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Apple Introduces iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4, new iPod
The store also offers exclusive music, music videos, and other multimedia, all in the main iTunes window. iTunes 4 will be available now (along with QuickTime 6.2), and the music store will be available today. It is Mac-only now, but will be available for Windows by the end of the year.
As a compromise to help prevent piracy, you must change your playlist every 10 CD burns, and you may share the music with only three other Macs (you may modify the list of computers that the music may be shared with at any time). There was no word on the technology used to handle this DRM.
The iTunes playlist sharing allows sharing of playlists, and the streaming of music from one machine to the other, though copying is not supported ("that would be verboten," Jobs added).
The new iPods will be $299 (10GB), $399 (15GB), and $499 (30GB). The dock holds the iPod upright, and has a line-out. The FireWire port is now on the bottom of the unit, and the buttons have been moved up higher, just below the screen, in a row. The improved screen features a backlight. The new units will be in Apple stores on Friday.
suck it!
Will all be by hippy favorites such as the Grateful Dead and Phish. Damn dirty hippies.
I'm going to ask the question everyone was thinking but didn't want to ask: when will this be available for porn?
Why don't they just buy a record label and be done with it?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Its about time someone started selling music the way people want it... one song at a time. Even better that its from a cool company like Apple.
Reality has a liberal bias
Thats a very small 30 gig drive. Hmmm... the 5 gig model might be in my price range now...
I love singles and think paying $20 for an album with just one good single is silly.
If I owned a mac I would support Apple just to show the RIAA what consumers really want. DRM will not help but more modest pricing.
I do wonder how many record labels are signing up with this service though? They make money ripping people off and this may cut into their profits.
http://saveie6.com/
At $0.99 (US) a song, this is still expensive, considering you still don't get original quality of the song (yeah yeah, sounds the exact same, blah blah; but there are times it's better to have the hi-quality original then a compressed format when doing editings, etc...), or a physical media, or the physical cover/lyrics, all in a jewel case...
Considering I'd have to add another $0.25 (I'm guessing here, I'm in Canada) for a CD-R, I still would be missing 2 things above at the same cost, especially considering some CDs have 'extras', which I do like. The 'convenience' factor doesn't make up for that either; I can still just drop by the retail shop next door when doing my grocery shopping (or the used store across the street).
If it was 2/3 that price, then I'd definitely say it's worth it. But for now, I think they missed their own mark.
I'll pass for now.
AC comments get piped to
Wow, my government denies me civil liberties and the world is on the brink of WW3. But Apple introduced iTunes, so there's nothing to worry about! Love it or leave it, hippies.
this is such a painfully obvious compromise, why has the music industry been such a grinch about it?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Apple has some more shiny widgets to try and hock?
Wow. That's certainly deserving of all the hype. A new iPod. Woooooo
BTW, I can pay an average of a buck a song at Best Buy and not be saddled with a crippled and lesser quality copy.
some cd's have intro or little skit song throughout the cd. i don't wan to have to pay $1 for a 30 second intro or skit. of course i don't have to, but then again i will never have the entire cd. for a cd that is 60 mins but 20 tracks it is a bit much. still worth just ordering online and paying shipping.
a per mb or per song minute charge would take care of this. or at least special pricing if you want an entire cd. i guess this is more for people who are just d/l'ing a few songs not the entire cd.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
What's wrong with OGG?
Oh, this is meant for people buying Apple computers. Nevermind then.
Hackers announce breaking Apple DRM, details to follow.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
How appropriate that Jobs played "Changes" by Bowie. This is a great day for music lovers, and more importantly, for the musicans themselves. Finally a system that with fairly lax restrictions, and they signed agreements with ALL FIVE of the biggest record compants.
My only concern is that Apple come up with a system by which smaller labels (which comprise 90% of my music) can participate, labels like Saddle Creek, Arena Rock, Vagrant, Kill Rock Stars, Tooth and Nail, etc....
Overall, I am thrilled, Apple may be a corporatation, but I do believe they are the least evil of the big ones.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Will artists be able to place their music on the iTunes Music Store on their own, independently of a recording company?
If so, then this could be absolutely huge for independent artists. :)
0.50 per song and under and I'd say its good but thats too expensive.
Also why no wireless features? If I have to go online to get my music why shouldnt I juse use Kazaa? I want to be able to download music while I'm walking around outside.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
$0.99 USD Is too pricy. It is more than the cost of the average cd and the AAC encoding is a lossy format. Perhaps if they offer better deals on albums or bulk songs this is a good deal. As it stands, music is too expensive already.
This looks like a nice stand politically, but its really just a chance to gouge the consumer market as the first big dog in.
Besides, I'm of the, "Go to my concert, I'll give you the CD" philosophy.
Rob
play bought tunes on a non-iPod player such as Archos or Rio
stream bought tunes to a SliMP3 or Audiotron
play bought tunes on your Windows or Linux PC
burn bought tunes on an MP3-CD for use in the car or a DVD player
switch to another client other than iTunes (e.g. Audion) for your Mac music experience
broadcast bought tunes using Shoutcast
So, despite the convenience, I think it will not compare to either ripping CDs or downloading from less-than-legal services. Too bad.
sulli
RTFJ.
Quote from the website:
"The iTunes Music Store is only available in the U.S."
Interesting how they say "in the U.S.", and not "to U.S. customers". Does this mean it does some sort of IP check and won't allow you to enter based on that?
Either way, Canadians are shut out yet again. Shit... first Tivo, now this.
Anybody remember this? Seems like he knew exactly what he was talking about.
How long before someone comes out with an ACC to MP3 or ACC to OGG converter?
...what? Service available only in the U.S.? NOOOOooooo!
Seriously now, I was ready with my credit card to sign up for this service but will probably have to wait ages while the Canadian subsidiaries and industry groups resolve their differences to get this service rolling in Canada. I honestly think that Apple has added enough value over regular P2P or IRC mp3 mining to make me change my habits. I guess I'll either have to wait for Canadian service or get access to an American-based credit card somehow.
Was there any mention about the rumors of Apple picking up Universal?
I listen to all my music in .ogg format. I download for free to try em out (usually mp3 cause all the assholes on those services never have .oggs), and if I like what I hear, I buy the cd and rip to oggs. I'm not going to pay to get a digital only copy of something.
Well, now there is a legitimate way to purchase just an individual song. Now, slashdotters will have to admit they're stealing. If P2P file swapping continues, the MPAA will probably (successfully :() lobby congress to make it
illegal, and easier to prosecute.
I can't find it in the article, I'll read it again, it was probably obvious....Does Apple get a cut of that buck?
I don't would dig to start da holy war in da house, but wus da deal wiv yous mac fanatics? i've bin sittin in da house hat me freelance gig in front hof da mac (a 8600/300 w/64 megs hof ram) fe about 20 minutes now while hit attempts to copy da 17 meg file from one folda on da ard drive to anotha folda. 20 minutes. hat turf, on me pentium pro 200 runnin nt 4, which by all standards should be nuff slowa dan dis mac, da same operashun would take about 2 minutes. if dat. in addishun, durin dis file transfa, netscape iz gonna not wurk. an' everythin else has ground to da halt. evun bbedit lite iz strainin to keep up as I type dis. i won't bore yous wiv da laundry list hof uva problems dat i've encountered while workin' on various macs, but suffice hit to say dere as bin many, not da least hof which iz i've neva seun da mac dat has run fasta dan its wintel counterpart, despite da macs' fasta chip architecture. me 486/66 wiv 8 megs hof ram runs fasta dan dis 300 mhz machine hat times. from da productivity standpoint, I don't get how peeps can claim dat da macintosh iz da superior machine. mac addicts, flame me if you'd dig, but i'd ratha hear some brainiest reasons why anyone would choose to use da mac ova uva fasta, cheapa, more stable systems. Is it coz I is black?
So, where was Microsoft in all this? Or are they still waiting for Apple to succesfully implement DRM so they can copy it, too?
Seems strange to me that Apple can actually come up with a workable DRM while Microsoft is still sitting on their hands.
I think the time is coming when DRM will be a reality for every computer user, whether we like it or not. However, it's good to see that at least one company is using DRM in such a manner that protects the artists without diminishing our fair use rights. I don't mind DRM as much as I mind giving up my freedoms. Hopefully, Apple will continue to strike the correct balance between protecting the artists and making content available.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Thats too expensive. Sorry but I'm already priced out of that market. No song is worth $1.
I wont pay more than 0.50 for any song. Especially a 128bitrate song, that should be 25 cent.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You can go ahead and say "Oh, but all my 128kbps MP3s sound just as good as the CDs", but chances are, you're wrong. Anybody with anything better than cheapo computer speakers or $5 headphones they got for free in a box of Cracker Jacks is able to hear an enormous difference. It is especially bad if you have high fidelity audiophile gear. For example, the vibration dampers and $1000 cables I bought for my Bose speakers aren't going to help that much when the source material is total shit. Isn't this supposed to be Apple's target market, anyway? You know - the artsy types who care about things like well-rendered fonts and high-quality sound? What are they thinking?
Not to mention the DRM restrictions that Apple is imposing. I thought we had decided that Apple wasn't going to do DRM? It sure looked like it, but then here we are, looking at Apple supporting and using DRM in one of its premiere applications. Do you feel betrayed yet?
The only way that Apple could even begin to make this all acceptable would be to offer the music for $0.25US/track at 320kbps quality. Sure, it still won't really approach CD quality, but at least you won't be charged an arm and a leg for substandard music.
--sdem
Old iPod: Built-in rechargeable lithium polymer battery (1200 mAh), 10 hours of use.
New iPod: Built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery (630 mAh), 8 hours of use.
Pretty impressive reduction of power usage.
At 8-14 tracks average per CD, going to Sam Goody and buying a disc costs the consumer somewhere between $1 and $2 per track. For them to charge anywhere near that price range for degraded-quality, use-limited, non-physical, no-cover-art-and-liner-notes-having version of the same content is ridiculous.
Additionally, with a pricing scheme like this, you end up paying the same price for a 20-second interlude skit between songs as you do for a 20-minute jam band improv. It's not equal value across the board.
I believe the Magic Price Point for downloadable music is closer to 10 cents/minute. Until legitimate downloads become TRULY affordable, and have a selection comparable to what's out there on Kazaa right now, most people will continue to steal music instead of buying it.
Sorry Apple. I'm not willing to put up with this sort of restrictions on use. I am not willing to comprimise on this. I will pay for music that is a master quality copy (read CD-Audio or better) without additional technology restrictions on use. Anything less is of little value to me, especially not some random DRM encumbered format that no one uses. I don't care if it is "better" sounding than MP3, it still isn't good.
$0.99 a track is a bit steep IMO even for a master track but for a DRM encumbered, non-standard compressed format it simply is not good value for my money. DRM with a crappy format moves the decimal point on what I'm willing to pay at least one digit to the left.
... would be 'music to my ears'. instead, its just more 'spend too much $$$ on stuff w/ an apple logo, even though you can get the same exact stuff elsewhere for much, much less $$$'.
yea apple. you go with your bad self.
Am I the only one who feels 99 per song is a rip-off? Yes, it is wonderful that you get full rights to the song, but it's AAC... 128k AAC I may add.
:)
Their marketing people now have two problems. 128k AAC is still better than 128k MP3, but how many people are going to believe that when most people assume that a 2ghz Pentium is faster than an AMD processor running at a lower clock speed? Second, who is going to pay 99 for something they can get for free on Gnutella?
Sure, some people will pay for the convenience of downloading very simply from the iTunes Music Store.
I will not be one of those people.
I *still* won't buy unless I know how much money is going to the artists, and how much everyone else gets. I've been boycotting the music industry for almost three years now, and this doesn't look compelling to me. Anyone else agree?
Oh, and before I hear a bunch of people calling me a cheapskate, I have a good collection of DVDs and an Apple Computer. I'd assume most cheapskates have a thriving collection of VCDs and a Windows PC... not to stereotype or anything...
and 7500 songs on the new iPod = Profit!
... is how long will it be before someone wants to unlock their legally purchased AAC music and writes "unfuckAAC"?
<Speculation>But then again, maybe most Macheads won't care...</Speculation>
-- Shamus
Bleah!
Artists like Brittney, who have 1 hit and then poop out 12 extra tracks to fill a 11$ CD, will now only get 1$ income. :-)
If made-up artists want to sell as much as they do now, the overall quality will have to increase
Applemusic guarantees quality poop all the way
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The killer part of this deal is the integration in iTunes .. forget everything else. That's what will make it succeed. Why would you bother hunting down a track on P2P when it's right THERE.
.. will this service cater to my tastes or it will it be a glitzy shopping mall piled to the ceiling with crap I try and avoid?
I don't listen to U2 or Eminememem. I listen mostly to stuff on indie labels like Warp or Projekt (those are "big" indies but I listen to even smaller ones like planet mu or schematic or "dude in his bedroom with a burner")
Will it be possible to play/stream to my Linux box or my Zaurus handheld? That's where I usually listen to my MP3s even though the interface (xmms, tkcPlayer, etc) are pure crap compared to iTunes.
AAC player for Linux? What is AAC? I that was a bad format (as in DRM bad).
Will I be able to give copies to my friends as I do my physical CDs? I guess I would just burn a copy? That's probably the best way anyway. They are probably watermarked or something evil.
Anyway, I'll definitely be taking advantage of this for the occasional mainstream single I want to hear, though if it's all mainstream stuff I probably won't be using it much.
If I can't play them on Linux though I'll probably not use it and stick with P2P and emusic (emusic ROCKS for jazz and non-mainstream stuff).
Any word on pricing per album? .99 a song is cool if I only want a few songs but it becomes moot if an album is 15 songs. Also, I'd really like it if they would rapidly introduce the stuff you don't hear on radio. I'm tired of all the music I want being a special order.
-
Apple continues its tradition of repackaging old technology in a proprietary wrapper and calling it "innovation". Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field(tm) is still operating at full power.
I applaud anyone brave (or foolish) enough to try the pay-for-content model. Anything that subverts the traditional entertainment monopoly distribution mafia is noble, but if you're going to charge someone for something, you have to make the product unique or better than what people can currently obtain for less. 128k is a joke. At least offer full 44.1 CD-quality tracks at the price you're charging - that's something worth buying. Re-assign some of your engineers which are busy working on the next proprietary peripheral plug, and have them focus on a way of delivering high quality audio with less bandwidth. Then you have something worth paying for.
for a whole album theres a discount, its only $9.99 no word if its all albums (like double, etc)
service will be expanded past US once they get the deals
itunes4 or at least the music service will be available for windows by the end of the year
also has live, spoken word, and video content plus some prev. unreleased or rare content from bands like sum 41 and U2
99 cents per song? That's still $14 for a 14-track CD, and they don't even have the cost of shipping, making cardboard inserts, or burning it to CD (you do that yourself). This will not be viable until it drops to less than 50 cents per song. It is as if they want to doom the pay-download services to failure. I'll stick to Kazaa Lite.
Looks like apple is finally just starting to catch up with Microsoft with their addition of solitare to the iPod.
;)
Apple: "Riding on Microsoft's coat tails yet again"
Why downgrade quality and pay the same price?
Dont accept this $1 a song crap, thats still ripping us off, 0.50 a song is fair, about the price of a bag of chips.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is a great idea, too bad it is on such a faggy OS. I fire up the ol' mac whenever I need to get in touch with my feminine side.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
By all means, then, go do it. Not everybody uses Grocery Gateway, either.
hell, not everybody uses Linux, but i'm thinking it's nice to have alternatives.
You don't need Geeksintraining if you're on Slashdot.
if you don't have any CD's to rip...
Unlimited CD burning for personal use? In other words, it's pretty simple to turn an AAC into an mp3. At worst, you'll be able to burn to CD and then convert back from cda to mp3. Or ogg, or whatever your personal preference for non-DRM-restricted music is. Hopefully somebody can make a direct converter without the intermediate CD burning step.
This could be a huge boon for Gnutella. Just think, a check box that says "Go ahead, take this directory full of AAC files, transform them to mp3s, and share them." There would finally be a standardized high-quality mp3 version of any given song. No more downloading 5 different copies of a song and deleting the ones with hisses and clicks, or Madonna complaining about how evil I am.
I don't understand how DRM can coexist with the ability to burn music to a CD. To me, this is the reason that DRM will never be able to create a music-downloading service that everybody likes and that the big music companies make a lot of money off of. The only way for them to have a service that everybody uses is if it's so cheap it's not worth the extra hassle to do P2P.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
"The iTunes Music Store is only available in the U.S" (http://www.apple.com/music/store/)
Oh well. Back to P2P for me then.
(Note - The above is a joke. Well, both bit's are a joke really. When will US media companies learn that breaking the world into regions is a terrible idea?).
With a broadband connection and a decent speed burner...MOST people could have the song downloaded and burned to a CD BEFORE you get your keys in the ignition.
SO you say? Well, you could be listening to the song ON THE WAY to the grocery store.
Add to the fact that its likely that you would have to stand in line at the music store AND, oh yeah, you would still be paying $10 or up for that physical CD.
Oh, and you go to the grocery store EVERY day, too, right???
Really, this isn't more convenient???
(BTW, I am saying all this given the facts that I don't have ANY of the things mentioned-high speed ISP, burner, or an Apple. But IF I did, I would find this DAMN convenient)
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I was watching the webcast.. He did mention that you could buy the entire album at a flat rate.. (Like Alanis Morisette Jagged Little Pill was displayed for $9.95)
Personally with this kinda flexibility.. I think it all works out.. $.99 for a song.. your normal ~$15 for an album.. *shrug* and you don't have to search for the music on kazaa, or drive to the store to buy it..
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
"Well, now there is a legitimate way to purchase just an individual song. Now, slashdotters will have to admit they're stealing."
It is impossible to steal by downloading a song. Or two. Or 100. It just does not meet the definition of actual theft. How can it, when nothing is stolen. It might be copyright infringement, but it is not theft, arson, carjacking, or murder.
Now they have Solitaire, semi-pda applications, and a dock in the iPod. That is the mp3 player to get. Amazingly it's also smaller then the old one.
Now the semi-pda apps, are neat but no replacement for a REAL pda if you need that. All it has is a simple calendar, phone book, and text notes. (sarcasm on)And an alarm oooooo wow, alarm!(end sarcasm)
Though you can make playlists on the fly which is nice. Though probably very slow. Do they have smart playlists for the iPod?
The only bad thing is that the USB 2.0 cable will not be out until June, you have to buy a special (not included) cable to use USB.
Time to start saving those pennys. mmmmm iPod
They know that they can't get tightwad cheapskates like you to pay for music, you're not their target audience. The people they are targetting are those who have real, actual money to spend and happen to like the convenience of being able to buy just one song, instead of a whole album of questionable merit. What this means for you, in practical terms, is that you will no longer have to shell out for the whole "Gay Dance Beats Mix XVII" album, but rather just download "YMCA" and "In the Navy". If you weren't a tightwad, that is.
--sdem
Ok, so MP3 isn't high quality enough, so why not use .OGG instead? What's wrong with patent-unencumbered, open, free standards?
It doesn't seem to have the functionality of the new iPods (new games, customizable main menu, etc.). At least we got AAC playback though. Whew!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
- iPod Battery life has gone from 10 hours with the old version to over 8 with the new version. AAC apparently takes more CPU to decode.
:^) - According to the Apple iPod webpage, the older Windows iPods appear to not support the AAC upgrade (look under the "High Fidelity" paragraph). Older Mac iPods apparently do support the AAC upgrade.
One question I have is on average, how does a 128kbps AAC file compare to something like 256kbps MP3? I've been using LAME at 256kbps for all of my music encoding, and it is going to be hard to accept anything less in quality.Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Isn't that the whole thing with P2P? Each of us has unique friends that have unique friends that have unique friends...
If I stream a song to my friend, and he streams it to his friend, and so on we are just passing the song out to the whole net for the price of $1.
Someone will design a P2P software that only allows you to share your music to your select 'friends' and it will cause a network of P2P nodes that will become the Napster of the future. On the surface, it will look like a much more local version, but the big picture will show us that its just as big as the original.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
There's also new firmware out today (mac only, windows version is due out in a week or two).
For those to lazy to click on the link, here's the info:
The iPod Software 1.3 Update provides iTunes 4 support, including playback of AAC encoded audio files (Mac-only). Additional enhancements include audio playback and user interface improvements, increased playback time on scroll-wheel iPods, and longer stand-by time for all iPods.
Am I missing something here. You are allowed to burn songs to a cd. So, what's to stop you from just doing this, then handing said CD to your friend who rips the CD into mp3 format? If there is no catch to this obvious loophole, then hey I'm all over this service :).
An absolutely beautifully designed, lightweight product that I definitely want. Unfortunately it is RIDICULOUSLY priced like all Apple gear, and I'm sure the components and hardware are as mediocre as the rest of their stuff (spell mediocre? M-O-T-O-R-O-L-A).
Apple when will you just learn that you will make MORE money selling the larger players at a lower price per unit?!? Take off the remote control, take off the "belt clip", keep the base station and sell me the 30gb at a more reasonable $350.
I know 20gb + belt clip + base + remote aren't worth $200, but apparently you don't. I mean jesus, I can get a full, powerful PC for the price of your player!
-rt
"Check, check". "Is this thing on? Test test". "1-2-3-4. Check check". "Is tape rolling?" ("Rolling!"). "Inna Gadda Da" ("cut! You were flat."). "From the top? Check check". "Can someone adjust my monitor volume?" bwanggg! "Damn, I broke a string!" ...
Mod me to troll, flamebait if you wish, but let's look at the facts:
99 cents per track.
Mandatory changing of playlist every 10 burns
Limitations on sharing with friends
Proprietary format
If MS did this, we'd - and I mean myself included - be screaming bloody murder. But since this is APPLE, and APPLE IS COOL, it's ok.
I don't think it's OK, and until the price is right, and it is realized that the consumer market will settle for nothing but NO DRM WHATSOEVER, all that seperates Apple's new service from the legions of failures before it is the zealot-like brand loyalty.
"The iTunes Music Service files are 128 kbps AAC (reportedly better than 128 kbps MP3)..."
You would think that with so many audio engineers using Apple exclusively, Apple would have offered higher-quality music downloads. I don't care if it's better than a 128K MP3... 128K MP3s sound incredibly bad on any decently nice speakers. (For reference, try playing some classical music at 128K, and then play the CD, on any decent speakers. You'd be amazed at the poor quality of the MP3.)
If I'm going to be paying for music, I'd like it to at least sound as good as a CD! I will say that even on my nice floorstanding speakers, I can't hear much difference between a 256K+ MP3 and a CD. So why not rip the audio at a higher bitrate?
I've been begging for a low-cost download option for songs for a while now, but I'd like to feel like I got a better-quality track for the same price. My reference point is a CD (and soon, it will hopefully be DVD-Audio or a similar 5.1/6.1 format.) Those with the cheap $10 speakers aren't going to notice the difference anyway, but those of us with $1000+ sets hooked up to our home audio jukebox computers sure are.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
www.richardsrealm.com
googling for "apple sosumi" returns goatse.cx as top link. don't do it!!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that previous versions were for one OS or the other. This new iPod version seems to be for both OSes. Does anyone read it this way as well?
I can not seem to listen to any tracks on the Music Store. Keep getting "504" errors. Also, iTunes4 has some funky new button styles, and uses a different font!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Let's get this out of the way, so we don't waste time on Apple-hate threads :
NAY
The music store is only available in the U.S.
Damn, damn, damn.
"The iTunes Music Store is only available in the U.S. To get running all you need is a Mac with Mac OS X (version 10.2.5 or later preferred), and an Internet connection (DSL, Cable or a LAN-based connection recommended for streaming and downloading music). Just download iTunes 4, click the Music Store icon, and you?ve got the world?s most accessible music store, right on your screen. Feel free to browse for as long as you want. There?s no pressure to buy, no annoying pop-up ads, and no confusion about what?s offered."
Maybe I'm missing something obvious somewhere, but I haven't seen a mention anywhere about whether the new AAC format works with older iPods. Is this something a firmware upgrade would take care of, or is that impossible/unlikely?
"and have a selection comparable to what's out there on Kazaa right now, most people will continue to steal music instead of buying it."
The only theft of music is when someone shoplifts CD's from the music store. You can't steal using Kazaa, since it is definitionally impossible for it to be used in theft at all.
Wow, there sure a lot of whining flamers around here today. What apple has done is really tremendous. They have introduced sexy hot hardware, and at the sametime produced a service which fundamentally changes the business model for popular music. Big labels will no longer be able to charge $18 for a Britney Spears CD with, at most, one listenable song on it. If that song really is any good, they will get $1. If not they will get $0. This has the potential to change the entire basis of how artists are signed, produced, and promoted. We should be excited!
You are naive enough to buy 'special' cables...errr.... snake oil cables - yet call .99/song a rip-off! Oh that's just too much!!
And if you don't believe me, please visit RAP and see what the pro engineers say.
This is exactly what people have been waiting for. Too bad the industry couldn't have come up with this rather simple (and unrestrictive) process back in 1998 when mp3's started gaining popularity.
I fear that this new venture is doomed to failure now that people are so accustomed to getting their stuff for free. Too bad the industry didn't come up with this sooner.
www.lonseidman.com
Also, it will be a major hassle, and then you have all those burnt CDs that you'll use very infrequently, which will be a cost and a pain as well. Which, I suspect, is the point.
sulli
RTFJ.
Most of my music listening comes in my car via a head unit that plays CD-RWs filled with mp3s.
I'm not going to purchase songs that won't play on my car stereo.
I guess there's always the workaround of burning the AAC files to a CD-RW, then ripping that CD-RW to mp3s...but who wants to do that...even quality loss aside?
And Apple users aren't fags?
The iPod Dock
The 15GB and 30GB iPod models come with a dock that makes charging and syncing easier than ever -- no more reaching around, looking for the right port
If you like something you'll pay for it instead of stealing it. Your excuse is used way too often by those who'd rather "borrow" then pony up the dough
See, now I think $1 a song is just right. If the average CD costs $13-$18 (on sale) for 12-17 songs. It seems very reasonable to pay slightly more per song than if I were to buy in bulk. If I buy a 6 pack of Amstel for $9.00 ($1.50 each) at the local bodega, yet if I were to buy a single bottle, Apu charges me $2.50 for the same size bottle. While I am paying more per piece, I can keep my total cost down buy only buying the amount I need. Unfortunatly, in the case of the Amstels I am much better off buying a case, but that's a different story.
