More Music Thoughts | Dafacto
Dafacto

The personal website of Matt Henderson.

More Music Thoughts

30 April 2003

Now that the Mac and the iPod support the AAC format, I’m re-encoding my CD library. The iTunes “auto-import-and-eject” feature makes this task much less daunting than it could be. Casually popping in CDs while I work, I should have the entire collection done in a few days. Since my original encodings were done at 192 bps (with variable rate enabled), the average filesize was about 7.5 megabytes. With AAC and 128 bps selected, it looks like that will be reduced to about 4.5.

Don’t know if the Music Service will be a big success, but it’ll likely be the bankruptcy of me. :-) I’ll be watching Version Tracker for some shareware controls to help restrict impulse buying. :-)

As I talk to people about the Apple Music Service, the question of “Why pay $1 when I can have it for free?” keeps popping up. For me, it boils down to the following (apart from the question of ethics):

(1) It saves time. You can spend loads of time trying to find and successfully download a song encoded with sufficient quality. I consider 20 minutes of my time saved worth a bit more than $1.

(2) Identification of new music. Being able to browse the service, check out recommendations of others, and listen to 30-second clips of songs and artists I’d otherwise be unware of are definite advantagse of this mode of music shopping.

What I’m now looking for is a URL format to allow exchange of song/album recommendations. NSLog(); reports that work on this is underway.

By the way, the port to open in order to share your iTunes music is 3689 (use your firewall).

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