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Apple Drops iTunes Plus Price to 99 Cents

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 8:20 AM - by

Apple lowered the price of its DRM-free offerings at the iTunes Store from US$1.29 to $0.99 on Wednesday. Along with the price drop, Apple also announced that its iTunes Plus catalog now includes over two million tracks, making it the largest legitimate copy protection-free music collection in the world.

The price reduction follows the launch of the Amazon MP3 music download store which offered a wide selection of iPod compatible copy protection-free songs for 99 cents.

The iTunes Store began offering tracks that weren't hampered with digital rights management code earlier this year in a special deal with EMI. The tracks were also encoded at a higher bit rate, which offered listeners better audio quality.

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dlstarr7 said:

member since 12 Jul 2001 with 119 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:33 am

I am going to sue. I can't sell my existing songs I bought at the more expensive price for a profit anymore.

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Bosco said:

member since 03 Jun 2002 with 1002 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:47 am

Me too. DRM-free songs from iTunes Store contain pphphphphpphhphhphphptlate, and that gave me birth defects.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:33 am

Bosco: You didn't read the paragraph in the License Agreement that warns you not to place your iPod in your lap when you listen to DRM-free songs?

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Oct 17, 2007 1:33 pm

Sweet, AmazonMP3 is already impacting iTunes and it's not even out of beta yet. Gotta love competition, unless you're Apple.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:00 pm

Quote:
Sweet, AmazonMP3 is already impacting iTunes

Good one, guest. Thanks for the laugh.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 3:07 pm

Guest wrote:
Quote:
Sweet, AmazonMP3 is already impacting iTunes

Good one, guest. Thanks for the laugh.

Haha, youre right, Apple is a hardass about pricing structures and refuses to bushe ti accompdate the clients, but when another online commerce power house releases a competing store offering bwtter quality at a lower price and Apple has the first xhange in pricng in how long it has nothing to do qith it. You're roght i am certain that Apple had planned thus proce cut all along, there arw no outside ingluemces om Cupertino. Get off your meda.

sorry for typos. This was written on an iphone

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Intruder said:

member since 07 Jul 2004 with 3149 posts, TMO Mac Specialist, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Oct 23, 2007 3:58 pm

Better quality that 256 AAC? I'd like to see the proof. Please provide.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 4:42 pm

It is far too complex to explain in a single post so instead you should go read an audiophile forum instead of a apple promotion site. Try hydrogen audio for one. It has been shown that you cannot ABX an mp3 encoded the same way that Amazon encodes theirs from a file encoded with a lossless codec, that means you cannot tell the difference. Add that to the fact that mp3 has far greater support than AAC and it is a no brainer that the file is higher quality since you do not need to transcode it for devices that do not support AAC. The files are as good as lossless when being played and more flexible for the end user.

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Intruder said:

member since 07 Jul 2004 with 3149 posts, TMO Mac Specialist, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Oct 23, 2007 5:41 pm

I'm not sure why you bring up "an Apple promotion site" when Apple has NOTHING to do with AAC other than using it. Or are you referring to here? And transcoding issues are irrelevant to the basic premise regarding the respective qualities of mp3 vs AAC (which is MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 audio coding). Even Fraunhofer IIS considers it a superior replacement to mp3 (and, since they created or helped create both, you'd think they would know).

And, per the Hydrogenaudio site, it appears the general consensus is that you can't tell the difference at the higher bitrates (neither between the original and the compressed, nor between the different compressed versions).

So, I still question the contention that the Amazon offering is better quality than that offered by Apple (or anybody offering 256kbps AAC). Flexibility was not the question. Quality was.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 6:55 pm

"I'm not sure why you bring up "an Apple promotion site" when Apple has NOTHING to do with AAC other than using it."

um...

"Or are you referring to here? "

There you go, I swear that one was obvious.

"And transcoding issues are irrelevant to the basic premise regarding the respective qualities of mp3 vs AAC (which is MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 audio coding). "

It is not irrelevant to the discussion of what the quality of the file. If I have to transcode an AAC file just to get it to play on my device, then yes, it is highly relevant as the codec will lose transparency. Yes, AAC is a more efficient codec, but you are completely missing the point. Once a lossless codec such as AAC or MP3 is at a level that it is transparent to the listener, it doesn't matter which codec is more efficient at compressing, they are transparent. So once that transparency is achieved the QUALITY of the more flexible file is thus greater. Oh, and by the way, mp3 is not MPEG-2, it's short for MPEG-1 Layer 3.

