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. "
Anyone tried this under Wine yet?? :-/
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
"HELL FREEZES OVER".
Now that's funny.
The download link is here
It's been available online for half an hour. http://www.apple.com/itunes/
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As an aside, they have also added 5000 Audiobooks and cleaned up the interface. Good news all around.
For us Mac users: The updates for iTunes 4.1 and QuickTime 6.4 are both on softwareupdate.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
From the iTunes 4 download page for Win2K/XP:
128 MB RAM minimum/256 RAM recommended
OK, I know RAM is cheap these days, and most people should have at least 128MB on modern machines, but I just have to ask--why would a simple network file retrieving application (let's face it, that's all this is with a little security thrown in) need that much memory? Damn...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I'll have to try it out tonight. I wonder if it allows Mac-formatted iPods to be read as well, like Xplay does? That would be great, since that would allow my to use HFS+ format instad, that way I can boot off of it on my powerbook.
Plus, I hope this means that true Play Count support has arrived for PC users (you need at least firmware 1.3 for that wot work though)
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
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.
Apple stated a target of 100 Million downloads by April, 2004. Assuming their Mac-user targets of 30mil, will PC users take to this as fast, getting them 70 million downloads in 6 months?
My hopes were running high, then they were crushed into the ground.
There is no proxy support built into iTunes, so I have no access to the iTMS at work and I cannot get at my purchased music. I thought the iTMS was all web-based. Why wouldn't they think to include web-proxy support?
I'm getting an Unknown Error (407).
Sigh. I've been waiting for this all day and now I'm disappointed...
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
I suppose they could if they wanted, but it is free.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Seeing as how it just came out today, I kind of doubt that many people have had a chance to yet. Sorry.
This space for rent, inquire within.
huh? of course you can do that with itunes... ive doen it many times
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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 ?
Windows iTunes is for Win2k and XP only?! I guess lack of Win95/98/NT support comes as no surprise, but still... that bites. No Linux version either. Ah well, there's always my iBook...
I'm, currently planning to replace my old iMac with a new, cheap PC.
It has sounded really scary, until now...!
If I can run iTunes on it that would be like a guiding light in the Windows darkness!
It is the brushed metal look, similar to the quicktime player.
You can burn your purchased songs onto a CD to play wherever you want. What's the problem?
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
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
go to the apple frontpage and see the screanshot there...
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
All I get is an error dialog: The folder iTunes cannot be found or created, and is required. The default location for this folder is inside the Music folder Nothing more.
Great Job Jobs.
I'm attempting it, but the installer keeps crashing with this error:
1155: File F:\INSTMSIA.EXE not found
guess I'll have to find an win32 box, and copy over the
installed files
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.
The installer is painless. Couple next buttons, and three checkboxes (iTunes default media player, Quicktime default movie player, shortcut on desktop) followed by reboot. Interface is pretty much the same as iTunes for OS X. Worked with an off the shelf IDE burner in the machine. Windows users are going to be very happy.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The Windows interface is very close to the MacOS interface. So far it does everything I expect it to, including plyaing MP3CDs made with the MacOS version (including pulling all the info out of the XML data file burned on the CD). It also uses Rendezvous so you can share music on your LAN (also like the Mac version).
So far, it's two ears up.
With the release of iTunes and the iTMS on the PC, what is this all going to mean to Apple as a computer company? One of the side effects of releasing iTunes for Windows may very well be something Apple has been hoping to do for quite some time; demonstrate to PC owners just what the "Apple Experience" is actually all about these days.
Nobody bought an Apple machine because iTunes was the killer app, but most people that use it for managing archives of music are pretty steadfast about it being the best software for music management out there. Will people take this as a sign of Apple's quality of software development, and match that up with the quality of the iPod design for a pretty decent picture of Apple's design ethos? Could this be what Apple needs to jumpstart the market share?
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I'm sorry, but a quarter of an hour is hardly a long delay...
#define DRM chmod 000
I guess I don't understand your complaint... you can burn these into a CD ALL YOU WANT and from there you can do anything you want to them (mp3, record them onto a *cough* tape player, whatever).
or maybe you're just upset that there's a resonable compromise between DRM and free use rights. Come on, if you want legit digital downloads, there's going to have to be some restrictions.
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.
Have you even any idea about apple's drm? Unlimited cd burns, (only 10 times of the same songs in the same order) transfer it to your ipod, and I would assume other players as soon as they adopt mpeg4. And you are allowed to import those files back into any format you want.
But undeniably, this is a step in the right direction. The above issues, of course, need to be addressed. Solutions such as online radio may improve the ability of individuals to sample music, for example, but the RIAA has created tough conditions for low level online radio systems, keeping the medium for the most part under the heavy thumb of the cartels. This isn't, by itself, a bad thing: there's nothing to stop independent groups coming together and creating libraries of non-mainstream music that Internet radio stations can play cheaply, or without cost at all. It requires the will however, and the mechanisms to be created such that Internet radio's operators can easily find and thus negotiate directly with such libraries, avoiding the dangerous possibility of not doing so and hitting the defaults the RIAA offers.
Creating a huge, high quality, downloadable library, as Apple has done, and making it semi-platform-independent, is certainly a single brick that can be used as a plank to build a bigger concept, a better music platform than the bricks and mortar systems of the past. Without other bricks to form those additional planks, however, that concept will never be dreamt.
This quagmire of downloadable music services requiring a substantial ancillary infrastructure to survive will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them that online music is important to you. Tell them that the infrastructure, both technical and organizational, must be built up to ensure the long term viability of online music. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by Apple and others to create download services but that if the rest of the system is not built you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a lack of a viable music distribution network harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies concerning downloadable music.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
iTunes for Mac, at least, and I am extrapolating to PC, allows purchased AAC files to be used in:
:)
Quicktime
iMovie
iTunes
iPhoto
I can also use it on my iPod
I can burn audio CDs
I have streamed it across the network
I can burn data CDs
I can convert/transcode to AIFF/MP3/etc
So download the iTunes4PC and give it a shot
GPL Deconstructed
What the fudge!?!! I just clicked on the Music Store icon in iTunes and it says that the service is unavailable in my country. What's so hard about getting my credit card info and bill me?
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 ?
You can:
/very/ fair.
1) Play it on any three computers (that have iTunes) at a time.
2) Burn it to as many CDs as you like.
2a) Rerip it from CD.
3) Put it on as many iPods as you like.
What about these exactly do you consider draconian? The music companies are not going agree to a DRM-less system and, frankly, Apple's FairPlay doesn't get in my way at all and is
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Apple.com says it best, "Hell froze over. Introducing iTunes for Windows."
Followed by the awesome, "The best Windows app ever."
Anyone else picture Comic Book Guy when they read this?
Unfortunately, Apple's advertising campaign for this really depends on the price being under $1 US, so it may be unavalible in Canada for a while.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
with a Join Tracks feature that allows you to meld two or more songs into one continuous, gap-free track -- perfect for listening to classical music, concept rock albums and extended dance mixes.
You know, it's not a big feature, but one very nice to have to avoid the little blips that aren't intended to be there and annoy the hell out of you on continuous tracks.
Nice!
blenderking.com over 50,000 blenders can't be wrong
I find the inclusion of audio-books quite interesting. Up until now they advertised their partnership with audible.com on that front. An audible subscription still is the better deal if you listen to a lot of books (you can get two a month for US$ 20) but it looks like single titles are cheaper, or at least in the same ballpark.
I am curious how iTunes for Windows fares in the look and feel and functionality departments. Seems like I must visit a Windows-using friend at some time in the future. Expect to see the return of "number of songs sold in period" press-releases from Apple.
On an unrelated note: Did the original submitter of the story really need to link Apple, AOL and Pepsi? Are these URLs people have a hard time figuring out otherwise?
Hank! White!
Burn those songs to a cd, then re-import them as mp3's. Not really a pain in the butt at all.
I just downloaded and installed it on an old HP Pavilion here. Looks and operates EXACTLY like on my big-screen Mac. Rendezvous sharing works as advertised, and is awesome. Seamless with my Macs. Imports exactly the same and works fine. Playback seems static-y but that seems OS-related (?) (will troubleshoot; it's not in the data since they stream fine to the Mac) (Update: Oh, now I actually hear some static in the data now; will have to look at that more in a bit.)
.m4p files (although the incentive for that might be low due to being able to burn and re-rip the audio to .m4a) .m4a files flooding the P2P networks, starting now
I think this thing will still be huge.
Possible upcoming issues:
1) Exposure to a plethora of Windoze hackers who will now come after the authorization tech that Apple uses for
2) Can you say "windows corporate LAN"? 400 people sharing their local tunes? d'oh! WAN people will start cursing very soon... either that or the mass email chatter of people's criticism of their coworkers' musical tastes will flood Lotus Notes...
3)
4) AAC plugins for winamp 2 and foobar2000 are already out there
Actuall I'd just read the thing about Napster right before this, so I have a bit of baggage from that tagging along.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Seeing as Pepsi is going to be giving away 100 million free iTunes Music Store codes (1 in 3 winners on pepsi products) in feb/april of next year, it shouldn't be too hard to hit their goal of 100 million downloads
Steve Jobs is mercurial and all that, but he can read the public well lately.
What should be interesting is not iTunes playback on Windows, or even the Music Store, but the wizardry Apple had to do to make iTunes burn CDs as its Mac counterpart. Consider: While Apple makes iTunes to work with drives that it knows are present in Macintosh systems, it has to consider the myriad of CD and DVD burners out in the PC world. Hell, even dedicated PC burning software goes nuts on PCs, sometimes.
I'm thinking it leverages XP and 2000's advanced features for that sort of thing (thus the system requirements). I'll have to do some experimentation.
Even if the Windows version attracts only 5% of the user base, it's still going to rock Apple's world (and its revenues).
I would expect more cross-platform marketing and products. If Apple can't sell you a Mac, well, they'll get you a free taste of something else.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Yes, the typical front end interface looks a lot like iTunes on the Mac, except they use more Windows-centric fonts. However, I give them kudos that the menus and configuration dialog boxes are all standard looking Windows dialog boxes rather than the crummy half Windows/half Mac dialog boxes from their Quicktime players.
Is there anywhere you can view their music selection without having to download and install the application?
...you don't seem to get it. Read the docs. The only thing it won't allow you to do is play your tunes without electricity.
Please don't mention slsk in public. It's already mostly ruined by the Audiogalaxy monkeys.
And for those of you who don't know; slsk is for electronic music.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
This is just one reason why iTunes will likely kick the ass of its competitors for the Windows market--name one other player that has a promo even a tenth as big as this one. Apple is playing hardball, and there aren't many companies out there that can compete with an Apple/Pepsi combination, to say nothing of their partnership with AOL...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Not even worth it.
Well, considering they will be giving away 100 million songs with Pepsi starting in February, I think that might help get that number....
The web page says:
Free burning and encoding - Burn unlimited audio CDs and encode music from CDs in pristine AAC or MP3 -- with no extra fees.
Isn't that just a tad bit misleading? Wow all the free music I could ever want and I can burn it to cd without paying a cent! Awesome!
http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/16/technology/itune.r eut/index.htm?cnn=yes
"Apple Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson has said that the Windows launch of iTunes would be a Trojan horse".
My, that certainly is a bad choice of terms for a computing product.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jfe1205/in_mp4.zip
.mp4 for it to work.
I think you might have to change the extension to
-Mr. Fusion
The installer was unhappy (wouldn't go past license agreement page) on my machine, but I'm running a Panther developer seed (not the GM, that's not on ADC yet) so perhaps I have a buggy copy of Installer.app on my machine. The command-line version of the installer worked fine, though. Just in case anyone else out there needs to use it, here's the magic invocation:
installer -pkg /path/to/itunes4.mpkg -target /
-- Tim Buchheim
Got a Mac, got a Linux server, when they released the Linux version, I'll be happy.
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
This will change the way people purchase music. With the usability of iTunes, and the advertising blitz that is taking place, there's no looking back. Kids who win a song from a Pepsi bottle, download iTunes, buy the song, realize how cool and easy this service is, will never go back to buying CD's. there will be folks who want quality but the masses don't care, they want ease of use and iTunes delivers. Throw in the fact that AOl is fully inegrating the iTunes music store and forget about it. Everyone and the garndmother will be using this service in a few years. This will mark the beginning of the end for CD's, let hope donwload quality will catch up soon, or I won't have a place to buy music. Viva la revolution!
I was really interested in the "Sharing" feature as my MP3/ACC library is now over 120 gigs and I wanted to set up some sorta server with RAID and be able to hear all the MP3s and stuff.
;-)
Anyhow, Sharing from iTunes between platforms works great. Actually, both versions work great. Interesting to see that a lot of the rumor sites (www.macrumors.com for example) were predicting WMA support. But there is none. Not that I miss it or anything
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Hahahaha, the online music distributor makes an appropriate joke with a music reference in their tagline.
:\
Too bad "Hell Freezes Over" isn't available in the iTunes music store
The installer recommends that you install SP4; I'm at SP3 with some hot fixes.
The app is completely identical to the OS X version. I have a first generation 5GB iPod and my Windows machine has no firewire, so I cannot test to see if the Mac iPod will work with this.
Or are mp3 versions available? AAC is worthless on my mp3 player...
1)Looks and feels just like the mac version- everything is the same so far as I can tell.
2)Unlike quicktime for windows, win itunes is every bit as responive as the mac version
3) Visualizations are the same as the mac version
4) downloaded the installer at 450k/sec. Go Akamai!
5) Batch ID3 tag renaming as fast. almost instant for a group of 5 tracks
6) New feature allows for one touch backup of your collection onto cds AND dvds. Just swap the discs as needed.
AAC->CD is lossless, as AAC is 44KHz 16 bit, and the CD can encode that perfectly.
CD ->MP3 is lossy, but blame that on MP3 ^^
GPL Deconstructed
19.1Mb
Can you now use the *same* iPod on both OS X and Windows? Before this didn't work, supposedly due to the MusicMatch software.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
I've been playing around with the Windows version for the past half hour or so. It's very well done -- and feature complete:
1) The Rendezvous stuff for sharing the tunes works well. I can now share 80GB of music with my wife's IBM Thinkpad.
2) My CD drive was recognized without any problems. I can rip and burn without any problems at all. Goodbye CDex, et. al.
3) The response time on the store seems to be pretty good. The uptake on the new Windows version will probably be a lot slower than it was for the Mac version (hundreds of thousands of the Windows faithful are NOT waiting anxiously for Steve to say "it's available today".)
4) It's kinda weird seeing the Aqua UI controls and metal skins in a Windows app, but it supports my theory that iTunes is a lead in for both iPods & regular hardware. Get them used to the way things are in the Mac world, and then get them to switch.
Well done Apple. I'm impressed!
You should be able to choose any one of your drives. In OS X's version, it's under preferences>burning. Sorry, don't have a pc to check it out. ;)
Noticing this is becoming more and more about Apple... sounds like what happened to the Mustang, as its first costumers grew older and richer the car grew and was tamed. Is this the fate of geeks, graduating (degrading?) from GNU/Linux on cheap Intel boxen to an Apple Macintosh?
I love the Mac, but the machine. I still run GNU/Linux and Gnome on it.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
at sly.us/iTunes-ss.
Do your worst =)
Easy enough to get other formats. Run the stupid AACs through FAAD and get a nice WAV. Of course, if you encode that to mp3 you're gonna take a quality hit but it's something.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
The CNN article references an comment by Apple's CFO "Apple Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson has said that the Windows launch of iTunes would be a Trojan horse for the company, spurring more sales of its popular iPod digital music players, which have also been popular with Windows users. "
"Hell Froze Over"
That's the best laugh I've seen in a long time
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
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.
Some people are trying to obtain music through legal means or trying to show their children that stealing music isn't right. I'm not saying that iTunes is the perfect answer. The prices are still a bit high, the concept is still a bit confusing and lord knows it's hard to trust corporations today.
iTunes Music Store is ONE WAY to do the right thing. It's going to hurt the "one hit wonders" out there... I think it's going to raise the bar on music. It's also going to give the "little guy" an option to sell music his/her way.
Remember, you can always just pick up the CD if you don't like the service. Plus it's another free (high quality) MP3 player for Windows.
Now if only they would make a Linux version!
Grab iTunesPC; it costs you nothing, you get to use it or drop it as you like, you can buy or *not* buy on a per song basis as you like, it steals nothing from your SoulSeek, Kazaa, WinMX or Overnet habits, and you may be able to find songs on it you can't find on the other networks.
No loss, essentially.
You *may* find your music habits substantially improved with smart playlists, song ratings, library sharing and the jukebox... so possible gains.
GPL Deconstructed
My first impression is negative--they've made using XP as clunky as using OS X! Check out the glacial scrolling and window resizing.
.), then iTunes is a great application on that platform. Its functionality appears to be the same on Windows. It is just a shame that they ported the UI sluggishness to a platform on which it is not inherent.
If one can get past "Mac" OS X's UI problems (the Mac OS was so good! Why did you. .
Announcing a windows release being "hell freezing over". When can they do this for Linux?
There is no patch for stupidity
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Been stuck in the stone-age with WinAmp2 and MusicMatch Jukebox. Come on guys, really, learn just a bit of user interface design skills! iTunes to the rescue! :D
The Link
The headline on Apple's homepage is about right.
I, a traditionally rabid anti-mac zealot have just download and installed iTunes for Windows and used it to buy some music. It does kick much ass!
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...http://akamaidownload.apple.com/530x3824/binaries/ iTunesSetup.exe
Great first step. I'd love to be able to try it! Unfortunately, I'm not going to install windows just so I can use iTunes. Let me know when they release a Linux version... (or someone figures out how to run it with Wine) -dave
Anybody have bets on when someone gets this to work in wine? ;)
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
I know there are a couple different versions. If it doesn't work with the standard Wine it would be interesting to see if someone using the TransGaming version had better luck.
Also: do you have quicktime installed? Does quicktime even work with Wine? I suspect iTunes may not work without it.
I would love to test this myself, but my linux box is kind of in pieces on the floor at the moment, and I have yet to get around to emerging or testing wine..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"Use error correction when reading Audio CDs"
That option wasn't there in 4.0, was it? Kick ass...
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
There are some new accessories available as well, mostly made by Belkin. Of note are the microphone and flash card (CF, MMC, SD, SM, MemoryStick) reader.
As a long time Linux geek (Debian all the way), I switched to a PowerBook this spring and have never looked back. iTunes is a big part of that experience; having it available for my Windows machines at work is even better. Plus, it means Apple has a huge chance at continuing to be viable in the marketplace. After all, this is about selling iPods--not music.
Anyway, having followed the launch even this afternoon and downloading immediately, I can tell you fidelity of the experience on Windows is good: everything is the same as Mac OS X. The look and feel will be recognizable as similar to QuickTime--the brushed metal look so often reviled among older Mac die-hards. Interestingly, I entered the same account information I use on my Mac at home, but that does not allow me to re-download music already purchased onto this machine at the office; if I want it here again (outside of my home network), I need to buy it again.
The Music Store itself appears inside iTunes; it's just another bookmark, like your playlists, your purchased music, any CD you have in your drive, and any other computers on your local network sharing music through Rendezvous. You can play music off another computer with Rendezvous, but you can't add those songs to one of your own playlists, or download / copy them to your machine.
The experience of using the Music Store inside iTunes is a little like a browsere experience, but on steriods: the interface is more sophisticated, but still based on following links for navigation, backward and forward buttons, a home page, etc. On many pages, lists of highlighted albums appear in scrollable horizontal strips of album cover thumbnails. Definitely more than a browser, more than a website.
If you spend time with iTunes, you discover that more and more music arrives everyday. Things you didn't see when you did a search last week are now there. Over time, it starts to have the same jaw-dropping effect as Napster did in it's heyday: all the music you ever wanted, right there.
A while back Steve Jobs said he and Apple were going to innovate during this tech downturn and when the economy recovered they'd be well positioned. It looks like they're doing it ... G5, iPods, iTunes Music Store on Windows, Panther ...
When is Longhorn supposed to be out? 2006? At the rate Apple is coming up with this stuff, by that time we'll have a wearable iBook with a holographic display, plus an iPod with GPS, WiFi and takes digital photos ...
iTunes supports plugins. Mac users have had 3rd party OGG plugins for a while. Someone will develop or port one to Windows.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I've been waiting for a replacement for winamp for a while now. I downloaded and installed this and everyting looks nice. Almost a perfect clone of the mac version. There is one major problem for me. Every time I try to inport my music folder it crashes almost as soon as the first song is processed. I don't want it searching my HD for media because the only audio I want in my playlist is the stuff in one specific folder and I have more audio files outside of my media folder than inside. Any suggestions?
Since, Safari and iTunes both use webcore as the backend on the Mac. Does this mean we might see a port of Safari on Windows? Anybody heard anything?
Just grabbed iTunes for my work box (Win2k) and it's pretty good. The menu *in* the window still wigs me out a little, and the ID3 tag editor takes an incredibly long time periodically with longer songs, but so far a pretty good port. Haven't purchased online yet, but I did browse and it's every bit as neat as on my Mac at home.
Here's what worries me... I dig the iLife apps, but the only one I've been able to show off to friends and family and instantly get a "Wow, that's neat" was iTunes with the Music Store. People like it. It really made them wish they had a Mac. A few enjoy the iPhoto books, but everyone is impressed with iTunes, from ripping to burning to buying (and then burning and ripping and...)
The iPod is similar. Remember when it was Mac-only (it was, wasn't it? For a second or two? Almost surreal now)? That was another reason for Windows (even Linux!) users to covet my favorite OS and hardware.
Now my friends and fam are a download away from having a quarter of iLife, and the most desired of the group. Sales of iTMS tracks should skyrocket -- I've seen it said that Apple should expect to grab 20% of the legit online music market (AP article in local paper). As an Apple stockholder, I hope they get even more. And I'm glad iPods are the best selling mp3 players and my stock's happy iPods are the best selling mp3 players.
