Slashdot Mirror
iTunes 4.2 and QuickTime 6.5
usr122122121 writes "iTunes 4.2 and QuickTime 6.5 were released today, available by Apple's Site and Software Update (respectively)."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
".. shortest news item, ever"
Now people with AOL can just use their screen name to buy songs on iTMS, and it'll be billed to their AOL account.
...
Not that I would know personally now!! I read it on the website, I swear!
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
when it plays ogg, runs on linux, is devoid of patents, is open source, is GPLed and can first post for me.
Quicktime info
iTunes info
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
Here are the "new" features.
For itunes, you can now use your aol login, and aol
wallet to pay for stuff.
Quicktime now supports the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards
These standards are usefull for Third generation cell phones. They allow transfer of scalled video, sound, text, and just about anything as the yare track based formats.
(anyone know if the itunes breaks the support for mytunes <www.cowpimp.com> the program that lets you download thru mytumes)**
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
There's a good java clone of iTunes complete with Rendezvous support.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtunes4/
any plans of a Linux version of iTunes? Since Mac OS X kernel is BSD, I guess porting to Linux wouldn't be that hard.
This is kinda like saying it would not be hard to port Internet Explorer to DOS. There are a number of problems with porting iTunes to Linux, mainly:
Granted, iTunes was successfully ported to an OS that has no real UNIX underpinnings in common with OS X (Windows), but the fact that QuickTime already existed in a mature state for that platform eased things a great deal I'm sure. It's not impossible, but there is little incentive for Apple to put the rather gargantuan effort required into porting iTunes Linux.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
>A non-unix based software program
....
Ummm
Non-Unix Operating system?
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
You've basically summed up why a lot of good commercial software doesn't exists for linux. Photoshop anyone? This isn't meant to be a troll, but he makes the point that companies want to release closed source software without jumping through hurdles. However, this is not an attack on Linux, but more so on the distros for not agreeing on standards. Make standards, then compete. This is why people hate internet explorer so much, it broke away from standards and tried to make the www a microsoft application.
But I'm not trying to be negative, things are improving...
Hey, here's a hint - If you load iTunes and hit that button that looks liek a triangle on its side - you can now play your "worthless" AAC files!
Man that must have been frustrating downloading all those songs and not knowing what to do next. Once you learn this "triangle trick" you might find you are able to play music on all sorts of things you couldn't before!! Those shiny discs at Target? They all have music on them as well as it turns out, once you slip them into that funny looking box in the middle of your car that until now has only emitted the tortured sounds of radio DJ's.
No need to thank me for opening the wide world of music to you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
forget about AOL support ... you can group tracks now! awesome
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Or make a 7-line AppleScript
on open fileName
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
open fileName
present movie 1
end tell
end open
Drag a movie onto the script icon and it plays full screen.
Idiot.
The kernel (Mach, in Mac OS X's case) doesn't matter much to a media player. Obviously things like hardware support and i/o latency make a difference, but more or less any modern OS will support something that supports MP3 playing. It probably wasn't a matter of a quick recompile, but iTunes works fine on Windows, which has a completely different hardware and low-level software architecture.
What makes the difference here is having a media architecture. iTunes floats on QuickTime, which Apple trusts to work really well with various audio codecs (and their DRM schemes). Besides that, it's (")just(") some GUI, network, security, and disc-burning code. QuickTime is the central issue here; Apple would not make iTunes for mpg123/ALSA/whatever.
But if you're asking "Why haven't they ported QuickTime to Linux yet?", I agree. I suppose they might be thinking like this:
In other words, they have to port to Windows if they want it to survive at all. But they're the powerful ones in comparison to Linux, and they can just try to borg its users.
Disclaimers: (1) this is pure speculation, (2) I use Mac OS X considerably more than Linux these days, and (3) I'm feeding a troll.
Scientists have figured out how to sucessfully reconstruct a circle given only two points.
And some other, related headlines...
Slashdot moderators continue to consume crack in mass quantities.
The parent post is decidedly not funny.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Quicktime 6.5 does not fix the No One Lives Forever 2 problem with QT 6.4. I just tried it.
Back to rebooting in 10.2.8/QT 6.3 for Cate Archer action.
JP
> Which hack was that?
QTFairUse.
Mmm, but iTunes is mainly used to buy music online, not to play music, QuickTime maybe used to preview music, but I think they can use Linux OSS or something similar, or just give the user the preview file to play using MPlayer or Xine, so I think QuickTime isn't that important in porting iTunes.
If you're only speaking in terms of what it does that can't already be done well by something else in Linux, then yes, iTunes mainly is just for buying stuff from the iTMS. However, the way that's worded, it sounds more like a comment on what people who use iTunes use it for. People who use it, in my experience, do not use it primarily to buy things. It's been the primary MP3 player/organizer on the Mac for most people for years now (probably since SoundJam was discontinued), kind of like how everyone uses WinAmp on Windows, but with a less profoundly odd interface (which is a whole different story...don't get me started on using ZXCVB for play/stop/ff/rw/etc. or how unintuitive that is).
