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Music Store Offers Hi-Def Downloads

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

September 29, 2005, 1:35 PM

Hoping to cash in among audiophiles and those who want better quality in their music downloads, Nevada-based MusicGiants launched its digital music service on Wednesday. The music store will offer its tracks in Windows Media Lossless format, the first service to do so.

MusicGiants says these tracks would have up to seven times the quality of those available from competing services like iTunes and Napster, which offer songs at a bitrate of 128 kbps. In comparison, songs on MusicGiants will range from 470 kbps to as much as 1100 kpbs, producing a much more accurate reproduction of the music.

"The MusicGiants Network will give music lovers a reason to fall in love with their music all over again," MusicGiants CEO Scott Bahneman says.

So far, the service has been able to procure agreements from EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. All tracks will carry Windows Media digital rights management. The company also says it is actively pursuing agreements with smaller and independent labels to further extend its catalog.

The MusicGiant client that customers will need to access the service runs on Windows XP, and users must first open an account and pay a $50 USD annual fee. The service is only open to United States customers at the current time.

Each track costs $1.29 USD to download. As an incentive to register, MusicGiants will give each new account $50 in music download credits, or the equivalent of 38 tracks - meaning the first year of service would essentially be free.

Since digital music costs very little to reproduce, services like MusicGiants could open a path for music labels to squeeze more revenue out of digital downloads. Labels have expressed a interest in breaking out of the 99-cent revenue model in recent months.

MusicGiants' Bahneman also announced the company will sell a "professional-grade" digital music player running on Windows XP and preloaded with the MusicGiants software. The device would be sold at high-end electronics retailers as well as online.

Such a device only makes sense according to Bahneman. "We sell premium music for high performance audio systems," he said.

Microsoft appears to have thrown its full support behind the service. "When it comes to listening to music, quality is everything," said Dave Fester, general manager of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft. "MusicGiants Network is taking a giant leap forward to now give consumers the best digital music listening experience possible."

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By blacklightknights

edited Jan 30, 2006 - 8:48 PM

As an audiophile and tech addict with 4 computers and thousands in audio gear I am dying for someone to start providing music that takes true advantage of todays 24/96 hardware. The music has definately not kept up with the quality of the hardware. It amazes me how much the music industry crys about technology costing them sales yet do nothing about taping into the millions of us that would pay for state of the art sound. 44khz 16bit sound is what they try shoveing down our throats, and we are so way past that. We are in the 21st century and some consumers have a brain and understand the technology they spend so much money on. I think of an analogy...its like putting out your best china then serving fast food burgers on it. Get with it people.

Score: 0

By midfingr

posted Oct 2, 2005 - 10:32 PM

Has anyone ever checked this site? - allofmp3.com
I've been using it for months. They offer online encoding in different formats... MP3, OGG, WMA, AAC and MPC. Up to 320Kbps - I think. The prices are way less than others I've tried. For example a 16 track download at 192kbps is $1.81 in any format (mentioned above) you want.
- Just thought I would mention this as I see a lot of discussions about online music stores here at BN.

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Oct 2, 2005 - 10:40 PM

THere's a comment about this site from Nate at the bottom of the page. Basically, you're buying stolen goods on that site. You might as well download it on P2P and save your money =((

Score: 0

By blackimp

posted Oct 2, 2005 - 1:15 PM

wincemeat is God!

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Oct 2, 2005 - 10:41 PM

Really? Sweet!

Just a question though: you're not the first person to spell my name (wrongly) like that. Is there something in my username that makes the 'n' look like an 'a'?

Score: 0

By jaker00

edited Oct 1, 2005 - 2:12 PM

There may be better quality than 16bit 44khz CD's but there's certainly not much of it readily available. The CD, despite the age old argument that it's not HiFi, has indeed become the standard and most folks are very happy with the quality. I am glad to see such a service as MG and I've long been willing to pay more for higher quality downloads than the current industry standard lossy formats. I think the price is a bargin but they're gonna have to make *ALL* their content available on a per-song purchasing model and nix the $50 annual fee.. The appeal of online music stores is the ability to buy only the songs you want. I have no desire to pay $15 to download a whole CD when I can buy one in the store for the same or less. And I don't like being forced to buy the whole CD when all I want is one or two songs. I think they'll be successful and I welcome their efforts but the business model needs some adjustments in order to capture any significant share of the download market and my hard earned dollars.

