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Apple to Launch iTunes for Windows
An anonymous reader writes "According to this AppleInsider.com article published earlier this morning, Apple has planned an event for next Thursday to formally introduce their iTunes player and online music store for the Windows platform."
Why do people seem to tolerate DRM and crippled formats when Apple's peddling them?
umm
apple is launching this *now*, the others arent even close to ready.
apple has an existing library and successful delivery mechanism already. a windows client was all that was needed.
i fear you are clueless
Interesting someone takes this comment as a troll. The commercial music vendors may indeed be considered as purveyors of selling and whoring music to the masses.
What was once an art shared by cultures is now being exploited and contained within a mob like business culture. Those wishing to share free music are often discouraged, despite the many venues available. The message we are sending to young artists, is if you don't sell your work, you have no place in society.
Mac.ars has a much more thoughtful response to this.
Headline: "Should Apple be concerned about the recent launch of MusicMatch Downloads? Will not having first-mover advantage on the Wintel platform hurt Apple?"
seems to be what everyone is focused on (or rather Apple's lack of it). I don't think the fact that there were other online music stores available for windows prior to Apple's launch of iTunes for Windows is a big deal. It isn't like once you pick a service you can't use any of the others. Most of them don't have subscriptions.
Since iTunes for Windows will be (presumably) free to download and try why wouldn't someone give it a try for $.99?
If they like the experience, then they will come back. Simple as that. All that anyone can do is hope that Apple's user experience is better than the competition. I have faith that it will be.
No matter which service dominates the online music store it is a good thing for every consumer. This new revolution in legitimate online music will force the record industry to adapt to consumer demand.
On my Mac, I don't have to go to a Web page, order music, download it to my music folder, import it into my music app's playlist, load it on my external mp3 player, rinse and repeat.....
I just click the Music Store button within iTunes, order what I want, and it's automagically in my Library.
It's that integration, in my humble opinion, that will help Apple beat the other competitors. Then, all Windows users will soon realize how superior the Macintosh is, the Red Sox/Cubs world series will go 20 innings in the 7th game, scientists will discover self-healing skin, the planets will align, and we'll all live forever in harmony and bliss.
OK, maybe not the last part, but still.........
--Sig? Uh, it's in my other pants.
Apple is afraid of Linux and they in No way want to give creedence to it being an acceptable platform for desktop use. Apple's nightmare is 3rd party vendors like Adobe porting their products to Linux. If some of the traditional Apple ISV's started porting to Linux Apple would be totally fucked. Hence Apple is hardly eager to get the ball rolling in that direction.
That's why you'll never see Apple porting any desktop apps to Linux.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
How will this sort of thing change the industry as it relates to their current target audience ie, kids? Let's face it, most of the music industry today is targeting ages from 13-17.
How are children supposed to get credit cards and go online as easily as popping down to the mall with some extra cash? This means one of two things. Either a way will be found that children will be able to get credit more easily (pay cash by ATM for instance) or the industry will have to move towards a less age-centric approach to their sales.
After all, if I know that I could get some of the obscure Pink Floyd or Supertramp Euro stuff out there online, I'd pay for it. I'm certainly not going to find that sort of thing at your local Circuit City!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Cheap people want their music to be free, not cheap. Feel free to make yourself a musical instrument with your own hands and materials you find laying around, and make your own damn music.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
when I pay my buck, I don't mind DRM (as long as up front I know it's there) but what I _do_ mind is a crappy 128bps recording.
what I want is for my $.99 is:
a: 1 (drm restricted) full CD quality track (that I can write to CD a limited number of times using their tool)
b: 1 high bit-rate drm restricted mp3/ogg/wma equivalent for i-pod type devices
c: 1 128bps (drm or no drm) mp3 equivalent for flash based mp3 players.
that way they can be happy about controlling my access and I can still get decent quality sound..
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
In the words of Woody Flowers, "The most important thing is to make sure that the most important thing remains the most important thing."
At some point you have to look around the absolutes of file format particulars and the 'principles' of DRM.
Why? Because the pros far outway the cons.
I can play the music on three computers.
I can carry it all around on my iPod.
I can burn CDs all day long.
For all practical purposes, it sounds great.
The artists get paid.
I don't get subpoenaed.
Maybe I'm missing something but I'd really like to know the answe to this: what exactly is the untenable downside here?
All I can see "bad" is that (1) I can't play the music on one computer when I'm miles away from the other (but that's what the iPod's for) and (2) I can't hand the files to everyone in the world just because i feel like it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Apple is worried about software being available on other platforms? Are you insane? Look at how much more software is available on Windows, and that includes stuff like Photoshop and Quark. If those were available on Linux, it would make no difference to Apple because Apple's selling point is its ease of use for non-technical people and elegant interface. Linux is far inferior to even Windows when it comes to these aspects, and Windows is far inferior to Apple.
If apple can sell 10 million songs on a platform that only has 5-10% of the consumer market share, theres no telling what they can do with the windows market. I wouldnt be suprised if we saw 1 million songs sell on the first day.... Its more than obvious that the record labels dont listen to fans, but they do seem to listen to the almightly dollar, and I really think that this will be the breaking point for digital music distribution. Crisp, easy to obtain music delivered straight to your computer, and at a somewhat reasonable price and tolerable DRM. My only question now is when do we get a linux client? /grin
I seriously doubt that Apple has any great fear of Linux on the desktop. Think about it. What's the difference, in the mind of the average consumer, between an x86 box that comes with Windows, and one that comes with Linux? About $50. That's not going to make any difference in the number of people buying Macs. Apple only has to worry about Linux if it starts providing a better desktop user experience than OS X on Apple hardware, and that doesn't seem too likely at the moment, since most of the desktop efforts of Linux are basically attempting to clone the Windows UI, and nobody in the x86 hardware market has shown much interest in competing with Apple's slick industrial design.
