Neil Young, Steve Jobs, and the quality of digital music

Ok, it's been a while since I've written something on this blog. So let's start again with a fragment of news about Apple and the quality of music on iTunes.

No one else than Neil Young apparently spoke with Steve Jobs and, well, other folks at Apple, about this. Unfortunately there isn't any encouraging news. Steve Jobs might have been interested in improving the quality of music on iTunes, but Apple, as a company, doesn't show any interest about this.

Oh well, we keep out finger crossed anyhow...

Source

Yeasayer - Live at Ancienne Belgique

There's a good critic of the new Yeasayer release on Pitchfork today. The live album is available for download on their website for a "name your price" amount. You can get it for free or you can pay either 0.99$, 2.99$, 4.99$, 7.99$ or 9.99$. You decide. Available in FLAC or Apple Lossless.

Manage An All-Lossless Music Library With iTunes

There's a good article on Gizmodo on how to manage a lossless iTunes library. I learned something new: if you have a Mac, like I do, you can use Fluke to play FLACs directly in iTunes. Currently I convert all the FLACs to the Apple lossless format with XLD. More on this later, I'll give Fluke a try. I'm curious to know if it works with Airtunes.

Update: Fluke crashed the first time I tried to import a FLAC album. Not looking good.

B&W Music Club

This is one of the good reason to start this blog. B&W, the speaker company, has team with Peter Gabriel to create the B&W Music Club. The idea is great: you sign up for 12 months. It costs 60$ USD. Each month you can download a new album. That sums up to 5$ per album, a very good price. There's one downside: you can't choose. There's one album per month and that's the one you download.

You can also sign up for a free trial where you will be able to download a EP, a small selection of the songs available on the entire album. The trial is offered for 3 months.

Obviously Peter Gabriel's involvement caught my attention. He chooses the albums from his RealWorld catalog. This month it's Spiro "Live in Box". Based only on this album only, so I might be wrong, but it would appear that the B&W offers unreleased or digital only releases because I can't find it on Amazon. Since the point is to discover music, it doesn't really matter.

Download

You can download the album in three formats: Apple lossless, FLAC and FLAC 24bit [Apple doesn't support 24bit in its lossless format]. Pick the format you prefer, or download them all.

And 24bit FLACs, this is very interesting, specially for the anonymous audiophiles! It's also nice because suddenly your sound source is better than the CD. I had to do some research on how to take advantage of the 24bit FLACs and I will write on the subject in a subsequent post.

Personally I downloaded the Apple lossless for my iTunes library and iPhone. I also downloaded the 24bit FLAC for the simple fact that it's better and I have the required audio equipment to listen to 24bit music. Does it sounds any different? Probably not but that's not the point ;)

Click here to go to the B&W music club.

The picture used in this post comes from the link above.