Digital music purchases have already become the most common way for people to get albums or individual songs, but as a result, the quality of those tracks has unfortunately declined. A new project called PonoMusic, which is backed by Neil Young, hopes to change that by combining high-quality and digital to create a better listening experience.
People will be able to purchase the original high-quality master recordings of songs on the PonoMusic store and then listen to them on the PonoPlayer, both of which are being funded and supported on Kickstarter.
We are pursuing this vision by building a system for the entire music listening experience – from the original master recordings to the PonoMusic.com Store to the portable PonoPlayer. So now you’ll hear the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo – the texture and the emotion of the music the artist worked so hard to create. – PonoMusic
Whether it was the internet’s love of music or its love of Neil Young (probably the former), the Kickstarter project reached its $800,000 goal within one day of going live. Since then, it has continued to rise past $1 million and currently sits at $1.27 million.
All of the music that is purchased through Pono will be in the FLAC audio format. This means that the quality of the music will be much better than regular MP3 tracks, however the size of each file will also larger.
The PonoMusic store is pretty straightforward and will allow people to purchase and download high-resolution songs. Once the songs are on a Mac or Windows computer, they can be loaded onto the PonoPlayer.
Even though the music is stored on a small device, the quality is the same and in order to make sure that is true during different forms of output, there are two output jacks on the device. One will be used for personal listening through headphones while the other is specifically meant for plugging in the PonoPlayer to an audio system.
Summary: The PonoMusic kickstarter project has already reached its $800K goal within one day of launching. Pono is meant to provide high-quality digital music through its own store and music player.
Image Credit: exclaim