My two Macs running OS X are not. What good is all of this for OS X? What does this Windows capitulation say about OS X's future? Will Apple eventually become purely a software company, a la Sega leaving the console market? Will Mac hardware go away as Apple throws their support behind the monopoly (IANAL)? Probably a bit too alarmist, but it's clear that Apple is betting on Windows software and compatiblity for short to medium-term profitability, not a crazy come from behind win for Mac OS. Sure, that's probably smart (and yes, I can see Windows users being more comfortable switching once iTunes is one of their hard core favorites, but that's a reach at best), but it's still a little depressing to see these great Apple ideas leave the Mac and sell out.
All in all, this is great news for Apple but not such good news for Macintosh.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Or you could give your money to people who don't saddle you with restrictions.
http://www.magnatune.com/
So what you meant to say was "Come on, if you want legit digital downloads of songs we all have already bought several times over, there's going to have to be some restrictions"
Not me. I get most of my music from Juno, Substance or Vinyl Addiction. The gratification is not instantaneous, but I still don't have to move my arse. But I do visit used record stores from time to time. What a shame that the old New Order records are so overpriced (at least if they are original Factory releases)
Hank! White!
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.
At home I've a windows desktop machine, an OSX laptop, and an old linux file server.
I just loaded up iTunes for windows, added my music, and enabled iTunes sharing. Now, when I open iTunes on the powerbook, my library from the PC magically appears there too.
Does anyone know of any attempts to reverse engineer Apple's iTunes sharing protocol? It'd be nice to have an iTunes sharing daemon running right on my file server, so that my library would appear in iTunes on both my other machines, and would always be up-to-date.
The 2.1 software update is only for 3rd gen. Other iPods are sent to a software version 1.3 page, and any mention of iTunes or iTunes functionality are conspicuously absent. Booo!
I'm sorry, but you're 100% wrong on this. I'm sitting at some kind of old Pentium 2 (3, maybe?) with 128 Meg of RAM, playing MP3's, working in a few web browsers, running an anti-virus app, a firewall, serving VNC, and running a point of sale application, all while it's being used as a print server. It works fine, and the hard drive isn't going when it's just playing music (idling). I don't know what you did to that poor machine of yours, but mine runs like a champ.
anyone seen http://downhillbattle.org/ theres a great itunes/napster2.0 parady.
There's been a lot of gushing about iTunes for Windows today, and I really hope it lives up to the hype. What about the drawbacks to iTunes? Are there any "gotchas" that really degrade the experience? What about limitations? I'd be interested in hearing the top gripes about iTunes.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
home-made. Pulls music over the WiFi from the house.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Seems to work great so far -- my only beef (and it's one that will probably keep me in WMP for the time being) is that iTunes doensn't support "watched folders" (which automatically import music that you drop within them). It's really handy when you're, err, downloading music and you don't have to reimport manually each time.
Even my favorite jukebox of old (Media Jukebox) didn't have that as of V.9. Had to tell them bye-bye.
Audio is fairly memory-expensive, and on top of simply playing the mp3s (which if i am right it does through quicktime-- not exactly the MOST memory-efficient thing out there) it has to do a decent amount of buffering with the audio. It does this both when simultaneously playing and downloading over the network, and when using this feature (the fade-between-tracks thing).
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
What other method would you suggest for getting music from your PC to your car?
Your options are two: Burn a CD or transfer them to a device like an iPod. If you're that concerned about wasting CDs, make sure your car player can handle CD-RWs and use those instead.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Well, I'm willing to spend the dollar (er, 99 cents) to find out if it's suitable for my tastes, regardless of the holes in my speakers.
I don't know about ripping but as far as playing is concerned, some time ago I found a Quicktime plugin that lets me play ogg files in my Mac iTunes.
I assume that the plugin is only for Mac but I suppose that it must not be very hard to compile a Windows binary. Soon, I'm pretty sure, somebody will write/port this Windows plugin.
The Apple software is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control systems, life support machines or other equipment in which the failure of the apple software could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
And yet Apple stock is still down 6% today. Damn beleaguered companies. AOL tie-ins, opening up the music store to a HUGE customer base...but what does Apple know?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Maybe some people don't want to waste their time and money on burning CDs that they are not going to use. Of course, it's a good idea to make a backup of your songs in a format that is not going to vanish, but that's just me.
Then convert the AAC file to AIFF, then back to MP3. Or use Audio Hijack or WireTap to save them out in any number or formats. No need to burn to CD. The net effect is the same, but you save the cost of a 1 CDR and the 3 minutes it takes to burn.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Sorry, I know very little about iTunes - is there a system like Amazon/NetFlix/Launch where you can rate how much you like/dislike a song/album/band/genre and then have it recommend more for you?
It seems it would do well here - but with a quick glance over the site, I don't see that they have anything like that.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Anyone know how/if this thing can support .ogg files?
If the Apple site gets bogged down
That's silly. Apple uses Akamai.
Well this should guarantee Apple with at least 6% of market share for Itune.
with Mac OS at 3% market share
and everyone that owns a mac installing iTunes on their work computer another 3%
Not a bad start. (I included in both 3%'s)
Look at all the Windows using slashdotters coming out of the woodwork now that it sucks one notch less. ;)
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
You just reiterated my point: the parent poster was incorrect that AAC->CD->MP3 is two generations of loss. It is in fact one generation of loss:
AAC->CD == 0 loss == lossless (just by technical definition)
CD->MP3 == 1 generation of loss
So AAC->MP3 by *transitivity* is 1 generation of loss
Now, as per getting *truly* lossless data, we'd need 96KHz and 24bit audio from master; CD is not 'lossless' data, as it's been downsampled from master already, for the most part.
GPL Deconstructed
New iPod accessories include a $100 media reader that lets you save digital photos to your iPod and a $50 voice recorder that lets you save memos or lectures to the hard drive and sync them directly to iTunes. Both courtesy of Belkin.
The media reader seems overpriced to me, but a good idea for photo nuts. If I bought my high-school-age daughter an iPod in the near future, though, I'd get her the voice recorder at the same time. (I'm a viral geek; I have little use for an iPod myself, but I'd love to get her one and let her discover all the fun stuff you can do with it.)
I imagine Apple managed to port iTunes because quite a few of the Carbon APIs were already put into Quicktime for Windows. So before anyone asks if there will be a Linux port, it's doubtful right now. There's nothing POSIX or OpenStep like that'll work with Linux. It's all Carbon, as far as I can tell.
I am a long time Mac user with a PC too, here are a few of my comments on the iTunes for Windows software -
- Firstly, congratulations to Apple, they have gotten 99% of the app and it's feel perfect in Windows, it's free too, what more can Windows users ask for? I forsee WinAmp being forgotten about within weeks.
- iTunes for Windows does not scrub through songs when you drag the playhead dot in the location bar, it continues playing the song until you let go in a new place where it will then jump to. The Mac version scrubs nicely.
- Visualisations need optimising, they are fairly unusable on my machine, being very jerky and unpleasant. (Perhaps a lot of Altivec used for the Mac version?).
Can't find anything else at fault yet, of course you miss out on the gorgeous drop shadows, the vastly superior text antialiasing etc. in OS X. But I think this will become the de facto music app on the PC within 8 weeks.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
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).
Good point. iTunes will burn MP3 CDs, yet it will not convert AAC files to MP3 for an MP3 disk.
:/
/MP4 is going to catch on for other digital audio players. It's more open and easier to adopt then WMF, it sounds great, and Apple has already established it as the most popular codec/fileformat for DRM audio. Heck, the iPod is the most popular digital audio player, iTunes is the most popular online music store, iTunes is going to be AOL's music store, etc etc. It doesn't make sense not to support AAC.
You need to burn them to audio CDs and re-rip them
(I'd send some feedback to Apple...they listen. Check the menu options in iTunes. There's a feedback option somewhere)
However, I have a feeling AAC
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I was first in line to get this thing downloaded. It seems identical to the Mac version, including my biggest PET peeve on my Mac OS ( please note I am a multi OS person). The window does not expand to fill the whole screen. Am I missing something here?
blade
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
I, for one, welcome our new music distribution overlords!
Hmm, I definitely need to check this out. And prove that I will download music legally when there is a good electronic alternative out there, which this is!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Then I was disappointed. Am I the only person that runs Windows 98?
I wonder if brushed metal actually has nothing to do with the various explanations Apple has given for it - for "real devices" etc - and a lot to do with cross-platform.
... brushed metal. Hm.
iTunes looks identical to the mac version, almost, and that's a Good Thing. Quicktime was the first cross-platform windows app of note, and it's
Got to wonder if Apple has a cross-platform plan, even if only a big-disaster-become-softco one, or one for apps with revenue streams a la ITMS. iPhoto's brushed metal, and it has a revenue stream. Safari and iMovie don't, but Safari at least could conceivably be released for Windows.
...it just crashed while importing my music library !
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.
Atmosphere! Nice man.
forget it.
The other good news here is that Jobs announced that they've signed on 200 independent labels to provide music. Woo-hoo!
So is this a deal to bring back Scully?
=)
Yeah, they're giving away 100 million copies of "The Hokey Pokey".
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
It crashed on me when importing my music library and I've been reading a few reports of it crashing at Ars as well. Seems like Apples has some fixing to do.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
the mac version is an insanely great music player.
rip mix burn!
I have two macs and a PC, the PC being the 'holder of the files'.
Not very intuitive so far.
Great band, great song. Life is good!
The fact that the compression format is a standard does absolutly nothing to help you play ITMS files on non-apple hardware. These files are ENCRYPTED and will not play except on an iPod or a Macintosh for which they are licensed. The only way to play them elsewhere is to first convert to AIFF and then possibly re-encode (even if you want AAC, heaven forfend!).
This is not even about DRM (notwithstanding Apple's reassuring words to the RIAA). The DRM is actually extremely weak, as any DRM is. It's all about vendor lock-in, in that you can't get at the original compressed data except on Apple hardware.
"I mean .. who wants to pay for it?"
;-)
Us stupid people who like musicians to continue making music. This pay per download thing is by far the best option for musicians so far.
You want free music, buy a guitar.
BTW: I sniffed your IP, one of these days I'll come around to steal your mouse. Afterall, why should I pay for a mouse?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Just to show some support, and to see if it's worth it and if they have my favorite artists. $20 is practically lunch money.
I'll probably also see what they offer in the way of music videos.
Pepsi does taste like shit.. but I'll be damned if this isn't the first under-the-cap game that will actually lead me toward a particular product.
I could typically care less about "winning a million dollars or one of 10,000 Xboxes."
If 1 out of 3 pepsi sodas will give me a free song of my choice, I'm game. I'll simply drink Mountain Dew and have the shakes for a few months.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Set it up on my LAN at work. My work box is an older Dell with 2000. Set up was a breeze, and I'm ripping my CDs on to it now.
Just installed it on a workstation we use in a central locaiton. It found my computer's iTunes music file. Now we can play the music without having our CDs laying in different locations.
Installation's a breeze. Even installed on the workstation even though it doesn't have the latest updates.
At home I'm a Mac/Jaguar user at home--the interface looks almost exactly the same (some different fonts), and moves quickly.
I've downloaded iTunes for Windows, and it's worth it if only for the ability to rate songs. But is there anything I can do with all my Oggs? Or am I gonna have to rip everything over again to AAC?
19MB download? Holy bloatware batman! A full install of Winamp is 2.2MB, and it plays videos as well.
The install is typical of the annoying Apple installs we were used to with Quicktime. It doesn't even ask you, it simply installs QuickTime 6.4. Not only that, but it adds some **** to your startup so you have a gloriously useless memory-hogging QuickTime tray icon by default.
It's also somewhat weird how iTunes demanded access to the internet the second I opened it, even at the configuration wizard's first screen.
It requires "special" drivers for burning to CDs and DVDs -- huh? What kind of design is this? This also requires a reboot after an install.
The GUI seems to be remarkably inefficient, when I resize the window there is a noticable delay of when I move the mouse to resize and when the window redraws -- and it's choppy when it does so. And the CPU is an Athlon 64 3200+...
It doesn't recognize WMA as an audio format whatsoever, which is somewhat of a pain considering 95% of my audio files are in WMA format. The least they could've done is take a couple hours and simply call DirectSound's WMA decoder, doesn't add to file size nor complicate the program. But I suppose for political reasons they want to shun MS' format and only support MP3 and AAC (no OGG either).
The interface is huge, and virtually uncustomizable. I'm not a fan of the brushed-metal look. There is no equivalent window shade mode (Winamp) or taskbar mode (WMP) I could find, which is annoying for playing it in the background. Closest thing is you can minimize it, and then use the tray icon to do basic controls (play, stop, next song, etc). The taskbar entry is still there.
It's a resource hog: Playing a simple 4 minute MP3 it uses 32MB of RAM and 3-5% of my Athlon 64 3200+. The exact same song in Winamp 2.91 uses "0%" of my CPU consistently and 7.6MB of RAM.
Reading this comment reminds me of exactly why Apple has such great mind share with average home users and Linux doesn't. In a word: innovation.
Now, before you start flaming me, please listen to my intent:
Apple: puts out uber-cool, lickin' your chops iPod, but makes it only available on Macs (to start). Puts out actually workable online music service and makes is only available on Macs (to start). People love both of these things and buy them in hoards. Mac users have status and coolness as they're the only ones that can get this awesome stuff... at least for little while.
Linux: Can we run this on WINE? In other words, can we take this cool stuff from another platform and try to make it work on ours. You probably can and probably will, but meanwhile you have to wait for some point in time AFTER everyone else has it. Let's face it, cool is very often about being first... about having something others don't have.
What Linux needs is innovation. They need something that only they have (at least for a little while) that everyone else wants. That is how it will build mind share, not by saying "look, we can do it too (if you're only willing to wait a while)"
TW
Looking on Google I found this and it has a Windows port. I have no idea how well it works, or if it works with the newest release of Quicktime, as I don't have access to it on this machine.
More specifically, iTunes has to talk to the IMAPI (Image Mastering API) present in Windows systems, which abstracts CD burning since a while back.
Things have changed since CD burners first appeared. It is not all that different, these days. If IMAPI says you're good to go, then go ahead and pump the data. Who knows where it'll end up? It's not your problem anymore.
During install iTunes asks if you want it to be the default player on your system. I selected no and proceded with the rest of the install.
Started the program and then went into preferences. There is a check box for "Use iTunes as default" and it is checked anyway. I would assume if you did not notice that and chnged some other preference setting and clicked ok, it would set iTunes as the default, even though it was not picked during install.
Either they were clumsy, or they are just relying on people to be less aware when they are changing settings.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
This could be the only way us international users can "buy" songs from the Music Store. Buy it for you kid? Bah, sell it to a foreigner and get a profit.
I expect this to be huge on eBay anytime soon. If someone wanna sell me a song I'm very interested, haven't even had the chance to try it out..
Ciryon
Duh... well you can also play it on a Windows machine now using Apple's software. Not on a competeing hardware player is what I meant.
When Apple does requirements like that, they're 'System' requirements. You answered your own question: Most people should have at least 128MB on modern machines. Even Microsoft recommends this.
By your logic, with all the software I've bought my machine should need several gigs of RAM. How many basic consumers do you know that will think: "Gee, when they say 128MB, that must mean 128MB _extra_ just for the software." as opposed to "128MB? CompUSA told me they put 256MB in my machine. Ok, this'll work."
The iTunes icon in the system tray lets you control iTunes, much as the dock lets you on macos x. I was wondering how they were going to do that! Nice job apple. It seems to have EVERY feature that is available on the mac side, I was not expecting that. Every setting, every option. Anyone know if the plug-ins are compatible? I wouldn't mind seeing G-Force running on it.
today is spelling optional day.
Well, they had me up until Pepsi.
Oh, wait no.. they lost me at Windows. I guess I can still buy music from work.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
So if you have an anti-Apple friend all you should have to do is send them a music gift certificate for... $20 (minimum I believe)... then watch them cry as they install iTunes for Windows... :)
Although it doesn't work with my Napster WMAs, I launched iTunes and it had 3 items under 'shared playlist' with hundreds of audio files.
:)
Turns out it's picking up iTunes playlists from MACs on our network... that is kinda neat.
Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and sell sugar water bundled with free music?
All those music and iPod sales to Windows users will go a long way towards keeping Apple profitable, and will help subsidize lots of R&D to keep you enveloped in delicious Apple-y goodness. And stop being so elitist. So what, you can't show off to your Windows brethren and boast about your superiority? Get over it.
Someone forgot to take his prosac?
There, there. See, the nurse is all female, you can stop screaming...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I get the same error. But it's not important enough to me to figure it out under Linux. But I do plan on checking it out on my XP laptop just to see how the store works.
Umm...
I don't know a whole lot about audio en/decoding, but aren't you leaving out 1 generation of loss?
Specifically, the loss that occured when Apple ripped these songs to AAC from whatever they rip from? (CD?)
Good Lord, Apple is slashdotted. This has got to be a first, their site usually stands up even to the worst rushes of newly-released trailers for the next geek movie.
I wonder what tomorrow's headlines will be.
Yes.
I have a Mac and can't understand how people get by with WinAmp or --ugh-- MusicMatch. iTunes is just so easy to use and find the type of music that you want.
The feature that blows my PC friends away is the Rendezvous streaming. I have a G4 in my bedroom with 20GBs of MP3's and an AirPort-equipped PowerBook in the living room connected to the stereo.
If iTunes is running on my G4, all the music and playlists on it automatically show up when I launch iTunes on the PowerBook. It's really slick...the songs start playing immediately with no stuttering or buffering.
I was thinking about getting a SliMP3, but not anymore...I can even connect the PowerBook to the TV and show iTunes visualizations on it...cool.
Those of us who want to listen to more than 4 "rock" artists (although how they use that term to describe "instrumental electronic space pop" I'm not sure) will buy from a better source.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
From Apple's website:
iTunes 4 is the best software jukebox in the world, with a great music store inside. With it, you can create your own personal digital music library to manage and listen to your music collection, all with drag-and-drop simplicity.
iTunes encodes high-quality MP3s as well as pristine AAC, all in a free application. If you don't like getting charged a subscription fee or paying for additional features like fast CD burning, your digital music experience is about to get a whole lot better.
Although I use ogg myself, frankly I hope Apple gets top spot for legal music distribution. Teaming with Pepsi is a brilliant move. Makes you wonder why Microsoft can't be this creative. Oh, that's right, someone else needed to think of it so they can steal it.
Guess I'll be seeing Windows Media Player songs on Coke cans soon.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
After quitting it often hangs using near 100% CPU, have to kill the task iTunes.exe with Task manager. Memory usage is also quite high, peaking at 52Mb.
It also associated all my music files with QuickTime when I told it not too. Hmm...
Is this a beta?
Really? My 1st generation player plays AAC files just fine. Is there not an updater for Windows? If not - I would say go to a store where they sell Macs and let them update your iPod software from a Mac.
I just got an iPod for my girlfriend and the software that comes with it, MusicMatch Jukebox is the crappiest thing ever offered. It does not work with the iPod. I subsequently downloaded other iPod managers, such as ephpod, XPlay, and Media Center 9, and they all work. I tried convincing her to use ephpod but she refuses. She wants to use MusicMatch because it's the official offering of Apple.
I'm downloading iTunes right now and I'm praying that it will work.
Compared to what Kaza gives away.
If you want to conserve a little bit of memory, log in to Windows as an admin, go to your list of Services running. There is a service that is installed with iTunes called iPod Service. Stop the service and set it to Disabled (setting it to manual will still allow iTunes to start it up when it starts up). Now you have freed up a little bit of memory! I'm not going to say I'm 100% sure of this fix, but it looks like it works fine for me. Running on WinXP.
Hope this helps some of you complaining of the mem. footprint!
-my other sig is your mom
This hint at MacOSXHints.com has a comment regarding ripping from multiple disks. I know it is a Mac OSX site, and all that - but it might help. I dunno...
And, sure, they've made *huge* sums of money off their operating systems. First they had the deal with IBM for DOS on every PC shipped, then they rolled out the very successful Windows 3.0 (every Windows release before that was a yawner), but it wasn't until Windows 95 that they are really started to get ahead financially with their operating systems.
;)
I guess I always thought that they did applications very, very well, but operating systems not as well. Hence, if they'd just made their application portfolio available *everywhere* (regardless of OS), they could absorb every desktop on the planet.
But, hey, seeing as I would have chosen a different strategy, that might explain why it's Bill with all the billions and not me, huh?
You gotta love the whole AOL and Apple connection. I really think this is going somewhere.
First you've got the whole AIM integration with iChat. That seemed to be a pretty big thing back in the day. Next, iTunes signs the major labels. Hmmm...who's in there? And now today it's announced that AOL users will be able to purchase from the iTMS.
This is big stuff. Major collaborations on a few different projects now. It makes you wonder...what's next?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Anyone know what they're using as the HTML rendering engine for the store? The Mac version uses KHTML (also used in Safari). Did they port it, or did they just use the IE control?
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.
Looking at the iTunes interface... and options menu:
1) I can encode as mp3 as an option.
2) when burning a CD directly from iTunes I can
choose to make an Audio CD, an MP3 CD or
pure data CD.
Based on these two options alone, I would be significantly more inclined to purchase from iTunes than from Napster. Score one for innovation.
Yes there's an update for the iPod for both Mac and Windows: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/269 25
need i go on with the list of things that apple has boosted from the free-n-open *nix community? turn about is not only fair play, but good for software in general and everyone!
now, don't get me wrong. i love my quicksilver/10.2.8 rig and it is my primary machine - but don't sell the oss community short on innovation.
2 1337 4 u!
It appears the trojan horse theme was picked up on Ars Technica discussions, too, although not with regard to "Yellow Box."
MPEG-1 Audio layer 3 in an MPEG container is compatible with more handheld music players than MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Codec in an Apple DRM container.
That said, I do all my ripping with CDex to PCM .wav files and then process them from there. I'm not an audiophile, so wav -> nominally 160 kbps Ogg -> 96 kbps mono MP3 doesn't introduce any unacceptable artifacts that I can hear.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Like Baldur's Gate... and... um... Photoshop.
