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Apple Releases iTunes for Windows
Billy_D_Goat writes "Today at a special media event, Apple Computer released their acclaimed iTunes Music Store and stand alone player for Windows XP and 2000. They also announced a partnership to sell music on AOL and give away songs with special bottles of Pepsi. You can learn more and download it from here. "
For Mac OS X users, check your Software Update, as QuickTime has been revved to 6.4, iPod software hits 2.1, and iTunes itself is now at 4.1.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
it's fast on my Athlon 1700XP with 1GB Ram. But you sure need a shitlmoad of ram : in the taskmanager, iTunes itself gobs up a whopping 26MB when browsin. qtask takes another 13MB and iPodservices another 7.
:-)
After a while (and when in bakground) those numbers drop to a more reasonable 9+4+3 so it's feasible on a lesser machine. But prepare for some heavy trashing on launch.
Music sharing between OSX & XP works like a charm, even with dynamic playlists. I still gotta try out how my iPod responds when connected to the firewire port on the PC.
Right now i' mgonna do a little stresstesting with iTunes+media player + warcraft, playing all together. The wife sure is going to love that sound
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Apple also released several new accesories for the iPod. They include such things as turning the iPod into an image tank for CF cards and the much-rumored voice recorder.
No
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.
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.
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 ?
Well, it rips CDs to MP3/AAC/AIFF/WAV from CD, burns CDs, compiles smart playlists, accesses the iTunes Music Store, displays visual graphics as music is playing, etc.
So, I'd say it does a bit more than a "simple network file retrieving application" - never mind that a Win2K/XP machine with less than 256MB RAM is going to be awfully painful (my Thinkpad had only 384MB and it was painful if I tried to actually use multiple apps simultaneously).
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
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!
"Hell Froze Over"
That's the best laugh I've seen in a long time
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
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
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
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
Hmm, yes and no. 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. RAM access is usually much faster than hard drive access, so why not fill up RAM with stuff that you might possibly need from the hard drive at some point.
Memory management in Mac OS X goes like this: boot up, take up a good percentage of available RAM and place system stuff in there. Every time a window is created, make a backing store for faster and smoother access. If the user runs a program, load as much stuff related to that program as possible. If the user quits a program keep most of it in memory anyways, they might want it a minute later. They access the hard drive? Read into memory the next few sectors beyond what the user asked for simply because they may want them next.
All of this fills up RAM pretty quickly and makes the operating system look bloated. Actually though, it's highly efficient. It's usually much quicker to free up RAM then it is to fill it. Even in the case where you need to page out memory (store it back on disk to make room for something else), it's still not much slower than having the memory empty in the first place. This is why having more RAM makes Mac OS X faster, it uses the extra space to be more efficient.
To show you what I mean try launching Internet Explorer (or any other large program). Time how long it takes to launch, then quit it and start it again. Time how long it takes to launch for the second time. For IE I got 4 seconds for the first launch and then 2 seconds for every launch after that. This is because IE is now cached in RAM and doesn't need to be loaded from the hard drive to be launched.
So again, you are perfectly right in that Mac OS X takes up a lot of RAM. However this is actually a feature. After all RAM is pretty cheap now and I think most people would trade off a few bucks to have their system more responsive. On the other hand I do know that Mac OS X does cope decently with low-RAM situations. It can run just fine on a machine with 256 megs of RAM but it will seem slower than a similar machine with 512 megs of RAM. I'd say that 512 megs of RAM works well with Mac OS X, any less you see slowdowns, any more and you don't notice much improvement under normal use.
Sapere aude!
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