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iTunes for Windows Reviews
The iTunes stores provides one of the most liberal usage policies of any of the Internet music download services, matched by some of the best prices. Most individual tracks are 99 cents, most albums under $10. There is no subscription fee, so once you've downloaded it, you can listen to it forever. You can also burn CDs with the music you've purchases, provided you don't burn the same playlist more than 10 times.
These terms are a testament to the weight Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, pulls in the media industry. The fact that he was able to single-handedly negotiate such liberal licensing terms is simply amazing given the comparatively restrictive policies we've seen from other online music download services. Jobs clearly gets it, and he's dragging the music industry, kicking and screaming, into an entirely new way of thinking about online music distribution.
And now it's all available on the lowly Windows PC. We'll talk about the implications of Apple writing Windows software later, but for now, on to the review.
Installation
You start at apple.com and click the download link for the Windows version of iTunes. I thought perhaps I'd experience some sort of clunky installation experience - after all, Apple has never written any Windows software, let alone had to deal with the vagries of the Windows installation process. But the installation went off without a hitch, requiring one reboot.
Atfer the reboot, you launch iTunes, it asks you a few questions, and you are ready to go.
The iTunes Music Store
To download music, you must first create a user account. This is a fairly simple process. You provide an email address, credit card number and verification information. It's quick and painless, and when complete you are immediately logged onto the iTunes Music Store (iTMS from now on).
First, a little bit about the interface layout in iTunes. iTMS is presented as a browser pane within the iTunes software. A hierarchical "Source" sidebar on the left hand side of the screen allows you to switch between the Music Store, your own music libraries, shared libaries, CDs, Internet radio, and the iPod (though I don't have one, so I can't test this).
All of the various content choices are displayed in some way in the main browser pane. Along the top of the iTunes window you'll find a search box that works as well for the iTMS as it does for your own music libraries.
The iTMS is attractively laid out with quicklinks on the home page to top songs, top albums, featured artists, and celebrity play lists (what does Shaq listen to?). A drop down allows you to browse a particular genre (what, no separate genre for Heavy Metal?)
Click on an album you like and you are taken to an album details page. Here Apple takes advantage of the fact that iTunes is more than a simple web browser. The top of the browser pane shows cover artwork, top downloads from the album, and a "People who liked this, also bought" list (didn't Amazon patent that?).
The bottom of the browser pane shows a sortable list of all the tracks in a grid format. You can add and remove columns, chosing from Album, Artist, Comment, Composer, Disk Number, Genre, Time, Track Number, and Year. Double clicking on the track plays a short, 20 second sample of the music. The Artist and Genre columns provide little arrow icons that serve as links to display more music from that artist or genre.
At the top of the page you click "Add Album" to purchase all of the tracks, or click "Add Song" in the grid to purchase a single track. Some album's don't allow you to purchase the entire album, you have to buy all the tracks individually. Some tracks are available only when purchasing the entire album (these are marked "Album Only" and are usually longer tracks).
Buying and downloading music
Apple provides two options for purchasing music, a "1-click" option, and the traditional Shopping cart/checkout. I prefer the shopping cart. It helps keep down the impulse buys and the cart itself is pretty slick. When you select the shopping cart, the main browser pane shows a list of all the tracks you've selected for purchase. Tracks from a whole album purchase are nested under their album title. Almost all of the same functions (preview, links to other works/genres) are available in the shopping cart. At the top of the pane a list of "Recommendations based on the items in your cart" is shown. Ah, blessed be the up-sell...
After you click "Buy Now" you will be asked to provide your iTunes password. You can optionally tell iTunes to remember you password for music downloads, and you will not be prompted. After a final confirmation, the download begins. You can continue to browse the music store, listen to other music in your library, or rip CDs while the download continues. The status window at the top of the screen continues to show the download progress. You can also check up on the status of a download by looking on your "Purchased Music" folder, a sub folder of the Music Store folder.
iTMS Music Selection
I found plenty of variety in just about every genre I like. Apple claims 400,000 tracks from 5 major labels are available. If you like audio books, they've got 5,000 online. And no, Metallica, that fun loving band of music sharing nay-sayers, isn't available.
Burning CDs
The easiest way to burn a CD is to create a playlist with the tracks you want to burn. If the playlist contains any music you've purchased from the iTMS, you will only be able to burn that particular playlist 10 times. Not much of a restriction in my book.
Burning is as simple as selecting the play list, selecting the songs in the playlist you want to burn, then clicking the "burn disk" icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This confused me at first, because the icon is grayish before activation, it looks disabled to this long-time Windows user. But once clicked, it comes to life, turning into a little radioactivity icon that throbs and spins as the burn progresses.
The progress of the burn is displayed in the same place that the download status is displayed, the oval status window at the top of the screen. A little icon in the status window allows you to switch between "Now playing", download status, an equalizer, ripping status, and burning status. Another little 'X' icon in the status window allows you to cancel a download, rip, or burn.
I have to say that this layout is a marvelously efficient use of screen real-estate, and avoids the dialog box hell many similar programs suffer, but at first I found it a bit confusing, especially since it's not immediately obvious how to get the status window to display the status of the various tasks iTunes has initiated.
I burned several CDs and had no problem playing them on other PCs. There are only a few options to set for burning. You can explicitly specify the burn speed, and the format, picking between Audio CD, MP3 CD, and Data CD (I am assuming this is just a direct burn of the music files, in whatever format).
Music burning just works, and works well. In fact I burned a disc at the same time I was ripping another, and playing some downloaded music. Everything worked without a hitch, though CPU utilization was high enough that it slowed down other things on my machine.
iTunes also supports burning to DVDs but I believe this is still available on the Mac only. As I don't have a DVD burner handy, I can't test this.
