Slashdot Mirror
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).
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 ]
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.
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
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.
Whilst they might make a lot of noise here on
They're kinda weird, and few & far between...
-- james
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.