Well, not quite yet, though the producer tools did just receive an update for it. FairPlay support still needs to be added, and it'd wreak havoc on bandwidth, and might add tiered downloading (which content providers are fighting Jobs vehemently for--Jobs refuses to give in though), so it's still up in the air.

Link

no such thing as lossless AAC... it's called Apple Lossless (or ALAC)

Heh, the article mentions people upgrading to bigger iPods for it. Funny, since the audio quality you're gonna be getting out of an iPod makes using lossless kinda pointless. Not to mention lossless music is a battery eater since it requires much more frequent fetching from the hard drive.

Yeah, my battery is much more important than the extra bit of quality my ears can barely detect!

Yay for moving forward though.

Since you don't like to read articles, in the article it mentions that Lossless AAC was just added to the iTunes Producer studio.


Depends. If you make a bigger flash cache (flash is getting cheaper and cheaper) you have more songs you can queue up. No matter which way you look at it it's going to benefit your average consumer. Hell, it'd be nice to see some 16gb flash players for ~300. I'd totally buy one for that kind of cash.

Data still has to be added into the cache. A bigger cache just means you'll be loading more data at a time but less frequently, but you'll still be doing the same amount of disk access in the end. The only thing you're truly reducing is the number of spinups (while increasing the amount of seeking and reading needed to be done after each spinup). You're not going to eliminate the problem of disk access and battery usage until you eliminate the disk and move completely to flash. If it would've provided any real benefit, Apple would've already thrown more memory into one of their many upgrades to the iPod. They haven't though, the iPod still has the same 32 MB of memory it did in the first generation (save for the 60 gig, which does have 64 MB).

And there is no such thing as lossless AAC. The author of the article made an error. ALAC is Apple's lossless codec that they developed, and that's what they're using. People just confuse AAC and ALAC all the time, but they're completely different things.

If iTunes started selling lossless quality songs, I'd consider using it. But as it stands, I don't see the point in paying money for what is effectively an incomplete song.

While it wouldn't be best option for MP3 players, it'd be great for buying CDs online and burning them. I bet they'd want to charge more for lossless though. I'd rather have the CD case and cover, anyway.

Exactly, it's something I see them marketing towards the audio enthusiast who will basically listen to them on his desktop or burn CDs from them. Too many problems associated with trying to push it into the majority of the market.

I stood up and I said YEAH!

I agree. There are other services that offer lossless, but usually not for mainstream artists, and many of them are just encoded from lossy.

$1 per song is about how much I can buy a CD for, especially if I get it used on Amazon or from a similar service. As an audio enthusiast, there is no way I will pay that much for poorly encoded 128 Kbps music (it's nowhere near as good as 128 Kbps with LAME) when I can get the actual, physical CD for the same price. In some cases, less!