It's a good year to be a pirate

Ultenizer Has Changed Thinking To NON Memory Mode, So No Infringement Can Occur. I am NOT Even Sure What ICES Stands For. In Fact: j U }|`} ? /} < ^^*. Thats Code for Entire SlumDogs New Movie from BHollywood Plus ICES. STeWie Drashek

Like "pay downloading"; I hear Polorid isn't doing too well either, pehaps, ISP's should be telling people not to purchase Digital Camera's either.

Markets change, why don't they focus on live performances, or move on with the Format. It's pretty sad that in 2009 Audio is still sampled at 44.1khz in 2 channels. The format is stale.

While I can see the use of multiple channels, 44.1 kHz sampling is based on a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, well suited for human hearing which is rarely sensitive to frequencies above 20 kHz (even in children). Few adult males can hear frequencies over 15 kHz, even if some high-level musical instrument harmonics are still present (http://www.its.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm).

Now, if you're recording music for your cat, that's another matter.

The "industry" di not lose anything. People was not going to buy in the first place, so they did not lose one of those supposedly "lost bucks".
I'm tired of these (the "recording industry" and their protecting Mafiaa) saying that "they lost money" when they did not have it in the first place!, and second nobody stole a thing from them. It is an _infringement_ on a right to copy, they can copy the others no. Nothing more.
They should care more about their "artists" making something people want to buy instead of today's junk.

... you forecast that you will earn XYZ $ in the next year and when you do not hit your imaginary target, you say you lost ZXY ammount... ... which you never had in the first place...

The funny thing is that this is the accepted way of doing business and nobody finds it strange.

That's all that's needed. Offer customers a £2/month deal with their ISP that includes up to 10 music tracks, 2 albums or 3 movies per month.
If my ISP had an offer like that I would take it up. It's only £24 a year, 50 pence a week, the cost is the same as a bag of crisps each week.

Also, need a simple to use GUI. Steam should get in on this asap, Steam should get in touch with Tesco or vice versa.

More media cartel propaganda with numbers pulled out of the air. If you don't buy music because (a) it's crap they put out now, or (b) you want to eat or pay the mortgage instead, then the fat cats say "must be piracy" and ask for laws to give them more money.

They never look in the mirror and ask what they did to run their own industry into the ground.

"IFPI estimates that the piracy rate of downloads last year was around 95 percent with over 40 billion files illegally shared in 2008." yeh yeh yeh, i download sounds that i wouldnt dream of buying lol and i suspect that the vast majority of P2Pers are the same, FFS they wanna get a grip on reality, downloaded sounds are crap in the extreme, i wouldnt pay for it if it was 2 pence a pop never mind about the silly prices they charge and all the DRM $hite that comes with it, most of its outa copyright anyhoooooos, they wanna stop worrying about their IMAGINERY 'lost' money and start giving the punters VALUE for money, furkin money grabbing barstewards !!!!!! grrrrrrrrrrr O_o

This is just deserts for all the years the record companies stole money from consumers for high price low quality analogue products.

£13 for an Album in 1983 on vinyl.

When I hear stories like this it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside...

Mininova anyone??

But Little Boots threatened to walk all over me!!

The amt of internet usage ur using is being watched by the ISP's and in my case they are considering increasing the cost based on how many meg's ur downloading ea month. When that occurs I will just go back to dialup and let it run day in and day out to get the file i am after, like yrs past. It is my guess that most of the file sharers are tightwads that go to garage sales, estate sales, flea markets and such to find what they want and would go there if shut down by the ISP. I know I do. Cheap and free. Buy one and get three.

Ale is absolutely right. Pirates weren't going to buy in the first place, so it's meaningless to say that the industry "lost" money due to piracy.

Nyquist criteria only defines the minimum sampling to avoid aliasing, i.e., having even higher frequencies "fold-back" into the audio spectrum. And by ignoring higher frequency content it ends up distorting the audio high frequencies as the D/A process can only infer what becomes a square wave at 22.05kHz. But then you slap an analog low-pass filter on there to remove the false higher frequencies due to the square wave representation, and now you've got phase shift, which certainly does affect the listenability. For ref, look up published information by Bob Carver, which addresses phase shift phenomena and the effect on audio reprodution.

But then, most digital recorders use oversampling as a means to reduce the noise floor, so for professional recordings you aren't sampling at 44.1ksps anyways.

