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iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003'
Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."
A few days after Itunes for Win32 came out, I decided to reboot from Gnu/Linux to try out Itunes on my decficated Windows XP partition.
.exe file which of course was being slashdotted by millions of Apple zealots, so it took around an hour on my Cable modem.
First of all, I had to download the HUGE 19.9 Mb
When it finally downloaded I double clicked the install file. Yuck, an installshield, so much slower than the RPM format I am used to. I had to read the Apple EULA, wait around 20 minutes for it to install, and GASP Reboot, installling xmms.rpm didn't go that.
After rebooting, a dialog came up telling me where to scan for files. I selected "my documents" of course. Unfortunatley it retardedly thought my pr0n mpgs were "music" so I had to spend around 30 minutes removing them from the list.
After pissing around i decided to actually tried it out. First of all I could tell it was retarded. I had previously tried the Mac Version on a G5 at my local PC world, and this was a completley different looking App. Its used non standard controls, no way to maximise it and looked retarded similar to what Windows 3.1 looked like. Looks like whoever ported it to Windows had NO idea of the Windows HIG. Brushed metal looks so inconsistant on Windows too, and unlike other media players its not skinabble.
Its visualiasion feature was completley stupid, for the first 10 seconds it ALWAYS swowed a gay little Apple logo in the centre of the screen, with no way to turn it off.
The Musique store was useless for me, since I live in the UK, I could only listen to crappy previews that even on my 15 quid speakers sounded like ass.
I think that the music store could be a good idea, providing Apple provides an API for other Music Players to be able to connect to the Apple store, and that they provide service world wide (and at decent exchange rates, charge no more than 59p in the UK). But i don't like the Windows version of itunes. Lukily the other day I found a linux program called Rhythmbox that a similar layout to itunes but has the crap stripped out, actually conforms to Operating System HIGS and does what its supposed to DO, and THAT IS TO PLAY MUSIC!
Someone sounds like they work in the pantent office.
Seriously, though. Get your head out of your ass.
Should I read that you meant "an entire box of Twinkies" instead of "solid food"?
At $1/song locked into a propietary platform, I may as well stick to CDs.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. iTunes is an online CD delivery service.
You go to iTunes. You find an album you like. You click the "buy" button. Seconds or minutes later, it's on your computer. You put in a blank CD. You click the "burn" button. Minutes later, it's sitting on your shelf next to all your other plain, ordinary, non-proprietary audio CD's.
$10 canadian per CD will bring me BACK to the CD format
Wait just a damn minute. You're Canadian? In that case--no offense--who the hell cares what you think? iTunes isn't available in Canada. Your opinion on this subject is irrelevant.
There was NO invention here. Steve Jobs could take a dump in your breakfast cereal, call it iShit, and you fucking retards would pay him money for the privilege of eating it.
So yeah, that one part of it, happens to be innovative you like massively-pushed music.
And of course, iTunes music store sells their stuff in a weird format for which there are very few players. (Some people (well, usually AC trolls) keep saying that the AAC format isn't "weird" and is standardized, but they forget that the DRM effectively makes the files nonstandard.) The fact that MS Windows users needed special software before they could take advantage of the service, and the fact that every other platform in the universe except for Windows and MacOS still can't use the service, shows just how flawed the approach is, from a "standards" perspective. mp3.com (and other services like them) beats the living shit out of Apple's product in this regard, has had that advantage for many years, and there is little hope that Apple will ever modernize and become competitive, thanks to their DRM requirement.
The DRM is really dumb, too. In order to make the DRM at all tolerable to users, they had to effectively neuter it by letting people burn the music to CD. So it doesn't actually provide any copy protection at all; it merely adds a monopoly chokepoint to the users' toolchain. Worst of all worlds: inconvenience the good guys, don't slow down the bad guys. (In other words, the typical results whenever copy protection is involved.)
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