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HP Working With Apple To Add WMA Support To iPod
iPod Afficianado writes to a short piece at Connected Home magazine in which Paul Thurrott "is quoted as saying that HP's blockbuster deal with Apple will have one
exciting side effect. The company will be working with Apple to add support for
Microsoft's superior Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to the iPod by mid-year."
WMA is supported on more devices and players than Apple's AAC (w/DRM) and the iPod. BUT WMA support is IRRELEVANT if the Digital Restrictions Management that infests Microsoft products doesn't allow me to play it anywhere else anyway. I once had a free offer to download WMA files from some music service and found that once the files were copied to any other computer, they were useless anyway. Copying to a player which did play WMAs was fruitless as well. So the DRM (remember it's Digital RESTRICTIONS Management) is the overriding limiting factor, and not whether WMA is supported or not. All the other online music services are music RENTAL right? If so, I won't participate regardless of the format. Microsoft's argument is irrelevant until the WMA-supporting music services offer more lenient restrictions. I don't want my music to stop after I stop paying $19/month, I don't wanna have to worry if I bought the correct license to burn to CD for every single track I buy!
first of all - superior to what?
secondly: I've had it with the codec wars. Let's let the big music/hardware/software companies keep duking it out and pissing away their resources fighting over mp3/aac/wma. Personally I'm re-ripping all my CDs once and for all to FLAC. If a better lossless codec comes along later, all I have to do is batch process them all and save some space. No worries about finding a new original to avoid lossy reencoding.
As far as my ears can tell, there is no appreciable difference between ANY of the lossy codecs about 192kbps. But they all seem to come with DRM these days, and that's just anacceptable.
Superior to unencrypted audio (from a record company's point of view).
Unfortunately, however, this is a *serious* boost to the .wma format's commercial success.
The task of informing the public of the dangers of CRM becomes more important...
The only way we can stop it is by making it unpopular, even hated, amongst enough people to make a serious dent in profits for CRM systems, thereby forcing their hand back into open systems.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I don't think this is far fetched: WMA on iPods. If there's WMA on iPods, then there's WMA in iTunes. If there's WMA in iTunes, then there's WMA in QuickTime.
Maybe HP will go off on their own branch... but maybe not... just a thought.
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Yes, I'm sure I will get plenty of replies stating that Vorbis support doesn't matter. Well, sucks for Apple: they're not getting my $400 because they don't support Ogg Vorbis, the format in which my 1,200 CD's/14,000 tracks are all encoded in. But these are the choices one must make, and they've made the calculation that they can do without Vorbis users' money. Time will tell whether this is a good calculation or not.
[ home ]
WMA = Wipe My Ass.
"You heard it here first" sounds a lot like a guess to me.
I don't think it will happen.
Nobody's telling you to listen to a .wma file with DRM activated. It's quite possible to have a collection of wma files with no restrictions whatsoever.
In my opinion, Thurrott does nothing to hide his bias against all that is not Microsoft-made. He makes Slashdotters and Mac users look moderate. So view his article with the necessary skepticism of Microsoft propaganda. But hey, we're all entitled to our opinions - I just wish Paul's magazine was entitled "Connected Home Opinion" instead. Perhaps he should go to work for the mainstream media. Whether WMA is superior to AAC or not, it wasn't appropriate wording.
As far as the addition of WMA to the iPod - understand that Apple has a vested interest in selling iPods, not supporting AAC vs. WMA. With all that talk from a few months back about how iTunes makes Apple no money - those interested in Apple's success should be pleased that the iPod can enjoy a wider audience of music stores. As for myself, I agree that having a DRM-Free file format in the iPod other than MP3 is a win for all.
Why isn't OGG there? What costs would be involved in it's development?
Paul, please stop writing technical articles and stick to editorials.
Bill
I also re-encode any higher than 256K Mp3s to AAC 160. I can't really notice any difference in quality, but the space savings are quite noticable.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
How is this really all that unusual? What if Apple released a WinCE version of Quicktime player that let you play Quicktime videos on an HP iPaq? But that iPaq can also play WMV files, so is this smart or stupid of Apple?
I would say smart, because now they have another platform for their content. So isn't the same true for audio? Isn't of looking at it as "Apple is letting WMA infiltrate their iPod!" why isn't it "Apple has expanded AAC to another major portable brand."? You don't think HP has the resources to design their own player? If they had, it would almost assuredly be using Microsoft blessed DRM hobby kit known as WMA. But then HP would need to make decent player software, and find a partner to provide content...by partnering with Apple, they are piggybacking on the success of the existing iTunes client and store. Meanwhile Apple now is selling a player every time someone buys an iPod or the HP version and now has a new customer for iTMS either way.
