Neil Young appears at the D: Dive Into Media conference at Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in Southern California on Jan. 31, 2012. The event was sponsored by Dow Jones. - Provided courtesy of D: Dive Into Media / Dow Jones

Neil Young: Steve Jobs listened to vinyl

Get more: Music

02/01/2012 by Nichole Hamilton

Legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young says the late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, maker of the iPod, shared his love for vinyl records.

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Young, known for hits such as "Rockin' in the Free World," says the quality of the sound of today's digital music files is lower than that of hard copies of albums. The 66-year-old Canadian rocker says he had once spoken to Jobs about the idea of creating a new audio format that would preserve original recordings better. The Apple co-founder died of cancer at age 56 in October 2011.

"Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music and his legacy is tremendous but when he went home, he listened to vinyl," Young said at the D: Dive Into Media conference at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in Southern California on Tuesday, January 31, as seen in a video posted on the MarketWatch website. "And you gotta believe that if he'd lived long enough, he would have eventually have done what I'm trying to do."

Young said "some rich guy" should back the production of "a modern-day iPod for the 21st century," which would be the size of an iPhone and able to store about 30 albums.

"I talked to Steve about it," he said. "We were working on it."

When asked "what was going on" regarding the idea following Jobs' death, Young said: "Not much."

Young was a folk rock trailblazer in the 1970s and his music has been featured in a number of films, such as "Jerry Maguire, "Almost Famous," "American Beauty" and "Eat Pray Love." He released his first album, "Neil Young," in 1968 and won two Grammys, in 2009 and 2009.

"My goal is to try to rescue the art form I have been practicing for the past 50 years," Young said at the conference. "We only have five percent of the content in the music that we used to have in the mainstream. It's not that digital is bad or inferior, it's that the way it's being used is not sufficient to transfer the depth of the art."

Apple reps have not commented about Young's remarks. Under the leadership of Jobs, the technology giant released products such as iPod portable music players, as well as Macbook computers and iPad tablets, which can also play songs. Digital music files, such as MP3s, are made up of compressed data and can be transferred to a computer from CDs through a process called ripping.

Young said it should ideally take 30 minutes to download a song using the new technology he says he and Jobs talked about. Today, with high-speed internet, downloading a five-minute track can take seconds.

"I'm hoping that some people who want the high-res would have the choice of buying it," he said.

After his death, Jobs was mourned by millions, including celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Charlize Theron, who called him a "true visionary."