Ñ'
But I am not allowed to convert these files to, say, mp3 so that I can play them in my car.
You have an MP3 player in your car, but not a CD player? gripe to the manufacturer, then, and tell them you want a firmware update to support AAC files. It's not Apple's fault they can't add DRM support to the MP3 file format.
...and obviously don't spend money on anything new.
Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.
Hmm I don't have the high cpu problem, well unless I enable visuals. The whole unable to import music thing really sucks though. ITunes isn't much good to me if I can't navigate my Music Library.
The one thing I will say is ITunes Music store is about as cool as it gets. The long previews and excellant sound quality definitely put it above and music shopping site Ive used.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
checking with each other, getting this installed, sharing out libraries.
It's pretty amazing that it takes Apple to create an application for Windows that excites people in such a way.
So how long before microsoft releases a critical security patch which "incidentally" and "accidentally" breaks iTunes?
More music, fewer hits
Shame that the iTunes music store is STILL not available outside the USA. Also, it looks nice, but Apple made some mistakes with the interface when porting it to Windows. Firstly, the button which you'd expect to be the maximise button actually puts iTunes in Compact mode. Secondly, there doesn't appear to be any right-click functionality to speak of. Thirdly, there doesn't seem to be a way to bookmark favourite radio stations (which I was expecting to be able to do with the non-existent right-click functionality I just mentioned).
When Sierra Mist came out, they did a big "1 in 4 recieves free 20oz bottle" thing. I got 20 sierra mists. I didn't win once.
Probably will be the same thing with the I-tunes. Or maybe all those free Sierra Mists owed to me will be in the form of I-tunes. Anyway, sounds like a good promo for pepsi.
Wow that was a bit off-topic... ummm... LINUX R0X0RZ!!!
iTunes is a complex Cocoa application. iTunes was ported to Windows. What's the easiest way to do this, both development-wise and especially maintenance-wise? Port Cocoa to Windows.
As others have remarked in response to your comment, s/Cocoa/Carbon/g and this becomes true. IIRC, Apple ported Carbon to Windows a long time ago as part of the process that produced QuickTime for Windows, and Carbon was initially defined as those parts of the Mac OS toolbox that are in fact portable to another operating system.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I feel like a Cubs fan...
;)
What, you think a bunch of geeks are going to get a current sports reference?
You want a sig? I can get you a sig... Hell, I can get you a sig by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
That's the microsoft installer exe.
You can get it at http://tinyurl.com/3ha9, but that doesn't seem to help a whole lot...
I used iTunes for quite a while on my Powerbook, but for the most part i kept wishing i had Winamp on my Mac. Winamp 3 proved to be too bloated, in some cases a stripped down minimal player is best... so im back to using winamp 2 on my pc While itunes is a great looking app, it may not be the best choice for everyone
http://akamaidownload.apple.com/530x3824/binaries/ iTunesSetup.exe
No downloading for me, I've got an iBook, but it's Linux. Now an iTunes for Linux would be news, for Windows, it was just an inevitability after the 'you have to have Apple to hit it' wore off on the accountants at aapl.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
That includes QuickTime 6.4, of course.
need i go on with the list of things that apple has boosted from the free-n-open *nix community?
First of all, quit saying "*nix." One: it's incredibly lame. Life is not a command line. Wildcards do not parse in English. Two: it perpetuates the legitimacy of TOG's trademark. Do we say "*eenex" for facial tissue or "*-tip" for cotton swab or "*erox" for photocopy? No. Don't say "*nix." Just say "UNIX."
Now, with that out of the way, Apple never "boosted" anything. They've used a lot of open source stuff in their OS and applications, and they've played by the rules. They honor the licenses under which that stuff is released and they release their own stuff back in. (Go download Rendezvous sometime. It's out there, man.)
Yes, there's a ton of innovation going on in the hobbyist community. (That's what we're talking about here; let's call a spade a spade.) But the problem is that the innovation that's going on is vastly outweighed by the sheer amount of bullshit that's also going on. Apple, on the other hand, chooses its targets wisely (usually) and fires with both barrels, dedicating money and engineering talent to coming up with excellent solutions. "Just good enough" isn't.
Don't bother trying to compare what Apple does to what the hobbyist community does. The hobbyist community is--no offense--a million monkeys. Apple is Shakespeare.
Not at all. Only music purchased from the iTunes store has any restrictions placed on it.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
My next music purchase will be a huge iPod that I can store all my music on, just as soon as I find a good way to interface it to my car
If you have a head unit with cd-changer input, but no cd changer, you can probably find someone that sells a converter to provide RCA inputs. This, for example, is used for VWs. I used it in my wife's Passat for her iPod.
If you do have a CD changer, you can get something like this.
It lets you switch your CD-in between the changer and 3 different RCA inputs. I got it in my car for my iPod and it rocks.
- Tony
No. Unless you purchase songs from the music store, it operates as a simple media player (and kick-ass media file manager) like WinAmp.
It doesn't modify your songs at all (except maybe the ID3 tags).
----
Bryan Samis
http://www.thesamis.net
My point was that you don't have to put up with restrictions to get music legitimately. It's just the industry shoving it down everybody's throats because they think they can. Well actually from the looks of it I guess they can.
If you check Peter Gabriel or Coldplay home pages in iTunes music shop, they have 10.89 or 13.99 pricetags...
I thought in the first version of iTunes store everything was supposed to be "just $9.99".
What's the point of buying it over there instead of getting a CD and ripping it on you own and to better format than mp3 or aac bitrate that iTunes store has?
.
------------ Internet? Is that thing still around? H.J. Simpson
The indy labels are on iTunes! yeah. Download tracks from NOfx, Rancid, Sleater Kinney, Modest Mouse and many more! Now that is what I call a music service.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Okay, I'll admit it -- I don't have a Mac, so I haven't really been paying attention till now.
Is there DRM built into the music that you buy with this system? How does it work? If I copy the mp3s I buy onto my server and try to play them from another machine, will it work transparently, or do I need to use a special app or log in or something?
-monique
"-apache
-Sendmail
-khtml
-ssh"
"... don't sell the oss community short on innovation."
Wonderful points and well taken. But I must point out that these are server products (mostly). Linux has exellent mind-share on the server, and rightly deserved. This is _because_ of the innovations you mention.
Where is the similar inovation on the desktop? Even one hit game or one hit device would make a big difference in mind-share.
TW
Gotta love the books on tape too...Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash Unabridged for $32. Not bad...not bad at all.
Well, at least now you have a decent player to play that music with. Playlist management and searching in winamp is a headache. iTunes makes it all so easy.
t'nera semordnilap
A good first start, I've been waiting for this for some time - here it is at the apple store (Search for "reader" alone in Apple store if link does not work).
It's made by Belkin, and appears from the picture to bea bit larger than the iPod itself - it also uses 4 AAA betteries. It is a six-in-one device which is nice for those people silly enough to buy a camera that does not support CF...
What I was really hoping for was a device that would attach to the end of the iPod with minimal profile, CF only to conserve space, and use the iPod's own internal power for transfer and operation. I just bought a Nixvue Vista a few months ago, and am torn now weither I should sell that and buy a larger iPod (which I have been wanting) or just hang out for a bit and hope someone else develops a more compact system.
One cool thing about the Belkin though is that the cable retracts into the case so at least you don't have to worry about a cable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
those are fine tools and there's certainly no lack of real innovation in the open source community, but how many Joe users are actually going to install those? I can't really think of a killer app for Linux that would drive average users to Linux.
Browers like mozilla are no longer "cool" just because they present web stuff, they're just tools now. 100 years ago a horseless carriage was "cool" to have but the novelty wore off when they everyone could afford them. This time next year online music stores will likewise be pretty standard fare.
It does include MPEG-4, but I would assume you can't encode with MPEG-4 unless you license it via Quicktime.
This one I didn't understand.
The iTunes software uses the GraceNote (CDDB) database lookup; remember to change your hosts file to include map the cddb.cddb.org name to freedb.freedb.org if you've a mind to.
What is Kerbango? And why would I want to use it? And why does 3Com (associated with Kerbango) feel it necessary to specifically disclaim liability for "loss of or fluctuations in heat, light, or air conditioning"? I wonder what case that came from.
Just so you know, the last word in the agreement is "EA0197".
They rip from master: Which is generally 96KHz and 24bit multichannel/stereo; so there is no CD->AAC loss.
Besides which, the parent poster wasn't talking about CD->AAC, so that's not part of the equation. He was complaining about quality loss in transferring downloaded/purchased songs into MP3. Or in other words, AAC->CD for his car, and then CD->MP3 for his Nomad or something.
GPL Deconstructed
I downloaded and installed it. I restarted the machine at the installer's prompt and now Windows 2000 won't boot. It just hangs at the splash screen. This is somewhat frustrating.
Very.
the user-agent is supplies is inconclusive, just says itunes windows xp etc..
Perhaps some awesome game that came out only for linux...i mean not just something that looks like a game for linux, but something of AA porportions...just an idea, because as of now gamers are driving a lot of the technology.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
But I've got two simple request for the next version (and I hope it is released soon).
That is a good point. But this kind of magic is Server-Side Magic(tm). The deals with record companies may be covering which songs are available in the store, not the app. If the network protocol / API to the Store is public (is it?), writing iTunes++ for Linux will not be trivial but certainly possible.
"It is a six-in-one device which is nice for those people silly enough to buy a camera that does not support CF..."
Why is it silly to use a camera that uses another media format? CF is the largest standard on the market. SD cards are cheap, fast, high-capacity, tiny, and integrate well with my Palm.
'Not like me' isn't a good measure of silliness.
Kevin Fox
but how many Joe users are actually going to install those?
LOL. A lot of Mac users already have and don't even know it!
IMHO iTunes is seriously lacking. It may be great for Mac users, but Winamp 2.91 (not 3, 3 is a piece of crap) is still far better. Between the visualizations, window shade mode (in which you still have full control of the app) and performance (iTunes is using FAR too much CPU AND memory on my 1.6GHz P4, compared with Winamp) iTune has no place on my computer.
What else is there to say, the winamp download was a little over a couple meg (~2MB) It plays avis/mpegs and I can playlist them like everything else, and I have plugins to play every type of file that didn't come with the default install.
Winner: Winamp.
I'm sure I'll find more reasons I prefer Winamp to iTunes, that's just my hours worth of mucking with iTunes. Add/Remove programs, here I come.
Please, if you're actually using a pay service and a pay music appliance, please use a real non-sucking service like GraceNote. Don't suffer through FreeDB. I think what happened to CDDB was terrible, but on the other hand, I have about 2000 spelling errors to correct in the titles of the 700 or so CDs I have ripped at home so far, and nevermind that no one can agree what a performer's name is. It isn't worth it. Ugh.
i've heard this argument before, and really winamp and xmms are the best slim trim mp3 players i've used, however, itunes is a music database which, among other things, offers dynamic playlists by genre, rating, album, artist, play count, etc. etc., so you really can't classify itunes as the same type of app as xmms or winamp.
Want to know why business is so fucked? Apple rolls out a successful service to tens of millions of new customers, and Wall Street fucks their stock price for over six percent.
Guess they should lay off a few thousand people. That'll impress the suits, right? Hey, it's just an extra bonus discount for the smart money.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The original poster had a very good point. Why does the 'best' mp3 player on linux have to be a WinAMP clone? I would LOVE to have iTunes on my linux boxes - even without the Music Store. I can't, so I use iTunes on my Mac.
The Linux architecture and concepts should foster experimental and new designs for software. Why do people have to duplicate existing apps? Apple didn't when they created iTunes.
iTunes is DEAD simple to use, manages a database of your music easily, rips cd's asynchronously, burns audio and mp3 cd's super easily, and makes it easy to build playlists and browse your library, AND allows you to tweak each individual song. Did I mention it is DEAD simple to use?
The magic, is not actually in the code, the magic is in the usability features and concepts.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
...maybe microsofts got a deal with some memory chip manufacturers
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
You can't burn an MP3 CD from the paid music store selections (I've tried), but you can still make Audio CD's and pure data CD's.
:)
This is the DRM in effect, there is no technical reason why this should be.
Though you can, of course, take that Audio CD and rip it to MP3's, Apple claims you lose fidelity. My crappy ears can't tell the difference though.
(I'm a fan of iTunes, just didn't want you to get your hopes up
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
The VBR settings for MP3 importing says that the Stereo Bit Rate setting you choose is used as a minimum bitrate. There is also a list of VBR "Quality" settings from "Lowest" to "Highest." This seemed to imply that the quality setting determined the average bitrate used by VBR, and that the Stereo Bit Rate was just a minimum, a la Lame. I imported some songs using a VBR Quality of "Highest" and Stereo Bit Rate of 64 kbps. I noticed that a five minute song was only taking up 2mb or so, and I knew something was amiss. I played the song in WinAMP, and its average bit rate was 66 kbps. I went back to iTunes and changed its Stereo Bit Rate to 256 kbps. Now the song was 9 mb in size, and WinAMP claimed its average bit rates was 268 kbps. So I think these controls are just busted. It also doesn't look like there's much V in the VBR setting, as most songs seem to stick the Stereo Bit Rate, very rarely dipping higher or lower. Maybe that's a function of the "Quality" setting?
Like him or not he's pretty popular but not one song on I-tunes. I haven't looked around that much yet but is there really that much content ? Lou Sir
Oh Yes.
It just works.
Good bye MusicMatch Jukebox.
I have the same goddamn thing on my Windows PC already, minus the "convenient" store front for the majors to shovel their shit onto my hdd. It does great visualizations, available in hundreds of varieties by hundreds of artists, has literally 10,000 skins available for it and uses next to zero system resources. It's stable and easy to use. It's called Winamp 2.9
Acutally, with GPL software it's "we can do it too, if you're willing to wait a while, deal with several months of buggy and poorly documented betas, deal with a complete lack of support from both developers and vendors, deal with confusing user interfaces not so much designed as copied from other applications that don't do the same thing and teams of programmers that feud with each other over mildly different implementations that are equally lax. But when *we* do it, it'll be skinnable and run OGG files. Because really, that's all that matters."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Now we just have to wait for the GNU implementation :)
:(
of the iTunes music store
Actually, I guess RMS wouldn't be too cool with
the DRM involved in iTunes
What about the .ogg format. Is that not supported... Or will their be support in the future?
"Important: After installing iTunes 4.1 for Windows, you'll only be able to transfer music to your iPod using iTunes. To transfer music from MusicMatch Jukebox or Audible Manager to your iPod, you'll need to first import the music into iTunes. For more information, search iTunes and Music Store Help."
Well, there are over 400,000 songs available, and 200 indie labels have just been signed up. But there are certain artists who refuse to let their music be sold this way--Madonna, the Beatles, a few others (probably including Dave Matthews, if he's not available in the store). So complain to him, and his label, not Apple.
I like the headline on apple's main page:
"Hell Froze Over"
(really - check it out
There is plenty of experimental innovative software for Linux. Just because you only look at the Windows-clone apps doesn't mean that is all there is to Linux.
"Where is the similar inovation on the desktop? Even one hit game or one hit device would make a big difference in mind-share."
America's Army
Savage
Neverwinter Nights
These are all hit games that run natively on Linux.
khtml is a desktop innovation... KDE is full of other innovations that make it such a nice environment to use.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Works pretty well, except that you can't close it's window without exiting like you can in OS X.
They give you a system tray icon, but "close window" and "exit" both quit the program (stopping the tunes) and remove the system tray icon.
How dumb.
Common sense is not so common.
The Mac OS and the QuickTime APIs have no concept of a "Multiple Document Interface" as Microsoft calls it. MDI is a Microsoft Windows exclusive concept that how MS originally got around some of Apple's early "look and feel" litigation. There is also some historical reasons for why Apple never adopted this kind of interface.
When Multifinder was introduced to an earlier Mac OS, it was considered desirable for a user to see content from windows between applications. Macs previously used "desk accessories" to approximate multitasking before, and this UI decision helped smooth the transition. Letting applications only have window scale control, rather than the full screen, eventually allowed Apple to discontinue the DA concept in favor of microapplications.
In addition, as the Mac OS developed, Apple started advocating drag-and-drop data manipulation. This requires that both the source window and destination window be visible for a drag operation to occur; this continued emphasis is why OS X now has the trash can in the Dock and Panther includes an "Expose" feature to make all windows visible at once.
Mac users are accustomed to bouncing between applications readily while most Windows apps seem to be designed for exclusive, one at a time use. Other interface quirks, like floating verses anchored toolbars and the global menubar, are extensions of this differing emphasis in multitasking.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Yes, it's WMA, probably DRM up the wazzoo, but it's available in Canada. Which means they got the licensing worked out, and CHEAPER than the US iTunes store.
However, I'm not going to harp on Apple; I fully realize getting the iTunes store to Windows is far more important, and they have to prioritize their advances. Now that this is done though, Apple had best get their asses in gear.
Thanx.
:)
While burning an audio CD then ripping that to mp3 is theortically possible, I don't see the benefit.
There is an option to use mp3 encoding rather than Apples' default.
MP3s on a data cd are what I use now and that suits me just fine. I'll play with it for a while Maybe I'll even pay for some, if for no better reason than to say that I gave a legitamate, paid model a fair chance
-KS
Actually, Carbon apps can use .nib files too. They even work in OS9.
We have 2 Akamai cache engines here at the university I work for and they usually work great. You go to download something and it comes in at like 10Mbytes/sec. However, there are times when something is screwey and it goes back to some off campus server, and is much slower.
We don't know what causes it since we don't control the cahce engines, they just live here.
Oh get a grip. If you're worried about hi-fidelity audio quality, you're not buying downloaded music.
You know what? Most people don't give a shit.
Damn, I wish I had some mod points.
Ok, I've downloaded and installed it. I must say, the port (UI at least) is remarkably true to the mac version. I like it.
Does anybody else keep going to the upper-left corner of the window to minimize it though? Am I the only one?
-- yawn. --
Unique Linux innovation . . . TiVo! But most user's don't know it uses Linux (nor should they have to)
And here I was, thinking uptime was the ultimate measure of coolness.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
it uses whatever drive has an audio cd in it right now i am using 2 drives to rip (itunes is doing it sequentually)
If they've done it right (and it took long enough so they probably have), iTunes on Windows will "Just Work". How many other Windows apps can say that? Overall, Apple has simply positioned themselves to take the lead in the growing market of legal music downloads, and even has the code base for video streaming/downloads. Like them or not, RIAA lawsuits may actually help iTunes get accepted.
Further, it will be just one more thing that you can say is the same when someone complains about all of the Windows Vulnerabilities and you mention how few the Mac has. If they continue porting Apps, soon the only thing Windows computers will have to offer will be the headaches.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
These are all hit games that run natively on Linux.
They can hardly be called a Linux desktop innovation if they run natively on Windows, too.
Does anyone know if there will be an SDK for the iTunes for Windows version? I have put together a little page that I hope to track what happens here. It will have a list of dev tools, resources, etc.. and a listing of the known plugins that work with Windows.
I expect a lot of cool stuff to be made for this:
Here is the link at ohlssonvox my webpage.
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
Regardless of the amount of innovation Linux provides, one must remember: It's a free OS written by hobbyists in their spare time. It's mere existence is of CRUCIAL importance, because it provides a vital alternative to the industry-provided monopoly OS. Could you imagine a world without Linux?
I think Linux is just fine as it is - it adequately fills it's niche, and does not need "marketing wizards" to add flash and pizzaz.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And windows isn't? For fuck's sake. The port is for sharing. Calm down.
I suspect Apple is willing to do without the ability to target the people running Win 98/ME for two reasons. First, the numbers using it will continue to head downward. Second, people who are using something that old are unlikely to be the sort of people who are early adopters of technology -- and the early adopters are a better market for the iTunes music store. So I think it makes sense for the people at Apple to target resources where they have the best potential customers.
Bah.. When I lock my XP machine, iTunes stops streaming!
I have an older PC at home that I have left on 98 because I have a Powerbook I do pretty much everything now. But now I'm thinking it would be handy to have the PC as a central server, and share iTunes music from there... so the release of iTunes may very likely make me upgrade when nothing else would!! I wonder how many other people are thinking along the same lines, like people who really want to use iTnues but are only on 98.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would think that the versions would be the same, using the same engine. I noticed that the windows version is quite a bit bigger, so along with installing quicktime, I would assume it installs the webcore framework, just for itunes. Or maybe as well for a future version of safari. ;)
you don't have to put up with anything when it comes down to it. Why haven't I purchased a CD in the past six months? I'm tired of paying $18 for a disc and it's a pain in the butt to import them all into my computer.
iTunes is a service that I like, cheap music, easy to download and I can do everything I want with the music without running into the DRM.
If you don't like iTunes, then don't use it, obviously people like you are not their target customer. I just don't understand the smug attitude that everyone brings up on this topic. "because business X doesn't sell what I want for the price that I want they are evil and are shoving everything down our throats"
So allow me to clairfy, comon if you want legit downloads of mainstream artists, there are going to have to be restrictions. Restrictions that don't bug me in the least because guess what? i haven't run into them yet because i'm not trying to pirate the music.
What Linux needs is innovation. They need something that only they have (at least for a little while) that everyone else wants. That is how it will build mind share, not by saying "look, we can do it too (if you're only willing to wait a while)"
What really makes iTunes (and many Apple applications) special is the interface. Building a really great interface is a real multidisciplanry task, in a lot of cases. You need great code engineers *and* great user interface designers, and you also need to spend a lot of time getting the interface right by testing it on users. That takes time, money, and a set of skills that most "pure" coders just don't have.
