Neil Young Trumpets High-Quality Digital Music, With Steve Jobs’ Blessing
Mike Isaac at Wired - Neil Young is upset at the low-quality of modern downloadable digital music. Apparently, Steve Jobs was, too. While building his iTunes empire, Mr. Jobs listened to vinyl records at home. Apparently, he was planning to add CD-quality or better to the iTunes catalog, at a premium. I hope Apple does that. I no longer buy anything but the odd single there. I get all my new tunes on CD from Amazon or as high-res downloads (up to 96KHz/24-bit) from HDTracks.com. And I usually listen to whole albums, not playlists of individual songs. If Apple were to start selling CD-quality or better from iTunes, I'd go back to buying from them. Bravo, Neil Young!
There could be hope yet. Before Jobs passed, Young was working with Apple to do so. Young said he had spoken with Jobs about high quality music, and working on a way to get it out to the masses. Young says he and Jobs were working on new hardware capable of storing the high-quality audio. Unfortunately, now that Jobs has passed, not much has happened, Young said.
Despite Apple’s success and the tumult of the recording industry at large, Young believes that not everything has changed. In particular, Young thinks there is no reason why we should lose the rich, full experience of listening to whole albums just because digital downloads offer other ways of purchasing music. That connection between an artist, an audience and that sound is no accident of a particular kind of media.
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