Jobs and I Were Working on New iPod, Says Neil Young
Legendary rocker Neil Young said that he was working with the late Apple, Inc. (NYSE:AAPL) chief Steve Jobs in developing a new iPod.
Neil Young took his campaign for better and innovative digital sounds on the stage of the D: Dive Into Media Technology Conference saying that Jobs and he were developing a follow up device for the iPod that enables listening to "high resolution audio."
Although he still prefers to listen to vinyl records, Young said he and Jobs both felt a need for high-quality listening formats for digital audiophiles. They met to work on a new device that can store large music files. Young said that since Jobs' death in October, there has no further work on the project.
Neil Young said MP3s and other compressed music formats cannot embody the whole music experience. CDs offer only 15 percent and MP3s 5 percent of the original sound recording, he said, and digitization of sound should improve it and not degrade it.
Thus, Young calls for devices that improve the standards for high quality audio files. However, the main obstacle to the realization of this dream is the downloading time. Audiophile-quality songs took 30 minutes or so to download and have large file size. Most players are equipped with memory that can hold up to 30 albums only.
"I have to believe if [Jobs] lived long enough he would have tried to do what I'm trying to do," Young said.
There has been no confirmation of Young's claim from Apple. The singer is currently working on his two new albums with his band Crazy Horse.