NIN + CC = Hi-res Free Music

Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 5 May 2008 at 9:55 PM

Nine Inch Nails today released a new album – no, not Ghosts – called The Slip. The Slip, I can only guess, refers to the pink slip they’re giving the music industry. This new album is released under a Creative Commons license, and it’s available as a free, lossless download. Just go to this page on the NIN website, plug in your email address, and they’ll send you a link to the download.

Once you’re there, you have some options for downloading. You can download some basic MP3 files of the 10 songs on the album. Or if you’re looking for CD quality, you can download either FLAC or Apple Lossless versions of the songs. Either one is mathematically identical to the CD version. For people with access to a downstream hi-res D/A converter, you can download 24/96 WAV files. That’s better than CD quality. For free.

The album is released under the Creative Commons Attribution - Non-commercial - Share Alike 3.0 US license. Basically that means you’re free to copy the album, remix songs, post it on the internet, etc. The limitations are: you can’t make money from sharing the album and if you create a derivative work (i.e. a remix) you must share it along the same terms as the original.

The fact that NIN released the album in two CD quality, lossless formats tells you something about the state of music today and about a problem with Apple’s approach to high quality formats. Well, the first problem is that iTunes doesn’t support hi-res formats. Simple as that. But more importantly its support for lossless formats is fractured at best. FLAC is a free, open source audio codec that produces lossless, compressed audio files at CD quality. iTunes (and by extension, the iPod) does not support FLAC even though the codec is freely available and widely used in some circles. Instead Apple came out with their own Apple Lossless codec. The problem with this codec is that it is proprietary, and Apple has never published a specification for the format. Some people back in 2005 reverse engineered a codec for Apple Lossless, but for the most part it remains a closed format. You can use it in iTunes and on the iPod, but not anywhere else.

Personally, I use iTunes as my reference encoder. I rip CDs as 320 Kbps AAC files. I find 320 Kbps to be indistinguishable from the original CD. The advantage of the AAC format is that it is open. I then use those AAC files in Linux and in CD burning software for creating audio mix CDs. So Apple Lossless is a dead end without an open spec and Apple doesn’t support FLAC. My preference would be for lossless encodings of my CDs, but there is no easy way to do that in a cross-platform, open and accessible way. Well, that is, unless you rip them as WAV files. WAV can also render CD quality audio, but it’s uncompressed. That means, you’ll be soaking up scads of gigabytes on your harddrive (not to mention your iPod) for the privilege.

Of course, if you want to go the hi-res 24/96 route, you’ll need a good digital-to-analog converter, such as the Linn Klimax DS network D/A processor that was reviewed in March’s Stereophile magazine. It’ll set you back $20,000 and requires professional installation, but hey, those are just details.

The point is that SACD and DVD-A, two DVD-based hi-res physical formats, are dead. It’s time to make hi-res audio accessible. If it’s possible to make a high quality SACD player for, say, $800, which I believe it is possible, then it should be equally easy to create a networked, hi-res D/A converter for a similar price. And it wouldn’t have any moving parts, so nothing to break. The state of lossless, CD quality audio and also hi-res audio is such that nothing is easy. It’s a bad time, frankly, to be a technologically-savvy audiophile. (Tip of the hat to Brandon.)

Tags: audio · creative commons · hi-res · nin · nine inch nails · the slip · torrent

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