"High-Def" music service announced
MusicGiants, a privately funded company, today announced a new music download service that wants to find its place in the market by offering higher-quality music tracks than what is available from other services such as iTunes and Napster. Digital audio files are offered in WMA "lossless" encoding, representing bit rates ranging from 470 to 1100 kbps. Traditional music download services sell tracks in 128 to 256 kbps quality.
The music catalog should be fairly complete as far as popular music is concerned. MusicGiants said that it has licensed its "hundreds of thousands" of titles from EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. The step-up in quality does not come for free. MusicGiants requires users to pay an annual $50 fee upfront, which is credited towards music purchases. Instead of the common $0.99 per track, MusicGiants charges $1.29 for each file, a 30 percent price hike that may be justifiable for some users because of the higher audio quality of the content.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
![RTX 5090 Gallery Shot](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/WUFMBny8Mp9idMH79kLr7C-840-80.jpg)
RTX 5090D tested with nine-years-old Xeon CPU that cost $7 — it does surprisingly well in some games, if you enable MFG
![A Maingear Zero Series desktop PC.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ozqDihdWshdHA5AE2Mfu3g-840-80.jpg)
Threadripper 7000 is the most reliable CPU as per Puget Systems stats — Nvidia RTX Ada Generation GPUs have the lowest failure rates
![Intel](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/fJDMeVAgTgJrUtvsaJJdYe-840-80.jpg)
Intel Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake CPU specs break cover — leak suggests up to 16 CPU cores and 180 total AI TOPS