It's not a knock on Linux coders- when the community puts their mind to it, they can produce some great, user-friendly interfaces. It's just not fair, though, to expect a bunch of coders to consistantly produce interfaces on par with professional user interface designers. Hell... most professional software houses like Microsoft can't even produce a decent interface. Look at Windows Media Player... it's an absolute freaking trainwreck of an interface. If you ate iTunes and threw it up, it would look like Windows Media Player.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
but those aren't the sort of innovations that the average person understands or cares about.
anyone from a grandma to a ceo could look at an ipod and thing "wow, that's pretty/cool/sleek/whatever", but they aren't going to do that with apache 2.2.345
it's a matter of what arena are you comparing in? if you are comparing backend innovations it's a whole different set of applications than if you are comparing end user excitement.
apple builds a culture of cool, cutting edge people with their sexy laptops and fluid desktops.
linux has a culture of hackers.
windows... um... has the same culture that makes walmart and mcdonalds run.
Mind you, I'm working with the Mac version, but allegedly the Windows version is exactly the same. iTunes smart playlists are what take iTunes over the top compared to anything else. Make a smart playlist with, among whatever other conditions, the condition "last played is not in the last month" and check the "Live updating" checkbox and you have a never ending playlist that doesn't repeat for a month (or whatever time period you choose.) Etc, etc. Go nuts.
--- What?
uh, we've had rhythmbox for quite some time now.
its still not a 1.0 release, but we all know that a 1.0 in OSS is MUCH different than an M$ or most other commercial 1.0 releases.
Sounds like Wine or the installer can't find a newer (than you have installed or available) MS Installer DLL/exe? MSIA is the MS installer app, used by a lot of installers on windows...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Try rhythmbox. It's not quite at iTunes level yet, and the UI is a blatant Apple ripoff, but it's pretty good nonetheless.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
THIEF!!!
oops... I guess, according to your reasoning, that itunes isn't an innovation anymore then.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Unless you change anything, it won't modify the id3 tag. There is an option for artwork cover, that is part of the tag I believe.
But I think that's the only thing it would modify. I have old mp3's from back in SoundJam's days that still retain their original info.
Does Apple Quicktime for Windows still have that incredibly annoying "Do you want to upgrade to Quicktime Pro?" dialog every freakin time you play a movie?
That is the #1 reason why Quicktime didn't make it back on to my box last year after a reformat.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
None of those games were first on Linux. NWN was so massively delayed we got about 50 /. articales about it. Linux apps, yes, but they're not Linux innovations, which is what the parent was getting at.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
You can prove this in about 2 seconds on OSX by running this command: otool -Lv
That's a technical delineation but in short it means that it's based on C/C++ (not Objective-C) and the Carbon / CoreFoundation family of APIs.
The term Yellow Box is normally used to refer to Objective-C / Cocoa / Foundation, which is an entirely different API and implementation that provides generally the same services.
Carbon and Cocoa share some of the lowest-level code in OSX, but for the most part they are entirely separate. Actually separate but equal is another way to say it -- you can do anything in one that you can do with the other.
Yes, having two native application frameworks built into the OS is wasteful, but remember that both Carbon and Cocoa have had long lives independent of each other before they came together in OSX. Rewriting one in terms of the other would be a lot of work and a compatibility nightmare
Apple has had a framework to let it deliver software on Windows for a while now. It's called QuickTime, and it's got a large chunk of Carbon already ported to Win32 APIs. A lot of the other stuff that might be used by applications (CoreFoundation, for example) is already x86-savvy thanks to Darwin.
So iTunes was ported, but almost certainly not through what is normally referred to as the Yellow Box. Unless of course they're re-using the term deliberately to confuse everyone.
I believe the iTMS content view in iTunes might be rendered with HTML, though I'm not sure. So maybe they ported their WebCore engine. Since that's based on KHTML it should also run nicely on x86 of course.
I suspect porting Safari or other apps is not so much a question of "is it technically possible" as "would it make economic sense?"
Remember, the only reason Apple's software is free is because they're trying to entice you to spend money in other ways, like on their hardware or their music store.
cuz I was only getting 16k/s from apple. The torrent was d/ling at ~200k/s
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
I downloaded and installed iTunes in Virtual PC. With iTunes running I can see my shared playlist from the Windows side immediately. That's the first time I've seen anything "just work" with zero configuration on a PC.
Nice pictures. You shaved your cat?
I'm not a developer outside of some pretty ugly shell & perl scripts, but from what I've read here on Slashdot (which is a disclaimer unto itself), high level languages and APIs tend to promote lots and lots of data structures which aren't always memory efficient. Could use of all the Apple APIs and/or C++ have anything to do with this?
on iTunes for Windows to see some of the problems people have been seeing. Of course, keep in mind that you only hear the bad stuff on these boards. I'm a bit worried myself about iTunes truncating the filenames of my music.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Sorry, but I'm gonna have to disagree with that whole "best windows app" statement. Considering it won't even connect, it's not that great. Obviously there's a firewall here at work. Where are the options to change the port or use a proxy server?? All I can use iTunes for is to play music I've already ripped. I've got winamp for that! Stupid iTunes...
Has anyone successfully gotten two Windows boxes with iTunes sharing running, to work?
We can see each other in the playlist panel, but when I click on the item, it just spins, and eventually times out.
(Yes, the boxes are on the same subnet and not crossing a router)
On the Mac there is a free (opensource I think, but I'm not sure offhand) Ogg Vorbis QuickTime plugin and that allows iTunes to play Ogg tracks, but it doesn't give iTunes the ability to rip as Ogg and iTunes doesn't fully support ogg tags. I.e. it's a kludge.
--- What?
Please tell me - what experimental innovative software is there available for Linux? What does innovative software mean to you?
BTW, I've been running Linux since kernel version 0.99pl15, and am running servers with RedHat 7.3/8/9, debian, and embedded linux-ppc based on YellowDog linux.
All I see now are me-too web browsers, me-too developer IDE's, me-too office applications, me-too games, and me-too multimedia apps. Yes I know there is value in making a word processor that feels like Microsoft Word, but where are the experimental word processors that go beyond Word, GUI and functionality-wise? Word is not and never was a good GUI design. It makes me really want to write up my own...
The innovative software that I have I've seen running on Linux was not written with Linux in mind but was originally written for Unix/X11 before Linux existed.
Back to the iTunes topic, I installed iTunes on a WIn2000 machine. On my Mac, I ran iTunes and clicked 'Share Library'. On the Win2000 machine my Mac's music library automatically appeared in the left panel. No complex setup either. It is these little things and attention to detail that make iTunes more innovative than any music player on Linux.
I myself am guilty of promoting complexities. Since I know how to set up NFS and Samba and Apache and Shoutcast, I would just use one of these tools on my own Linux boxes to accomplish the same thing with XMMS or X11AMP or even mpg321 with a cgi php4 script front-end with apache and the mp3 meta-data extracted into a PostgreSQL table for faster searches. All the tools are there, and as a programmer, I find it fun to implement these kinds of things - and I HAVE spent time doing this for my own system.
Because I did it myself like this, I forget about the fact that there would be a much easier way for the end user who maybe does not have these tools or does not know how to use these tools, or does not care - he just wants his music on one computer to be played back on another computer without having to think about file sharing or audio streaming software or DNS issues or IP addresses or IP ports or protocols.
Click on 'Share Music' on computer A.
Click on shared music on computer B.
Press 'Play'
Brilliant Idea!
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Has anyone noticed on Apple's main page where they picture iTunes running on WinXP, that Apple themselves has not patched their WinXP system? Take a look, on the bottom right corner of the screen you can see the icon for new paths are availble for download/ready to install/we're going to force you to reboot your system now. Lol!
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
Actually you're completely wrong because Savage was simultaneously released for both platforms on the same distribution CD. I know cause I bought it and it's a great game.
They are innovative because they demonstrate it is VERY possible to target Linux as a gaming platform despite all the trolls on Slashdot who'd like everyone to believe only Windows is good for games. The innovation is in showing that a crossplatform graphics toolkit like SDL not can work, but work very well. I have no lag in any of those three games.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
That is total nonsense. Thousands of companies, both large and small have been founded becuase of Apple. Big companies like Adobe wouldn't be around if not for Apple. There are also hundreds of small Desktop Publishing companies that woudln't be around. Tons of Mac only software companies. The list goes on and on.
Hardware like the iPod is certainly innovative, or else why would it be selling so well. It is quite a bit more expensive than many of the other products out there, but it still is outselling them. Why do you think people are buying them?
There are 10 different types of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Or, you could have been planning on signing up with eMusic- another organization that doesn't saddle you with restrictions. Just MP3s, do as you will.
Except, someone boguht them. And now there are restrictions. But before that, it was looking great- the same day the news about their being purchased broke was the day I was going to signup, just got a paycheck. Pfft, assholes!@$!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
You misunderstand. So what if we have it? Most of us sure as heck didn't install it ourselves.
How many Windows users install their own webserver, SSH system, or html rendering engine?
Plenty of applications out there to do that...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I would rather have a much smaller and cheaper device that supported CF only, selfishly having only CF cameras myself. I also have to wonder if it would require so much power if it didn't have to support all formats (though perhaps there is no way to get power from the attached iPod). A smaller cheaper devices with CF only support would also sell pretty well since the majority of people are using cameras with CF card support.
The form factor is important because if I buy the adaptor, I have to carry two devices the size of the iPod, instead of one about the smae size for my Vista. So it's a little less appealing, especially when you add $100 to the cost of an iPod.
Even if I had a palm with SD support (just an old Palm V at the moment) and an SD card, I can't imagine I'd every want to transfer anything to the iPod for later movement to the PC - since the Palm has great syncing already.
As to SD cards being fast and cheap and high capacity... The max size at the moment for shipping cards appears to be 512mb vs 2GB for CF. The 512MB card is $250-$438 on procegrabber, whereas as I can a 512MB CF card for as little as $80 if I go no-name. Even a 256MB SD card (the smallest size of any real value with modern 3mp+ cameras) goes for around $60+, while a 256MB CF card is $40 at the low end.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So I installed iTunes for Windows and it works great....
Was it me or was anyone else feeling a little weird as the installation was going on?
Almost felt like my Windows box going on its first date or losing its virginity...
iTunes is suppose to use the proxy settings for internet explorer. But as far as I can tell its broke.
I'm behind a firewall and I keep getting an unknown error 404 whenever I try to connect to anything.
All I can find is :this link for OSX
No, I'm not naive to the practices of record labels. But most artists are very favorable to Apple's conditions.
And tell me, how do you think downloading music without paying is helping artists?
For every (non-millionaire) artist you show me who condones stealing his work I can show you ten who'd love to have a quiet word or two with you.
I've helped a few artists make "some" of their work available for free, online. That's cool. They're cool. That doesn't mean they don't want you to buy their CD.
Most artists can barely pay the rent. They love everybody who buys their music.
Is that naive?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
SOCKS proxies & anything other than simple proxies.....
$50 for a recording mic?
$35 for FM?
$100 for a card reader?
Wow! That's a lot for some clunky gadget hacks.
I guess after spending so much on an iPod which *lacks* these basic features, Apple, Belkin et al figure they have captive, well-heeled market.
Seriously, how many comparable music players don't have recording or FM these days? In the last few days I've seen the iRiver and the Samnsung, and they are both cheaper than an iPod and come with this stuff built-in.
Da Blog
Now I can finally run iTunes on VirtualPC!
Is it okay to cry "Movie!" in a crowded firehouse? --Steve Martin
You could always sing the songs.
But then again, we humans generate electricity for our brains. Oh, fudge.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Hmm, are tissues named on the same phonetic theme as Kleenex? Are cotton swabs named on the same phonetic theme as Q-Tips? Are photocopying machines named on the same phonetic theme as Xerox? No. Do those items function in nearly identical ways to their major brand counterparts, so that they don't need a recompile (nose job, ear reconstruction, paper resizing)? Yes. Are UNIX-like operating systems named on the same phonetic theme as UNIX? Yes. Can ALL UNIX apps run on a given UNIX-like OS (for the same platform) without a recompile? Probably not. Can they be called UNIX? No. *nix doesn't just mean UNIX, it means UNIX *AND* UNIX clones.
I wonder if they dusted off the old OpenStep for NT code to get this beast working on windows. It didn't take very long from the original release of the ITMS, maybe 6 months. That's insanely fast for an application of this size.
Ask my wife.
My favorite uncle is gay though. And some of my best friends. They're sweet guys. So I don't care what you call me. If you're afraid of gays, that's fine. Must make life interesting.
BTW: my mac isn't colored, it doesn't want me to do complicated non-nutricious things with carrots either.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I started it up... nothing happened. Looking at the process listing I see it, but nothing else. Then, after what feels like at least 60 seconds the gui pops up. And this is a 1.7 ghz athlon with 512M of ram.
However, if you rip in AAC but want to burn in MP3, you can manually convert a non-protected AAC file (.m4a) to MP3. For obvious reasons you can't do it with a protected AAC file (.m4p).
To do it, select MP3 in your import preferences, then select one or more AAC files and select Advanced -> Convert selection to MP3.
OK, since KHTML is LGPL wouldn't that mean that they would need to publish the source?
The iPod was by far the best mp3 on the market when it first came out and iTMS is the only online music store that is worth using (at least for major label music)
No, iTunes is still an innovation for the Mac platform; it was availible long before it was on the PC. The grandparent post is simply trying to point out that Linux needs something big like that to come out for Linux, and just for Linux, otherwise it's an innovation for all platforms it is introduced on. And in that case, why get Linux?
Downloading it now.
photosMy Photostream
DRM "enabled". No thanks.
Anyone know of any players- existing or in the works- for those of us with PDAs running Linux (a Zaurus C760 in my case) or Windows CE (incl all PocketPC, although I've a Sigmarion III)? I've no iPod, and my PDAs double as music players. I've a Mac (although now, that's moot), and would prefer using the AAC standard over MP3s, but I've not seen a player for either the Zaurus or Windows CE. In both cases, a some-what specialized player needs to be written, avoiding floating point instructions.
Hell, the Zaurus has an ATI Imageon chip in it, which includes an MPEG4 decoder. Anyone know if that would cover decoding of MPEG4 audio, or just video? If it is the former, it'd sure be nice if someone wrote software to use that feature of the chip- Sharp certainly hasn't done much to support their own hardware on Linux. But that'd rule- low CPU usage, nice sound, small files.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
You're right, AAC has nothing to do with the copy protection. That is simply a codec. However, MPEG4 does have a lot to do with the copy protection. (a lot of us interchange the two terms when talking about ITMS music)
I;m fairly sure the DRM is based on an open standard that has been built into the MPEG4 spec (but, I could be wrong). As I recall, Apple chose MPEG 4 because it is an open standard as well as a standard that was taking right management into account.
Apple's "locked" mp4 files will play on any iPod you put them on. If you own a million iPods and 1 Mac or 1 PC, the AAC/MP4 files will play on all 1 million iPods that you own. (if you don't believe me, check out Apple's iTunes site). However you're still limited to 3 computer user accounts (yet you are able to easily remove a license, or transfer a hardware license, to a new computer if you see fit).
I see no reason why other portable audio devices that properly support AAC/MP4 could not function like, or somehow sync to iTunes like, an iPod. One does not need to authenticate an iPod... why should they have to authenticate a Rio or a car stereo?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Simple, it gives you the biggest volume for the least price. Sure SD can integrate into your palm, better, but most high end camaeras all use CF, because of it's advantages with high res pics (stuff that are like several megs per picture, even compressed.)
Even Sony, which is so big on their memory stick has included CF in their latest pro-sumer camera...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
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.
There are plenty of CDs that only have one or two songs that I even like, so rather than paying $10-20 for the disc, I'll just pay $2 for the songs I want and put 'em on one big mp3 CD.
Yeah right, Apple hasn't allowed you to view the source code of thier software and send in bug fixes. Thats complete BS.
There's no incompatability at all, why don't you name one. Oh and OK i won't scream Gentoo, I'll scream SuSE, Mandrake, and RedHat, which oh, my 12-year-old sister manages to be able to run and install software on Mandrake just fine. She clicks the package and bam it installs. Most of what she wants to play with doesn't require dependencies, and if you're going to a level of needing something with deps, then whats so hard about downloading a dependant package and installing it. Of course she had to be taught a little bit, but MacOS is no better for installing. I can't count the number of time's I've put a disc in my Grandparetns Mac (which they are extremely confused about) and had it bitch that I don't have version x.xx of some stupid ass extension, or I need a certain kind of mac to do this.
As far as for the average user, Mac offers nothing besides video editing. The average user doesn't have a firewire DV camera, or want to burn DVDs anyways.
I don't think that the 'fucking average user' understands that when you close a window, the program is still running in the background. How the hell is that for usability. "Oh by the way even though you don't see the program it's still running on the computer, thats why when you clicked the icon, you didn't see anything. You have to go to the file menu and say new window." Average user my ass.
You know what else, I don't want to mess around with steering and pushing pedals when I drive either. Fuck I just wanna get in my car and not even talk, just have it read my mind and go automatically where I want to go. Oh right you still have to know certain things. Training and learning is involved in everything, and I don't think computers should be an exception. Now i'm not saying that we force everyone to learn command line, but realize that there is some extent to learn. Just because linux is a little different and people are going to have to learn a few new things (clicking on an RPM).
And since you brought up the average user, which I mentioned nothing of in my original post, why don't I point out that you can't buy dick at an average store for a Mac. There are 400x the products available for the PC. If you're talking the average user, and them not wanting to deal with stuff, then sounds like Winblows is the way to go. Becaue you know what? EVERYTHING is automatic in windows! Automatic virus installations, automatic spyware installations, automatic bugs, and security holes. See the user doesn't even have to deal with installing those. Thats what happens when you give every user Administrative priveleges on a system. So people are going to have to learn a few new things now anyways.
You're ovbiously a moron to say that linux is archaic. It's a unix derivitive you dumbass, just like your prescious little MacOS. And If it weren't for the innovation of Linus to create free and open unicies, then Apple would never have been able to 'innovate' by taking an 'archaic' unix system and calling it thier own.
hey gang - love it or hate it - but maybe that's not the point. Notice that there are *already* 3 pages of comments here on /. on itunes for Windows.
That's one hell of a reception for a music app new to windows. People are taking notice. That speaks volumes in and of itself.
Someone, please shake me from this wide-awake nightmare.
And in that case, why get Linux?
Well, I don't know.. maybe because it's a rock solid platform whose developers care about my privacy and the security of my computer?
If you refuse to acknowledge the innovation merely on the basis that it isn't platform specific (as if this was some indication of superior innovation) just so you can invent reasons why Linux might be inferior for yourself then please, by all means, don't let me stop you; I'll just leave you with the irony of making that claim as a mac user.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Sorry, but "DEAD simple to use" is not a Linux value. If anything, it is a Linux anti-value. "DEAD simple to use" does not confer status.
Now, the Linux version of iTunes would be infinately customizable, with no possible standard interface. Of course, why the average consumer would need or want anything beyond a L-Pod (Linux-Pod) command line is beyond comprehension.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I agree that the iPod is very innovative. They were truely the first to come up with a small portable device that carrys hundreds of songs. In fact, I totally want to buy one. But to call iTunes for Windows an innovation is a bunch of crap. It was only an obvious decision that Apple made. And for the parent to my post to call linux un-innovative is a bunch of crap too. Maybe I was just pissed off about that, and had to flame his ass. I'm just tired of the Mac-is-so-goddamn-supreme attitude of that guy. The arrogance of him saying that the thousands of thousands of linux projects out there aren't innovative just steams me.
wtf? you shaved your cat??? he looks absolutely ridiculous. looks to be in a worse cat than any I've ever seen, and I like cats and have seen many of them.
Unfortunately you are 100% correct.
Why does linux need iTunes when Linux already has mpg321, postgresql, cdparanoia, sox, LAME, cdrecord, samba, and php with apache? Just connect them up and you have an even MORE powerful system than iTunes! Amaze your computer-illiterate friends with your knowledge of arcane things!
Meanwhile, I run iTunes and now I have more time available to post to slashdot.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
uhhh.. he said "under 128 MB of RAM"..
Do you even bother to read peoples' messages or just go directly to "Reply to This" so you can disagree with them?
We have several Pentium 200mhz Laptops with 80mb of RAM (max configuration) running WindowsXP.
These systems run faster than they do on Windows9x with identical hardware configurations.
They also run WMP9 with all the bells and whistles, including being able to play full screen video with WMP7-9 codecs at MPEG2 quality.
So if you think that Win2k or XP needs 128mb to be functional, you do not understand the OS architecture at all.
The benefits of MORE RAM in Win2k and XP can be stated like this - you will get an additional performance boost with more RAM in 2k and XP than you would with Win9x, but with anything above the baseline level of RAM 64mb, 2k and XP are more efficient. Period.
Just like the Win95/NT4 performance tests of 1996, if your system had over 32mb of RAM, NT4 was 20-25% faster than Win95 because it could use the extra RAM more efficiently - even though the NT OS architecture had more overhead.
So even with only 80mb of RAM and a regular Pentium MMX 200mhz CPUs, these test systems STILL run faster than they do with Linux, FreeBSD, Win95, Win98, WinME, etc.
Additionally when running XP, even with the 'eyecandy' of XP TURNED ON, they still perform 5% faster than Win2k with the exact same configurations.
All tests were performed using identical Hard Drives, swapped out of the laptops, and run on an array of laptops with various Graphics Chipsets, from 2mb 2D video chipsets from Neomagic, to early Trident 3D chipsets. (All old video technology).
Tests consist of PC benchmarking (CPU, HD Subsystem, etc), Application Benchmarking (MS Applications for the Win9x to WinXP comparisons and Open Source apps like OpenOffice for cross-platform comparisons), in addition to technicians being forced to use the machines as their daily machines for several days to assess the benchmark reliability. And the techs impressions back up the benchmark results.
Additionally XP, Win2k, and NT4 Configurations use NTFS as the base file system which, in theory, would add overhead for things like journalling.
The tests across the board were consistent. XP and Win2k simply run 20% faster than any other OS, with Win98 coming in second with the Web Interface disabled).
I understand that not everyone is in the business of OS engineering and have a lab dedicated to benchmarking and testing systems, but it is just wrong to state facts that are based on propagated myths and FUD.
