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iTunes Disables MusicMatch
spooza writes "If you own an iPod and use it with MusicMatch on a Windows machine and then install iTunes, strange things happen: after the installation, MusicMatch is unable to communicate or even find the iPod anymore. Of course this might be a coincidence or bad programming on the Apple side, but since MusicMatch also introduced a pay-per-download service it seems not too farfetched to suspect that Apple simply took the opportunity to knock out an opponent. The funny thing is, Apple and MusicMatch cooperated before, because Apple wanted to have software that was able to work with iPod and thus not lose potential customers that want to buy an iPod but have only Windows." MusicMatch recommends deleting, then downloading and reinstalling, the MusicMatch software to reenable it.
Even with the registry patch for xplay almost every time I fire up iTunes afterwards I get a blank xplay folder. EphPod seems to work fine no matter what. I wonder how they are able to overcome this.
Apple said fairly upfront that if you installed iTunes for windows, iTunes would be the only way to load your iPod anymore.
I don't even have an iPod and yet i know this.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
They go through several lengthy notices when you move to download iTunes, and then to install it, that if you are already on Windows your MusicMatch software will no longer function.
MusicMatch was a bandaid for Apple when they did not have a Windows software client.
Game on.
At least it is not targeted at MusicMatch, just broadly to all competitors :)
I joined two users too late.
Funny, I remember when installing iTunes on my laptop, it WARNED your that this would happen.
While I see MusicMatch not being happy about this, it isn't like it wasn't an expected result of the iTunes installer.
I had to use musicmatch for my ipod, and it was one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. Musicmatch was kind enough to send me an e-mail alerting me that itunes would disable the musicmatch interaction with my ipod, unfortunately when I replied to the e-mail with "Thank god, your software is horrible" it didn't go to an actual person. Oh well.
So Apple co-operated with MusicMatch, up and until it had its own software, and then used it to knock out its former partner.
Reminds me of a certain big software company somewhere in the North West of the USA.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I work for Apple and am therefore posting anonymously. While this was done on purpose, it was buy a sole developer, and not a decision by Apple. That developer has since been let go.
Bullshit! If that was the case, iTunes would have immediately been 'fixed' to stop that behaviour, and/or a patch released.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
You know, I would have thought this was simply another conspiracy theory on /. created to stir up controversy and debate. However, after reading this and this on Think Secret the other day I'm not so sure. This isn't the first not will it likely be the last transgression at this level pulled by Apple.
This is classic Apple (as I type this from my 15" TiBook) and lets face it. Apple is used to controlling the environment it is in (why the hell freezing over joke was less of a joke than outsiders realize) and this only smacks of something any Apple user has known since they became an Apple user. That Apple takes care of the hard part and doesn't leave much control to the end user as a result. ie; It just works...
FYI: I like that as much as I like the exact opposite with Linux, which I run on multilple machines so the above was not a dig.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
It's because their hate for MS completely biases them - to them, anyone who takes marketshare from Microsoft is a hero. I imagine that there will be lots of people defending Apple here, but could you imagine the reaction here if Microsoft pulled the same stunt?
What is your alternative in the computer industry?
Apple is looking good mostly by comparison with it's peers.
they seem to be like any other large software coporation out there, in it for the benjamins, and nothing else.
I presume you mean "like any other large software and hardware corporation".
Just in case you weren't aware, the primary responsibility of every public for-profit company (Apple is one) is to make a profit for the shareholders. So, yes, "the benjamins". That is not a bad thing - without the profit motive very few cool new things would be produced.
Regardless of Apple's profit motive (which as I pointed out every other company has as well) it produces some of the coolest, fastest and best engineered gear out there. Apple also had the wisdom to adopt a Unix-like OS, along with many other well-chosen hardware and software standards.
All of this is more than enough reason for any self-respecting geek to salivate heavily! :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
This doesn't strike me as frontpage material, folks. It's kind of a no-brainer.
"And before you start lambasting Apple for pulling a stunt like this, c'mon... the people affected by this are Windows users-- they're used to this kind of treatment. Obviously they thrive on it, or they'd have ditched Microsoft years ago. Heck, crippling a competing product was probably the only way Apple could have gotten an ounce of respect from these folks in the first place. In fact, we think Apple probably missed a golden opportunity to win some serious admiration from the Windows community; instead of simply removing MusicMatch's ability to sync with the iPod, iTunes should also have deleted MusicMatch entirely, installed spyware, inexplicably disabled a random piece of system hardware, reformatted any writable volumes not containing iTunes itself, and then emailed itself to everyone in the user's Outlook address book. Oh, and it should have cost thirty bucks. More, with technical support."
