Walter Knapp wrote:
> iPod Audio formats supported
> AAC (up to 320 Kbps), MP3 (up to 320 Kbps),
> MP3 Variable Bit Rate (VBR), WAV, AIFF(Mac only), Audible
Oops! So Mac users can play AIFF files on their iPods. That'll teach
me to scroll down and read the whole page before forming a
conclusion.
It will be interesting to see if the AAC format, which is part of the
MPEG4 specification and is incorporated into Quicktime, can make
progress against the overwhelming popularity of MPEG1 level 3 (MP3)
format. AAC encoding produces similar sound quality to MP3, but from
a file that's as much as 25% smaller. Since it's often a challenge
to squeeze a movie onto a single DVD disc, AAC's smaller file size is
an important advantage.
Apple reports more than a million downloads of the new iTunes for
Windows in the four days since the software was made available.
That's a lot of new customers. Apple reports selling 14 million songs
since the start of their 99-cent-per-download service. Reportedly
almost all of this money goes to the record companies, but it
establishes Apple as the most successful of the music download
sites.
Regarding the reverse byte order of WAV versus AIFF, the root of this
difference is that the Motorola processors in Macintosh computers put
the most significant bytes in the lower memory locations (so-called
big-endian byte order), while Intel processors in PCs are little-
endian. This is of no practical consequence since all CD writing
programs make the appropriate adjustments without any user
intervention other than to specify you want an "audio CD."
--oryoki
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