
Apple is working on a new digital music format - lalmachado
http://time.com/3393297/u2-apple-new-digital-format/
======
imaginenore
> _Bono tells TIME he hopes that a new digital music format in the works will
> prove so irresistibly exciting to music fans that it will tempt them again
> into buying music_

Bono, I will tell you a secret. It's the good music that's irresistible, not
some DRM garbage which you don't even have the balls to discuss.

~~~
pain_perdu
Well-put sir, thank you for this.

~~~
zeruch
This is the band with the most sociopathhic manager since Peter Grant, who has
been trying to push DRM before:
[http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507](http://devrandom.net/~zeruch/wordpress/?page_id=507)
(disclosure, the link is my own write up of a speech by Paul McGuinness at a
Medem conf)

------
dandelany
Here's something I've always wanted: A consumer music file format that
preserves all of the underlying tracks ('stems') so that they can be adjusted
while you listen to the song.

Imagine listening to a recording and going "ooh, that bassline", and then
turning up the bassist and turning down everything else to hear it better. Or
easily "remixing" while you listen by eg. applying a filter to only the drums.
You could even save presets to listen to "your" mix of the song again. Maybe
this only appeals to hardcore music fans, but I know it's something I'd love
to play with.

Of course it would have to be supported by major user-friendly software like
iTunes, and would have to implement a nice interface for interacting with a
tracks. But I've always thought Apple was very well positioned to take this
on, if they wanted to.

~~~
jaimebuelta
It sounds cool, but it will be a disaster. Does anyone remember the "ultra
boost" button on the old Walkman to raise the bass to insane levels? Or all
the equalizer voodoo, where people will "tune" moving levels and buttons
forming shapes?

The sad truth is that audio engineers are way better than anyone else in
mixing the music and making it shine. The better approach is not to mess with
that and just trust them.

The same thing goes for headphones. It's better to get something more or less
neutral in the sound to listen music in the way is supposed to sound, not
distorting it adding crazy bass.

~~~
ihsw
> The sad truth is that fashion designers are way better than anyone else in
> designing clothing and making it shine. The better approach is not to mess
> with that and just trust them.

> The sad truth is that chefs are way better than anyone else in creating a
> delicious menu and making it shine. The better approach is not to mess with
> that and just trust them.

Who ever said that keeping people from dressing hideously or eating food that
doesn't _match_ was a good idea?

Some people might even make it sound better, but you're advocating we take
that opportunity away from them without giving them the benefit of the doubt.

~~~
jaimebuelta
I don't think that people should be forbidden of playing with equalizers or
even making their own recordings and mix. At the moment there are lots of
tools that allow this.

But releasing a format for music that works around the idea of "do your own
mix", that's a different issue.

If some artist wants to do it, hey, that's totally fine. What I'm skeptic
about is that it's the future of music.

------
higherpurpose
If it's going to be a proprietary DRM-locked file format - just don't bother,
Apple.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
That and/or "high definition", "above CD quality" digital audio.

There's a lot of noise in the digital music industry about high quality audio
at present. U2 may be following in Neil Young's PONO footsteps.

There may be doubt whether high quality audio can deliver what it promises -
i.e. an improvement over MP3 320 that is noticeable to normal people's ears.
But the Pono kickstarter proves beyond any doubt that there's money it it:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-
wh...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-
soul-rediscovers-music)

~~~
dagw
The recording industry have tried the "above CD quality" thing to get people
to re-buy their music several times before. Each time it flopped, and I fail
to see why this time will be different.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
I don't disagree. To generalise a lot:

The older members of the music-listening public are more likely to be
audiophiles and have more money to throw at kickstarters from classic rockers.
They are a bit slower to adopt new technologies, but are now fairly well on
board with iPods and MP3s. However their ears aren't always high definition
any more.

The younger members of the music-listening public don't really bother so much
with the concept of "owning" music. It's like fresh air – so long at it's
streaming at you, it's good and who cares about owning it.

No mass market for buying high-definition audio downloads is to be found in
either category.

------
shaggy
Above CD quality has been tried many times. Currently, the service with the
most to offer in terms of catalog is
[https://www.hdtracks.com/faq](https://www.hdtracks.com/faq). You do have to
re-buy albums you might already own, but the choices are ever expanding and
include a lot of great stuff.