Organizing your music
Even without the iTMS, Windows users should want iTunes for it music library management/jukebox features alone. iTunes blows away the competition in so many ways it's hard to catalogue them all.
Playlists
Let's start with the play lists. Playlists are added to the Source pane, along the left hand side of the screen. You can create a play list and add songs manually. You also have the ability to check and uncheck songs within a playlist, to disable and enable their playing after you've created the list.
The "Smart Playlist" feature allows you to build dynamic song selection criteria based on the meta tags (song attributes - artist, album, rating, genre etc...) For example I created an "Ella" play list for Ella Fitzgerald. This included three rules: "Album contains 'Ella'", "Artist contains 'Ella'", and "Song Name contains 'Ella'". These playlists can optionally update dynamically as new music is added.
You can tell the Smart Playlist to match 'Any' or 'All' of your criteria. Criteria include "contains", "does not contain", "is", "is not", "starts with" and "ends with". Criteria can be applied to any of the meta tags. The number of songs in the playlist can be limited to a specific number of songs, minutes, hours, or total file size.
The Library
Selecting the "Library" icon from the Source pane displays your entire music library in all of its glory. The bottom of the screen shows the total number of songs, number of days of music, and total size in Gigabytes. The default view is a sortable grid displaying all of the meta tags as columns. You can sort on each column. The columns can also be rearranged. Every column but the "Song Name" can be enabled and disabled.
All of the usual meta tags are present, along with some new ones (at least to me) "My Rating", "Play count" and "Last Played", and "Equalizer". That last one lets you specify an equalizer preset for that track only. You can also specify a volume preset when you view the track's Info page (this is not available in the grid view).
Most of the fields are editable in the grid display, just click on the text and wait a second, an edit box will appear, allowing you to type over the information. You can also perform bulk updates by selecting multiple songs then viewing the "Info" page for those songs. A "Multiple Song Information" dialog appears that allows you to update selected tag fields for all of those songs.
I found this to be very handy for my ratty old MP3 library. It was poorly catagorized, with many fields missing. The bulk update feature made for quick cleanup.
As in the music store, double clicking the track in the grid plays it. By default, when finished with a track, the player plays the next track in the list, based on the current sort order. You can select a "Shuffle" mode that plays random tracks. Repeat options include "Repeat Playlist", and "Repeat song". I'd like to have seen a "Repeat album" feature.
The Browse feature
When viewing the Library, or any playlist, you can click the "Browse" button in the upper right hand of the screen (minor nit, the "Browse" button looks like a large, poorly rendered eye). This toggles the browse pane, taking some real-estate away from the song list grid at the top of the screen.
The browse pane itself is broken into three panes, Genre, Artist, Album. Selecting a genre limits the artist pane to only those artists in that genre. Selecting an artist limits the album pane to only that artist's albums. As you are doing this selecting, the grid below dynamically updates to show only those tracks that meet the catagories selected above. It's a very quick way to see what you have at a glance, and to find a particular track, album or performer in a large library. Very cool.
Overall iTunes does an excellent job of allowing you to flexibly organize and find your music. The interface is clean and simple, but powerful.
Ripping
Simple. Stick a CD in, select it from the "Source" sidebar on the left hand side of the screen, and the click the "Import" icon. I was not impressed with the ripping speed, which seemed to vary between 2x and 4x. There doesn't appear to be anywhere to set or tune the ripping speed.
There are only a few configuration options for importing. You can set the import format, choosing between AAC (MPEG-4), AIFF (mac uncompressed), MP3, and WAV. For each of the formats you can pick the sample rate and stereo/mono. For AAC and MP3 you can select the bit rate (VBR is an option for MP3s).
iTunes uses CDDB to look-up album and track information. In my usage this performed flawlessly, recognizing all the albums I threw at it.
More on the AAC format
AAC is the default music encoding format (codec) for the iTunes player. Apple claims that 128kbps AAC encoding provides quality almost indistiguishable from the original, much better than a 128kbps MP3. To my ears it all sounds great. The AAC files I downloaded at 128kbps sound great. I rarely encode MP3s at that low a bit rate, so I really can't do a comparison.
The full name for the AAC standard is actually MPEG-4 AAC. Music purchased from the iTMS is downloaded in an encrypted version of this format (.m4p) which is presumedly proprietary to Apple. However, you can rip music into an unencrypted AAC format (.m4a).
AAC is not an open standard, but was developed by the MPEG group, which includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia. As a result any software or hardware that uses AAC has to pay a license fee. As AAC is realtively new, support may be sporadic for the format in other players.
As a test I ripped some CD tracks to AAC format and then tried them out in other players. The Real One player didn't recognize the .m4a file extension. After renaming the files with .mp4 file extension, Real One downloaded a decoder, but then failed to import the ripped tracks. Note that these should not be encrypted tracks, as I ripped them, they weren't purchased from iTMS.
Windows Media Player didn't know what to do with either file extension (and I have the fully up to date version 9). There supposedly exists a winamp plugin for MP4/AAC, but I did not test it. There also appears to be a burgeoning gray market in unlicensed MP4/ACC de/encoders.
Even if your other audio players can read the audio format, they may not be able to read the meta tags you've created in the iTunes software, as Apple apparently uses its own tag format. So, if you rip to AAC, expect that iTunes will be the only platform that is going to provide full access to your music, until other players fully support the format. Also, don't expect to play the purchased music in native AAC format anywhere but in the iTunes player because of the built in encryption/DRM (though you can certainly burn a disc, then rip to MP3 format, you will lose some of the native quality).
If any of this is a problem for you, just rip directly to MP3 format and be done with it.
Importing your existing library
When you install iTunes, it will ask you if you want to search for existing music. I passed on this option, preferring to tell it exactly where to look. Importing older libraries of MP3s is simple. Just use the "Add Folder to Library" feature in the "File" menu.
