iTunes – Sound Quality – Tweaking the Sound
By Simon Dawson

EQ and Beyond

One way to enhance the sound on your computer and iPod is to be discerning with your importing preferences. Another option is to improve your speakers, either by investing in better earphones for your Pod or by hooking up to a decent hi-fi. But aside from all this, you can also tweak the sound using various iTunes tools, including a pretty comprehensive graphics equalizer. You can either apply EQ as you listen or assign customized presets to specific tracks, which are then transported to your iPod when you next plug it in.

Equalizing

The iTunes Equalizer allows you to adjust a range of frequency bands for the music coming out of your computer. To open Equalizer, hit its stripy button in the lower right corner of iTunes pane. First make sure the Equalizer is active by checking the box in the top left of the pane. Note, though, that this window doesn’t need to be open for the settings to be having an effect – you can tell whether the Equalizer is currently active by seeing whether its button in the main iTunes window is glowing blue.

Presets

From the dropdown menu you can choose between a number of preset frequency settings, designed to suit different types of music: the “Dance” preset, for example, has a heavier bass setting, while the “Spoken Word” setting features stronger mid-range frequencies, just like the human voice. Play some music that you are familiar with and try a few of the presets, even ones that don’t sound at all suitable from their name. Take a look at the different shapes that the Equalizer’s sliders make on-screen and get a feel for what is happening to the music. Toggle the tick-box in the Equalizer panel “on” and “off” to compare your new settings to the unequalized version of the song.

Make your own Presets

At anytime you can drag the sliders up and down yourself to try and get a sound perfectly matched to the music you’re listening to (as you do so, the Preset dropdown will display Manual). If you create an EQ that you like, you can save it by selecting “Make Preset…” from the dropdown and choosing a name. Once you’ve made a preset, you can recall its particular combination of levels by clicking its entry in the dropdown menu. Or you can edit or rename the presets.

EQing Songs

So far i have explained using the Equalizer as a real-time tool, simply changing the settings and presets as you listen. But iTunes can do more than that: using the song information panels the program allows you to associate preset EQs with individual songs so that both iTunes and your iPod know exactly how you want to hear them.

First, in the Song List select the song, or songs, you want to add an EQ preset to and then choose “Get Info” from the File menu. Now simply choose the preset you want to use from the Equalizer Preset dropdown menu (found under Options when you are dealing with a single song).

And on to the Pod…

All your Equalizer presets and individual song associations are carried over to the iPod when you update, though you can manually select the preset you want to use from the EQ menu within the iPod’s main Setting menu. This is also the place to go to toggle the iPod’s Sound Check function “on” and “off”. However, the single best way to improve the sound that comes out of your iPod is to buy a good pair of sound-isolating headphones.

Other Sound Settings

Other than EQs, iTunes offers a couple of other sound-tweaking settings within the Audio pane of iTunes Preferences…

Sound Enhancer

In theory, when you set the Sound Enhancer to high you should notice a general improvement of the “presence” in the music you play. It’s tricky to quantify, but the sound should be brighter and the stereo separation really vivid. You may not like the effect – or not be able to tell the difference – but it’s certainly worth experimenting with, so check the box, slide the slider and see what you think.

Sound Enhancer is usually most beneficial for composed audio formats like MP3 and AAC, but you may also notice a difference with CD playback. The only real downside is that it can keep your computer’s processor pretty busy, which could result in glitches and skips if you don’t have a fast machine.

Sound Check

When Sound Check is on, iTunes attempts to play back songs at approximately the same volume level, so you shouldn’t have to keep turning the sound up and down as you jump around your collection. As more songs are added to your Library, oTunes recalculates its setting and stores the information in its database. It’s not perfect, and you may still notice discrepancies in loudness between different songs, especially where songs have been imported from a non-CD source. If particular tracks are still too quiet or loud, use the Volume Adjustment setting to bring them into line.

Simon has been writing articles for nearly 2 years. Come visit his latest website at http://1cupcoffeemaker.info/commercial-espresso-machines/ which helps people find the best information on commercial espresso machines.