The point in the article about the new format helping lesser known artists
really shows just how little U2 and Bono actually get about the current state
of the music industry. Artists are getting completely screwed by labels and
must tour by necessity to make money. In fact, with the huge growth in the
festival industry, small acts (and large acts of old) can make significant
chunks of money they otherwise wouldn't. To Bono's point, Cole Porter could
tour and make lots of money doing it today. He may not have wanted to, but
it'd be possible. A new digital format isn't going to change that.

~~~
tzs
> To Bono's point, Cole Porter could tour and make lots of money doing it
> today. He may not have wanted to, but it'd be possible

Was Cole Porter a performer? What I see after a bit of searching indicates he
was a songwriter/composer, so what would be the attraction of a Cole Porter
tour?

~~~
shaggy
He was not a performer. He was a songwriter and composer mostly for Broadway
and he was a great one. The draw would be something like "an evening with Cole
Porter and his music" or "Cole Porter and his Broadway orchestra play his
hits". You can imagine the marketing around hearing the music live, standing
on its own. That kind of stuff makes money today, and lots of it.

------
stevekl
Great, another proprietary format.

While I want everything to be open and interoperable, I personally work in a
startup that aims to make profit. So I also understand the commercial reasons
of proprietary technologies.

So, I am torn, what should be proprietary and what should be open?

~~~
Slackwise
Formats should never be proprietary. That's just holding user data hostage.

Really, nothing should be proprietary, or at least not proprietary
forever.Take note of Id Software's approach of open-sourcing their engines X
years after release of the accompanying game.

If we keep releasing proprietary systems, nothing will be archived or usable
in the future, if the source is never released. Hundreds of video games are
going to be inaccessible in the future due to DRM servers, or proprietary
backends.

I mean, I can ramble on forever, but it's pretty clear that non-free[1]
software is bad for the future of people and society. Snowden proved RMS
right.

[1]: Free as in freedom: [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) (You can still charge
money for free software or related services. Not everyone can run their own
Google, even if they open sourced it all. But that's a whole 'nother set or
arguments.)

------
veidr
There's no chance whatsoever that this is a new DRM-encumbered format[1].
None. So some people need to take a breath.

(And there's _almost_ as little chance that it is going to matter any more
than the Apple/Bandai _Pippin @WORLD_.)

If Apple is actually involved in a more significant way than grudgingly acting
as fluffer to Bono's fantasies of heroically saving a nonsensical[2] industry
that briefly emerged as an artifact of technological limitations of the
previous century, I would guess it is some kind of super-metadata-laden format
that includes art/video/interview/extras, maybe including built-in
remixability or something, that is designed (but unlikely) to entice users to
buy even more DRM-free $1.29 songs than they already do in MP3/AAC.

[1]:
[http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_post...](http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_posts_rare_open_letter_thoughts_on_music/)
(Was astonished that Apple doesn't still host this, btw. But it's not gonna
change.)

[2]: “Cole Porter wouldn’t have sold T-shirts. Cole Porter wasn’t coming to a
stadium near you.” Right. So he would have sold his songs to somebody who was
-- or else not made much money from it. So what. There are homeless drummers
in SF better than Cole Porter, and no new media format is going to change any
of that, nor should it.

------
startupfounder
Apple should buy Pono, Neil Young & Jon Hamm's music "high-resolution" 24-bit
192kHz audio company and have Neil play some real Rock & Roll at Apple events.

~~~
tmuir
I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but Pono is bound to fail. Throughout the evolution
of widely adopted audio formats, the sound quality has always decreased. The
average listener doesn't care about fidelity. They can't tell the difference.
They care about convenience.

Cassette tapes were better than vinyl records, because they were more
portable. CDs were better than tapes, because you could skip tracks. Mp3s were
better than CDs, because you could fit thousands of them in your pocket. But
at each step of that progression, the sound got worse.

Young's testimonials are from professional musicians, the extremely small
subset of the public that actually cares about the quality of the sound. These
are not the people he needs to convince. This is obviously aimed at the
general public, who have proven time and time again that convenience is king.