Score: 0

By roj

edited Oct 1, 2005 - 1:50 PM

$1.00 a song for lossless and 50 cents for lossy.

APE and / or FLAC but no WMA or ALAC DRM filth.

No extortion, er, membership fees.

If no to any of the above, then sod off - not interested.

Score: 0

By csamaha

edited Sep 30, 2005 - 12:02 AM

It appears to me that they are not even trying to be competitive with their prices, but rather counting solely on the fact that they use lossless compression and think that will be an incentive for people to use their service. Well let me tell you, I am quite an audiophile, but I'm not that crazy. If they offered some kind of subscription service and charged an annual fee of $50 for unlimited downloading, that would be one thing. But to pay $50 right up front just to have access to their catalog and not even counting the price of each track which is also absurd, ($0.30 more than most of the competition,) come on! As I said, I am definitely picky about the way my music sounds, but until they get off their high horse and face reality and realize that not many people are going to like this pricing structure, I'm not switching. If they had a plan similar to the Yahoo! music unlimited service, now that would be really cool. As of now though yahoo is still the best music service in my opinion.

Score: 0

By drumcat

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 8:18 PM

When you rar something, are you worried about quality? That's a lossless format...

An exact copy, even compressed, is still what it is; exact. So indeed, if they losslessly compress Ricky Martin, it's crap -- but only because it's Ricky Martin. It's not because it's a tiny bitrate.

They fail to mention the source since it's a store-bought CD. Maybe you should be more self-respecting, and learn a little more about a topic you plan to rant on.

Score: 0

By pwned_j00

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 2:53 PM

And yet they fail to mention the source of the files.

Stupid pr1ks are probably ripping the audio from the CDs. Quality? From CD?

feh.

If they had a high-fidelity source, they'd mention it. No self-respecting audiophile would waste time going to the site without it.

Score: 0

By wincement

edited Sep 29, 2005 - 4:12 PM

"Stupid pr1ks are probably ripping the audio from the CDs. Quality? From CD?

feh."

Really? 16bit 44Khz is quality imo.

I mean sure my sound card can crank out 24bit 192Khz sound, but I don't use it.

Any higher than CD quality, and you really can't tell the difference anyway, at least not without $1,000 speakers. I mean, I'm an audiophile, but not THAT much of one.

Score: 0

By rav0

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 10:15 PM

44KHz? No. I'd expect at leats DAT from someone calling themslves hifi. BTW wma is s***house anyway

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 11:22 PM

yeah... I did notice that. Too bad they have to use WMA... =(((

Score: 0

By DiGiTaLFX

posted Sep 30, 2005 - 10:53 AM

Now if it was flac :D

Score: 0

By pwned_j00

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 4:23 PM

I cannot be held accountable for your low standard of quality. With standards that low, please stop calling yourself an audiophile. It's just plain wrong.

Look, get some decent speakers. Or hit up the local walmart for a $30 set of noise-cancelling earphones. You'll be able to tell the difference between CD and hifi the first time a cymbal is played or someone hits the distortion pedal connected to their guitar. The difference becomes so obvious, it's painful.

Quality CD rips simply don't exist. Like trying to get DVD quality video from a .rm stream.

Puh-lease.

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 6:56 PM

What drumcat said... lol

Yeah... I didn't realize you didn't know the audio on CDs is written using a loss-less format. I thought everyone knew that.

And frankly, there just isn't a lot of stuff out there that is even recorded above 16bit 44Khz quality, so what's the point?

Score: 0

By pwned_j00

posted Sep 30, 2005 - 8:56 AM

CD-Audio is not hifi.

'Nuff said.

