iTunes Mods?

Cookly -- Thu, 02/18/2010 - 15:09

Hey my favorite record store closed. : ( And Best Buy has a horrible selection, in my opinion, so I've reluctantly turned to iTunes for my primary source of music. There seems to be a bunch of iTunes mods out there, can anyone offer me some insight on some of them? i.e. the iWOW Premium? I'm not really impressed with iTunes quality so far.

Any help... would help. lol.

Thanks.

Steven Stone -- Fri, 02/19/2010 - 11:20

Have you heard of Amazon? or HD Tracks?

Both are excellent sources of new music and high resolution (or at least redbook) quality discs.

Also what bit rate are you using for importing or "ripping" your CDs for iTunes?

I would humbly suggest trying to get the best into and out of iTunes before starting to modify it with sometimes questionable 3d party apps.

Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications

ScottB (not verified) -- Fri, 02/19/2010 - 21:42

What Steven said. Any audio files you get from iTunes are, as far as I know, lossy-compressed and therefore compromised in an absolute sense. No software magic can reverse the information loss from lossy compression (hence, the term "lossy").
Beyond that, focusing too much on software in computer audio is a mistake. Assuming that the goal is bit-perfect delivery of digital audio to external D/A solutions, products like Amarra, if they make any difference at all, make that difference by indirectly reducing problems in the <em>hardware</em> side of audio reproduction (i.e., problems related to noise or digital transmission jitter created by non-dedicated audio computing solutions).