"And, per the Hydrogenaudio site, it appears the general consensus is that you can't tell the difference at the higher bitrates (neither between the original and the compressed, nor between the different compressed versions). "

Exactly! That's called transparency! The less you can hear compression artifacts, the more transparent the codec is.

Let me break it down for you since you are confused. You are reading and writing "quality" when you seem to mean "sound quality" which we can better refer to as "transparency" when discussing digital media codecs as the actual sound quality depends on a number of things not just which compression scheme was chosen. You want the codec to not be noticable, which once the bitrates are high enough for either AAC or MP3 they are, you cannot tell which codec was used. That's what transparency is, and that's sort of what you are thinking of when you write quality. However, the quality OF THE FILE is not just based on the transparency of the codec (which at this point is moot since I'll concede without looking it up to see if it is actually true that 256kbps AAC is transparent).

Like I said before, this is far too complex a subject and you really need to spend a lot of time over at HA before you can grasp the nuances of this subject. We even use different terms and you first need to familiarize yourself with that and the ABX process. Seriously, there is way too much on this topic to cover here, and it's not apropos to this article, hang out at HA for a year and see what you learn, I'm still learning from those guys every day.

Just a brief list of other nuances not touched on..

- Fraunhofer has nothing to do with the mp3s from Amazon, they are using LAME.

- mp3 is not strictly defined in the MPEG-1 standard, hence all mp3 implementations have a varying degree of compression and transparency, mp3s at the same bitrates by different encoders score wildly different on ABX tests.

- I THINK LAME 3.97 is the current recommendation at HA, and that's what Amazon uses.

That's enough on this subject, join the fun at HA.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 6:57 pm

substantive typo:

"Once a lossless codec such as AAC or MP3 is at a level that it is transparent to the listener.."

LOSSLESS is supposed to be LOSSY, obviously, sorry.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 7:07 pm

SHORT VERSION:

In case that was too much verbage or too technical, the main point here is that when you say "quality" you are writing about not the quality of the file, but the quality of one attribute of the file. Whereas when I write quality, I'm refering the quality of the product being sold, since that one attribute you refer to is equivalent in both products, assuming that 256 kbps AAC is indeed transparent. Then naturally you must look at the other attributes to determine which product is the higher quality.

After my time at HA, I have found that audiophile preferences usually go in the order: FLAC, OGG/MP3 (a tie as some people prefer the open nature of OGG and others prefer the ubiquity of MP3 support), and far behind those three come AAC & WMA for the major codecs.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 7:08 pm

See what I mean, ugh, there's always more to be said on the subject, so yeah, go hang out at HA if you really want to learn more about it.

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Intruder said:

member since 07 Jul 2004 with 3149 posts, TMO Mac Specialist, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Oct 23, 2007 7:57 pm

I am aware that mp3 is not mpeg-2 (I never said it was). I said that AAC is mpeg-2 or mpeg-4, depending.

Transcoding still isn't the issue (and I am not confused). For the iPod, Zune, Sansa, PSP and others that can use AAC (which covers probably 90% of the market) there is no need to transcode the files. In those instances, mp3 high bitrate and AAC high bitrate should be virtually indistinguishable. Transparent, if you will, to the original. Obviously, if you need to transcode to get the music on your player then you will lose quality (transparency). That is a given. But original mp3 file to original AAC file should (and I emphasize SHOULD) be indistinguishable. The guest (you? I doubt it, since you appear to be able to type and make sense, unless it was a bad typing day) said that the Amazon files are of better quality. I (and probably most people) would take that to mean that they sound better. I am questioning that because the consensus seems that 256 AAC is, as you say, transparent. Frankly, the majority of people would only judge the files by the quality of the sound, as that is what you are usually buying it for (the sound, that is). So yes, I am writing about one quality of the file... the sound quality. The rest is pretty immaterial if the sound is bad. At least to the average person.

I'll peruse the HA site a bit more. It looks like there is quite a bit of good info there on audio codecs.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Oct 23, 2007 11:09 pm

90% of what market dude? DAPs themselves don't cover 90% of the mp3 player market. Again, you are completely missing the point, I believe intentionally so. You are making up an argument just to argue. I'll say it one last time, but use analogy. You are judging the quality of a car based on its engine. When two cars have the same engine, one must look to other attributes of the car to determine which is of better quality. I said the files were better quality. Amazon mp3 is a higher quality product. I'm sorry I need to be so explicit with you and that you are still so confused as to what the hell I am trying to say. Smell you later.

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