128MB of RAM for Win2k and XP is a sweet spot, but in systems with less RAM (64-128mb), the Win2k and XP OSes still run faster than their predecessors (Win9x,NT4) as well as competing x86 OSes.*
*The above statement is comparing Graphical OSes only, DOS, and *nix environments running without a graphical front end are not being compared in the above test results.
You seem to have forgotten
Apple: Puts out semi-cool web browser based on code written by those non-innovatin linux folks. (Cough, KTHML)
At least it builds now.
Still, I have ESD and it just complains about not fiding OSS. I use ESD, and have it as my aRts back-end too.
Pardon my ignorance. Does GStreamer play nice with ESD?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
1628: Failed to complete installation.
Bloody InstallShield.
Task manager reports that there are 2.6GB of memory free. No other application has trouble starting. But iTunes says there's not enough memory!
My guess: it's a signed/unsigned problem with measuring the amount of ram: mor than 2GB and it's going negative.
I'm also a bit worried about the server it puts up if you enable sharing. I suspect that the port (3389 IIRC) will start getting portscanned a lot. Good thing my firewall blocks it.
Best Buy can have you arrested
sorry but, that cat looks horrible. you might have just ruined the whole concept of feline pets for me.
There is this project witch makes this Quicktime plugin.
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
Download oggvorbis.qtx and put it inn your C:\WINDOWS\system32\QuickTime folder.
The plugin is very bad.
-very slow
-eats your cpu utilization up to 100% for 2 sec. every time you load a track.
-vorbiscomment - no support for chars like oaea etc.
-vorbiscomment - no tracknumber support?
-vorbiscomment - no year support?
The artifical sweetner used in Diet Pepsi (and Diet Coke, for that matter), is aspartame, which is IMO much better. They also say it's addictive. That might be so, but I can't stop drinking Diet since I've started.
The same thing happened to me and it totally fucked up my stuff with out so much as mentioning it to me. All it said it was doing was adding my mp3's to the list and said nothing about creating new directories and moving EVERYTHING around. Now I am more or less forced to use itunes. Fixing this could take me months
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
"It even has over 50 radio stations."
50? Big deal; iTune's has over 350.
So then the problem is simply one of file format? I wonder what that could be, since the Windows iTunes supports AAC on FAT partitions - you would think that it wouldn't be a problem with the iPod. Or maybe is it just that they have not released an update program for the Windows (FAT) iPods? If that is the case, then I wonder what the HFS is giving the iPod software that FAT can't provide?
And now that WiniTunes is out - could you convert your iPod to HFS and thus get the new software version as well? Of course you would need a HFS kludge for Windows to access it outside of iTunes though...
Actually if you read the terms of their agreement closely, I think you'll find that it is illegal to do whatever you want with that CD. For instance rip mp3's from the CD created from the bought AAC's.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
...Apple started advocating drag-and-drop data manipulation. This requires that both the source window and destination window be visible for a drag operation to occur
True, but in Windows, you can drag the data and hold it over a taskbar button, and that app will become active. So drag and drop still works with maximized windows.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
The iTunes Music Store is/was an innovation by virtue of being the first successful pay-to-download music store. The fact that it is available for multiple platforms, in this case, has nothing to do with it.
America's Army and NWN, on the other hand, are just games - there are plenty others. They're not firsts, and they're not (arguably) bests. Thus, I don't consider them innovations like I do the iTMS.
Hell yeah, I'll second that!
The Free desktop that Just Works
If you refuse to acknowledge the innovation merely on the basis that it isn't platform specific (as if this was some indication of superior innovation) just so you can invent reasons why Linux might be inferior for yourself then please, by all means, don't let me stop you; I'll just leave you with the irony of making that claim as a mac user.
Given the way you trumpeted them as "inovation[sic] on the [Linux] desktop", the fact that they're not platform specific does matter.
Maybe my perspective is different since I usually run Linux as a server platform, and I greatly value stability over features. I recently noticed that one of my linux machines has an uptime of 371 days -- and this is a box accessed by a dozen people, running an SQL database, web server, etc. etc...
I *love* itunes, and just hope I don't go overboard with it.. but maybe it's time for a "workstation" and a "server" branch of linux? one for ease of use and all the great features you like, and another for the rock-of-gibraltar stability and predictability that all the server folks love?
99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
- 80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
- 19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic. That means 8 Million $$$ to the record companies and $1 Million to be shared among every one of the artistSo don't start thinking that the record companies might not actually be total bastards just because they're letting you buy somebody else's songs for a dollar a song. They're just as evil as ever.
On the other hand, if a band can set up it's own independent record company and then promote their music on their own, then they'll get both sides of the fee structure and make 90 cents per song instead of 10 cents. So once again, the way for a band to actually make money from their talent is to stay as far away from record companies as possible.
Where's all my favorite 80s songs and groups?
Try finding the artists "Taco" or "Men without Hats" or the song "Amadeus."
Come to think of it, try finding current songs. Found "Omnibus" yet? How about any album by the Chemical Brothers?
This app is cute, and I like the radio feature. However, as an on-demand store, it's not very comprehensive, unless you like Justin Timberlake or whatever else sells a bazillion copies at Wal-Mart.
Where's the obscure stuff? Where's the exclusive, otherwise-out-of-print or not-sold-in-the-U.S. selections that will keep me from going to P2P networks? I'd be happy to pay for these things if I could find them for sale. Anyone listening?
Get off my launchpad!
Oh man you just completely fucking nailed it. The people who are digging around trying to find something to bitch about iTunes are exactly the ones who have absolutely no intention of actually patronizing any legitimate download service. They want free as in beer and they will talk all day about how the artists are exploited and the record labels are crooks (both of which happen to be true) but when it all comes down to it they just want the keys to the vault handed to them with no restrictions. Nothing less will do.
They're not the people anyones trying to sell music to because they're not the people who will pay any money for it. Anything proposed is unreasonable. 99 cents is unreasonable, any format that drops a single bit (even if it's undetectable by human ears) is unreasonable. If the software isn't made available to whatever 0.003% market share holding operating system that they use it's unreasonable. Common sense is simply unreasonable.
Maybe if they came out with a service that had every track ever recorded for a penny a track (with ten for one pricing on weekends!) and no restrictions, that let you download it in a lossless format and you only paid on the honor system some of these people would use it.
Probably not though. I certainly wouldn't count on it. The only thing that approaches how unreasonable the RIAA can be is the demands of the gimmie something for nothing crowd.
Go ahead, Troll me. Like I give a shit.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
1) Launch iTunes
2) Listen to music
3) There is no step 3!
Realistically, the Apple "iApps" are what I'd call strictly "gateway" products. They're inexpensive to own for Mac users, easy for anyone to get started with (and in many cases, eventually grow out of), and generate a lot of positive press for Apple.
By releasing the iTunes portion for Windows, they're just creating one more "bridge" to get people hooked on Apple products, software and services.
You won't see them releasing iDVD for the PC, or even iPhoto. The most the Windows crowd is going to get is the iTunes portion of the suite - because it makes all those people potential Apple Music Store shoppers. (By contrast, Apple's service to get prints made of digital photos in iPhoto is actually done by a 3rd. party.)
I don't think Apple really has their sites on competing with sales of PCs running Windows anyway. I mean, yes, they want to sell to the folks who are tired of their Windows experience, and want something different/new/better. (They did run all those "switcher" ads, after all.) But even Apple management themselves have been quoted as saying they'd "like to see Mac sales in the 10% to 15% range of computer sales". They're not making an effort to convert the "masses". They want to be an upscale minority alternative product - but hopfully one with enough sales and profit margin to make their business a very comfortable/long-lasting one.
Apple doesn't sell at WalMart. They don't do "deep discount" offers via mass mailings like Dell tends to do. They won't even build a retail store unless it's in one of the shopping malls catering to the wealthiest people in a given community.
There's no "selling out" going on here at all. Merely a few "tokens" thrown at Windows users to make money from use of Apple services, if they won't buy/use their systems themselves.
iTunes was ported for profit. Safari would not be worth the trouble.
iTunes was also ported, at least partially, to slow the adoption of WMA. On the surface, Safari for Windows seems like a dumb idea, but consider:
-Microsoft not only abandoned the Mac browser market, but also is flat out ignoring cries to improve the standards-compliance of the Windows version now that they own the Windows browser market.
-One of the biggest remaining gripes about Safari is that a lot of lazy web developers code for IE exclusively, and ignore complaints from users of other browsers or lock out non-IE browsers from even loading the IE-specific sites.
If the most standards-compliant, most security hole-free, and easiest to use browser for Windows was a modest download from Apple.com, perhaps we'd see the Microsoft balkanization of the web come undone, and the web would return to the way it was imagined: platform-agnostic.
That would benefit the Mac platform-- Apple would sell more Macs because willing people previously unable to switch because of that Windows-only web site they had to use as part of their job would then be able to.
I'm neither for nor against Safari for Windows, I'm just pointing out that there are reasons why Apple might do it.
~Philly
My 800 MHz iBook can a rip a CD to iTunes faster than my 2.2GHz Celeron PC. I felt bad about how slow Microsoft Word performed on the G5, according to PC World, until now. I'm off to create all sorts of iTunes benchmarks comparing Macs to PCs...now we'll see who's fastest after all.
MDI is a UI abomination
True, but in Windows, you can drag the data and hold it over a taskbar button, and that app will become active. So drag and drop still works with maximized windows.
That is less intuitive that just dragging to where you want something to go. Like one text selection in one application to somewhere in a body of text in another application. Or photos in iPhoto to clips in iMovie.
Plus, I can never get drag-and-drop to do what I want it to do in Windows. It always does something unexpected with the content, document, or whatever I am dragging. The destination doesn't seem to be aware of what it is receiving unless you tell it.
I'm using iTunes on XP while sitting behind a very restrictive firewall and I can't get out. Mind you, I can't get out with anything (e.g. WMP, Real, QT Player although QT movs embedded in a web page are fine, Music Match track name lookups ) except a browser. If iTunes uses anything besides port 80, that could be the problem.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
I just wish I was a big enough computer wiz to get sound in Debian under a 2.4 kernel. But nooo...
My newx computer purchase will be a Mac.
Not really impressed with it yet. Grabbed it at work this morning, went to add around 30,000 mp3's....it worked for awhile and promptly crapped out on me.
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
WOW all i can say itunes just met its death. winamp 5 looks like it'll be dominant at its final release. winamp 3 is was a joke
Just a quickie question for you guys who've completed the installation, does it actually require Quicktime to be installed? I'm not a big fan of QT at all, so I'd rather not bother if it's going to piggyback on the install.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I think I sort of agree with you. I find these DRM terms pretty darn good. The prices a tad high for me (as I'm in college and you guys know how that goes), but if I weren't in college I think the prices would be fair(Speaking on which I wonder if I can get a student discount on the iTunes Music Store!). I know some people as you were describing, who will not pay a dime for a song if they can get it free, "legal niceties or not"(heard that somewhere). You do raise a very good point, mod up!
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
Anyone know if its IE thats rendering the Music Store in the Windows port? And if not...
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
APT:
apt is innovative. Can you update every single piece of software on your machine in one hit on a Mac or Windows pc? Ahhh nope. With apt (and provided you only install apps with apt - not a problem there), you can.
X Windows:
You aren't stuck with a default Window Manager with Linux (yes with MacOS X you can change WM also nowdays) - you can use any that you like, and installation in most cases is trivial (not quite so easy with Mac OS X).
Neither APT or X Windows are compulsary, and I consider these as innovated in comparison to other OS's.
I just fumbled with it for a couple mins on winXP @ work. One cool thing I liked is that 'Visual Effect' with Apple and orange electric lines...really sweet.
The default vis-effect in Media Player makes me dis-oriented. (I don't know if any good replacement viz-plugins are available. But if the default is crap, it definitly leaves a bad taste about the App)
only thing from your list winamp5 beta is missing is the music store and i refuse to pay 99cents for DRM music i cant play on other programs
Click on 'Share Music' on computer A.
Click on shared music on computer B.
Press 'Play'
Brilliant Idea!
Yes it is, but it's not apple's idea. ZeroConf is an open standard invented by the IETF.
"Hell froze over. Introducing iTunes for Windows. The best Windows app ever." ...sounds about right to me...
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
I just installed itunes on my w2k machine and whenever i try to do things with the music store, ie create a login or bring up their main site I get an out of memory error. I have 256MB ram with 1GB virtual memory and I usually hover about 300MB memory usage, nothing else complains though.
Any idea?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Yeah I really wish they'd figure that out in windows. Half the time I drag something into, say, a word doc, I end up with an icon in my doc. When I double-click it, then it opens the embedded thing in the other app. Now I as a user would expect to see a printable representation show up there.
And as for dragging over the taskbar button - I didn't even know you could do that till about a year ago. Frankly it had never occured to me to try.
Different from what we are accustomed to is bad - we don't wanna to be able to take the car apart, just be able to start it.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
" I can't really think of a killer app for Linux that would drive average users to Linux."
I can: mplayer
Show me something like that on a Mac or on XP.
streaming audio, streaming video, encoding all kinds of formats, playing virtually all available audio and video formats.
And all you do is type "mplayer "
Now that's a killer app and it's cool.
this is just a digital storefront
For someone who's not interested in buying music from itunes this software offers me very little; it's quite limited compared to many windows offerings. For example, winamp is a much better player of music, windows media player is a better organizer of files, and realone offers a lot of online content and i would argue beats itunes in terms of having that "apple" look.
It hardly offers anything new, except perhaps the AAC conversion, which is debateable whether i'd be interested in considering ogg vorbis or xvid, or even windows media 9.
So I downloaded the iTunes software today and started playing around with it. This thing is great! I got so tired of dealing with endless searching on P2P services for the songs I wanted, dealing with slow and incomplete downloads, and you could never count on the quality...
Now I can quickly search, find what I want, and download a good quality song fast! I then started to wish I could convert the songs into MP3 format so I could copy them onto my Web based MP3 Server, and my Nomad Jukebox portable player.
At that point I broke out my Apple AAC file encryption cracking tool (a 3 inch male-to-male stereo connector cable that I used to short-circuit my Headphone jack to my Line-in jack) and then ran Audiograbber to capture and encode to Mp3 all at once. Audiograbber has this great feature to automatically break the catpure file up based upon breaks in the audio feed.
Now I can download from iTunes and yet have mp3's too.
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.
So then why doesn't any Linux music player programs support this??? And why does Apple's?
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Yes, but it's up to Apple to implement them in such a useful way.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Now UNIX refers to a set of unwritten API and user interface conventions.
What is "unwritten" about POSIX? And UNIX does have UI conventions: Motif. It's just that that convention sucks.
And it lets us windows lusers 'bounce between applications' just as readily as any Mac user.
Frankly I prefer a GUI that let's ME decide if I want an app to fill the whole screen or not. If I want things to be tiled or cascading or whatever then *I* can make that choice. Think different, yall.
I also kinda feel Apple should conform to the Windows standard if they want to release Windows programs. Everyone else does, it's not about conforming to the Evil Empire's laws, it's about usability. Why do I need 99 applications that behave one way and 1 that does it's own thing simply because people on another system with a different version of the program like it to be different.
Let's put it this way - would you like it if someone released a major app for OS X that was forcibly skinned to look like Windows 2000 and only allowed Windows-style document handling? Or would you choke on your lattes with rage and indignation?
Read Pynchon.
Umm... you certainly are "free" to study the OS X kernel (also known as Darwin), or Quicktime Streaming Server or Rendezvous...
I personally believe Apple has made good use of the open source concept - the issue is that one of Apple's best assets is the IP behind user experiences, UIs, and making things simple - this is the stuff they aren't going to give away for free - and shouldn't - its what makes Apple, Apple.
Try and copy/paste text between all of your Linux apps... its hard enough just between, say KDE apps, and pretty darn impossible between different GUI frameworks... what percentage actualyl works?
I'm not going to pay 99c per track for no album art and no physical disc. Plus let's not forget that the distribution cost to Apple is relatively miniscule compared to the cost of shipping a bunch of physical objects around the world. Nonetheless, for a reasonable length CD - 10-12 tracks - this doesn't really work out any cheaper.
I think something in the order of 20-30c a track would be reasonable. Let's also remember they're trying to compete with free.
Read Pynchon.
That is the key, isn't it.
Apple is researching user habits and asking the users what they want to do, and then uses the appropriate technology to do it.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Considering how hostile the linux community tends to be towards interface designers, it's really not surprising that most of the Linux desktop applications that are turned out are unusable crap.
UI design has always been extremely devalued in the Linux community. It is seen as nowhere near as important as something technical like kernel hacking, and this can be clearly seen in the amount of resources spent both in manpower in the developer communities (e.g. Debian) and in money by Linux distribution companies, like Red Hat. Red Hat spent $650,000,000 buying out a technical company like Cygnus, and then their programmers tell me their software is so unusable because they don't have the money for a usability department. And to think this company actually thinks it deserves a piece of the desktop pie. Until Red Hat spends $50,000,000 to buy out the Nielsen Norman Group, their software shouldn't be used on anything that runs outside of a server closet.
Even if an interface designer manages to get his foot into the door of an Linux project, the crap he or she is put through by Linux coders makes them so ineffective at changing the course of the interface development that it's pointless to join the project in the first place.
To begin with, in order to make a really good, consistent, integrated user interface, you have to design the UI before any major coding is done. Technical decisions influence the UI, and you can never totally abstract it away. Too often, a technical decision is made before the UI is designed, and then when the UI is 'grafted' on in the form of a front-end on top of the technical stuff, it's just too out of sync and there's no really integrated feel like some of the Apple apps have.
Linux desktop software would be so much better if the folks designing it would just figure out the user interaction first and then write the code. But this conflicts with the traditionalist unix
ideology on software development, so it's not done. In fact, pretty much any tenet of UI design that clashes in any way the The Unix Philosophy gets thrown out, no matter how much it might improve the UI. And there's damn nothing the interface designer can do about it because he or she doesn't have the ability to code and change it back.
And then there's the issue of the coders' geeky preferences outweighing the user interface designer's knowledge and experience. If there's a button that's just not working out in some location and the coder feels its perfectly okay there, guess what happens? The button stays there. Or maybe it's just that the coder doesn't want to put in the 2 seconds of work to change it, and tells the interface designer that if he wants to change it, he can damn well write the code for it himself. And again, if the user interface designer can't code, then the unusable design is just gonna stay that way. If anyone reads the GPL, they will see that they are permitted to modify the software and make it better. If they read the fine print, they will find this freedom only pertains to programmers.
Especially in light of all this stupidity, I think it's perfectly fair to expect Linux coders to consistantly produce interfaces on par with professional user interface designs, as they keep trying to convince CIO's and IT managers to force desktop Linux as a replacement for Windows in corporations and schools. If Linux coders want to declare themselves "only hobbyists" and refuse to take blame for their bad designs, then they need to go back to the server closet they came from. The desktop needs developers serious about providing excellent usability to end users. It doesn't need volunteers.
Just so no one accuses me of having an anti-programmer bent, I should also add that part of the reason why Apple succeeds where Linux fails is because the mac users have a culture of criticizing unusable software. They will not take an ounce of crap from developers and will vocally express their opinions about the software they use. Contrast this
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Hmmm. I'm afraid you misinterpreted the term "shaving your pussy"...
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Actually, AppleTalk had all of the main features of ZeroConf back in the 80's. ZeroConf was actually patterned after AppleTalk.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
It was Apple's idea to take ZeroConf and apply it to sharing music.
THAT is brilliant.
Vonal Declosion
"Stop being such a control freak and you'll learn much more about good software"
Ahem... 'good software' wouldn't make major (unneccesary) changes to a file system as a default option IMHO. And if it were about to do so on an OS where such behaviour is quite out of the ordinary, it would need to go to extraordinary lengths to make it clear to users that this is what is about to happen. I think it would be a characteristic of 'good software' that the bigger the amount of fcuking around with a system you are about to do, the louder you ask for permission to do so.
I'm just glad I became aware of this now, before I installed this software and let it eat my MP3s.
Read Pynchon.
MJ has had the "make a playlist out of query parameters" feature for years, but takes it further: you can define custom fields in the database and search on them (though to be fair, iTunes already includes the things I used those custom fields for.) More importantly, its notion of (non-dynamic) playlists is much more flexible -- you can use a song's presence on a static playlist as a query parameter for a smartlist. I've come to think of playlists as a way of attaching attributes to songs. It's a much more flexible, nuanced way to represent things like genre, where multiple values can easily apply to a song.
How is that useful? Well, for example, I have a playlist of background music for dinner parties. If I'm serving Mexican food one night, I can whip up a quick smartlist that says, "Play all the songs on both the Dinner playlist and the Latin playlist." Or better, if I decide I only want instrumental pieces, "Play all the songs on both the Dinner playlist and the Latin playlist, except ones on the Has Lyrics playlist."
As far as I can tell, other than putting lists of keywords in the Comments field and doing string searches, there's no way to do flexible user-data-driven queries like that in iTunes. You can add a song to a playlist, but the playlist is a data sink -- you can't leverage it for anything else. (If I'm wrong about that, please clue me in!)
MJ also has a robust plugin interface for audio codecs, rip/burn capability, a built-in sound editor if you want to make a mix CD with fancy effects, ReplayGain support (same as iTunes' volume leveling), and supports downloading to a variety of portable MP3 players. The latest incarnation can also manage libraries of video files.
Other than the selection at the iTunes Store, I don't see a single thing iTunes gives me that I haven't already been enjoying for years with my existing software.
Why you would want a single application to take over the entire screen is beyond me. It must be a Windows-user thing.
Moof.
The answer is none. None more wrong.
ZeroConf was first and foremost started by an Apple Employee. Yes the IETF got behind it very early, but after all it's Apple's baby, even if they call it Rendezvous.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I'm gonna be perfectly honest, free is still better than 99. iTunes has a great selection of current airplay singles and that's why I'm not ignoring them altogether... A good copy of a new song is notoriously hard to get due to OverPeer and the like releasing fscked up copies with skips, loops, beeps and swooshes.
