No AAC, I’ll stick to iTunes, Thanks

I am not somebody who shops around particularly, but I always used to for CDs. I remember when I was in London once seeing an album at HMV Oxford Street for £15.00, and then going round the corner to Selectadisc in Berwick Street and buying it for £11.50. I worked with somebody once who would have paid the £15.00 rather than having to go down ‘back streets’,  but I always preferred the savings, which were always at least £1 per CD. With the CD, what I was buying was exactly the same thing at a cheaper price.

Nowadays, I buy all my music from iTunes and £11.50 seems a lot as I am paying £7.99 for most albums. I continue to buy  exclusively from iTunes, as they are the only store in the UK that sells AAC. Other stores, such as Amazon and 7Digital insist on selling MP3s. Now, I know that AAC is associated with Apple and iPods, but none of the As in it are Apple. It stands for Advanced Audio Coding and was designed as a successor to MP3.

Basically MP3 is not as good as AAC, whether I notice the difference is another matter, but if I am paying the same price, as generally seems to be the case, I am not getting the same thing, like I was with CDs. I have over 700 albums and as far as I remember, two albums are MP3s. One the band had made available for free, and the other was ‘In Rainbows’ by Radiohead, which I paid less for than I would have for AAC. I would be perfectly happy to buy music from stores other than iTunes, but even when there was DRM on AAC, I preferred to buy music in AAC format rather than buy MP3.

The iPod is the most popular music player and iTunes is the most popular store. Most ‘MP3′ players will now play AAC, as it means they can now play tracks bought from iTunes, as will many phones. The MP3 touters talk about supporting all devices, but that’s a bit like arguing in the 1980s that you shouldn’t support these new fangled CD players as everyone has cassette players. Ok, so its not quite the same, but there is some comparison. MP3 was approved in 1991, when Acorn, Atari, MSX and Commodore were still making computers and when Windows computers were still 16-bit on Windows 3.0.

Now perhaps most people are buying their downloads from iTunes solely because it is well integrated with the iTunes application. But I suspect at least some are like me and would shop around if the downloads were equivalent. I buy 3o-40 albums per year from iTunes. If anyone else other than iTunes wants some of that business, they need to start selling AAC