Serious inaccuracies in James Jolly's "A basic guide to downloading"
Sat, Apr 3 2010, 4:11PM
The guide contains some useful information, but I was disappointed to find some serious errors concerning iTunes. I hope you can correct these as soon as possible!
JJ says that "Apple’s 128 KBps (and for iTunes Plus recordings 192) is starting to look rather parsimonious for classical collectors."
Actually, all music now sold on the iTunes store is encoded at 256 kbps AAC (equivalent in quality to 320 kbps MP3). This has been true for some months now: ALL music now sold on the store is in the "iTunes Plus" category (256 kbps, not 192 as stated in the article!), and NONE has "Apple’s proprietory DRM"!
As for the complaint that "the ability to search easily, given the somewhat primitive engine on offer, is a bit frustrating": not so! In the iTunes store, go to the "Store" menu at the top of the screen (next after File, Edit, View, and Controls), select "Search..." from the menu, and you get the Power Search screen. In the drop-down menu, change "All Results" to "Music". You now have separate search boxes for Artist, Composer, Song, and Album, and the option of narrowing results down by Genre (e.g. Classical). Far from being "a bit frustrating", this offers everything a classical collector is likely to want.
One other point: the article gives the impression that readers need to decide how far to compress music from CDs at the point of ripping. Those with plenty of hard drive space who want the best possible quality for home listening but also want to listen to music on the move on a smaller-capacity portable player can have the best of both worlds by ripping with the Apple Lossless Encoder and then configuring iTunes 9.1 to convert tracks automatically to 128 kbps AAC when transferring to a portable player (iPod/iPhone): for your portable device, go to Summary - Options - "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC". (128 kbps AAC is likely to be ample for less than ideal listening conditions in the car, underground, street or similar.)
(originally posted in another forum, but probably the message belongs here)
