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."

Comments

Re:I fear this is too late

[Zebbers]

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

The wait

[chia_monkey]

Great...now we have to wait a whole week just to see what is released. iTunes sounds good, but what else do they have up their sleeve?

The bigger wait though is maybe a month or so...to see just how well it does. iTunes Music Store was a wild success the first day, the time to their milestone song sales, and so forth. All done on machines that command a mere 5% of the market share. So...what happens when the other 95% gets to play?

Creative Nomad compatibility?

[Sean80]

I don't suppose iTunes would be compatible with anything but the iPod? Yeah, my fiancee has one, and they're small and cool and all, but goddamn if they're not expensive. So, I went out and bought myself a Creative Nomad. Does anybody know if there'll be any way to get iTunes songs onto it?

Re:Why?

[Eponymous Coward]

Because Apple's scheme has a better balance between consumer and producer rights. Maybe not ideal, but better than many of their competitors.

I hope its better than Quicktime

[bogie]

Quicktime isn't exactly the best performing multimedia app going on Windows. Its a bit slow and files that play perfectly on low end Macs can play like crap on fairly high-end PC's.

I also hope it themeable because by default the color it pretty ugly. I don't know that much about ITunes, but one thing I do know is that unless it obeys XP themes or like I said is themeable, its going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Either way I still look forward to trying it out when I get a chance and also of course trying out the Music store.

btw how are they handling the whole DRM thing?

Re:Why?

[imadork]

Why do people seem to tolerate DRM and crippled formats when Apple's peddling them?

It's the RIAA that's the problem: they likely would not consent to distribution on the wide scale that Apple is engaged in without some type of restrictions. I'd rather use Apple's DRM (which is much more consumer-friendly) than Microsoft's.

Re:I fear this is too late

[cK-Gunslinger]

True, but some people do prefer quality over quantity. Like Apple or not, iTunes was a rather well-designed, well-planned, and well-implemented venture. The copy-cat Windows clones, to date, have had loads of shortcomings and problems, and were generally met with ho-hum enthusiasm.

Now, whether this was due to the quality of the service, or the general differences between Apple and PC users remains to be seen.

Re:Why?

[kwerle]

It turns out that everyone has some level of comfort with DRM and "broken formats." Do you use DVD's? Cable? Satellite? All those are DRM'd to some extent. Just like Apple's DRM, the hope is that consumers (which may not include you, in which case producers don't much care) will find them acceptible.

Being able to burn music CDs from apple's downloads seems pretty reasonable. Certainly that covers most user's needs. What's more, you can share music on your LAN.

What more could a reasonable consumer want?

what I want in a music service

[gonar]

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..

Re:what I want in a music service

[gsfprez]

an thusly, you're not part of Apple's target market.

Sorry. They had to draw a line somewhere. Feel free to purchase the music in other places.

I honestly don't understand how audiophiles and audiophile wanna-bees don't get this. This is a MASS MARKET targeted service. Its not targeted to audiophiles. Its not complicated or hidden or even confusing.

What I think you're upset about is that you'll have to buy $18 cds to get the quality you want.

That's part of higher quality - it often costs more than average mass market-level quality...

Just like my PowerBook G4 12" cost me more than a Dell piece of shit laptop. The difference is that I don't bitch about it costing more - I know that i got a better product than the average consumer.

Pick and choose what you want to spend money on - and buy what fulfills your need. And for the 897,592nd time - iTMS is not for audiophiles with $25,000 stereo systems.

Because the damn thing just plain works.

[jpellino]

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.

Re:What about Linux

[Phroggy]

I know Windows has the larger market share, but what about Linux? Surely, it cannot be that difficult to port from OSX (BSD-based) to Linux.

This is a common myth. The command-line user-space environment is FreeBSD-based, but the GUI is proprietary. iTunes is written with the Carbon APIs, which do not exist anywhere but Mac OS X, classic Mac OS, and a partial implementation in QuickTime for Windows.

