"Digital Music"

I don't have anything against audiophiles or analog purists in general. Just the stupid ones.

First: the anecdote:

I was flipping around on TV when after a few minutes of some kind of 'making the album' style documentary about the new offering from a big band* I found myself infuriated about the crap they were saying. I wouldn't really have had high hopes for a new album but i think if i'd hadn't caught this documentary, I wouldn't really have had any strong opinion on the album.

*The name of the band** and the title of their awful new album is pretty irrelevant.
** I'd be a foo' to name names

What annoyed me was that it was recorded on tape.... No, wait.. I don't really care about that either.

What really got annoying was their insistence that this had any effect on the finished product at all. The frontman preached that digital recording is "everything that is wrong with rock 'n' roll" and that recording on good old fashioned way was the right way to do it.

Really- who gives a fuck? However an album is recorded, whether it be using pro tools, one of those portable combo 16-track recording studio/CD burner/toastie maker machines or indeeed on oldfashioned tape, the main objective is to get music out of the musicians heads into some kind of distributable medium. The shortcuts of digital recording give and take very little.

It all started to stew in my head and I started picking on the other major flaw in their ethos. The frontman also insisted that analog recording gave the recording some kind of warmth that could only be delivered through analogue electronics. That's all fine and well, but you're making a commercial album here. Millions will buy the album, but will any of them benefit from the fact it was recorded in analogue? There are people who swear by analogue and still buy all their music on vinyl but it'd be interesting to see who (if anyone) falls under both camps- fans of the band who listen to their music on vinyl.
The fact is that the music is going to be digitized before 99% of the people listen to it (Not an actual statistic). So to me, that makes the 2 possible arguments for recording this album on analogue tape into moot points. (Except for the 4 people who bought the album on vinyl and actually opened the cellophane)
 
So while I'm at it, I might as well make a similar point about analogue and digital formats.

People are entitled to their opinions, but they sometimes they should give wikipedia a quick read before doing something like announce their hatred for digital music. I'll be doing my best to avoid hypocrisy here because I do prefer to buy a physical format when I can. Vinyl is appealing to me because it actually feels like you have something for your money. It's square foot of artwork you can hold in your hands put on display along with your collection, something to read while you are giving an album that all-important first listen.. or to some people who are trying to keep with the times it's now just become a frisbee after you've recorded it into an mp3.

One worry I imagine keeps all anti-digital audiophiles up at night if they're sticking to vinyl but listening to newer music is that the album might well be recorded digitally then made to vinyl later, which sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? 

When people try to argue the case for CD's over what gets called digital music- that's when it gets properly stupid. As the labels on CD's themselves will tell you, Compact Discs are a digital format. Compact disc digital audio. So people who think CD's are superior in quality to an MP3... well... they're right. But not half as right as they think you are!

It's all about bitrates, (if you're confused already, you have my permission to stop reading now). A CD is about 1400 kilobits per second (kbps) That means that there are 1.4 million ones or zeros to make up every second of audio. MP3 is a compressed version of the same audio which brings it down to anything from 32-320kbps. The main ways that it does this are:

• Cutting out information representing sound which is not there
  

  CD's hold information for all frequencies at all times on the recording, whether that frequency is there or not. MP3's only encode what frequencies are there

• Cutting out sound we can't hear
  

  You (if you're human) can hear sounds from roughly 20-20,000 Hz. This is a huge range which starts narrow out by your twenties. Even though you can hear high pitched sounds above 15,000 Hz, nothing interesting really happens way up there.

  CD's hold information on sound from 0-22,050 Hz and MP3 cuts out some useless parts and only represents (roughly) 20-16,000 Hz.

• Computery magic
  

  There are people (if you call mathematicians people) who devote their lives creating algorithms which allow data to be compressed by representing information in a shortened way.
  The simplest way to think about it is if you were to write the word "fudge" a million times in a notepad document, it would take up the space 5 million characters.
  If you were then to zip that document, A compression algorithm would step in and write it just like I did there - "fudge a million times" (except in computer language), then when reading the document back it's returned to it's original form.
  
  This is of course a very simplistic explaination, and in reality an mp3 is not transformed back into an identical copy of the source it was created from. It is as good a representation of data that can be made at the bitrate chosen. It's this "loss" during compression that causes most offence to audiophiles.
  
  Despite all of the information that is lost during compression, it really can be difficult to notice. This is the product of the years those people spend working on their algorithms.

The standard for "near CD quality" mp3 downloads is usually 128-192kbps, which is about 4-6 megabytes for a 4 minute song. Despite these files taking up 10-15% of the space they did on a CD, it is still a good enough representation and this is good enough for most people.


Why does music come in a compressed format?
It's all about storage space. We want all our music on the hard drive of our computer (because we can!) and as much as we can carry in on an mp3 player when we're on the go. Modern players only have a certain amount of storage (NOT memory- see the earlier blog!) so in order to fit as much as possible in the space available the files are compressed. Music downloads are traditionally around 128-192kbps which is a fair trade-off between file size and quality.

Online download stores are beginning to sell mp3's at higher qualities because this demand is changing. The lower bitrates were chosen when portable players had very little capacity. My first mp3 player held 64MB which was only enough for one album! And this point in time, we dialled up to the internet, download speeds were nothing by todays standards

"you could be up all night and only see eight women"

So as players grow in capacity and our connection to the internet gets ever speedier, the audiophiles may well get their way, simply because measures intended to cope with these constraints are no longer necessary.

I talked mostly of MP3, but there are of course other formats, including the audiophiles fave, FLAC. The "L" is for lossless, so a track ripped from a CD into a .flac file is completely unchanged in audio content, yet the file size compared to the cd track is still significant. 

This sounds brilliant and all, but I don't use it for the simple fact that I don't have an MP3 player that'll play FLAC. Until all the big companies see the light and build their products to play a variety of formats, flac and formats like it are unlikely to gain much ground, because at the end of the day, most people just take what they're given.


That was maybe a bit of a bit tangent but The Point is that You're Wrong- cd's are digital music! Your music does not neccisarily sound better on CD and when you say "digital music", you really mean "downloads" or "mp3's"

As I was saying, MP3 isn't going to be the format that's stuck to, but it's likely that the name has stuck. If another format were to become the standard format, I doubt people would pat their pockets as they leave the house and say to themselves "wallet, keys, phone, ogg player" mp3 player may well be the 'brand name' that gets used for all products like it. Though in saying that, Apple have done quite well and some people call any old player an iPod.


Despite all this, I still buy most of my music on CD. I feel cheated to spend £8 to download an album, when I could go out (or go on amazon), get the CD for pretty much the same price, rip it to mp3 and have both!