A friend recently said he had been steering clear of the iTunes Music Store because of the low bitrate. This is even though he uses an ipod, mac and iTunes. I personally have purchased over 300 tracks at the previous 128Kbps bitrate, and up to now, have been happy with the quality of these AAC song files.

Now apple have released a (so far limited) portion of their catalogue, being from EMI at 256Kbps, and DRM free to top it off.

This audio review on digg says “Comparing these two compression rates was tough, even when using a pair of state-of-the-art Ultrasone headphones. In our decidedly unscientific comparison, we listened to all the tunes at both compression rates in A/B comparisons with those phones, with iPod stock earbuds, on our kick-ass car stereo, and on our reference Dolby 5.1 system.”

Will this be enough for people who previously avoided iTMS to give it a go, maybe not for whole albums, but for the one or two songs they might want to buy in a pinch? Will this be just easier for people to purchase a single song at a decent quality, instead of wasting 1/2 an hour searching through limewire or other sites for the song they want?

Time will tell.

read more | digg story