I pointed iTunes to the root folder of my entire MP3 collection, and it figured everything out, flawlessly importing all of the albums, along with all of the meta tags. By default it leaves the tracks in their current location (which is what I wanted). You can choose to consolidate your music library at a later point. This copies everything into you iTunes music directory.
The iTunes music library directory is configurable. By default in Windows it's under My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music. If you want to change it (as will many with large secondary drives used for music storage), make sure you do so before you start downloading, otherwise you might end up with music files in multiple locations.
Sharing your music
No, iTunes won't let you get in trouble with the Recording Industry by sharing your music with everyone else on the Internet. What it will do is allow you to export your full music library, or various playlists, to up to five other people on your local network. I didn't test this feature extensively, but it worked flawlessly between my desktop machine and my laptop over a Wi-Fi network. Apple calls this feature "Rendezvous", and it's been available on the Mac for a while now.
It just works. I fired up iTunes on the laptop, and the shared library, with all its playlist was immediately available in the Source pane. I'd suggest Microsoft take a page from this playbook. Anyone who has ever messed around with Microsoft's supposedly 'plug and play' home networking knows what I am talking about.
You can't do much with a remote music library, other than play it, and it's play lists. You cannot edit the meta tags, or create/edit play lists. Not a biggie, I am not sure I'd want that much flexibility anyway.
Sharing between users on the same machine
iTunes makes sharing music with other PCs on the network a snap, but it's a bit harder to share music between users of the same PC. At home I've set up my computer with an account for myself, and one for my fiancee. I installed iTunes in my account, and downloaded some music.
We wanted to see if my fiancee could use this music as well. The iTunes icon was on her desktop, but when we launched it, there was no music available in her Library. We changed her music libary to point to the music library iTunes had created for my user account, but still, nothing showed up in the play list.
We did mange to get it to work by exporting my Library using the "Export Library" option on the "File" menu. This allows you to save all of your playlists and track information to a massive XML file. We then imported this into iTunes when logged into her user account. It worked. This is a bit clunky though, and I doubt any meta tag updates she does will be reflected in my Library, and vice versa.
I imagine we could have manually added the music to her iTunes Library using the import functionality. The larger problem is that as we buy or rip more music we will constantly have to worry about keeping both account's Libraries and playlists in sync.
One cool way to work around this would be to use Windows XP's fast user switching. I haven't tried this (I run Windows 2000), but in theory with fast user switching you should be able to use Rendezvous between two users on the same machine.
Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has become a dirty word in some technology circles. Many other music download services use DRM to lock you into their music player, force you to pay a subscription to keep listening to your music, and to tightly control what you can do with the music once you've downloaded it.
With iTunes, what's most noticable is how unobtrusive Apple has made the DRM. In fact, it's almost not present. Here are a list of things you can't do:
- Burn a play list with purchased music more than ten times
- Share music with more than 5 other computers on your local network
- Share music over the Internet
- Access your purchased music at full quality outside of iTunes
- Re-download music once you've successfully downloaded it once (remember to make backups!)
Internet Radio
iTunes provides a comprehensive list of Internet radio stations. I don't believe that Apple provides the content for any of these stations, but it does dynamically update the lists for each genre when you access them to ensure that the list remains fresh and defunct stations are removed.
I didn't exercise this feature too extensively, as I quickly found one of my favorite di.fm trance stations and spent the entire day at work listening to it - so I can't vouch for the quality or availability of the other stations. But there appears to be a wide selection, within a good variety of genres.
User Interface
If there is one thing I don't like about iTunes is the way it plays fast and loose with the various user interface metaphors. The iTunes player is a strange mixture between a "Brushed Metal" look, the native Mac OS X "Aqua" interface, and the boring old Windows native interface. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what's used where.
The menus and most drop down lists are windows native, even if the controls that access them are the Aqua look alikes. For example, in the iTMS there is a drop down list labeled "Select Genre". It's rendered with the translucent Aqua look and feel, but clicking it displays a drab Windows native drop down list. Just weird.
Also, what's up with this brushed metal obsession of Apple's? Why should computer software look and feel like a 1970's stereo component? I don't know. Do you?
The interface overall is sluggish. Presumably because of whatever software Apple used to port the Aqua eye candy to Windows. I'd prefer to give up some of the eye candy for a bit more speed.
All things considered, the interface potpourri doesn't get in the way too much, and though sluggish it's still usable. So these are all minor quibbles. Apple did such an outstanding job in making iTunes a simple yet powerful way to organize your music, that a few minor interface issues can easily be overlooked. At least until the next release.
Stability
One might think that as a first attempt at Windows software that iTunes might be buggy or prone to crashes. It didn't crash once in my usage, and handled some heavy workloads without incident. In fact I had it burning, ripping, and playing all at once. I'll bet you could add downloading to that list without a hiccough. There have been some reports of iTunes locking up after install - Apple is currently investigating. I did not experienced that particular issue.
I did find some minor display issues where sometimes the screen didn't update properly. Particularly when ripping, the little check mark sometimes didn't appear next to the track after it was ripped. This didn't seem to affect functionality in any way, and the songs played fine after the entire CD was ripped.
Wider implications for Apple
For years, Apple has been writing superior software, but only for the Mac. This has been a way for Apple to draw users to the Mac platform. Apple's tight control of the both the software and hardware environment allowed them to provide a superior user experience. For Apple to produce Windows software represents a sea-change in this philosophy.
First of all it represents a huge risk to the Apple brand. If it doesn't work well, or crashes due to the weird hardware/OS combinations that are all too prevalent in the Windows world, they will tarnish that hard won reputation for quaility and ease of use.
