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Apple is Porting iTunes to Windows
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Apple is indeed porting its new iTunes software to Windows as evidenced by a posting on its job board (No. 1949938) This has interesting implications for Apple trying to sell more expensive hardware when the same apps are available on cheaper Wintel hardware. Is this inevitable? Will this have any effect on P2P networks?" Sure enough, I go there and it says, " Looking for a Senior Software Engineer to desing (sic) and build Apple's newest Consumer Application, iTunes for Windows." Heh.
Considering that at the presentation Monday Jobs said that the Music Store would be available to Windows users by the end of the year- yes, they'll be porting the Music Store along with it.
MusicMatch does suck, but there are a couple of other apps that make life a little easier.
EphPod, free IRC
XPlay, not free.
Enjoy.
Web Objects Application
My other sig is extremely clever...
To anyone who cares, here's the damned link
"Once upon a time, MS asked Apple to cede the authoring market for digital media in return for keeping playback."
It was the other way around - MS proposed that Apple could have authoring and MS would do playback - Apple told them to fuck off and MS has been trying to kill QT ever since.
That was classic intercourse!
Apple Computer is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design and build one of our newest Consumer Applications, iTunes for Windows.
Must be possess strong skills in the areas of application design, solid API design principles, user interface engineering, and have a strong understanding of customer and workflow issues. Experience with Windows logo certification preferred. Candidate should have a history of successful large volume consumer product shipment.
A B.S. or better in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science is preferred. Required skills include C, C++, UI, MFC, Win32, COM, DirectX, Installshield and application engineering. Exposure to networking and device drivers a plus. Minimum of 10 years of directly related experience.
Wonder if they would force .mac subscription on windows users.
.Mac subscription isn't required for the Apple Music store. All you need is an Apple ID. That's the same ID you would use for the Apple Store. I see few problem for Win32 people getting the songs once iTunes 4 has been ported.
A
On the other hand, the un-heralded feature of iTunes 4 is that it allows you (sometimes) to share over a network, if millions of Windows users started doing this, we could get a pretty good P2P file-trading network going.
Actually, it just lets you view the playlists and play them. I'm almost certain you can't swap the files.
Pooty tweet
Two responses that don't really answer you. I'll try.
Let's say you have a 5 GB iPod and a 4 GB music collection. You can set up iTunes so that the iPod syncs to your music collection every time you plug it in. The first time you plug it in, all of your music and playlists will be downloaded to it. Buzz buzz, the iPod will get hot while the FireWire cable sparkles.
You unplug your iPod. You go do something. You come home, and shop on the iTunes Music Store. You buy three songs. You plug your iPod in, and poof! Quick as can be, those songs are now on your iPod. You make a couple of playlists, and those are on your iPod, too. You rip a new CD, and those songs are on your iPod too.
There's more. When you plug in you iPod, iSync automatically launches and downloads your address book and calendar items (including alarms) to it. So now your iPod is a simple PDA as well as a music player.
All of this happened without your having to actually do anything beyond the initial set-up. It's all automatic as soon as you plug the iPod in. And because we're talking about FireWire here, it's all fast, fast. In fact, the limiting factor on the iPod's transfer speed is the internal hard drive itself, not the connection to the computer.
There's more to it than that. iTunes has support for smart playlists, which means (for example) that you can have a playlist that randomly picks 10 songs you've listened to at least once but haven't heard in a week or more. Very handy.
All in all, the iPod is both the most expensive and the most popular music player on the market, and that ought to tell you something.
ditch the nag-dialogs for non-pro users entirely
This may not be terribly relevant, but there is an easy way to disable that nag dialog. Set your system clock to the year 2500 or so and launch QT player. Quit it, and set the clock back to 2003. You'll be nag-free for 497 years. I know this works on the mac; it may work on Windows as well.
I don't know anyone who bought their Mac just for iTunes
I did.
I bought an iPod when they were still Mac-only, so I ended up buying the eMac to go with it. After using iTunes once on a friend's iBook, I was hooked. Doing ID3 tags on a Windows platform is like looking forward to a root canal when you're talking about 5,000+ songs. Of course, I don't mind a lot of the other features of OS X, but iTunes and the iPod were a killer combination. Frankly, I still prefer Win2K over OS X, not least because a number of programs I use are still Windows-only and have no decent OS X equivalents. It kind of pisses me off that had I waited a year, I could have saved myself a massive ($3000+) investment in Apple hardware. I suppose that's the price for being an early adopter -- but I'm still pissed, and I hope Apple makes the iTunes for Windows client a shadow of the real thing.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
I think Apple uses some special kind of session tracking system or something. That link does not work anymore.
This link should be persistent.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
My main point was that rather than having the URL actually contain the query, it was storing information about the session, so someone coming in later to that link wouldn't get anything at all.
I use session ids all the time in sites I design, but unless the data needs to be kept secure, I go ahead and make URLs work for queries even when the session has expired.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
iTunes (well, most of it anyway) is Carbon, not Cocoa.
It's not quite THAT fancy. Basically, iTunes lets you either specify your whole library to go on the iPod(if it fits), or just the playlists you specify. You can modify the tags and assign star ratings, 1 to 5 starts, for each song. You CAN'T pause a song in iTunes and continue in the same spot on the iPod, or vice versa.
iTunes 4 adds Rendezvous network streaming over LAN or AirPort networks, or manually streaming to one remote IP address. It adds the iTunes Music Store, and lets you store album art for each song. (I'm not sure WHERE on my hard drive those images are stored) Album art comes with new purchases from the Store, but you can drag 'n drop to add art from other sources. I was browsing Amazon.com the other day for album cover art for my existing files.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
The source code to Apple's Rendezvous implementation is already available for download. It includes implementations for Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS 9 (yes, they're different stacks) and Posix.
I've only tried the Windows implementation (I'm only interested in Windows and Mac OS X, and I think it's a safe bet that Mac OS X works). It seemed to work perfectly.
I agree with you that Windows seems to be a lot more mysterious than OSX, in that if something doesn't work right it's pretty tough to figure out why. I hadn't used Windows since 3.11 until I bought this laptop just recently. XP is a big improvement over that but still far from perfect.
Your problem with skipping sounds to me like maybe your hard drive isn't using DMA properly. If it has to run through interrupts then you can see exactly the symptom you described. You might try poking around in the Device Manager and see if you can spot anything. On mine here, when I look at Properties->Advanced Settings for Primary IDE Channel it says that I'm using Ultra DMA Mode 5, and gives me the opportunity to set it to something else.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
You're confusing the need of record companies to make volume sales with the need of a reseller. I'm sure the record companies will need Apple to sell millions of songs before they start seeing much profit out of it (especially if it steals CD sales). But Apple is a music retailer - they're akting a cut on every song they sell. They don't invest in musicians who never make it big, they don't pay stars for their lavish lifestyles. The only investment they have to recoup is the cost of setting up the store and once that's done (since the running costs will be low), every penny they make will be pure profit. Basically the Apple music store is like Amazon -- but without all the expensive infrastructure (like book warehouses, inventory control). Web sales tied to web delivery really is the holy grail of online profitability.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.