Apple gets a larger audience used to AAC and iTMS which will someday make a profit, no doubt about it. Maybe right now its a loss-leader to sell iPods, but what do you think will happen next year when music companies post their quarterly reports showing the profits from this major new (and free) income stream? What happens when Apple goes back to renew the contract and says "you know this free money pouring in? Well, you're going to settle for $.30 or we start giving priority placement to indie labels" Not to mention, with the release of GarageBand, Apple is about one puzzle piece away from becoming a completely end-to-end music enterprise, starting with a dude running GarageBand and ending with a thousand people clicking "Buy It Now" on iTMS.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Consider this: who's seriously supporting AAC right now besides Apple?
Umm, HP, Pepsi, a bunch of record companies, a million iPod owners, and 70% of the online music buyers?
PLATFORM LOCK-IN.
You can get it for Mac and Windows. Sorry, no Linux, OS/2, BeOS or Amiga support, but there's always something you give up when you decide to buck the trend.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple doesn't make much money, if any, off of iTunes. They pretty much break even after paying off bandwidth costs and management fees. When it comes down to it they make the most money off the iPod which sells for a lot more than what it costs to make. If Apple could allow the playing of WMA files on the iPod they would have far more people purchasing the iPod; because, to tell you the truth the iTunes music store is pretty limited in size. I'm sure some of the other music sites out there have different collections, unfortunetly (for Apple) in WMA format. Anyway, they'll end up making money in the end.
Well, you are right about vinyl being the ultimate format. Distributing an analog medium in digital format will always yeild lossless data. With records, you get the original analog master, which sounds amazing. Anyone who has every listed to a record on a high quality sound system will tell you they are amazed at how incredibly lifelike the sound is, myself included.
It is just too bad that records have to be so big and the very fact that you listen to them degrades their quality overtime.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Everyone's always ABOUT to do it. Have some courage and just do it. Don't talk about it, don't whine about, just do it.
--
RumorsDaily
Correct me if I'm wrong, but, doesn't MS make a lot of money by licensing the WMA technology to other companies (DVD players, Dell [for the jukebox], etc)?
So, if this were to be true, every sale of an iPod would generate revenue for MS.
Somehow I don't think that apple would really let this happen -- at least not to Apple branded models.
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
why on earth would Apple agree to opening up the iTunes/iPod combo to someone elses store?
.mp3, .aac, .wav, etc, with no regard to where you bought them..
What do you mean by "opening up"? iTunes and the iPod will play
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's right... It's true that iTMS makes little money. And will make little money because Apple's cut is so small. Apple will have to sell billions a year. It means the best way for Apple to profit is to drive iPOD sales. And what a better way to profit then...
.ogg support and you get $$$ from all the geeks that want this format.
iPod, the only player to support both iTMS and all the WMA stores. Apple can keep iTMS, iPOD only, but sell more units on the fact there is no format lock.
Add,
The best thing Apple can do is make the iPOD support every format they can.
The "WMA superior" troll is not the only thing that stinks here. This is being reported by "Connected Home Mag" which I've never heard of before. It also states that "onlookers were surprised". Surprised where? At the recent Apple conference? We didn't hear it there. At an HP conference? Why hasn't anyone else picked up the story? I think this article is a load of B.S. At least until I see an official announcement from HP or Apple.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
2.) The WMAs are smaller in file size (even at the same bit encoding). This is nice. Especially if you plan to put the songs on some sort of MP3 player with limited memory.
How so? The bitrate implicitely fixes the size of the file. If it's 128kbps MP3 it will be 16000 bytes per second played. Same for WMA or whatever. If it's exactly the same playing time but different file size, then it's not the same bitrate*. Period.
*Only taking into account "raw" audio data. MP3 could have id tags that increase file size by some bytes without adding to playing time. Point remains.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
I use Ogg Vorbis, but it's far from trendy, yeah.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
giving users of the highly profitable ipod the chance to use other stores to download music will do 2 things:
1) sell more ipods
2) allow people to actually see what the other stores offer and realize that iTMS is far better...it eliminates TGIGOTOS (the grass is greener on the other side) syndrome which in turn will sell more iPods.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Whilst they might make a lot of noise here on
They're kinda weird, and few & far between...
