Musicgiants, a high-def digital music download service is all set to launch on Wednesday. Billed as a download service for audiophiles, the 15-person company will offer songs that are uncompressed and are encoded using windows media technology at 1100 kbps. In comparison, Apple’s iTunes and others like Real’s Rhapsody offer music at a compression rate which is a tad lower than the CD-quality, mostly to keep the file sizes down. Musicgiants’ business model is predicated on widespread deployment of broadband and speeds which can handle the big-phat downloads. So far, the service works only on Windows PCs
> “If you’re listening to compressed music using your iPod earbuds, you won’t notice much difference [from a CD],” says Scott Bahneman, founder and chief executive of tiny startup MusicGiants. “But once you play it on a good home stereo, the difference is huge.” Even an empty 40-gigabyte hard drive would hold only 100 CDs or so. A 1-terabyte drive from LaCie USA, may be more like it, if you’ve got $949 with nothing better to do. (Business Week)
The songs cost $1.29 a download, and you have to pay $50 a year membership fee. The Nevada-based company claims its sound quality is seven times that of other download services.
So why would we pay for this again? If it’s DRMd, why would audiophiles touch it? And don’t we get higher quality for paying the cd and using a really really good codec? and WTF about Windows only. Must mean they’re using WMP10+ for their DRM. meaning it’s not going to burn, meaning there is NO point at all because you know we don’t have a 9.1 surround sound reciever hooked up to our PC.
ah. when will these people learn. three letters without three others. MP3 w/o DRM.
Does anyone have any insight into a company called MatrixView? It’s a Singapore based company just moving into the U.S. market that claims to have a new algorithm for data capture, storage and retrieval. There new algorithm claims to capture, compress and store all kinds of data, including audio and video files, without any data loss. There primary target appears to be medical xrays. They claim to capture, compress, store, transfer and retrieve xrays without any data loss, (critical to xray diagnosis).