Apple iTunes LP format gets dissected, explained
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted September 14th 2009 10:08PM
posted September 14th 2009 10:08PM
Did you hear the news? Apple "resurrected" the LP! It turns out that a complete reversal of millions of music lover's listening habits has been accomplished by throwing some images, videos, interviews, and DRM-free 256Kbps AAC audiofiles into a WebKit package playable in iTunes. OK, so maybe we are a little jaded -- our busy 21st century lives generally don't afford us the time to stare glassy-eyed at our computer screen (any more than we have the time to stare glassy-eyed at 12-inch album covers while sitting on the floor of our incense-soaked Haight-Ashbury crash pads). But if you're morbidly curious about the inner workings of the new iTunes LP format, an experience accomplished via HTML 4.01, CSS and JS, hit the read link for the down-and-dirty tear down from web developer Jay Robinson. And who knows? You just might learn something.
[Via Daring Fireball]
[Via Daring Fireball]
@Blind Boy Grunt
Check out roberto amorim's public listening tests. It's been a few years, but his tests pit the best LAME MP3 encoder versus AAC versus WMA and some others.
Here is the presentation :
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/presentation.html
Here are the results :
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html
The executive summary is as follows :
"There's a big tie at first place, with MPC only a little above AAC, WMA and Vorbis.
Lame is at second place and Blade is far behind at third."
LAME performs well, but is outclassed by the modern AAC, WMA, Vorbis, and MPC codecs.
Cameron : You're absolutely right that storage on a flash device like a music player or a cell phone or an SD card even isn't as cheap as on a spinning platter hard disk.
The larger size of lossless music files also presents another serious challenge on mobile devices as well : power consumption.
Larger files means more time the device needs to spend reading the uncompressed file from the storage device and into RAM. Almost unintuitively, a compressed file that can be completely buffered into RAM and then decompressed using the CPU takes up fewer system resources. This is because the bottleneck in the system is typically slower storage, not the faster memory and CPU.
On a Desktop PC or a notebook computer, the efficiency advantage is negligible because of how much power the PC consumes swamps any gain... but on a mobile phone or a music player, where the entire device might only consume 30 to 40mA while playing back audio, extra NAND usage to read back a much larger uncompressed file might make a huge difference.
@LaughingMan: Actually if you look in the context of the whole power budget. the duty cycle increase for the additional read time is negligible (concurrent DMA scheduling) when compared to the efficiency of the decoder implementation on the DSPs or ARM processors. MP3 has been around for a while and Apple's tuned the heck out of their AAC decoders ... I don't know if they've tuned their lossless to the same extent so I would expect more power "loss" in the decoding. I haven't seen the Apple implementation (how could I!?) nor have I measured the current consumption waveform in different situations - but I've implemented low level DSP decoders for mobile platforms - the largest source of power drain on new codecs has always been inefficient early implementations ...
question: can we copy the iTunes LP files (html etc) and embed them into our existing albums?
You mean to make your own LPs? I haven't bought any to take a look at them, but unless there's some checksumming or DRM wrapping involved, I don't see why you couldn't replace music and resources, alter the HTML accordingly, and have yourself an LP. The special content wouldn't be there unless you could scrounge it up from other sources, though.
Has anyone tried this yet?
Hooray for people getting duped into another proprietary format!
Agreed. After you spend hundreds of dollars on "albums" in this format, what are you going to do in ten or fifteen years when everything has changed?
I'm betting MP3's and even AAC's will still be playable OR it will be easy at some point to automate the conversion to some new format that is taking the world by storm.
Do you really think the same will be true of this "LP" format? It seems likely you need to be prepared for all the extras to fall by the wayside along the way...
It's a zip file with HTML and javascript files inside it. How is that proprietary?
How is the format proprietary? Have you guys read the article? The LPs use HTML4.0.1, CSS, and Javascript. These are all core web technologies that won't be going away in 10 years even if iTunes goes away.
The author of the article even went as far as to launch the index in Safari, and almost everything just worked. There's no DRM on the web portion, so theoretically, you could "play" this LP using a modern standards compliant browser like Firefox, Chrome or Safari.
Don't people still play vinyl's on a turntable? Or is there some kind of vinyl playing CD player that I don't know about.
I was under the impression that these were more "unnecessary features" that Apple said their customers didn't want. Kinda like a microphone, FM radio.......hmm.
