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Apple to Launch Music Service?
discstickers writes "The San Jose Mercury News is running an article about an Apple music service that might be ready to launch next month. $.99 a song with the ability to burn to CD doesn't sound too bad."
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But if you burn it to CD, will you be able to still listen to it on your iPod. (without ripping that song back from the CDR)
From the LA Times:
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Basically, I'll believe it when I see it, and even then I won't be able to buy in because I don't have a Mac. Has one of these services so far failed to disappoint?
when CDs can often be found for $10-12 or even less
Not sure where you're shopping, but popular CDs are running $14.99 around here (DC area) - you have to go to the used CD stores or the bargain bins to get down into the $10 range - and the used stores are only $2 or so cheaper than the new ones around here.
Besides, when was the last time you bought an album for the album and not just a couple of songs? Meatloaf? Pink Floyd? There aren't that manny artists producing thematic albums, instead of "compilations of 3-5 minute songs we just wrote."
I'd pay $0.99 a track to create my own version of someone's Greatest Hits.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
Why not go make a subscription to emusic instead?
:)
15 bucks a month with unlimited downloading of mp3s that you can burn. A much better deal
(shameless plug)
if you want to use a GTK2 Emusic album downloader that I wrote, Hot Lead
http://www.emusic.com
arcane for life
The files will be in AAC format according to other reports. Quicktime handles it and so will the next iTunes (and therefore the Mac iPod). So if you have an AAC decoder/player you should be in luck, but there is no indication that the files will be converted into MP3 via iPod or iTunes.
The LA Times article says that the AAC files can be DRM locked, but that Apple has required that they can be burned onto a CD, which would unlock them.
Or for that matter, music selection. It only mentions that it will only be available to people with Mac AND iPOD, whatever that means. Where did the poster get this information? We really need to have a moderation system for articles, with karma influencing bonus @slashdot or something.
Here in Canada we can now make copies of CDs legally. I borrow my friends CD, copy it, and give it back to him. My copy is perfectly legal thanks to the blank media levy that was introduced. I'm not sure it's worth it, though.
There is already a great program for downloading movies and music on the mac. It's called Giftbox. Giftbox utilizes the openFT protocol. This thing is fast like the fasttrack protocol used in Kazaa, but is opensource. It is still in beta now, but it is the best file sharing client available for the mac. Better than limewire, aquasition, and iswipe. It's free and fast. A network supported by apple will not be necessary with the openFT network out there.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
Key difference: Listen.com requires windows. Apple is doing this to make an apple version, because there has been little effort on the part of 3rd parties to cater to apple users.
You say
For those who are interested, AAC is the "Advanced Audio Coding" codec, and apparantly a Dolby standard. It's the same format that BMG and Universal are using for their online downloads, and it claims to have better audio quality than MP3 while using 1/3 the space.
It does contain DRM tech to prevent copying. There appear to be a number of portable digital music players that support it, such as the Panasonic SV-SD80 and the Nokia Music Player.
For more info, see the AAC homepage and a Google cache of Dolby's announcement regarding BMG and Universal.
Personally, I'd rather see FLAC or some other lossless encoding available. But that'd give them DRM nightmares (burn it to CD as CD-A and the DRM is gone, but you can recreate the song perfectly - no transcoding issues). Oh well. They'll eventually get there.
Yes, using third party software. Go to www.versiontracker.com and type in "iPod"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Yup, great point. As an example, Limewire is available for the Mac and they don't bother to install any extra crud either, they just nag you now and then to buy the pro version.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I don't know what to tell you, man. I've got the latest QuickTime running on my PC at work (Athlon 1.8Ghz w/XP and QT 6.0) and it has only asked me the upgrade thing once. It's not as elegant in operation as the Mac one, I'll grant you, but it's hardly the catastrophe you make it out to be.
It could be that you blew through the intaller, pounding Enter past the screen where it explicitly asks you how you want to map things. You also missed the control panel where you can set it after the fact. It's in the system tray usually upon install.
And, what's the problem with the interface? Pretty straightforward, don't you think? Did you miss Play, Skip back/forward, pause, volume? Worse, do you like the Windows Media Player, which is more like the mess you describe?