-- james
How about portability as a relative merit? I can do mp3 on Linux just as easily as on Windows. Last I tried it (OK, a year ago), WMA could only be done on Windows (natively I mean - no plugins or emulators allowed)
C|N>K
Has this "reporter" ever done one minute of research? 2 points alone kill his article.
1. Jobs stated in the last conference call (look it up at apple.com), there is no need to work with #2 when they are #1. This was in response to weather or not the iPod would support WMA.
2. Why would Apple allow HP to rebrand their player and gut their online store? Where is the profit? I know the argument of more iPod sales, but if that was all Apple really was after then why bother with the store in the first place? They could have spent that time and money making sure the iPod worked with every format known to man.
TANSTAAFL
Ahem, "convicted monopoly"?
Being a monopoly is not a crime. Abusing a monopoly is. Please remember this. Thanks.
It never occured to you to just turn the DRM off?
It's irresponsible to put this on the front page as if this were news, or even a rumor. If you read the article, you can see that the suggestion that Apple might support WMA in their iPods is merely wild speculation.
Admittedly, the article is poorly written. It's not easy to tell that the first paragraph is based on fact (HP really is licensing the iPod from Apple) and the second paragraph is based on fantasy (Paul Thurrott is really hoping WMA crushes all other codecs.) That probably reflects that Thurrott himself has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. Nevertheless, critical readers should be able to make that distinction.
Note that I didn't say I was surprised this ended up on the front page of Slashdot. I'm only saying it's irresponsible.
That's why he said "convicted monopoly", do distinguish them from those, who by neverhaving bee convicted of abusing a monopoly position, are not convicted monopolies.
Simple, eh?
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
I think he meant to say "convicted illegal monopoly"
mp3 was designed for speech compression. ogg vorbis, WMA, and AAC are second-generation, designed for music, and have better compression with less noticable loss as compared to mp3.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Jesus, people! Quit spreading the tinfoil hat "DRM sux" FUD already!
Enabling DRM is optional. As in you don't have to use it to encode your own music. As in don't worry about it. As in shut up!
Jeremy
I don't understand why a format is bashed for allowing DRM. It makes it a more flexible format. It helps open the door to content providers that would otherwise be scared off by online content.
But WMA != DRM. It simply supports it.
I have over 3GB of legal, non-DRM WMA files on my computer. The fact that WMA supports DRM does not effect my use at all.
So, you're tacitly acknowledging the other standard (and there are no other players that do the same for the AAC standard), and you're encouraging people to download from the other stores.
Apple would gain some of the music player market share for those stores' users, instead of being completely locked out. As Apple has already said that iTMS doesn't make them money, and that it's merely supporting iPod sales, this allows their profitable iPod sales to go up even more.
It's win-win for them, as far as I can see.
Well, a 128kbps AAC file is superior to a 128kbps MP3 file in quality, so your 192kbps MP3s might not be much better quality.
Plus, your iTMS tunes are legal. Some people care about that.
What most helps the success of the iTunes Music Store is how cleanly it integrates with iTunes and how cleanly iTunes works with the iPod. All of which doesn't mean much if the iPod ends up a high-end niche product in the portable digital music player market.
Adding WMA support broadens the appeal of the iPod and lowers the barrier to entry among those many windows users who have already ripped CDs into WMA files. (Just as adding support for at least reading competitors file formats was so important to Microsoft, among others, back when there was still a competitive market for word processors and spreadsheets).
Of course, the other argument is that the iTMS only exists to sell iPods, so Apple doesn't really mind if people aren't buying from iTMS. I personally don't buy that argument though. iTMS may not be a profitable business now, but you can bet Apple intends it to be, and the best way for them to get it there is to sell more iPods
This makes sense to me. This means that if a customer has been using a WMA service they can still switch to iTMS and not loose their investment in the older service. This stops the possibility of people being locked into WMA services.
My husband is one, and he definitely can tell the difference between something encoded as MP3 and something encoded as .OGG/Vorbis. And there is a difference. .OGG just sounds better to his ears.
This statement is completely worthless. You didn't specify what encoders were being used, what the type of music was, and what the encoder settings were. Take a look at hydrogenaudio.org if you want some objectivity and real listening tests. All you have offered here is your personal opinion, and we all know how useless they are when it comes to music.
Besides, it shouldn't be about "what sounds better" at all. It should be about "what sounds closest to the original recording". If Vorbis has some kind of subjectively 'better' sound, then something is wrong because it's moving further away from the original. Unless you just meant better as in better than MP3, but again, you didn't specify anything about any tests done and with what encoders, so PIPE DOWN!
why would you limit your future platform to play those music files?