Score: 0

By drumcat

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 4:55 PM

Quality CD rips don't exist? What are you smoking? The point of mathmatically lossless compression is the same as zipping a file; it comes through as less data, and comes out identically.

While I might think it's a bit pricy, "audiophiles" are either going to accept that these are lossless, equating to 16bit 44.1, 1411kbps uncompressed, or they want more quality than a CD can offer by its own standard.

Looks like j00_b33n_pwnd.

Score: 0

By pwned_j00

posted Sep 30, 2005 - 8:54 AM

Ok, genius. Whatever you say MUST be true, right?

I must be mis-hearing my true hifi recordings vs their CD counterparts. That painfully obvious difference must be all in my mind.

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 2:34 PM

Sweet. It's about time. The horrible quality is the reason I haven't gotten into the whole downloadable music service. I prefer having the CD with perfect quality.

I just might have to check this out.

Score: 0

By elawford

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 9:53 PM

Just be prepared to pony up $50USD (and US credit card holders only) for the privilage. There are (as far as I can see) no trials, free periods or free credit. You can't even see their collection and you certainly can't hear any of the content until you come up with the cash.

Pretty lame for an expensive new service that is trying to differentiate itself in a crowded field. Perhaps the difference really isn't all that?

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 11:25 PM

Yeah. I did notice that. I've decided to stay away from it until it gets more content, or at least lets you see what's there before you signup.

As for the $50, they waive the first year's fee if you sign up now. It's still not worth it to me though since I have no way of knowing exactly what music they have. And I can imagine, since they're going the hi-fidelity route, there's not going to be a lot of content right away.

Score: 0

By nricciar

edited Sep 29, 2005 - 2:00 PM

last time i checked allofmp3.com was the first place to offer lossless music downloads.

Score: 0

By nate

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 2:07 PM

AllofMP3 does not have legitimate deals with the recording industry. It only exists because it is located in a place with weak copyright laws - Russia. And it has been raided/busted by the police before, but corruption reigns supreme in the former Soviet Bloc so it continues selling.

If you're going to buy from AllofMP3, you might as well just download songs from P2P networks instead. Either way, the artists and recording industry aren't getting a cent.

Score: 0

By elawford

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 9:58 PM

Perhaps if other legitimate online stores offered a) decent bitrates and b) DRM-free downloads, we wouldn't need AllofMP3.com.

The fact is that music will ALWAYS exist DRM-free. As long as they sell CDs, you will be able to buy DRM-free music. If you can buy it DRM-free from the store, why the hell can't you buy it DRM-free online?

To me, its indicative of the paranoia that is so prevalent in the music industry that has caused this total paralysis of innovation to meet the P2P networks head-on.

Why is it noone in the music biz seems to notice how ridiculous this situation is?

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 29, 2005 - 11:28 PM

CDs did, and still do have DRM. It's called copy-protection. Obviously that was cracked long ago.

If they added DRM to CDs now, that would render all current CD players useless. That's why they can do it on downloads and not CDs. You can update your favorite media-playing software for new DRM. You can't do that for CD-playing hardware.

I would be willing to bet that if they could do it, they would put DRM on CDs in a heartbeat. Fortunately for us, they can't.

Score: 0

By digitalking

edited Sep 30, 2005 - 8:15 AM

Yahoo! Music uses 192Kbps format, and they sound great.When they said HD downloads, I thought they meant the Dolby Digital 7.1 Surround sound type music. 7.1 I agree sounds amazing. In regards to regular 16 bit 44khz 2 speaker music, can your ear really hear any noticeable difference above 320kbps?
Listen to these samples, at the links below, of what I consider HD.
http://www.microsoft.com...with/sursoshowcase.aspx
http://www.buymusic.com offers 5.1 audio downloads.

Score: 0

By wincement

posted Sep 30, 2005 - 10:31 AM

I can DEFINITELY tell the difference between 192Kbps and the original CD track. That's why I was excited about this service. But my hopes have been dashed against the rocks because of their prices and lack of content preview.

Score: 0

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