The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit,
44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.

~~~
ssharp
>The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit,
44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.

I don't think the vast majority of people could either tell the difference or
care about the difference between much larger compression gaps than that.

I received three free months of Sirius radio when I purchased a certified used
car. After a few minutes of flipping through the channels, I couldn't
understand why anyone would want to listen to such highly compressed music
with tons of artifacts, yet lots of people pay for subscriptions.

------
chiph
I liked the new U2 album, but the amount of compression used was absurd. A new
high-resolution format won't be able to fix poor decisions made in the
mastering booth.

------
snowwrestler
I am fully supportive of the idea that musicians and songwriters should get
compensated for their work in proportion with its popluarity. Just because
people love to make music, that doesn't mean they don't want to save for
retirement, buy a house, send kids to college, maybe do some investing, etc.
If you pirate an album you like, instead of buying it, you're taking advantage
of those artists.

[steps off soapbox]

That said, I have a hard time seeing how a new digital music format is going
to affect piracy at all. AAC is already technically superior to MP3, but
everyone still trades MP3s.

And I really hope this is not a veiled reference to a new DRM format.

~~~
72deluxe
You're right - it seems popular even on HN where people make a living that
musicians are exempt from earning a living through recording and selling
music. Wrapped in daft phrases like "music wants to be free", it seems
fashionable to engage in copyright infringement for music, and I think it
stinks. Arguments that record labels ("fat cats") get a cut of the earnings
are not relevant - the musician signed with the label (correct) but does this
mean that the musician said his recorded music is free? (incorrect!)

We have disgust for software piracy here (particularly if it something we have
written), yet the same disgust DOES not translate to music or musicians. It is
wrong.

I think it is an attitude that needs to change. And the argument that "if I
like it, I'll buy it" is wrong too; do we all pirate Microsoft Office and
decide if we'll buy it after using it for a while? I don't! I buy Office if I
need Office / enjoy using Office (not likely with that daft ribbon
interface!).

~~~
MeadowTheory
No, no, no. Emphatically no.

I am speaking a musician here: by the time you are earning an appreciable
amount of money from album sales, you are no longer just "making a living".
Most musicians that support themselves through music do it by touring and
selling merchandise (including physical recordings), and musicians that get
famous have usually been doing this for years before they start making money
off of recordings. The only exceptions are "manufactured" pop stars, like
Miley Cyrus or Ariana Grande, who get big contracts right away through high-
powered connections and nepotism.

And yes, the record "fat cats" earnings are perfectly relevant in this
situation. They are exploiting musician's work to become wealthy, and by
supporting them, you are implicitly supporting their actions. If you want to
support a band, go see their shows and buy their merchandise.

~~~
snowwrestler
Right, because studio time, publishing CDs, booking tour dates, and promoting
it all is free.

Before an artist earns money from album sales, they have to pay for all that
stuff. When album sales drop, either the artists get less of all those things,
or they have to pay for them from other revenue sources. Either way it's not
good for them.

The idea that album revenues never did anything for anyone makes no sense.

~~~
MeadowTheory
Most artists tour for years before signing to a major label, during which time
they most likely book all their own shows, do their own promotion (with maybe
a tiny bit of help from the venue). They have often released albums on a
smaller indie label first, usually recorded on studio time for which they
themselves paid. There are many artists that have made a living doing things
like this for years and even decades, and they are harmed by a music culture
which values artists purely based on the number of units of recordings they
can move. It is not a simple binary choice between making things bad for the
artists or good for the artists by pirating music or not. I personally think
that piracy is the catalyst that will effect a tremendous and positive shift
in the music industry, where the artistic qualities of the music and,
importantly, the performance of music, take primacy over moving enough album
units to hit the quarterly sales goal. Maybe the resulting industry will have
a lower overall profitability, but maybe that's not entirely a bad thing,
since most of the profits the recording industry has made were based on
unethical business practices. The idea that this will spell the end of music
because musicians won't be able to make a living is absurd and betrays your
lack of vision and historical perspective

~~~
snowwrestler
Bands don't do these things themselves. When they're starting out they don't
know how, and when they start to catch on, it's a waste of their time. The
small labels do a lot more than you think. And album sales have been an
important part of financing all that. As album revenue has declined, something
had to give. Labels are doing less these days, which makes it harder for new
and small bands to succeed.

Piracy makes for great exposure. You can't eat exposure though. At some point
a band has to make money if it's going to make a living, and piracy has made a
big dent in that, even for small labels.

------
Pxtl
The way Bono talks about it it really sounds like bringing back DRM, since
he's focused on career songwriters in his little quote. Maybe improving the
way albums and additional metadata are bundled for the non-audio content.
Hopefully the audio files themselves will remain as-is.

