Radiohead “In Rainbows” Update
posted in Business, Music, Technology |Got the link in my email this morning. The download went flawlessly, all the concerns about Radiohead being able to deal with the infrastructure seemed unfounded. To be honest, it went more smoothly than my Amazon mp3 download experience since Radiohead just sent out customized links and didn’t try to do some wacky “you can only download once and you are screwed if the download fails” sort of thing. Its amazing how people can just make things more complicated for themselves (and their customers!) in unnecessary ways… I wonder if Amazon should try to block TCP-level retransmits to make sure you receive each packet only once?
Two things that could have been better- I wish the files were encoded at more than 160kbps. Its better than 128kbps but I’d rather see 256-320kbps to get much closer to lossless quality. I would have expected that with the band managing the process they would have cared about making sure their “product” was at the best quality possible, but then again most people won’t notice or care and I suppose it does preserve some value for people who buy the physical CD.
I also wish they had included some album-art files. Its nice to have them in Explorer / the Media Library and too bad they didn’t just include a few of the correctly named JPG files.
The music? Its almost beside the point right? Listening to it now. In any case the last few Radiohead albums took me a few play-throughs to get into so I’ll wait a week or so before making up my mind.