15 years from now, if ANY of today's music file formats are still supported, odds are it will be mp3.
mp3 is so universal and easy. play it on mac os 9, os x, linux, freebsd, windows, dos, handhelds of all sorts, hardware players like my pioneer headunit, sony walkmans, game consoles.
hey. you want to limit your options...you go right ahead.
keep convincing yourself you made the right choice.
*If* Apple go down this path, I would expect iTunes / iPod to try and ween the user off WMA and onto AAC.
Does it mean the iPod or iTunes will be able to play the particular flavor of DRM used in online music stores using WMA? I rather doubt that too. So what exactly does this get anyone?
There are people who have only been introduced to encoded music through using XP and haven't been aware of the issues relating to DRM. They may well have allowed their CDs to be encoded in the WMA format because they didn't know better. These people would otherwise not know about the benefits of Apple's product line.
Its worth noting that Apple don't just get potential iPod / iTunes sales out of providing WMA support. They also expose PC users to the beauty of Apple user interfaces. This in turn may influence their choice of computer when replacing their current one. How can this value be calculated? I have no idea, but I imagine Apple will have made some projections and fed these results into any choice to extend iTunes to allow WMA files. You can bet that Apple's marketing plan extends well beyond the life of your current PC.
And who would want to use WMA in iTunes or on your iPod, unless you were at least going to be able to play a competitor music store's goods.
The people who already have WMA files on their computer, have seen iTunes on their friend's / colleague's PC, or someone else iPod, and want the same thing. I guess there is nothing stopping the user from buying a WMA file from another store and playing it on iTunes / i Pod, once WMA is allowed.
Apart from the aforemention benefits, Apple actually have very little to lose. User thinks about buying Mac next time - check. User buys iPod - maybe. User buys on-line content from iTunes - check. Any future sales lost as a result? - nope.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Even without DRM WMA (like most or all Microsoft formats) is still evil.
Imagine that you'd like to switch to another platform, Mac or a GNU/Linux desktop.
On GNU/Linux you're pretty much out of luck. You can probably make mplayer play the files but who wants to have a video player playing their music files? I'm also betting that you can't do it with even Mplayer on non-x86 because it's probably relying on some Windows dlls for the playback.
I don't know that much about MacOS (X or otherwise) support for WMA but I'm guessing that it's playable *for the moment* as there's supposed to be a Windows Media Player version for OS X. But in addition to the fact that WMP is an awful choice of a player, there's no telling when MS will discontinue that player and then you again end up with unplayable files.
Sticking with mp3 or preferably ogg ensures you'll never be left in a situation where those 3GB are useless because you have nothing to play them with. And seriously, what are the advantages? Against the mp3s I guess it probably could sound better at the same bitrate but AFAIK Vorbis fares very well against the MPEG4-based codecs.
Yeah, it's cool that they are making their own version of the ipod with help from Apple.
Yeah, it's neat that they hope to add WMA support.
However, I will not buy any of their crap, since they have taken the viewpoint that every single music afficianado out there is a thief, declaring war on the "Sharing Culture" at the recent CES.
I mean, their CEO filled her keynote speech at CES Carly with media piracy rhetoric, saying that consumers are undermining the economy and the morals of this nation by exchanging music.
You want to buy from a company that thinks of all of you as thieves for ripping music, or *gasp* downloading a bunch of 1's and 0's that when put electronically, become music, go ahead. Just don't say you weren't warned.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
As for why DRM is bad in the first place, it boils down to a very fundamental debate over property rights and the rights of corporations versus the rights of individuals. Yes, DRM does make new products available, but you have to be remember what you're giving up in exchange, which is ownership and therefore control of the product. The value you place in that exchange is probably related to where you fall on the spectrum between sheparded bourgeoise and intellectual revolutionary pinko. Remember, though, that MS wants their DRM technology to extend through every level of the computer, which is much further reaching than Apple's media-oriented DRM. MS-DRM iniative even bears the newspeak name "Trusted Computing."
------- Was it just a coincidence I got moderator points the first time I logged on to
Dude - I feel for 'ya. NOT! I would never, ever, willfully waste my time encoding audio into a Microsoft PROPRIETARY audio format. I'm sorry, but doing so is just retarded. If you must degrade audio by running it through a lossy compression algorithm, the least you can do is use a high quality *standard* format such as MPEG. (Layer 2, Layer 3, AAC, whatever variety you choose.)