Downloaded, installed, clicked on "access music store" and...
We could not complete your Music Sore request (504).
There was an error in the Music Store. Please try again later.
[ok]
Surprise surprise! The new store is Mac only... why? Oh that's right; to leverage hardware sales!
*sigh*
too bad they obviously didn't manage to secure international rights. how can i get a credit card with a billing address in the U.S.? Any ideas? No, I'm not moving there. Not for at least another year... :)
The iPod is the perfect travel companion. It features a sleep timer, so you can fall asleep to your music. And with the iPod?s new alarm clock, you can choose either an alarm tone or your favorite music to wake you up.
Uhm... are you supposed to go to sleep with headphones on or does this have a buzzer or something?
Now, not to troll or anything, but who is going to actually buy into this service? Even if Apple dropped the price to say, .25 a song for a higher quality format, would anyone still buy it? It's unfortunate... but I don't think it would do well either. Why buy when you can get it free? I guess it's a moral decision, but hopefully Apple will try to use this service to provide more money to the _artist_ and not the record companies. If that were the case, I would be impressed, and I know that I personally would pay per music download if I knew a large majority of the money was going to the artist. It may be a little too much to ask...
But, at least Apple is trying to go along with what some people want. I think that if there is some positive support, this service could grow and improve. I really hope it makes it.
take off every sig for great justice
Even better is iTunes new built in sharing features. They do not however work with the pay-for format. When you enable it, it displays a warning: Sharing is for personal use only.
The store is also down already 504 error.
Also, 1-Click shopping is available, did they pay Amazon for this?
The beauty of the old iPod design was that it doubled as a Firewire hard drive AND an mp3 player. I praised apple for sticking to a non proprietary interface for docking, and then look what they went and did.
To make matters worse, they switched from an intelligent radial design, which if you know anything about good interfaces you know that radial designs kick ass, to this 4 button shit. Why apple, why?!
- tristan
If you read up about it, Apple went back to some of the Master copies, use AAC, the audio is better quality on a lot of these songs then CD is.
But Thanks for the Troll
I think the best new feature on the new Ipods is Solitaire! Also, 99 cents per song is a little high, but fair.
n/t
Anybody with anything better than cheapo computer speakers or $5 headphones they got for free in a box of Cracker Jacks is able to hear an enormous difference. It is especially bad if you have high fidelity audiophile gear. For example, the vibration dampers and $1000 cables I bought for my Bose speakers aren't going to help that much when the source material is total shit.
If you have that much money to throw into listening to music, then Apple's download service is not for you, because you a) probably enjoy going to the music store rather than downloading music and b) can afford to buy an entire album at a time in case you happen to like it.
I thought we had decided that Apple wasn't going to do DRM? It sure looked like it, but then here we are, looking at Apple supporting and using DRM in one of its premiere applications. Do you feel betrayed yet?
You formed this idea in your mind that Apple wasn't going to get involved in DRM, and then "felt betrayed" by Apple when your fantasy didn't come true? Can't help you there, Sparky.
The only way that Apple could even begin to make this all acceptable would be to offer the music for $0.25US/track at 320kbps quality. Sure, it still won't really approach CD quality, but at least you won't be charged an arm and a leg for substandard music.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. You make it sound like Apple bought out and closed down all the record stores.
Apple has released a service for people who like downloading single MP3 tracks to listen to on their computer. There's no point in banging on your high chair like Apple just took away your zweiback. You're not the target customer, so just keep doing whatever you're doing now and don't worry about Apple.
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Arg. Who's gonna make the portable I want?
you pay more online with this Apple service
the sound quality is lower with this Apple service
You have to burn it yourself. At the CD store, you get it burned already
With this Apple service, no liner notes, no extras.
You are still paying more and getting less. This costs way too much, especially considering that i should cost less due to all the middlemen and overhead that is cut out compared to getting it at a music store.
"I fear that this new venture is doomed to failure now that people are so accustomed to getting their stuff for free."
No, it is doomed to fail since the "pay more for much less" plan makes no sense economically.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I like the idea of someone finally allowing you to download single songs for under a buck, and allowing you to use a format with out DRM. Reading the FAQ, looks like Mpeg4 AAC sounds better at 128K than MP3, so even better.
Very impressive, thou have to wait to see how big the artist collection is. It states "Everything", thats pretty impressive if true. Need to test that old database out with some techno/metal/free music after I get home (No macs at work...)
I wonder, if I no longer buy whole CD's just the one song I want, wont this put the record companies out of business?
Also, Apple can do this, but MP3.com can't?
-
Do you fink?
What about Indie Artists? How can I get my music up there?
_______
2B1ASK1
I guess you could just burn ACC to CD then CD->OGG/MP3.
And where the fuck did you come up with this $0.50 number? "A bag of chips"?? Why aren't new Fords priced around $300? After all, that's about the price of my pair of speakers - it's a fair price.
--sdem
Not necessarily.
:(
The problem is, Apple has a very small portion of the Market. In fact, it's not much larger than Linux's desktop percentage, and will probably decrease as Linux and Windows become better platforms.
If Microsoft did this, then that would be huge.
25 cents per song? To pay for all the downloading as well? It's not like Apple's bandwidth is free. Considering that most people can't tell the difference between 128 and 320, this won't effect most people. Does it effect you? Yes. So don't use it. But I think it would be odd for Apple to shoot to please such a small minority first instead of the masses. Perhaps in the future they will have encoding settings as well. Sort of like how it only works in the US currently. But I don't think being able to choose between different encodings or having a super encoding which would be much larger and make downloads excessively long for modem users would have a lot of merit in an initial release.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
You can make unlimited burns from the 128-bit AAC to CD. Once it's there, you can do anything with it you want. I'm not an expert, but it doesn't appear to be signifcantly worse than MP3, so once you burn it you can do any of your list. Is it an extra step? Yes, but it's about as few steps as your going to get from a scheme blessed by record executives.
They seem to have struck a fair balance between allowing fair use and not providing for major abuses. Obviously, anyone who wants to turn around and distribute the music still could, but Apple has no liability for what is done once the song is burnt. In fact, providing an option to legally obtain music may introduce a sense of personal responsibility. Personally, I'm surprised that they will have unlimited burns - it is possible that the burns will have watermarks, though that would blow up in Apple's face if they don't disclose it now.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Why should I buy this? Less quality than CDs, same exact price as CDs, and I already think CDs are too expensive.
So if I cannot afford CDs, why would I be able to afford this? Lets not forget this is less quality than CD, so why would I get this when I can get a full quality CD?
I'll let rich people like you who already can afford to buy $15-20 cds, waste your money on some 128bitrate copies of that CD, go ahead and waste your money, I'd rather buy a full quality CD or even vinyl than waste my limited income on this garbage.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I have to stand by the idea that this is Big News for the music industry, and more importantly for music users... Steve Jobs took to heart the fact that the cost of music is the cover price plus the cost the user associates with any copy protection. Under that system of accounting, this is perhaps the cheapest (legal) large scale music distribution system yet. Anohter user posted a question as to whether artists will be allowed to post 'tunes in the store without a record company - I would guess that the anwser is no, in order to get the companies on board, but if they could, the relevancy of record companies would suddenly become much more questionable.
Either way, it seems like this has the potential to revolutionize how people listen to music. And I'm glad Apple is on the right side of the curve.
Right?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
How is this different from any of the existing services like Pressplay and their ilk? I mean, yeah, all tracks burnable... but it doesn't seem like that big a leap.
Frankly, I suspect that this is not what music fans want. And that the population at large has, with the rise of mp3, taken to thinking of music as free. Totally free. And once they've thought of this, there's probably no stopping them.
The record labels will eventually have to find a business model that allows for the fact that recordings of music are now treated as items with negligible value (Rather like airings of TV shows), and finds a way to get value other ways. Advertising, maybe.
But, ultimately, I think that any system that claims that a song has a monetary value is doomed. The general public got too big a taste of the alternative.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Back up your mp3 collection before you downloadn & install iTunes4. iTunes2 did some funky stuff with my home folder, and iMovie3 is (still, at 3.0.2) a disaster that screwed up 3 of my home-mde movies. hours of work lost :-(
I'm not installing it for a few weeks, until the guinnea pigs (that's you, dumbo) have spotted the bugs.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The only reason anyone gives a shit is because this is Apple. This has been done before by other companies and no one cared. Go ahead and Mod me down, but you know it's true!
I don't like Rock and/or Roll music, so the download thing doesn't really appeal. I can still go to the library and rip just about any music that interests me. What I can't get there, I can't imagine that the iTunes "Store" will have for me.
It's fairly laughable that many of the folks who complain about the price/crippling of the content are those who would never buy the content anyway. I personally, can't imagine that 80% of any "downloader"'s personal music library would ever be purchased.
I find it just as silly that Apple is crippling the content. There's a very available (albeit illegal) substitute good - one that strikes me as kiltering the economics of this undertaking towards the "failure" side.
That being said, I thought the new iPods had usable feature improvements. They are very expensive, but I think they seem to be feature/form factor competitive.
I thought the "rendevous" software side was somewhat interesting.
BTW - We made it how many posts before the predictable "I can build myself an AMD with Linux and Windows (just for games) for $1.99 and it will outrun a $3,000 Mac"?
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
In other news, Apple will soon introduce the
service for European customers. Prices are
expected to be in the range of E 1.50 per song.
(This is sarcasm.)
What about the costs of encoding every song and the distribution and development of iTunes, payment to arists, etc."
Encoding is quick, easy, and automatic. Distribution and development is still much less than factory-printing and shipping and making display boxes and everything for CD's. Payment for artists exists still, but the rest of the overhead should be significantly reduced.
If my band isn't signed by one of the big 5, how can I get my material posted for sale by Apple? I suspect that the answer is "I can't". I wish I could figure out what contact number or e-mail address to use from the apple site to find out...
I said young man, when you're short on your dough
You can stay there, and I'm sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time
Very, very cool.
Apple is so damn cool.
Why the heck isn't ogg supported by iTunes 4? I seem to recall Apple liking open source software before...
True - except for the fact that Apple has committed to releasing a Windows client for this by the end of the year. If they succeed in this, then this service will be accessible to Windows users as well - the market becomes gargantuan.
It sucks - the concept is great but I have two major issue.
AAC - My fiancé who uses the ipod etc the most has an old powerbook that limps along in OSX and can't deal very well with this type of compression.
Selection - I thought oh goodie, immiedately whent looking for stuff to download, I could not find a single damn thing I wanted.
US only - I am not living in the states right now and normally that would be a big problem, except I do have a billing address over there available to me.
Great concept, poor execution.
1. Does iTunes 4 break iCommune?
2. What copy protection - if any - is used to protect tracks downloaded from AppleMusic.com?
3. Does the copy protection affect tracks burned to CD as well as tracks copied to iPods and Macs?
4. If the tracks burned to CD are copy-protected, will these CDs be playable in standard CD players?
-MAL
AAC at 128 is as good or beter than MP3 at 256.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
This article at MacCentral brought me to a conclusion:
The iPod may turn out to be the most useful piece of computer hardware ANY computer or electronic hardware company has ever developed.
That is a very general, seeming overly biased, statement coming from an Apple Computer Consultant; I'm sure.
Apple created a wonder in ease of use and portability with the iPod. Until the iPod was intrduced not only were Creative and Archos Jukebox series bulky, but 10, 15, and 20 gigs was impossibly slow to load to download to the units. They were also about as easy as a car stereo Mp3 player to navigate. Apple came out with a unit that essentially put a miniature iTunes (one of the easiest, most elegant MP3 players on any platform) on the iPod, made it a hard drive to boot, but added a firewire interface. This allowed the full 5, 10, and 20 gig transfer in minutes rather than the 3.3 hours it would take for the 20 gigs through USB.
The iPod is becoming a status symbol. Shaq uses one and CONSTANTLY talks about his in interviews. He made everyone on the team purchase one before they went to the playoffs last year.
The iPod is also versatile beyond it's intended uses:
iPod as a remote control The beauty linked here was ORIGINALLY planned for the iPod and is being redeveloped now
iPod as a mouse
iPod with FM radio and here
iPod as a gameboy and game controller
Some of the coolest accesories have popped up for the iPod too. Some are linked here. Check out the transpod and of course the cool iTrip and iFM availible from Griffin.
Here are two great resources for iPod info:
http://www.ipodlounge.com
http://www.ipodhacks.com
I have already seen future incarnations and "in development" iPods. Apple is planning for it to change the future direction of the company!
To answer a question common in the forums, there WILL be an update to allow 10 and 20 gig rev 2 iPods to work, it will be released sometime next month.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
How many times are you going to post the same thing in this article?
--sdem
Didn't know about the whole-album discount.
AC comments get piped to
Yea, I'm having the same problems. I donwloading Itunes4 within seconds of Apple updating their webpage and had no problem playing a few tracks, but now there seems to be a bit of congestion.
Apple's "very small" portion of the market is still millions of people.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I'm wondering if the store is accessible using a standard browser. If so, anybody hacked out the URL to the shop yet?
BTW, I can pay an average of a buck a song at Best Buy and not be saddled with a crippled and lesser quality copy.
Yeah, but then you have to go to a Best Buy.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
What about these albums composed of only one track? Still .99$?
Makes great sense, even if you use MP3 instead of Ogg. It might work, too, unlike the sky high Apple pricing.
Not only that, the fact of the Apple name is likely to keep away the 90% of the public out there that shies away from Apple products.
I'm really disappointed the music service is US only. I was set today to buy some music to show my support for this venture, and since I have a Canadian billing address for my credit card I can't.
On the one hand I am glad this is getting launched as soon as possible, on the other I'm disappointed Apple wasn't able to get other countries in on this great service for launch.
I have been browsing 30 second tracks, a lot of fun, great quality and starts playing instantly. I'd like to be able to hit that buy button though.
---
I support spreading santorum
But most college students and highschool students simply cannot afford the high priced(and getting higher each year) CDs.
You go pay $1 a song, I'll never buy music because I cannot afford to spend a dollar a song, I can spend 25 cent a song, 50 cent a song, but not a dollar a song, I barely have enough money to eat lunch everyday and I'm supposed to be spending a dollar on some 128bitrate low quality music file?
Sure people like you who always purchased music will spend this but for the people who use Kazaa and the napster users, and people who cannot afford to buy music, this service is worthless.
So ultimately this service will sell to the same people who are currently buying music CDs in stores, it wont make any more money than the current online music stores who do this.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I installed iTunes 4 when they were showing the new commercials during the keynote and I had no issues with existing MP3s.
Only issue is too many people using the music store right now!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Come on, people, we can do better than this! iTunes 4 is downloading as fast as my DSL pipe can take it!
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Now you can carry $7500 worth of music in your pocket.
Already in my dorm, I can see three computers with iTunes 4 on the network, sharing their libraries. I can listen to other's music like a radio station- I can't save it, of course, but it's fun to set someone else's playlist on random play and listen to what they have. And if they have something I like, it's off to the apple store
Yes. Amarok, the 60-minute track, is the first thing that came to mind when I read this. It would be a bargain at 99 cents for this track/album, no?
If this took off BIG time, it would be an incentive for artists to split things into more and more tracks, right?
I think a per-minute charge would be better than a per-track charge.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I guess you've never heard of WiFi. Try free downloads. WiFi speed is good, its better than 56k anyway.
Maybe if you lived in a real city like Boston you'd know about WiFi. Move into the city onto a college campus.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Just as cool -- Quicktime update to support AAC. Now I can watch my Divx movies w/dolby sound and burn them to DVD through FfmpegX much easier!
Did I say that out loud? Whoops...
I'm quite frankly surprised at all the negative comments here. A system that makes allowances for fair use and that is priced reasonably seems to be what folks here have been clamoring for since the shut down of Napster.
.mp3-savvy consumer.
Apple is stepping out on a very thin limb here, and as with every other product they've released in the past few years, they'll make adjustments to the feature set and pricing as feedback reaches them.
$1.00 a song isn't unreasonable given the convenience, flexibility and feature set they've built in to this product. They've removed the need for me to pay shipping charges opn music, to fight traffic on the way to the music store, and to find space for more jewel cases. I still retain the right to burn the song an unlimited number of times, albeit on different playlists every tenth burn. Sounds like fair use to me. It's an intelligent approach that is the FIRST one to consider the needs, rights, wishes and hopes of the
At least give them credit for doing something no other computer company or music company has done or even shown an interest in: further integrating the computers we use for 8-10 hours a day with the other devices and interests we all have.
you mean shitney smears?
and the fuck this is going to have any effect on m usic. the morons show by shitney smears crap are still going to buy her stupid CDs. all that rat bitch has to do is to take more clothing off and stick it in the CD sleeve, at fat sexless live with parents losers who love apple but have no job will run out and buy it all over again.
oops, i farted again, i ripped a big fart, my panties are stained, please open a hatch, and light up a match, im very faltulent. ooh baby baby. lactose intolerent.
The main word here is INDEPENDENTLY
I think you mean the same way any user can peer share their garage bands mp3s of their version of "Stairway" up to a small touring club band hoping to get a break by self promoting themselves by giving their music away hoping that people will pay to come see them.
No, they should HAVE to pay Apple for this right.
I am not kidding or being facetious.
But in the end Apple should get to decide if it is worth their energy to negotiate with an INDIVIDUAL BAND or SMALL LABEL.
Apple is taking the risk. They are paying for the infrastructure. The "brand building"
No, you should not be able to set up your own server or upload your own songs within the network.
They have to make a profit at this for this to work. If that means that they only deal with a company that gives them a library of 50,000 songs that they KNOW at least SOME of which people are willing to pay, that's their choice.
I know this will be not be a popular view, but from a business perspective, it makes perfect sense-
I can sell 10,000 Britney songs at a $.50 profit each or I can sell 10 of your songs $1 a shot. Not really a hard choice...
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I have no use for this format...
My car CD player reads mp3. So not only must I jump through hoops to get the files in a format I can use (by creating a music CD from the AAC files, then ripping that CD to mp3s), but I must also have multiple copies of the same song (one for the Powerbook, one for the car), which aside from being a hassle, also takes up more hard drive space.
No thanks...I'll stick with mp3s for now. I'm willing to pay for my music, but am not willing to live with restrictions. Any digital music distribution service that treats customers like criminals will fail. It may be better than previous models, but in my opinion, it still has fatal flaws.
I didn't see if the purchases from the online music store were truly one-time. In other words, if your iPod and hard drive both get formatted, do you have to buy the songs again?
Having that kind of record-keeping would help make the $0.99/track cost seem more worthwhile to me.
for example, I can certianly xerox copy a few pages of book if I wanted to. Or I could scan the whole thing and distribute it on the web. the latter would not be fair use, though nothing is physically stoping me from doing it besides the effort and distribution channel. the former is fair use and its trivial for any idiot to do as it should be.
apple is making fair use easy, the rest is up to you if you are that kind of person.
as for people moaing that 99 cents is too much since a whole cd costs about 99 cents per song and you get the physical media to boot. Well look, this is called buying in volume. Want to pick and choose, well that's extra. want to have to drive to the store or wait for it in the mail, for physical media or do you want it now on demand? Well your paying for something you want obviously.
Sure they dont have to send you out the physical media. But they are taking whopper start up risks to fund this adventure, they are taking risk of piracy. 99 cents seem like a pretty fair price. sure 50 cents woul dbe better but I'm willing to let the pioneers charge more
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The only downside is that yesterday $399US would get me a 20GB iPod, whereas today it will only get me a 15GB iPod (albeit one that plays AACs, is smaller, lighter and has a cool dock).
I still dig the iPod, and have been waiting for this new version (I will now buy one), but this one little thing is a shame.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
It's our new marketing strategy.
-- Steve
With the Apple service, you can share your music with your 3 friends (or their computers, anyway), but it's streaming, not copying. Once they've listened to the song, it's not sitting there on their computer to then share with their friends. If they want to do that, they have to go buy the music themselves.
Unfortunately, they've chose AAC as the "music format of the future" - an unfinalized format with no tagging standard and no good gapless playback support...
You missed it. You'll pay a buck a song, on average, at Best Buy, and if you're like most people, you'll wind up paying for the songs you don't like when you pay for the songs you do. At Best Buy you drop a buck to spend the next several months hunting for the track ahead button on your cd deck.
A buck a song is a deal as long as you're only buying the songs you like.
1)Yes, $.99 per song is expensive if you go to Best Buy to purchase your favorite N'Sync CD, but the Apple service gives you the flexibility to pick and choose your songs -- and you pay for that. 2)Just because you feel that everything in life should be free does not make it so. Music, movies and most things in life are not "open source." Taking things for free when they are not is called STEALING.
"further integrating the computers we use for 8-10 hours a day with the other devices and interests we all have"
Someone pointed out that it only works on Macs. Hardly anyone uses them, so this is doomed be a tiny niche thing even if it works.
The most important question is, does Apple have the music? I'm looking for downtempo electronica to add to my Internet radio station, VoyagerRadio. I hope Apple has a better selection of electronica than services like BMG.
Harold
Hmm, I wonder if this will include non-English/US music? I'd expect some Latin/Spanish music, but can I get Indian music? Can I get Quebec pop? Can I get Japanese?
Jim
Has anyone actually been able to access the Music Store tab in the new iTunes. I suppose they're overwhelmed, or the system is down.
(+5, Insightful)
Thurgood Marshall is your dADDAYD
The porn industry is one of the most lucrative on the surface of the planet, some claim it's the only way to make money, and a lot of it on the Internet.
Yet there are no organisations to protect the rights of the producers. No MPAA, no RIAA, ever heard of someone going to court for pirating porn? Didn't think so.
In this industry very big corporations are in competition with very small and innovative business and both are pirated like crazy both non seems to suffer.
There's a lesson to be learn here, maybe the pron industry is the way to go for the whole entertaiment industry: Less regulations, more diversity, very lax fair use and aggressive competition between big and small producers.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Just remember that people still pay not much less than $1 per song for songs on a jukebox, and those you get to listen to -once-, you can't copy them, you can't put them on your iPod.
"Taking things for free when they are not is called STEALING."
Except copying is not "taking"; it is copying. Copyright infringement and stealing are two separate things. Capitalizing your false use of the word does not make it any more true.
And, yes, copying is free, so even that part of your definition is wrong since it is "[copying] things for free when [they are free]"
In iTunes 4 while the tracks you get from the music store are 128k AAC, you can rip your own tracks and set the bitrate up to 320k for AAC
You arent going to stop the poor from using Napster like programs until you bring the price of music down to their level.
Just like if all resturants were expensive as hell fancy resturants which required tips, and there were no fast food resturants like mc donalds, poor people would never go to resturants. Sure you could try to offer smaller dishes to the poor, but they still wouldnt buy it because then they'd get less food.
What would they do? They'd make their own food and not go to resturants. SO I dont see how this solves anything, rich people who went to resturants before will go to the resturants selling smaller dishes, but the poor will still not buy food from resturants.
I wont be buying music at $1 a song because I cannot afford it, period, thats all there is to it, I think music is over priced, alot of people (millions) agree with me. Until I'm an upper class rich person like you, I'm going to continue to think this, and I think most college students who arent upper class and rich like you agree with me.
So until you release a music service for OUR class and age range of people, why should I care? I want cheap music. Its that simple.
How hard is it for rich people like you to understand? I'm sure you were poor before, or in college before, when you have to worry about just getting 3 meals a day, you arent caring about spending a dollar on music, that dollar is lunch!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I must admit I went straight away to DL some Led Zeppelin tunes I don't have and was dismayed that I didn't find any on the search. Perhaps the search engine timed out due to overleading but I didn't see any yet.
200,000 songs are in the library today Steve said. New ones added each day. That means in one year we;ll have at least 200,364 songs to choose from which is great but a fairly narrow slice of what has been created so I can't wait to see have fast it actually populated. Until then, "hey Hey, What can I say".
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Hey Thats great Fuckwit!!! Now I learned a new word today. Fuckwit Fuckwit Fuckwit
"Just remember that people still pay not much less than $1 per song for songs on a jukebox."
Is this really a valid comparison? I've put on average per year less than a nickel in a jukebox. Can you say that you have done the same? I doubt many here are feeding jukeboxes much more than "non at all", so it is not the best successful business model to hold the Apple system up to.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No Henry Rollins, Townshend, Residents, Zappa.
.5 stars.
Everything I look for gets no search hits.
And these are somewhat mainstream. I think what this
really is is sharing Job's playlist from his iMac.
So far, I'd give it
I said, I was down and out with the blues
I felt no man cared if I was alive
I felt the whole world was so jive
Buy, Burn, Rip, Distribute (Freely)
Artist will always make art.
Didn't know about the 'whole-album' discount. This does make the per-song cost lower to what I'd be willing to pay.
AC comments get piped to
If you look in the readme file it says you have the ability to backup your iTunes library to DVD and also to some CDRW players.
There is backup feature there.
For those of you wanting to play AAC file on Linux, then you should check out Audio Coding. It is open source under the GPL. There is both an encoder and decoder.
:)
Eat your heart out
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yes- but how many more teenage girls are going to buy that $1 song, since, after all, it's only $1? Go read a basic economics book.
Don't forget that US children are a HUGE market, but one that's not very easy to access- they often need someone to cart 'em around, they don't have credit cards, etc. If Apple wants to be really slick, they'll figure out a way to let parents drop some money into a .Mac account, ie prepaid; that way, mom/dad don't have to worry about Jenny draining their savings going nuts with iTunes' store.
If made-up artists want to sell as much as they do now, the overall quality will have to increase
Overall quality will have to increase, but not for the reason you cite. Now that little Jenny doesn't blow her entire allowance on one CD, she can afford to(gasp!) check out other artists, and be a fan of more than just one person/group. "Cost of entry" for a new artist or style of music is very cheap.
Record companies never really figured it out- by making CDs so expensive, they locked kids into one musician/group, and when that group goes into the trashcan popularity-wise...the record company has to come up with something new really quick.
I think a big reason file-swapping was/is popular has to do with people wanting to check out new music. Now they get previews on almost any song they want(try before you buy, major argument behind P2P music swapping) and they can only buy what they want.
I can't believe your comment got modded 4/insightful...there should be a new mod category, "knee-jerk-reaction". Your premise was right, but the reasoning was pretty weak.
Please help metamoderate.