While I don't claim to be an export on the processes involved in the creation of a stereo audio track for distribution on the CD medium, which I would like to note as being higher quality then MP3 as it is un-compressed; the Record Makers themselves have "Master" tracks including multi-track audio streams, and much higher resolution information. The idea of distributing this to the masses in an affordable manner was nearly impossible due to technology contraints. Now days there is no reason you shouldn't be receiving this level of quality for your money. If your favorite song was offered to you with independant channels for each instrument all with amazing resolution and detail, who would want the MP3? Granted one could argue you would just pirate the new content, but I feel people would be more willing to pay for it. CD's are from the 70's

Rich, you have some good points. In a non-audio (but audio frequency...) signal acquisition, I oversample 8x-16x, then low-pass filter and downsample to suppress unwanted artifacts and to decrease effective amplifier noise levels (using multichannel 24-bit ADCs). Phase shift is not a issue with my own applications, and I'm not familiar with what its effects on audio listenability might be. I understand professional audio is normally mastered at 96 kHz, then downsampled.

It makes little difference to someone listening to an MP3 of Britney's latest gem (not even worth pirating, to get back on track), but maybe an audiophile, with good equipment and better ears, could pick up the difference. However my understanding is that a lot of the flatness of recorded music comes from deliberate post-processing decisions made in the studio that are unrelated to the sample rate.

While is true that 44.1KHz is enough for most audio applications, the main problem AFAIK is that since 1993 and above, the recording studios have been using dynamic range compression to fit as much as audio data can fit in that range, and that's far from ideal. That's why when you hear a song, as an example, an old song like Linkin Park - Easier to Run, when it starts, you can hear cleary lots of acoustics, percussion and the letter "s" pronunciation when he's singing, but when the song ramps up with more instruments, some sound is overlapped and you can barely listen the "s" pronunciation and the plates from the drum (Whatever it's called) DVD Audio sounds so wonderful, you can listen every instrument from the beginning to the end and none would overtake the other one, a pity that the DVD Audio format never took off. If I said something wrong, please correct me, I'm not an audio maniatic yet :)

I love hearing numbers like this as they are MASSIVELY inflated. Let us start ripping this apart. Goto LimeWire and do a search for a popular song. You will find hundreds of downloads... Well download a few. about 75% are ads or garbage. Now look at the others... they are poor quality, incomplete, or miss labelled. It is not uncommon to download a song 10 times to get one good copy... maybe even more for popular songs. Now take into account how many people that own legal copies of a song that had dowloaded it first to see if they like it. Likely not as much, but still it happens. What about people that own an old copy of a song on say tape, but download a digital copy... is that illegal? Probably not.I might go as high as 75% are illegally downloaded, but even that is likely high. I would worry about people selling illegal copies of CDs, DVDs, and programs (mostly in China) as theey are proffiting from this illegal activity.

There is no firm relationship, and certainly not one to one between downloads and lost sales. As many above have pointed out, there are a boatload of reasons the download does not even equal a copy of the song, let alone a lost sale. And there is NO evidence to show that those who do get an illegal download would have bought the track if it was not avialiable illegally. Most probably would not.

Forget the huge and inflated estimates, and get on with counting the huge profit from those you have sold. Quit beating up your customers, and develop a market friendly attitude. You cannot sue your way to success, as hundreds of fools before you have proven. Anyone heard of Lotus lately?

Rich Wargo:

Nyquist criteria only defines the
minimum sampling to avoid aliasing,
i.e., having even higher frequencies
"fold-back" into the audio spectrum.
And by ignoring higher frequency
content it ends up distorting the
audio high frequencies as the D/A
process can only infer what becomes a
square wave at 22.05kHz.

Which doesn't matter. The difference in the waveforms is purely due to the higher harmonics, which you can't hear anyway.

But then you slap an analog low-pass
filter on there to remove the false
higher frequencies due to the square
wave representation, and now you've
got phase shift, which certainly does
affect the listenability.

Only if the filter is very sharp. But by applying oversampling, you can use a very gentle roll-off filter, starting from a higher frequency, so the phase shift becomes insignificant. That's one of the reasons why oversampling is such a clever trick.

If you want to clear away the snake-oil and get some real info about all this, go read John Watkinson's "The Art of Digital Audio". Very well-written reference.

Commenters who tell musicians 'they should play live' should first tell us how they themselves make an income, so we can tell THEM how they should act.

You patronising hypocrites.

If your job became a free download, you'd squeal.

Hey Tom you want to get paid for your job? make me want to buy your product, otherwise just go play live my friend(if you want to remain on business), if not just go get another job.

