iTMS.ca

Only a few days ago, after much speculation and waiting, Apple has finally opened the iTunes Music Store in Canada. They are offering downloads at 99 cents Canadian, which makes it the best deal for downloading music from Apple worldwide.

I have not spent much time fiddling around with the iTMS. I went searching for some obscure music, and found little. I guess "obscure" is the key word here. When searching for music on the internet, I am usually searching for songs that I cannot otherwise find in music stores. At 99 cents per download, it is still cheaper for me to find music in pawn shops. Not only that, but then I have an uncompressed digital archive of all my music, which is something very important to an audiophile such as myself.

One thing that has bothered me about Apple's store is that the songs they are offering are encoded in the .m4a file format at 128 kbps. I have no problems with the MPEG-4 audio format; I think it is a superior audio codec (compared to mp3, wma, and similar ilk). My issues revolve around the bitrate. I find that the bitrate of 128 kbps is of poor-sound quality. I can identify the compression in such files, and not only do I find the sound annoying, it is also hard on the ears. I have been encoding all my music at 160kbps (.m4a format), which is comparable to mp3 files at 192kbps. At this bitrate, the audio quality is almost indistinguishable from the uncompressed original.

Even so, if you played your internet-obtained music on a high-end system, even at an encoding rate of 192kbps, you could still tell the difference between the audio file and the digital master. Apple has circumvented this problem by installing a "lossless audio codec" in the latest release of iTunes. This is a great feature for an audiophile, but the files are too large for anyone to put any substantial amount of music on their computer (or iPod for that matter). I would likely need a terabyte of storage on my computer before I would consider putting an uncompressed music library on my home computer.

The iTMS is still a powerful tool to search for music. You can preview music, so you could effectively find artists and music you would be interested in listening to. If you knew the title of a song, but not the artist, you could effectively search the archives and preview songs until you found the track you were searching for.

Unfortunately, most of the music provided on the iTMS is in the Top-40 category. Even Matthew Good stated on the opening day of the iTMS.ca that only two of his albums were featured in the store; his latest release was absent.

Perhaps things will improve in future months as tracks are added to the music store.