OK, before you mark me a troll or whatever, There are a fair number of us geeks out here who would love to "switch" to Apple, but we have our music collections in the open Vorbis format. OK, so we can use third party audio players on the Mac, but why won't Apple just support Vorbis and make everything easier? They don't have to make it the default, but for goodness' sake, it's free! The code's already there, just use it!
One thing I think Apple has caught onto is that the WWW sucks for applications. With Sherlock (read Watson) style channels and an iTunes interface to this music service, I'm hoping they're pushing (and leading) services away from WWW interfaces to saner, cleaner platform-native interfaces. HTML may be quick and easy but offering a service (airline tickets, buying books, auctions, etc.) through a custom interface is my dream for the Internet. Just my offtopic $0.02.
So today we get the big announcement from Apple that they have done just that -- negotiated an agreement to sell music online, on a per-song basis, with an easy-to-use interface, which allows you to share your tunes, burn CDs, or drop them into a portable player. To me, this sounds pretty bloody close to what the Slashdot crowd has been saying should happen for quite a while.
And what happens?
Now, I know that whining is often a staple of Slashdot, and I also know that the opinions of a few are not neccessarily the views of the many. And maybe the complaints have merit. Perhaps the new service Apple announced is too expensive. Perhaps it would be better to have non-lossy formats, or the ability to use software other than iTunes, or whatever else is on the wish list. But it looks to me like Apple made a good effort to create what was asked for, and now all people can seem to do is complain about it.
They have agreements for US distribution. I'm sure they would love to sell it worldwide, but have to get all their legal ducks in a row. I am not a lawyer, but I imagine the legal issues vary widly from country to country.
You should learn about the format before jumping to conclusions.
AAC at 128 easily surpasses MP3 at 256kbit. The kbit is not a representation of quality when you are comparing between two different methods. It's a representation of size.
So basically with AAC people will be downloading files no larger than the ones they are accustomed to but the quality will be worlds better.
Queen - none
Sisters of Mercy - One partial album
Tangerine Dream - one and a half albums (out of how many?)
Fields of the Nephilim - none
The Beatles - none
Jean Michel Jarre - none
Tori Amos - less than half of her songs
orbital - one partial album
Future Sound of London - none
KLF - none
Pet Shop Boys - 5 or 6 partial albums
Joni Mitchel - 3 songs.....
Alan Parsons - 3 albums + a few partials
Pink Floyd - a few albums
Not really a good enough selection eh?
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I am not familiar with ACC; never seen it. However, your message implies that it is one of those useless dead-end formats like WMA since it does not have complete conversion ability to OGG/MP3? Is it true that it is crippled in this fashion?
plus you can listen to it (30 seconds of eac song) before you but
When I say "rip", I do indeed mean "rip off".
:-)
Not only do they want you to spend $.99 on a song, they want to be able to tell you want you can do with that song after the transaction has been made!
Not when I can go down to tower records (or even better, CD Warehouse) and get a CD, rip the songs, and listen to them whenever I want.
Or even better, borrow from my friends
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
It doesn't seem to matter how long the songs are. Whether I buy the Toy Dolls 30 second album intro or some 18 minute piece that took 100s of musicians in a full blooded orchestra to produce, I pay the same. Will this result in artists making shorter songs? Or maybe even "multiple parts" to maximize their revenues?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
My "old" iPod can charge/transfer music with ANY 6 pin IEEE1394 cable. The new one looks like one needs the dock in order to be able to do either.
One more friggin thing to pack/lose...
I wonder if this goes against that terms of their settlement with Apple Records... according to this brief history [ZDNet] Apple Computer settled with Apple Records sometime in 1989...
Get lose, you can't compare with my powers.
Hey all,
This sounds sorta similar (but better in some ways) to what listen.com does. Sadly, though, I'm not an iPod or a Mac user so it's not that interesting. In the mean time, I have been using Listen.com for a week or so, here's a quick mini-review of my experience with it:
- $10 a month gets you unlimited access to their music database. It's reasonably extensive and will likely grow, but I was surprised at some of the songs it didn't have. Still, I've found music I enjoy.
- The music is in copmressed format, I think it's Mp3 or a variant. Unfortuantely, it does not let you save it to your computer so I have no idea what it really is. I can tell you, though, that it sounds pretty close to my 128kbit Mp3s. No complaints here, but I'm not exactly an audiophile. YMMV.
-You can only play it when you're logged on. That sounds bad except I have a good connect at home and at work, so no real biggie. Some of you may find that unreasonable, and I would agree. I think they just want to make sure you're paid up. Why it doesn't download an "he's okay for this month!" certificate I'm not really sure. In any case, for only $10 (less than the cost of a single album...) it's fine with me.
- Most songs can be burned for $.99 a track. That's your fee if you want it off your computer. I wish they'd let me keep an mp3 version for $.99 to burn to CD on my whim. I guess they're worried I'm going to give it away or something, I dunno. I think it's pretty cool, though. Imagine paying $10 for a CD where you like every single song that's on it. Wow. I tried this once and it was alright. If I had a CD player in my car this would be a lot more exciting.
- Very responsive. One thing I really like about Listen.com's service is that if there's a song I want to hear, I can usually find it pretty quick, and within seconds of clicking it I'm listening to it. It's not really streaming in the sense of having to buffer or anything, it's more like Quicktime in the respect that it dumps the data into a resevoir and starts playing as soon as it can. Also, it's caching is pretty reasonable. I have a couple of entire albums on my computer right now I've been listening to at work. I don't have to re-download it every time I listen to it. Every day my playlist gets a bit longer and it's all music that's interesting.
- Linux/Mac users need not apply. This is a Windows only app that runs, not a web based search or antyhing. This will turn a lot of you off. The flip side, though, is that you don't have to leave a browser open or anything like that. I've had 0 stability issues with it. I do wish they had a 'Minimize to tray' button.
Since I've started using Listen.com, I haven't even been tempted to fire up Kazaa. Most of the songs I'd want to listen to (plus comedy!) are there. Plus, they have 'radio stations' (it's actually just a playlist, so it's not like you come in on the middle of a song, you can just 'next' to the next song if you don't like the one that's playing) that make it easier to find songs of interest. Their comedy radio channel's a hoot.
I think this service is superior than P2P when using it to find new music of interest. Music is found faster, consistent quality, plus tools that make it easy to find songs I like. $10 is reasonable to me as I can spend it without missing it. I would, however, miss this service if I discontinued it.
It sounds as though that Apple's using a similar business model here, only it goes to your iPod. That's damn cool. Any of you into music would probably really enjoy this service that Apple's providing. Rhapsody (Listen.com) would probably be #2 if Apple's not an option.
"Derp de derp."
Okay, dude, you think 128 Kbit AAC is "low quality"? It's approximately equivalent in sound quality to 256 Kbit MP3, which, on average consumer-grade electronics equipment sounds just as good as any CD.
So, a penniless high school or college student can't afford to spend $0.99 for a song that he knows he likes, but, apparently, can afford the audiophile-grade headphones or speakers for his $500 iPod that would produce a discernable difference in the sound quality? Not likely.
Most users of this service will be playing tunes off of tiny computer speakers or standard-issue earbuds, and will just be pleased that they could get the one or two songs that they like by an artist without having to shell out $18 at Sam Goody.
Its not the technology that is innovative, but the business model. AFAIK, there is no one else selling music in this fashion. If they are the first, then they rightly get to claim innovation.
I think that what people are missing in all of this is how monumental it was that apple managed to talk the big 5 into this at all. Considering that, the amount fair use allowed is pretty incredible. Look at the competition (pressplay) for comparison.
Take your nice little to the proposal to the RIAA and see how hard they laugh at you as security escorts you out the back.
Oh, wait, no, you're just going to get artists the aren't on a major, you say? Well, I'll sign up. And maybe 5 or 6 of my indy-rock pals. But good luck getting your favorite artist out of their soul-crusing major label deal so they can get in on this....
spreer
Well, the part about marketshare and the size of Apple's future slice of the pie can be argued endlessly, but it really doesn't have any relevance. It's still a behemoth of a company, and in the MP3 player market, it has more of a presence than Microsoft. Furthermore, Apple has been able to pull this off pretty much by itself. It has control of the technologies involved, so it didn't need partners when it approached the big 5 music labels. The music industry is notoriously hidebound, and there's no doubt that being able to deal with just one entity appealed to them. Not that Microsoft can't or won't be able to pull off something similar, but it'll be a lot more complicated, both for them, and, I suspect, its users.
Sanity is relative. For some of us it's just a distant cousin.
The best part is that the 1.3 firmware that includes games, text reader, on the fly playlist creation and some other features will be or is already available for all older iPod users. I love the fact that I bought my digital music player almost a year ago yet it is just getting better and better. Support like this will keep me coming back to Apple, now if only their workstations weren't 5X what I can build my own for =(
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
And you didn't expect this the first day?
How long have you been reading slashdot?
While this might keep the RIAA off of Apples back, there's no way that this will stop some people from copying CDs. As long as there's some charge for the song, there are people that will copy it so they don't have to spend their own money.
Sad, but true.
For the rest of us, it's a good thing. I'll probably buy an iPod now.
I fire up the ol' mac whenever I need to get in touch with my feminine side.
My feminine side is a lesbian. That's why I don't own a Mac.
my music store's not working. i'm getting a
we could not complete your music store request (504)
there was an error in the music store. please try again later.
i hope this doen't bode ill...
read the apple site more carefully. they are selling whole CD's for just 60 cents a song. that's a hefty discount. and remember your not pating tax, etc on that.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
All you audiophile gods can take your "i am the coolest audio guy ever and this 'aint good enough for me" talk and go somewhere else. It seems like every time we bring up audio here we all have to assert our own wealth of knowledge. Mp3 is just fine for the masses - that's why Apple can offer a service like this. This is why there are Mp3 players.
I don't give a damn about 'lossy.' I want good. Mp3 is just fine for most people (and I don't even understand how you can tell the difference) - and now Apple has given everyone a really great service.
Don't want lossy? Then why the hell are you making comments about handheld mp3 players and desktop computer audio?! Go back to your multimillion dollar studios! Geez!
The cost is also pretty good.
The DRM is reasonable. Reasonable, folks. All you pirates out there can stick with whatever you want, but I want to try to contribute to society and to artists that play the music I like . . . not to mention to ease my own conscience. Pirating music is stealing - no two buts about it.
Way to go Apple.
Again.
--$0.02
I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm encoding a CD in 128 kbps AAC at 15x on my 1 GHz machine. And that's just on a single processor. The MP3 encoder was multithreaded and vectorized and gave me about 22x, but the AAC encoder is doing 15x with half the CPU. Pretty impressive.
128 kbps AAC really does sound as good as 192 kbps MP3, by the way. I'm gonna be able to strip my 35 GB music collection down to about 25 GB, which is gonna be cool. Also cool: more songs at a time on my lowly 5 GB iPod.
Long and short of it: even without the Music Store, this absolutely rocks.
You tell me to get a job, where? Mc donalds? I dont have a degree and we are in an economic depression yet somehow I'm supposed to be able to get a job and have plenty of money overnight? You must be living in a fantasy world.
If a bag of chips were $1, I wouldnt eat chips anymore, if a mc donalds hamburger were $50 (about the price of a resturant meal) I wouldnt be eating there anymore.
Yes I do have economic problems in my life, millions of other people in my age range have these same problems, so according to you, college students shouldnt be able to listen to music now?
Please.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
For those of us (aka not your gilded 5% of stereo owners) who have 30$/pair default speakers in our Celicas, Escorts, Metros, and F150s and just want to hear a little Barenaked Ladies or Kid Rock as we roll down the street, but don't like having to keep $500 worth of CDs in our car to do so...this is a nice service. I only wish that there were a way to go AAC to mp3/wav/whatever so I could use this, since I haven't had a good Mac since my PowerMac 7100/66.
Alot of bitching happens here whenever anyone does anything that hits a good part of COMMON INTEREST instead of NERD KINGDOM. Sure, "news for nerds" but a nerd should be able to see that this is a Martha Stewart "Good Thing" since alot of people a) don't have $1000+ speaker sets.... b) don't play classical music that needs a $1000+ speaker set all the time.... c) just want a few songs, but don't want to filter through the crap which is Kazaa.... d) couldn't give a damn about audio quality when you just want a little Nelly without the ads and DJ-spew of the radio.... e) and so on.
Higher quality is just completely unnecessary at this point. If you want something really tight for your platinum kickers at home, then you'll buy the DVD-Audio you mentioned. Duh. Nobody's going to sit around (or have an ISP for long) if they have whole albums of CD-quality or higher data streaming into their cable modem/DSL. Please, let's just sit back and be a bit more realistic of what we're expecting.
That goes for the people complaining about the price tag too. You want a whole album of music...go buy it at the store if this is too expensive. Nobody said you had to buy it online. For those of us who like the occasional radioplay or a backtrack from a party, we'll spend our dollar and get a 1st-gen copy of something nice to listen to.
but those of us with $1000+ sets hooked up to our home audio jukebox computers sure are.
So all 2 of you aren't going to buy into this? Somehow I don't think you're the target market. Obviously audiophiles are not going to buy into this, you go buy you're DVD-Audio and the rest of the world who aren't nearly as anal, picky, or discerning (98% of the world) will have no problems and not be able to tell the difference. How many consumers know the bitrates of their MP3's? Probably not many.
Lame sig, look at my Photos
Before you make your anti-Windows comments, I own an iBook too... I just like discovering new things. Address any anti-Windows comments with that in mind. ;-)
Anyone remember the story about Apple Records and the "Sosumi" sound? I think this new venture violate's Apple Computer's "no sound" agreement...
yeah, 1$ a song is a lot of money for a complete album... But think about this first. If you like the whole album, go and buy it in a Music Store, if you want 1 or 2 songs on the album, that will cost you only 1 or 2$ instead of 15 to 20$. If you like all the extra stuff, then go buy the album at your store!
:o)
Think before complaining about this service: The Apple Music Store is not made to replace the local Music Store but to give you an alternative in getting singles for a buck a piece... It's not that bad... Maybe they should give discounted prices when you want to buy the whole album... but why? Go and buy it at the local store.
Imagine, all the "one hit wonders" can start making money again...
When will companies learn that in order to compete with compressed and "pirated" music, they either need to add compelling value to the retail product, or bring the product in at a price point which is much more attractive. 99 cents a song is about the same price as it would cost you to purchase the physical disk in most cases, and if the artist is someone I enjoy enough to actually give money to, I want the work in unadulterated form.
Usually with me, the way it works is thus:
If I enjoy the music somewhat but it's not something I can see myself listening to a lot/for a long time, I just download the mp3s. Linkin Park, VNV Nation, and Wumpscut are good examples here.
If I enjoy a music a lot, and can see myself going back to it over time/listening to it all the time, I'll try to rip it from the local college radio station archives, or buy it if I can find a copy for around 10 dollars. Tool's Aenima or anything by Amon Tobin would be perfect examples of this category.
If I listen to the music compulsively AND appreciate it on an intelligent artistic level, and that is still with me after listening to it for a couple weeks, I usually buy the cd for my collection. Examples of this category include Underworld's dubnobasswithmyheadman, Orbital's In Sides, Morcheeba's Big Calm
Honestly, in most cases even used CDs are over priced. With the exception of a very few really good CDs the most I'd pay for a disk is about 4.99. I might go for a system where you could "check out" tracks... Perhaps 100 tracks a month for 10 bucks, with the option of previewing a track a couple of times before being forced to add it to the 100 track list or discontinue listening to it for that month. Of course, something like that would provide too much consumer benefit, so don't expect to see anything like that, ever.
Correct. Theft/stealing requires removal of something. In copyright infringement and/or copying, the "original" item stays in place, and is never removed or tampered with.
Nothing about music will change, fundamentally or not; only the _sale_ of music will change, which is a really obvious consequence of this.
A. I should be able to buy the songs I like, without having to buy the whole album.
B. I should be forced to buy the whole album.
Now, let me explain why I dislike both of these...
A. I think this approach will encourage less and less thought for artists. Everything would be "hit" driven, much like it is today. The days of "good albums" would be gone, it would all be song driven. Sometimes I find some of my favorite songs aren't the hits played 1000000 times on the radio. I like discovering other tracks. Not all goods songs are the popular ones. Artists would be less inclined to take risks, or put any thought into the layout of the album.
B. I may not want to buy the whole album. I have been burned many times in the past. I have heard a good song, bought the album, and it sucked ass. In that event, the good song was just an ad to get me to buy the whole album. I'll bet a lot of albums have been sold on this principle. Sometimes groups just get lucky with one song. For older music, I think the individual songs should be made available on a per-song basis. After 2 years (and some could argue even one) the album sales basically drop to nothing. In that case, release the individual songs, so people can make compilation CDs or whatever they want. At that point, the album is effectively dead anyway, you might as well reap the benefits of the hit songs.
But like I said, I bounce back and forth between these ideas. You might think that it doesn't matter what I want, that the RIAA will decide what I want. But I am just one of many. They could really make the music industry take off again, where everyone is really into music. Hell, the market is THERE, they just don't see it. I haven't bought a new CD for at least 2 years, simply because nothing out there interests me. I am sure that there is stuff out there I would like, but I am instead fed the tripe that the average teeny-bopper and idiot consumer will swallow. Instead, I am going over my 300+ CD collection and rediscovering music that I "own". Hey RIAA - up yours.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Wow, like I imagined, about 60% of the comments to this article are along the lines of "99 cents! What an amazingly large sum of money!" Come on geeks, here's your chance to put up or shut up. I can't count how many times I've heard someone say "if I could just buy two or three tracks instead of the whole album, I'd be there in a heartbeat." Well HERE IT IS! Go for it.
This article reminds me of a post I made a week or so ago... this quote sums up the geek mentality concerning online music services quite nicely:
"Well, IF they make available every song they've ever published and IF they make the songs available in mutiple MP3 bitrates and in OGG and in uncompressed PCM audio and in every other esoteric compression format I can think of and IF they can guarantee a full 10Mbps connection to me I *MIGHT* consider paying two dollars per month for the service. Until then, I'll continue to download music that I enjoy listening to but do not enjoying paying for."
As Julia Roberts once said:
"I've got money to spend in here!"
I've been waiting for this since the rumours started, now I'll have to wait an indeterminate amount of time longer for the UK release.
I can buy pretty much anything online from the US with my UK credit card - I do it with RAM all the time (half as expensive as the UK in some cases), so what's the deal with US only.
Argh!
You're just jealous that we have free healthcare aren't you?
...and in the darkness...rock them!"
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Me too- think it's more in line with the firewall/proxy issues Apple has with some of their software.
And said young man, take a walk up the street
There's a place there called the YMCA
They can start you back on your way
On a Pr. track basis, I fear the end result would be a lack of quality music reflecting what the artists want to do, ALL the tracks will be designed as marketable generic "mass-appeal hits", gone are "hey thats neat" music you never hear on the radio.
Whats with this AFF format? My car CD player supports MP3's I can't just "upgrade" the software for it. Proprietary formats are useless in hardware based devices. Whats so wrong with just paying to download an MP3?
Why? They still don't support OGG. There is a gigantic petition on Apple's forums for OGG support in iTunes/iPod, and once again Apple just IGNORED it. Of course I'm not surprised...apple continues to IGNORE all the complaints about iDVD, which is STILL UNPATCHED (and unusable for a large majority of people).
I could care LESS for the big labels Apple has signed. The last time I bought from a big label, I couldn't play the CD in my computer. I have no interest whatsoever in supporting those vultures (the labels).
Think small labels like Ninja Tune, Waveform or Warp Records will get a piece of the pie? I wouldn't hold my breath. That's why I'm glad SomaFM is around to give me the music I really want.
My order from Waveform Records just arrived today...6 cds of incredible music I won't hear anywhere but on SomaFM (and that's where I heard of these musicians, on Groove Salad). If SomaFM had their own music service they could bury Apple's.
I said young man, what do you want to be
I said young man, you can make real your dreams
But you've got to know that one thing
like the new games and on-the-go lists and stuff are only on the new pod! not available to us longtime pod owners! what the hell? can someone crack this please?
"So you think this will be about as successful as the iPod, right? They could do worse."
They could do worse, indeed. They can be quite successful, in fact.
As such, it certainly won't be what many messages and the parent item imply: that this will revolutionize the download music situation for everyone.
I, for one, am very pleased with this. I'm sick and tired of scouring the net looking for music that's been ripped by some 12 year old that doesn't know what he's doing. Apple's introducing quality and giving us the music that we want.
Life today. Uncertainty tomorrow.
apparently it is 9.99 an album. Sweet.
AC comments get piped to
Apple wants to stock up on that oh-so-valuable funny currency with the moose heads on them.
$100 headphones, $400 archos. But I'm not going to spend $400 on music, because unlike the archos and h eadphones, music only lasts alittle while, once you hear it a few times it dies.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It records and it has an FM remote control. It can even record from the FM remote control. Oh, and it's cheaper than the iPod.
I noticed that my font smoothing is gone in this version of itunes. Has anyone else noticed this problem as well. My library of songs looks all blocky and crappy.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
This is such a cool feature that is sorely lacking
in PC iPods (works fine on Mac though). I know no PC software supports it, but if they added it in the next firmware release, I'm sure one of the open-sourcers would run with it fairly quickly...
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
No my reading is great, thanks!
You started with:
Obligatory warning: I'll be talking about the price as compared to a complete album, not individual songs]
You then ACTUALLY talked about
At $0.99 (US) a song
In other words, you are comparing part of the whole DIRECTLY to the whole. Of course its not the same
You go off into all the tangents about the jewel case, without addressing your original complaint-one song is not worth $15.98. So now you can buy that ONE SONG and add your own CD, jewel case, etc. and you still have less than $2.50 in it EVEN if you are shopping at Guido's Corner store for your CDs and the jewel cases have real jewels in them.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I'm not just talking about missing my friend-down-the-street's music, either. For example, there are only three songs by Primitive Radio Gods, from the same album of six. Not one of them is the was-very-popular-on-the-radio "Standing Outside a Broken Phonebooth with Change in My Hand".
I hope Steve's side comment of "and more are being loaded every day" refers to 1000+ per day or so. And I hope more than the Big Five decide to get on the bandwagon, so smaller bands like "Towa Tei", or "Pizzicato Five" can get heard.
""If only there was a easy way to buy songs online, I'd stop using Kazaa and go legit."
There still isn't. Better stick with Kazaa everyone! If it is crippled by DRM, only uses an obscure non-standard format, only runs on a small fraction of computers, and costs more than going to the store, no way is this an "easy way to buy songs offline".
"But it looks to me like Apple made a good effort to create what was asked for, and now all people can seem to do is complain about it."
It's not even a good effort. The price is way too high compared to relative value of paying elsewhere. If they had really wanted a good effort, the system would allow download into MP3 and Ogg (user choice) and it would not care one bit what hardware you were using.
AAC?
AAC == DOA
We heard him the first two times... geez
Not even a little bit!! I've downloaded more than my share of music, apps, etc because I agree with you, prices for these things are outrageous. However, just because something is expensive doesn't mean a company shouldn't recieve compensation.
Sure people like you who always purchased music will spend this but for the people who use Kazaa and the napster users, and people who cannot afford to buy music, this service is worthless. So ultimately this service will sell to the same people who are currently buying music CDs in stores, it wont make any more money than the current online music stores who do this.
People who get all of their music for free will never pay for it. Whether it's $1 or $0.01, it makes no difference. Just because someone can't afford something, doesn't mean it should be free (or even priced down to your level).
People will buy it Ray, they will go to apple.com for reasons they can't fathom. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it's money they have and music they lack.
People who buy music will appreciate the convinience of this, as will the people who currently don't pay for the music because they don't want to spend $20 to hear the one good song on a CD.
This is only going to change music for anyone signed on the BIG 5 only.
Indie artists and small labels will STILL be frozen out in the cold by this.
He may have had the info right, Apple plans to release Windows software soon to allow older iPods to use the service side.
If you're worried about AAC sound quality, listen to some professionally-encoded samples here:
http://www.epicrecords.com/mpeg4/?qt
Streaming doesn't mean copying. A streamed song can only be listened to, not saved, or passed on again. It's just like shoutcast (except there aren't tools (yet) for pirating the stream to your hard disk).
Kevin Fox
the new quicktime released today has the option of exporting 'sound to ogg vorbis'. i'm a mac user, but i thought you linux geeks might like to know...
I do make music, and no people dont need to pay $15 for my CDs,
Instead they could pay $1 for each CD and I'd make more money than I'd make selling twice as many for $15 as long as I dont have to give record companies their $14.50 cut. You act likke musicians make big money selling CDs, they make 50 cent per CD.
50 cent per song if the musician got only 25 cent of that 50 cent is more than they'd make selling 15 songs on a full $16 CD.
The goal of a musician is to make fans, and then sell stuff like tshirts and hats, and go on tour, thats where musicians make real money, they only make about 50 cents per CD sold, they dont care about the price of CDs.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
What happened to the iPod being a portable hard drive? Do I have to carry around a cradle to make use of that feature? I gained a slimmer iPod but lost the portability afforded by the ability to pick it up and go. I can score a firewire cable away from home for unanticipated file back-up a lot easier than a cradle.
Is it safe to ASSuME that was planned to restrict serendipitous music swapping? Why would I want sound out on a stationary cradle vs. the head phone jack? I know having to support USB2 on the system hardware had to be taken into consideration but I rather have ubiquitous access to straight firewire than the added cradle connectivity to non-firewire wintels.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Once more the music industry is screwing Europeans. Even if Apple ever manages to get the distribution rights for Europe - they'll have to charge European customers at least 50% more to satisfy the distributors. I've been boycotting them ever since they introduced copy protection for virtually all CDs here in Switzerland (which keeps them from working on my CD player) and I don't see any reason to support them again any time soon. Screw them.
I've waited for this for a long time. still, the only thing I can think of is that this is the death of the b-side.
I guess I'm a classical slashdot cynical negative bastard. that's why I'm in QA.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I call this HYPOCRISY.
Support this service. It lets you D/L right away any song in their catalog wihtout having to pay a monthly fee. You're free to browse their entire collection as well as preview music before you buy. Hell, if I joined any of the other services out there paying a monthly fee, I'd be pretty pissed if they didn't have a song that I wanted, but another service did. I don't like getting locked in.