No, the QuickTime movie players for Linux don't count; QuickTime is far more than a movie player.

If it were written with Cocoa instead, it might be possible to port it to GNUstep with some work.

By the way, I specifically said user-space; the kernel is also completely different which means hardware drivers are completely different. Don't expect that porting Linux or FreeBSD drivers to Mac OS X should be trivial either.

Re:Why?

[Graff]

Files *created* by iTunes when you rip your CDs are standard AAC files. However, files downloaded from the music store are NOT standard AAC files, and the DRM is most definitely NOT "volutarily enforced" by itunes. They are encrypted and keyed to the computer which you license with Apple.

There is no such thing as a standard AAC file. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is a codec, not a file format. The AAC files created by iTunes are actually .m4a files and the files that come from the iTunes Music Store are .m4p files. Basically the m4a and m4p files are Quicktime files that use AAC encoding to store music. The m4a data is unencrypted and the m4p data is encrypted.

Other players could definitely play the m4a files if they worked out the file format. Knowing Apple the file format is probably readily available to developers. The m4p files, by nature of the encryption, would require either cracking the encryption or partnering with Apple in order to play on a 3rd party music player.

Here are the notes for the MPEG-2 AAC Standard and the MPEG-4 AAC Standard

Re:I fear this is too late

[levik]

The problem is that apple tend to get cokcy about usability. They believe to have what is the be-all-end-all of UI systtems the hallowed OS X, and release applications as though they are wrighting Mac software.

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.

Finally...

[bunhed]

Now they just need to port the rest of OS/X to windows and we'd have something!! :)

The Big Picture

[sloth jr]

Apple wants to make money. Here's what I think they hope will happen with the release of iTunes Windows:

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

Re:The Big Picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Sell more Macs, with aims to pull 10% market share in a year.

No, no, a thousand times no. Apple is ALREADY selling Macs faster than they can make them. Haven't you heard all the bitching about how it was taking a long time for people to get their new G5's and PowerBooks? That ain't because Apple doesn't want you to have them, man. It's because Apple is literally selling them faster than they can deliver them. And that's true even WITHOUT major universities buying new machines by the thousands.

Apple doesn't give a FLYING SHIT about market share. They care about making products that are so good that a certain number of people are compelled to own them, and doing it in a way that allows them to invest heavily in R&D and still make a tidy profit.

In a down-market, Apple has posted a profit in 20 out of the last 22 quarters WHILE STILL releasing entirely new products (like the G4 iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and the G5) and continuing to enhance their existing products on an aggressive timeline. That's FUCKING AMAZING, man. If you know anything at all about business, that's absolutely amazing.

Windows iPod users and the youth market

[Infonaut]

My guess is that Windows iPod users will be among the first guinea pigs. I have a friend who is an avowed Mac-hater. She recently received an iPod for her birthday and was absolutely giddy. She has stayed away from online music stores because she sees them all as inferior to spending hours on P2P systems hunting for the stuff she wants. I wouldn't be surprised if she tried out the Windows version of the Apple Music Store shortly after roll-out.

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.

Re:Why?

[Thorkytel Ant-Head]

I agree completely! I don't understand why Apple couldn't just make every standard CD player able to play compressed audio formats. Damn you Apple!

Face it: Having to expand your files to 12x their original size is a result of standard CD players not being able to read compressed audio, not a result of anything that Apple has done. If you download a pirated MP3 file off of Kazaa, you're still going to need to burn it to CD to play it on a standard CD player. Your criticisms apply that it's Apple's fault, where it's not.

Re:Why?

[Aqua OS X]

AAC only applies to downloaded music. You can transfer it to 3 machines, send it to an portable player, burn it to your hearts content, or convert it into a different format without DRM.

Moreover, iTunes has setting to rip to MP3, AAC, and AIFF by default. You never have to use AAC if you don't want to. (actually I think music ripped to AAC doesn't have password protection)