When mp3@320 is better than aac from iTunes

[Rain197]

How it is possible ?
From Sjoerd, they send only 1 WAV files to everyone.

The albums are World One and World 2: Euro-Beat from LED Records/Vibration

[Lebon14]

First of all. Most of these were lossy masters to begin with. Thank you for telling me to NOT care about these releases. By lossy masters, I mean somebody took a MP3 and convert it to WAV. There's no quality gain: only quality degradation from further lossy transcoding after that WAV transcode.

So, for "Starman" and "Don't Stop The Music", one thing IS very clear. Sjoerd is wrong when he said that one single WAV file was sent to every outlet. It's very clear that Starman was from a different MP3 to WAV than the other. Note that, with most of these Spek screenshots, I can confirm that most of the file's WAV were from low quality MP3s:

World One: Track 4, Track 6 through 10.
World Two: Track 1 through 9. Would need to see a close-up for Wings Of Fire. I know that Chemical Love is legit, I have that single in lossless purchased from Juno.

So, in other words, the two tracks you pointed out were from different quality MP3s and two different WAVs were sent to iTunes and Juno.

Case closed.

[Rain197]

I contacted Apple and their answer :
It's saying there's no blemish.

I also get the same message for World One.

[DarkSky]

First of all. Most of these were lossy masters to begin with. Thank you for telling me to NOT care about these releases. By lossy masters, I mean somebody took a MP3 and convert it to WAV. There's no quality gain: only quality degradation from further lossy transcoding after that WAV transcode.

So, for "Starman" and "Don't Stop The Music", one thing IS very clear. Sjoerd is wrong when he said that one single WAV file was sent to every outlet. It's very clear that Starman was from a different MP3 to WAV than the other. Note that, with most of these Spek screenshots, I can confirm that most of the file's WAV were from low quality MP3s:

World One: Track 4, Track 6 through 10.
World Two: Track 1 through 9. Would need to see a close-up for Wings Of Fire. I know that Chemical Love is legit, I have that single in lossless purchased from Juno.

So, in other words, the two tracks you pointed out were from different quality MP3s and two different WAVs were sent to iTunes and Juno.

Case closed.

WAV masters are sent out to the aggregator that sends out these files to the shops. We don't have any influence on what they do with the WAV after we've submitted it.

So yes, we DO send one single wav for each song to the aggregator, and what happens next is their responsibility.

[xiao]

　

[KiraTM]

Moral of the story: iTunes is a Dinosaur living in the Space Age.

Even Juno, Beatport, & VibeDeck ~ which I highly dislike ~ aren't as backwards as iTunes ... but I guess kiddos still like buying songs off Apple & Amazon. ~

iTunes is not a dinosaur. In fact, they do have a huge impact on digital sales nowadays. I think so because only 1% are audiophiles or people who want the best-possible quality. There are other 99% who don't care about track quality. The world doesn't know anything about music quality. Apple tells them, iTunes sells music in "almost CD quality" - which is correct. The AAC/iTunes Plus codec comes really, really close to WAVs.
They sell a good quality for a good price.

However, this shouldn't sound like AAC is enough for me. Of course I enjoy a FLAC over an AAC file. But iTunes isn't made for audiophiles. It#s made for the mass of the world. It would be nice if they'd offer lossless files, but I don't see a neccessarity here.

[Lebon14]

WAV masters are sent out to the aggregator that sends out these files to the shops. We don't have any influence on what they do with the WAV after we've submitted it.

So yes, we DO send one single wav for each song to the aggregator, and what happens next is their responsibility.

You didn't exactly sent "a WAV Master", it's what I mean: you took a MP3 then converted it back to WAV and sent that to aggregators.

@RotaryFTW Apple s'en crisse de la qualité des fichiers envoyés par les distributeurs ou labels. Tout ce qui compte c'est le cash. (Apple desn't f*ing cares about the quality of the files sent by aggregators or labels. All that count is cash.)

[xiao]

　

[DarkSky]

WAV masters are sent out to the aggregator that sends out these files to the shops. We don't have any influence on what they do with the WAV after we've submitted it.

So yes, we DO send one single wav for each song to the aggregator, and what happens next is their responsibility.

You didn't exactly sent "a WAV Master", it's what I mean: you took a MP3 then converted it back to WAV and sent that to aggregators.

*sigh*