One thing that disappoints me is the way folders have stayed un-typed in OSes.
I've always wished that the Reiser concept of "a file that contains files" had
caught on, as that would be much more appropriate for packing metadata and
other information unrelated to the main audio stream into an audio file
container.

~~~
colanderman
"a file that contains files"

How does this differ from a ZIP file? (Keep in mind all modern OSes support
treating ZIP files like directories.)

~~~
Pxtl
First, because folders are far more performant for accessing child objects.
That's mostly an implementation detail, but a big one - there are tremendous
optimizations made on the filesystem that are not accessible for something
like ZIP. Particularly relevant to bulk searching/listing - the intent in
ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into sub-files.

Second (and this is more a problem in Windows where the 3-letter extension is
more important) the OS needs to know which tools it can associate with which
type. If a file is a .zip, then it's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's
not a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music
archive). But not both.

~~~
colanderman
_the intent in ReiserFS is that ID3, EXIF tags and the like would move into
sub-files._

The problem with this is the concept of "files with subfiles" is _not a thing_
outside of ReiserFS. Sure, if people used ReiserFS, they'd have this feature,
but how would you transport such files between machines? You'd have to
serialize them somehow: this is exactly what ZIP is.

(Remember HFS resource forks? Me neither. They suffered from exactly the same
issue: ambiguous transport semantics.)

Optimizations around such things are exactly that – optimizations – and should
not affect the semantics of the objects involved. The proper way to approach
this is to decouple data storage from indexing from file semantics. Hence a
better approach would be to permit access to contents of ZIPs using FUSE (on
Linux) or what-have-you, and index the contents in a database like Spotlight
(on OS X).

 _If a file is a .zip, then it 's a .zip and it can use zip tools. If it's not
a .zip, it can use the file's own tools (like if it's some kind of music
archive). But not both._

Ignoring that OOXML (.docx etc.) already takes this approach (zipped XML
files), the problem of allowing multiple different programs to access the same
type of file is a minor enhancement to the OS. (I'm pretty sure you already
can configure Windows to allow .docx to "Open With..." a ZIP program.)
Supporting files-which-are-also-folders requires breaking quite a few more
assumptions in OSes.

------
bequanna
I am having a tough time understanding this whole Apple + U2 'partnership' (or
whatever it is).

It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something
marketing managers to be hip/relevant.

Hell, I'm almost 30 and few of my friends have any interest in U2. I just
asked my 21 year old cousin and she can't name a single U2 song.

Maybe some of my contemporaries think this is interesting or cool, I just find
it odd.

~~~
Mandatum

        It seems like a misguided attempt by an out of touch group of 50-something marketing managers to be hip/relevant.
    

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Apple circa 2004 nailed
marketing. It seems recently they've stopped 'evolving' and are looking to
past concepts that have worked, but no longer relevant.

Beats was cool because Dre is a legend and a celebrity. I hope Apple starts
using some of Beats' marketing people for their own brand.

------
tonysuper
This might be proprietary, but Apple's other major codec is open.[1] Hopefully
this will be as well.

[1]
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless)

~~~
gillianseed
It was proprietary was most of it's existence and was not opened until 2011,
which in turn was likely as a result of everyone using FLAC instead.

I have no doubt this new codec will be proprietary, and only if it fails to
gain any traction is there a chance of it becoming open.

------
adamnemecek
hockeybias: you are shadowbanned and have been for the last 5 years

------
mbesto
Obligatory: [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

~~~
adamnemecek
Can we please stop linking to this whenever there's a discussions about a new
standard? There are other reasons for creating a new standard besides
unification of the current standards.

~~~
mbesto
Why? The conclusion is always the same. I'm genuinely curious as to what these
"other reasons" are.

~~~
adamnemecek
There is literally 1 billion possible reasons why that could be. Smaller size.
Higher bitrate. Simpler format. Faster/more power efficient decoding. More
than 2 audio channels. Separation of single tracks within a song (so that e.g.
you can mute vocals). These just off the top of my head.

------
sp332
I'm betting on Freemium DRM. Listen to the crummy version for free, or plug
the file into a totalitarian DRM system to pay for and decrypt the good
version.

~~~
ceejayoz
Given the big deal Apple made about dropping DRM, I doubt that. It'll probably
be something to support extended content. iTunes has some packages that come
with video, PDF, etc. content as well as the music already.