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[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks]

[Posted by Mark Mulligan]

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US music subscription service MOG is set to launch in the UK by the end of the 2^ndquarter off the back of a 2^nd round of investment totaling $10
million.

As I posted earlier in the month, the music subscriptions space is going through an important period of transition.  It took much of the last decade to realize that the 9.99 premium rentals model was only ever going to appeal to a niche of music aficionados, and though global premium music subscribers total 8.25 million, we’re still no closer to mass market appeal for premium subscriptions.  And yet we have a host of new entrants including, MOG, Spotify Premium, We7 Premium, Sky Songs, Virgin Media etc etc.

So what’s changed? Well, both a little and a lot.

The niche audience is getting bigger. Firstly, the appeal for premium subscriptions is still a niche addressable audience of tech savvy music aficionados, but that audience is growing. It’s still far from mass market (and never will be) but it’s a more attractively scaled base now.  A few million per major music market perhaps. For a company like MOG that’s plenty enough addressable market. Also improvements in consumer technology and connectivity make it easier to deliver a high quality on-the-go cloud based experience, a crucial asset.

New routes to market. Perhaps the most important change though is that numerous new channel partners are emerging that can help shoulder the to-consumer cost.  ISPs, mobile operators, device manufacturers, even brands all are becoming realistic partners for subsidizing premium subscriptions, in turn reducing the price point to an extent where appeal is much broader.  The music industry is waking up to the fact
that a recurring household music purchasing relationship is much more valuable and secure than ad hoc individual spending and illegal downloading.

MOG has an additional crucial asset: the service is inherently social.  Regular readers will recall that I posted about the concept of ‘putting the crowd in the cloud’, that social interconnectivity in cloud based services will become a crucial component of music discovery and engagement. MOG joins those dots.

Those assets alone though may not be enough. If MOG is to steal serious market share in the UK it will do well to investigate the unique
range telco partnership opportunities that the UK presents due to the government’s strong(ish) stance on making telcos partners in tackling music piracy. A subsidized MOG service from BT, integrated into their IPTV boxes and xBoxes, for example, would be a really enticing prospect.

(And a sign of the times, MOG is being talked about as a potential ‘Spotify-killer’….whatever happened to being an ‘iTunes-killer’…they’re still the ones that own three quarters of the premium digital music business…)

This week contributing member Howard S. shares his thoughts on sound.

What happened to sound…

I have always been a music fan. I like listening to it when I work; it paces me. I’ve been doing much more listening lately because I’m in the process of writing a book. And I’ve been expanding my music library like crazy lately because I live around the corner from the Mercer County Library and have been checking out CDs to burn into my iTunes library.

My preferred method for listening is through my iPod headphones plugged in to the back of my Mac. This morning I was listening to the CD “Centerfield” by John Fogerty, taken from my iTunes library. And the sound of the record really hit me; it annoyed me how it just doesn’t match up to how I’ve heard this album in the past.

No matter how I adjusted the iTunes equalizer, I could not get things to sound right. The sound is completely flat – no dimension. I haven’t reached the point of being a complete audiophile in that I can tell the difference between the “warm” sound of vinyl vs. the “flat” sound of digital music, but I’m starting to get there.

It is pretty amazing. We’ve traded sound quality for pure convenience. Maybe there are digital formats for music that place more emphasis on sound quality, but the file sizes seem huge and the sources don’t seem that accessible.

I can remember buying stereo equipment, speakers, tape players, turntables, and a decent receiver/amp combo and being thrilled at how I could turn things up and make the walls of my room shake. Then one day, you wake up, you listen to something you’ve heard a million times through these tiny “ear buds” and you say to yourself…

What the fuck happened to THE SOUND?

I’m a fan of author Michael Chabon, who wrote The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh among other books. On his Web site, Chabon has a short essay which really captures what all this talk about sound means. http://www.michaelchabon.com/Michael_Chabon/Bonus_Track_2.html

Thanks Howard for writing in…. Let us know what you think, in the comment section.