I'm gonna hear all about this "revolutionary" feature in the coming weeks, and I'll point everyone straight to the Zune software...which has been doing this very thing (for free) for quite some time.
Another step towards making the music sound like ass; to cover up the failure that are the Apple headphones.
While I'm sure the idiots who insist on paying the Apple tax for everything will lap this crap up I think I have better things to do with my money than to burn it just so I can pay Apple to read biographies that are easily available free in a bazillion other places. And yeah I'm sure what I really wanted was to download an extra 500 megabytes of crap with all my albums for more money.
If this was free? That would be cool. Extra money so Apple can pump up their revenue numbers? Yeah not happening.
And it's not like I haven't bought several iPods before, but this nonstop greed-fest has to stop-we get it you want more $$$ whether it's iPhones and $80/month plans (and dumbing down the Touch to keep it that way). I never realized that Think Different meant thinking about more ways to dick people for huge quantities of cash.
The last time I checked, all of these special albums are exactly that... special "deluxe" edition albums that have "plain jane" versions on the store too.
If you just want the songs and not the extra crap that comes with it, I'm pretty sure you can buy a cheaper version without videos or anything else.
It's simply an option. There were deluxe edition albums that came with extra b-side tracks, pdf booklets, and videos before... you also didn't have to buy them.
Moreover, how is this dicking people out of their cash? If you don't want the special albums, buy the regular album. If you don't want the full regular album because the artist only has one good song, buy the song you want individually.
One question. Where are the torrents for these albums...
so... [bit.ly] that apparently has a "sample" lp... but no music included... adding your own doesn't seem to make it work w/out heavy customization
http://bit.ly/4rMwXz
whoops, messed up in my last post
What the hell is an LP? Wasn't that for cassettes that could go on for longer times? I remember seeing a few of those as a kid. How can clubbing a few AAC files be equal to that unless ... puzzled. Now to google up LP ... sigh ...
Ok, so LP is some prehistoric vinyl disc. What is the damn connection between an LP and a digital download? I recall CDs having album art / booklets ... so what is so "LP-ish" about Apple's new frilly AAC-in-a-bundle??
Talk about an old (ancient!), useless wine in a shiny new bottle ... I mean options are good, but why make it out to be such a big deal ?! Unnecessary hype kills the signal-to-noise ratio on the good news ...
sigh. Kids.
LPs were not just the media itself; They were the presentation. You see, long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, prior to the existence of the Internet, there were vinyl records. These vinyl records came in a big art-covered cardboard "jacket" (a sleeve, basically) that often folded open to reveal even more artwork, along with lyrics, information about the band, and other things. Inside the cardboard jacket was a vinyl disk that was itself enclosed in a paper sleeve. This paper sleeve also frequently had artwork, credits, liner notes, and other information. They'd also sometimes come with booklets about the height of a comic book, but thinner and wider.
What made LPs awesome was that the artwork was often quite beautiful, or startling, or shocking, or funny. It was more than just a Photoshop compilation with slick fonts (There was no such thing as Photoshop)... It was often a painting by a real artist (the kind that use their hands and real paint, instead of a mouse and virtual paint), or a photograph by a real photographer (the kind that used film, and developed it themselves in a place called a "dark room"). The artwork was often brilliant, and a lot of these artists were famous or *became* famous due to this work.
Sadly, when the CD came into being, they had to shrink the packaging to take up less space in the stores. That meant that the artwork became a tiny, non-detailed reprinted image, and the stuff you'd find in the old LPs was now gone. Sometimes they'd condense the old stuff into a little booklet, but usually you didn't get anything but the CD and the cover insert.
Yes. Vinyl is old-fashioned... But the artwork that was once included with vinyl albums was often revolutionary, and it's a shame whole generations never got to experience buying a new record, opening the gatefold jacket, and seeing a beautiful painting or a cool new photograph of the artist, and then reading all the stuff on the sleeve while you play side one all the way through for the first time.
LPs weren't just about the music. They were a whole art experience; Music, graphic arts, prose, and poetry.
The best you kids get today is Kanye's liner notes that say "Imma thank my moms and pops. And Beyonce's video was the best ever."
I for one am absolutely offended that they have decided to call any online product an LP. If you product is so wonderful, why not call it waht it is? Why do you have to pretend it's something it isn't? Why besmirch the good name of the LP? With 90% of your company being in the marketing department, you couldn't think something up? Pretty lame.