Yeah, just imagine if Internet Explorer disabled Netscape when it was installed...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
If you want to use xpod or musicmatch with the ipod, you just have to terminate (kill) the iTunesHelper.exe process. That will allow xpod and musicmatch, and most likely any other ipod software to work.
Then I got a mac.
,of course, the firewire ports on his laptop are 4 pin, and don't have power in them, so we had to leave the ipod plugged in for an hour or so before being able to use it.
Now I understand.
Apple is a corporation. Yes. They are out to make money. Yes.
Their way of doing so, however, is to make some rally kick ass stuff.
I *LOVE* OS X. And I"m a control freak. If I didn't have OS X, I would be using a linux desktop, no questions asked.
As it is I get a rock solid desktop that rules. In fact, I'll even go as far as to say that if you haven't sat down and really got to know OS X as a desktop, you only THINK You know what a good desktop is.
It IS that much better, in terms of user experience. Apple knows what "User experience" actually means.. to microsoft it's a buzzword. You don't know what good effortless computing can be if you haven't been using a mac.
What they say about itunes is totally true...
I bought an ipod last summer. I plugged it into my ibook. Then I opened up the manual, and started reading.. and basically every step said "If you have a mac, skip this step". When I got to the end, there was nothing for me to do.. I looked back at the laptop, and it had already done everyting.
THen my co-worker got one, and he uses windows.
It took us 5 or 6 weird dialog boxes to install MusicMatch.
Then we had to get musicmatch to import his music to it's library (which was REALLY slow, and it doesn't even move files around, just reads them). We had to reboot.
We had a few more dialog boxes for a few other components....
Then we could synchronize, which was by overwriting everything already in the ipod. And it was slow.
And,
End result:
I plugged in my ipod, and it worked. All the music I had ended up on my ipod in seconds, and it started charging up.
IT took us an hour or so of futzing around to get my co-workers to work.
See this discussion over at Ars Technica for more details.
Bottom line : iTunes or GEAR removes vital registry keys that prevent audio CDs from playing once you've uninstalled the software. I had to manually hack my registry to restore functionality.
Bad Apple. No Cookie.
Its great, Apple does bad business practices and people look away, a company like Microsoft does something simular and people start whining about how their evil and mean.
Apple should not have done this, and I hope affects them in a bad way, either loss of revenue, or loss of customers.
TruePunk | Games
I highly recommend using Ephpod (http://www.ephpod.com/) with an iPod under Windows. When my SO gave me my iPod as a present last year and I installed MusicMatch on my work laptop MM was dogslow and often didn't finish syncing with the iPod. The free alternative Ephpod is simple to use and has always worked perfectly for me.
regards,
Heiko
If you're a sysadmin nerd, it's sort of a given that if you have two sources accessing the same filesystem at the same time, you're going to clobber your data. (That is, unless special protection is used.)
Maybe Apple just wanted to prevent people from screwing up their iPods.
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
"Why would you want to use Musicmatch when you have iTunes"
"Musicmatch is a piece of crap, iTunes is much better"
"There's nothing wrong with this, Musicmatch was a temporary solution until iTunes came out"
The thing is, you ought to have the choice of using whatever program you want. Internet Explorer doesn't diddle the network settings of Mozilla or Netscape when it installs so that they will no longer be able to communicate with the www.
Not true. There were and are tons of alternatives to Music Match on Windows.
My very own vPod is one of them.
Users of XPlay (third-party iPod software) may be familiar with a similar problem. If you have XPlay installed and then install the MusicMatch which comes with your iPod (I prefer XPlay to MusicMatch for interfacing with my iPod, but love MusicMatch's tagging utilities) XPlay will no longer see the iPod at all.
Nothing really suprising here. There is only one driver for the iPod on the machine and when you install software that uses accesses the driver it will register itself as the default application.
Your USB cable has three ends. One is firewire, one is USB and one is the iPod dock. Plug the USB end into the computer, the dock end into the iPod and the firewire end into the AC adapter that came with your iPod.