Secondly, they are giving up one of the drivers that pushes people to purchase that high margin Mac hardware - the superior software, that used to be available only on the Mac. There are people who bought Macs simply because of the media software that came bundled. Now, there is one less reason to get a Mac. Will Apple port more of these goodies to the PC? Is Steve Jobs crazy?
Like a fox. Note that Jobs has no plans to port OS X to commodity PC hardware, nor has he made any moves to port any of the other software in his suite of media productivity tools to the PC. The reason he ported iTunes is because it's the best way to access the iTunes Music Store. Apple makes money selling music on the iTunes music store. Probably not much money yet, but certainly they will make considerably more money if they don't restrict users to the Mac platform. With the advent of iTunes for Windows, the iTunes Music Store became the largest distributor of online music overnight.
Remember also that Steve jobs is in the process of re-conceptualizing the Mac as a media hub, de-emphasizing the computer itself, for media accessories. The iPod is an outgrowth of this process. With iTunes on my PC, guess what's now on my Christmas list? An iPod. I've played with other MP3 players and they software they use to manage MP3 libraries. They sucked - hard. iTunes shows me that it can be easy - it should be easy. In a single stroke Jobs has vastly increased the market for the iPod.
So what Jobs has done is managed to increase the market for two of his newest alternative revenue streams (iPod and iTMS) without singificantly compromising the revenue stream that's funding everything (Mac sales). Brilliant, and very pragmatic, so unlike Jobs.
Summary
Steve Jobs claims that iTunes is the best software ever written for Windows. It's certainly the best music player/Jukebox ever written for Windows. I don't know that any of the others can match it, feature for feature.
With iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, I honestly can't see myself returning to buying CDs. It's just so much more convenient, and significantly cheaper to download and burn - and I don't care about the minor quality differences or the lack of cover art. This is what I've been waiting for. YMMV of course, but it's definitely worth a try.
I love the fact that the sharing under an OS X box can now be accesses without any other software on the host computer. iTunes for Macintosh Rocks & now with the advent of iTunes for windows, it rocks as well!
"I'd be smart if I didn't let thinking get in the way."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can confirm that hell has not in fact frozen over because Natalie Portman is still refusing to date me.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
You can also burn CDs with the music you've purchases, provided you don't burn the same playlist more than 10 times.
I wonder if they included this restriction just to please the music studios. This is quite possibly the easiest thing to get around - burn the CD once and then just copy that CD instead of burning the files again. Unlimited copies!
It doesn't even seem like it would be worth coding that in there unless the studios required it...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
The previews are 30 seconds for a song, 90 seconds for an audio book. If you have one-click ordering on, then all the "Add Song"/"Add Album" buttons become "Buy Song"/"Buy Album". Apple have licensed Amazon's patents for one-click and "people who bought this also bought..." etc. (I believe they are the only other online store owner who have.)
Apple claim that the DVD burning works on Windows. As a Mac user I can say that iPod synching is effortless - I would assume that the Windows software operates the same (the iPod supports Firewire and USB 2). Apple have admitted that the iTMS makes no money at the moment and mainly exists to sell iPods.
The 5 computers thing is a restriction on the number of machines you can authorize to play DRMed music. You can share your own rips with as many on the local network as you like. You can also authorize a machine at work and copy your music there to play, but that's one less machine at home obviously. Rendezvous is very cool - it's basically plug-n-play IP (using wacky multicast DNS).
Various people have found ways to share a library between different users on Mac OS X, I would assume that similar hacks can be used with the Windows version - Google may turn up something helpful.
So easy to use, no wonder it's number one!
Err, sorry... I'm getting my corporate slogans mixed up.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
The main oversight I've noticed in reviews of iTunes is performance/efficiency, and it just so happens that performance is my major gripe with iTunes, and actually the main reason why I don't plan to use it.
iTunes uses around 40 MB of RAM on my WinXP SP1 machine, with no music files in my library and nothing playing. Add in the iPod driver and the iTunesHelper app that it runs in the background, and you've probably got around ~60MB of RAM usage on average. Winamp uses 8-10 megs in comparison.
Resizing the iTunes window is insanely slow - 100% CPU usage, and it takes a quarter to half second just for the screen to update while resizing the window. Oh yes, and if the Music Store is open? It takes, I kid you not, more than a second for the screen to update while resizing. The resizing performance seems to increase a little when the window gets small, which implies that the entire iTunes window is being buffered offscreen (which probably explains some of the RAM usage too.) I also noticed that dragging the volume slider would peg my CPU at 100%. I don't have a low-end machine, and I can only imagine how horribly slow iTunes must be on older machines. On one hand, though, iTunes didn't seem to lag when playing music and things like that. Switching playlists/views on the Source sidebar usually took between a half second and two seconds. Playing a 96KBPS MP3 radio stream used an average of ~8-12% CPU usage, which while not terrible is a lot more than Winamp uses to do the equivalent on my system. The iTunes visualizer averages a decent framerate of around 30FPS, so it looks smooth, but it obviously pegs the CPU.
iTunes's setup is also around 20 megs, which is a bit hefty for a music player. But since you get CD burning, iPod support, and online music purchasing in the deal, it's not too bad, but it probably is a little painful for modem users.
The iTunes executable is nearly 8 megabytes. I can't imagine that this does anything to help the ~6 second load times for iTunes that I experienced on my system (which has 768MB of DDR233 RAM, and an Athlon XP 1800+, FYI.) In comparison, Winamp loads in under a second. It seems to me almost that every single library and component iTunes uses is static-linked in, which is a bit bizarre.
