How could it sound better? Either it is passing bits along unmolested or not.

Try "Genius" and you might change your tone; I'm having loads of fun.

I can't even find the 'Importing' settings, they seem to have disappeared completely!

I am soooo happy I escaped this tyranny; looks like I got out just in time...

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It hides in plain sight. Right there on the preferences-general tab

What he said. I looked for about 10 minutes and still managed to miss it. They say that when you make something idiot-proof they just invent a better idiot. Well I am that better idiot!

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How could it sound better? Either it is passing bits along unmolested or not.

Well giving the good folks over at The Asylum the benefit of the doubt (and one of them claims to have a 'super transparent system' so who are we to doubt?) the only explanations I can come up with are:

• iTunes was molesting the bits before but isn't now and it sounds better
• iTunes wasn't molesting the bits before but is now and it sounds better
• iTunes was molesting the bits before and is now, but differently, and it sounds better

The first case is easy enough to understand on an intuitive level. As to the second and third, I dunno, an enhanced Sound Enhancer??

Well done.

Skellum,

Thought you might like to know that a bug has been identified in iTunes 8.0 which affects compatibility with the Airport Express. Apparently with some earlier AE firmware versions an streaming fails with 'Unknown Error'.

If you hit this problem the solution is apparently to update your Airport Express firmware to 6.3 (download from http://www.apple.com), and ensure that iTunes sharing is enabled in the Firewall section of System Preferences.

Could someone please elaborate on the "iTunes 8.X sounds better" statement? Do they mean it sounds better when playing discs or files, or also that files ripped or converted in iTunes sound better?

I love it--- love the new album view, love the Genius playlist maker and suggestion mode. Well done Apple.

"p.s. Nice web site Doug "

Thanks man!

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Could someone please elaborate on the "iTunes 8.X sounds better" statement? Do they mean it sounds better when playing discs or files, or also that files ripped or converted in iTunes sound better?

bertdw, Reading the various posts on sites like Computer Audio Asylum and MacRumors it seems that people are asserting that iTunes 8.0 sounds better playing back files without re-ripping. That said, many posters undermine their own credibility with statements, often in the same post, that are obviously false or even fatuous.

As I originally responded to Skellum, assuming that all the "enhancements" are switched off (which he said they were in his case), there is no rational explanation I can come up with. I would only point out that many people appear to have reported the same thing on a number of different audio and Mac forums. Of course it may just be an example of mass expectation bias. I am highly sceptical, but not yet ready to dismiss it completely.

Skellum, Now you really do sound like Lewis Black! lol

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Skellum, Now you really do sound like Lewis Black! lol

If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.

Thanks for the replies, guys. Somebody in one of the forums you linked to said iTunes 7 sounded worse than its predecessor. Wasn't there a bit of fiddling involved in getting iTunes 7 to provide a bit-accurate output? I'm just guessing, but perhaps iTunes 8 is bit-accurate by default, and those hearing a difference never bothered to get iTunes 7 set up right.

If I remember correctly the issues were back with iTunes 6.0/Quicktime 7.1 which had a number of design weaknesses including a volume control and bit-depth conversion routines that weren't correctly dithered.

iTunes/QT is bit-accurate iff:
- Volume is set to 100%
- No replay effects are enabled
- No SRC is being performed

Moreover, to the best of my knowledge the above statement has always been true, the trick has just being satisfying the prerequisites. However I am really tempted to believe that what folks are reporting here is just the result of mass expectation bias so I wouldn't waste too many cycles on trying to reverse-engineer a cause for this alleged effect.

Keeping this real simple, as Elk alluded above, iTunes is either passing (or, more correctly, instructing QT to pass) the bits unmolested or it isn't. If it isn't then by definition it is distorting the signal. Some users may like the distortion and others may not, either way it is still distortion.

The most recent set-up guide over at Benchmark states that the volume control in iT7.x is fine. No need not to use it.

And the audio output in Audio MIDI (if you are running a Mac) needed to be set to the source file to prevent an unneeded sample rate conversion.

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/wiki/index.php/ITunes-QuickTime_for_Mac_-_Setup_Guide

Of course, now we are on iT8...hopefully there are not a whole bunch of other setup tweaks needed to get it to work well.

Brian

Brian,

The thread has morphed slightly from discussing subjective sound quality to bit-transparency, which are two different if loosely related topics. Statements made in one context don't necessarily apply equally and identically in the other.

Use of any digital volume control will violate bit-transparency for fairly obvious reasons. The more attenuation that is applied the more musical information a digital volume control throws away - regardless of how well it is designed. Proof by extrapolation: if you turn the volume all the way down you end up with no signal at all! The point about the volume control in iTunes is that at one point it was incredibly badly implemented and introduced substantial distortion artefacts over-and-above the attenuation it was applying.

Just a general word of caution, I would recommend being a little bit circumspect about Wikis. After all, the whole idea of a Wiki is that anybody can go in and edit the information there. Moderators only check adherence to guidelines, they don't generally check for factual accuracy. In fact in that respect you could think of it as being pretty much like this forum! I have spotted several mistakes in the Benchmark Wiki (which I corrected), and some absolute howlers in Wikipedia. The idea of a Wiki is not that every single piece of information is always correct but that the "hive" causes the aggregate quality level to tend to increase over time. This is in no way a criticism of the Benchmark Wiki which is a superb initiative and a valuable resource, I just want to remind folks that it is still a Wiki. Benchmark is the facilitator but neither the sole provider nor guarantor of the editorial content.

The other point worth making here is that Apple publishes little or no information about its proprietary system (beyond publishing APIs for media owners to load their content into it), so what we think we know is gleaned by piecing together fragments divined by various folks through reverse-engineering and other detective work. This is a necessarily slightly hapahzard process and there are no guarantees that all the conclusions and guesses made along the way are correct.

At this early stage in its evolution computer audio is still a minefield. Tread carefully!

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The idea of a Wiki is not that every single piece of information is always correct but that the "hive" causes the aggregate quality level to tend to increase over time.

This is the best defense of the electronic pooling of ignorance I have seen.

Even better, I think it is true.

Elk, It is a great honor to be dubbed "Defender of the electronic pooling of ignorance". I accept this honor with gratitude and humility and can only hope I shall be able to rise to the challenge of justifying it!

I was very cynical, but Wikis do work and do improve with time. The power of the hive mind.

I-TUNES 8 is a great reincarnation
Genius is fun
New graphics v good
Pity you have to renew disc permissions after update
However Appleshop says if you are signed in to store this does not apply.
It does sound better
IT 7 did have problems
This is good software
The worlds most popular they say.
Roger imho