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."

Comments

DRM?

[stefanmi]

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!

stupid formats

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:Superior?

[Anonymous Coward]

Superior to unencrypted audio (from a record company's point of view).

Re:Without Vorbis, it is useless to *me*

[matastas]

So, I gotta ask: how many people outside the open-source/Slashdot community are really aware of Ogg? A dozen? Twenty, maybe?

Look, my parents can barely program the VCR, much less decide between audio codecs, and they're typically technologies buyers. They may not get the hardcore geek sale, but they'll get The Masses, and that's where the money is. DRM will give them a backlash, yes, but the codec wars are not fought in the Best Buy crowd. They're fought here. And frankly, we're about the only ones who give a damn.

Give The Masses something that's portable, sounds like a CD, and is flexible, and they'll buy it. Argue with them over open source vs. licensed and bitrates and OHMYGODMYHEADEXPLODED.

You get the picture.

Re:Without Vorbis, it is useless to *me*

[greygent]

Jesus, so don't buy an iPod. The rest of the world uses the MP3 format, so that's what Apple supports.

You shouldn't have picked some smalltime format to encode everything in. It doesn't make good financial sense to support every little "eleet" latest fad format that the relatively small population of Linux geeks whine about this week. Next week, it'll be "GNU KewlAudio" or something.

Apple has heard you and they obviously don't care (as Ogg Vorbis support still isn't there). So, buy something else and stop whining.

Think about it for a second

[JoeShmoe]

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
.

Re:Think about it for a second

[Selecter]

Mr. Shmoe is th only poster I have read so far on this topic that

A: makes any sense at all.

B: gets the big picture.

it's all about payback time. Apple lost the battle last time around, and this time they are gonna make Microsoft eat shit. It's all about the player itself and the music store, not what damned format the music is in.

When the iPod plays wma files, any leverage MS had is gone. iPod will GAIN market share, not lose it. It's the op system war all over again, only Apple is fighting the battle smartly this time and using it's competition's strengths to add to it's own, on it's own terms.

One iPod to rule them all. :)

Licensing Issues

[CatPieMan]

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

Re:Licensing Issues

[phillymjs]

Doesn't Microsoft already own a huge chunk of Apple?

No. Below is my canned history of Microsoft's Apple stock, which I keep around to set straight misinformed individuals such as yourself:

August 6, 1997- Microsoft agreed to purchase $150 million in non-voting Apple preferred stock. Note that it was NON-VOTING stock-- so essentially this was just a goodwill investment in Apple. Microsoft was required to hold the stock for at least 3 years before selling. Another clause of this investment was that Microsoft was to continue to produce Macintosh products, including all new versions of the Microsoft Office product, for a period of five years. In exchange, Apple would make Internet Explorer the default web browser on Macs, and not sue the living hell out of Microsoft.* Microsoft has long since sold all of this stock, at a nice profit, I might add. This agreement expired in August 2002, and since then MS has occasionally made noise about discontinuing Mac Office.

* Strong rumors from several sources indicate that the 1997 deal was the public portion of a settlement made after Apple discovered substantial patent and/or copyright infringment by MS in Windows. Word is that there was a meeting between senior Apple and MS officials where Apple laid out the evidence and an ultimatum. Personally, I think there is some credibility to this, as Microsoft rarely if ever does anything that could be deemed 'nice,' especially to a competitor. There is, however, another school of thought that says Microsoft was only acting in their own self-interest, propping up Apple so they would have a competitor to point to when the antitrust thing really built up some steam. I question the use of the term 'propping up,' as Apple had a few billion in the bank at the time and did not need the $150M, and the government would have realized that.

~Philly

Re:Superior?

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Superior?

[Enahs]

OTOH, nobody I've met IRL has ever mentioned anything non-MP3. Not FLAC, not WMA, not AAC. Nobody gives a fuck about either WMA or AAC, except that those two are being crammed down their throats by places like Apple Music Store and BuyMusic.com. Most frequently asked question "can I convert this to MP3, and how will it sound if I do?"

I use Ogg Vorbis, but it's far from trendy, yeah.

Re:Superior?

[hype7]

I wanted it. My brother wanted it. I own a Neuros and he now owns a Karma. Entirely because of the Ogg Vorbis support (I got my Neuros a few days before it became the first player to support Ogg Vorbis because they said they were supporting it and I said I'd buy the first player with support so I did). I spent a bit over $400 on my Neuros, which is what an iPod would have run me. Apple would have gotten my money if they had had Ogg Vorbis support because I don't use MP3.

Whilst they might make a lot of noise here on /. , people who want Vorbis support in their MP3 players are akin to people who want MiniDisc player support in their cars.

They're kinda weird, and few & far between... :)

-- james

What a load of ........

[lost_n_mad]

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.

Re:Superior?

[Chmarr]

I think he meant to say "convicted illegal monopoly"

Re:Superior?

[ceejayoz]

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.

Re:What is wrong with having more optional feature

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The nerds are out in force.

[evilviper]

Get a grip. WMA has been proven time and again to be one of the best codecs in both overall sound and in efficiency (sound per bitrate). This is a simple fact.

Feel free to point us to ample data that proves your "simple fact."

It's _never_ going to storm the market.

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.

- most people would be extremely sensitive to hear any difference.

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.

I'd take a $200 bet that in 2 years the latest WMA codecs will sound as good or better than Ogg Vorbis.

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.

You're basically marginalizing yourself if you use anything other than MP3, WMA, or AAC.

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.

much ado over nothing

[vnv]

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.

Wall Street Journal reports Apple rejects WMA

[caudley]

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.