The Trouble With Digital Music Distribution

Despite living in the download era and having a whole networked music streaming home setup and an iPod, I still buy CDs. I rarely listen to them - they go straight onto the streamer (Sonos) and then they sit on a shelf - but I still like buying CDs. They're the highest bitrate you can buy (for most releases), and they have packaging with artwork and a back cover and inlay that expands the graphic design concept for the release, sleeve notes, lyric sheets etc. Occasionally I'll buy digital stuff if it's the only way it's available (eg. digital-only singles and EPs, live show downloads), but for albums it's CD all the way, really out of necessity.

So I recently participated in an experiment with the new Radiohead record (King of Limbs). They were offering it as a lossless download, and six weeks before the physical release. Same price as a CD from an internet retailer, but with none of the manufacturing or distribution chain taking a cut. And of course, no reliance on the postman or a trip to the shops. Anyway, I figured I'd try it. The results were slightly disappointing: the music, well that's pretty cool minimalistic electronic noodling, but the distribution needs more thought.

I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who remembers actually going to a record store and buying music on real actual bits of plastic and generally having something that represents the sounds coming from the speakers. If you grew up on planet download then skip this and go trawl the iTunes store and torrent sites.

Here's what's wrong with Radiohead's approach, and what really needs to change before I'll change my buying habits.

• The Format. The download is available in two flavours: MP3 (high 320kbps bitrate but still compressed) or WAV (pretty universal but no tagging info). If it's available in CD quality 1400kbps, that's what I want. The lack of a decent lossless format option (eg. FLAC) is baffling. Metallica, Bad Religion, NIN etc. have shown the way by providing FLAC downloads. OK, the WAV came in a ZIP so the download isn't huge (probably the same size as the FLAC would have been) but WAV is just a terrible format, because there's no tagging info and the files are huge. There's track numbers and song titles in the filenames, and that's it. I had to waste my time with Foobar pasting tagging info into the tracks so my player (Sonos) had something to work with. And really, after ten years of digital music files, I just expect them to have tagging info. It's actually less effort for me to unwrap a CD and rip it with EAC than to deal with a bundle of WAV files. CD 1, digital 0.
  
• What's In The Box? So I have the music and whatever track titles I can ascertain from filenames, and a nice hi-res JPEG of the front cover artwork, and that's it. No equivalent of the sleeve or booklet. Hell, I'm used to getting those digital booklet PDFs with downloads from the iTunes store. The MP3 release is apparently the same (don't know for sure). Maybe Radiohead want to give you the music and nothing else to distract from it, maybe they think booklets are relics for physical releases, maybe the music's ready but the design (apart from the front cover artwork) is still pending. Whatever, CD 2, digital 0.
  
• The Shop. When I buy music, I can go to online retailers like Amazon, Play, iTunes Store, or real places like HMV or the local independent record shop, wherever. I had to go to Radiohead's own store to buy this (or wait six weeks until it's everywhere). Not just Radiohead's store actually (the way that most bands have a store these days), but Radiohead's "store for buying this one record". And sign up and enter my credit card details and all that. And any savings from cutting out the middlemen, well I don't see them. A record is still worth it for the nine bucks I paid, but when I'm getting less of an experience than the CD and I appear to be paying fewer people for that privilege, well it's hard to champion going straight to the band for what feels like a "paid for torrent". CD 3, digital 0.
  

Bits Of Plastic

Hey, music is all just digital files, and if I could get the digital equivalent of those shelves full of CDs I would, but I can't help feel a little underwhelmed by this release. A "live bootleg" download is one thing, a studio album is something else. I suppose the inlay info is a web search away, but paying for a bunch of music-and-nothing-else files is still an adjustment. In some ways, this release reminds me of my early music listening days when I'd have a C-90 cassette of an album with just the music and maybe the tracklisting scrawled on the case (although the download is better quality and the band now gets paid).

Digital music distribution has mostly been a story of missed opportunities, from low quality broken formats winning out, to the devaluing of the album experience (no artwork/booklet/package and the cherry-picking of tracks onto playlists). The bandwidth is there for lossless (downloads if not streaming), even if most people are happy with their music compressed and low-quality and playing through tiny speakers. Even if most music playing applications aren't really equipped to handle a track in multiple formats, the biggest record store in the world (iTunes store) showed potential with the "iTunes plus" dual-format idea, slow upping of the available quality, and recent rumours of higher quality formats. And what's stopping someone like Amazon offering a record in CD, MP3-with-PDF and FLAC-with-PDF?

Right now there's all sorts of rumours going around about apple and possible 24-bit masters either cropping up in the iTunes store, or being used as the source for 256kbps MP3s, or something. Certainly a "better than CD" quality format would be welcome, but as persuading the vast majority to upgrade from low-quality MP3s to the 25-year-old CD format is hard, don't see it happening soon.

So back to Radiohead. They get points for a lossless download option. But it's not enough. The WAV format choice is just wrong and the lack of any booklet or package is infuriating. You have to assume Radiohead considered why people still buy CDs when deciding on a lossless download. MP3 isn't enough for music fans like me. We want the "CD without having to reach for the physical CD" experience on our home music servers. When will bands/labels start properly catering for us?

Digital Music: Gapless Playback

I use the term "gapless playback" a lot. These days it's kind of essential when talking about music playback. "Advances" in digital music playback have spawned the need for this rather curious term. "Gapless" is basically

"the ability to play one song followed by another song without introducing additional gaps or silence"

Obvious really. It's something that was a standard feature on all music formats and playback devices - vynyl, cassette, CD - until the rise of modern digital music players. Something we took for granted as standard for over 60 years is now an optional extra.