I think it's quite easy to make the case that Linux on the desktop would be a very good thing for Apple. Apple's strategy of late is mostly designed around the idea of building really slick proprietary apps for working with open standards -- iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, iMovie, iCal, etc. all fall into this category. Doesn't that strategy work better in a market where most people are using standards-based Linux, rather than proprietary Windows?
Another point to consider is that the cost of buying new versions of apps right now presents a major barrier that might be keeping some people from switching to the Mac. If Linux makes it big on the desktop, it will probably do it with the help of many free desktop apps -- apps that will be ported to OS X. People will be able to switch to OS X without spending lots of money on new apps.
No, the reason Apple isn't porting iTunes to Linux is probably just that there isn't all that much money to be made in the Linux desktop market at the moment. The market isn't very big, and its fragmentation (across distros, desktop environments, etc.) leads to higher support costs. In the near-term, Linux's gains on the desktop will mostly be in the enterprise market, which is not the market iTunes is aimed at.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Look at Quicktime for PC. It duplicates a lot of Mac's UI concepts instead of trying to blend in like a windows app. As a result it's confusing - there are no OK buttons on its property sheets for one, so the user has to close the props window to save, something that generally discards the changes in the windows world.
Whatever you wanna say about MS, they did a great job of following Mac conventions in designing MacIE and Office for OS X. I just wish Apple could do as good a job when making windows apps.
Did anyone see the horrible software that they shipped with iPod? I'm not too enthusiastic about the windows incarnation of iTunes.
Ñ'
Does anybody know of a virtual CD driver (for MacOSX or Windows) that could be used to "psych-out" Apple's iTune product (or anything really) into writing to the file system instead of a CD?
Then you could do all sorts of cool things like hook it up to a codec and have iTunes burn straight to a set of FLAC/Ogg/MP3 files instead of a CD.
Sell more music
Sell more iPods on which to play iTunes downloaded music. Integration will probably be seamless.
Get general consumers less afraid of Apple the company, and more willing to consider buying Macs
Sell more Macs, with aims to pull 10% market share in a year.
sloth jr
iTunes is great because it's really a smart database application. There's even a tool that lets you do SQL queries against it. The DB smarts are what make iTunes so great - smart playlists - play only 80's songs without having to actually create the playlist. One smart playlist continually tracks the 25 most listened-to songs.
The real beauty is the iPod integration. Every time I plug in the iPod it does 2 things: It starts charging and it completely syncs to the iTunes database. My iPod is an identical copy in every way, including MP3 metadata, playlists, EQ settings for every song, etc. Buy a song from the iTunes music store, boom its on your iPod too.
The Windows version, if it remains consistent with the Mac version will blow Winamp out of the water. I can't wait. I'll finally have my music DB's synced at work too.
Just before rolling out the dual-platform iPods, Apple was reporting that the Windows version of the iPod was selling at the same rate as the Mac version. With those rough numbers in hand, if you count on a similar conversion rate for the Music Store (I know, it's a wild ass guess), it seems that the Windows version should get at least as many customers as the Mac version.
Those who argue that Mac users are zealots are ignoring a few things. For one, Apple is slowly convincing Windows users that Apple can make great non-Mac products. Second, Apple's brand image in the youth market is extraordinarily strong. If there was ever a market dominated by youth tastes, music is it.
Reports of Apple arriving in the Windows music game too late ignore the fact that nobody else has been able to implement a Windows music service that consumers actually like. I don't think we'll see the Windows Music Store getting 20x the volume of the Mac version, but I do think it will be immediately profitable.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Incorrect. You are confusing m4p with mp4. mp4 is the ISO suffix for general mpeg-4 files (audio and/or video). m4p is the (arbitrary) suffix that Apple uses for encrypted mpeg-4 audio files (aka Apple Music). And then there's m4a, which is plain mpeg-4 audio.
QuickTime on Mac can create m4a files when you rip CDs. QuickTime for Windows currently doesn't recognize that suffix, but will accept mp4 instead. NOT THE SAME AS M4PDon't blame apple for MusicMatch's lousy application.
You may not have noticed that at 99 cents a song, 10 songs costs 10 bucks. Not much different than a real cd. A real cd you could rip, burn, encode, trade with a friend, resell. Case and Notes, everything. Any way you like. What do I do with these songs I paid to download when they wont work on my Rio (or any other portable player but the overpriced ipod)? Rip and re-encode? Sorry, for all that trouble i'll kazaa, torrent, gnutella, irc, or bum the song off a friend.
On top of that ITunes is a mac lovers dream. A beautiful looking piece of software that is written for the "My Mac saved Christmas" sort of end user. Arguably it's the best player for the mac. But hardly the best player on any platform.
Suggestion:
Offer high bitrate non drm mp3/OGG file:
10-15 cents. Put them on servers that are very fast and easy to find, and I'll buy a song or two.
Or put "Paypal" like accounts up for artists, for funds that go directly to artists with links in the ID3 tags to the site. Your not gonna get everyone to donate, heck you may not even get 10% to donate, but it'll be more than you get from P2P.
Obviously the Record Industy wont allow that, which is unfortunate, because I think it's their only real chance at online sales.