This service simply uses a different audio format. Closed, mind you, but it's got to start somewhere. As for me, I feel a lot better knowing that Apple is in control of this format than anyone else. They've already shown us with this music service that they DO have the needs of the average consumer at hand. (Average. not the crazy audiophiles that b**ch and moan about 128kbps and not the cheapo colege students freely copying music under the premise of rebelling against corporate america).
Support this service if you want to advance the music industry and show them that we ARE willing to pay for artistic expression and maybe others will follow suit. All it takes is a little tolerance to a closed audio format and an underdog computer company to change the entire music industry.
does anyone know of an AAC encoder that can compete with LAME? i think i've been using the -r3mix tag and it works great. i want to move to aac, but not until i can keep the quality.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
..will I be able find and download Klaus Flouride's "Bus through the barrier?
1. Make the music service everyone is asking for, but only for your hardware. (5% of the market or something like that)
2. ????
3. Profit!
What, me Tweet?
WHY would they choose AAC over Ogg?
Oggs can be created on any platform, using software that exists, is maintained, and is royalty-free. There are two separate BSD-licensed libraries for decoding, also royalty-free. All the work's been done! All they have to do is download from a sourceforge mirror and integrate this work into their product.
Instead they choose AAC, a format that is patent-encumbered, royalty-incurring, unplayable on most platforms, and uncreatable on nearly all platforms. And they lose my business because I am unable make any use of their products.
As much as I dig Apple's products these days, I am not willing to succumb to any kind of lock-in to use them.
Is the catalogue available on the web? (Or in some other platform independent format) For those that don't have Macs but are interested in what artists are offered.
The new iPods no longer have a standard Firewire port. Instead there is a non-standard connector on the bottom. Check it out:
m l
http://www.apple.com/r/store/gallery/ipod3/6.ht
Apple says that only the 15 and 30 GB models come with a dock. So, I guess the 10 GB model must come with a special cable.
Depends on the album.
Dark Side of the Moon for instance goes for $15. "Aha!" you say, "I'll just buy the single tracks separately!"
No.
You can't. They deliberately prevent you from buying two tracks from the album, just to get you to pay an inflated price.
What does this mean? It means the camel's nose is already under the tent with respect to playing with the prices. Soon we'll see certain singles going for $1.50. Then we'll see certain singles you'll have to buy in combination with other singles. Then finally we'll see singles you have to buy the whole album before you get to listen, and we'll have come full circle.
No, the answer to the problem of music and computers is clear. Fuck the studios. The Internet has made them obsolete. We don't need them. The bands don't need them either. Let the bands sell their music direct on the Internet, let other web sites serve as portals to those band sites, and then let's do this dance again, this time without the fucking studios.
Charge a dime per song. The artist sees the whole dime, and not only that, more people would pay.
The artist wins. The listeners win.
And the rat fuck studio execs can go get themselves a real job.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I have a LazyWeb Request.
:)
I want a script that will mount a loopback device that appears to be a CD, and will fool the CD burner built into iTunes into believing that it is one. Then I want an AppleScript that will "burn" (which will be really fast, because no actual burning is required) the audio files onto the CD, rip them off again as MP3s, add them to my iTunes library and archive and/or erase the original AAC file.
Bring it on.
-Waldo Jaquith
They have two adapter cables for the dock port. See their page here One of the cables is for firewire, the other is for firewire + USB2.
Really? Being able to play a song I legally bought on any of the devices I own (audiotron, non-apple media players, etc.) isn't fair use that I'm entitled to?
That's only a function of the file format, which is no more restricted than MP3 is. Apple is not placing any restrictions on that; thus, once the AudioTron and other media players come up to speed with the latest technologies, they will be able to plat it just fine. This is not like, say, WMA, where you have the problem of its being controlled by a single vendor which actively works to prevent others from implementing it. is AAC the most open file format out there? No. But neither is MP3.
Or, to put it another way, would you be complaining if Apple provided bought tunes in the OggVorbis format?
Apple makes such great hardware....I wish they would make a flash based MP3 player to compliment the Ipod because it would rock.
Yeah I know everyone is going to say that flash memory is way too expensive, and they capacities are too small. But I would rather pay $300 for a tiny, ultralight player with 256-512MB than an ipod size 10GB player. Yes, the ipod is very small, light, and durable for a hard drive based player, but it will never come close to the size/weight/durability of flash players. Having something I can barely notice in my pocket is much more important than having every single MP3 I will ever own on hand at all times, even if this means loading new songs every 2 or 3 days (which is about how often I change the mp3 files on my flash players now).
I just got a new MP3 player from Korea called the i-bead. 256 MB of storage, built in battery that charges through the USB port, built in usb plug (no cable needed), NO DRM, shows up in Windows/Mac/Linux as a generic USB flash drive. It's pretty much everything I want, but if Apple unleashed it's useability engineers on this, I can't imagine how much better it would be.
If I TiVo a show on TV, am I stealing?
If I download a song, using Gnutella, that is all over the radio, am I stealing?
I can't find any of the stuff I want on it. Until they get a wider selection and some smaller labels signed up, I don't think it's going to be of much use to anyone other other than 13 year olds. Until then, I'll keep using SoulSeek (I can't use kazaa any more... I did a search for Jack Elliot and got pages and pages of Missy Eliot/Janis Jackson duets). Also, I keep getting errors when I click on some of the links. It may be my firewall, though.
I'm in my university's library right now, and there are a bunch of other users with laptops hooked up to the wireless network. Once we all got onboard, we realized we could change the names of our libraries to have a group Rendevous chat session. Check it out- I thought it was cute: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sanskritboy
what does this have to do with the fact that you need to carry a cradle to use the hard drive
A lot of readers here seem to think that this new service is too expensive and doesn't offer enough features.
Guess what? That's what they said about the iPod...and the iPod was a huge success.
Is it perfect? No. But it's still way better than anything else out there. Same with Apple's music download service. Sure, I'd prefer MP3 or Ogg over AAC. Sure, I'd prefer less than 0.99 per song. But you know what? I'm going to buy a lot of songs from Apple, because a lot of the time their service is exactly what I've always wanted. The rest of the time I'll just order the CD.
Some could argue that recorded music has a greater value than a live concert. Sound preposterous? Here's how it works:
The majority of music-listening I do is from recordings. It constitutes roughly 95-99% of the music I get to enjoy. Meanwhile, the concert, while good in its own right, is transitory and fleeting. Why should I pay more money for something I'll hear once (unless a bootleg is available later) than for something that will provide me hours and hours of enjoyment? Because they're doing actual work instead of recording? Hogwash. Recording is work too, just a different kind.
So you could say that CDs are under-priced and concerts are over-priced. I'll pay $20 for the CD if the concert is $5 or $10.
How's them apples? (pun intended)
Keep in mind that I am not afflicted by the filler-track syndrome. It happens to people, I know. But I manage to avoid it. That comes from being more selective and less impulse-y. If I only ever hear one song by a band that I like I'm not going to buy the CD since I can hear the song on the radio. It also helps to listen to KEXP.
Cheers,
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
On-The-Go playlists
Have a particular set of songs you want to hear? Queue up as many songs as you like in a playlist while away from your computer.
Finally.
There was no word on the clever new dynamic list making technology being employed.
"This service simply uses a different audio format. Closed, mind you, but it's got to start somewhere"
Why didn't they start with a much more useful and "open" format such as MP3. Or even Ogg? They had to start somewhere, and they started in the wrong place.
"Support this service. It lets you D/L right away any song in their catalog wihtout having to pay a monthly fee. You're free to browse their entire collection as well as preview music before you buy."
So does Kazaa. And, unlike this Apple service, you don't have to buy a $900 Apple boat anchor just to use it.
"They've already shown us with this music service that they DO have the needs of the average consumer at hand."
The opposite is true. They are aiming at the small minority which has Apple hardware. They have the needs of the Apple niche at hand, but not the average consumer by a long shot.
"All it takes is a little tolerance to a closed audio format and an underdog computer company to change the entire music industry."
Sorry, I have no tolerance for unnecessary crippled formats that really have no reason to exist and won't play on the vast majority of the hardware out there, and is perversely difficult to convert to a standard audio format.
Change the entire music industry? Even if they get all of the Mac users signed onto this, that is still too few to have much of an effect on the entire industry.
No chance of this doing much: they are aiming at a small community with a useless format.
CD Singles that you buy at the store usually run about $3.20 or so plus tax. They usually come with the one track you want, plus maybe a B side and different mix of that main song. So that is already more than $1 per song and since you may not even like the other 2, you are really getting one song for $3.20. So how does that make Apple's $1 per song so expensive? Since they have the $9.99 per Album option, it is always cheaper than buying music from the store. Coupled with the convenience (something you usually have to pay for--think TicketMaster) it more than makes up for the indiscernible loss of quality.
I just got the USB wireless adapter and haven't set it up yet, so it's a question for those of you who might be a little farther along in this equation than myself...
the ipod is shiny, disregard the cradle
The introduction of the dock pisses me off. One of the great things about the old ipod was that you could use it as a firewire drive and just plug it into any computer.
Now with the new model if I want to share the drive amongst my work & home computers, do I need to buy two docks? If so, it seems like a step backward. I don't even see the option to buy extra docks at the apple store.
I can see why they introduced the dock (a way to accommodate usb2.0 without sacrificing smaller form-factor), but it seems they are gaining one feature people don't need (most people with usb2.0 also have firewire) at the expense of a feature that was truly useful.
Please tell me if I'm wrong about this... otherwise I need to hunt down an old iPod.
You may notice that the text in iTunes stopped being anti-aliased when you installed iTunes 4. Here's the fix:
System Preferences -> General -> Anti-alias fonts smaller than 8pt.
Should work now.
In other news the iPod firmware 3 does not install any new features - not even a 24 hour clock - whatsoever. Oh, there's AAC-compatability, which will be nice for new re-encoding, but it's not like us European users can purchase tracks yet. Oh, others complained before me? Right.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
Something tells me that it's because everyone and their mother is hitting the site. ;)
Apple might have huge capacity, but I don't think they expect everyone to storm the ramparts like this every day.
I think we're all overlooking what's really important here. Did nobody else notice that the iPod now plays Soliatire?
And how exactly are you planning to make up for the money lost on each and every transaction ? By volume ?
At least you got step 6 right.
from here:
In a nutshell, you can play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.
Anybody know what that means, exactly? Neat concept, but on a quick browse of Apple's site, I wasn't real sure what the restrictions were.
Also wonder when we'll see Win-iTunes. iPod went "both ways" officially. Will Apple move a little iLife over to the enemy to make a little more cash?
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Yes, and I think that BMW should lower the price of their cars as well. I mean, I can spend $15K on a car, $20K on a car, but not $40k. I barely have enough money to pay my mortgage and invest in my 401k and I'm supposed to be spending tens-of-thousands of dollars on a car?
I don't know why so many people think that pop music is a necessity is life. You're not "supposed" to be spending anything more than what you can afford on music.
IT IS A LUXURY, NOT A NECESSITY!
You might have heard of it .
And that would be a good thing? I think Microsoft is too huge (and powerful, etc.) already; I'm glad Apple beat them to this. I'd much rather see Apple profit from this than Microsoft (in fact, I'd rather see Microsoft no longer profit from anything, but oh well... ;) ).
This offer sounds great if you look at it for the first time. But i am sure that the record companies get paid, if not by the tunes, then how about useage and preference data? Is it not obvious how this store could elegantly and quietly be used to harvest useage data from the users? Demographic data, song preferences, by the end of the year even world wide... So yeah, 1 buck for a song sounds good, you just pay the rest otherwise, either to Apple itself, or to the RIAA, or to both of them.
its not 1$ a track if you buy the whole CD. then its 50 cents per track. read the apple site.
the new ipod almost half the volume of old one! by moving the firewire port to the dock they also gained the ability to use USB.
there's a new cable that lets you bypass the dock.
I do wonder about the new button positions and possibly if screen is smaller. But basically I trust apple when it comes to ergonomics. I doubt they will screw it up.
BMWs are too expensive for college students to be able to afford! They should be less expensive!
I barely have enough money to eat lunch everyday and I'm supposed to be spending a dollar on some 128bitrate low quality music file?
Why the fuck are you spending money on luxuries like music if you "barely have enough money to eat"??
--sdem
AAC 128 is comparable to MP3 256. Actually, Apple claims their files are equal to or better than the CD versions, which implies that they aren't simply ripping them from CD, but encoding them from the masters. Should be interesting.
What does that mean? What playlist? Does it mean you can burn the song 10 different times?
Random is the New Order.
Yeah Baby! We don't need Windows anymore! Consider me switched!
So, is the new green note in the iTunes icon for all the money Apple is going to be pullin on this?
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
... I'm pleased with the AAC support and the iPod update (maybe even LONGER battery life than 1.2.6), but this freshening isn't terribly innovative or interesting..
Music service? Hmm. There needs to be a 'grab bag' discount, an Audible-style subscription (20 tracks/mo for $10 is about right), et al.
Perhaps the new docking station is step 1 in the ongoing struggle in audio integration, eventually leading to a Car CD changer emulator.
And someday, a video iPod. Who needs a remote control if you have a touchscreen? DVD menus are designed for use on PCs anyway, sometimes abominably so, and worst case you can put a T68-style joystick on it..
Couldn't you just burn the cd and rip it to get a MP3?
It's been immediately obvious to everyone that, after downloading an album from Apple and burning it to CD, you can rip your purchased songs back to MP3 and then distribute wildly. I wonder if Apple thought of that and put in any rights management to ensure that a ripped MP3 so generated is of an audibly lower quality than the original AAC. They could alter either their ripping or burning code... - Ert
More info here.
I haven't RTFA yet, but it seems that for this to really take off and reach the critical mass that it needs to enact a fundamental change in the way we all buy music, there needs to be a Windows client. It needn't be feature-wise equivalent, but it DOES need to be capable of buying songs, if not sharing them in a limited manner as well.
More potential users -> more artists/labels -> more users. And more money for Apple, of course, which is definitely in their interest.
"I am never paying for music again."
That is the mind-set. That is the technology. People want that, so it will be so.
The end.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Does anyone know if it could support the George Foreman USB i-Grill?
C|N>K
*Holds up hand* Dumbass!
Okay, SOMEONE here was talking about albums in the context of only one or two good songs on the ENTIRE CD....
*looks around room at the 30 OTHER Threads he has been reading and realizes this is not one of those threads, sheepish grin*
My main point still stands-Personally, I would by MORE music by the song at $.99
That might lead to paying $17 for an entire album one day far away. I think in the end I would come out FAR ahead
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
the apple site shows that you can play solitare with it. the docking station looks like a pda docking station. i'd like to see it sync to Outlook, and we'll see apple return to the pda market in a big way. put some wireless capabilities and i'll buy it!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Couldn't put it better myself. Wish I had some Moderator points for ya.
and listen to the OGGs. This way I get the cool lyrics and pictures, a legal copy (though I don't believe trading mp3s is wrong), and a perfect backup if I lose my data.
If you consider a CD to be in a lossy format, what music media do you consider to be not lossy? I think you are distorting the traditional meanings of lossy and lossless quite a bit. The way you are using the term, you could argue every form of music is lossy, including a live band (since your ears can't pick up all of the sonic frequencies being generated). Seems kind of silly to me.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
If you had your own Gap Factory at your house and could just push a button and out pops any clothes from the gap you want, why shouldnt you use it? If you can copy the porsche without physically removing it, why not?
If someone cannot afford to buy something, but can copy it without harming anyone else or removing anything, why not?
Should people dying of aids in Africa not build factories and make drugs because they cannot copy our vaccines?
Where are my mod points when I need them?
So let's see. That one lawsuit for MP3 distribution was estimated to be $97billion, charged at $150,000 per song ... which equals about 646,667 songs. At $0.99 a song under Apple's new rate, maybe these kids just pony up the 640,200.33 and be on their way!
What crappie implementation of the "itunes store". Try going back forth between the store and your library or folders. All my playlists disappear and the top nav from the store left bits and pieces behind. Happens everytime for me. i have to close and restart itunes to resolve it. Mainstream pabulum just one click away. Somehow seeing it in MY itunes app just pisses me off more then anything. Help make the ridiculously rich richer support itunes 4! 99 cents for a digital copy of a song has no justification. Blank CD and your time burning it. No cover art lyrics etc... all for the price of a CD. This is a big dumb ass failure.
The best P2P user defence was until now the lack of good commercial music downloading services.
Now that there is a credible online and legit alternative (or at least raises the bar for the others), expect the music industry to go harder against P2P private users.
Check out the ads. They're not all horrible but Floyd and Nic (warning: white guy rapping "Baby Got Back") are scary.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
That we're going to have another wave of people gnutella-ing songs even with this in place, this time the protester's battle cry is "it's not ogg!"
What's next, they fold in ogg, but they used blue bits instead of red bits, therefore the whole thing is crap?
If you don;t like it, don't use it. Go to the record store and buy stuff until you make a better solution. But remember, when you steal the artists get zero, so please don't waltz out the poor artists argumentto boycott paid music. Free music starves them even faster.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That would be cool, but I don't think you need apple. Anyone can set up a web page to sell mp3s and whatever price you want, with no middle man.
I guess this is an acceptable compromise, yet not as convenient as the original.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Am I the only one who can't access the new store using iTunes 4 because of timeouts? It looks like Apple's servers are collapsing due to high demand...
That bit in the presentation where Alanis Morrissette goes on about how "everybody is taken care of" with this new service... Er, I'm an independent musician, one of tens of thousands in the US alone, and if this service is supposed to displace P2P technology I'm here to tell you /we/ have not been taken care of.
We have been screwed again by being left out in the cold.
Lip
Did anyone else notice this? iPod firmware 1.3 allows you to create playlists on the fly. Finally! That's the one firmware feature I've really been waiting for. Firmware 1.3 upgrader for Mac available here and Windows updater should be available early May. (I'm sure someone will hack it first though)
Random is the New Order.
Well the BIG difference between Linux and Mac folk... (I happen to be both) is Mac folk tend not to mind paying for things. Not to mention we pay LOTS more for a fully functional OS and supporting hardware.
A buck a shot is a bargin and will be on every single Mac delivered from now on. iTunes is the only player that comes with the OS (besides QT) so people will be likely to buy being it will be staring them in the face.
My point (I guess) Mac users are not Linux folks 9 out of 10 times and are buyers.
If anyone has brought this up yet, I haven't seen it: how is Apple dealing with the problem of credit card fees for small charges? Is it safe to assume that most customers will buy more than five songs at a time?
Ok brand new cd on the rack costs $13.99 for 10 songs, 2 of which are cool the rest suck. A cd that's not new on the rack costs $18.99 and you're probably only buying it for the one song you heard on the radio that one day. This service is a great thing... and it's going to be huge.
I thought that was a feature. I hate anti-aliasing of fonts on Mac.
sulli
RTFJ.
All this is cool, I agree.
I hope they'll fill up their stock of foreign music (French/Japanese/Iranian/...)
anyway, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The next logical move from Apple (now a multi-media company facilitator), is movies on demand.
sure downloading a DVD is another bandwith requirement. But they do trailers, already.
With a distributed proximity network (say apple stores), one could download from where the bandwidth is up.
Apple just open the can of worms of the 21st century. Will they be able to control it.
I don't know, and I don't care.
It's opening for competition, and frankely better distribution model for us, lazy fat ass stuck in our couches crunching slimmy buttery pop-corns sprinkled "a la" Bud.
cheers
anyone notice the nice new PIM and game stuff that was added this time? looks like a new newton without the inkwell, or maybe it's time for the new newton???
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Just wanted to reiterate that you can preview the first 30 seconds of EVERY song they offer for free.
The new iPods have a new connector that will have either a USB or a FW connector on the other end. You do not need or are required to have the connector.
Drill through a purchase of an iPod, and you will get to accessories. There you can buy an extra FW or USB cable for $19.00
...they put some sort of wireless feature in there that allows the ipod itself to download/buy tunes directly from the store via a wireless connection, basically, from anywhere there is a Wi Fi hotspot / internet connection.. that would be nice... and sell more songs... prototype devices (Compal Red E, MS Dev SmartPhone) (and even production devices -> Orange's SPV) are coming out running the new MS Smartphone OS (yes, yes, MS sucks, blah blah blah). This OS is really nice for a phone, at least, and a hybrid of this idea, running over CDMA or GSM + a PDA + Smartphone type device could be interesting down the road. It's not ready for prime time yet, but, I can see a convergence here, coming in the near future...
According to courts, Kazaa is legal at this time. As for the Apple system, legit as it might be, it is not a credible alternative:
it only runs on Apple hardware. I don't have a Mac. The same is true of the overwhelming majority of computer users. "Won't run on my system" is a very valid excuse.
It only downloads into a crippled obscure non-standard format that requires hassle of conversion or "burn-rip" work-arounds in order to get anything about it. "The files are non-standard and won't work with my music utilities and hardware" is another very valid excuse.
Despite the lack of most of the overhead costs that make up CD prices, the difference in price is underwhelming.
Just wanted to say hello to a complete dolt who needs to get out more and is making Apple fans look bad. Thank you, you have done a great disservice to the community with your fanatic ravings. Perhaps someone should develop the iVag attachment so you can have an outlet for your objectum sexuality.
;)
And this coming from a Mac lover.
You can plug the cable directly into the iPod.
Let's get a few things straight.
1. The songs are 99 cents each, but an entire album is $9.99 USD.
2. You can burn MP3 Discs.
3. You do get artwork.
4. Steve Jobs himself said during the product announcement that they were bringing it to Windows by year's end.
Deal with it folks. Apple got something right.
(I'm still skeptical about Music Store. If it turns out that the AACs are portable and unencumbered except by iTunes, then I'll be ok with it - but if they're locked to one iTunes client, no dice. Burn-rip is too much of a pain.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Interesting...
I spent a few minutes on the Apple website to check their catalog. Actually, I could not. The only way to browse the catalot is through iTunes. Although this might be a way to push more people to use Macs, should not Apple provide a sample of their catalog over HTTP? Or maybe the experience is everything...
99 cents is cheap. But we want cheaper, and we want unlimited access and best quality. So they will cut to 50 cents someday, but that will not be good enough. The price will come down to 10 cents, and then they will see that their efforts are not worthy, and the music industry will have to get another jobs.
Same will happen with movies. Oh boo hoo. Imagine a world without Richard Gere and Sandra Bullok. How ever will Hao cope?
I suggest you read Slashdot
Link the stuff to a historical chart database and you have the perfect gift machine. For an birth, wedding or graduation anniversary, offers a CD with the very hits of that day.
Have it even burned and printed by apple with a personalized commemorative text and case and sent to the celebrated.
It's not a bad idea that they put some games in there instead of the hidden Bricks game, but I can't figure out why every cellphone, PDA, and other little handheld wireless device with a screen doesn't automatically have SNAKE on it. I mean they really don't get much better than that as far as games go. We all know what Bricks is but what the heck is Parachute anyway. -peel
Postulate this..you've finally graduated from school, and started a career as a writer. You get ALL of your icome from selling books.
I go down to the library, check out one of your fine writings, and proceed to make 100,000 copies of it. I then distribute these copies, for free, far and wide. Put up a website, letting any and all get a copy, either electronically, or an actual hardcopy.
I , according to your thought processes, have not 'stolen' anything, because you, the writer, still have it.
You, of course, get no proceeds from my efforts. Your actual book sales go waaaaay down, and your personal income suffers greatly. Eventually, you have to give up writing as a profession, because you get nothing back from it. You have to go get a regular job, and have no more time for writing.
This is assuming that you'd have gotten a sale from the person who refused to buy your book. But someone who is too poor or who cannot afford to buy your expensive book, wont buy your book if they can get it off kazaa or not. How are you suddenly losing sales if people who dont buy books dont buy your book? They dont buy books and didnt buy books before you came around, they never purchased your book before, its not like they all were purchasing your books and stopped, these people never purchased your books because they either cannot afford them or they dont think your books are worth the money, so why do you care if people who have never and will never buy your book read your books?
Thats more readers of your book, and it has no effects on the sales of your book.
If you distribute lots of copies of a book alot of people cannot afford to buy, and alot of people download it, well how does this effect sales? These people wouldnt buy your book even if it wasnt online.
Now, the rare book reader who has lots of money, who does buy books, will download it from the net if its easier and less time consuming then going to the bookstore, but thats your job, its your job to make it easier to buy your book on the net than to download it for free, this means you need a website to sell your books, perhaps yourname.com and put this in the back of all your books so your fans can go to your site and buy your books.
Keep your price decent, and you'll have more sales, let your price get too high and only your true fans or people with alot of money will buy your stuff.
But you cannot get mad at freeloaders, why not do it? Its not like anyone loses anything, and you get a book for free that you would have never bought anyway.
I dont see the problem with this.
Look at Apple's track record in hardware. You end up paying twice as much for something somewhat slower than a "comparable" PC, and features are missing as well.
I wonder if this music service is the same? Certainly it lacks features compared to standard music services: it uses AAC instead of more-useful MP3's. I wonder if it is double-priced and slower than necessary as well. Remember, this is Apple. You typically pay double just for their name.
I remember doing some encoding with LiquidAudio which was AAC based, at 128Kbps, didn't hear any artifacts, to my ears it was about the same as MP3 VBR (with 200Mbps on average).
I tried running the software update, and it showed and seems to have installed the iPod updater (it hung when it had a sliver left on the status bar...force-quitting it brought up a "plug in your iPod to update the firmware" dialogue box, and there's an iPod Software 1.3 Updater in the utilities folder), but I don't see the iTunes 4 update available via Software Update. Is this something that is available through the Software Update in System Preferences or is it only available as a separate download from Apple's site?
You don't go about changing the music world by specifically limiting 9 out of 10 computer users by making it "Mac only".
They are going about it wrong. They should make a PC version first, or at the same time as the Mac version.
They are just shooting themselves in the foot here. By doing "mac only" first, and for a while, they let the idea "It will only run on a Mac" permeate the marketplace. It will take a while to dispell this in the future once non-Mac versions exist.
It makes little business sense; they'd also get more profit by selling 9 times as many units (sell for PC first) as they do by selling it just for Apple machines first.
I can fuck like a demon, I'm reasonably good looking (IIDSSM) and I can upload this to a web site and believe you me - a lot more people will want to watch me fuck than listen to me sing. Put another way I would pay top dollar to watch JLo fuck, but not to hear her sing.