Be warned: this post mightwill turn into a bit of a rant. Gapless playback is something I care about a lot. It's been an absolute deal-breaker with my last four digital music player purchases. It's technically possible, it should just be the minimum acceptable standard.

I'm not going to list all the various gapless solutions and guilty parties on this post, if gapless playback is something that concerns you, do the research.

Disclaimer: gapless isn't an issue all the time, only if you're listening to albums. If you think the album format is dead and music must be listened to as individual songs, shuffled or compiled into playlists, stop reading. Otherwise...

What's the big deal?

If you're thinking "but all my albums have gaps between the songs anyway, what's the big deal", well what about live albums, dance music, prog rock records, etc? Some random examples of bands with studio albums that require gapless playback: The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road), Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall), Dream Theater (Six Degrees, Systematic Chaos), The Prodigy (The Fat of the Land), Wu-Tang Clan (Forever), Nine Inch Nails (Pretty Hate Machine, The Downward Spiral), Slayer (Reign in Blood), Tool (Lateralus), Linkin Park (Meteora, A Thousand Suns), My Chemical Romance (Danger Days).

OK, the Beatles probably were wrong to start the whole "album format" thing without considering the limitations of future music players, but we're stuck with a larger number of albums that the average portable player can't handle. Oops.

Gapless doesn't mean "no gaps"

Yes it's confusing. "Gapless" doesn't mean "no gaps between songs", just "no added gaps between songs". So, if we take the Beatles as an example, Revolver has long gaps between the songs on the record, but Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road let the songs seamlessly flow into each other. Gapless playback recreates the record exactly as it was.

OK, I'm converted. I want gapless. How do I get it?

1. Use a "gapless" format eg. OGG, FLAC, MP3 (*)
2. Buy a "gapless" player eg. iTunes/iPod

*Not all MP3s are created equal
Oh, and just because your format is gapless, doesn't mean your player will handle it. My Sony phone plays OGG files, but it leaves a massive gap between them. Spotify also apparently has issues playing its OGG files gaplessly. However, there are gapless-capable formats for both lossy and lossless, and music players capable of handling them. Gapless playback is available if you want it.

Why is gapless so hard to do?

Well, on vynyl/tape/CD, gapless is built into the format - it's a continuous stream of music, and "tracks" are nothing more than index markers you can fast-forward to. Where digital music is concerned, each track is a separate file, to be unpacked (if compressed) and re-combined into the album/playlist running order.

So really, why is gapless so hard to do?

It's not that hard. Many formats manage to store the necessary information. However, playback requires a little thought. Only a little.

1. Buffering 101: you need a very basic knowledge of buffering - you need to be uncompressing a track slightly ahead of playing it. If you were to build a music player that:
   
   1. Played first track (slight delay as the music starts buffering) exactly as it is on the CD
   2. Waited until it finished then thought "oh, there's more?" and went off to fetch the next track
   3. Played second track...
   ...and so on, you'd probably get gaps due to disc access, buffering, etc, creating a time interval of greater than 0.0 seconds between tracks. Remember, those tracks already have whatever gaps (or "no gaps") existed on the CD.
   
   
2. Track Length: The track must know when it begins and ends - astonishingly, MP3s can't be relied on to know how long they are (the original specification only stored "roughly" how long a track was, so you often ended up with the track stored as a number of "frames", the last of which contained the end of the song plus some silence to pad it out), although modern encoders seem to do fine.

To play gaplessly, you need to basically treat your tracks as contributing to a seamless playlist, sort of like re-creating a CD on the fly.

But surely if gapless was a problem they'd have fixed it by now?

MP3s have been around for years now. The original specification didn't address gapless playback, although subsequent revisions (and decent encoders like the latest LAME) now allow for gapless (it's not guaranteed that MP3s you buy will be gapless though). And subsequent formats (specifically AAC) based on MP3 repeated the same problem. When apple got so fed up with the situation they first fixed it (for iTunes/iPods only, of course) with a hack for not-necessarily-gapless MP3s that was rightly announced as a major new iPod feature. In 2007.

Apple's hack was basically to figure out how long the track should be (the info that OGG, FLAC etc files keep and MP3s originally threw away) so it can be played gaplessly. There's space in an MP3 to store this info (again, modern encoders create gapless files), but as gapless is not part of the original MP3 spec, no guarantees your player will manage to playback properly.

Getting gapless on non-gapless players

A couple of unsatisfactory hacks:

• The 'Single Track' hack - OK, you could join all the songs on a CD together into one very long track (apple used to offer a 'join tracks' mode in the old pre-gapless iTunes days) but would you really want to?
• Crossfading - by having your tracks fade-out and fade-in, slightly overlapping, you eliminate gaps. Of course, you also eliminate any sudden powerful track start/end that should be there, any pauses that should be there, etc. Save it for DJ mixes - crossfading is not gapless.

My 20-Year Turntable / Tape Deck / CD Player does Gapless - surely my shiny new MP3 player does too?

Why did gaps ever appear? Why hasn't the gapless problem been completely eradicated? My guess is that people either don't notice or don't care enough to choose a different player, so the extra effort needed to allow gapless playback isn't considered necessary. People buy individual songs or listen to their own playlists. For many, the convenience of the ubiquitous MP3 format far outweighs its many drawbacks (poor sound quality, inefficient compression, no automatic gapless). It took apple six years to get round to fixing this. Sony used to offer gapless (albeit via ATRAC only) but abandoned it along with their hard-drive players. Spotify considered it such a low priority that they took forever to implement it (and their "free" mode is still flaky).

So if you care, do the research and buy gapless. Or just put up with your player/format adding extra gaps between songs.

Note: updated to cover Spotify etc. finally getting gapless.