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Apple Releases iTunes for Windows
Billy_D_Goat writes "Today at a special media event, Apple Computer released their acclaimed iTunes Music Store and stand alone player for Windows XP and 2000. They also announced a partnership to sell music on AOL and give away songs with special bottles of Pepsi. You can learn more and download it from here. "
The download link is here
For Mac OS X users, check your Software Update, as QuickTime has been revved to 6.4, iPod software hits 2.1, and iTunes itself is now at 4.1.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
it's fast on my Athlon 1700XP with 1GB Ram. But you sure need a shitlmoad of ram : in the taskmanager, iTunes itself gobs up a whopping 26MB when browsin. qtask takes another 13MB and iPodservices another 7.
:-)
After a while (and when in bakground) those numbers drop to a more reasonable 9+4+3 so it's feasible on a lesser machine. But prepare for some heavy trashing on launch.
Music sharing between OSX & XP works like a charm, even with dynamic playlists. I still gotta try out how my iPod responds when connected to the firewire port on the PC.
Right now i' mgonna do a little stresstesting with iTunes+media player + warcraft, playing all together. The wife sure is going to love that sound
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Apple also released several new accesories for the iPod. They include such things as turning the iPod into an image tank for CF cards and the much-rumored voice recorder.
No
You may want to re-read what iTunes is. You can copy the files to a CD, as a regular music CD, and then do whatever with 'em - such as conver them to mp3 for your car.
;)
That's what I'll end up doing, anyways. (Car mp3 players are cool
The new iTunes Music Store now supports gift certificates & music "allowances" for your kids.
Plus, the catalog still seems to be growing at a healthy clip - unexpected holdouts such as the Grateful Dead are now available and Audible audiobooks are now available through the store.
I still wish that they would keep track of single song purchases and deduct them from the album price (a kind of installment plan) but a nice feature bump nonetheless.
I also like the headline on Apple's homepage - "Hell Froze Over!"
Well I've been a Mac user for a while and love iTunes on my iBook, and I just installed iTunes for PC on my parent's machine. It feels just like iTunes for Mac, very polished, very smooth. I imported a bunch of songs (bad Kazaa, bad!) and they all were read in fine. It sees my shared playlist on my iBook and I can play the files from it just fine. Haven't gone up to the iBook to see if it works the other way, but it should. So far I'm very impressed with the quality of it, considering it's a Windows app.
;)
Now I just get to tell my family about how buying the music is better than copying it for free.
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
If the Apple site gets bogged down it is also availible via BitTorrent at this site. It also looks like Apple is only supporting Windows 2000 and XP.
Well, it rips CDs to MP3/AAC/AIFF/WAV from CD, burns CDs, compiles smart playlists, accesses the iTunes Music Store, displays visual graphics as music is playing, etc.
So, I'd say it does a bit more than a "simple network file retrieving application" - never mind that a Win2K/XP machine with less than 256MB RAM is going to be awfully painful (my Thinkpad had only 384MB and it was painful if I tried to actually use multiple apps simultaneously).
at sly.us/iTunes-ss.
Do your worst =)
The Link
Here, and here
running on Windows 2003 Server. Memory usage is little bigger than other mp3 players, but I have 1gig of ram, so it's a non-issue.
I've gotta say, while I'm a Mac fan. Apple likes to eat up RAM like candy. If I look at Process Viewer right now of all the crazy stuff I'm running on my iBook, the Apple software is chewing up the most (and we're talking about a calendar, and a mail program here...). I can imagine the Windows equal, done by Apple, may experience some of the same issues.
In general, Apple == get more RAM. I think even dedicated Windows users would be a little taken aback.
Anyone agree or am I way off base here?
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Here's how you play your iTunes purchased music at work:
1. Authorize your work computer.
2. Drag the purchased music files from your iTunes player to your desktop on your home pc to make a copy of them.
3. Transfer the copies to your work PC.
4. drag the copied files into iTunes on your work PC to import them.
5. Delete the copied files on both machines.
6. Enjoy your music at work.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Has anyone noticed the new accessories that you can get for the iPOD!? Voice memo recorder? Photo Card reader/writer for the IPOD? This means you can empty your 512 mg card onto your 40 gig ipod and keep shooting...!! This is awesome and makes me want the new ipod badly (Still using the old 10 gig version).
Case in point: go to the Music store, and you will see an Aqua-style dropdown control showing you're at the top level. Try to pull it down, and a Windows-style list of options appears. It Apple cannot standardize the UI across ONE FREAKING CONTROL, what can you expect?!
Some other interesting usability choices: the Maximize button actually SHRINKS the jukebox window to a Winamp-sized player. Double clicking on the title-bar, which should cause the same behavior as the Maximize button, works as Mac OS's (+) button - toggling the window size between "Optimal" and "Current".
Interestingly, Apple went through the trouble of porting their gloved hand cursors - something I am sure we all agree was needed on Windows for years.
I wish they took the time to put in some more confirmation dialogs instead. Like maybe it's obvious to an experienced Mac user that plugging in my iPod to a machine with iTunes will clear it of all the music... But it sure was a surprize to me. Would asking "Are you sure you wanna delete 10 Gigs worth of MP3s off your iPod?" been so hard?!
I expected better of Apple who provide a lot of documentation explaining to PC programmers that when porting their applications to MacOS they should follow the Mac UI guidelines in order to provide an application that will be consistent with the rest that are available. I guess it doesn't apply when going the other way.
Whatever bad sides Microsoft has, at least Office X and IE:Mac *LOOK* like MacOS apps. Sad to say I can't say the same for iTunes for Windows.
