There's your problem right there. There's no difference between Jethro Tull recorded in iTunes Plus and on a wire recorder, circa 1942.

And I predict that someone will write an iTunes ID editor in a second or two.

In addition to the problems named in this article, when Apple offers a menu of previously purchased tunes for upgrade, you have to buy them all. This can get a little expensive, and frankly, even if the sound is better, not everything I've bought is something I want to upgrade.

Also, the previous poster's right about the Tull.

The DRM versions always had your email address embedded as well, so the "someone who steals my iPod might send me an email" scenario has not changed. You could choose to think of it as a feature: "when I accidentally leave my iPod on the airplane, the friendly geek who finds it will be able to contact me." (Neither is very likely.)

For me the plus versions are valuable because now I can move these songs onto devices that wouldn't play them before (PSP, PS3, etc.) And when we someday find ourselves with more than five computers in the house, we won't need to choose which ones to authorize. (Don't laugh, we're at five already.)

The higher bitrate also means you could burn the files to disc then re-rip in your format of choice and end up with an untraceable file that still sounds great. If that's your thing.

If those benefits don't apply to you, and you can't hear a difference, don't buy the plus versions. Both options are available. So what's the problem?

The name and email address has always been there in the file's metadata. Nothing new has happened. I think there's just a whole lot of whining going on here. I think it's a perfectly reasonable approach to discouraging the casual sharing of these tracks on p2p networks - totally without impeding your ability to do whatever else you want to do with it.

The higher bitrate doesn't sound a lot better than the previous one? Seems to me like the people who complained so bitterly about the lower bitrate for the last few years should take note of this fact: 128-bit AAC sounds pretty gosh darned good.

I'm not too pleased with the price increase of single tracks, but at least album prices haven't increased.

All things considered I think there's entirely too much bitching about nothing going on.

Another major drawback is that 256kbps files are twice as large and eat up your hard drive space. While sound quality matters, 256kbps mp3s are unnecessarily massive. I guess Apple felt it needed to equate high bitrates with sound quality, which most serious mp3 consumers know is a dubious distinction (aside from drum-heavy mixes found in metal and techno, the article is right in claiming that 128kbps and 256kbps are virtually identical). Napster encodes their songs at 192kbps, so I guess Apple felt it needed to up the ante.

First off, as Alastair Houghton has noted -- having a name and email address embedded in the file is not a privacy concern. It is an anonymity concern. Do you really need your music to keep you anonymous? If someone wants to get your email address, they will get it - they don't need to steal your iPod and look at your music to do so, it is probably freely available on the web.

I was going to write my second point out, but Houghton makes it better than I could:

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but people commonly mark their name and address onto items that they don’t want to lose, presumably on the assumption that it’s more likely that something will be lost and then found (and maybe handed in) by an honest individual, rather than stolen.

In fact, many devices (iPods included, if I remember correctly) have special options to let the user put their name and address in them.

I’m sure the response from the “privacy” advocates will be that the user has the option to set these settings, whereas they have no choice over whether this information is embedded in their music files or not. But even if that’s true, it’s a very weak argument indeed.

http://alastairs-place.net/2007/06/eff-common-sense/

Finally, there's the sound quality. When the iTunes Music Store first came out, a big stink was made about the fact that they only provided 128k encoding. At the time, Apple stated that most people wouldn't be able to hear the difference between the encoded version and a lossless one. Now people are complaining that they can't hear the difference? Good grief! Of course it is a little bit better, but you will only notice it occasionally because the original bit rate was pretty decent.

John Gruber had a joke yesterday at the end of this point that describes this kind of reaction perfectly:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/itunes_plus_metadata

The Jethro Tull tracks in question have shitty audio quality to begin with. They sucked on vinyl, on CD and now, on iTunes. Don't use them for sound quality comparisons.

There certainly is a difference in sound quality. I wonder, what kind of playback system do you use to evaluate fidelity? I wonder what you're looking for, or even if you know what to look for.

The stero image is much more solid; the sense of space and air around acoustic instruments is more apparent. For example, the pianos and acoustic guitars on McCartney's Memory Almost Full have greater presence and body. The timbre of the instruments is preserved with far better fidelity.

Perhaps you should try listening to something other than a 30-year old, marginally recorded pop song.

"...but any track you purchase in the new format is instantly watermarked with your username and e-mail address."

Your name and account information is not "watermarked." An audio watermark is a specific technology that inserts hopefully inaudible data directly into audio bitstream for recovery by that specific watermark detector. Real audio watermarks are designed to survive various audio conversions and processing that may later be done to the file.

What Apple is doing is not watermarking; they are simply embedding account information into the header of the file as metadata tags, which by the way, they have always done for purchased tracks. It wasn't a problem for years, so why is it a problem now?

I would suggest that if you are going to report and comment on technology, you might want to actually learn about the various relevant technologies first instead of echoing what you hear on other website that may or may not know what they are talking about. After all, we come to Salon for original analysis, not to hear a game of telephone.