But MP3 and AAC aren't the only options. I've had my whole CD collection encoded as Ogg files for almost two years, and they sound great. But I'm not about to reencode them all to AAC, and certainly not to MP3, so I guess Apple won't see me "switching" anytime soon, let alone buying an iPod.
They could easily and painlessly support Vorbis just as they support MP3, and still have AAC be the "default" format. They'd have me buying from the iTunes store, too. It's not like I think AAC is a bad format - it isn't. But it's not any kind of standard.
If I did switch and redid all my music as AAC, would other people be able to play my AAC files? So far half the places that Apple mentions AAC they also mention "Mac-only". I wouldn't be suprised that they have some sort of Apple-invented tagging convention.
Furthermore, on the iTunes info pages they brag about iTunes' "gapless" capabilities, which seems to consist soley of ripping multiple tracks and encoding them into one audio file. That's not gapless playback, that's one giant audio file. Can you skip between tracks in that "gapless" file, like you can skip between tracks on a CD? Can you share just one track out of that big "gapless" file?
That's an idiotic, kludgy way of getting around the gapless problem. A better way would be to use (or at least support) a format that has gapless playback from the get-go, like Ogg Vorbis.
I'd choose AAC over MP3, too, but those aren't my only two options, and as long as Apple says they are, it's too much effort to switch. I can afford the Apple hardware tax, but my time is too precious.
(and yes, I could just use a different audio player on the Mac to play my Oggs, but I still can't go put them on an iPod and play them)
First Gore gets on Apple's board, now they're showing off Eminem on the front page. Says something doesn't it? Hello Cheney?
I'm not sure what you are trying to do, but QT Pro has a ton of functionality for $25.
Help needed
So if I offer you a free CD you wouldnt accept it? Even if you didnt have demand for it, its free.
So for the RIAA to claim people who accept free gifts "demand" their music its not true.
Also some people believe information should be free and that education is a human right.
This would mean listening to music is a human right.
Its a debateable subject, its also debateable if copyright and ownership of information is a human right.
The RIAA assumes anyone who listens to their music would have paid for it, but thats wrong, most of their music sucks, most people who use kazaa never buy music and wouldnt buy music if kazaa didnt exist, so to blame kazaa for lost sales is stupid, people who dont buy music wont suddenly buy music if Kazaa didnt exist.
People who cannot afford music wont be able to affford music if Kazaa exists or not, we just have greedy people who want to tax the poor, should the poor not be able to access information beause theyt cannot afford it? Should you punish them for taking what they cannot afford to buy? I dont think we should, I think we should punish the ones who take when they can afford.
IF you h ave a good job and make a good deal of money and you dont buy music, thats when you should be fined, if you are a college student barely surviving and people are sueing you ecause you listened to some music without paying, this is like sueing people in afganastan for not paying movie companies in the USA, or some other bullshit.
Its just not fair.
anybody remember those? When i was pounding out BASIC on my Atari 400, a thompson twins single would cost me like 75 cents. about the price of a comic book (think they were 60 cents at the time). of course you got 2 songs on that single, but considering inflation paying 99 cents for a song i want is a lot less irritating than paying $3 for a comic book.
do they still make those stupid cd "singles"? I seem to remember those running about $5 for 2-3 songs.
taking all that into consideration, seems like a right fine deal to this geezer!
(plus it goes right into ipod. he he he he)
"It's the year 2000, where are the flying cars?"
...guess that's saved me a packet! ;-)
I heard there was a shortage of jobs. So where are all these jobs you mention? most interships dont pay anything and the ones that do pay, they pay maybe $9 an hour, most of that money goes into buying books and paying for school (work study)
" $0.99 per 128kb/sec song is overcharging."
It is only overcharging if no-one buys it.
Supply-and-demand.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
This is a great idea and i hope it succeeds, but it simply is not designed with real music fans in mind. I own over 1000 cds and buy about 2-3 albums a week, and this serivice doesn't appeal to me at all. Why ? Because discovering music isn't convenient, its hard work and that's what makes it rewarding. Downloading an mp3 of a song is like like cutting out a square inch of the Mona Lisa, and viewing it as a JPEG on your computer. Its only a portion of the piece of artwork, and it looks/sounds like shit in its compressed/encoded format. Most artists go to great lengths to compile there albums in a coherent package. This includes all the songs, and the order in which chose them to be in, the art work, and the packaging. Downloading "singles" is great, but not for a music enthusiast, its more geared towards teeny boppers wanting to have the latest hit "single". Of course I am deliniating between artists (Wilco, Radiohead, Sigur Ros) and music business persons (Britney Spears, Linkin' Park, Emminem) So in summary... good for business, bad for art. Good for casual music consumers, bad for music enthusiaists.
Am I the only one dismayed this is a U.S. only feature?
:)
-Nex
First iPhoto prints and hardback book ordering is U.S. only.
Then Sherlock is practically useless in non-U.S. countries.
Now this service IS useless. And there is no promise to bring it to international customers.
International users pay the same amount for our product, why do we lose out on some functionality? If you are an International (non-U.S.) Apple customer, then I invite you to sign the petition to promote more international-mindedness at Apple, which can be found here
Apple Features for International users petition
Please sign it if you are an international user frustrated by non being able to use this new service. (Moderators, if you have a mod or two to spare, I'm not below asking to mod this up if you feel Apple needs to spend more attention to the international community
This sig has been deprecated.
While I think it will focus more people on "hit" songs and singles, I think that the same kind of people who produced really good albums before will still do so - I see it more robbing from the crappy end of the spectrum than the good. In fact, perhaps it will help make fewer "fluffy" albums by letting bands release good singles before an album really exists...
There are also other forms of music (like serial weekly releases) that can be explored when the level of sale is granular.
How much variety will really happen is kind of up to Apple - I hope they get some independant lables on board too, and let this service become something of a medium for creative expression.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ironically, a search for Britney Spears in the iTunes Music Store brings up nothing.
Where do I sign up?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
long live the 10Gig model!
(Now, if I only had a spare $300 on me....)
Apple's pay-per-song system is ideal for times when you want to own a song now. This may happen for several reasons, some of which are pure marketing (ever wanted to buy a CD because of a song you heard on TV or on the radio?) while some others are more subtle: you feel such song would perfectly fit your current mood. It's close to the jukebox idea "and you get to keep a copy"...
OTOH, those for whom music is important likely want more than just "Instant Gratification(tm)". For this, there will always be free concerts, CD swapping, actual record stores with dedicated personnel, used CD stores, and garages to rehearse in. My point is, the iTunes Music Store isn't an end-all solution, but it might just work for some situations.
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
so its a dollar for an old rockability song thats 2 minutes long
of course - shine on you crazy diamond and 2112 would be huge deals
I as an independent musician and I am sure there are others would like to get in on this Apple Music store too. Is there any news if they will have an mp3.com-esque section to this thing? I think this would be the best way for artists to begin to sell to the end users directly.
ohlssonvox
http://ohlssonvox.8k.com
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I was (still am) going to buy the itrip from griffentechnology.com
It's a radio transmitter. But now that the fireware port is on the bottom, how many accsessories will that screw up?
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Jesus...i just am so shocked so much of the time even though i shouldnt be by now. But a lot of you (not all) are a bunch of damned whiners, oh this isnt good enough, or this isnt done right, or its not fast enough, or something.
.99$ and try one that u have the mp3 for, make sure its the same bitrate to compare though, because knowing ppl on here...."the 128 AAC just doesnt compare to the 320 Mp3, blah blah blah, or shorten" ok u may be right....but look at the file sizes....and for most people, audiophiles not included thats fine...if u are a true audiophile CD's shouldnt be good enough for u anyway so shut up already...
Apple comes out with a service that is reasonably priced, and if you are enough of an idiot not to think so, go to your local CD store and check the prices again, or go to amazin, and dont foget to add shipping into the cost.
Fair Use....hmmm....youcan burn it as many times as u want...ok so u cant burn the same playlist more than 10 times, hey kids if u need to do this legally, clean your f**king dorm room....but even then just modify it and burn away.
AAC vs. mp3....ok so a company is bringing out a hige music service...and doing it using their products, to also help promote their products....hmmm...whats the problem with that? oh wait, it doesnt work with what YOU have, or YOU want...well sorry...Apple is a company and needs to make money, but hey, they dont try to screw you like M$ does....go compare the DRMs folks...not even to mention quality at the same bitrate...go listen and compare, fork over your
It only works with iTunes....ok, yeah your point? so a company wants to use thir own product again...which is free anyway....
But damn the readers here are sopposed to be smart, and u just whine about everything...this piece of free software isnt good enough or whatever...
sorry for the AC, just not burning as much karma as i i think i am about too..
AC
Go figure.
1. The file itself is not DRM-encumbered. iTunes places the restrictions on burning, streaming, etc. They are not built into the file in any way. There are plenty of other tools you can use to manipulate the files, because...
Cool. Glad to hear it but the service is still encumbered. I'd rather not waste my time working around any restrictions Apple imposes. $0.99 for anything less than CD quality is a rip off as far as I'm concerned. (note, that's my opinion, yours may vary) Not to mention that the amount of music offered is, shall we say sparce?
2. AAC is a standard compressed format:
http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpe
There are plenty of so called "standards". Doesn't mean anyone uses them or that they are relevant. Apparently I should have said "widely used industry standard" so people would get my point instead of pedantically pointing out that this is a codefied standard. So is DVD-Audio but it also isn't relevant for most of us.
So,yes I'm aware that it's a part of mpeg4. So what? There are almost no portable players, most of the audio out there (including my entire *legal* music library) is in MP3, and there is currently little software to manipulate these files. Could that be changed? Sure. Should it? Can't think of a reason to bother. There aren't any benefits to the format that make me want to rush out and convert all my MP3s or deal with another format.
I'm also well aware that record labels are unwilling to release their stuff in CD-Audio quality. That doesn't mean I should just say "oh what the heck" and cave in. When they provide what I want for the price I want, then I might buy. If this service provides what you want, then great, please use it. But I know I'm not the only one who feels the way I do.
Oh, and of course the company isn't going to pay for the bandwidth. Why do you think they charge us in the first place? Not altruism. Part of the cost is the cost of the service. That cost would be passed to us. Simple economics 101. However not all the costs are variable costs so as the service scales up, the cost per unit delivered should fall in time.
Rock and Roll will never die. A digital recording is forever. I still listen to music that is over ten or twenty years old because I can come back to it and it rocks out. For instance, Led Zepplin III is still a great way to get laid.
Your problem is that you're listening to the Backstreet Boys. Stop that.
Is it me or is it odd to see an article with THREE categories attached to it?
Ok, a troll, but a valid troll nonetheless. So, in the interest of wasting server space - "I just got a TiVo with the Home Media option. I'm wondering if the new AAC format will work with it - Does it stream the song from the Mac (already decoded) or does it stream&/or cache the file, then decode on TiVo?"
you're = you are it's = it is and so on. Apply as needed. Do not use internally.
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
I tried to download the newer version of iTunes which is "Available Right Now" as Steve likes to say. Seems that the downloader is pulling down version 3.01 and the installer actually installs the older version.
Where can we get version 4 from? Not available on software update yet.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
ha ha funny....no
Of course, the absolutely best thing about the new music service is the song selection. If I search for Britney, Britney Spears, or World's Greatest Turbo Slut & Virgin, I don't see a single track.
ipod_april2003_qtvr320.mov ipod_april2003_qtvr480.mov AppleMusic-Jacob_m480.mov AppleMusic-Jacob_m240.mov AppleMusic-Nick_m480.mov AppleMusic-Nick_m240.mov AppleMusic-Tyra_m480.mov AppleMusic-Tyra_m240.mov AppleMusic-Floyd_m480.mov AppleMusic-Nava_m480.mov apple_music_store_m240.mov AppleMusic-Floyd_m240.mov AppleMusic-Nava_m240.mov
You know, at the very least, this is a really convenient way to preview entire albums before you buy them.
Woot!
-/-
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Oh, you mean I can't buy tunes completely anonymously with cash like I do when I buy a CD in a store? Move along, nothing to see here, try again, Apple...
With iTunes 4, you can rip to AAC, which means no encoder switching and no loss of quality. Stewby's idea is valid if you rip the songs in AAC.
It is not going to be huge. For one thing, Apple made the decision to exclude most computer users from the program. Incentive to use Kazaa, which actually runs on computers people have
Then they made the decision to use an bizarre obscure format for the files which does not work with almost all players and utilities, both hardware and software. Another incentive to use Kazaa, which will produce files to run on most MP3 players.
Finally, it is way overpriced. The profit margin is vast since with this system you don't have to pay much of the overhead and packaging costs involved with shrinkwrapped CD's.
As a UKian i can only browse & preview songs at the store, I can see a use for it in collecting the classic tunes I can't (be bothered to) find in the shops, can't see me buying whole albums this way though, and they won't get a penny if they use the £1 = $1 exchange rate used to set prices for UK music.
Got to go see how well streaming works to the laptop/stereo, been using iCommune but It bugged me the way it would only play one song at a time.
Cyall darndog
that apple is considering releasing "iPorn" ?
Seriously. AAC was chosen as the sound track of choice for HD-DVDs (ok there are lots of standards. Some of them). While it's not quite there with Ogg Vorbis at bitrates as low as 64k, at 128k it's right up there with Ogg Vorbis, Mp3pro, WMA and the rest, far ahead of MP3.
Also, repeat after me: The big music companies will never ever release in a format that you can share freely. If they did, those files would be all over every P2P net as the "original" files. The fact that you can burn and reencode ensures one thing - that there'll be ten thousand ways to rip it to mp3/ogg, some good, some bad, but different.
As for value, picking songs at $1 is a damn lot cheaper than buying CD singles, which is what you could compare it against. For a full album, well doh they offer "quantity" discounts like everybody else.
So will I be a customer? Nope. No Mac. But if they can get their IBM PowerPC chip in there soon, maybe I'll reconsider and make my next PC, uh computer, a Mac instead of an AMD Opteron.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Correct that: 3 Macs with iTunes installed. But I have 1 Mac with iTunes installed -- and a couple Linux boxes. Which would probably be okay, except the Mac is a laptop. Whoops.
Just because you are Fortune 500 does not mean you have a good business model.
Apple hovers over the brink with a "smoke and mirrors" business model that tries to sell hardware on what it looks like instead of what it does. No wonder Microsoft had to bail them out.
And whatever your tastes in music are: Rock, Rap, Jazz, Blues, Pop, Latin, New Age, Folk, Inspirational, R&B, Reggae, Electronic, Classical or something in between
Has anyone checked to see if Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony is available? The first movement should cost a little over $0.02 per minute.
If what the record companies are saying is true, shouldn't there be a dramatic reduction in the price of a new CD.
That would be a price based on the lower demand in the marketplace. I am not taking a stance on piracy either way in that statement but wouldn't that be a perfectly legitimate way to combat piracy?
Does piracy force the record companies (and software developers) to have high prices or do the high prices encourage people who may not have pirated otherwise to try it out.
Here's a thought: would we have seen as much looting in Kuwait had we overthrown that government (the average Kuwaiti being more affluent than the average Iraqi).
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
The problem is that the high-end iPod holds 7500 songs. Filling that up would cost $7500. I don't see this as reasonable. The technology and music are available to give me a huge library I can carry around, but licensing fees make it prohibitive. A nickel a track, now that would be reasonable. Price the music such that I can actually use the hardware you're selling me without breaking the law.
Exactly. Not only are they not offering it for PC users, they appear to be discouraging interest by PC users.
Slashdot is littered over the past few years with announcements of many new online music services that are overpriced and offer worthless files. Wish I could name some of them right now. I can't; they all failed and are forgotten. Apple's decision for the time being to tell the majority of computer users to go to hell only ensures it will sink a lot faster.
Okay, iTunes music store is only available in the US. I figured that out after I downloaded it and it gave me iTunes 3, which I already have. I'm a US citizen just LIVING in Ireland... okay so I try DLing it selecting the US as my country. Still gives me iTunes 3. They're clever, but annoying. What's worst is that at the bottom, it meantions the many languages iTunes 4 supports, including Swedish, Danish, Finnish, etc. Why bother if they won't let anyone from europe even DOWNLOAD IT? The thing is, I've been waiting for this service for a long time, I want to support Apple every step of the way, but with this kind of thing happening, I'm frustrated.
Yup...
No Shatner. This sucks.
Did anyone notice that the "Music" tab on Apple Store has replaced "Switch" tab. I went there looking for the ads shown today, and realized what happened.
Also, if anyone has a link to the ads, please pass it on.
For instance, most of the Panasonic players support AAC - so shouldn't you be able to just copy a file from Music Player to a Panasonic player and take it on the road? Is the AAC format the only reason that the iPod is only supported right now?
I was called an outright liar last week when I mentioned that Apple had DRM and had plans to use it in the very near future.
So a big STFU to you!
There are flaws in their scheme that Apple will have to address. For one, a 0:14 second Naked City track costs the same as a 16 minute Ravi Shankar track. I'm not inclined to pay a dollar to donwload a 0:14 track, even though it's packed with goodness. On the other hand, I feel like I'm shortchanging poor maestro Shankar. Also, the selection's not so great so far.
Besides, I've already found 1 bug in iTunes 4.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Umm what's your beef? If anyone has mod points please mod the article back up. I didn't know half the stuff that was mentioned in this article.
AAC formatted files, converted from MP3, are actually larger than MP3 files. Unless Apple is saying freshly ripped CD files to AAC wind up smaller than ripped to MP3, I have not seen where AAC files are actually smaller, at 128.
The great thing about Napster and other file sharing programs to me was that I could find old songs that were virtually unavailable anywhere else. I found old old very obscure blues ("How Come My Dog Don't Bark... by Prince Partridge and others),show tunes and songs from the soundtracks of french films like (Shoot the Piano Player & Jules and Jim), old comedy stuff like Lord Buckley - the list could go on for pages. Anyway, Apples' new store may generate revenue on popular music but it still does not address my problems and I will continue to use file sharing programs for these older unavailable songs.
I don't see how the RIAA can stop file sharing for songs that are not available or in print at the current time. This should be a minimum requirement in my opinion.
I would willingly pay a reasonable fee for what I seek but the fact is much of what I search for is not available anywhere else.
...this cocksucker bitch.
Weird to say the least, for some reason when I try to download from the Apple site all I get is Itunes 3, anyway aside from that I hope that this Service kicks some serious ass and takes off, I certainly will be trying to help do that and use it a lot. Also, just a question but does anyone know what cut apple will be making off of every micropayment?
"Guns don't kill people, bullets do."
One less than useful but definitely cool feature that has been added is the ability to associate album art with songs. There are two things missing however:
1) When you have an Album selected in the iTunes browser you can not see the art. You are only shown art when you have a song selected. I wish there was Album level art.
2) There is no way to easily download art for all of your files. This seems like a solvable problem. A little bit of Apple Script and Amazon should be the key to CDDB style updates.
Is anyone up to the task? I'm no Apple Script whiz-kid but if something doesn't show up soon I may just have to brush up.
Ok, I can stream to 3 other machines - great. But I can't copy the files to 3 other machines. Meaning when I'm on the road with my laptop, I can't listen to my music. Unless I want to carry a bunch of CDs. But portability is kind of the point of a laptop. This is a serious drawback for me.
Devon
Apple's servers seem to have trouble displaying albums, but it works fine if you just use "Power Search" for everything. I haven't had any trouble listening to tracks; the 30-second previews sound great (much better than the RealAudio previews at Amazon.com). For some reason, just browsing seems to be broken right now.
In mulling over the new Apple service, I came to realize that there is another major aspect to this - it's the first major networked shopping app (that I know of) that has a dedicated interface, not just a browser interface!
People have been using iTunes for a while now, so using it to search for music is very natural - not that web shopping is hard, but it's just not as integrated an experience. I think that will make impulse purchases even easier, and really drive a lot of sales vs. just having a classic web storefront. If you're just sitting there listening to an old CD you have, you can say "I wonder if this person has anything new out?" and buy it with just a moments effort, expanding your playlist.
I wonder if this is the start of an expansion of heavily customized interfaces for shopping that really take advantage of web services (I wonder if the Apple music store will have a web service interface?).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Look: it would be nice if the whole world was run like a giant porn business, I agree. But you've got to give some thought to the pool of available talent, production costs, and the economics of distribution. Bottom line: it's somewhat easier to find a woman down on her luck who needs food and shelter and is willing to trade for them by laying in the center of a bunch of strangers who penetrate and ejaculate upon her, than it is to write, record, and sell a record.
From time immemorial, artists have been struggling with this very problem at the intersection where art and anonymous, for-pay sex meet. As Michelangelo once said, "Argh! If I don't get that Sistine Chapel commission, I'm going to have to do 'Venetian Orgy 4: My Tower of Pisa Leans to the Left'." Fortunately, he was spared that indignity and went on to paint one of the truly inspiring works of art of the ages featuring, but only by coincidence, God and Man in the nude.
So you see, while porn does appear to make the world seem more happily unidimensional, there are still nagging complexities that prevent our moving fully to a Porn-centric Economy. Besides, Alan Greenspan's ticker couldn't take it.
WHY would they choose an obscure format, which is only used and even known by a bunch of computer geeks?
Look, AAC is an industry standard and everybody who wants to claim MPEG4 compliancy has to support it, so I don't see any problem. I have paid for the software (either directly or via hardware purchase) and I can play and encode AAC just fine with iTunes/Quicktime. This is exactly the same licensing situation as with MP3 and I had *never* a problem with not being able to play or encode songs because of patents or royalties.
If "openness" is important to you, there are alternatives you can choose from. Just don't expect Apple to waste money adding Ogg support to iTunes AND the iPod, just so they can cater to a minority.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
All you friggin whino's, read the article!!! AND I QUOTE: "iPod Software 1.3 is compatible with touch-wheel and scroll-wheel iPods without a dock connector."
FINALLY!
I thought I'd never find someone willing to talk about the hardware part of Apple's announcement. It's hard to hear over the shrill whine of the usual suspects bitching about the price/selection/DRM of Apple's new online music service.
Bottom line: Apple's hardware continues to kick ass, Their new music service is going to revolutionize music distribution. More windows users filled with apple envy. Film at 11.
Non tam praeclarum est scire Latine, quam turpe nescire
-- Cicero
Good idéa!
pr0n directly into iPhoto. Wooohoo!!!!
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
From the iTunes Terms of Sale:
If you are purchasing using 1-Click, your order may be authorized and billed in gradual increments during one purchasing session as you click the "Buy Now" button. Depending on the size of your order, this may appear as multiple orders and billings on your credit card statement.
If you use the Shopping Cart functionality, you will have one order that authorizes and bills as a single purchase.
iTunes Music Store purchases will include sales tax based on the bill-to address and the sales tax rate in effect at the time of download. If the sales tax rate for the billing address changes before the song is downloaded, the new tax rate in effect at the time of download will apply. We will only charge tax in states where music downloads are taxable. No customers are eligible for tax exemptions for purchases made on the iTunes Music Store.
ha ha funny.
that would be the work-around we need.
sulli
RTFJ.
Lower life forms may only require food, water, and shelter, but I also need refined sugar, entertainment, caffeine, computers, fast cars, attractive women, automatic rifles, and big screen TV's - not necessarily in that order.
You can call me part of the problem, but honestly I'm only this way because of Corporate America!
From iTunes 4: How to Locate Downloaded Files:
Be sure to make regular backups of your music files (in your iTunes Music folder) by copying them to an external hard disk or other media. If your hard disk becomes damaged or you lose any of the music you've purchased, you'll have to reimport all your songs and buy any purchased music again to rebuild your library. You can also make an audio CD of the songs you purchase so you can listen to them in a consumer CD player.
That said, all purchases are saved in your account: iTunes 4: How to View Purchase History. Makes me wonder why you have to re-purchase any music that you've lost. The FairPlay system should still be enforcing the 3 computer limit. Although that might be the problem: purchase 1000 songs, deauthorize, tell friend Apple ID (after removing your credit card information or something), friend authorizes, downloads 1000 songs. Who knows.
Still no support for Ogg, which is a bit disappointing. I guess we'll have to wait til iTunes 5. In the meantime, I've gotten good mileage out of this handy plugin to add Ogg support to iTunes: http://illadvised.com/~jordy/
Apple has people set up to deal with this. iTunes 4: How to Contact Music Store Billing Support.
Overprotected, the list goes on and on! Brittney rocks and I watch her videos constantly on Lauch!
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
The OTHER purpose that a lot of non iPod owners (some owners too) is that the iPod is ALSO a great hard drive backup utility. As the parent posted, it has become one of the most useful tools to own, particularly if you are a mac user.
You can just pop the burnt CD into any machine with a CD-ROM and a CD-RW drive and copy as many as you want...DIRECTLY.
Toast Titanium is good for that. But so is OS X's built in burning.
This little technology has huge loopholes...on purpose. You can still do what you want with any of those songs as soon as you download them. Just drag and drop to a seperate area on the desktop or a folder or CD burning application, and suddenly, iTunes is out of the loop!
Gee...I never thought of that...nur.
I got nothin'.
People seem to be forgetting here that electing to use the service does not exclude you from being able to go to your local rapeord store and pick up a CD. If there are only 3 songs that you want from a CD, then getting 'em through iTunes makes more sense. If you want a whole CD with the liner, etc. Go to the store.
>> Give me option number 2 any day.
Option Two would be pricing CD's at $30 and tunes at two bucks each.
Let the market decide. Apple owes nothing to no one.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm sure most of us here both use and traffic in technically-illegal mp3's. But it's the intelligent ones that don't try to justify it as some sort of honorable, revolutionary act, because it isn't. Of course, that won't stop me from firing up Kazaa or my Easynews account to download an mp3 of something, but I am one of those people who actually does put my money where my mouth is, and buys the actual CD of an artist whose mp3's I've previously downloaded from the net (if I like it and listen to it regularly, that is).
Most of my pro-corporate, pro-majorlabel, pro-RIAA friends laugh in disbelief when I say this, but when they come over and take one look at my "real" CD collection , they promptly shut their sumg asses up.
There's another matter, too. So many here thump the tub about "cutting out the middleman," as if that were some de facto good, but the "middleman" in this case is actually the guy running the great little music store in our neighborhood -- a place to meet and talk with other music lovers, compare tastes, hear new stuff -- and one of the last personal shops in a sea of bland corporate chains. Inevitably, he'll go out of business, one day, as we trade what remains of our local flavor for a few bucks shaved off the bill here and there; but I wouldn't like to hasten that day.