Just to weigh in on the rest of iTunes:
The GUI is, overall, acceptable. I've never cared much for the Apple 'steel/silver/whatever' look, and while it's not bad, I can't say that it looks terribly attractive. One peculiar thing is that the titlebar looks very strange and is neither the titlebar that you see in OS X, or the standard Windows one - I can't say I understand their choice to roll their own titlebar, as the iTunes one lacks a few usability features of the Windows titlebar that I've come to rely on (context menu, icon, etc).
In comparison, the iTunes preferences dialogs are very well designed and use Windows XP themes when available, so they look mostly pleasing to the eye and are easy to navigate for someone who is comfortable with Windows.
iTunes adds a simple but useful system tray icon that lets you change tracks and turn shuffle/repeat on and off. Good feature, I'm glad they didn't leave it out.
One strange GUI quirk is that there are two options for Exit on the iTunes File menu - Exit, and Close Window. One would assume that Close Window would just close the window and leave iTunes running, like on the Mac, but no such luck - it exits, with no confirmation dialog. Strange.
You can't resize the iTunes window unless you grab the bottom-left corner. I've never liked this aspect of Mac GUIs at all, but I'm sure there are some people who do like it.
The music store is very polished and easy to navigate, and my guess is that it uses a subset of Safari for rendering (but of course, I could be wrong.) The front page presents lots of content in a very organized manner, and it's easy to navigate back to wherever you came from while looking around. I didn't get around to buying any songs, so I can't say how well th
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Yeah, and driving to work "just works" because of all the effort the road builders put in, not because of some fad called "a car".
Perhaps you don't understand. Rendezvous is a service discovery technology. It automatically finds machines on a network offering a service. Without Rendezvous, you'd have to find out the IP address yourself.
It really IS plug and play, in that as soon as I plug my iBook into a network, I show up on everyone's iChat Rendezvous list. Pretty smart, and much more than a 'fad' in my view.
> I don't care about the...lack of cover art.
Errrr. Two steps:
1 - Toggle 'iTunes > Edit > Show Artwork' on.
2 - Select a purchased track.
Alternatively,
1 - Select a purchased track.
2 - Visit 'File > Get Info > Artwork'.
--- Fox
Just go to the QuickTime Components Project.
It's not as elegant as having Ogg support out of the box, and the open-source component is beta right now, but it works. I just tested it.
And hell, Windows Media Player? Clearly, you're either a troll or you haven't begun to look at the tag editing functionality of iTunes. I'd delete this post if the information about Ogg weren't useful.
I have used the Windows version of iTunes and wanted to compare the experience to the Mac method. I went to a handful of Mac sites that have user forums with comments about Quicktime/iTunes vs WMP and it really seems that objectivity has gone out the window for most of these folks. Specifically when users make comments like "windows media format is inferior to AAC and MP3", in order to rally the fellow lemmings to cry out against the terrible M$ product. Makes me not want to buy anything Mac platform tho I know better. No, not all Mac users are idiots. It's just that the ones that are seem to be extra annoying.
.ogg format on your Linux box of course), try out iTunes and see why it is the trendy thing to do. You won't find a great variety of competitors to choose from if you don't want to go the iTunes route. Until there are significant AND popular alternatives, it's likely to be an enjoyable experience for the majority of users.
Fact is that with digital technology, if you don't have the ability to integrate your various softwares and devices because people are trying to force usage of only their product, everyone loses except for a minority of users.
Seeing as I can digitally play any file and capture it to disk in any format I like, there is nothing that can be done to prevent this. NOTHING. Their business model is for the interim as is most of the corporate world. Always has to change because they cant continually cash in for long periods of time without constant adjustments.
iTunes for Windows has a handful of great interface elements and functions. It satisfies most users desires who are looking to purchase music online for whatever reason (I personally don't buy anything that I can't inspect if I haven't heard it before, and no I dont want just snippets because people have a knack for making potentially great songs suck). I personally think it is great and good progress for the online community is being made by enabling normal common people to easily interact in a way that most can relate to. If I didn't have a completely digital sound system and multiple audio busses to let me do nearly anything I want (minus native program functions that do it for me), I might feel limited but probably it is more a state of mind than a state of being.
I highly recommend that if you are frequently online with a high speed connect, want easy to access media on your Windows or Mac system (to save in
(Disclaimer: Poster just woke up from a late party night hence the long format and is not in flame proof mode.)
One of the features touted by Apple is that when you buy from iTMS, you can copy that file to an unlimited number of iPods and unlimited number of times and it will always play on those iPods no matter what.
How exactly are the iPods getting around the DRM and what's to stop someone from making any of the iTMS files think they're actually being played on an iPod and not on a computer?
Sure. Shall we start from the top?
Forget the easy to use interface, its tiny footprint, the effortlessness in syncing it, its notes, calendars, games, contacts, etc. Lets focus on the big things.
Apple have designed it from the ground up based on the user rather than the techonology. Take the front panel buttons, they do not have moving parts. This is because a normal use will use it in environments that have dirt and other irritants.
The scroll wheel makes moving through menus so eas y it is not funny. It makes second nature in minutes and no other device, not a PC, nor a Mac nor even a microwave oven has anything like it in terms of perfect interfacing.
The sound outlet is put on the top...not the side. Most players I know have it wherever they feel like. The iPod is placed where you need it when it sits in your pocket (again, unlike most mp3 players).
This is a big deal to me...the scroll wheel when playing songs functions to skip through it, change the volume and change the rating. Everything so nicely placed and so perfectly executed.
Anyways, I am going to go to bed listening to these 5 new songs I downloaded and synced without a button click. Go grab your Wal-Mart mp3 player, but enjoy setting it up, and using it day to day. As for me, I will continue to buy and recommend the iPod to everyone I know. 7 other friends agree with me.
First, let me state that I own an iPod, which is why I like iTunes to some degree. It works incredibly well with the iPod.