QuickTime was a real pig on Windows around v3-4 (some of which might be MS's fault), but it's really not a problem now.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
You can buy burnable tracks from Liquid Audio right now for $.99 per song or $10 per album:
http://store.liquid.com
The tracks are (unfortunately) only in WMA and Liquid Audio formats. Still, I think this is a good deal.
AAC (it's known as mp4 because it's the "official" baseline audio standard for the MPEG-4 bitstream) is worse than LAME 3.91 encoded mp3 at high bitrates, even the high complexity branch, especially with VBR streams which AAC can't really do well - at ~256kbps you'd be better off with Ogg Vorbis (if you can tell the difference at -q8 or even -q7 (224kbps nominal) in an ABX double-blind test, it's a bug, report it), mp2 (you know, MPEG-1 audio layer II, as seen on VCDs, only at a higher bitrate?) or, even better, MPC (based loosely off of MPEG-1 audio layer II then improved, currently reaches perceptually lossless at lower bitrates than any other codec, although because of its piebald heritage, patent issues cloud its adoption -and it stinks at low bitrates, which it wasn't designed for).
AAC beats mp3 by only about 10-20% in listening tests - it's trounced by RealAudio 9 (at very low bitrates), WMA7 (at high bitrates), WMA8 (at low bitrates only thanks to a bug that causes the "metal" sound), WMA9 (at all bitrates, particularly good for classical), WMA9 Pro (160kbps is its bottom end and it does hyperstereo better than anything else until Vorbis gets n-channel coupling), mp3pro (at low bitrates, noticably warmer than the original though), MPC (at high bitrates) and Ogg Vorbis, which happily poops all over both AAC and MP3 (and I'd put them in the same class) at all bitrates and gives all the others at least a run for their money.
Note that this is the best case. There are a lot of frightfully bad AAC encoders, and only really one or maybe two good ones. Use a bad encoder, and- seriously - you'd have been better off with Xing.
AAC was tuned for the 32-64kbps per channel range, not the high fidelity range. And the only codecs that are really noticeably better than MP3 at high bitrates are MPC, MP2 and maybe, maybe Vorbis - there's little or no difference between most of them at the high end, it's at the 64kbps per channel range and below that the codecs' relative qualities start to separate them...
If you had RTFA, you would have realized that the article doesn't mention any price. The $.99/song price tag is a mere guess/wish by the story submitter.
This was news in December when an Apple employee leaked the information in a Slashdot forum post.
I wonder if he's still around?
You are correct about the audible.com encrypted downloads.
.aa file. A dialogue popped up, I provided my audible.com username and password, and the files were decrypted and available to iTunes.
.tar file of the .aa files.
.aa files and imported them into the iTunes on my laptop. Same dialog, same username and password. No network connection.
I created an audible.com account, supplying a username and password. Then I bought the three volumes of "Learn Japanese in Your Car," (I guess "Learn Japanese on the Plane" just doesn't sound as catchy...) downloading the @47MB files in MP3 format, which were actually stored locally as "x_mp332.aa" files, where "x" was the selection name.
From within iTunes, I selected "File->Import..." and selected the
Next, I activated the Software Base Station option on my tower, brought my TiBook laptop within range, did "arp -a" to find the IP address of the Tower, and scp'd over a
Later, with the Software Base Station disabled, I untarred the
The only complaint that I have about the audible.com content is that it doesn't fit nicely into the "artist/album" views for sorting data. I found it useful to make a new playlist for the audible content, so that I could find it again without too much searching.
This will be great.
/. crowd is one of the major proponents of on-line distribution-
Here's something to keep in mind. Which labels will Apple be able to distribute using this service?
Music is distributed on a label basis, not an artist basis, (at least for "signed" artists), so if Virgin doesn't sign on to join the service, you can't download willy nilly from the Virgin catalog (which mostly sucks ass anyway it seems).
You may be able to get a couple tracks from their current flavor of the week, but not something that was done a couple years ago probably.
But, never mind that, here's a more important question, given that the
"When was the last time you actually bought music from an on-line service such as mp3.com?"
And yes, you can buy "signed artist" music, and not just indie music from some of these existing services.
Just once, I'd like it if someone called me "Sir".
Without adding, "You're creating a scene."