There is a new web site applemusic.com. Last time I checked it went directly to apple.com/music. That may change.
This is a great service and a step in the right direction. However, there is a major flaw in the strategy. You see, this service works FANTASTIC -- but only if you use Apple.
And therein lies the problem. Apple has neither the production capability nor partnerships to make this happen. Yea, so I can burn it to CD (on my mac) and port it to my iPod (apple, too). Ok. But what about my portable mp3 player? Nope. What about my DVD/Mp3 player? Nope. What about my audiotron or home network? Nope. What about my PC? Nope. Can't do it.
customer "So I have to buy an apple product to use this?" -- yep. Sure do.
customer: "Screw that! Why do I have to buy something from Apple to do this? Oh - that's right. They're a hardware company too (that, incidentally, has a history of not being able to meet demand for its products)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why this will ultimately fail in the long run. It's a DOA.
Don't all of your arguments kind of lack substance when the Windows version of this service becomes available?
How are the files "encumbered"? The only "encumbrance" is the file format, being somewhat non-standard. Once you've bought the files, you can transfer them however you like... it's just that the default TOOLS that work with these files have some restrictions. But if I copy an AAC file from this service to another computer running Quicktime 6.2, I should be able to listen to it just fine... once it's on an iPod you can mount it as a firewire drive and copy it elsewhere (note - have not tried it yet, I'll retract my whole statement if not true).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On top of the buck or so, to show appreciation for a really good song. Good idea?
Probably no signed artists, as the record labels 00wns th3m, so to speak. IIRC, an artist is often "forced" to give up quite a lot of things in order to even be signed (small things like their artist's name and such..)
Seen in that light, this probably won't make a difference to these artists. For unsigned though, it might be the chance they've always been waiting for!
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
One thing I like about Apple is that they are waiting until they actually have a product ready before they make the annoucement.
Complain here using the iTunes feedback form.
I just did some "listening" in the store (I can't buy anyways right now they don't sell up here in Canada) and I compared the sound samples to some of the stuff I have on my iBook right now.
The result? The files sound flatter, not really all that bad but if you can directly compare it it is almost shocking.
So sorry Apple. As much as I like you and my iPod I will not fill it up with your service for the forseeable future unless something really is changing in regards to the quality (Not talking about the DRM right now).
M.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Well, if that's your preference you can push it up to 12 and you'll see a lot less of it.
Type looks sucky though. Kerning's all bad at smaller sizes.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
Dunno if others are getting the same thing but moving around the "store" throught iTunes, I get a number of access problems. Maybe we can't /. the Apple site but iTunes might already be too busy for its own good...
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
Wow,
That sounds like a great deal! Make it a million, though! Then, I can do book signings, appear on talk shows, write stories for magazines, and start my own tv reality show where I torment you by repeating every word you say, while you rant that I'm stealing your thoughts. Btw, right now I'm singing myself "Happy Birthday", and stealing some company's hard earned income.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
First of all, $.99 a song, when the song is burdened with DRM? That's just too much. That's virtually the same price as buying a CD, but with none of the distribution costs of a CD. A CD also (normally) doesn't get burdened with DRM. If the price was $0.10 or less, then I'd be excited. That would be a reasonable price, but this $1 a song crap is just too much. I'll stick with file sharing and MP3s, thank you.
As for the new iPod, I'm not terribly impressed. It's an evolutionary change, not a revolutionary one. What's the big deal about including USB 2.0, especially with these caveats: USB 2.0 connection is for Windows PCs only; dock connector to USB 2.0 cable sold separately. USB 2.0 requires Internet download available in June. I wonder if this means I can get a good deal on the old iPods...
AAC has DRM functionality.
Ogg does not.
Case closed. Whiners.
So, when the Apple site says that playback of AAC-formatted files on an older iPod is currently unsupported for Windows, there is no actual hardware restriction. And if you're using Linux, you can talk to an iPod that's formatted either way. So if it means going with Mac formatting to get more features, just do it.
On top of all that, the new buttons are touch-buttons like the "wheel" so there are no moving parts to break (except the Hold button).
Haha I thought Nic was great. F'ing hilarious.
First, you can buy the album for $9.99 if it has a lot of 20-second skits. Something like Flanders & Swann is different than your average Top Ten album.
.m3u files, maybe that doesn't seem like much, but in iTunes having a clean database is heavenly. The interface is elegant and powerful. The playlists can be conditional and dynamic, including all songs with "raindrops" in the title that have been played less than ten times and aren't Jazz. MP3 files are sorted on the hard-drive into a directory structure of artists, and then albums by that artist, according to their data in the XML database, which is synced with the tags of each file.
Second, a lot of people here are talking about what you lose when you go to the computer. No physical medium, no liner notes, whatever. Guess what? You're buying a software product! When you decide whether to drop a couple hundred bucks on Methematica or an HP-48GX, you're deciding between a hardware product or a software product. When you choose between Photoshop and a set of oils, brushes, chalks, pastels, and canvases, you're choosing between software and hardware. Each side has advantages and disavantages. You also gain something by choosing software over hardware, something I think is rather more important than pretty pictures, liner notes, and a cardboard or plastic box.
Getting all your music from a consistent source means all your tags will be in order. If you're using WinAmp and fiddling around with
In this kind of environment, if one collects files by Bjork off Morpheus where some have the accented o and some don't, and most haven't had the rest of the fields filled out, one will have a very different user experience than if Apple provides the file with the correct artist, album, year, genre, etc. $0.99 might be a lot for an AAC file with just a name, but it's not so much if you can play only broadway musicals from before 1945 and _rely on the player to play them all._ Of course, you could manually enterevery tags yourself, but the basis of modern society is paying other people to do manual tasks for you, hopefully just once for everybody.
And if the tags don't justify a price of $0.99 instead of $0.50 to you, consider also that you can get music here that is difficult to get from the store. Converatively, 200,000 songs is 10,000 albums. The main Virgin Megastore in Vancouver does not have 10,000 albums on its three stories. Perhaps some of your American megastores do, but for the vast majority of the world, this is easier than ordering in specialty items.
So software has its advantages. Choose depending on circumstance. This is what we would call a new option.
a) Cost. The cost has to be 50c or less per track.
b) Quality. The quality must be CD equivalent or better. Forget this 128K rubbish.
c) Format. The format must be completely open - i.e. not controlled by any one company. It must have a published spec, and be free for anyone to implement. Ogg is a good example of this. Not sure about AAC. MP3 is OK, but it should be at least 256K, and it is not 100% open, but it's well used enough that it might as well be.
d) Selection. The range should include the most popular artists from the last 40 years or so, and most of the less well known.
The only service I've ever seen which came remotely close to this was Audiogalaxy. I would gladly have paid to keep that service going.
then why is anybody even thinking about trying to sell music online. ALL 5 MAJOR LABELS signed on to this idea. Doesn't that tell you something???
Are you a jealous windows troll or what??
Now that the server can handle the load, I can browse the selections. I gotta tell you, I really like what I see. Granted, I am 40 years old so I am looking for new songs as well as 25 year old songs by Ambrosia (don't ask) and there is a lot here. In fact, I'm finding that I have a lot of the newer things (Audioslave, etc.) but it has a bunch of singles from the past n years (where n > 20) that I have been looking for. Lots of songs an oldster like me is looking for and I am old enough to have disposable income. Yep, Apple has me pegged. Bay City Rollers, here I come (don't ask)!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Well, Software Update didn't have anything needed for this, but they're all online: (1) iTunes 4 -- for some reason I got 3.01 the first time. Same link the second time (two minutes later) got 4.0. YET. (2) QuickTime 6.2 -- had to get the installer; doesn't show up in QT update either. YET. Oh, requires restart. I'm impressed, When I want a song, and it's there, I'll DEFINITELY pay the $0.99. If my wife wants an album, I'll DEFINITELY pay the $9.99 and burn it. YES, it's worth it especially for full albums. The, uh, less than honest way takes too much time for entire albums and there's a lot of broken stuff out there. Most albums are only $9.99, no shipping, no handling, and (for the wife) a cheapie $.20 CD. WAY COOL. Of course, there are things that WON'T be in the Music Store for a while. Until then, if I only want a single song, I'll stick to the, uh, traditional procurement methods. DRM? Simple enough to evade if I need to do that. But that's only *if*. Left to check: can I burn my iTunes onto a data DVD so I can use the MP3's in my DVD player?
--Jim (me)
I've read quite a lot of the comments about this on slashdot. There's just no pleasing some of you. Apple makes a great step in the right direction and all you can do is whine and complain about it being "too expensive still", "uses .acc format", "can't do this", "can't do that." Good night you people, get a Life! If you don't like it, don't participate. If you are a company that can do better than Apple on this, DO IT! but for crying out loud, stop your insessant whining! Here, have some cheese with that!
-- DuckWing
Everyone says the same thing... "I don't want to buy a CD with one (maybe two) good songs on it"... I'm just dissapointed that MTV and the RIAA controlled radio has limited people to think that any new, upcoming artist can produce only a maximum of 2 good songs... Sooooo, that means that yes... 2 dollars for two good songs is great, but I would honestly like to see people be a little more objective of modern music, rather than being subjective, for that's one of the big reasons that the RIAA got themselves in a rut now. Well, on a side note, MTV2 does play whole albums on the station for people to review, which i think is fantastic, so they can hear more than the two singles an artist(s) releases.
You disgust me and all right thinking Americans with your commie nonsense. If you ever had to do anything more difficult than washing your sticky underwear you would run home crying to mommy, yet you have the gall to steal other people's hard work. You are a living breathing, insult to the United States of America and the principles that made it great.
quoting from http://www.apple.com/ipod/:
"no more reaching around looking for the right port"
indeed...
Slate's Webhead reviews it here.
One of the main reasons the dance culture did not take off in the states like it did in europe is that, until now, the states is a album based market. Dance music is single based.
If this takes off, there will be widely available distribution channels for singles and radio might even respond. We might see the dance culture boon in the US yet.
m
I'll pay $1 a song when it's a 320kbs MP3 with NO DRM or restrictions. Until then I'll either use Kazaa or just buy the CD.
Keep Austin Weird!
I bought one song just to see how it worked. With my TiBook hooked up to my PC speakers, I could not tell the difference between a song I had already encoded 192kbs VBR and the AAC preview of it on the Music Store or the song I downloaded. The new Quicktime 6.2 also plays these files (they have an .m4p extension). I'm still wondering what the "(Protected)" on the file is when I do an Info on it in Finder. Any thoughts? Does this tie it to my laptop? Can I not transfer it to another computer (ie: another Mac I own?)
To use the music flexibly. I choose not to let Apple control what I do with music I have bought.
If MS did it it would all be DRM enabled WMV files instead of DRM enabled AAC files :(
Just a follow up to an earlier post, with some real world evidence. Apple claims the file size is smaller. It isn't. I imported a song off a regular CD, first in AAC format, then in MP3 format, both at 128kpbs, stereo. The song was 4:29 long, and BOTH AAC and MP3 formats left a file size of 4.2MB! Am I missing something, or is the claim of smaller file sizes just not true?
Say what you will about the whole file format debate and such, but the service works very nicely. To try it out I fired up my newly downloaded iTunes 4, set up my account, found something that interests me (Massive Attack's Blue Lines, cd I had meant to get but never got around to it) and bought it for $8.91 for the whole album.
The tracks where then downloaded to my library, after which I burned a copy of the disc, and had it transfered to my iPod. Sound quality is good so far, though I haven't gotten to listen to it on my good speakers at home yet. The album cover art and such is downloaded with the album and displayed with the tracks in iTunes. Not the same as the physical thing, but it's something.
The selection could definitely use some work (hopefully it will expand to include more indie lables and such over time), but as for the service in general it works very well. The protection is minimal when you think about it - unlimited cd burns means you can re-mp3 it easily if you desire. There's no way the big labels would've let them do something like this in a totally opened way, so this is not too bad.
My usual procedure when buying a cd is to bring it home, throw it in my cd-rom and wait for it to rip, then do the iPod transfer, and if it's a cd deemed worthy I put the disc in my car changer. This cuts out the whole ripping step (replaced with downloading though), and saves the trouble of having to go to a store, or wait for an online place to ship to me. I can't see myself using it too much right now honestly, but if the selection improves it will be a good way to grab songs.
ExInferus
Open iTunes:Preferences...:Effects and turn on Crossfade playback with 0 seconds. And there you go.
At least I assume that's what you meant.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
anyone else notice that there's now a "BPM" (beats per minute) field in the view options? that, uh, wasn't there before, was it?
So why did iTunes 4 shift to a crappy font and not give us the ability to change it in the preferences? Anyone got a suggestion as to how to fix it?
---- Live for Music. Die for Trance.
1st offence: I Photo charges (or charged) in american dollars and did not state the currency. As all my dealings with the apple store are in my home currency then i figure iphoto is too. Nope, and next thing i know i'm stuck with paying for something in american currency (mucho $$$$$ on exchange) and my grandparents whom i sent a 'special' book of photos to had to pick up the shipping charges! Like about 15US worth of additional shipping.
Cust service was good about it so i forgot about it. They covered the difference in everything but the shipping. Apple Okay, whatever.
But Now!!! the first digital music service worth its salt, the service macatistas all around the world have been waiting for is here and.... I need a bleeping credit card with an american adress to participate. There better be a good legal reason for this. Otherwise it's just plain rude.
I'm a self-admitted mac-a-holic. Since i swiched from win98 se and bought an iBook a few years ago. Since then i have bought so much stuff from apple. My point, its not like everyone out side the US is poor and cant afford apple stuff! And we do buy it.. so why why why treat us like second class citizens! Expecially at a time like this, when the pinacle of modern e-tailing is in their grasp.
Why are you screwing me Apple, why
So it is with pain that I arrive at boycotting apple. I have persuaded three people switch to the MacOS from windows in this year.
~so~
Until apple starts treating me, and other non-americans like me with some respect (or at least until 10.3 comes out) I will not buy another product. I will curtail my advocacy and conversion efforts to produce less stellar results, and I will tell all my mac friends. (Kinda wea. \I know... but it is apple!)
Noooooooo! I've just spent a half hour or so doing comparative listening tests with my 192 CBR and 192 VBR MP3s versus CDs and the 30 second 128 AAC samples. And AAC @ 128k doesn't cut it. It's better than MP3 at the same bit rate, but sounds muddy and loses punch. I'm not an audio engineer, but I'm using a decent pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD200s) and I haven't lost my hearing yet (can still hear the whine a TV makes (~30KHz).
Test at home! If you have the Bjork song Joga, play that from CD or high quality MP3 (>200kbit), from around 3.30, roughly where Apple's 30 second sample starts. At about 3.54, the background noise ramps up quickly, a rich white noise. That should be there in the last few seconds of the Apple sample, but it's been muddied almost completely out. It's there in the MP3. Other subtleties lost too.
Same deal with They Might Be Giants's Birdhouse in Your Soul and Subliminal. Missing spark and punch. It's just too low a bitrate. I'm sure you can't tell the difference on regular computer speakers, but any decent pair of headphones (like those that people use with their iPods) should show it up straight away.
This is a shame, but fixable (192k please!). Right now, I can't use the thing, because I'm on the wrong side of the pond. But at 128k, I wouldn't touch it anyway.
it's not about the karma, it's about the whuffie
If that's the price the market bore two decades ago, I don't see how it's too much now.
So if I want to make up a CD of AAC files (rather than burning a CD for a CD player) can I do that or will the DRM stop me?
Yeah, he had inside info. But Apple didn't remove the record labels from the loop, they are paying the record labels. Dave Matthews Band didn't sign to some mythical "Apple Label".
1) The interface is great, much better than working through the web (aka amazon) to buy, especially for sampling. However browsing can be tricky with so many bands, so searching is a must.
2) Like amazon, there should be the ability to post reviews, suggestions, and personal playlists (based on iTunes playlists, naturally, possibly automatically culled). Also it would be nice to have the option to buy the CD, although that would best be addressed with a tie in link. Oh yeah, links to official band/album websites would be nice.
3) $0.99 for a song is not unreasonable, if you're only going to buy a couple of songs off an album. $9.99 for an album is probably more than it could be. No doubt there are actuaries in the works. In fact, for $0.99 is probably too little for albums where the songs are all long, depressing the price of the album. This includes mainly Jazz and Classical works. Really, prices for individual songs and albums should be much more variable, based on the set album cost and the song length, with the popular songs boosted in price a bit over that number.
4) There isn't enough content. I couldn't find even half of what I was looking for. There ought to be a way for small labels and independents to get in on the action. Allowing them to host their own music and samples through the iTunes music store interface would be the most reasonable way.
5) There are way too many partial albums. I have no idea why you would only put up some songs off an album - did they not have all the source recordings for the entire album?
6) Once Apple has expanded the service outside of America, they should provide a way to buy music from overseas as well. Under the current distribution model, (true) international music is difficult to find and get.
7) I couldn't find the Fleetwood Mac "Peacekeeper" song that just came out, even though they were right on the front page. Bad Apple. I have a feeling the big 5 made them jump through more than a few hoops to get where they are now, and are still calling a lot of the shots with regard to what is actually offered.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
... and I've been wanting to buy a copy of "Under the Big Black Sun" by X. (I bought it on vinyl in like 1986, but now I want it on my iPod.)
Last record store I went to didn't have it. I'm going to try iTunes tonight and if they have X, they will have my money. Besides, I already have some of the songs on that record from the X anthology, so I just pay for the songs I don't already have.
128 isn't just a random number -- its a measurement of size. As in "128 kilobits per second." With minor fluctuations for overhead, a 128kbit AAC should be roughly the same size as a 128kbit MP3.
If that's not the case, then somebody's software is lying about the bitrate.
Quality, on the other hand, is another story. I find that for two same-sized files, one encoded with MP3 and the other with AAC, I prefer listening to the AAC one. That, of course, is harder to measure objectively.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
you are such a whiner
Well, this will probably get buried because there are so many comments, but anyway...
I just downloaded a track off of the new site. In toying around I opened it up in the Quicktime player and saved the music file as a self-contained movie. Then I threw it back into iTunes to see what would happen.
It doesn't see the file as protected audio. If I get info for the purchased tracks it lists them as "Protected AAC Audio", but the track I ran through Quicktime is listed as a "Quicktime Movie File". It sounds exactly the same and iTunes treats it as just another music file. Interesting.
Anybody else have any luck? I love the new store and I plan on purchasing often, but it is odd that the DRM can be stripped out (possibly) by another Apple software product.
erm, I mean only Jobs could go to the music industry.
Dammit dammit dammit. Well, you can do the listening tests if you like, but I'm talking out of my arse. The listening tests are OK, and I'm not crazy. But the samples (duh) aren't @ 128k, they can't be, they don't sound anywhere near as good as the real thing. Re-encoding (which I couldn't do before, because I had to restart to get QuickTime 6.2 going, yada yada etc.) in AAC gives just lovely audio. As good as the higher bitrate MP3.
Very nice, well done Apple, I take back all the bad things I said. Roll on. Lovely. Etc. Sorry to waste your time. Nothing to see here.
it's not about the karma, it's about the whuffie
I was checking out the scoop over at Fortune and noticed a picture of a very sexy yet sinister BLACK iPod accompanying the story. Where were these during the announcement? More colours to come perhaps...?
So I've just been checking this out, browsing around and looking at what there is to see in the iTunes Music Store. I've been really excited to see this, because I've been wanting a reasonable online music service for a while.
So I decide on a test. I like Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By", but I don't have the CD. That would be a pretty cool song to buy for a buck. So I browse on over to "Electronica" and look for the CD. I find it. Yay!
You can't buy the song "Days Go By".
You can buy any of the other songs on the CD individually, and you can buy the whole CD including "Days Go By" for a paltry $12. But you can't just by the one song that everyone might actually want by itself.
BOGUS! I had no idea they would do something like that. Surprised? Not really. But I am sorely disappointed.
Sarah
The problem with this is its still too damn expensive. My iggest problems w/ the labels is price fixing and this still costs the same or more for an album. (i'm of the mind that artists w/ 1 good song really aren't that good). And the quality is only 128. I can get better than tha on Kazaa.
However, at least the DRM is reasonable so this is a step in the right direction.
Look at Vinyl singles. All new club music (house/breakbeat/trance/drum 'n bass, etc) comes out on vinyl first. They're usually singles, 2-3 tracks a release on average, and the LPs cost $7-8 each. So, $.99 in that regard isn't so bad. Then again, you'll never have these small releases available instantly when the come out like they are at the record stores...
For around $7-10 depending how old they are and no matter how many songs.
Why are the record companies saying Piracy is destroying them, no ones buying music, and trying to sue college students for hundreds of billions of dollars?
And I do buy from indie folks, I dont buy britney spears and crap. But just because I dont buy it doesnt mean I wont listen to it if someone offers to give me a copy of the CD. What kinda idiot or liar is going to tell me they wont accept a free gift?
Why? Because its free you cant accept it? Who cares?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Interesting, you're right... but this may not be of Apple's doing, there could be some legal reasons like this song maybe part of acompilation CD like one of those billions of NOW CDs and it might hurt their sales, OR the label may have placed restrictions on popular songs and limits Apple on how they can sell it. Then again, it could be all Apple.
:\
I don't know, just my guess. Apple needs to resolve this or it will severly hurt the success of the service
- Danny
iTunes 4 does appear to 'break' iCommune -- at least the original version of iCommune; the new version is unaffected, I'm sure, but works very differently.
And iCommune (old version) had a huge feature that iTunes 4 does not -- the ability not only to play a streamed file from another machine but also the ability to copy a song from one machine onto another; just drag the file from the "remote" iTunes library to the "local" one, and iCommune copied the file.
-Mark
I agree with apple on setting 128kbps as the default bitrate, although it would be very nice to have option to download in higher quality (Audible.com provides 5 different compression formats for their audio books). Its a nice speed for portable players - allows to fit plenty of music and doesn't affect quality when you're listening on earbud headphones.
Hopefully they'll move to multiple bitrates when their service picks up. Right now the service is well suited for people who listen primarily on computer/iPod, but they could easily expand it to include those who'd like to download audio in better format to burn a cd.
I'd also like to see bundled sales of traditional CD (with booklet et al) and digital rights to download. Amazon has been doing some of it, but not on the high enough scale. That is I'd like to buy the physical CD for $13 and immediately download 128kbps files to my mp3 player.
Why shouldnt I copy a Lexus if theres a Lexus copying machine in my garage? Stupid people like you make no sense, you tell me its bad to copy stuff and not pay for it when i dont have the money to pay for it to begin with.
Its senseless, thats like punishing africans for making their own anti aids vaccines without paying royalties and then giving the vaccines out to their people for free.
Who gives a fuck? I dont, you shouldnt, why do you care if people share music? Its not like it matters.
One moment people act like piracy is destroying the music industry and so much money is lost, the next minute you call people who refuse to buy music cheap, so you are basically saying if a person cannot afford to buy music they shouldnt listen to it even if other people are willing to give them music, I say you are a fool, if someone is going to give you something you werent going to buy, you are going to accept it even if you'd never spend your money on it, simply because its free.
Whats happening is music is less valueable because its no longer hard to find, now its not restricted, anyone can listen to music, not just people with money.
So when you say steal a car, this is trying to pretend like a car cannot be copied, but in a world where anyone can copy any car they want, why the hell should anyone buy cars?
Think about it, if you have a machine allowing you to copy anything you want, why buy anything? its like the jetsons, you just click and its there so why buy it?
People buy when the value makes it worth paying for, people dont buy because of some kinda weird "life should be difficult" idelogy or some life is supposed to be tough bullshit, people are human and will take whats free, right now music is free, people who didnt have the money to buy music now can listen to music for free, why does it matter if they listen to music for free? Its not hurting anyone.
Their option is listen for free or not listen at all, so it doesnt make a difference to the musician if they listen or not because they wont be paying either way.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
So how about offering discounts if you buy the whole album? That or they start discounting slow moving songs. I can see a number of ways that this business might go.
If I'm going to pay $15 for 15 tracks, I want glossy cover art and a pressed (aka UV resistant) CD.
OTOH, $1 to buy the only song I want from an album is better than paying $15-18.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
An exerpt from the iTunes Music Store TOS:
9d. You acknowledge that some aspects of the Service, Products, and administering of the Usage Rules entails the ongoing involvement of Apple. Accordingly, in the event that Apple changes any part of the Service or discontinues the Service, which Apple may do at its election, you acknowledge that you may no longer be able to use Products to the same extent as prior to such change or discontinuation, and that Apple shall have no liability to you in such case.
So, it looks like they could close the store, shutdown their servers, and in theory your music would just be completely inaccessable.
You beat me to it!
:-p
Just finishing up a degree and looking into getting into the workforce and actually having freetime
Now back to those three papers I have due by midnight...
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
When you have unlimited supply due to copying, and unlimited demand, theres no need for capitalism.
Why should you buy something when people are willing to give you music for free?
The arguement that a poor college student should not accept free music, is as stupid as saying a hungry person shouldnt accept food, or people with aids shouldnt accept the vaccine without paying for it.
Its such bullshit, sure music is entertainment and I dont really need it, but if people are willing to share it with me why not?
No ones selling it, or making money off of it, so hows it hurting anyone?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If I offered you 1 million dollars you wouldnt accept it because you didnt earn it?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Damn skippy! ;-)
Try this link...it is a download from the mothership/a>, not via Software Update, at least at this time.
First of all, what is with the insane amount of trolls on all the Apple-related posts lately? This only further proves that a good chunk of anti-Apple sentiment is just flamebait. Anywho, here goes my debate on pricing and user appeal: Why is it so hard for many slashdotters to realize that they represent a relatively SMALL majority in the music consumer industry? Millions upon millions of real albums are still being sold in stores, this offers an alternative to those people (unfortunately now those people that are mac users). It also offers a viable alternative for Mac users that don't have access to full albums with 160kbps+ quality, sans glitches. In terms of the Mac world (albiet small in the grand scheme of things), getting your hands on full albums is for the most part a hassle for your average user. Sure, Direct Connect has made that a bit easier lately, and there's always IRC, but yet again these people make up only a small faction of Mac users (for now) and computer users in general (for later). When it comes out for Windows, it will offer an alternative to those who use Kazaa... and I'm sure any of you who've used it extensively knows that it's not so easy to find a full album in decent quality without glitches or fakes from the record companies or whatever other quirks you can think of. As for my ideas to make this MY music service: GIVE ME INDEPENDENT MUSIC! I understand the pricing for the Big Five, but what about letting independent labels sell their tracks for say, $.25 a piece? I would go nuts, I can tell you that much. There's so much more to say and so many more topics to debate about, but I'm spent already.
