Nice surprise from Amazon Prime!

[JonRB]

GetCarter said:

Though I understand that people don't have either the money or the inclination to get this sort of quality. I just wish Mr MP3 had not decided to squash the fk out of music when he invented the software.

It's a variable lossy compression format, just like JPEG. And, just like JPEG, you can choose the level of compression. Of course you will get compression artifacts ("janglies") with the very highest levels of compression.

Also, not everyone has the same audio perception, and MP3 is "good enough" for their Use Case and their ears. One size does not fit all.

I appreciate that you have very good ears and like/need very high quality, but not everyone does. For them the convenience and small file size of MP3 is quite an acceptable trade-off.

For myself, I find that MP3s with a bitrate of 320 kbit/s are quite acceptable for listening to on personal media devices, in the car, and at my desk at work with headphones, or at my desk at home on 2.1 speakers. And by having the original CDs as backup, I can make lossless FLAC rips of them if I so wish or else listen to the CD itself. To be completely honest, though, I rarely bother.

Edited by JonRB on Wednesday 5th August 17:56

[GetCarter]

JonRB said:

GetCarter said:

Though I understand that people don't have either the money or the inclination to get this sort of quality. I just wish Mr MP3 had not decided to squash the fk out of music when he invented the software.

It's a variable lossy compression format, just like JPEG. And just like JPEG, you can choose the level of compression.

Also, not everyone has the same audio perception, and MP3 is "good enough" for their Use Case and their ears. One size does not fit all.

I appreciate that you have very good ears and like/need very high quality, but not everyone does. For them the convenience of MP3 is quite an acceptable trade-off.

For myself, I find that MP3s with a bitrate of 320 kbit/s are quite acceptable for listening to on personal media devices, in the car, and at my desk at work with headphones, or at my desk at home on 2.1 speakers. And by having the original CDs as backup, I can make lossless FLAC rips of them if I so wish or else listen to the CD itself. To be completely honest, though, I rarely bother.

I understand what you are saying. I have to use MP3's to post on my webisite in various levels of squash. However, in almost all technology, quality gets better and better and better. For the past 25 years, the quality of music reproduction has gotten worse. 'Tis a real shame.

[JonRB]

GetCarter said:

For the past 25 years, the quality of music reproduction has gotten worse. 'Tis a real shame.

I'd say that the quality of music production has gotten worse, not reproduction. A lot of modern music is companded, flattened, normalised, brightened, and generally dicked around with in the journey from music studio to radio station or other distribution. There are even people who specialise in taking the finely-crafted music that the producer in the studio created and 'making it suitable' (ie. completely fking it around) for distribution. I'm sure I read an article on it semi-rececently.

Anyway, I apologise - I know you're in the industry so I am probably telling you about sucking eggs here.

My point is that you can't really blame the MP3 algorithms for all this.

[audi321]

Kermit power said:

Does anyone happen to know if there's a family option for Prime Music?

I think up to 10 devices under the one account.

[sgrimshaw]

audi321 said:

Kermit power said:

Does anyone happen to know if there's a family option for Prime Music?

I think up to 10 devices under the one account.

Not quite the same though, the devices will all be using the same Amazon account.