Neil Young: First major artist to release lossless album download

News

Neil Young

Neil Young has released his new album "Living with War" via "lossless" online music provider MusicGiants, with the "hard copy" CD coming out on the 8th of May 2006.

What's the big "lossless" deal?

Well, as opposed to (for example) MP3 which is a "lossy" compression (it makes assumptions about what you would/ wouldn't hear and discards anything deemed unneccessary), with a "lossless" format, you are receiving the full audio content - but with a saving (typically 50%) on space required to store the song. The problem is that 50% of 50 megabytes (a typical 4 minute 16bit, 44Khz song) is still a lot more than the equivalent MP3 version, which would be around 2-6 megabytes depending on the "bitrate" (quality).

A giant leap?

Hardly. Lossless audio compression has been around for a long time - granted the majority of the compressors in the 90s worked "offline" rather than allowing you to "stream" them.

That is the least of the problems, though. The biggest problem is Joe Public and their inability to hear the difference between an MP3 encoded track and the equivalent track on a CD the majority of the time. This is to be expected for the iPod generation, but for those who like to listen through a decent HiFi - presumably a minority - it's a different matter.

MusicGiants who launched in 2005 were the first online music service to offer lossless downloads, initially requiring a proprietary player to decode the downloaded file, but now using Microsofts WMA lossless format supported by Media Player 10.

Daniel O'Connell