However, it's not without it's faults, both major and minor. Most of them are because they shoved it out the door too early, I grant you. The next release may fix most of the problems.
Minor ones:
- Speed. It's slow. Not excessively so, but Apple made a massively huge mistake in porting large chunks of the iTunes interface to Windows using some kind of emulation trick. Resizing a column width isn't fluid and smooth like it should be. Even moving the window around is clunky because of all the custom interface code. Memorywise I have no complaints, unlike many others, but it's slow because it's trying to use nonstandard interfaces. Quicktime suffers the same problems. Hey guys, this is Windows. Use the freakin' Windows standard interfaces already. You're only pissing off Windows users. Ease of use? Ease of use always boils down to what you're used to, and that's it. I'm not used to using a Mac. If I actually had a mac, then maybe I'd be used to it. This is piss poor design and sloppy coding. If you're really determined to stick with the mac like interface, then actually rewrite the damn thing instead of slapping a slow emulation layer underneath it and shoving it out the door.
- Interface is totally wacky. There's no way to maximize the thing to get the most out of the screen real estate. NONE WHATSOEVER. You can drag the thing larger, but you absolutely, positively, cannot fill the screen. This is damn annoying. The maximize button even makes the damn thing go into compact mode. Talk about unintuitive. Again, USE THE STANDARD INTERFACES.
-It has a real problem playing one playlist while I do things to other songs. I start playing something in a list, then go elsewhere in the interface to edit tags or something, and when that song stops, the damn thing stops playing because I'm no longer on the playlist that I was on when I started playing. WTF? Why can't I have it continue to play songs in the background while I'm doing other shit in the foreground? This is clumsy and stupid. When I start the thing playing a list of songs, it should play until I tell it to stop, no matter what the heck I do. Unless I go in and remove songs from that list, don't freakin' stop. I hate having to go back to the list to start the next song every 4 minutes. It's so annoying that I've started using Winamp in the background to actually play songs while I'm modifying tags and adding album art and such.
- Oh, when I manually add album art to a file, if I do it more than once, it adds multiple pictures to that file (in the ID3 tag). This shouldn't happen, it should remove the old one first or overwrite it or something.
-Quicktime installation without asking. Make the initial install more clear that quicktime is going to be installed, and then install it in such a way that it doesn't: a) leave an icon in the taskbar by default, b) leave an icon in the Quick Launch bar by default, c) leave an icon on the desktop by default. In fact, why not detect if QT is installed, and if so, upgrade and then use it, but if it's not installed, just install the minimum crap needed to use iTunes, like DLL's and code and such. Maybe I don't want the damn QT player, but I still want to use iTunes... Forcing customers to have to clean up the shit you're spewing everywhere is not a way to make friends.
Major things:
- I cannot believe that an advanced media player program has no capability to retrieve tags and cover art and such for random files using available information. This is totally unacceptable in a modern music organizer program. Hell, even WMP9, as crappy as it does it, can do that. Why am I entering tags and cover art and such shit manually? WTF?
- Support other devices. Not massive support, you don't need to do smart playlists on them and such, but if you want to use iTunes as an interface to the store, then you need to be able to support devices other t
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The answer is that you can copy it to an iPod using iTunes and perhaps nothing else.
.MAC username, might as well encrypt the data too.
Apple's DRM works, basically, as follows:
1) Every iTMS user has an account. This account gets a key.
2) When you "authorize" a copy of iTunes, basically you're downloading a copy of that key somewhere onto that computer. Apple will let you authorize 3 copies of iTunes per account. You can "deauthorize" a computer too, telling apple that the key has been removed from that computer.
3) Every file you download from iTMS has some DRM in it. The M4P file (MPEG4 Protected) has a note in it saying which account downloaded it. In other words, it has your ".MAC" username inside.
4) When you play the file with iTunes, it sees the username and checks it's big list of keys to see if there's a key for that user on the computer. If so then it plays the file. If not, it doesn't.
The key can work a few different ways. Which way it really does work, I haven't fully worked out yet.
Method a) The M4P also contains a signature that decrypts with your key. iTunes then simply checks the signature using your key and plays if it's good.
Method b) The M4P's actual audio data is encrypted using your key. This is possible, since they're already modifying every downloaded M4P file to stick in a
Method c) A combinaton of both a and b. This seems most likely, but again, I haven't totally worked it out yet.
Now, when you stick the M4P onto the iPod, a few different things can happen:
a) iTunes can remove the DRM, decode the file into a normal unprotected one, and stick it on the iPod. Unlikely, as the iPod has basically zero protection for taking music back off of it. Just a bit of obfuscation, nothing seriously hard to overcome.
b) iTunes transfers the key to the iPod, which can then decrypt the file and play it as needed. This means that you must use iTunes to transfer the M4P to the iPod, and therefore this seems to be the most likely method.
The reason I call this whole mess DRM-lite is that everything you need to play the song is on one computer. This is easily proven, in fact, as you can authorize a computer, unplug the ethernet cable, and it still plays just fine. Reboot it, it still plays great. Whatever, the key is on the computer somewhere.
The crack that will eventually come up is that someone will find the key on the hard drive, figure out how it decodes the M4P, and write a quick and easy program that converts the M4P to an M4A (unprotected MPEG4 Audio). That'll be the way the conversion is done without decoding and encoding again.
