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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. "
THis really really rocks :
Allowance accounts and gift certificates Now you can give your kids a legal way to download their favorite songs with music allowance accounts, which give them access to the store without requiring a credit card and set a limit on how much they can spend. It's easy to set up recurring allowances which refresh every month, and you can establish different allowance accounts for each of your children. You can also buy music gift certificates -- just the thing for your favorite college student or birthday friend. A counter in the iTunes Music Store shows how much credit is left in allowances and gift certificates.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
With iTunes, Final Cut Pro, and iMac, Apple obviously sees apps and services instead of the OS as the key making money off of its expertise. Even Microsoft is not secure in its OS market share and is trying to lock in users with Passport and .NET. The only downside is that the user interfaces between OSes will become even more homegenous once the OS doesn't matter.
Consider:
- Before NeXT was gobbled up by MacOS X, it used to sell a version of OpenStep running on Windows NT; no doubt Apple has had a skunkworks team keeping that up-to-date just in case.
- iTunes has a huge memory footprint on Windows. Why? Perhaps because it needs to load its own entire runtime environment?
- iTunes only runs on modern Windows systems.
Has anyone disassembled iTunes yet? See any symbols in it starting with NS? Enquiring minds want to know..."I just ripped Sting's newest CD, Sacred Love, to AAC at 224Kbps, absolutely excellent. I was getting ~14x ripping off a virtual CD driver"
:(
Heh! Thats the first album I ripped as well...but I was only getting about 4-6x speeds off my Dell
Sadly, I've been meaning to download one of his exclusive tracks, and it showed up in a tenth of the time it took to rip a single track. Doh! I think Apple is trying to tell me something....
I was following the launch event on an IRC channel (via MacNN), and during the course of that IRC someone asserted that Steve said the way they got iTunes onto Windows was by porting Cocoa wholesale--and called it "Yellow Box."
That's a term Apple has used before; IIRC, in the Copeland days, Apple was offering developers it's "Yellow Box" APIs (an early version of Cocoa, I would guess--NextStep wasn't in the picture, though), which would allow them to write to new APIs but with the current Mac OS (Classic) underneath. It was basically a hosting environment, so that once the real OS was released, programs written to the Yellow Box specification would "just work."
I can't confirm that this comment was actually made by Steve Jobs. If he did say this, and he was being serious, then I wonder if Apple now has a framework to let it deliver software on Windows? I don't know about you, I've always wondered why Microsoft never ported COM & a few other things to Mac, Linux, etc., 'cause that would let them leverage their existing codebase on new platforms. Has Apple put itself in a position to pull that trick on Microsoft? Could we see Safari for Windows soon? Or more "insanely great" software on Windows--and not from Microsoft?
Trojan horse might be apt after all; and delivered so innocently, so out in the open at such a cozy event as a music service launch.
What some might call "eating up RAM like candy", others might call using all the resources at hand.
If you're running OS X, eventually most of your RAM will be getting used for something. It doesn't necessarily need that much RAM, but its not going purge anything from RAM until somebody else needs it -just in case it is needed again. Basically works like a cache.
You need to open up a terminal window and run top to see what's reeeally in use.
Only if you don't want to go to the trouble of copying it yourself. You can put your purchases on up to three machines you authorize to play them, and from the info today it seems that includes whatever mix of Macs and PCs you want; you can move files from one comp to another with impunity. Just copy the music you bought at home to your portable storage thingie of choice and take them with you to the office and copy them to your work PC.
As Steve said back in March when introducing the iTMS, "We'll download it to one machine; you have to move it to the other two." If Apple let people download their purchases more than once, lots of people would opt to do it simply out of convenience, and Apple would inevitably spend tons of bandwidth serving up the same track 50 times to the same person for just one payment. Their attitude is that it's the same as any other purchase; once somebody buys a track and gets it from them, it's that customer's responsibility to keep it, put it where he/she wants, prevent it from getting damaged, etc., in sort of the same way Sam Goody won't replace your CD once you get it home and drop a bowling ball on it.
Apple doesn't mind you copying the tracks from one comp to another (as long as you don't put them on a total of more than three, and that's why they have the DRM); they just don't want to do it for you.
Was the iPod originally formatted on a mac, or on windows? There may be some compaitibility issues there... Peace!
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
I downloaded and installed it about 12:30PM Pacific. It DOES look and feel just like on my Powerbook. I was very pleased that it didn't ask for any personal information (unlike MusicMatch). It even very nicely asked me if I wanted to import all of the AAC and MP3 files in "My Music".
There is where success ended though. When playing music, the sound is choppy. Much like when the heads and rollers are very dirt on a cassette or 8 track tape (or the tape is creased.)
However, the same songs play fine in Music Match and WinAMP on the same computer. (AMD Athlon 1900+, Windows XP Pro, 512MB ram.)
I like iTunes on my Powerbook. I'd like it on my XP machine here at work. However, it looks like for at least the time being, I'll be sticking with Music Match Plus (I registered it years ago and even bought the lifetime updates.)
Being able to easily share music over a LAN. How easy? My roommate (who runs Windows) starts iTunes and voila, he's sees my shared music. He even sees my playlists. He clicks a single button to share his music and instantly he appears as source in my list on iTunes. No mounting of disks, no mucking around with servers, it's just there and it works. Instant gratification.
Oh yea, the interface is so much better than anything else out there (except those that are attempting to clone the iTunes interface).
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Haven't gone up to the iBook to see if it works the other way
Yup, works both ways, flawlessly. I'm sharing my playlist with two other Windows boxes which are intern sharing their playlist with the others computers. I have been playing files off my Power Mac on both Windows computers while I play music from either Windows box on my Power Mac, just to test it out. And it works without any problems at all. Zero configuration, instant play back just like local files, completely seamless, all over 802.11b. Great job Apple.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Well... iTunes uses Rendezvous (aka Zeroconf) to allow machines on the same subnet to see each others' playlists. Perhaps the infrastructure for Rendezvous exists on 2000 and XP, but not on the 9x based systems?
I'm not sure, but there may well be support for functionality in 2000 and XP that doesn' exist in the 4+ year old OS versions.
Started playing with iTunes, hit the volume keys on my Microsoft key board and iTunes intercepted the call and changed it's volume. I didn't even install the drivers for the keyboard (it's plugged into the PS2 port at the moment) tres cool.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
It's still pretty new. I did some tests in QuickTime on this OS X box here, and it seems pretty neat. I haven't tried loading the image in a browser, though. You'd have to Google it. It's still coming around.
It's great because it 1) uses wavelet compression and 2) has two modes, lossy and lossless and 3) the lossy compression is an order of magnitude better than regular JPEG.