I'd just like to dispel a misconception that bandwidth is expensive. A GigE connection doesn't cost what it used to. Bandwidth is to Apple as peanuts and beverages are to airlines. Of course your point stands; airlines skimp on the refreshments. ;)
All of the music I buy at the moment is on album, rather than singles. I only buy artists I like, instead of songs I like, so I trust that their entire album is worth listening to (give or take). For my current purchasing habits this is clearly a bad deal.
But what this will allow me to do is buy that one song by that band that's really great. $1 a song for an album is too much, but just $1 for that one song is fine (not great, but acceptable). So this could actually expand the music industry's sales by capturing lots of single purchases that wouldn't happen before - for every person who spent $15 on an album for that one good song, there were probably >15 who couldn't see the value, but could for a buck.
But first I have to buy a Mac!
Cheers, Paul
Anyway, my first suspicion about the price is that it's higher than it will eventually be. And I'm right about that.
This is from http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58656-2
So those of you too cheap to pay up can sit back and wait for a while and stop griping. This service is going to cater to you as well.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
According to everything I've read, you can change the list of computers allowed to share the files at any time. You couldn't do that if you embedded a key into the file, because you'd have to track the changes across all of the machines.
More likely, the mechanism used is nothing more than a list stored on the machine that downloaded the files. Weak, yes, but quite in keeping with Apple's previous attempts at preventing copying, which basically just made the copying technique nonobvious, not impossible.
I just downloaded iTunes4 and I have to admit that I like the minor facelift. However, when I clicked on the Music Store button, I got this notice. Shouldn't Apple have foreseen such issues, or they simply don't care? We have Macs here in Greece too you know. :(
it's instead of its (and vice versa)
That one is hard to remember and quite understandable to screw up.
Yes, I get all of the possessive pronouns wrong, like their's, your's, her's and hi's.
I keep reading in these threads that $0.99 a song is great because CDs are $15-$20. Where are you people buying CDs?
Circuit City and Best Buy, among other stores, carry new releases and even a lot of catalog titles at $13.99 or less...am I the only one aware of this?
I see your complaint. And it is valid about this album. But know that Apple doesn't get to select the prices for the tracks.
Apparently for this album, the labels wanted more.
And you can see why. The album is a huge seller, one of the largest of all time.
If you want to get your point across that this album isn't worth what they are charging, then I suggest you not buy it.
And I'll follow along because I happen to agree with you.
But Apple is working hard to keep the service affordable. I sure hope they succeed.
But I was surprised how few. I picked out quite a few songs from bands that really had only one song.
The Ohio Player's "Love Rollercoaster"
Color Me Badds "I Wanna Sex You Up"
Kim Wilde's "You Keep Me Hangin' On"
Sister Sledge's "We Are Family"
Taylor Dayne's "Tell It To My Heart"
The Lightning Seed's "Pure"
Gary Glitter's "Rock & Roll, Part 2"
The industry's mechanism in the past has been to get me to buy a whole album to get each of these songs. And got them all for less than $7.
I found that for every 1 song of this type that you can't buy, there are 9 that you can. I found that quite surprising.
Maybe in the future we'll get to 10 out of 10.
128kbps AAC is easily distinguishable from the CD is very many cases, especially anything with sharp transients. It is indeed significantly better than 128kbps MP3, but not by as much as you insinuate. I'd consider it more comparable to a 160-192 kbps MP3, which is not a range in which MP3 is reliably transparent.
Theoretically, 128kbps AAC should be transparent on nearly all samples, but that would require significantly more tuning than has been done thus far. Currently, the best-performing transparent codec is MPC (Muspack), which achieves its almost-always-transparent quality at 150-160kbps; AAC at these bitrates will be inferior (with current tunings) but still very good.
Note also that it depends heavily on the encoder. I sincerely hope Apple is using a better encoder than the currently available QuickTime AAC implementation, which is frankly horrible (the Nero AAC encoder is vastly better quality).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd like to announce a new service for those outside the US who would like to take advantage of the new iTunes Music Store. For US $2 per song I will download the song(s) and then email it to you. Full albums would be Apple price plus 50%. Cash only, download will take place only after money is received.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
the whole Apple music catalog could be available on Kazaa. Just download, burn, rip, and share.
Vote for Pedro
Apple did an amazing job implementing this.
First off, full albums cost $9.99 no matter how many tracks. All you $.99 winers, notice this price ceiling drops the average track cost for many albums.
Second, the usability of the itunes interface is striking. It acts like your regular song library. You can search, browse by genre and group, etc., and it lists all of the songs. Choosing a song plays 30 seconds of it, and it starts playing immediately. Sound quality is very high. The itunes threading is, as it's always been, rock solid. You can download an album, transfer stuff to your ipod, burn a dvd AND listen to another album.
Prediction: This will be a success. In spite of a somewhat guilty conscience, I've spent my share of time on Kazaa and LImewire. This is a MUCH nicer experience. It's immediate gratification at its best. I'd much rather use this than buy from a store, where I can't listen to tracks and have to walk around to find the stuff I want.
I'm sorry, but if you think music is not a luxury and is not essential to life, than you lead a sad, dark, inhumane existence. It is the artifacts of culture that keep us alive and fuel other commerce. If you want to reduce works of art to the level of commerce, you are just like the corperate slugs who milk the art and talent of others.
White exterior, rounded corners, integrated display...
Perhaps they should have named this the ePod?
TTFN
You really do suck hard erect dick. Shame shame!
we will encounter the RIAA Event Horizon, where the US economy is based solely on the buying and selling of music promotion contracts for progressively more horrendous singles.
I love this... already pulled down 4 albums I have been meaning to buy for a while now, it only took me about 3 mins to sign on, find the albums, and buy them.
;-)
Downloading them as fast as my DSL line can go, I may spend myself into the red
100% agree... it is a great way to browse for music, especially if you are used to iTunes already.
While I do think the thin 30 GB iPod is cool, but why in gods creation does it have to cost as much as it does? That's frickin expensive if you ask me. For $299, I can get a 20 GB Nomad Zen. While not quite as skinny as a iPod, it costs as much as the 10 GB iPod and I get twice as much storage plus it supports MP3 and WMA and possibly more on the forefront (the DSP in the Nomad Zen can't handle OGG's...not enough horsepower). Oh and I forgot...it sounds better then a iPod as well. PLUS iTunes, which is really what makes the iPod shine ain't available on Windows. iPod is also firewire only and I can get a Zen that is USB(1.1) or firewire, or a USB (2.0) only version with transfer speeds almost as fast as an iPod. Apple's days as MP3 player king are numbered. The Archos Multimedia with movie playing ability and CF card offload features plus Philips new even thinner 15 GB one (probably larger ones to come....) will eventualy dethrone the iPod. I am surprised Apple has not tried to integrate WirelessG, WiFi or Bluetooth in the iPod yet. WiFi or Bluetooth would be great and worth the extra cost.
Gorkman
Ok, lets just do the maths on that.
We'll do it first in US dollars, because the number is one that has been quoted (I'm an Aussie):
A song costs $US 0.99 A CD contains ~ 17 tracks, or $US 16.83
The current exchange rate is ~ 0.60
Thus a CD worth of songs costs: $AUD 28.05
Now in addition to this, you're also paying for bandwidth, because unlike purchasing the CD in the shop where the distribution network is paid for by the supplier, the electronic distribution is now paid for by you.
Lets assume for a moment you have a basic ADSL account, lets say 256K download, with a 2Gb cap. Cost is $AUD 60.00
A song is roughly 3.5Mb (based on looking at the songs on my HD, guestimating an average size), thus with your 2Gb cap you can download about 580 songs. Thus each song also costs $AUD 0.10 in download charge.
A 256K ADSL account has a throughput of about 25Kb per second. Thus each song will take just over 2 minutes to download.
You save on time going to the shop and you save on your bus fare getting there.
To download your CD would cost you around $AUD 29.75.
You end up with a CD worth of music, which takes up around 60Mb of space on your hard disk. A 20Gb HDD costs around $AUD 100, so you can store around 60 CD's worth, or around 5850 songs. Cost per song: $AUD 0.02.
So your CD has now cost:
$AUD 28.05 charge to purchase
$AUD 1.70 charge to download
$AUD 0.34 charge to store
Total: $AUD 30.09
For this $AUD 30.09 you get an electronic copy of a CD, with no media to use in your car (additional cost $AUD 0.50 for a Blank CD), no case to store it in (additional cost $AUD 1.00 for a case), no cover booklet (additional cost of $AUD 0.20), all for the convenience of electronic shopping.
To top it off, if you haven't burned a CD of your tracks, if your hard disk crashes, or your files get accidentally deleted, you have nothing and you can pay for your music again.
Contrast this with buying a CD in a store, which can cost you anywhere between $AUD 19.95 and $AUD 29.95, plus $AUD 1.50 for the bus.
And finally, for the audio purists among us. We're not talking about CD quality music here, we're talking compressed MPEG. A CD quality download is 650Mb, thus you can only download 3 CD's for your $AUD 60. Making the download cost $AUD 20 per CD. It would also take nearly 7.5 hours per CD on your 256K ADSL account.
As an aside, the electronic CD shop consists of an Internet connection, a server farm and software. The current method of distributing CDs involves printing CDs, booklets, boxes, posters. Shipping them across the globe, putting them into warehouses, shipping product to shops, stocking shelves and returning faulty CDs.
Are the record companies excited - I would be if I could make money for nothing!
So, perhaps it will go well. But at these prices I won't be a shopper.
Disclaimer:
All care has been taken to make these calculations accurate. All prices are Australian dollars - except the inital quote for $0.99 per track. One Australian dollar is calculated to buy 0.60 US dollars. 1Gb is 1024Mb, 1Mb is 1024Kb. A 256K download link is 25Kb/s effective throughput. A song size is guestimated at 3.5Mb. A CD is taken to have around 17 songs.
|>>?
It is fucking increadiable! I just updated everything and am now listning to Rammstine (just ripped to 128kb/s AAC). It is way better than my 160kb/s (VBR) Mp3 files! I will be up all night swapping cd's out of the mac :)
Am I the only one who finds it annoying that the older music does not have the correct year in the meta info? I mean, there's stuff in there from 50 years go and it has a "year" value of 2001. The oldest date I can locate in the service is 1988.
This sort of defeats the whole purpose of iTunes' Smart Playists where songs can be sorted by decade or the like.
It's just a tad weird (for example)to have Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" sorted in the category "90s music".
Yes, yea, I know it's the publishers who set those values, not Apple, and it's probably the year the song was last released on any album, but it's still annoying just the same.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Does anyone know how much of a cut the artist gets with this new deal? Is it fixed, or variable? I'm eager to hear Janis Ian weigh in.
I just went searching for the Music Store's Beatles selection. They have some of the Tony Sheridan-era stuff, and Chet Atkins' album, but none of the major stuff. You know, from Apple Records.
Who saw that coming?
--Kimota!
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
NEWS FLASH: Today Apple Computer, a hardware company, performed an action designed to increase hardware sales.
Slashdotters everywhere were amazed. "I never would have thought that Apple, a hardware company, would have attempted to leverage their a service to increase their hardware sales." said BigBir3d. "I mean, yeah, every single other thing apple has done since Steve Jobs signed on has in the end been designed to increase hardware sales, from the free apps to the Mac-only mp3 player, but I never thought that when they released a music download service for iTunes and iPod, two strategies designed to leverage hardware sales, that the music download service would be designed to leverage hardware sales!"
Why exactly apple performed this action is, as of this time, unknown.
Apple markets better, that's why I kind of love apple. Steve jobs can get up on stage and talk about a 800mhz computer and DVD burner likes it's the next coming of Christ. I'm not sure how he does it, but I think it has something to do with the idea that things are different in the apple world - that when you buy an apple you'll be different too, or at least be part of a crowd that's different, and that somehow makes it better.
.99c when there are still p2p systems that let you download for free? The last nail on this services coffin is the fact that people can still download music for free very easily, and of perfectly good quality, often higher then what you'll pay for. Just before writing this post I downloaded three full cd's from soulseek at 192kbit at about 70k per second, why would I want to pay 30 dollars to do the same thing plus have to deal with DRM? I
It's been done before, and better. Pressplay, eMusic, MusicNow just to name a few have been around for a while. They offer high quality music downloads, the exact price and file format might be a little different, but a for-pay music download service this is nothing new.
It's only available on the Mac. Apple's current Market share is currently 2.1%, for comparison Dell's and HP's are 17.3% and 15.8% respectively. So what's the point? How does only offering a service to 2% of the possible customers seem like a good idea? The only reason that makes sense to me is not to sell songs for 99c, but rather sell people on the Mac, and the idea that you can do things you couldn't do before if you have Mac.
Why pay
Apple makes money selling Macs, not software. Apple is selling people on the idea that when you get a Mac you're joining an exclusive and therefore better world, that in some way your life will be better, even if that is the farthest thing from the truth.
-Jon
this is my sig.
I've installed it. It warns me about needing to be in US (i'm not). Then it stored a cookie countryVerified=1.
e ct s/MZStore.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.Direct Action/viewArtist?artistId=471744
c ts/MZStore.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.Direc tAction/viewArtist?artistId=471744" -A "iTunes/4.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.2.5)" -b countryVerified=1 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, x-aes-cbc"
It uses HTTP for transfers. I did some packet watching. I believe it's almost all XML. There might be some HTML in there, I am not sure.
Apart from the purchasing side, I am not sure if there is anything specifically restricting the creation of a competing "iTunes Music Store" for another platform.
Maybe apple will release a DTD? Maybe not.
A sample request I found was to:
http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObj
For those of you with something like cURL you can simulate iTunes almost perfectly like this:
curl "http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObje
I reckon if we could make alternative viewers (harder), we might be able to create alternative servers (with more content from artists apple won't touch). I wonder how it knows to connect to ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net?
I could change my DNS I think... that would work.
It doesn't matter. Eventually, Apple will turn it into a way to enrich itself....and then it will die.
What about Linux support? I think that is a good idea too.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Over at iPodLounge they say that iTunes will be coming out for Windows. Hooray!! I never even installed MusicMatch, it is such a POS.
Random is the New Order.
I have to say the system is almost too easy to use. I planned to spend just $5 to see how it works and whether I thought it was useful, and had to force myself, multiple times to remember my self-imposed limit.
.Mac credit card to one, with a lower credit line :))
One of the things that I find absolutely beneficial about this service, is the ability to cater to a couple hobbies (obsessions) of mine. My friends think its kind of weird, but over the last few years, I've become hooked on a songs genealogy. Typically, a particular song will interest me, and then I try to collect MP3s of everyone who has song it, as well as other historical tidbits. I have a fantastic collection of "I Put A Spell On You" that ranges fromScreaming Jay Hawkins to Sonic, to a very starnge rendition by Credence Clearwater Revival. So far, I've collected 15 different variations, a few by the same artist.
I've recently been doing this for "Dream a Little Dream of Me". I went to iTunes, logged into the music service, typed in the title of the song, and walla, they return 21 songs--most are Louie & Ella renditions which I have already, but I'm now the proud owner of a version by the Beautiful South and Laura Fygi, both who had otherwise escaped my radar on this song. I get to add these to renditions by Doris Day, Diana Krall, KD Lang, Dean Martin, etc. ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC.
It would be nice to actual just set-up purchase accounts, where you could deposit money, this would guarentee not overspending your budget. For example, I don't like subscription services, because I don't always want $14 or $15 bucks taken out of my account monthly. But that said, some months, I may spend $50-$100 on music without much thought at all. It would be nice, if I could have Apple charge the money, when I can aford it, and then use it when I want it. Plus this would guarentee I only spend whats in my account, and then prompt me if I over use, to add more money.
The credit card method is direct and easy, but its way to tempting to get rid of the warning that your card is being charged, and far to easy to select way more songs than what you had planned to buy.
Other Comments...
I'm not liking the new font in iTunes, its kind of wimpy. Anyone know what font its using?
I like the browse, search, and history functions in the music store, as well as the ability to view album covers, and purchase older albums.
Overall a great first use experience, though I may have to change my
yes, itunes creates standard cds, and pretty darn rapidly too! i don't use itunes much since i have lots of independent and obscure stuff, but i cut a cd for a friend, and whoa! it was like 4 or 5 minutes to a full cd mix.
with respect to the service, i would like to see lower costs... but this will likely come with time. similar to cell phone calls, less cost per minute more volume. i don't want to worry when my disk fries. just spend another $20 bucks to fill it back up.
...you'll also know that nobody buys Bose speakers.
Dark Side of the Moon for instance goes for $15. "Aha!" you say, "I'll just buy the single tracks separately!"
No.
You can't. They deliberately prevent you from buying two tracks from the album, just to get you to pay an inflated price.
Sure, but then pick another album, say liz phair's _exile in guyville_ which is listed on the dark side of the moon page as a 'consumers also bought these:' where you get 18 songs for 11.99. As you said in your first line, depends on the album, sometimes you get the shaft, more often you get a deal.
What does this mean? It means the camel's nose is already under the tent with respect to playing with the prices. Soon we'll see certain singles going for $1.50. Then we'll see certain singles you'll have to buy in combination with other singles. Then finally we'll see singles you have to buy the whole album before you get to listen, and we'll have come full circle.
Good god, the service has been available for less than a day and already you are damning it as a the product of some scheming, conniving, mustache twisting evil scoundrel. Give a chance, try it out, it's nearly a miracle something like it even exists given the anal tightness of the RIAA. So while better systems do exist in theory, this one actually let's me buy things now.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
I'm all for this type of internet music distribution, but what I really would like to know is if this will make audio CDs cheaper. My ears and my stereo system prefer redbook audio over lossy compression. So will this drive down the price of traditional CDs or will it raise the prices?
I used Napster a lot when it was out, I've tried a few other file sharing apps since. This just makes those feel so obviously illegal.
Let's be realistic, this makes sense for me. I have an iPod, iMac, .Mac account, broadband, and an iSucker tatoo on my forehead. I also have almost zero free time, I don't have time to find the best ways to download music.
This will probably be something like eWorld. Remember that? It was clearly better than AOL for mac heads, but once AOL caught up service wise, eWorld folded. I wouldn't be suprised if it's AOL who launches a service that buries this one too.
Finally! Now I can play Solitare anywhere! and for Eight Hours!
and it comes in a package about the size of a deck of cards!
Whoo Hoo!
OK, stop laughing. It *might* not have worked perfectly the first time, right?
Words fail me here. I think when this sinks in with other people, that Apple could sell a couple million Macs *just* for this one feature alone. Oh, I'm sure the new codec is nice, and I might even buy a track or three from the Music store, but transparent wireless music sharing is just so much more than that.
Babar
I am sure that AAC is better than mp3, and I am sure that I couldn't tell the difference between a 128kbps AAC and a CD to save my life, but still, I can't bring myself to actually pay for something that has "128" in relation to kilobits in the description.
Still, those new iPods are damn sexy.
sic transit gloria mundi
I dunno about you, but that's a bargain fo me *Think back to Eddie Murphy Standup*. 3 full albums, plus a dump truck full of singles. I'm lovin' the service. I think I've spent about 200 bucks on songs. Slap them on a MP3 CD, hop in the car, and there's my traveling music. WHOOP! In my eyes, Apple's got a winner.
- Yes, but think about the b-sides. History is full of groups that only became popular after a radio DJ turned the record over and played a track from that side.
- If only one track were released at a time, there would be so much pressure to make every song radio friendly that they wouldn't "waste time and money" putting out tracks that truly meant something to them group. As an artist myself, I know that our little 6 track CD has about 2 radio friendly songs and the other four that were deeper and introspective. Do you think I get more compliments about the first two, or the last 4?
Just some thoughts...This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Terms of Service
.html, which can be readily viewed on the Service, and any end-user agreements or other terms and conditions required for use of the Service, all of which are hereby made a part of this Agreement. If you have not already read Apple?s Sales Policies, you should do so now.
iTunes Music Store
TERMS OF SERVICE
THIS IS A LEGAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND APPLE COMPUTER, INC. (?APPLE?) STATING THE TERMS THAT GOVERN YOUR USE OF THE ITUNES MUSIC STORE SERVICE. THIS AGREEMENT?TOGETHER WITH ALL UPDATES, ADDITIONAL TERMS, SOFTWARE LICENSES, AND ALL OF APPLE?S RULES AND POLICIES?COLLECTIVELY CONSTITUTE THE ?AGREEMENT? BETWEEN YOU AND APPLE. TO AGREE TO THESE TERMS, CLICK ?AGREE.? IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, DO NOT CLICK ?AGREE,? AND DO NOT USE THE SERVICE. YOU MUST ACCEPT AND ABIDE BY THESE TERMS AS PRESENTED TO YOU: CHANGES, ADDITIONS, OR DELETIONS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE, AND APPLE MAY REFUSE ACCESS TO THE ITUNES MUSIC STORE FOR NONCOMPLIANCE WITH ANY PART OF THIS AGREEMENT.
1. Definition of the iTunes Music Store Service. Apple is the provider of the iTunes Music Store (the ?Service?) that permits you to purchase downloads of digital content?such as sound recordings?under certain terms and conditions as set forth in this Agreement.
2. Age requirements for use of the Service. This Service is available for individuals over 18 years of age who can form legally binding contracts under applicable law.
3. Objectionable Material. You understand that by using the Service, you may encounter content that may be deemed offensive, indecent, or objectionable, which content may or may not be identified as having explicit language. Nevertheless, you agree to use the Service at your sole risk and that Apple shall have no liability to you for content that may be found to be offensive, indecent, or objectionable.
4. System Requirements. Use of the Service requires a compatible computer, Internet access (fees may apply), and certain software (fees may apply), and may require obtaining updates or upgrades from time to time. Because use of the Service involves hardware, software, and Internet access, your ability to use the Service may be affected by the performance of these factors. High speed Internet access is strongly recommended. You acknowledge and agree that such system requirements, which may be changed from time to time, are your responsibility. The Service is not part of any other product or offering, and no purchase or obtaining of any other product shall be construed to represent or guarantee you access to the Service.
5. Policies and Rules. Your use of the Service and purchases made through it are subject to Apple?s Sales Policies at http://www.info.apple.com/usen/musicstore/policies
6. Apple?s Privacy Policy. Except as otherwise expressly provided for in this Agreement, the Service is subject to Apple?s Privacy Policy at http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/, which is expressly made a part of this Agreement. If you have not already read Apple?s Privacy Policy, you should do so now.
7. Your Information. You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information required to register with the Service and at other points as may be required in the course of using the Service ("Registration Data"). You further agree to maintain and update your Registration Data as required to keep it accurate, current, and complete. Apple may terminate your rights to any or all of the Service if any information you provide is false, inaccurate or incomplete. You agree that Apple may store and use the Registration Data you provide (including credit card information) for use in maintaining your accounts and billing fees to your credit card.
8. User Account and Security.
a. Account and Password. As a registered user of the Service, you may receive or establish an ac
Colin Crawford, an executive at the publisher IDG and a long-time Apple watcher, said, "It looks very cool and easy to use. It's classic Apple. They've taken a complex environment and made it simple."
Crawford said the service is likely to change significantly in coming months, with price drops and big growth in the library of available music.
"It's a premium service at the moment," he said. "The audience that Apple is after here can afford the iPod and to pay for music like this. But by the time it comes to Windows, it'll be a lot different."
More here: click
Maybe he's right...?
How Come My Dog Don't Bark by Dr. John.
Not that everything is on the service, but there is a lot and more coming later.
And once again, while Microsoft waxes lyrical about .NET and it's web services and how great they'll be, Apple just goes ahead and does it, and makes it work.
I wonder if in fact Microsoft have been deliberately waiting for Apple to come up with some good uses for web services, so they could copy them.
I did some initial AAC listening tests at home with my powerbook hooked into my stereo. I encoded a song from a CD into AIFF, 128kb/s MP3, 320kb/s MP3, 128kb/s MP4, and 320kb/s MP4.
Since I'm an audio snob, I already hate MP3 compared to uncompressed CD media. If I'm listening critically, MP3's are far too compressed and grainy. So both MP3's sounded pretty crappy to me, 128k and 320k lacking all sorts of detail and crispness. And at around 8 MB, the 320k MP3 is a total waste of disc space!
MP4 on the other hand was smooth, rich and surprisingly detailed. The highs were very smooth, and quick, dynamic notes were clean. There was a slight shift in image, Norah Jones was standing further right than in the AIFF version (boggle). I couldn't hear any difference between 128k and 320k MP4 (and the files were also almost identical in size, 2.9 MB from a 32 MB AIFF). So I could tell the MP4 from the AIFF from the image shift and the slight quietness, and I'm confident I could tell them apart in a blind listening test. However, I couldn't tell you which one was which. In terms of quality, its really hard to say what you lose in the 11x compression factor. My setup isn't good enough to tell (i.e sub $1000 stereo, no digital out from laptop, no DAC etc.). But again, its smaller than MP3, and worlds better. This is one audiophiles opinion.
If you really want to, you can convert your bought aacs to aiff (then to wav if necessary) by using audio hijack from rogue amoeba software... Useful for regaining tracks for burning onto cds...
Apple,
Have you considered how to handle Independent artists? Many of us are struggling to be heard at all, and this could really help... a service with big promotion $$$, that will actually get used and explored. I can understand if you are worried about quality of the average indie release and don't want to be in the business of filtering the good from the bad but so many of the indie artists are so good there HAS to be a way to work it out. I would suggest it could be an isolated Independent artist category and if the database racks up a certain number of sales then they could be added to the general mix. or something to that effect.
Having content from the big 5 is great but try not to forget the little guys. We have be distributing our music online for years. If we are left behind when the cash starts to actually flow then April 28 2003 could go down as a real sad day for us... The day we could no longer compete with the big record companies, on any level.
