With the switch to digital distribution, there are several things missing that I would like to see corrected.
- Liner notes. The digital music package should include both a cover art image as well as either a PDF file with the liner notes insert or HTML equivalent.
- Cover Art. I haven't seen a problem with this, but the cover art is an absolute requirement.
- Playlist file. If the music files are meant to be played, they should include a playlist file such as M3U. This is a nice-to-have feature.
- ID3 tags. I have seen MP3 files that do not include information such as title of the song, artist, track, attached to the file. This is commonly known as meta-data. If the files do not have ID3 tags, then the user won't be able to identify the album, track, or artist when the songs plays on the music player.
- Multiple formats:
- MP3 with 320 kbps bitrate is absolute minimum.
- Wav file is useful to avoid any kind of loss, but Wav files are huge.
- Flac file format is a compressed kind of wav file. Flac offers the same lossless nature of Wav files at 66% to 50% of the size of the original Wav files. The downside is that Flac files are also huge in comparison to lossy formats like mp3 and AAC.
- Mpeg 4 Audio (M4a-AAC) is the standard format for Apple iPod devices and is supported by iTunes. There are two distinct subtypes of Mpeg 4 audio: enclosed in Mpeg wrapper (M4a) and enclosed in native AAC ADTS wrapper (AAC).
- Note: DRM generally won't impress music buyers.
- Song names that naturally sort in play order: "nn - title.mp3" is one good example, where nn is the track number and title is the name of the song. If the track number is not a part of the name of the song, it makes it difficult to play the tracks in the proper sequence, unless you have a playlist file. Playlist files were my item #3 above.
- Accepting payments with PayPal is nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment