Quality Revisited
As follow-up to my prior post on necessary-vs-excessive audio quality for the masses, I was intrigued to discover that on November 9th, Napster bumped up the bitrate on its subscription music library from 128 Kbps to 192 Kbps. So…was I wrong? I don't think so (but you knew I'd say that, right?). My earlier hands-on testing of WMA7 (the WM8 and AAC data in the article's addendum seems to have disappeared; I'll need to check on what happened here) and WMA9 attests to the codec's ability to retain a perceptually meaningful percentage of the original two-channel sonic data even at (and below) 128 Kbps bitrates.
What I suspect is really going on is that Napster's boosting its bitrate in order to compete with Yahoo (which also uses 192 Kbps WMA9) and to differentiate from Apple (which employs 128 Kbps AAC on the iTunes Store). It's a financial gamble, because bigger bitrates incur higher storage and transmission costs for Napster, but the company must be figuring that that'll be offset by the ability to attract more customers (or, pragmatically, at minimum to retain its existing customer base). Napster's got other ways of attracting customers, too; check out this ad (which is probably not safe for viewing during work hours). Good old non-prudish British advertising….
