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is in progress. MacCentral is offering a live report of what’s happening. Afterwards this same link should still work to give you a summary of the event.
Steve’s talking about a new encoding format, AAC:
Jobs also introduced iTunes 4, which supports AAC encoding alongside MP3 because “it sounds a lot better.” Jobs said it was the “state of the art” audio codec.
Every song is “pristinely encoded” and some sound “better than CDs.”
I believe AAC may sound better than MP3, but I doubt it sounds better than the uncompressed file from the CD.
The Apple music service will offer one-click downloads. You can use iTunes to “browse” the entire music store by genre, artist and album. Apple is offering music tracks not available anywhere else, including Bob Dylan, U2, and others.
.....There are free 30-second previews with every song on the service.
.....Apple has made deals with the big five music labels and we have over 200,000 songs available.
Now this is exciting. Up until now if I want to hear new songs I have to go to Tower or Barnes and Noble and hope there’s a headset free. Now we’re going to be able to do this any time we want, and download tracks on the spot.
#1
"Every song is pristinely encoded and some sound better than CDs. -- I believe AAC may sound better than MP3, but I doubt it sounds better than the uncompressed file from the CD."
Note the "pristine" and the "some." Jobs is not lying. You're assuming that the AAC is generated from CD-quality data. In that case, obviously, you're right. But if you take a 96KHz, 32 bit studio master file and generate both CD data and AAC from them, then AAC *can* in some cases be better (i.e., better match the original experience). AAC supports (up to) 96KHz samples, while CD forcibly downsamples to 44.1KHz. For data that has sharp transients (say, percussion) the AAC may do better at matching the original sound. It's still true that *most* tracks will sound worse in AAC/128 than CD, if only because most were probably generated from CD data.
Cheers
-- perry