Murdock Scott
www.paynesgrey.net
Oh yeah, and for everybody who's been bitching about what Apple introduced today, you're insane. I've spent the last few hours trying out the service and it rocks! I don't think 99 cents is too expensive when I can assemble the equivalent of a CD single for less than the price of buying one or when the full album price is less than or equal to what I'd pay for the physical copy. Add to that tracks that you CAN'T get on CD from bands like U2 and other popular acts and I'd say you have a winner. The service is easy to use and provides a good balance between fair use and content owner concerns. My guess is that Apple has a big hit on their hands. Just wait for Steve to announce the first week, month or whatever numbers.
Finally, everyone knows AAC is lossy, but if you can't hear what's lost (like with those --r3mix LAME MP3's) who cares? If you can't distinguish it from a CD in a double blind test then it's as good as the CD. So, like I asked in the beginning, any info on this? Here's some intelligent discussion on the topic, but no answers.
For the unenlightened, click here to find out about r3mix.
Thanks!
Once you lick the lollipop of mediocrity, you'll suck forever!
First, 128kbps is crappy encoding. Even if it's better than 128kbps mp3s, it probably isn't as good as 192 kbps mp3s, and certainly isn't CD quality. I'm not some audiophile who has a $1000 record player and buys vinyl to get that "pristine" sound of analog, but jesus, I can certainly hear the difference between mp3s and CDs on a regular, ordinary stereo. As such, for music that I really like, an mp3 is not going to be good enough for me. I'll download mp3s for portable use and to preview music, but if I like it enough, I'll buy it. A big question those RIAA types keep neglecting to address is, why can we listen to songs on the radio for free, but not via mp3s? The quality is similar, but with mp3s at least I can bypass those ClearChannel bastards who have a virtual monopoly on our public domain airwaves. I don't believe any argument that radio stations pay royalties, because we all already know about Payola, a.k.a. pay-per-play publicity for Top 40 artists. After that price-fixing scandal, where the RIAA bilked millions from the American public, what fscking right do they have to sue anyone (like poor college students) for theft! Two wrongs don't make a right, but I'd estimate that for every CD you've ever bought, you've paid for about two or three. So you're just getting your money's worth if you pay for 50% of the music in your library. Downloading more than that might be pushing the limits of honesty, though. But make sure to pirate only from record labels for which you've purchased something. Not that I'm changing anyone's mind in this forum, but so many people think they have a right to pirate music because they can. In fact, there are some logical reasons why we should be able to download mp3s. Until a radical change in the way the record industry does business, Apple's new program is a step in the right direction.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Has anybody ever taken an iPod running? I assume it is impossible, but if it is safe to do I'd love to buy one for my wife.
I was curious about how it all worked, so I decided to give in and buy one song. I could duplicate it and everything, and so I tried to convert it to mp3, just by changing the file extension. It seemed to work, but it can't possibly be this easy to get rid of all the protection and everything, though the file wasn't protected, unlike the AAC original. I opened it in Quicktime fine, so I tried to send it to someone else.
Apparently when I sent it, it was still m4p, but when I looked in the info of the file, it said it was an MP3 Audio, and it said that in the Finder and what not also.
Who knows, but this will be fun to mess around with..
Nick Sings Baby got Back
Nick Looks Like Affleck
Affleck's Girlfriend has a big ass
Profit!
It seems like about 10% of the people on here have actually used the new iTunes Music Store before they posted and I'm just another one of them :) Here's what I thought:
- If you tried using the service anytime from the announcement until around 5 or 6 it was pretty useless. Everybody was hammering it from work and pretty much nothing would load. Now, however it's really speedy and works like it should.
- Signup is painless: (1) It explains the terms of the service in plain language, (2) you agree to the standard agreement that nobody reads, (3) you enter your credit card info....and you're ready to buy!
- To test out the service I wanted to download some White Stripes. (I've listenend to them before but seeing them on Conan all last week has got me more interested) To my dismay, however, The White Stripes aren't on the service at all.
- Lots of artists are on the service, but not necessarily with all of their albums. Some of the Michael Jackson albums are listed as "partial," meaning that there is about half of the actual tracks avaliable for download. (No word on if the rest will come down the pipe at a later date)
- I wanted my first track to be something distinctive...I picked "Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes. It downloaded fast and sounds flawless.
Overall, I like the service and have downloaded a few more tracks since the first. I think they need to have some type of "Billboard top 200" chart showing what peopel are hearing on the radio with direct purchase links, because right now it can still be a bit tricky to find something if all you've heard is some lyrics on the radio.
4/5 stars
AAC is the codec, not the file format. Don't confuse the two.
.m4p, which I suspect stands for MPEG 4 Protected. I haven't done my homework on this one, but I suspect that it is part of the MPEG 4 standard.
That being said, the file format is
So the two questions that remain are, "Does the Panasonic player use the same file format?", and if so, "Will it support the same method of authentication and decryption?"
I suspect that the answer to both of these questions is currently no, but if the Panasonic is firmware upgradable, that may change.
Okay, now this is my coolest discovery in iTunes 4 yet: the library sharing works seamlessly *outside of your local subnet!* Yes, you read that right: you can easily share your entire music library with your friend in another location! Rendezvous is cool, but music sharing is even cooler when the person you're sharing with is in across the country. (Broadband is probably a prerequisite here, as network congestion could be a buzz-killer.)
In order to activate this, turn on sharing in the iTunes preferences. Also be sure to open port 3689 in your router or firewall (this is iTunes' port for sharing). Then, tell your buddy across town to open iTunes 4 and choose "Connect to shared music" from the Advanced menu. Then he types in your public IP address.
Voila! S/he will have full interactive access to your music library, as well as any playlists you decided to share. (The collection shows up in the left column, the same way local machines would show up via Rendezvous.) Let me reiterate, this is *not* merely a stream of what you are playing... this is your full library, with full listening priveleges. They can pick any song, pause, play, etc.
I imagine that some folks with the largest MP3 collection and a nice fat broadband pipe will share their libraries with friends this way!
(For those not already trying this, the iTunes sharing preferences allows you to select any or all your playlists, as well as dictate a password.)
Note also that this only works with current MP3's, as any purchased (AAC) files are authorized to work on up to 3 machines with your account only.
Now, once you enable sharing in your iTunes 4 preferences, create a playlist, and control-click it. Select "Copy Sharing URL."
Paste this into an email, and change the part after "daap://" to your actual external IP address.
Now you can send this *particular* playlist with a friend. Instruct them to paste this into "Connect to Shared Music" and they'll have immediate and full interactivity with the songs in that playlist. This works with individual songs too. Basically it's like emailing a "bookmark" to a particular playlist or song or your Mac, so you don't have to direct them where the song that you want them to check out, is.
This is a very big paradigm shift. I can't believe how easy it is. Too good to be true?
well if you click on the link, you would see a cable that connects the ipod to a firewire port. There is no cradle. Please click the link to find out for yourself.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
$0.99 per song? That's what the RIAA makes me pay now! What's so great about that?
$0.25 to $0.50 for a song, with $0.75 for a "hit" that just came out within the past 0-3 months... Nothing more.
Also, forget the restrictions. Don't even waste your time coding in anything that even attempts to restrict me in the slightest. I (or someone on this blue ball) will code around it anyway... Focus on getting more music...
If it's cheap enuf, I'll buy it... so will my friends... Ripping us off is why we're returning the favor...
Most people would prefer "Something for Nothing" though...And don't complain about being a student, we've got to install microwave ovens, custom kitchen deliveries...
Good luck!
Full Elliptical Encryption is not any sort of technology that RSA or all the other crypto shops can match.
Ask Richard Crandall the brains behind it.
and what do we get for it down under? more tariffs than china and no apple music store! well, thats it, you yanks are on your own now!
...that a large proportion of Slashdotters (even those with good jobs and money to spend on computers and iPods) really thinks they're entitled to free music and won't pay no matter how cheap it becomes. I'm no Apple lover, but they're at least pushing this new purchasing model to the forefront - longer term, this could open things up for the other services people have mentioned. And to touch on two of the other points that keep coming up;
1) In the world of normal people, no-one cares about Ogg Vorbis; most techies I know don't even know what it is. As long as you can listen to it, that's what matters.
2) If there was no DRM, exactly how many of the current record labels participating in the scheme would have signed up to it?
It's probably been discussed here already, but there are loads of posts...
If I buy a song from an album for 0.99, and then decide to buy the album, do I still have to pay 9.99 for the album, or do I pay $9?
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
For what it's worth, Media Jukebox has had this functionality for a couple of years now. Nice to see Apple finally catching up. :)
True, but you can buy a cable with FireWire plug on one end and a dock plug on the other.
were you always such an asshole, or did you take lessons?
That aside, I'm still going to wait until some company does it right. I refuse to accept any restrictions on anything I'm paying money for. Why do you think so many people are pissed at broadband monopolies like Comcast who restrict service through upload caps, VLAN refusals, and other ways of hampering of fair use? People get _really_ pissed when they're paying through the nose for crippled services. Let one company come along with a similar business model and no restrictions and they'll sell like hotcakes. I'll be one of their first customers at least.
I know for a fact I've burnt cds for my car, quite frequently reusing one or two songs on the same cd, but changing others. This "forcing" to change your playlist will be an annoyance and a hassle.
I applaud the first effort at single-song online sales, but frankly, those who copy for the sake of copying will still do it, through other means if necessary. These restrictions do nothing but annoy those who honestly want to pay for music.
For all you PC whiners:
:whistles:
a) You can play aac on a PC. Quicktime supports AAC, and iTunes uses Quicktime to play AAC.
b) iTunes will be out for PC by the end of this year. Steve Jobs said so in the Fortune article.
i wonder - has anybody tried to use the nice little program - audio hijack to record the sound from the aac file to a nice aiff on disk ? audio hijack should be able to target any program ...
just an idea for those who are fearing conversion from aac>mp3
- not to encourage piracy - but to make good use of the file you buy !!
I used to think $500 was a lot for an mp3 player (thinking that was the only expense because mp3's are free, right?).
Now that we are expected to pay $1 for each song, the $500 for the top of the line iPod is nothing compared to the $7500 you would have to put down just to fill the damned thing!
Seems like there's something wrong about this picture.
I thought they might have some other kind of online store (for people to just see what kind of stuff they offer), but I'll bet almost all purchases are going to be made through iTunes - while I could purchase an song at work, what good is that if I can't listen to it?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, Sherlock is already sort of useful (even if it did steal from Watson)... so they've had some time already. I have wondered why there haven't been things like that already from MS!
I'm also amazed that Apple provided this music service before Microsoft. It'll be really interesting to see what happens when Apple releases a client for Windows - I wonder if they will do it in conjunction with Microsoft, or if there will big a major showdown?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, I'm one of those freaks that actually used Napster to find rare or out-of-print (or never-printed) tracks, or to preview CDs before I bought them. My music tastes range all over the place, and so I can't necessarily find someone who has the exact CD I'm looking for, and I've never liked using Kazaa for that kind of thing, what with mislabeled or partial files floating all over the place. Unlike some people on here, I don't have all the time in the world to hunt down music on P2P networks.
I see the iTunes music store as a way to preview an album before I buy and make my own rips; free 30-second previews of any track, and buy a track or two to listen to the whole song to see if I like.
Or I can use it to pick up those one or two tracks off of a CD when I don't want whole whole disc; the first two I bought were "Friends" by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow for my wife, and Eminem's "Lose Yourself" off of the 8 Mile soundtrack for myself.
This may not be the cheapest solution for online music buying, and I wish they offered the choice of MP3s so I can save myself the hassle or ripping them myself (it does look like it's possible to burn the AAC files onto a CD, so I can rip them on my PC for use in my Nomad), but it's just convenient enough to make it worth my while. (Heck, 90% of my music listening is done through iTunes anyway...)
Jay
mrpuffypants wrote:
...but what about Michael Bolton?
- To test out the service I wanted to download some White Stripes. (I've listenend to them before but seeing them on Conan all last week has got me more interested) To my dismay, however, The White Stripes aren't on the service at all.
- Lots of artists are on the service, but not necessarily with all of their albums. Some of the Michael Jackson albums are listed as "partial," meaning that there is about half of the actual tracks avaliable for download. (No word on if the rest will come down the pipe at a later date)
-- haaz.
I've only heard samples encoded with either 6.0 or 6.1, I forget which, but definitely not 6.2.
Another reason Nero has been higher quality though is that it supports VBR (variable bitrate), whereas QuickTime (at least in the versions I know about) only supports CBR.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It seems to me that iTunes 4 imposes a new peak volume level (I can actually hear the volume go up and down slightly in some songs, and, no, I don't have Sound Check turned on). It seems that disabling the Sound Enhancer fixes the problem, at least somewhat, but it's still disappointing that Apple would play volume-Nazi. All affected parties should file a bug report with Apple (go to iTunes, and choose "Provide iTunes Feedback" from the application menu).
I think, therefore, I'm smarter than our president.
- Try MP3 encoded with LAME's "--preset standard". It's far better than whatever you're using. If that's still not good enough, try "--preset insane" (which is a highly-tuned version of 320kbps).
- Download an ABX tool and actually do a proper blind test. Most people who complain about MP3 artifacts can't in fact ABX them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wonder if the whole "change your playlist every 10 burns" thing can be circumvented simply by making a duplicate of one MP3 (outside of the music library folder) funking it up by deleting random bits in QuickTime Player or some other audio editing program, and reintroducing it into the library so iTunes thinks its a new song. Heck, smart people can just assemble their MP3s to burn on an audio or MP3 CD outside of iTunes using Toast or OS X's built-in "burn" feature (just create a new folder, put all of the MP3s you want on a CD, and click the "Burn" button in the Finder window button bar. Of course, it would only make an MP3 CD, but it's free) It seems like the change-your-playlist thing is a bit screwy... it could be taken as "please, keep adding new MP3 material to your collection to distribute amongst your friends, don't just pirate the same old crap over and over!" That's quite enough out of me...
The Mac Observer has a list of Apple Knowledge Base articles which are essentially a fragmented FAQ for iTunes 4 and the new music download service. Have at it!
How to Keep Music Store From Appearing Don't want the Music Store to show up in your iTunes sidebar? Apple explains how to disable it.
How to View Purchase History If you're trying to remember what you purchased, here are instructions on how to browse your purchase history.
Issues Purchasing Songs From Music Store Apple offers troubleshooting tips if you are unable to complete a purchase at the Music Store.
About Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) What's this AAC stuff? Apple gives a definition.
AAC and MP3 Codecs Compared Apple explains the difference between MP3 and AAC.
About Authorization and Deauthorization Authorization, deauthorization, and what it all means in regards to Apple's new music service.
About Interrupted Downloads Dialup users take note: Worry not about your modem dropping out. Your song will be waiting for you when you return.
Burning Playlists with Purchased Songs Yes, you can burn your playlists to a CD. But the same playlist will only burn ten times.
How to Use The Shopping Cart Trying to keep your credit card statement short, or want to lump all of your downloads together? Check out the shopping cart.
How to View Album Artwork Miss taking a gander at the case of the CD you're currently listening to? You can now do so virtually.
About Apple ID and Password Apple explains what your Apple ID is and how it pertains to the Music Store.
Buying Music Requires U.S. Billing Address Unfortunately, you're out of luck for now if you live outside the United States.
Playing Purchased Songs on Your iPod Your 99-cent tunes are as mobile as you are, thanks to the iPod!
How to Purchase Songs With 1-Click Jeff Bezos may have patented it, but that doesn't mean you can't use it to get your music!
Some AAC Files Won't Play In some cases, iTunes 4 or an iPod won't play an AAC file. Here's why.
Music Store Connection Speed For best results, use the fastest internet connection you have.
How to Contact Music Store Billing Support Didn't buy it, but got charged for it? iTunes will help you work it out.
iTunes Music Store: All Sales Final Once you've bought it, it yours. No refunds.
System Requirements Sorry, that old Quadra isn't going to cut it. Here's what will.
About Music Store Parental Advisories Some %&*#!&@ music may not be $%*&@%# appropriate for children. Apple can help you decide.
About Third-Party MP3 Players and AA
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
and without this service, that same $100 will buy you 7 cd's (at 14.29 per cd)
everyone who thinks they'll be able to get their top 100 favorite tracks by buying only 7 cd's please raise your hands... anyone... anyone... bueller...
that's an excellent point -- this service works great for picking and choosing a small number of favorites, though I find it amusing to think of filling an ipod in this manner:
"My ipod holds $7500 worth of music!"
I've only tried out the PC version of their QuickTime AAC encoder. You're technically correct in that it's not CBR, but it's ABR -- you specify a target bitrate, and it flexes up and down a bit to accomodate the music, but averages very close to what you specify. When I've specified "128kbps" I get a file that's very nearly 128kbps. That's completely different from VBR, where you specify a desired quality level and the psychoacoustic model attempts to choose an appropriate bitrate.
I'm not sure what to make of his observations. If the 128kbps and 320kbps settings were ABR, the 320kbps should definitely have been larger. If they were VBR, it wouldn't even make sense to call them "128kbps" and "320kbps" settings, but if those are poorly-named aliases for "medium quality" and "high quality" or something, it still shouldn't result in the same filesizes; picking a higher quality should result in larger files, except in very rare cases (like recording a pure sine wave or something).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The selection is good. However, the only album I could think to buy at the time was not there (Big Tymers - I Got That Work).
The interface is great, really simple, almost like a p2p interface.
However, I probably won't use it much. I downloaded one song (The "exclusive" Eminem & D-12 song) but was a little disappointed for a few reasons. My mac isn't hooked up to a good set of speakers like my PC, and there are no programs out there that will play Apple's implementation of AAC on Windows (or Linux for that matter). I am confined to my iPod and my Mac to listen to them, certainly not something I would be if they were mp3 (or hey Apple...HOW ABOUT SOME FREAKIN OGG SOMETIME?!). Beyond this, $9.99 is too pricey for an album. I recently picked up (hed)pe's latest for $7.99 at Best Buy. And you know what? I'd really rather pay the normal $12.99 at Best Buy ($3 more!) to have the higher quality CD sound, the liner notes, and the jewel case. Plus, I'm not confined to a little supported format on only a few machines. I can do whatever the hell I want with it, rip it to ogg, mp3, or hell, AAC if I REALLY wanted to (hah!).
I have been listening to Voyager Radio for years. I miss live shows that baraka used to do.
iTunes will not permit AAC tracks to be converted to MP3. At least, not on either of my two computers. Have you found that you can do otherwise?
-Waldo Jaquith
...as people who spend more than two thousand dollars a year on CDs, and who think that if the music isn't worth anything unless the waveform is indistinguishable from the original.
Clearly I'm not a music fan... after all, I only have a couple hundred CDs, and am a performing amateur musician. And obviously my professional musician friends couldn't possibly be 'real music fans', since they all mostly have cheap stereos that couldn't tell the difference between a 160kbps mp3 and vinyl, though admittedly they listen to them a lot.
No, frankly, the only people who really worry about quality to that extent are those who have way too much time on their hands and a need to brag to all and sundry about how cool their stereo system is. I guess it beats bragging about your computer...but only just.
Really, it's funny, because you're here claiming CDs as the be-all and end-all of civilization. I'm sure that if you had any real LP collection you'd be trumpeting that, but I'm guessing you came along too late to ride the 'CDs suck, LPs are the One True Music Source' bandwagon.
And your little diatribe, claiming that the only true music lovers are the ones who are completely anal about precision music reproduction, will slide down the tubes just like LPs did.
Hell, I can reproduce the Brandenburg Concerti in my head accurately enough that when I lost that CD, I didn't even bother to replace it... all I have to do is close my eyes and hear the music. Clearly, that's the lowest of low fidelity... no sound at all! I must be a real music-hater, huh?
Sheesh.
-Fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
If anyone cant get it from apple, iTunes 4 is available here:
http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gtg739g/itunes4.d m g
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
So I'm Not crazy The TV has been whining at me for all these years ;)
Yes, i can plainly hear that whine that the TV makes, Always have been able to, learned to tune it out young, and always wondered why no one ever complained about the noise, began thinking I was the only one who could hear it.
It's louder than the audio and it's constant...
And the problem at 128k is the joint-stereo sacrafice. Esentially all formats at 128kbit have two options... joint stereo (read 'hi-fidelity' EG dual mono recordings running slightly out of synch) or splitting that bitrate between each channel of audio -- and music doesn't sound right at 64k per channel, I don't care what format you've got.
No, I do not want my right and left channels blended into one 'high-fi' monaural track. Joint stereo is an encoding trick to fool people with poor audio spacial awarness into believing they're getting both audio tracks. I can tell the difference. I'm not sure if 192k is enough for AAC to avoid the synthetic joint stereo, but I personally can't stand mps at a bitrate below 320k
(160k perchannel, true stereo channels) unless they're VBRed with lame set to got to a max of 320k.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Well, it's pretty straightforward WHY this is only available in the US... distribution of the same music is different between different countries. Basically, to distribute in the UK it would require the same amount of negotiation, arm-twisting, yelling and screaming, and payoffs that it required in the US.
I think they'll wait to see how the pilot program does before they commit to other countries. If it works out, then I bet it happens.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
> There are plenty of so called "standards". Doesn't mean anyone uses them or that they are relevant.
And yet, if this were Ogg, which is really only used by a tiny subset of the population, you'd be fine with it, I'm sure.
Basically, you decided you didn't want to like this, and came up with some reasons why. Someone challenged a main reason, and it was completely indefensible, so you tried to defend it anyway, and just made yourself sound dumb.
You want everything to be in an established, well-known spec... you don't want anything new to be invented? Or maybe you don't want competition, so that the only new things that should ever be released are the things that are so much better than the old version that the old one will just disappear immediately, so that there's only ever one thing out there?
Or perhaps you don't mind new things like AAC being introduced, as long as no big projects ever use them until they're already thoroughly accepted? Well, surprise, they aren't thoroughly accepted until some big projects use them.
Silly.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
did you take lessons or not?
The new music service has over 200,000 songs, and on the first few days of the service was probably inundated with 'hits'. (No pun intended) I think Apple may have a PR bonanza on their hands if they can tell me that the demand for all of this music was supplied by Apple Xserves. When Apple gets around to releasing the Windows version of iTunes 4.0, have Apple tell me that the entire music collection is being delivered to both Mac and Windows users by bank after bank of Xserves. Wouldn't this get corporate America's attention? So I ask again, what's serving the music up?
I was slightly amused after posting it until I looked at my schedule and noted that i had 2 midterms, a lab, a homework, and a bunch of other stuff to get done by various times the next day. *sigh*
well, it's official. I've downloaded 3 albums in the span of 10 minutes.. i'm hooked. this thing is phenomenal and the quality of the songs is fantastic. i don't know what all the hubub is about. I've got a pretty good ear and I'm not hearing any difference between CD and AAC. I even checked by d/ling a song that I already had (i know $1 down the drain)... great job, apple!
according to this document. "Other AAC files that you find on the Internet or elsewhere will not play in iTunes." There is also some question is other things that will play AAC will play these files also.
Buy some music, you might like it! One-click, baby!
Pay the fuck up!
Okay, I've been going to town the last two days. I think I've spent about $70 in the iTunes Music store so far. I've purchased 93 tracks. That works out to about $0.75 per song. This thing's an even better value than they advertise.
On a side note, I've found that my original 5GB iPod can now hold 37% MORE songs! Given that AAC is a higher quality codec, I've found that I can use the "ConvertSelection to AAC" under "Advanced" to change all my existing MP3 files to AAC. I set the "Importing" preferences to AAC and 80kbit stereo first. Even if you use 96kbit AAC you still get 25% more music in the same space compared to the MP3s.
I can't discern any difference with the speakers I have on my system or the headphones on the iPod. I'm not saying there isn't a difference, just that there isn't any difference that I notice or care about.
NOTE: When iTunes makes the conversion, it does not delete the source file(s) so you will need enough space to store both files.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Rome wasn't built in a day...but Steve wasn't on that job.
People seem to forget that the Apple Store only takes domestic c'cards as well. This is not a new issue for Apple.
There's a new song by Sophie Alice Backstore called Vagina vs. You. It tells the story of a young man who has to find his way in the vagina, and portrais all the difficulties he encounters during this journey.
I enjoy hearing it during sex.
Is it de facto impossible to extend OGG to include some kind of DRM. (NOT saying I would want it though)
The 10GB iPod is $299 in the US, but 399 ($440) in Germany. That's almost 50% more. If I imported the iPod from the US and paid all the taxes, it would be cheaper than just buying it here. Now there's something worth complaining about.
that you're wrong
I swore to myself that I would buy an iPod, despite whatever the cost, as soon as Apple ships one that has a built-in microphone, line-in or at least some support for attaching a sound source to record.
I really really want to be able to throw it in my pocket, go see a live rock show and record it for my personal re-enjoyment at home. Or use it as a dictaphone during a meeting. Or whatever.
If the iPod had a USB connector, it might be conceivable to write software for it which would let me hook up a Griffin iMic or somesuch. But even the new model has no such facility.
Bummer that it didn't happen with this announcement. Am I the only one who would kill for a line-in? Just curious...
myselfmusic
Ive been backpacking around SE Asia the last 4 months with my iPod, and i used the sleep timer ALL the time, listening as I fell asleep with a small set of radioshack speakers. an alarm would have been extremely useful for me with my setup. OnTheFly playlists were also a feature I sorely missed since i was away from my primary mac for so long. Alas, both the alarm and onthefly lists and all other 2.0 firmware seem to be only for new iPods, which seems insane. hoping Apple responds to the hordes of pioneers complaining right now and gives us these simple but essential features from the 2.0 software....
hurrah! thanks for the tip. the jagged text was driving me nuts. I switched to the larger font pref in iTunes but didnt like that either. perfecto!
http://www.petitiononline.com/AppleInt/petition.ht ml ( - gotta remove the space in the suffix)
I'm clear and upfront about the fact that I download and copy music.
Therefore, I'm honest.
Despite the fact that downloading and ripping music is a time-consuming pain in the ass compared to buying it at the store, I don't support the robber barons of the media industry.
Therefore, I have integrity.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I bought 43 on Day 1, but I'm trying to limit myself now to just 1 a day.
typo
So I'm Not crazy The TV has been whining at me for all these years ;)
No, you're not crazy, but I'm spreading misinformation. It's not ~30K, it's ~15K. In UK/Australia/most of world, that's 625 vertical lines * 25 frames/second = 15625 Hz. In the US/Canada/Japan, it's 525 * 30 frames/second = 15750 Hz. So more people should be able to hear that whine, but I guess tune out from it. Sorry about the math mixup.
it's not about the karma, it's about the whuffie