Bit Rate Balderdash

Michael Gartenberg | July 07, 2004, 09:43 AM

There's a lot of confusion around some of Sony's claims about it's new music player. I have already discussed the issue that the player will not support MP3 files natively but rather must convert songs into ATRAC format prior to transfer to the device. Well, Sony is also touting the fact that their device can hold significantly more songs than the equivalent capacity iPod or other music player. That's true technically but only because Sony is measuring using songs encoded at a bitrate of 48kbps per second, well below what anyone would encode their music at (Sony's music store encodes songs at 132kbps). Apple on the other hand uses a more realistic setting of 128kbs per second as the measure for capacity (as that's what iTunes music store files are encoded in). Bottom line, if you encode your music at similar bitrates, you'll end up with the same rough capacity. There's going to be a lot of consumer backlash over this and the bottom line is, caveat emptor.