I-tunes Issues

Well I broke down and paid for 4 tunes from i-tunes, sure they sounded ok, so I burned them to cd then reripped them to MP3 for upload to my empeg now they sound like crap,

Plus I had to retag them all did I miss a step or is this a feature to keep people from making mp3's out of them


P.S. New Sig if you get this one you need to take Mr. Linus Torvalds off speed dial and go live on a island somewhere you need a life.

so I burned them to cd then reripped them to MP3 for upload to my empeg now they sound like crap

Did you listen to the CD you burned? Does that CD sound bad, too?

Please give more specifics: How, precisely, do they sound like crap?

Plus I had to retag them all did I miss a step or is this a feature to keep people from making mp3's out of them

You had to retag them because CDs don't have tags. It's not a deliberate feature, it's just that CDs were invented before tags were invented.

I'lll do some side my sides tonight

I-tunes uses MP4 and can convert to ACC (I think that is what they called it)

As for sounding back it is like all the low end is clipped at 120Hz in stead of some boom its more a blat of static.

I've bought a couple of albums now over iTunes. You can't beat the convenience. AAC at 128 is not bad. I'd say it's comparable to mp3 at 160 or 192. I can tell it's compressed but the encoding artifacts don't jump out at me like with 128 mp3. It's good enough that I can enjoy the music, which is generally not the case with 128 mp3. I listen on my iPod so I haven't tried transcoding.

Carpe Aptenodytes

Seize the penguins!

What did you rip them to off the cd? I've done this a number of times by burning the AAC 128s to cd then ripping to High quality VBR mp3. When doing this I've not been able to hear any quality loss between the AAC128 and the VBRs - although AAC 128 isn't really that great of a quality to start with. I think that Apple should start offering AAC 160s for dl from iTunes. AAC 128 isn't close to cd quality in my opinion.

- trs

I've never tried it, being in the UK, but I always figured the "easiest" way would be to play the AAC back through your audio inputs as a WAV and then encode, trim and tag as needed.

I'd be very suprised if the AAC copied to the CD didn't sound good enough to just hook your CD player/iPod/another computer to the audio input of another. Maybe I'm spoilt by having access to a nice array of audio kit and maybe I'm completely oversimplifying the problem....?

Phil

I always figured the "easiest" way would be to play the AAC back through your audio inputs

But then you have to wait for your entire album to play in real-time and then encode/tag after that. Might as well just go straight to the ripping/encoding then tag. At least then it'll happen 5-10x faster. Also, wouldn't there be some quality loss or introduced artifacts by going from digital->analog->digital? Or am I wrong there?

- trs

Also, wouldn't there be some quality loss or introduced artifacts by going from digital->analog->digital? Or am I wrong there?

You are correct. That's the same reason we rip CDs digitally instead of sampling them through the sound card's line-in.

There are products such as Total Recorder which will intercept the raw digital wave audio data as it's headed out of the sound card, and stream it to disk. This is the functional equivalent of doing the record-wav-input thing he suggested, except without the D-A-D quality loss.

Ah yes, D-A-D conversion! Spent far too much time playing with ProTools and digital mixers - just ignore me.

Total recorder sounds very interesting though...

Phil

Total recorder sounds very interesting though...

It's a good product, works as advertised. It takes advantage of the fact that your sound card must get its data from the application raw, ie, without data compression or copy protection. All that Total Recorder does is insert itself as a "shim" audio driver in the Windows control panel. To the applications, it looks like a sound card. It intercepts that data and shunts it to disk before passing it on to the real sound card driver. So even the thorniest of DRM'ed audio is saved as raw digital wave audio by it. If you can play it through your sound card, you can save it with Total Recorder.

Neat trick, really. It's one of those ideas that I thought of independently on my own, only to discover someone else was already doing it.

Looks like pretty much a WIndows version of Audio HiJack Pro (www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro) on the Mac.

And should solve a problem my wife needs me to sort tonight - recording a radio stream to an mp3 for a broadcast this afternoon. Wasn't able to play the show on the Mac, so this should do everything I need.

Thanks for the tip!

Phil

Don't convert the iTunes AAC to analog only to recapture it. Likewise don't burn a CD. Just break the DRM and convert the files to AIFF (on a Mac at least). The software is out there. I can probably get a link if you can't find it - this may help to find a Windows program if anyone needs one.

You'll still have to re-encode as MP3 so it's not going to be a lossless transcode, but it's about as good as it will get.

Bruno

I link to that software would be great! I've yet to find it.

- trs

I expect one day the Total Recorder solution will become more difficult to achieve. When DRM has been pushed down into the hardware we'll probably end up with protected data being sent to the sound card.

I link to that software would be great! I've yet to find it.

Software that directly breaks copy protection is, under current laws, illegal and therefore should not be linked from this BBS.

Software such as Total Recorder can be used to get around the protection without actually breaking it, so I don't know how they get away with it. But they are a commercial company that doesn't seem to have any problems selling the software, so they're OK to link from the BBS.

When DRM has been pushed down into the hardware we'll probably end up with protected data being sent to the sound card.

Fortunately, that's going to take a while, since legacy hardware without DRM chips will be around for a very long time, and the content providers want a large audience rather than just those who own the latest cutting-edge hardware.

When DRM has been pushed down into the hardware

This has been tried many many times in the past and has yet to work. I wouldn't expect it to start working any time soon. (hopefully)

- trs

I happen to come across a solution for this today when looking for something else. If you are the valid license holder (i.e. you can play the song in iTunes) then this program can stream out the contents into an unprotected m4a file. It only takes a couple of seconds.

I'll wait for Tony to say whether I can post the link. In the meantime, I recommend dbPowerAmp for transcoding all formats. The forum at their site has lots of good information, too.

You have to actually BUY the iTunes AAC song to transcode it of course. So defeating the DRM, completely legal in Canada, is just about allowing you to play the song you just bought on the device or with the software of your choice.

I'll find out where to get it tomorrow and see what the authors say on their website about the software. If it's something that indeed sounds "fishy" then just PM me with your email address and I'll email you a link offline. Let me post a followup to make sure I have indeed found it again. Personally I don't have a use for it because it's not going to sound s good as the tracks I rip myself from my own discs. But if you're going to buy from Apple, you might as well be able to play the songs on your empeg or Karma.

Bruno

I did a little reasearch, internally and externally... This software is no different from the DVD-to-File/Transcode software Tony requested a few months back (perhaps even less questionable ) and is available from the two most respected Mac download sites:

QTConvert is the name of the program. It is a decoder/transcoder for many QT formats, including AAC.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14080

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22356

Bruno

Good point.

Now that the precedent has been set, here is a conversion proggy for the PC. This comes from the dBpowerAMP site which is a great PC program to convert between different music formats. dBpowerAMP itself can't read the protected file but this post has a link to a program that does.

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=4004