When I first read this, I was thinking "big fat deal. Everyone knows Apple does proprietary stuff." Then I read some of the comments about how people would be attempting to storm the gates of Redmond if Microsoft pulled something like this, and realized that my attitude is hypocritical.
And I still don't care.
Apparently, my principles don't come into play when the software works seamlessly and efficiently and the UI is so pretty.
This would bother me, but OSX is shiny and it's distracting me....
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
iTunes warns during install that it will disable Musicmatch. You're choices are a) iTunes for the iPod with Musicmatch not using it, or b) Musicmatch only. And Explorer most definately "diddles" with default browser settings. Hell, I ran the Word demo on my new Powerbook and suddenly Explorer was my default browser and I had never even launched it.
Just because you don't like the choices doesn't mean they aren't there. Since iTunes likely launches when an iPod is plugged in having Musicmatch also recognize it probably causes problems. While one might lament that Apple had somehow worked it out that you could choose each time, I'd argue that they had no real motivation to and from an ease-of-use point of view went for iTunes taking over the iPod completely.
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.
Lots of people have complained that if you have an iPod for Windows, and you have a Mac, when you plug the iPod into the Mac, the Mac wants to reformat it. And when you have an iPod for Mac and you plug it into your Windows machine, MusicMatch doesn't work with it without reformatting.
This is because the iPod looks like a disk drive. On the Mac, it's formatted as an HFS volume. On Windows, it was formatted as a Windows volume.
Now, with iTunes for Windows, you can share your iPod between Windows and Mac. This is because iTunes for Windows knows how to deal with HFS volumes. But unfortunately, MusicMatch for Windows does not know how to do this.
So you lose something, and you get something. Depending on what you want, you may prefer one solution or the other. If you prefer MusicMatch, stick with it. If you prefer iTunes, stick with it.
The point is that this was not just an arbitrary attempt to shut MusicMatch out of the business. It was done for a good reason. If MusicMatch wants to maintain iPod compatiblity after you install iTunes, this is doable, because HFS+ is a documented standard, and the source code to read and write HFS+ filesystems is available from Apple - it's part of Darwin, which is open source.
So yes, Apple did make an incompatible change. And it sucks for people who really like MusicMatch. But there was a good reason for making the change, and I personally think the end result is a significant improvement. YMMV.
This is a sentiment I have never understood..."Apple is cool, so people only use Apple computers to be cool"...It almost defies logic...If Apple were "cool" why wouldn't they have more market share, or at least mindshare?...As a long time Apple user, I can say, anecdotally, that I have never once had a conversation with another Apple user regarding how much cooler our computers are than others.
/. spewing fictitious nonsense about a platform they know nothing about -- and I'm not talking about Apple either...
People who choose to use Macs have always dealt with 'less' options...I don't see how being on the fringe is cool...If anything we have generally felt marginalized -- sure we have steeled our resolve with a belief that we get more done, or that we work more efficiently, but that really just helps to fortify our own conclusions...does that make us 'different'...I could care less...does being 'different' make us 'cool'? Again I could care less.
It always seems like it is the people who do not use Apple computers who have an obsession with being 'cool' or not. I myself, just continue to do my work on my Macs as I have done for many years now.
BTW, do you really think Apple users think they are 'cooler' than Linux user think themselves. If you cannot acknowledge that there are vastly more Linux poseurs out there than Apple poseurs, you are fooling yourself. I can support this simply by the fact that Mac users, as lame as you want to see them, by the lowest common denominator, at least run productivity/creativity apps most of the time. Most Linux wanabees just spend their time installing the latest release, do no coding, no produuctivity/creative app work, and then post AC drivel on
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
iTMS uses the FairPlay DRM. I have a lot of songs and I can't think of a single instance when FairPlay got in my way or kept me from doing anything. I can burn the songs to as many CDs as I like, play the music on up to three computers (at a time), and transfer it to as many iPods as I like. How exactly is that restricting me?
/chances are good/ you will want to use iTunes for syncing with your iPod anyways should you continue to use iTunes (not guaranteed, but likely).
This is like saying: "I never wanted to go out at night anyways, so how is this curfew a restriction." I have no desire at all to read comic books - yet if somebody decided that I could never read comic books I would still be angry.
The fact of the matter is that there are restrictions ("up to three computers") and the only way that ITMS can enforce them is by making sure that the software controls how you can access the data on your own computer. What I am saying is that that relationship between ourselves and our computers (the one where they place restrictions on us, however innouxious those restrictions may be) is one that we should never accept in the first place.
