worth $10, when I can buy the one song for $1."

My guess is that a lot of people exercise their choice to only buy the one hit song, because the others on the album are more subtle or take some time to warm up to. When albums or CDs were the only choice, it seemed like an artist could take more risks with those songs, and those risks seem to produce some of the best, most enduring songs (to me at least).

Answer: Yes.

I listen most of my music on the go, so the iPod is perfect. It actually lets me listen to the whole album, because it has the capacity to store it. If i was lugging around a discman, then i would burn a mix cd with only the popular stuff.

choice, choice, choice. That will win over quality.

As for compression, there are two very different types of compression that exist when talking about music. We're talking about data compression, but there also is signal compression.

Signal compression is a technique used (to great effect I might add) to squeeze the maximum amount of sound on a medium without clipping (distortion). The specifics have changed somewhat between analog and digital, but in broad strokes you have electronics that will see a peak and squash it down. This allows you to make things sound louder and get an even mix. In extreme use you get breathing and pumping effects. EVERY commercial recording you hear has audio compression. It is ubiquitous. There are other tricks you can play with it (like ducking...where a voice is talking over music and the music automatically drops in level when the voice comes in). In addition, analog compression (with tasty tube circuits) impart a "warmth" to the signal, along with a bit of distortion. This distortion, made up of even harmonics, actually is somewhat pleasing to the human ear, and is also quite common in commercial recordings.

Digital is different, and any distortion is bad...ugly odd harmonics that sound terrible. In analog recording, it is common to run levels a bit hot (into the red) to get some natural compression and warmth. In digital, you absolutely do not want to go into the red, insteal tending to run about -10db. You get a great clean signal, but miss the warmth. Enter digital trickery to simulate the analog distortion/compression.

ok, thats for the music. Now when you take that and prepare it for someone to listen to it, you end up compressing the file because hirez audio files can be very large (too big for cd). In that case you have a number of different comporession algorithms you can use, but you are essentially throwing away data to approximate what the original signal looked like. The more data you throw away, the poorer the sound. There are plenty of sophisticated tricks that you can play but lossy compression is lossy compression. AAC is Apples compressions scheme, and it sound better than MP3. There are other compression algorithms out there, and they tend to get better as we get more computing horsepower.

I buy CDs, but use an iPod when I run (and that's the only time). I *have* bought single songs off of iTunes, but probably only 10 or so. I like to read the liner notes in CDs, etc., so I almost always buy the CD.

For me personally, iTunes is my window into a world of music that I am just not exposed to here in Alabama. I love to get lost in there digging around for obscure stuff (like some Dandy Warhols songs I downloaded the other day...).

No, it's not ruining music. I've got an ipod and while I still like to take it to the gym and on trips, I don't much listen to it in the car anymore. I still buy CDs like I always have, and listen to them in the car.

As far as downloading music via itunes to the ipod, my biggest beef is that many of the songs/albums I like/want, aren't available on the US itunes store, but are on the UK itunes store. Since I live in the US, I can't purchase songs/vids/albums from the UK store. (I like a lot of obscure British music--obscure in the US anyway) So I'm still forced to go to Amazon.co.uk or ebay to get my CDs, as none of the local CD stores have them...

I was with you up until the last part...which I disagree with. Although a cd is certainly limited to 44.1khz (signal compression), as far as I know, there are no data compression techniques performed on cds that conform to 'red book' standards. In other words, the amount of storage consumed on the cds is essentially the same as the raw .wav file (i.e. no data compression). I'm not trying to argue...just curious that maybe I'm missing something.

I buy CDs, download to the ipod and play them on the car radio.

Which is exactly what I do. The new truck which I just ordered will have an mp3/iPod jack in it, as well as a CD player. I'll probably use both -- but nothing beats the ability to jam 1,000 songs into a small device that's about the size of a cassette tape.

-Z-man.

For me the music started to be ruined when Sony came out with the walkman, diskman et al. Plugging the earphones in your ears and making yourself deaf at an early age will doom the hearing of many of our generation at an early age. Sorry but when you are sitting 5 feet away from someone and you can hear the music coming from the phones plugged in their ears, think about what its like for their ear drum. I like to feel the music and that takes speakers moving air around.

That said, I do something illegal at times when testing music. I travel for a living and use a sharing program to download individual songs from the internet to my laptop from the hotel room. If the song is good and I listen to it often then I will buy it, otherwise I try it then its deleted.

Have as well downloaded entire albums but 99% of them are ones that I have purchased years ago that went missing or no good now. I paid the commission that the band/recording label etc demanded one time, and am not going to pay it a second time. Purchased at least 5 copies of albums like Dark Side of the Moon until doing this...

I don't buy CD's anymore but I will buy entire (mostly) albums digitally. The personal music players (iPod, Zen, Zune, etc...) are way more convenient than CD's. Both our vehicles have CD changers that now sit dormant in favor of the portable device.

The iPod isn't ruining music - the music cartel is ruining music.

The iPod has nothing to do with bands/labels putting out one catchy tune and 12 tracks of filler.