Now that the other (and let's face it, a bit more technical and hackerish) 90% of the world has real solid access to the format, it'll be cracked in a couple weeks or so.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If you're wondering why this process might take awhile, the following tidbit might interest you. I have a poster hanging on my wall promoting Skinlab's CD "Disembody: The New Flesh." This album was released on a label called Century Media. At the bottom of the poster is the following, in fine print:
"Distribution: SPV in Germany; Caroline Distribution in the U.S.; Suburban in Benelux; House of Kicks in Sweden; Plastic Head in UK; Media 7 in France; NSM Records in Austria; Phonag Records in Switzerland; Self Distribution in Italy; Mastertrax in Spain; MVM in Portugal; MMP in Poland; Globus in Czech Republic; Music Dome in Hungary; Megatherion in Greece; Voices of Wonder in Norway; Spinefarm in Finland; NordicMetal in Denmark; NEMS Enterprises in Argentina; St. Clair in Canada; M.D.M.A. in Israel; Shock in Australia; Rock Brigade in Brazil."
The distributors above most likely have exclusive agreements for their respective markets. Meaning that if Apple wanted to sell tracks from this CD to Canadians, for example, it would first have to get permission from the label (Century Media), and it would then have to contact St. Clair, the Canadian distributor. Even if both of them agreed to let Apple in on the game, the contract between Century and St. Clair would need to be renegotiated, and new contracts drawn up between Apple and both companies.
And all this work only covers the 10 tracks from this album, as it's quite possible that Skinlab's other efforts are distributed through entirely different companies. Not to mention thousands of albums from hundreds of other artists. After all, it's doubtful that Apple would launch a Canadian version of ITMS without having a substantial number of songs available.
My condolences, but I don't think ITMS will be available in (m)any other countries for quite awhile. I agree, sucks... But don't blame Apple.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Ok, I have karma to burn, so I'll see your troll and call it.
Bowie, you find its equivalent at WalMart for $80 and I'll buy you one. But remember - it has to be it's equivalent - You said $350 - actually they make a 10GB for $299 or 20 GB for $399 - but here's your challenge find one at WalMart for $80 that has 10 GB, under 6 oz, firewire or usb2 sync, 8 hours on a rechargeable battery, Mac/Windows compatible, contact and calendar management, mountable as a hard drive, and since it's Sunday, I'll give you a pass on the photo storage/sync, on-the-go playlists and built-in games.
Knock yerself out, boy-o.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Apart from some minor annoyances, I think iTunes works really really well. The only major feature I'd like to see is the ability to minimize it so only the icon in the systray remains visible. I like to listen to music when I'm working and if I have a lot of programs open, I don't my music program taking up space in the taskbar.
Oh, it would also be nice to be able to remove cover art once you've added it. The way it is now, if you make a mistake, you're stuck with the wrong cover art.
>A non standard windows UI.
Really? I can't imagine a more severe crime to "Windows UI laws" than Windows Media Player, WinAmp 1,2,3 and RealPlayer.
Windows Media Player is even reluctant to accept drag'n'droping of files, unless you pinpoint a certain area in the UI.
And all media players in Windows fight for the file extensions, but that is probably something Windows itself should have an item in the Control panel for.
Regards, Tommy
But guy, I just did. I'm using the windows version. I downloaded an ogg file, added it to my library, clicked on burn disc, and got a fine audio disc with the correct recording on it.
I'm not about to create an entire Ogg library and waste CDs testing out every one of your assertions. Most of them sound like reasonable limitations on software that is certainly being expanded to be the most ambitious music player yet, what with the iTMS and Rendesvous and all.
As for petitions, come on... when does a petition work? People sign those things all the time. I know they recalled the Governor, sure, but mostly petitions don't tell the company anything they don't know. Market research already tells them that there may be, say, a hundred thousand people using Ogg. Why would they change their minds just because those people clicked on "Submit" somewhere?
I really wish people would do their research before assuming something can't be done.
iTunes for windows *can* burn DVDs
You can "Access your purchased music at full quality outside of iTunes". Any app that supports quicktime files can play them, there aren't as many such apps on windows as there ought to be (and as there are on mac), but that will change if there's any real demand for this feature.
Plus you can burn your music to CD with no quality loss.
"Apple uses it's own tag format" is technically true, but misleading because Apple's metadata fromat from quicktime was adopted as an open standard for MPEG-4. Any app that properly supports the MPEG-4 file format should be able to read those tags.
Also, AAC *is* an open standard, it's just pattented, the same as MP3. All the documentation is available, any you can make a MPEG-4 AAC codec and legally sell it up to 50,000 times without paying any liscencing fees.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
It wont install under the latest version of WineX - generates an error and stops the installation.
..........FULL STOP.
Bottom line, as of a few days ago, Windows users have another choice. It's far more than Mac users have. So why the bitching? Mac users seem perfectly happy. If you don't want any of this, don't use Apple's products. Use the others.
- As many people have pointed out, Apple has indeed written software for the PC, not a lot, but some. Brain fart on my part. Quicktime is the obvious one. Some people suggested Filemaker pro - the company that makes it is a subsidiary of Apple, so I imagine that counts.
- iTunes does not, repeat does not, leave your music where it was when you import it. It re-arranges song locations based on Author - not too big a deal unless you have a lot of compilations. A friend of my found his compliation CDs split into multiple directories based on author, and then album. I don't have many compilations, so this is not an issue for me. There is no obvious way of getting the files back together in the same directories. Strangely, when you rip a compilation CD using iTunes, it puts it into a 'Compilations' directory, storing all of the tracks together. Not sure why the import functionality can't do the same thing.
- Previews on iTMS are 30 seconds, not 20 seconds.
- DVD burning is supposed to work on Windows according to Apple.
- Many people seemed to find the performance of iTunes much less acceptable than I did. My impressions of performance may be a bit skewed, as I have a dual processor box with a lot of memory and a fast harddrive. A friend of mine just installed it on a newer uniprocessor Dell, and it seemed to perform well. YMMV.
Something other than...
iTunes For Windows sucks because...