WMA is not just proprietary, its not even very good!*** I can *always* hear high frequency artifacts in WMA at 128k despite dubious "better than MP3 at lower bitrate" claims by Microsoft. In my opinion, the WMA artifacts are actually worse than MP3. (And MP3 at 128k is pretty bad.)
If you must use lossy compressed audio, good options for you are: use MP3 at a relatively high bitrate. (192k is probably good enough for most people. I can hear artifacts on some limited material at 192k so, if you are a super critical listener, it might be worth it to go 256k.) Alternately, consider a high quality MPEG AAC encoder at 128k or 160k. I have listened to 128k AAC and have yet to find obvious artifacts.
Now if your cool you will give up lossy technology all together and go with FLAC. FLAC rocks! And you dont need to worry about compression artifacts because, well, its lossless!
*** note: apparently with the latest and greatest WMA9 PRO (read, probably not what you used to encode your music library) the sound quality is quite a bit better. That's great and all but there are no players out there that can decode WMA9 PRO - other than a PC. And even if there were, it is still proprietary/evil and you should refuse to use it!
I was considiring converting my MP3s over.
Ack man, don't 'convert' your MP3s to anything. If you have the CDs and can rip them again, then sure, you might want to change the format, but converting MP3s to anything else is _always_ a bad idea. MP3 is a lossy means of compression, and if you try to compress something that has already been compressed, it will very quickly start to sound like ass, as the new codec will try to compress the left over sound bugs from the first MP3 compression. The only time I ever recompress compressed material is when I'm converting from ACC or WMA that I've bought online somewhere by burning them to a cd. When I do this I normally encode at about 192 Kbps because I know that mp3 doesn't like re encoding.
Feel free to point us to ample data that proves your "simple fact."
Yes, and 640K will be enough for anybody, and there's a market for about a dozen computers in the world. Your prediction is just that, and they are proved wrong all the time... Even the best are commonly wrong, and I don't think you qualify for that status.
Not true... Encode a WMA and an Ogg at 4Kbps (that's not a typo) and any idiot could tell the difference.
Yes, at large bitrates the two might be indistinguisable to most people, but you could say the same thing about MP3s, or perhaps even MPEG1-layer 1/2. If you are going to limit yourself to 300+kbps, few people will hear any difference between any codecs, limiting yourself to a slightly smaller number is not a fair comparison.
Yes, in 2 years, whatever version WMA is up to, will be better than Ogg is right now... Ogg is constantly improving, and will continue to be better than WMA in 2 years.
Every group is marginalized until they've gained critical mass. The early adopters of MP3 were marginalized (I was one of them)... The early adopters of CDs were marginalized... et al.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
with AAC. Dolby has quite a bit of clout in the audio industry, and I think more people (who are perhaps less knowledgeable than the Slashdot crowd regarding audio file formats) would take AAC more seriously. Perhaps if the iPod has a Dolby logo in reference to AAC or something. I am sure a lot of shoppers would go, "Hey! This AAC thing is Dolby technology! Cool!".
I am sure some people look at AAC, and see that iPod is by Apple and think, "AAC... Must stand for Apple audio something... Must be proprietary, maybe I should go with this WMA standard... It's supported by so many players, it must be more open!".
-B
Not to mention it is substantially larger.
Portable music players are in their infancy. There are over a billion PC's out there, yet merely a paltry few million music players have been sold.
We've got many millions of new customers coming into the market which will drive new music players, new music formats, new music distribution systems, etc.
So far all we've seen is the early adopters playing around with iTunes. By no means has iTunes "crossed the chasm". Once mainstream people really understand DRM music and how it is "resolutionally challenged" crippleware that sells for full price, there are likely going to be big changes in the online music world.
By "crippleware" I mean that you, the buyer, cannot do what you want to do with it. That is why people are using funny workarounds like snagging the temp files from Toast so they can get the unencrypted versions of their songs.
The rate of broadband adoption is slowing in the US. And for the most part, all affordable broadband is very low bandwidth compared to the rest of the world. So at least in the USA as disc-based music gets better and better (DVD-Audio, SACD), the value delivered by the disc will continue to improve vs. what is delivered via the wire.
Finally, at least vs iTunes, actual CD's seem like they are cheaper and easier. You get full songs, no DRM, any/all formats, and to top it off... you get a readymade CD, already printed cover art, already printed track listings, and a jewelbox. All for just about the same price as iTunes, especially if you buy used CD's or Universal's new more affordable CDs.