There's still a much greater selection of older stuff on Kazaa, not to mention parodies, amature remixes and other crazy home-made stuff that shows up on Kazaa. (Eminem vs Brittany Spears, Ghostbusters vs Michael Jackson's Bad, MMMBurp, Hummer Girls, all the Budwiser American hero ads, etc.)
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Hey, those 'applications' don't even behave correctly on a Windows machine :(
I think anyone who is actually keen on the Windows system as a serious environment will have replaced iExplorer with Mozilla and replaced Media Player with Winamp 2.7x in about 2 seconds flat.
Read Pynchon.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
No, it doesn't. iTunes gets custom XML from the store (a WebObjects app, of course) and uses it to build a UI. You can run ethereal or another packet sniffer and watch the transactions.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
1/ Does anyone know if iTunes communicates information about your music collection to Apple or anyone else (e.g. the RIAA)?
2/ When you buy a song can you download it again the future if it gets deleted somehow? Can you download it in multiple formats?
3/ How does the ripping quality compare to CDEx and co?
4/ Do you have to install Quicktime (personally I hate QT because it doesn't behave like a windows app and it comandeers my web browsers and file formats, stupid POS)?
5/ What's the deal with AAC on Windows?
6/ Do you have to wear a black turtleneck and jeans to make it work correctly?
Read Pynchon.
Of course, without the first type of people out there, there would be nothing to read on /.
Something to think about.
Actually digital video on personal computers more or less started with QuickTime a loooooong time ago. If you bother to write plug-ins you can get about any thinkable codec to quicktime, it also plays flash movies does interactive stuff, now supports dolby 5.1 audio etc.
(and there's VLC for the Mac and Mplayer OS X)
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Yes, like a fully workable and intuitive GUI based OS, plug-and-play self configuring networking (AppleTalk), on-board Ethernet, laser printers, on-board digital 16 bit audio, thorough support in software and hardware for USB, Gigabit ethernet on all laptops, FireWire (400 and 800), wireless networking (AirPort), 64-bit personal computers.
Yes most of those things were available for PCs around the same time add-on AS OPTIONs. They wouldn't work properly most of the time and would suck (until years later they finally got it right on the PC). Apple had all of the above (and more) first, as a standard on all machines.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Linux made popular, and for many, pioneered a new method of software development. It even created an entirely new enterprise, you might say, service industries like RedHat who function with the profit margins and innovation of software companies. Linux is also very popular among schools, research instutitions, and labs. When someone needs a custom solution (i.e., an embedded Wireless AP that can work with our existing authentication system without buying an expensive ReefEdge or similar), they often turn to Linux (as I did in the above example).
Linux has not pioneered great things for the desktop or user interface. And coincidentally, Linux accounts for a miniscule fraction of the desktop market. But that does not mean Linux has not innovated.
And while doing so slapping on a incredible clean and simple interface onto it (which is what makes Safari special) and fixing about two years' work of bugs while they're at it, and giving that back to the community. Sounds cool to me.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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?
"All I see now are me-too web browsers, me-too developer IDE's, me-too office applications, me-too games, and me-too multimedia apps."
Well, that's what there is demand for. Consider the position of desktop linux developers - they are by and large out to win over an audience used to another system. Computers are possibly the most inertia driven product on the face of the earth - after putting effort into learning an interface, people don't want to learn a new one, particularly for something productivity related. And brilliant design, which is what usually creates new products, is equally rare in free and commercial software. The genius of free software is its freedom, not any particular app. To the people who use it, the value of freedom is apparent and in many cases all powerful. This bias is not to be expected in general.
"Yes I know there is value in making a word processor that feels like Microsoft Word, but where are the experimental word processors that go beyond Word, GUI and functionality-wise? Word is not and never was a good GUI design."
And yet people use it the world over. If you want a bad design for an interface look at my old college's Peoplesoft database interface. Word serves reasonably well as a word processor, given the expectations of it's users.
If you want an experimental word processor that goes beyond Word, I suggest you take a look at Lyx or TeXmacs. They won't feel intuitive at first to anyone trained on Word, but for some jobs are far more powerful.
"It makes me really want to write up my own..."
There. You have it in a nutshell. The genius, power, and value of Free Software. Guess what? If you don't like what's out there, you CAN write up your own. The tools are there to support you, for Free. Knock yourself out. Amaze us all. Create the Linux killer app. Even if you decide not to, the point is you CAN. That's what makes Linux different. That's why it's worth fighting for.
By the way, I personally find Fluxbox very innovative as a GUI, not for what it adds but for what it knows not to add. That combined with gkrellm make for a desktop not found on any commercial system, but one I use on an every day basis.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Are you saying that Photoshop didn't show up on the Mac first? Interesting
"But I've got two simple request for the next version (and I hope it is released soon)."
Then go on and request!!!!!!
Don't tell us, tell them, they actually listen...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
ARGH! Why couldn't they figure this out! On the D800's high def display, fonts are generally set at 150% so you can actually read them. Well, this application doesn't take high def lcd monitors into account.
I am not sure what the hell you're thinking, but let me see if I can sort it out.
Don't get me wrong either, I love Apple. Their products are very good. But what exactly does Apple "innovate"? They have shiny computers (check). Their hardware is good (check), but they don't make it--they just put it together. MacOS X is mostly pre-existing technologies (yes, even Quartz), but the dock is cool, so I'd call that "innovation", maybe.
Now, let's look at how you're pitting Apple, a big company with who knows how many paid engineers, versus... an operating system kernel. "In this corner, we have a huge, heavy-duty bulldozer! In this corner, we have a spark-plug! Who will be the victor?"
Are you about to tell us Apple is a better innovator than Linux because Linus Torvalds doesn't make hardware?
Linux: Can we run this on WINE? In other words, can we take this cool stuff from another platform and try to make it work on ours.This is where your post comes to it's highest climax of stupidity.
You're claiming Linux (an OS kernel) is not "innovative" because someone else decided not to write software for it? Why not say that Apple lacks innovation because they aren't supporting a very viable platform. Frankly, you're an idiot.
Worse still, you then go on to tell us that Linux doesn't innovate because there are open source projects out there that write interoperability software. This world you live in must lack tools for intercommunication and interoperability between things... that must suck. On this note, I can guarantee you that Apple has a few libraries of their own for porting applications to Windows from their platform.
And that's "our" fault?
Okay, Mr. Cool, need I remind you how many things the open source community had before the commercial world had it? For example, many X11 GUIs had highly flexible themeability for years before WindowsXP was released. Just because Microsoft's marketing spin said it was "innovation" doesn't make it so. There's plenty of examples, but they're more technical. Guess who Microsoft steals a lot of their stuff from. Guess what Apple based OS X on? Think before spouting off. Open source has had a lot of firsts. Most people don't realize though.
Lucky for us, we're cool because we've had a stable operating system long before most consumer-range industry players. We probably will always have one "before" Microsoft does. ;)
"Linux" has got lots of it.
They need something that only they have (at least for a little while) that everyone else wants. That is how it will build mind share, not by saying "look, we can do it too (if you're only willing to wait a while)"Personally, I've found that Windows is still doing a lot of catching up. When I'm at work, I miss my Linux box. It works and works well. Windows just kind of, well, sputters along. It's very inconsistent, the user interface sucks, and it chokes on many of my daily tasks.
I'm not sure if you noticed yet or not, but open source does have lots of things other people want that isn't offered by Microsoft. Security, stability, integrity, etc. Is that innovation enough for you?
Blah. Why do I bother with Slashbots?
Join Tor today!
iTunes has problems. If you read the forums, people are reporting that iTunes REARRANGES your existing MP3 files into it's own directory scheme. Is that rude or what? Granted there is an option to turn it off, but what a bad default setting if you don't catch it!
For me,
But it also won't download or let you create MP3 files from music you download from them. I've got a car player with a 40GB hard drive that only supports MP3 and WMA files. I'm sure there's a way to make MP3s out of the AAC files, but I have a particular dislike for artifical hurdles like that. Computers are supposed to make things easy. The majority of portable music players do MP3, why support Windows if you're not going to support the players that Windows people use? Yeah I know, "copy protection", "DRM", mumble mumble... Well I don't give a shit about copy protection, I want to listen to MY music WHEN and WHERE I want to listen to it.
But the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is that iTunes only supports Win2k and WinXP. I run Win98SE (same installtion for 2.5 years on a heavily-used gaming/Internet machine.) I'm sure it's easier for them to only support 2k/XP, but there's no technical reason it couldn't run on Win98SE. I'm not changing OS's to run iTunes, that's too much to ask.
Now all we need is a virtual CD burner - it would look like a drive to software, and would dump ISO files. That would cut out one of the hoops - having to waste a CD to get to MP3.
There are programs out there to emulate a CD-ROM drive - but I'm not aware of any CD-RW emulators.
I'm not sure this is even possible on linux - again, you can simulate reads using a loop device, but I don't think you can use cdrecord on a loop pointed at a 700MB file.
Installed, rebooted
QUicktime takes 14 megs of ram (up until now I'd been avoiding installing QT at all)
iTUnes itself takes over 20 megs of ram
iTunes crashes when i try to add my mp3 folder to its library. So far I can't find any actual support on apple's website. Must be because it never crashes on a mac, so no support is needed...
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Sorry to burst your bubble that quickly, but mplayer exists for Mac OSX. I use it often, along with VLC.
mplayer's undeniably an awesome app, but since Windows already has a plethora of media players and encoders, mplayer isn't the killer app that'll drive Joe user to Linux. Furthermore, mplayer can't play anything that players on Windows can't, except perhaps formats Joe's not going to come across anyway (if it's available in ogm or ogg, it's probably also available somewhere in divx, mp3 and wmv/a).
iTunes by itself isn't a killer app, it's just another audio player. iTunes with its music store integration can be considered killer, because it offers something a lot of people want (legal downloads at reasonable cost), doesn't choke them with DRM that's too restrictive, and presents it in a fairly intuitive package. Better yet, people can stream their collection to others on the network.
All fine and good, but of course no one's going to rush and buy Macs for it, because it's now available for Windows. It will, however, almost certainly drive iPod sales up even further. Not coincidentally, the iPod is another killer product from Apple. With the brand name in mind, the potential to lure new Mac customers is there as they look at what else Apple produces on the theory that they might have something else worth buying.
Bottled Soda is usually about a buck in San Francisco (it depends were you get it though)
But hey, I'm going to drink caffeinated soda anyway. I might as well get a free CD for every 30 soda's I'm going to finish. Moreover, I'll probably just get a bunch of bottles at Costo or something.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Because seeing all those other windows behind the one window I want to concentrate on is a distraction. It's like in the real world I often clear my desk of clutter to concentrate on one thing. Maximizing a window to fullscreen does that instantly for me.
It also gives me maximum working space instantly.
Two things which make me more productive.
In iTunes you can set the iPod's preferences to automatically sync or to manage it yourself. If it's set to automatically sync then it will sync to whatever computer it's connected. Now you know.
-- thinkyhead software and media
100,000,000 Songs? Pepsi just started to taste a whole lot better.
Good points.
Basically, I am wondering WHY there aren't more people trying to write the Linux Killer App. We have more people working on and contributing to Linux/GPL'd software than any other platform.
iTunes is one good example of really simple concepts done right, and it is innovative... And there is no reason that I can tell for linux people to not have designed it first...
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Thanks, I just did.
Doesn't sound all-inclusive to me.
I use iTunes ALL THE TIME and I can't use the iTunes music store because I am in Canada, and it is still the hands down most innovative music player/burner/ripper on ANY platform. Yes, ANY platform, I've used them all.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Probably not though. I certainly wouldn't count on it. The only thing that approaches how unreasonable the RIAA can be is the demands of the gimmie something for nothing crowd.
While no doubt you're using exaggeration as a rhetorical device, I think you're mischaracterizing the demands many of us would make on a download service we'd use, whether for pay or not. I've no interest in paying for something and then having to demonstrate that I have paid for it time-and-time-again in order to make use of it. I really don't care how "seamless" doing so is, nor how easy it is to get around -- it remains an irritation that I would rather avoid. I've no interest in paying for digital audio of demonstrably lower quality than I can buy on commercial CDs. I really don't care what percentage of the population can't tell the difference, I care only about whether I can tell the difference and how convenient it is for me to know when that might be. I've certainly no interest in paying $10 for less fidelity than I can get for $8 or less by buying used CDs, which are plentiful both locally and online.
I don't think that everyone who greets iTunes's introduction to Windows with a great big 'ho-hum' falls into the gimme-something-for-nothing crowd. Is it really unreasonable of consumers to expect substantial cost savings from digital distribution? If one is willing to accept the reduction in quality inherent in all commercial services to date, is it unreasonable to expect even more substantial cost savings? Is it unreasonable to want access to files in one's preferred format, without having to burn & re-encode those files? How exactly does that make iTunes more convenient and a better value proposition than buying unencumbered, uncompromised CDs for less money than you'd pay Apple?
Obviously, there are plenty of people who find that iTunes suits their needs, and that's great for them, great for Apple, and one hopes that it might be good for the recording industry. But saying that people who don't are as "unreasonable" as the RIAA doesn't make any sense.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
what sharing does it offer
And importing and organizing your collection is painless I might add...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
The question that I have, is...
Will Apple release a SDK for iTunes for Windows???
I know they have an SDK for the Visual Plug-in's, but how about the rest??
CS...out
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
I agree with you, but I think there's an even bigger problem. One which none of these services seems to address:
What happens when you get a new computer?
Apple's "loose" DRM is all well and good, but what happens when the computer I have is hopelessly outdated, has been upgraded as far as it can be, and needs to be replaced? I've yet to see a DRM solution that accounts for this. At best, your music library will now view your new primary computer as a "secondary" one with limited rights. And you can never get the rights back that the primary computer had.
Seriously, with the speed that technology becomes obsolete, and the long period of time that a lot of music stays relevant (Beatles? Beethoven?), it's ridiculous to tie a media library to a specific machine. It's inevitable... sooner or later, you're going to lose control of it.
But on the flip side, if they did provide a tool to transfer your songs to a new "primary" PC, it could easily be abused and render the DRM completely useless. So what other options are there?
That's why I refuse to buy DRM songs, and will not sign up for iTunes no matter how hyped it is. Not because of the limitations on it - I'm fine with only using it on three computers, and not being able to share it with others (Heck, I already do that). I won't use it because I know, at some point down the road, my library will become inaccesible to me, and I will have to start over again. And that's unacceptable.
I hope I'm missing something. I hope somebody's actually addressed this problem. But I've scoured the web, and I suspect I'm right - and that's bad for everyone. Bad for the consumer who just lost their music library, and bad for the music store who now has an extremely pissed off customer on their hands, after finding out they've wasted a lot of time and money building a media collection they can't take with them.
-j
P.S. Please don't suggest I burn them all to CDs and re-rip them on a new computer. When you have several thousand songs, that's neither acceptable nor feasible.
Yes, it definitely makes since to have double clicking on the title bar not suck in the usual way (switch between a windowed position and a full-screen view) and instead work very usefully (switching between my windowed position and Apple's specially chosen windowed position)
I'm so glad Apple's around to tell us these things. Lord knows what I was thinking, wanting to see more of the iTunes listbox by making the window bigger. Silly me.
Anyway, it's obviously far more efficient for me to manually drag the window to the top of the screen and then manually drag the window borders to something approximating the full screen. Lord us Windows users have been stupid not following these tricks of the Mac users.
Good thing they only allow me to resize it from the bottom right. It sure would be confusing if I could resize it from one of the other corners, or by grabbing it anywhere along the border.
What? We shouldn't need the make the window bigger? Oh. It's obviously my fault for not having a 22" display. So sorry.
I realize you truly believe what you are saying, and I understand where you are coming from having used Windows since the 3.0 days as well as OS/2 2.1 through 4.0 and various Linux desktop environments. However, I must point out that you're really just fooling yourself into believing that maximizing windows is a normal and productive thing. I know this because I've been there.
I've been using Macs since the 10.1 days and absolutely love the UI. The OS X UI is built with multitasking in mind. Windows have drop shadows and sort of blend in with each other. Documents reside in their own toplevel windows. Toolbars and palettes may be placed anywhere on the screen.
One of the big problems with the Microsoft UI is its focus on rectangular boxes butted against each other. A typical MS application must be maximized in order to use it because the menubar, toolbar, and other UI elements are in fixed positions usually to the top and sometimes left of the document area.
On the mac you have ONE menubar. It stays at the top of the screen. It only takes up a small amount of space which is shared between applications (no wasted space having a menu on each window). In addition, the toolbars and floating palettes for an application are only shown when that application is active. Because of this, it's possible to stagger document windows since they are free from extraneous controls and only show the document.
Windows sort of blend together due to the shadow effect so it's less distracting to have document windows staggered on top of each other. If you really must concentrate on one thing, you can use the "Hide others" choice from the application menu (the one displaying the application's name in bold).
I suggest that you get a Mac and give OS X a try for a few months. Forget about your old ways and really learn the new system. I guarantee you'll be surprised. Nearly everything about OS X becomes second nature very easily. After having used OS X for a while, I find it difficult to work with Windows machines. I am used to the computer working sensibly, and Windows simply doesn't. I'm amazed at how much I've already forgotten about the Windows UI! Never in my life did I forget how to use Windows, even after having used OS/2 and Linux and what not. But after having used OS X my eyes have been opened to the Microsoft UI and frankly, all I see is ugliness.
And since Apple got access to ZeroConf at about the same time everybody else did, why are they leading the way in popular implementations that actually work?
Na, just download one of the many Rendezvous proxies out there.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Open office did expand on word. Open Office gives you crazy control over 3d effects that microsoft never even dreamed of and it also has that word completion feature which I ignored at first but now I find that it is great. I mean you just type and it starts completing your words that you already used for you. That's innovative, granted these features are probably available in Star Office, it is better then MS Word. Not to mention the GUIs are better and you can save files as PDF, try doing that in microsoft word, last time I checked it was impossible (at least without some third party plug in). Those are just some of the bonuses of using Open Office over Microsoft Word. Oh yea, and OOo doesn't consistenly annoy you to register and threaten to take away your ability to use the product that you payed for until you somehow contact Microsoft and they tell you that eventhough you may have payed for it weeks ago, only now is it ok to use it as much as you want because they told you it was ok and they gave you as special key, mind you, you payed damn good money for that product and they still dictate when you can use it. -Steve
sigh ... here we go again with rumors of Apple dying.
I should be able to script it except for a few things. It was fairly messy to begin with and I was slowly organizing things. Too slowly it appears =(
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
They'll settle. Apple Corps will just get a sweeter deal for distributing the Beatles on ITMS. Maybe some cash as well. People just want to get paid.
Why does apple need Gcc , apache when they have Visual C++ and IIS ?
Apple stop taking and start giving.
Apple has Visual C++ and IIS??? I don't think so.
Apple IS giving.... Konqueror on linux is better because of Apple's work on it.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
why not fill up RAM with stuff
:)
So when Windows uses up all available memory, that's "bad", but when OS X does it, that's a "feature".
Damn zealots, get of my lawn (shakes fist).
What a rip. Here I download it to try out the service. Install. Configure. Reboot.
"The iTunes Music Store is not available in your country yet. You will be able to browse music and listen to previews, but you won't be able to purchase music unless your billing address is in the United States"
Great. That's one program I'm now uninstalling. Too bad Apple, just lost a customer. Wish you had told me first about this.
I'm sure Steve's just itching to shake hands and have a casual friendly lunch with Scully.
karma: ouch!
Very similar to the GUI lag that I've seen in various OS X releases. I used to think it was the slow hardware, but now it's pretty clear that it's just Apple's bloat.
It is 2003 - there is NO excuse for a program to lag when I do something as simple as resize the window!
Steve said it was 200 indie labels, but i couldnt read the list from the screen, and i havent found a list of labels anywhere. Anyone have a link to the full list?
This spring I went to the Soho apple store to buy an iBook for a friend of mine. I wanted the 14" model with the 900Mhz G3 and an airport - one of the models listed on the site. The reps told me on the phone they had them in stock and all I had to do was come in to get one.
When I got there though, it turned out that the airport card was packaged separately. While the price for the laptop and the airport card came out to what the site quoted, it turned out that for the price I got two separate boxes.
Is it easy to install the card, I inquired? The reps told be a horror story of somebody coming in this morning with a fried laptop they bought the day before - caused by static while doing the very same thing. Deciding not to risk it, I asked if they could do it for me...
I had after all just dropped 1600 dollars on the purchase - the least they could do was present it to me in a way in which it was advertised. But they told me that they would have to charge me $30 and take one to two hours to do the job. Now call me crazy, but that doesn't sound like "standard on all machines" to me.
I ended up putting the card in myself - it was not as hard as they had led me to believe, but I did wonder how many people were taken for the 30 dollar ride - just for sticking what turned out to be a glorified PCMCIA card under the keyboard.
And while I'll give you guys firewire, I wish to remind you that Microsoft and Intel were two of the companies who came up with USB. Apple was not one of them.
Ñ'
I'm a music industry student and was wondering if anyone knew or knew where to find information regarding the deals between Apple and the RIAA. I'd be interested to find out exactly how much Apple makes out of the $1/song and the rest of the money distribution.
I might have been interested in iTunes if the damn thing would play OGGs. My entire music library is encoded in OGG format, thus it's almost completely worthless to me.
I installed it on my mom's laptop because she'd expressed an interest in buying music online. After showing her how to use it, I stuck around a while to watcher her play with it and answer some "NegaTech Mom" type questions. By they time I lef, she'd already bought like $50 worth of tracks! D:
Though the interface is purdy, how about letting me MAXIMIZE THE DAMN WINDOW?!?!
Thank you.
Well, I installed iTunes on a XP machine. People are complaining about cpu usage. Well on the 1.8Ghz machine I was using iTunes was using 0 cpu. That's right 0. and only 14 Megs of memory. Boys and girls 14 Megs of memory is not that much.
