Letters from Microsoft: An Employee Tosses His Zune

RoughlyDrafted Magazine ^ | Tuesday, August 18, 2009 | Daniel Eran Dilger

[Star Traveler]

You said — Ironically, you can go on audiophile forums (or at least forums full of people who pose as audiophiles) and they’ll refer to the iPod’s sound quality as total junk.

—

Yeah, and I can understand that from “audiophiles”, too... LOL...

However, for “the rest of us” who can’t tell the difference between 256 AAC rips versus uncompressed CD-quality files — iPod/iTunes has the best quality.

Of course, those same “audiophiles” that you’re talking about are saying that CDs are not the best either.... :-)

[But, in my mind, it seems that “electronics” can respond faster to sound changes than a physical needle on vinyl, of which the needle has *some inertia*... I haven’t ever heard of electrons having inertia... so I’m wondering about those “audiophiles”... :-) ... ]

[Terpfen]

However, for “the rest of us” who can’t tell the difference between 256 AAC rips versus uncompressed CD-quality files — iPod/iTunes has the best quality.

The dirty not-quite-secret is that MP3 encoders have come astronomically far since the late 90s. A 128kbps MP3 is no longer junk, but rather a reasonably decent quality piece of audio. On sufficiently high-end equipment, one will detect a difference between a 128kbps MP3 and the original CD, but generally the differences are not large enough to justify calling 128kbps "crap."

That said, I encode the few discs I buy in Apple Lossless. It's there. I might as well.

Of course, those same “audiophiles” that you’re talking about are saying that CDs are not the best either.... :-)

To an extent, they have a point. DVD-Audio and SA-CD are higher quality than CD, which is nearing its 20th anniversary. There just isn't any market demand for DVD-A and SA-CD because CDs are generally good enough, and digital distribution is becoming more prominent.

Media format isn't really an issue these days. Right now the biggest problem regarding audio is the loudness war; people think that louder music inherently sounds better, so dynamic range has gone the way of the dodo in favor of jacking the volume up on the sound engineer's board.

[TXnMA]

Thank you for posting that Quicktime series -- all in one place, and easily readable!

I've done a bit of development on the Mac (some of it ported from the Apple //GS -- and some of that ported from the Apple //). However, that work (animated 3-D spatial data analysis graphics for archaeology) completly ignored the audio side of Quicktime.

Long before there was an adequate PowerPoint, I wrote my own "presenter" (originally on the //GS)-- mainly so I could move data between multiple screen buffers for a huge variety of transitions (that, then, evolved into powerful video animation effects).

It is encouraging to know that there are far-superior graphics abilities "inside Macintosh" that I can access without the "brute force" low-level coding I developed 'way back when...

Although I'm nearly 72, I'm almost tempted to teach myself another programming language (or three) so that I can take beter advantage of the media goodies that Apple has put "under the hood" of OS X...

If I figured I had the need, time, energy and opportunity to make the most of them, I'd "have a go"... ;-)

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Thanks again for the QT piece(s). Those are some pretty clear reasons why the MS troops feel so inferior that they lash out personally...

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(FWIW, yeah, I'm one of those antique geezers who used to relish the challenge of writing functional programs in a single 80-character line of BASIC code -- with plenty of calls to Monitor Rom routines and to 6502 assembler code I'd written...) ;-)

[Kieri]

My husband has a Zune, I have an iPod Nano 4G.

I download songs from iTunes, put them in my custom playlists, sync the Nano with my XP computer and I’m off. My husband downloads to his Zune, fights with it, and crosses his fingers that updating it won’t screw up the time and calendar.

He puts a lot of junk and podcasts on his. Mine is just music from CDs I own, iTunes and a few anime tracks I’ve found. I guess it all depends on how you use it, but I sure do appreciate not having to fight with it.

[Star Traveler]

Glad to see you’re enjoying your iPod...

I have an iPhone, which has all the functionality of an iPod, plus being a phone, plus all the other applications on it, doing all sorts of things, plus being able to carry files around on it.

And, I’ve got music CDs on there, downloaded music from iTunes Music Store, the iPhone Apps from the iPhone App Store, and then videos that I’ve downloaded from the Internet, and videos from the iTunes Music Store, and Podcasts that I listen to, the e-mail functionality, the Safari Web Browser, the camera functionality, the iPhoto library of photos on the iPhone, my calendar on the computer, my address book/phone book on the computer/iPhone — and they all work just fine and seamlessly and I never have any trouble downloading/transferring them over to the iPhone.

So, no matter if one has a *whole lot of stuff* on the iPhone/iPod, it’s gonna work seamlessly and without trouble... you can be assured of that... :-)