Ñ'
I have to admit, very nicely done. I was a little skeptical when it required a reboot on XP, but it worked without a flaw.
The celebrity playlists are pretty cool too.. complete with descriptions on why they like the song. I already found a few songs/bands I never heard of and sound pretty cool.
I especially like the 30 second preview of the song, which loads really fast. Im not sure if I'm actually going to buy anything, but it sure is a good way to find that song that's been nagging you in the back of the head.
Live web cams
the Maximize button actually SHRINKS the jukebox window to a Winamp-sized player.
Actually, if you look at the icon you're clicking, it's not the maximize button. It's the 'restore' button -- ya know, the one built into the Windows API?
Thus, clicking it will togle it from full mode to small mode, the same as many other music apps out there.
When can they do this for Linux?
Which Linux? 2.2? 2.4? 2.5? Red Hat? Debian? Sun's? Elroy's Home-Grown Roll-Your-Own Distro-of-Choice?
It's not like you can just go code iTunes++ for Linux. Most of the magic, so to speak, is not in the code (which I suspect is fairly straight forward), but rather in the deals they've gotten with the record companies.
There is plenty of innovating going on - but expecting Linux users to just ignore exciting developments on other platforms is idiotic. Why can't Linux innovate _and_ use other people's innovations? Total originality all the time is highly over-rated, if you ask me.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Not necessarily. I agree that you have a fair use right to encode any CD you legally purchase from the store to any format that you want. In this case you are not licensing anything, you are purchasing a product and can do whatever you want with it within the bounds of US copyright law. However, when you use the iTMS you specifically waive several rights, you pretty much only have whatever rights Apple assigns you. Apple specifically allows you to burn CDs with your purchases, which is great. However, those CDs are a derivative of your purchased product and so I don't think that you have the same rights as a CD purchased from a store. Indeed, the music on the CD may still be covered by the Terms of Service you agreed to when downloading the original song. While you MAY have the right to rip these CDs as much as you like, it seems far from clear from a legal standpoint. This is a major stumbling block for me and I would like Apple to address it.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Downloaded, installed it, imported my existing music library. It asked if I wanted to sort my music library (or something like that) and I said OK. Now all of my MP3s are sorted into a million subdirectories based on artist and album information, all files are renamed to just the track number and the song title. I had all of my MP3 files in "Artist - Song Title.mp3" format and that is now all gone.
.MP3 files and move them back into my main MP3 directory and start getting overwrite questions because now two different versions of American Woman have the same file name, same for two different versions of Burning Down the House, etc.
I then do a Windows Explorer search for all
Other than the fact that it's fucked up my music library and I'll now have to spend hours sorting and renaming files, it's great.... Grrrr...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
OK, I just did it... I tried iTunes for the first time.
My Sister has a Mac and has used iTunes since the spring - and she has told me on several times how much she loves it.
I don't own a Mac (or an iPod), but for my sister to give a glowing review is a rarity - so I figured I'd try the windows version when it came out.
I'm a 20% Windows user. The other 80% of the time I'm a linux guy, with Linux on my main machines at work and at home. But I also have a Windows 2000 PC at home for things like Visio and Microsoft Money [blush].
So I fired up that w2k machine and then fired up Mozilla and downloaded the iTunes for Windows software. The download was uneventful. I fired up the installer.
The installer is much like any other Windows installer - a license agreement and some basic questions about the install process, and you're good to go. I did have to reboot after the installation, but hey, I'm used to that with Windows.
After the reboot I fired up iTunes. I checked out the internet radio stuff (very easy to use), and then I went right to the iTunes store and started poking around. I did some searches for some stuff I'd expect them to have (Pink Floyd, Beck, etc)... and found everything that I was looking for.
The search feature was very easy to use: basically, you just type what you're looking for and it gives you a sorted result set. Pretty basic stuff.
From there I "previewed" some of the results. Simply clicking on a line item plays a portion of the song. It was good quality, and they had a nice fade-in/fade-out.
From there, I decided "what the hell" and downloaded Beck's latest album. The price was $9.99, which is a bit cheaper than the cheap stores.
iTunes asked me to log in or to set up a new account. Of course, I chose to set up a new account. It asked me for some very basic information - the biggest thing being my credit card information.
Then the download began. It was fast and uneventful.
After the download, I figured I'd burn the Beck album on a CD. Usually this is a pain in the butt for me, since I have crappy manufacturer-provided CD burning software.
This is where iTunes was INCREDIBLE. It opened my CDR drive and asked me to insert a disk. I did. From there, it told me to click "burn". I did. And then it burned the album.
It was way easy. You have to ask why other software is so much more a pain in the butt.
15 minutes later the CD was done, and iTunes gave me a little "ding!". I popped the new CD out of the drive and played it in my regular old CD player. Flawless.
That's all I've done so far.
It's impressive how simple iTunes is and how well it works. It doesn't do amazing things - but it does what it does very very well.
Now I see. iTunes is simple and elegant. I'm going to try to download the same music off the net and see how well I do. Although I've downloaded music off the net before, it has never been so freakin' simple.
I hope Linux developers take heed of Apple's progress in simplicity. I'm not an Apple fan, but I must say that iTunes is on the top of the heap so far.
Now I wish there was an iTunes for Linux.
Cry more n00b! Stop using a useless format *no one uses* Get over it. You made a piss poor choice encoding your tune's in a format that is going nowhere. This is like bitching because you recorded all your movies on betamax tapes and now you cant play them on todays VCR's. What a coke head you must be.