All in all, it is too early in the portable music player market to worry about the small moves that are being made today. WMA will never be popular in Asia, so it will never be a world standard. There is nothing to fear there. The RIAA-friendly abd special-interest friendly USA and EU are a different matter, though, where Microsoft can use their mu$cle to drive adoption of their format.
I'm a professionnal sound technician and AV technician, I have been a teacher and technical supervisor in a sound design school, i am a consultant for musicians and project studios. I have to my credit over 5 complete studios which I conceived and built.
Means, I have a very good hearing, my ears are quite sharp, I pick audibly what most people don't seem to hear. If I measure said waveform what i hear is there, so I do not "hear things".
Why all of this intro, to be sure you do not sonfound me with the type of geek with no ears that tell you a soundblaster is the best sound card and that WMA sounds better than AAC.
Professionnaly I can, without any doubt tell you that WMA is one of the worst audio codec. Remember I am not a raver kid fiddling with Reason thinking that I gosh darn know a lot about audio. I know a lot about audio and have the background to attest it.
I will then repeat what I just said: WMA is one of the worst codec for audio. Audio encoded in such a format displays serious phase cancellation across the spectrum, the bass are rumbling and quiet passages present some serious quantization artifacts and a awfull lot of granulation noise, plus the file, if properly measured, won't play back at the same speed all the time, the difference is subtle (most of the time being under a sec. but it can reach 2-3 sec.) but measurable, I do not kow if the slow down is due to heavy computation but I have never seen that kind of artifact in another codec.
WMA is NOT a good codec and it DOESN'T sound better than AAC and ATRAC sounds better than those two previous ones, Squeezer sounds better than the above 3.
Well, it may be weird to you people not in Japan right now, but as someone currently living outside Tokyo, where *every* car I've been in or seen in showrooms has an MD Player and a DVD navigation system, it seems kind of natural to me.
The only reason I *don't* use Vorbis is because of the lack of player support (and the fact that, on the Mac, I've had too many issues with the Vorbis quicktime plugin that allows iTunes to play the files). Slashdot is about choice, right? If people choose WMA, that's *their* choice. I like AAC at 160; that's *my* choice. If you want to use Oggs, you should be able to excercise that choice and shouldn't be hampered by the wants of the majority.
That said, if you choose a non-standard format (and yes, OGG is non-standard, unless you're one of the, what is it, 2% of total computer users running Linux as a desktop OS?) you're essentially giving up a lot of the freedoms you'd enjoy if you went with the standard. It's a double-edged sword.
Also, while Apple might add WMA support to iPods (thus enabling Windows users who don't know better about ripping CD's to transfer their music collections), Apple will sell more iPods. Period. However, I'm pessimistic that such support will be seen on any but the HP iPod-a-likes. I'm still waiting for someone to reverse-engineer the firmware and add unofficial OGG support...
- Cloud
I agree, this rumor isn't true (IMO). Right now there are two significant (protected) formats for commercial music publishers -- WMA and AAC with Fairplay. Since the iPod is the market leading MP3 player (55% of MP3 player sales by dollars) and iTunes Music Store is the market leading digital download sales channel (80% of all downloads sold), Apple's in a great position, so publishers will support both formats.
If Apple added support for WMA to the iPod, it would allow music stores and publishers to ignore AAC and publish only WMA and cover all MP3 players. This would ultimately lead to AAC, and then iTMS and the iPod, being marginalized.
IMO, as long as Apple is a significant player they'll be supported, because the labels would rather do business with Apple than Microsoft, and because they prefer industry standards such as AAC over proprietary formats (that they don't control) like WMA. The last thing Apple would do is something that would promote the adoption of WMA...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
But once wmas run on iPod, apple has lost it's edge... iPod would have no distinguishing features from any other player except price...And apple can't function in a price war. That's the beauty of the MS plan. The manufactures of hardware lead a race to the bottom while MS quitely taps all of them for cash without "getting its hands dirty". MS gets a dime from every other service & device...and when pickings get slim steps in and puts the winners out of business if they don't toe MS line.
At the end of a story on the HP-Apple deal, the WSJ reports 'Apple executives say their company has no plans to relent' on the subject of WMA. It also quotes Jobs as saying, in regard to Apples strong position in the player/download market, "I think that favors the largest player, which is us by a mile."
Apple has no incentive to support WMA and every reason not to. If the iPod can play WMA, it becomes the defacto standard and AAC is dead.
HP makes no mention of WMA in their press release... http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/04010 8b.html
Could this "you heard it here first" nonsense really be just a bunch of wishful thinking or outright lies ?
Check the sources. This is all flame bait.