If it were to be ported, I don't see Apple just porting the store and not the rest of the features iTunes has. From what I've seen, they seem to want to keep everything together in products like that, because the presentation and the total package are a vital part of their image.
The point of iTunes isn't to buy music, it's to have a completely integrated music experience where everything is handled in a simple, streamlined way with a consistent interface. The only single missing feature from other software is the iTMS, but passing files between different apps in Linux to accomplish the same thing isn't the "Apple way". In iTunes, you can seamlessly buy songs from the iTMS, have them automatically added to your master playlist and your music folder, create a new playlist of songs (even automatically based on criteria you specify, if you want), then burn it to a CD and have it all synced to your iPod, with maybe a dozen mouse clicks, all in the same familiar interface, pretty much straight out of the box.
So no, it probably wouldn't be that hard to just port the iTMS frontend itself and write something to handle the AAC files (with their minimal DRM...I'm sure there's plenty of stuff to play normal AAC files already), but that just isn't how Apple works. If you don't get the full experience of it, where's the incentive to go out and buy their products in the future? There won't be Linux iTunes unless they can use it to entice enough people to use OS X on Apple hardware to make the cost of porting the full app worth it.
Apple said they love open source. Not that they love linux. Apple is using materials from open source projects such as BSD and Konqueror, and they are contributing code back to those same projects. I don't see why this means they have an obligation to write some big complicated AAC library for UNIX when the UNIX OSes don't even seem to have a totally homogenous way to playback sound.
I'd concentrate on seeing what you can do to get Wine to accept iTunes if you want to use iTunes Music Store in Linux.
If you really want something native, MPlayer can play AAC already. All it needs to play iTMS purchases is to get past the DRM wrapper. The DRM wrapper on iTMS purchases is the technology sold by a company called "Fairplay". Perhaps you could try contacting Fairplay and asking if you could license their tech for playback in MPlayer? Or even better, you could perhaps just contact Apple directly and say you are interested in writing code to add iTMS playback support to MPlayer, and you would be willing to go under NDA and such... Wait, what's that you say? You don't have the time or linux programming knowledge to add FairPlay support to MPlayer? Well, apparently neither does Apple.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Otherwise, I'm going to install Jaguar to my iPod and boot off that when I want some "Cate Archer" sneaking action.
You might consider checking with Apple first to see if it will screw up your warranty.
iPodHacks warns that booting off your iPod might be considered "abuse" by Apple if you have problems later.
FIVApple's Read Me's are always notably lacking information on specific changes, possible because parts of the read me display in the software update and installers. Anyway, Apple often releases specific details as part of its knowledge base.
My quick review of changes in iTunes 4.2 on Mac OS X (sorry won't have access to a Win2k machine until next week), these are the immediate changes I notice:
Hot Tips
http://www.apple.com/itunes/hottips/
Apple introduced hot tips on creating Smart Playlist, keyboard shortcuts, copy song, artist, and album urls from the iTunes Music Store, etc.
Grouping
Under song details, there is now a new ID3 tag called grouping. I'm not certain if this will allow for subcategories, or can be used for things such as Celebrity Playlist so songs from multiple albums can be grouped. I'll have to play with it. Also added to Smart Playlist queries.
Artwork
Added scaler to artwork, so images can be scaled up or down to fit album space area.
Playlist from Selection
For those who complained about queue-ing songs, I imagine this feature will come in handy, as well as for other purposes as well. Allows you to Command-Select (Click) on random songs in your library then create a playlist from them, immediately.
Music Store in New Window
Double-clicking will launch the music store in a new window (yeah).
iTMS: Music Essentials
Like Celebrity playlist, but collections of "iTunes Essential" music in categories I wouldn't have imagined, including Disco Ball Essentials and Coctail Party Kitsch--yet more ways to spend even more money.
iTMS: AOL Sessions
Added more music "exclusives" basically various performances by artist for AOL can now be purchased.
iTMS: AOL Users
Tons of direct access stuff for AOL users. Which, if they can do this for AOL, maybe they could do it for other venues, like artist who do live concert releases.
iTMS: Artist Self-Released Albums (Return of the EP)
This was there before, but some artist like Pearl Jam who are self published are and can now release stuff directly to the iTMS. I also noticed John Mayer's "As Is" is not attributed to Sony or any music label (which may indicate that it was also self-published). Ben Folds have also been doing a number of quick EPs, but they are all still published attributed to EPIC. It will be interesting to see if more artist start releasing EPs with 4-5 songs exclusively for iTMS or other music stores, and then have regular albums published every 1-2yrs.
These were the things I noticed immediately. Now I need to go and play and see what else comes up.
Really - before you start ranting you should at least bother to learn something about the subject. You can write plugins for QT. There is technical documentation at Apple's Quicktime developer's site, and you can download both Windows & Mac SDKs. Also, check sourceforge for other QT Components.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Try the following AppleScript: