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Microsoft Dismisses Apple's iTunes for Windows
fewnorms writes "Microsoft's general manager for the Windows Digital Media division, Dave Fester, yesterday dismissed the new iTunes for Windows version, saying it was too limited for the average Windows users. Choice quote: "[Apple's music store] ... is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device." Of course Apple doesn't feel to worried about this, simply stating their products will (and have) lived up to the hype." The points made are all valid- but contradictory to standard Apple product design where simplicity always takes priority over flexibility. Besides, iPod is growing market share, and iTunes will be the best choice for windows users who own it.
be sure to check out your QT settings in the control panel. If the audio out is set to DirectSound, you will probably experience muddy audio clarity. Change it to waveOut and the clarity should be just as good as it is in Winamp.
That is probably a hardware/OS problem. Your sound card IRQ is being shared with your video card's IRQ. You can check this by running MSINFO32 --> hardware resources --> conflicts/sharing. IRQ sharing occurs with Windows 2k/XP on older computers (older than P4/Athlon XP) with ACPI enabled. This problem is discussed on the WinAmp tech support boards in topics linked from here under the heading "RE: Skipping / freezing / distortion, clicking & popping during playback".
Centralization breaks the internet.
With only the Mac market so far, Apple captured, what, 30% of paid downloads. Now the other 90% can use their service, so watch out Microsoft.
No, with only the Mac market, iTMS has 70% of the paid music downloads. Imagine what they'll have after Pepsi will have given 100 000 000 songs for free!
30% is the iPod market share, and they have 50% of the revenues for portable digital players.
When will I finally have a good user interface to play music under linux?
When the linux developers start caring about interface design as much as they care about kernels.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
iTunes for Windows requires Quicktime 6.4 to be installed for it to work (or 6.3 for the Mac version).
Why?
Because all the decoding of the AAC files - both DRM'd and non-DRM'd - is completed through the QuickTime libraries (NOTE: this is also a way to get iTunes to play ogg/vorbis encoded tracks). ANY application that makes the appropriate calls to the QuickTime API can decode and play tracks ripped by iTunes into AAC and tracks downloaded from the iTMS (assuming the computer is authorized to play them).
So, in theory, it's possible to get WinAMP to play files downloaded from the store if you don't want to use iTunes as your player software. Toast for Mac already can burn tracks ripped by iTunes and/or downloaded from the iTMS onto an audio CD.
The only problem is audio device support, but Apple likes it's iPod sales and Hell already froze over, so we probably won't be seeing WMA support on the iPod or iTMS compatibility on 3rd party devices ever - or at least not until iPod sales start slipping in a major way.
Surprise, surprise.
Oh, and where exactly are you finding all this Dolby 5.1 music? Or do you just spin movie soundtracks at parties?