From Sean Cooper Sent Wed, Oct 14th 1998, 20:00
From Sean Cooper Sent Wed, Oct 14th 1998, 20:00
> But is it just me, but does anyone else here find most RealAudio > unlistenable due to the crappy sound quality? > > IDM is all about the details and nuances of sound itself, not just about > a repetitive beat or interesting lyrics. While Alanis Morisette at > > Yes, I'm spoiled with the T1 at the office and an ISDN at home, but so > are many many other people. Thoughts? > > me too! C'mon, there's got to be a sizable amount pf people on this list > that have tech related jobs who have T1's at work...let's here it for hi > res realaudio! i look at realaudio as occupying a middle-ground between a written review/recommendation and the ability to listen to a record in a store before buying it. it's not as vague as the former and not as specific as the latter, but like those two, it's yet another method of ascertaining whether i might like a given recording or not -- in the language of marketing, it helps me make a "buying decision." things get a little more complex when you're talking about netcasting or dj sets; those are meant to be entertaining in their own right, and sound quality therefore plays a much more crucial role. urban sounds has kicked around the idea of offering DJ sets in multiple formats (realaudio and MP3, for instance), but one major point (discussed below) has kept us from doing that -- storage. the two key factors that complicate offering higher-quality versions of audio have nothing to do with the bandwidth access of users/listeners: server space/throughput and legality. andrew already spoke to the former, but let me throw my chips in as well -- three issues worth of urban sounds audio currently require more than 300MB of server space, which is very far above the threshold of what most ISPs will offer with a standard hosting account, and eats up about 2GB of throughput a week, which is translating into large beads of sweat on the brow of our ISP (they want $$$). if you're not a commercial site (and urban sounds is not), offering multiple versions of audio simply isn't financially possible. as for legality, most labels that you deal with have no issue with you offering realaudio of their recordings with reviews -- they rightly see it as fair use. it's when you start getting up into higher quality compression that problems start arising. for instance, when contacting labels about the possibility of including entire tracks from forthcoming releases in the urban sounds "audioCode" feature, the only question asked (and it was a question asked by most of the labels) was, "it won't be offered at cd-quality, will it?" this has been made obvious time and time again on this list as people have posted MP3 versions of tracks and even albums and been asked to cease and desist. the current standard for offering audio as far as labels are concerned is that it *must* be lossy, and the lossier the better. that may change in the future as the policing of intellectual properties on the web becomes more sophisticated, but those battles have yet to be fought... sc