All and all this program rocks. So easy to use and show to all my friends who otherwise only use kazzaa to play music cause most of the other programs are to hard. And even those who use winamp Love iTunes Way more.
Yes it has it's flaws, but for Apple's first MAJOR windows application to be released in years, the first revision is pretty dang good.
Not a leak -- it's officially released.
And a helluva lot better than crappy ports of Apple software. If I were interested in the iTunes store, I might keep the program, but being slow as shit, insisting on a Mac interface on the PC, and installing and activating the iPod system service without asking me are too many marks against it.
I want to really like iTunes, but these fake memory error messages are a real pain. If I leave AdSubtract and Norton AV active then iTunes states it has some memory error. Turn off filtering - same error. Turn off NAV - same error. Close out AdSubtract - iTunes is able to work. Reactivate AdSubtract and iTunes loses what little mind it has. I even added the addresses iTunes uses (from router logs) and it still doesn't work right. Guess its time to start sending hourly complaints to Apple....
Guess all I can do is close out Adsubract and NAV then only use iTunes. Can't surf and use iTunes at the same time = big minus.
Make sure you can see which song it stops on, ie put the progress bar at the top of th screen before the Crash message covers it. Then move any file that won't import out of the path. This is waht worked for me.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Huh? Visual C++ and IIS are Microsoft's. Did you smoke some really bad crack or something?
Indeed, Apple is The Innovator of the computer industry. Rarely do they get credit for being so.
It did exactly what you told it to.
It was polite enough to ask if you wanted it to sort your music library; when you said YES it went ahead!
On a different note... why do you have to rename all your files and reorganize all of them? What's wrong with a hierarchical structure based on artist-album + track number-track name?
GPL Deconstructed
On my 750 MHz Athlon even just dragging the window is laggy. A lot of people are experiencing problems like this. Like I said, Winamp3 is more responsive. I've used iTunes for Mac, and while I'm not a fan of the general interface, it works a *lot* better than on the PC.
The fact that it's impossible to maximize the window is another major annoyance, and a stupid one to even exist.
I also am one of those people who would love nothing better than for brushed metal to be made a crime punishable by death. I'll admit this is just a matter of preference, but if you're going to have a non-default UI, at least have the decency to allow it to be skinned to the user's choice.
*mumbles something about the existence of the ? key*
Though it is true that Intel published the USB standard. It was Apple who first shipped an OS and computer that supported it (iMac, 1998). It wasn't until Windows 98 (August) and later that MS finally got something stable with USB. There were some early USB patches for Win95, but they didn't work with all devices and were very unstable. MS's USB support was completely rewritten for Win98.
It was Apple who drove USB with the printer and other peripheral vendors. MS had little to do with USB. USB was mostly an Intel creation.
Could anyone find out more information about the voice recorder? I'm curious what the quality is like. What I'd really like is to be able to hook up my own microphone to it...so it could completely replace my Minidisc recorder. (I want to use it to record music.)
Not true. There are many open-source projects funded by companies with full-time employees. IBM has contributed quite a bit to Linux. Does IBM not pay their employees during their Linux development time?
Get real.
Open Source is not at all merely about spare-time hobbyists but rather people and companies contributing software engineering and development effort in a non-proprietary way.
I agree with the rest of your post that its existence is important as an alternative to the monoculture of Microsoft's monopoly. But, do not minimize the amount of energy devoted to OSS development as "hobbyists in their spare time."
I've been wanting this feature for a while.
Damn. I wish I had some mod points for you. You hit the nail on the head.
This is a huge insight that I'm sure will be lost to most Linux programmers. Why do you think this is? Why are most Linux programmers so antagonistic towards good interface design?
One of my worst experiences with OSS is with Open Office. The interface is horrible and for anyone accustomed to productivity software, its user interface is wrong for just about any platform it runs on.
Indeed, Microsoft wouldn't be around today if it weren't for Apple: AppleSoft Basic for the Apple IIe (1977), Word for the Mac (1983), MacBasic (1984), MultiPlan (1984), MultiChart (1984).
Apple kept Microsoft alive during the '70s and '80s.
I just installed windows iTunes, and I was shocked to hear how "muddy" the tone was when compared to playing the same song through Winamp. I tried the "sound enhancer", which helped a little, but I'm weary of what it's really doing to my music.
Anyone know what's going on?
Really?
Open Source Projects at Apple.
Feel free to download the source code to the OS. They have an x86 version available as well.
Or, you can download a forked project at OpenDarwin.
By the way, OS X is based on FreeBSD and the Mach microkernel from Carnegie Mellon University, not Linux. Unix was open-source long before Torvalds learned how not to crap his diapers. Indeed, IBMs mainframe source code was open to their customers as well.
Closed-source is a Microsoft invention.
Good points.
If anyone has boosted anything from the OSS community it is Microsoft:
If you're geek enough to care that much to buy iTunes, you should be geek enough to have a few friends that can give you a cracked copy of WinXP. Use that. BTW, if the BSA wants to come looking for me, I only run Linux.
NT and XP are not based on DOS. I'm a Mac Zealot and I know that much. Go back to your telnet session.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
And also completely unsecure, thus making the RIAA have a shit fit a shut down the iTMS.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You must be another one of those Canadians complaining about ITMS, right, because I _know_ you don't mean $3000 US. My 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HD, Radeon 9600, 802.11g, bluetooth enabled, DVD-R/CD-RW, + goodies (like backlit keyboard) was $2500 (of course I bought the extra 512 MB from someone other than apple). PS I love Canada and visit frequently. Merely a comment on frequency conversions.
I do not consider myself a Macuser, or a windows user. I do not owe allegiance to any one school. All computer schools of thought have made great advancements and massive blunders. I think of computers as devices. Some devices get me hot and excited. A bling bling old school vette in kick ass condition makes me wet, its true. I have personel taste in things. I am NOT a zealot though because I think I can get more for what I need by being open minded and making good picks. Once was that was a Mac back in the day. Then quickly a Windoz box had to be used to get shiznit done. Now I have a windows heavy network but it is home to a G3 OS X box, another G3 MacOS 8 box, Mandrake 9, Windows 98 on an old tiny shit box, 95 on a really old laptop... My wife uses Win2k for her main beast until she buys her new Dell this week or next. And I use a Dell running Xp sp1 with lots of upgrades added on, PLUS my newest toy, a Sony Vaio laptop. It rocks and completes my needs. Anyway, I wanted to say all that shit, sort of like the calling of the generations on the Klingon home world. I use devices I don't worship Dells, or Suns, or Apples. So I feel my little test of the windows iTunes service is balanced and fair. I thought it was very solid and I am very pleased. As part of the test I bought an album. Heh maybe the name was ironic... A Farewell to Kings by Rush. My only concern is that I own a Rio Cali. What am I to do with this AAC format? Found some converters but have not played with them yet. Any advice is welcome. I bought my Cali at BestBuy with the 3 year plan, so I can trade it up for an iPod if I wish. What say you? I am too lazy at this late our to use formating or spellcheck...so this comes to you raw... thanks. L10N
"What we do in life echoes in eternity." Maximus Decimus Meridius
yeah, you really lived the life, you know what you're talking about. that much is clear. And you really know your artists.
I suppose you're a pizza gubbling, porn-site visiting code-pusher, either unnaturally clean or stinking sloppy. You can have either a hump, 2inch glasses or a s-s-stutter. No way you get a girl, unless you're helping her save the world.
If you are not a code-pusher, give me your profession, I'll stereotype it in under two minutes, and I know I'm right, I've seen it on teevee...
BTW glad you're laughing, wouldn't want you to take this serious. But boy, if I'm the one being confused, what do they call what you are?
There's a preview button for a reason...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
That's all I can say. It's my default player now on my XP box. Thanks Apple. Substance and style. Now to upgrade to one of those shiny Al laptops....
Isn't the threat of lawsuit enough?
I mean that seriously -- the whole lawsuit/accountability angle really is the proper way to go about it. F**king up everyone's ability to enjoy their digital entertainment, or even just placing stupid hurdles in the way, is *not*.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
The Mac OS and the QuickTime APIs have no concept of a "Multiple Document Interface"
And MDI has nothing to do with maximizing or not maximizing a window; it relates to whether a window can have child windows contained totally within the parent window as a subspace. Asshat.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
It's now my default player on my XP box. Sounds like you have you're EQ enabled for more low boost and high end in Winamp. When iTunes is first installed the EQ is enabled - but set flat by default (might as well not be enabled if you leave it at that setting - Apple should have just left it off). That could be one point, and / or you might have enabled "sound check" (analyzes the volume of all tracks within a playlist to create seemless audio levels between each track), which of course can make some tracks sound quieter than usual when played within an "unchecked" audio player. I'm not sure what the hell the "sound enhancer" does within iTunes (other than coloring up the track - which if you like the result, leave it on - it does nothing to your audio - just adds an effect)... I always thought it was some low freq boost....
So much for multiplatform code....
.net is no option, they could have made it in mozilla, but that is half asses on platforms and always gets flushed to VM and it takes ages to come back to REAL MEM.
Why couldnt it be done in java if java is soooooo great!!! or is java really just crap for apps, and only good for servlets and nothing else??? perhaps little games.
What else is there???? well nothing,
What happened to Nexts/ or Apples NextStep open platform fundation classes that worked in windows/solaris ages ago, they could have made it all work in windows/linux and be sweet.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Well yeah doofus, I do want to know where/how etc my mp3s are..
1. I store all my mp3s on my file server, a linux box with http access. so B) i can access the files in a convenient folder/archieve from any where or to any one.
2. I dont want to be LOCKED into IT all the time, if I want, I do want to use winamp (for its cooler AVS) to play and display the mp3s on a big tv. I still want to find my mp3s in my original folder layouts.
ok
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Does the memory usage go down again after a while? If it does, then they are using some kind of garbage collection, so memory is not freed when the machine is busy (i.e. rendering a new page), which would be sensible. If not, then it's a memory leak, and you should file a bug report.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I believe WinME supports WDM drivers (not sure about Win98. I've never really used the 9x/ME series), so if there's sufficient demand Apple may release a WinME version.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The magic, is not actually in the code, the magic is in the usability features and concepts.
So, while most of us implement usability features and concepts by writing them in some kind of code (such as C++ and COBOL), Apple instead just pours some UF&C-enriched MacMagic iSprinkles (tm) over the binaries to get their look&feel...
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
People are writing Linux Killer Apps all the time. The Beauty/Weakness of open source is these apps can be relatively easily ported to Windows/Mac/Whatever because the source is open. Therefore Linux killer app does not mean Linux lock-in. Sorry.
Also it strikes me that the reason the Linux community would have trouble creating an i-tunes service themselves would be lack of money/clout to talk all the different record companies into contributing. An-open source i-tunes clone would be useless without the clout of someone like apple serving the music to it. Writing the software is the easy part.
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
That being the case, you should know that '*nix' doesn't really make sense. Not in strict wild-card format, anyway. Given a list of 'UNIX *AND* UNIX clones', the wild card '*nix' would return only one result -- UNIX. (And not even that would be returned, unless you capitalise it 'Unix'.) Linux has a 'u' in it, so it wouldn't be returned. And i'm not aware of any other UNIX clones that have the so-called 'nix' thing. Unless maybe you count QNX. Which wouldn't be returned either.
We could all just say 'POSIX-based systems'....
I like it just fine, as it gives me evidence that you are an idiot.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Windows Media Player 9 does the same, I can view my files in the same artist/album order under a tree.... so whats new?
Btw Itunes crashed on my 'import' of 1000+ mp3s.
TWICE!!!!!
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yes it is, but it's not apple's idea. ZeroConf is an open standard invented by the IETF.
Actually, it was "invented" by Stuart Cheshire, when he was working at Apple (I put invented in quotes since this wasn't just pulled out of the air in an afternoon - but he was instrumental in setting up the IETF group that hammered out the standard, and did a lot of the groundwork to get to that point).
Nae bother
if its EXACTLY like it is on the mac then it obviously is extremely overrated.
well, apache is not an innovation -- if you remember the history, it's a-patch to NCSA httpd...
ssh is not linux innovation -- check the history book as well...
can't see anything terribly innovative in khtml as YAHRE (yet-another-html-render-engine)...
--AP
Another bug.
.01 second on 1.8ghz. Unless this is written in basic.
1. I have this one mp3, Dj Scribble - Silence.mp3 and it always crashed when importing that.
2. I have 956 songs in my techno list, and adding more stuff to it takes 3 seconds per mp3, must be some real shit ass code to be that slow, surely a linear crappy poorly coded search of 1000 items would take
3. When I installed it I told it NOT TO be the default player, but later it IS THE DEFAULT player.
4. occasional lockups of GUI.
5. crossfade not as good as winamp, and there is no crossfades when hitting FF button, like winamp.
6. I hit the EJECT button by mistake, (tooltips are slow) and it took its time ejecting, but the GUI was dead, no multithreading....
7. cpu usage, damn its only an mp3, its using 16% to 27% playing mp3s , IDLE pc is at 5% Winamp used virtually 0%. Explorer was using 2%
8. apples visualizations do look damn ugly tho, compared to the beaut stuff in winamp.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Apple has always been good at taking existing technology, make it easy/better/simpler and use their marketing skills to sell tons of them.
Sure you can always take a bunch programs and link them together to make something that functions the same, but it's never going to be simple to keep it up and you have to still find legal means to get music
-joe
I installed it at home and it works fine (better than fine, actually), but at work the installation program hangs. Are there firewall issues in the installation? All I was planning on doing with it at work (really!) was for playing music, so you'd think anyone would at least be able to install it.
I said PHONETIC theme. UNIX, Linux, A/UX, HP/UX, AIX, QUNIX (now QNX - they didn't want to get sued!), etc.
Well I am not impressed. I installed iTunes for Windows onto a W2K-Pro box and it hung up cold on startup (halfway along the blue progress bar). I could not reboot using safe mode, command mode, last good profile or anything.
I remembered the Roxio fiasco and unplugged my old CDRW drive (an IomegaZip 8x4x32) and W2K rebooted happily. Uninstalled iTunes, replugged the CDRW and all was well.
> On my Mac, I ran iTunes and clicked 'Share Library'.
> On the Win2000 machine my Mac's music library automatically appeared in the left panel.
How does it implement Rendezvous on Windows? Could iTunes be a covert way to get Rendezvous more common on Windows and thus more useful?
The philosophy of Mac OS X (and quite a few other operating systems, especially Unix-like ones) is that you should use as much RAM as you can.
This is a great philosophy until, of course, you've used as much RAM as you can and then you decide you want to load something new. It's perfectly reasonable to base your design on a user doing something like running a really small process over and over again - like, say, /bin/ls. But no one is ever going to quit Internet Explorer and start it again over and over, unless they're doing a benchmark to demonstrate how strong Apple's VM system is. Unfortunately, Apple chose to write for the synthetic benchmark rather than writing for a realistic usage case, I think.
A much more realistic case is that I'm using my memory loading web pages in Safari, I've got email going, itunes has been loading and playing mp3s for the past few weeks, etc., and then I decide I want to play a game. None of the game's data is cached, because it hasn't run recently. So the VM now has to scramble to find 200 MB of pages. Ideally the process of freeing unnecessary pages would be very fast, but it seems in practice (circa 10.2.x) it's going to have to swap a lot of stuff to disk first, which basically makes the whole process take twice as long as it could have if we had kept an ample supply of free memory available. OS X seems to have no problem finding "important" things to put in memory which can't be instantly freed, until there's very little free memory left.
Another complication of this is that it's pretty easy to fill up your root partition with swapfiles. Incidentally, this is terrible for disk performance. Like, making the system so slow that the cursor stalls for 10 seconds at a time. make -j comes to mind. And it's not particularly diligent about cleaning up swapfiles that are no longer used, which may not make any difference to the VM system, but it does to the filesystem, which still has to consider the disk space as in use.
One probably-related issue that comes to mind is that freeing memory seems to really take a long ass time even if you don't need it. The most glaring example of this is quitting Safari. Safari tends to "leak" memory (I don't know that it really does or if it actually has a legitimate use for tons of memory) over time/page loads, and occasionally I decide to quit it. Quitting Safari tends to stall my entire system for 10-30 seconds. [System: 500mHz G4 and over 500 MB of memory, YMMV] I really don't understand why this should be necessary. It seems to me that freeing all of a processes memory ought to be as simple as marking a lot of pages as dead, and it also seems to me that this entire process ought to be asynchronous with everything else since there's obviously nothing depending on those pages any more.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
As I said in a previous message, there is a lot more to iTunes than the store. I can't even use the store because I am in Canada, and I love iTunes, and I want an app like it or better on Linux! What features would you put into a linux music player program to make it even better than iTunes? You are right. THAT is the hard part. The software is the easy part.
But no talks with record companies are necessary to make a better app.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
also a Mac user for years, and a consultant for NYS which is all Windows, when I tell people at work that computing does not have to difficult they shrug and say 'typical Mac user'. Well, there's a reason I use Mac exclusively at home, it just works.
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
Download the windows version, and copy the file into c:\windows\system32\quicktime, then restart iTunes and you'll be able to play Ogg Vorbis files.
Enjoy.
What's the speed like on those searches? iTunes is instantaneous and I haven't seen anything like it (although I heard that BeOS had a similar system). If there's a way to get actual manegable playlists on pre XP/2k machines, I'd like to know. I use iTunes/Mac at home and iTunes/XP at work, but every once in a while I use an older OS and would like a good playlist management system.
t'nera semordnilap
I'm sure they would be only too happy to publish the source of KHTML. It wouldn't mean that they'd have to publish the source to iTunes though, if that's what you're getting at.
My credit card company will have to bill me for extra postage. At 99 cents a download, I will be using up a lot of paper.
Which was inspired by the seamless functionality of AppleTalk, an Apple invention.
ZeroConf is not revolutionary, it's evolutionary. But then, most ideas have to come from somewhere.
Btw Itunes crashed on my 'import' of 1000+ mp3s.
It's likely that you have some corrupted mp3s which are causing it to crash. A brief look at Apple's Discussion forum, in the iTunes for Windows forum seems to point to this as the problem.
ARGH
When did I *EVER* say master->AAC was a perfect copy?
NEVER
GPL Deconstructed
I know about lossless codecs. People bittorrent lossless-encoded concerts and stuff all the time. Perhaps in 20 years when we all have 50 terabyte drives, lossless codecs will be the norm. Until then, I'll stick to much more manageable lossy formats, just like all my pictures are in JPEG and I don't seem to mind. (incidentally, JPEG2000 is awesome.)
re: 128kbit MP3 and CD- Duh. I was talking about 128kbit AAC. 128kbit MP3 is crap.
re: 192kbps: DVD audio, as I understand it, is 192kbit. So much for an audiophile DVD system. So I never encode above 192 since I think the extra fruitiness it provides is not provably worth it (a matter of preference I guess)
If you want to talk about lossy, the digital encoding process itself is lossy, when going from analog. You chop up a theoretically smooth signal into sampled bits. 44KHz will sound better than 22KHz, but I suppose 88KHz would be even better, you know?
I installed iTunes on my WinXP machine at work, and some co-workers did too. Rendezvous works like a charm, and all I can say are good things for iTunes...
Except it doesn't work with a proxy! I tried to go to the apple store with the iTunes software and no luck. There's no way to configure a proxy.
Or maybe is that my crapy SysAdmin uses MS ISA and has the proxy authentication set for NTLM auth only.
That's the only gripe I have about iTunes.
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
iTunes for Windows can output both playlists and the entire Library as an XML file. Who's gonna be the first to make an app that can convert this into something nice like a neatly formated HTML page? Or of course there is always the possbility of taking it further and making an app that will let remote users search and copy the music files (assuming they weren't bought from iTMS). Whatever, someone needs to make something cool that uses this.
Anyone have any idea how to remove this service? Both it and the iTunesHelper.exe are loaded at startup now. I know I don't need the former, because I don't have an iPod. I have no idea what the iTunesHelper does, so I probably don't need it either. No information in the help, and as far as I can find no options to disable them.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Double click on the title bar to maximize the window.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
For extra points, how about under one of the BSDs?
[ReidNews]
Then, at the very least, all these wonderful GUI memory-meters could show how much RAM is *really* being used. As it stands now, I don't think there's any way to tell, is there?
I guess you could use how long a page has been swapped out as an indicator, but that's not quite correct enough, is it?
[ReidNews]
Well, it's more like a search than a browse, but you can sort of see what they have by using the iTMS Link Maker. It lets you search by artist, album and song name.
[ReidNews]
iTunes on my Mac uses WebCore, which is Apple's version of KHTML. [Perhaps KHTML already does this but I ask the question anyway:] Does anyone here know if iTunes for Windows means that Apple has modified KHTML to compile and run on Windows, and whether the modifed code is available anywhere?
Plus, I can never get drag-and-drop to do what I want it to do in Windows. It always does something unexpected with the content, document, or whatever I am dragging.
That used to drive me nuts, too, until I re-trained my fingers to always drag with the right mouse button. Then, you get a pop-up menu from the receiving application so you can tell it what to do with your stuff.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Hahahhaha
FUNNY
Yes it is, but it's not apple's idea. ZeroConf is an open standard invented by the IETF
You see, its funny because ZeroConf is apple's idea. It was invented by Apple and submitted to the IETF (or whatever it is you actually do to turn your idea/standard into an IETF standard.
Apple called it Rendezvous
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
You can do it from the computer, or you can send e-mail to iTMS support and they can de-auth it for you.
No problems.
The Safari leak you describe is something I experienced too: Use it heavily for a few hours (lots of open windows, lots of downloads, lots of tabs), then close all windows. Run "top" in Terminal. It's taking 1GB of memory (including swap), whoa! Quit, and it can take 30 seconds or more. Ouch.
OTOH, force-quitting it takes about 1 second. So, I wouldn't blame the OS - blame Safari for having a crazy memory leak that makes it take a long time to gracefully shut down (and at 100% CPU, thrashing the heck out of the swap volume, so basically the Mac is ultra slow for the time being). Force-quit or kill -9 gets rid of it much more quickly.