It always makes me smile to see the men from the RIAA jumping up and down and waxing on about the billions of dollars they have lost to the scourge of piracy this year.

This is rubbish.

The truth, which is not pleasant for the record companies and their cronies, is that they have LOST nothing. They have simply FAILED TO GAIN that revenue. I personally purchase DVD's and CD's all the time, but have only a limited amount of money per month to spend on such luxuries. If I were to then illegally download 10 albums on top of what I have purchased, it would make no difference at all - I would not have been able to buy them anyway.

OK so there is an opposing argument that by downloading album 'X' this month I no longer need to buy it next month. Fair point. It is also true however that I will look for OTHER recordings to buy next month instead. Also, if I really like a downloaded album, I will probably seek out the CD anyway.

'Ah'! I hear you cry, 'suppose that a person is happy to listen to music at mp3 quality and own no CD's at all, then doesn't this argument fall down'? Not really. This type of music lover has been taping the top 40 off of the radio since the 1970's. He's just updated his tape deck to an ipod, that's all. OK so it's easier for him to pirate MORE music, but since this guy would have spent little or nothing on music anyway, it's not really an issue.

The music industry benefits from piracy of course - it's viral marketing unlike any they have had before. Just ask Microsoft about pirated software and market share. The problem is they want their cake and eat it, just like the good capitalists they are. We dont mind that, it's the way of things. I just wish they would stop PRETENDING that music piracy costs them the Earth when in actual fact it does nothing of the sort.

DVD Audio and SACD do sound better than CD quality. Pity they did not succeed. Won't we soon be able to buy Blue-Ray audio disks containing Dolby True-HD and/or DTS-HD? (if they don't exist already).

As others have pointed out people download many more songs when they are free than they would do if they were not free. Hence there is not a 1 to 1 correspondence between song downloaded and lost sale. Free down loads also help bands by making them more well known and creating a larger potential audience at live performances.
Any way one of my pet peeves is that I live in Australia and sometimes get YouTube videos (or yahoo music vids - back in the day - who uses that now) that deny me permission to watch a video based on where I live - it takes me 2 secs to find another unbanned version on YouTube and just pisses me off and stops me later buying the track. The other thing that pisses me off is that I go to Aus iTunes site to buy a music video which I've seen that I like and I can't buy it because it's not available on iTunes in Aus (what they couldn't negotiate the right price or something?). So I am forced to download the video peer to peer instead (and usually get much higher definition than is available on iTunes in the process). The music industry has to realise that in this day and age of the internet the only people who pay money for your music are those who choose to do so despite it being free elsewhere. This will always be the case you can't win the battle against those who want to down load free (the pirates or rather their enabler geeks will always be one step ahead). Thus the music industry needs to get with the program and assist us who out of the goodness of our hearts (or why ever we do it) choose to buy legal versions of the stuff we've pirated (I always check out a free copy before I buy).

If you care about quality that much, wait until you can download UHDTV audio at 22.2 channels at 96kHz (crazy Japanese working on that, really).
95% of downloaders put their music in an MP3 player, so who cares about a little distortion at extreme freq ranges?

Piracy is real, but it has not affected the music industry like it has others. If we were using other means to share information, like the record labels bandwidth/server and some how drained a resource i would understand. I remember a while back there was a company that released a small mail server for windows, the crack came out right away. And it was a very easy to use server, nothing to configure. The problem came from the fact that it was a small company, and that the bandwidth broke it. People were buying the software, but the flood of people getting it because the crack was available killed them. The point is, that if that company would have made the software now. Then there would be no need to drain its resources, we use our own bandwidth that's to technology like torrents. Heck, when i had a 16/2 fios connection steam would serve me at 200k max. But torrents were only limited by the popularity of content and seeders. So how do you think i am going to re d/l my copy of hl2 because my cd is scratched? Maybe thats what they mean by lost revenue, now i dont have to rebuy the product i already own. imaginbe going to a retail shop and paying twice for a pair of pants.

Its about time the greedy !"£$%^&*#@ at the RIAA and equivalent's read comment threads like these and started listening for once.

Imagine Simon Cowell. Im sure you'll agree that he's a typical example of a greedy selfish arogant rich industry exec. Its because of shows like X-factor, that the quality of todays music is SO bland/crap/poor/etc...(think Leona Lewis).

Then there's UK alternative scene with new talented unsigned bands emerging (BBC Introducing...).