A) It doesn't play OGG
B) Why pay for music when you can get it for free
C) It doesn't play WMA
D) It doesn't feel like a Windows program
E) All of the Above
I think what the majority of people overlook is that this is a first release, there are bound to be improvements in later versions (just look at the first release of the Windows Media Player).
While it might not be the best solution for those of us who are more technically-inclined, for the great unwashed masses it's the best option for *free* ripping/organizing/burning out there.
Is it the best overall, well I think it's a step in the right direction. I still wish that I had WMA capability for my iPod. Then again, I do think that AAC is the best format around between the three (MP3, WMA, AAC) - at least at the bitrate I encode at and the music I listen to.
I think we shoudl applaud Apple for the time and effor they took exporting this app to the Windows platform. Although not completely altruistic (they want people to buy music and iPods), it was certainly going beyond what was required. If they just wanted to sell music, a little app to browse the store and sync your music with your iPod was all that was needed. Making iTunes for Windows completely undistinguishable from iTunes 4.x was going above and beyond, and they seem to have pulled it off.
It's not perfect, but it's definitely for the majority of users, the best music app out there.
Dr. Wu
"Yes, There's Gas In The Car"
Apple has writtent other software for Windows too. Through Claris and now FileMaker, the FileMaker and FileMaker Pro databases are available on Windows.
Also, before Apple canned it, they (as Apple and before that, NeXT Software) have written plenty Windows Apps, like WebObjects, Enterprise Objects Framework and all the devs tools that have now become XCode (aka, Project Builder and Interface Builder).
Don't be fooled. Those who wrote iTunes are those same folks that worked at NeXT before that.
In my experience XP networking can be as easy as just plugging in the cable and running the wizard. But it can also be as hard as hours of changing settings, rebooting after each change. I have had a network that had to be fiddled with every morning after turning the machines off for the night. Then after a LAN party I set it all up in again and it worked fine first time and has done since.
This seems to be a trademark of XP, sometimes it works fine, but sometimes for no apparant reason it just won't work. There are few things more annoying than a problem that has bugged you for months just disappearing, because you know its going to come back at some point and you still won't have any idea what causes it.
I personally am done with stealing music. I did it quite a bit when mp3's were getting started and Napster was new. I did Kazaa for a while also...but there was always something nagging me about doing that.
While I'm sure The Rolling Stones or The Beatles wouldn't be hurt by my downloads, little bands would...kinda sorta. While I don't want to reward the money grubbing record companies that make the artists sign these outrageous contracts and then they end up with nothing (there is a list a mile long from past AND present artists that are getting screwed out of money from their record companies), I don't want to cheat anyone out of what they worked hard for.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Apple makes money selling music on the iTunes music store. Probably not much money yet, but certainly they will make considerably more money if they don't restrict users to the Mac platform.
Actually they make no money on the iTMS at the moment. It exists primarily to sell iPods, which do make money.
With the advent of iTunes for Windows, the iTunes Music Store became the largest distributor of online music overnight.
Wrong. According to Jobs, citing Nielsen I think, it was already the largest distributor of online music, with 70% market share, before the advent of iTunes for Windows.
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LOL. Because NO other Windows software does this. I love installing RealPlayer because it just installs a single application, doesn't add links to my start-up application, doesn't place itself in my system tray, doesn't place icons (multiple) on my desktop, doesn't take over all music and movie related tasks, and lordknows for some strange reason, it doesn't take over my internet downloads.
God, almost every windows third-party media application (that isn't open-source) does this. I find it hilarious that Windows user are complaining that Apple is doing it. Now personally, I'd be all for Apple to not add another useless items to the start-up menu, because lord knows qttask.exe is not necessary there. I'm just amazed that people who use RealPlayer, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, and or MusicMatch would complain because iTunes gave them icons and start-up applications that they don't want.
"What? I see load times of around 1.5 seconds. Again, you're either lying or there's something seriously wrong with your machine. "
Sorry but of the three machines I've tried it on (PIII900,XP1900,Duron 1GHz all w/512MB) ITunes doesn't come close to launching in 1.5 seconds.
Hey I mostly like ITunes, but you're really in denial about slow it can be. Initial startup takes well over 10 seconds and second launches take just about 4 seconds on my fastest PC. Good for you if it starts up so fast, but rest assured a large percentage of its users don't experience that. And contrary to your accusations were all not a bunch of liars.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
WebObjects for Windows hasn't been canned, it's available for Windows 2000 Professional (development) and Windows 2000 Server (Deployment).
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Might be a tacky solution, but if you have friends in the US just get them to send you a gift certificate, then just pay them back. Use that to buy your music.
:)
Don't know if it'd work, but worth a shot
iTunes DOES leave your music where it is when you add a folder to the library (i.e. by dragging said folder to the Library icon in iTunes, or choosing Add Folder to Library from the File menu). If you do that, it won't make any changes at all to any other music folders that are added to the library (I just confirmed this by looking through various mp3 folders I added to the library, and they are all still the exact same folder structures and file names as before).
However, if you set a folder of mp3's as your root Music directory in iTunes, as described here, it will treat it as the iTunes Music Folder.
If you do want to do that, but don't want it to do the automatic re-sorting, etc. you described, you will want to go to the Preferences, choose Advanced, and uncheck the option for Keep Music Folder Organized. If you do that, it will leave all your music in tact.
Personally I chose to just add folders to the library without making any of them the actual iTunes Music Folder.
The other option available is to copy any music you add to the library to the iTunes Music Folder (which would leave all of your original music in the same place).
I imagine Apple might want to do something to perhaps make this a bit clearer, as people might more by instinct just make their mp3 folder their iTunes Music Folder, instead of just adding folders to the library.
-Tom
as Apple apparently uses its own tag format
Apple uses ID3 v2.4 (which added album artwork support).
Your other media players are written by companies that apparently don't care about standards.
Vonal Declosion