Now that you mention it, I haven't encountered this problem in the last couple of weeks. One of those "delete these preferences files" articles from www.info.apple.com seems to have made it go away permanently.
so after digging around the Apple support forums, I discovered that I was not insane to think that the iTunes sound quality was noticeably worse than the quality from other audio programs.
here is the fix, which you should look into even if you don't think anything's wrong with the quality - go into the quicktime settings in the control panel, go to "wave out" and change it from DirectSound to waveOut - windows preferred, or waveOut - [name of your soundcard]
The problem is that quicktime (which iTunes uses as its MP3 engine) uses the directsound driver instead of sending the audio directly to your card. somehow this extra layer of software tomfoolery mangles the audio, giving it an "underwater" muffled effect. Try it and see if you can notice an improvement in your sound clarity.
Can someone look, if this is also the case if an iPod is connected?
Indeed. I have a 15 GB iPod connected. I constantly hear repeating whispers saying "buy Belkin Voice Recorder, Griffin iTrip FM Transmitter, Belkin iPod Battery Pack, InMotion iPod speakers" etc.
Well, if you're going to burn an audio CD anyway, you could re-import them with any setting you like.
Check out the preferences pane on this (or properties or whatever it's called in XP world). You can import CD's using AIFF without compression and mp3 and AAC from 64 to 340 or something mhz.
That should do the trick. Apple said there would be quality loss, but I can't see this being anything but FUD. Have imported a ton of (bought) CD's and they all sound great in iTunes.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Please report this (link directly to the feedback page).
Chances are you're not the only one with the same complaint. I think it's acceptable behaviour for a first gen. app, but if you don't complain, next update won't be better for you.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Neither is the idea of using a compiler to write software for a computer. iTunes ios a complete rip-off! They even used icons on buttons which has been done before. And MP3 isn't an Apple invention either. Totally unoriginal, this iTunes. The mouse wasn't even invented by Apple!
Taste the brushed-metal irony in this message?:-)
Sharing is: No file copying, up to 5 people on local LAN can connect and listen to any song they want (end-user picks) from the playlists you've allowed to be shared.
Finding shared music is via Rendezvous (sp?), a zero-configuration protocol that allows service discovery on the local LAN with no configuration.
Those are the hardest discussions to have with programmers:
"Hey, we noticed you have a 5-click process on this function. Turns out it's a much needed function. We want it done in one click. And that click should be in the most logical place imaginable."
Then duck, run, leave the building...
Apple is so cool because in the end their design principles are all about the user. That sounds like so much marketing crap, until you've spend a day, week, month and in the end years on a mac.
The difference cannot be expressed in MHZ or fruity colors. It's about all the time, frustration and heart-ache saved compared to other systems.
Not to say they're perfect or holy. They're a company, so one way or another, you pay for their profits. But they do put you in the driver's seat.
Linux: I love it, in a philosophical way. Won't ever fiddle with it. Don't see why. Hated fiddling with PC's to get the most basic things running, now why would I enjoy that on Linux?
The strength of linux is also one of its greater weaknesses. All those distro's and crazy projects out there make it pretty hard to get those real user-friendly things implemented.
One click updating, installs, consistency in all apps, console-less apps with real gui's that don't try to hurt your eyes...
You don't get that in the average Linux build, it's not for that audience.
It would be nice to have one distro that would really focus on the desktop. And I wouldn't mind if it would be a "me too" OS-Application bundle, at least to begin with.
But a project that's all about the average user. It would be great experience for programmers who are interested in what makes users tick, and it would be very interesting in itself. It would also be a significant step towards Linux on the Desktop. The more the merrier.
For many people - especially in underdeveloped countries that would mean A LOT.
I would love to see a bunch of free programmers do that instead of Sun or whoever.
Cheers, rant over.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Not to mention that Linux software developers usually end up porting their software to Windows after it has been made successful. Take Apache, Nmap, and Gaim for example.
I'm still torn whether this is better for the Linux community. It introduces Windows users to free and good software. Apache for Windows keeps them from running IIS, yet it doesn't get them to switch to Linux.
Space out with me on this for a bit.
I myself am guilty of promoting complexities. Since I know how to set up NFS and Samba and Apache and Shoutcast, I would just use one of these tools on my own Linux boxes to accomplish the same thing with XMMS or X11AMP or even mpg321 with a cgi php4 script front-end with apache and the mp3 meta-data extracted into a PostgreSQL table for faster searches. All the tools are there, and as a programmer, I find it fun to implement these kinds of things - and I HAVE spent time doing this for my own system.
Well. There you have it. Most of Linux users are geeks and programmers of at least some skill. They want to twiddle around and quite a few probably prefer the malleability of those solutions to maybe bit easier but inflexible software.
And because they are mostly developing for THEMSELVES, not for Joe Users, that's what you end up getting.
Read up where ZeroConf came from.
Note though, that Apple does not own ZeroConf. It's now out into the IETF space where anyone can scrutinize, comment, criticise and suggest improvements. And this IMHO is a Good Thing.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I'm not sure how Apple is f*cking up your ability to enjoy your entertainment.
1)You can listen to the songs you buy anywhere you want. Home PC? No prob. ipod? No prob. Burn them to a CD? Basically unrestricted.
2) You can listen on multiple computers -- either by sharing or by authorizing multiple computers.
What can't you do? Give music away to millions of people you don't know. Is that really why you buy entertainment products? I doubt it.
There aren't any real hurdles placed in your way to use these files as you see fit. Please define the problem again.
Where are my mod points when I need them....
This is pure flaimbate, and I guess I'll bite....
Tabbed browsing is one of the best inovations yet......
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
flamebait....
where is the damn spellcheck for comments
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
Well overall I agree that MDI was mischaracterized by the original post. I'd suggest you might get more people to consider that fact more seriously by omitting the word "Asshat" from the end of your reply.
Now if it was a tinfoil Asshat....
Why do you need a life, when you have a brain?
Oh wait, you don't have either of those! Nevermind.
Ron Paul 2012
+1, Insightful!
From now on the proper wildcard is: *{i,I}*{x,X}
Clearly the advantages are great. This matches unix, linux, AIX, and posix in any case. However QNX and BSD don't match, therefore: we must use more search strings: *{i,I}*{x,X} QNX *BSD
(Thankfully BSD distros always have the BSD part capitalized, and QNX is always capitalized.)
Furthermore, an SQL implementation: SELECT ALL FROM OPERATING_SYSTEMS WHERE ( OS_NAME LIKE '%BSD' OR OS_NAME LIKE '%i%x' OR OS_NAME LIKE 'POSIX' OR OS_NAME LIKE '__X' );
As you can see, my SQL only matches lowercase "i" and "x" for brevity. Therefore I added POSIX and as a special case, and QNX and AIX should both be matched by '__X'.
Maybe we could just use SELECT ALL FROM OPERATING_SYSTEMS WHERE ( OS_TYPE LIKE 'POSIX' );
Don't mod me funny!
Ron Paul 2012
Tabbed browsing is one of the best inovations yet......
Yes, and it was invented by Opera, on Windows, over 5 years ago. What was your point again?
Java: the bastard demon spawn of C++ and Ada
Da Blog
This is OT, but how is support for JPEG2K? When will it be viable to put together a webpage with JPEG2K pictures?
Ron Paul 2012
It uses 64 bit pointers.
It does 64 bit arithmetic.
It has parts of the OS optimized for 64-bit calculations. (And 128-bit calculations, with Altivec).
So the reason you're saying that the OS isn't 64-bit is because some of it has 32 bit code in it? Well, then, Apple doesn't have a PowerPC OS yet, because some of Classic still runs 680x0 code.
Give up. It may or may not be the first, but it sure as heck is a 64-bit machine.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
As I listen to the discussion of how Pepsi is going to be giving away 100 million songs with their promotion - I started getting nervous about the ambiguity of the launguage which keeps being used. They keep talking about giving away songs, but they don't say that the user can choose what song they get. So - maybe the Pepsi giveaway isn't giving each person a $.99 coupon. But instead it's going to let everyone download a specific song by the an artist Pepsi is currently promoting. ?
I hope not. Giving away 100 million copies of the same Beyonce song (or whatever) just doesn't seem as cool as letting me download any song I want.
(Sorry if this has been posted before.)
But I have a better one:
Microsoft Works.
Easily my favorite. It's even ahead of Military Intelligence and Airline Food.
(Shamelessly stolen from some online comic strip or other.)
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
It's not such a big deal, window-wise, on the Mac. I'm running this on a 400 mHz G4 with about a zillion windows open, and 256 megs of RAM, and minimizing windows doesn't speed it up much, because all the compositiing is being done on the video card... all the window contents are already there.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I have seen several machines with minimal amounts of memory that poeple here have upgraded to XP or Win2k. I'm not sure what you do to make them run faster than Win95, but I have the suspicion it involves halluninogenic drugs, because it's sure not the case on the machines I've been using.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
C'mon! Who are 'known for quality windows software'?
;)
And where you get this: ' and they treat their own folks who work on windows stuff like CRAP.' - like CRAP.
By the way, I personally (using MacAnalisys) CAN'T see that 'HTTP server on p.3689' not on XP, nor W2k adv server, nor OS X 10.2.8
How exactly you find it? Accidentally?
Hence his statement that if you see .nib files, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is Cocoa.
Sheesh.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I suppose it's possible that there is someone off in some corner of the company that gets treated like crap, but I never met him when I was there.
I did meet plenty of the QuickTime boys and girls, and despite the fact that they all have both Macs and Windows machines on their desks, and every line of code that they write has to be cross-platform (with the exception of the lowest of the low level stuff, and the QTML interface layer), they were treated pretty well.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
You said:
> I expect all the applications to be consistent in their appearance and function when I use a computer.
You must be a terribly, terribly disappointed person, if you're truly a Windows user. It was only two years ago that it was observed that in three different programs in the Windows Office suite, selecting a chunk of text and then hitting the backspace button DID THREE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
So... is there some hypocracy there? I'm not sure I'd call it hypocracy, I think I'd call it *revenge*. Apple is tired of having their HIG ignored by masses of companies. They're trying to show Windows users what Mac programs are like, and at the same time poke a little fun. You can call it hypocracy. But if that's hypocracy, then the death penalty is too: we don't want people killing other people, so we kill them.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
What default option? He was ASKED if he wanted to do it and said yes. I remember that question as well during installation, and said NO. I had no such problems.
-Alex
That's an ssh session, thank you very much! :P ;)
:) heh It was a heck of a lot easier to see what was under the hood and how the system worked. Then I explored more with the GUI's to see what they did. :)
The first program _I_ opened when I got my Mac (switched 2.5 years back), was Terminal. It made everything feel right.
-Alex
Perhaps I used too strong a word for it to apply to Apple. Though it certainly does apply elsewhere.
Take the MiniDisc format for example. We'd all have probably been using them 5 years ago instead of messing with CD-ROMs if Sony would have just made computer drives that could read the music disks, and not hobbled digital transfers between disks. But instead you have a near white elephant of a format that is dying a slow death. Probably would've had multi-GB disks that you could buy for $5 by now if there had been demand. And there would have been demand if there had been freedom.
Back to Apple...
1)You can listen to the songs you buy anywhere you want. Home PC? No prob. ipod? No prob. Burn them to a CD? Basically unrestricted.
2) You can listen on multiple computers -- either by sharing or by authorizing multiple computers.
Well, these are still impediments. Annoyances that require you to put in needless extra work if you don't want to work strictly within their system. And of course there's the impediment that you must have an Apple computer (or now Windows), along with special software, in order to get access to it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't work with a regular browser.
What can't you do? Give music away to millions of people you don't know.
Uhh, I think you still can. You just described how to get around the barriers.
And that's my whole point: technical barriers don't solve the problem, just interfere with legit uses. The answer is a legal and cultural one.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
You totally missed my point! Why didn't the open source people design a killer mp3 player before? What was stopping them? What is stopping them now from making an even better mp3 player than iTunes without porting it? All the base tools are there, pre-installed on most Redhat 9 installations.
I use iTunes ALL the time, almost as much as I use gcc and pine.
Sorry, the original version of iTunes ran on Mac OS 9, which is NOT a BSD kernel. And the BSD kernel calls (open,read,write,ioctl,connect,etc) are a miniscule part of iTunes, it is not even relevant which kernel is was designed on. What is more important is the GUI API that it uses.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
It's because I use a Mac!
You wrote: Because seeing all those other windows behind the one window I want to concentrate on is a distraction. It's like in the real world I often clear my desk of clutter to concentrate on one thing.
I am sure that no matter what evidence is presented to you, you will claim that it is not innovative. Point is that all acheivements are based on previous works. This applies to the sciences, maths, and software too!
Linux has a few innovative package management systems, such as apt and portage. Gentoo's portage is probably the most innovative in that it does depenency analysis and system specific optimizations. Of course it takes ideas from apt and BSD ports, but like I said...
DDD is a relatively innovative debugger with all the power of code trace debuggers, but with added graphical output modes, that make your C++ linked lists look like linked lists during debugging. It makes it really easy to see a bug when a pointer isn't handled correctly.
Innovative programming languages such as Mercury and Haskell.
There are plenty of other innovations, many not directly visible to the end user. My favorite innovation is the concept of free software. Yup, that comes from the FSF and the BSDs... but the Mac and Windows crouds don't have that, and that is huge!
Thanks for turning the years of pain into a good belly laugh!! I got over the disappoinment that my machine had a windows modem and I had to buy a new modem, I got past the fear of guessing the frequencies on my monitor when I set up X.... but I couldn't get past the frustration of trying to get the @#$@#$@!! sound card built into my motherboard to work.
:)
Linux is great for starving students, save a ton of money and learn a lot about computers... but now I have a real job and I can afford a Mac. And my Linux experiences make me appreciate it sooo much more
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
"Basically, I am wondering WHY there aren't more people trying to write the Linux Killer App."
Because a Killer App is a really HARD thing to think up and write. Especially think up. Particularly when people have had twenty+ years to figure out what they want to do with PCs. Most of the problems people want to solve with computers have been identified now. Visicalc was a killer app because it made a pencil and paper job almost infinitely simpler. Same with word processors replacing the typewriter. A killer app arises when some great need is addressed that has not been addressed before. Photoshop, for example, with its graphics manipulation. But ask yourself, what problems are out there today that benefit from the virtual, wipe and undo environment of the computer? Databases, spreadsheets, typewriters-plus, graphics, sound, movies. Those fields were the killer app fields, that drove people to a product. The ones where annoying real world methods/products were replaced by something MUCH better.
Now it is much harder to create a killer app. What do people want to do in a computer that they can't? Not a whole lot - an industry has worked for a very long time to provide them with what they want. The next killer app would probably need to create it's own demand, for something totally new. That is one of those problems like grand master level chess - only a very few minds can think of such solutions. Rare in all fields.
If you want my personal read, I think the next "killer app" type effect might not be a single program so much as a system built from the hardware up to be secure. If you look at computers today, security is the main thing that people don't have and want. So if someone figures out how to provide it, there might be a great rush to it. But that problem is of an altogether different scale, and while there may be ways to address it in theory they would take hundreds of full time, professional computer scientists on staff somewhere. But that's just another stab in the dark prediction, not a visionary view of the future.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Why are you assuming what I would think?
I already posted that I believe Glade is innovative.
Haskell is not a 'linux' thing.
DDD is cool, I like it.
OGG is innovative.
XMMS and X11AMP and every other mp3/ogg player I tried on linux is NOT innovative.
My point is... Why? An easy to use music player should be easier to design than glade!
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
I like it just fine, as it gives me evidence that you are an idiot.
Not quite, you see what the grandparent post was doing was calling the great grandparent poster a faggot since the great grandparent poster poster had called the great great grandparent poster a "a pimple faced Linux zealot" when in reality the great great grandparent poster used Windows 2000 as stated in the post in question. Clearly the AC was trying to illustrate how much of an idiot the great grandparent poster by using his own tactics against him.
Apparely you are the idiot here since you were too fucking dense to realize that.
Now do us all a favor and put a glock to your head and remove your stupidity from society.
So there you go. Apple again is non-innovative in thier open source thing.
"Wow, open source is hip, lets pretend to be hip and cool by making some useless fork of our OS open."
Oh yeah Darwin is some real great open source software. Yeah everyone is using it now. I'm not talking OSX i'm talking about the real, open Darwin. How useless is that crap. YAY i've got an OS with shit for software.
Lets contribute bug fixes to Darwin, so that Apple can fix thier fucked up OSX problems and then resell it in a package that I don't get for free. In fact, its so not free that I have to pay for a fucking upgrade. Oh yeah pay $100 for fuckin 10.3, because my original OSX was fucked up in the first place.
Oh yeah Apple contributes a little bit of stuff to KHTML. Wow how generous.
Apple just started this to jump on the bandwagon and use some other peoples stuff. If they could have taken the open stuff and put it in thier os without contributing back they would have. Its all part of thier corporate strategy.
Since Apple is so open, how about the source to the iLife apps?
Apple's 'Open Source' policy is nothing but a corporate front. How about them releasing some code that wasn't already based on an open system.
Oh an BTW, it wasn't just based on FreeBSD, but also netBSD. And who gives a rip if they were out before Linux? Linux was out before OSX so quit blabbing on about nothing. You haven't proven your point and won't prove it because your point is invalid.
An Error of Type -2 has Occoured. User is a moron.
Linux schminix. Apple invented Open Source. RMS just stole the idea from Woz and Jobs.
That LamerX dood needs to get facts straight.
Did ya see that video of Jewels where she flashes her boobs and like the guy is like all over her?
NOW THAT is Open Source!!!!!
This guy is on crack. BSD is so cool. You can make stuff out of it and not give back! Thats the american way!
No wait. The American way is to help out, like raising that barn or making a bake sale that helps out the neighbors. Oh I get it, We need to buy something thats just an idea in someones head. No thata not it, what will we do?
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.
no "complex set up" either.
However QNX and BSD don't match
What do you mean QNX doesn't match? If you use the original name for it (QUNIX, or Quick UNIX), it does!
like most commercial companies they poopoo'ed the Internet.
They'll use the innovation of others, repackage, make it work only on OS/X and Windows and look real innovative while trying to corral the technologie and make it proprietary.
I don't care cause any music apple puts on its server likely sux anyway.
All I wanted to do was see what music they have available. They clutter up my system with several unnecessary pieces of bloated software, then REQUIRE a credit card # to simply browse what is available?
n ).
iTunes is NO GOOD:
------------------
(1) They require a valid credit card # before you can even begin to browse the "store." How about I give you that number when/if I find something I want to buy.
This would be like The GAP requiring you to hand over your credit card when you cross the threhold of their B&M store. When you give it to them, they swipe the card and copy all the info from it. When you leave, they keep the info but give the card back.
BLECH!
(2) Apple installs a bunch of stuff that is unnecessary on my system:
(2a) iPod Service appears in my services list, with an executable at \Program Files\iPod\bin.
I don't have an iPod, I don't need one. I don't want this "service" running. So I nuked it
(2b) a "qttask.exe" appears in my QuickTime folder and is set to run at startup (with a registry entry in HKLM/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/ru
I don't need that crap, so I nuke it as well.
(2c) Another app set to auto-run at startup (same reg key) is "iTunesHelper.exe" in the iTunes install folder. Why do I need this _always_ running even when I'm not using iTunes?
So I nuke it as well.
Ah things are a bit more comfy now.
So I run the iTunes application again.
(3) It re-installs all this shit I just disabled, puts back the registry keys, re-installs iPod Service, iTunesHelper, and qttask.
So I nuke them all, and set the NTFS permissions on all files involved to read-only (I nuke the fuckers permanently).
I run iTunes again. No weirdo apps/services any more, but they still want my credit card info before they will let me browse the store!
This sucks.
So I nuke the entire f\/cking iTunes installation, and burn the installer. Apple has not gotten any better at making software, IMHO.
Not exactly true. It's actually not that slow to page out to the backing store. The backing store is usually a contiguous space on the hard drive and so a page out is pretty quick, hardly any seeking is needed. Not only that but there are probably a ton of pages that are not "dirty" (have changes and need to be written to the backing store before being paged out) and can be just dumped without writing them to the backing store. Most times a page out is pretty quick and painless.
Again, most of those pages probably don't need to be written to the backing store and so they will just be dumped from memory without writing to the hard drive.
Swapfiles are 80 meg files. I've rarely seen more than 1 of them on my system at a time, although I've heard of some people having 2 or 3 after running a ton of memory-intensive applications. As long as you have around 380 megs of RAM or more you probably won't see too many of these. I'd recommend 512 megs of RAM as a good solid baseline for Mac OS X, it only costs about $90 for top-quality RAM.
Freeing memory really should not take that long. That sounds like some sort of bug in Safari, probably a problem with the program shutting down gracefully. It may be creating a ton of class objects (thus the memory leak) and is failing to close those objects properly. When the program closes it then tries to close out those objects creating a logjam of sorts. This probably doesn't have much to do with the memory model of the operating system, it is most likely application-related. I would report your problems to the Safari programming team, I'm sure they would love to fix problems like this.
Sapere aude!
Meanwhile, I look at it from a different perspective. I take the attitude that one should treat others as you would like them to treat you. If Apple and Apple users want people who port their software to the Mac to follow the Apple guidelines then it's equally important that they make the effort to do the same when porting to another operating system. Even Microsoft, who you seem focused on here, has followed Apple's guidelines when porting Office to the Mac. Cooperation works both ways.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
while most Windows apps seem to be designed for exclusive, one at a time use.
No, most Windows apps are designed for Alt-Tab use, or at least taskbar task-switching use. You maximize all your app windows, then rapidly toggle through them with Alt-tab (or if you're a noob, with the Taskbar buttons). Both multitasking paradigms are more efficient than Apple's "dig through a pile of haphazardly stacked windows to get to the one I want, repeat as necessary" design. That's why Windows users are so peeved about such a seemingly minor thing as iTunes not maximizing.
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