Just like I demand freedom of speech as a principle, not as something on which I will accept restrictions as long as I don't notice them, I demand control over my own computer and the data in it as a principle.
The rest of iTunes has no DRM incorporated. What this entire story is about is not any form of DRM, but Apple replacing MusicMatch's functionality with their own.
I wasn't replying to that, I was replying to the person who linked to an article about (among other things DRM) and tried to use that as a reason to make Macs better than PCs. The simple truth is that as of ITMS Macs have embraced the idea that users should be subjects to their computers just as much as Microsoft has with WMP and Palladium.
(Of course, I wasn't moderated down as being offtopic but rather overrated, as any comment critical of Apple invariably is if it reaches a score greater than three. At least this time the similiarly inevitable +5 modded flame quoted my entire post...)
Besides, if you own an iPod and you've download iTunes,
This is the argument I am uninterested it. As far as I am concerned, this just sounds like the typical antics of closed software programs, and is one of the reasons I only use free software. But, I want to comment that you are falling for the same fallacy here as you are with DRM.
It is not OK to break into somebody's house and replace a belonging with something else even if everybody you do it will like what you leave better than what you took (I don't want to argue whether this is a case of that, but in the quoted text above you are saying "this would be ok even if it was.") Our freedoms, our integrity, and our self determination are principles of humanity - it is not OK to step on them even when it isn't inconvenient for us.
So would you and whichever moderator modded you up remove your tinfoil hats?
Since I have gone from being scared to deeply depressed about this issue (mostly after seeing the majority of Slashdot suddenly embrace the concept of DRM once they realized they could get something in return for it) I wish it wouldn't worry me, but I see nothing "tinfoil hat" about it.
It is Microsoft and media industry's stated aim to have remote attestation built into the fabric of the web, so that websites will use DRM for their content, so that communication will only be possible between DRM enabled users, etc etc. I thought Slashdotters and maybe even Mac-heads would fight the takeover of our computers by programs hostile toward us, but instead they have become the backers and defenders of the process. It seems little other than inevitable now that we will not in a few years face a closed, proprietary, and restricted Internet.
In all fairness, Moofie, you're obviously using iTunes for Windows on .. (wait for it).. a Windows machine. This puts you in a mindset of ignoring dialog boxes, and not bothering to read them fully, because so many Windows dialog boxes are on the level of Clippy - totally fscking useless.
Should it be less easy to miss important messages in a dialog box? Yes. How should it be done? By programs not crying "Wolf!" all the time. If you want to blame someone, don't blame Apple. Blame the people who write programs that pop up dialog boxes for things like, "You have requested a web page from the Internet. Are you sure you wish to continue?" in web browsers.
Oh, and blame yourself for not reading the dialog box. Asking OS mfg's to protect you from your own stupidity only fosters more stupidity.
Sorry. Tough love, and all that.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
This is the email I sent to MM after receiving their whiny "notice" that MM would stop talking to my iPod if I installed iTunes. I did install iTunes....but MM don't work because I shitcanned it. ;-)
Sirs:
Hmmm...iTunes is faster at ripping, has better integration with my iPod, has a cleaner, more intuitive interface with less of the glitzy crap that MM comes with. iTunes also starts faster, only uses a single window on my desktop and integrates with Apples music store and proprietary music formats. I also don't use either for playing music on my PC, prefering the QCD player.
Apple didn't make the choice...I did. I uninstalled MusicMatch and have no intentions to go back to your bloated, cumbersome, slow, unreliable package when iTunes does everything I need and more.
The only reason I used MM was because it was the only option on a Windows box. Now that iTunes is here....MM is history as far as I am concerned.
After living with MM for about 6 months, I can truly say that I do "get the best possible experience when managing your MP3 collection and transferring music to your iPod" to quote your words. By using iTunes for Windows.
Your implication that MM is better than iTunes is both insulting and incorrect based on my experience.
Chaeron Corporation
Yes, except Apple understands software and hardware engineering. Plus Apple has released a large portion of it's OS and compiler technology to the Open Source community.
Microsoft's stuff has the simple elegance of an elephant...with gout.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I could watch it in the Task Manager's "Performance" tab, as my memory consumption gradually went from about 250MB to 1GB until the sync finished.
Then I found EphPod, which is better than MusicMatch *or* iTunes....