Apple reportedly looking to offer 24-bit downloads via iTunes store

[Tom Moreno]

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit.music/index.html

This is potentially the gates of nirvana to those of us who don't download music because of the inferior sound quality. If the entire iTunes catalogue was available at hi-res then they would certainly start getting a large chunk out of of my spending money!

 

[staggerlee]

it'll probably be £1.99 a track, on the basis that only a small minority want 24 bit -and they will pay. Most people are content with the normal compressed rubbish.

 

[Anonymous]

i really hope ths happens i for one would buy the hi res downloads from them
bring it on.

 

[DavieCee]

Having read the article, it sounds promising.

Fingers crossed for a huge selection without a huge mark up. I doubt it but you never know.

 

[Gerrardasnails]

Tom Moreno:http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit.music/index.html

This is potentially the gates of nirvana to those of us who don't download music because of the inferior sound quality. If the entire iTunes catalogue was available at hi-res then they would certainly start getting a large chunk out of of my spending money!

They can't make hi-res files out of normal ones. At the moment they don't offer lossless files at 16bit. I would not get too excited. This will probably be a few classical albums only.

 

[Overdose]

Improvements are always welcome, but the increased prices will not be.

If music is mastered in 24 bit, I see no other reason to pay more, than to cover the increased cost of bandwidth and storage required to offer such a service.

The highly compressed 128 or even 192 kbps files are from the very same 24 bit source surely? So why the large price hike?

Nothing extra has been produced, so it seems a bit of a swindle to me.

 

[chunky70]

This is a very interesting article! http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit.music/index.html?iref=NS1

 

[Andrew Everard]

Indeed: merged into ongoing thread

 

[John Duncan]

the_lhc:Overdose:
Well that would depend on the bandwidth component cost as a percentage of the overall download cost now wouldn't it?

Which as it happens is quite small, so a ten fold increase would not bring the cost up to what some people have suggested.

It's not just bandwidth, the storage requirements will increase as well and that isn't free.

The bandwidth cost is not to be overlooked. But before somebody tells me that you can buy a 250gig hard drive for 30 quid, the cost of high availability, high resilience storage is somewhat higher - I have to pay £90 per year, per gig for my file storage allocation for my department...