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Microsoft Unhappy With HP's iTunes Decision
rbrandis writes "The general manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division David Fester has suggested that iTunes' emerging dominance would be bad for consumers, because it would limit them to the iPod, as opposed to limiting them to Microsoft based products. In a moment of what must have been an attempt at ironic humor he said, 'Windows is about choice - you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services.'"
As bad as people may hate Microsoft or Media Player, it does support multiple players and platforms - not just the iPod. A list is available at http://windowsmedia.com/9series/Personalization/Co olDevices.asp.
What?
iTunes doesn't require you to have an iPod. It works fine on your computer. And it's the only solution that allows you to take the files you buy from it, unprotect them, and turn them into whatever format you want.
I know, you'll call me an Apple apologist. Whatever. I guess I could call you a Microsoft apologist and it would make as much sense.
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
Not compeletely. You can only listen to iTunes Music Store protected AAC files on iPods, Windows computers and Macintosh computers.
iTunes itself allows you to create unprotected MP3 and unprotected AAC from your own music collection and do whatever you want with them.
I do not believe Microsoft's Windows Media Player for the Mac allows listening to protected WMA files, so in that regard the WMA format is more locked in than AAC (currently).
Also if you look at Buy.com's music store you'll see that instead of Apple's flat and mild DRM policy (same policy all songs), music company's can restrict you to how often you can copy music to your player and how many times you can play a song and if you can burn it to CD (the ability to do this may be in AAC files, i'm not sure, but it has not been enabled)
so no, currently the itunes is not as restrictive as Windows Media Player, but the protected AAC's can only be played on iPod players (if Apple gains a large enough share of the online music world -- say 90%, there may be an anti-trust law suit against them for not allowing the songs to be played on non-Apple devices)
Kevin
Well I've been using an ipod on a Linux box for the past 3 months and it works great. Check out gtkpod.sf.net and be amazed :)
I hate to point out the obvious, but I use iTunes and I do not have an iPod and I'm sitting in my living room enjoying beautiful music off my stereo that I got from iTunes. All I have to do is burn a disk. La dee dah. One of the biggest misconceptions is that one needs an iPod to use iTunes. Tain't so.
AAC isn't a proprietary Apple technology, and there are other AAC players available.
OK, Let's see if I can clear this up for you.
iTunes can handle several different audio codecs. Most of my files are MP3s, but some are AIFFs and some are AAC. That being said, I can sync and listen to ALL my MP3s and AIFF files on ANY player that can understand them. You don't need an iPod to listen to MP3s from iTunes - almost any MP3 player will do.
iTunes Music Store on the other hand only provides AAC encoded content. You must have a device capable of playing AAC files to play this content - or, you can make a playlist, hit "burn" (you don't even need a CD - there is software that can make a "virtual" CD") and you now have all your purchased content in 128 Bit MP3 format. Yes, one extra step, but easy to do and it's then DRM-Free. I do this so that I can play my purchased music on my MP3-enabled CD player in the car or in my office at work. So the long and short of it is, iTunes content isn't only AAC DRM'd Files.
Hope that clears it up. Don't listen to the FUD put out by those who seem to feel threatened by it. iTunes is an excellent player/organizer in it's own right and doesn't need an iPod to work.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
The *real* question how soon will it take for some enterprising individual to be able to play the songs they bought on iTunes Music Store under Linux?
Jon of DeCSS fame has already done this.
Except that, Apple gives you the free iMovie App and allows you to save in DV and any quicktime supported codec (including DIVX if you install the plug-in) etc. So, yeah, I'm going to gripe about substandard "free" software from Microsoft.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
iTunes will upload and download songs from many MP3 players, including these.
The only limitation is that you cannot play AAC protected (iTunes music store) files on these third-party players. But a quick capture/rip (or just use Audio Hijack to capture the stream to MP3) takes care of that limitation.
Apple is only one of many companies *using* AAC. Apple did not invent it. Apple did not invent it. Apple did not invent it.
n dard.html
"AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia"
http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/
"MPEG-4 AAC has been specified as the high-quality general audio coder for 3G wireless terminals. Apple Computer has incorporated MPEG-4 AAC into QuickTime 6 and iTunes 4, as well as the latest version of its award-winning iPod portable music player. The Digital Radio Mondiale system (the next-generation digital replacement for radio broadcasting under 30 MHZ) builds on the audio coding of MPEG-4 AAC."
http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/sta
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Actually Apple's iTMS music is in MPEG-4 format, which is virtually identical to the Quicktime container format. The MPEG-4 format was adopted from the Quicktime format. The music in the container format is AAC which has been encrypted by FairPlay, a DRM encryption scheme.
If you look at the files you download from iTMS they have the file extension ".m4p" which stands for MPEG-4 Protected. Tunes that you encode yourself using iTunes AAC are given the extension ".m4a" which stands for MPEG-4 Audio.
The iPod supports both MPEG-4 Protected and MPEG-4 Audio. Both formats use AAC to encode the audio signal. iPods also can play MP3, Audible, AIFF, and WAV.
Sapere aude!
Easy - Apple doesn't own the copyright to the music and the record companies won't let Apple sell the music unless some form of rights management is in place. If they were allowed to do so, I'm sure they would have preferred to sell raw AAC files without any rights management.
I think its cool that Apple managed to get the record companies to agree on a system as liberal as iTMS. You can burn an *unlimited* number of *unprotected audio CDs* with the only restriction that a particular *playlist* can be burned a maximum of 10 times. (Not a big deal, just make a new playlist with the same songs or, for that matter, just make a copy of the *unprotected audio CD* you already burned 10 copies of!)
You can authorize 3 computers to play the protected files directly and you can backup the protected files to any type of media you like. You can play the protected files on as many iPods as you want, etc...
To play this back, you need to convert it back to raw bits again. Now, you can capture those bits (Audio Hijack does this), and save the file, but it will be huge. (You encoded using MP3 etc becuase you wanted to save space).
If you reencode this with any lossy CODEC, including the 'original', you will lose some more information. Probably enough that you will notice that the quality has degraded.
So, the DRM in AAC stops you making unlimited copies of the original file. (Well, you can copy them, but they will only play on a limited number of machines---keyed to the embedded DRM info.) You can of course burn the tracks to CD---which copies the raw bitstream. You can make an unlimited number of copies of this (though iTunes won't let you make more than 10 copoies of a playlist, but that is mere inconvenience). You can also re-encode using another DRM free CODEC, but if that CODEC is lossy, the quality will be degraded. Probably noticeably.
Note again though: any time you reencode between lossy CODECs, you will lose some quality. This has nothing to do with DRM.
In conclusion, you are right. A copy is going to be lossy, except if you burn to CD (which is easy).
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Sorry pal, the most notable engineering effort by Compaq was marketing.
Compaq essentially was a marketing organization and box assembler, which made too much money and bought a couple of enterprise computer companies (in hopes to get a foothold into their customer base).
Digital Equipment (or DEC as we preferred to refer to it) on the other hand was an engineering company (which was later part of its downfall) and the technologies you are referring too where hatched at DEC.
Notable engineering efforts where (leaving away very ancient history) the Alpha AXP chip (which introduced 64bit processing 10 years before Intel could even come up with a workable prototype and Itanium "steels" a lot from alpha), or clustering, which worked seemlessly and transparently in 1988 (probably before that), while other "clustering" technologies, most notably under HP/UX, seem to be a bunch of hacked together scripts, which provide a never ending nightmare (specifically after major migrations). I could continue with some of the best compilers and a development environment, which would still put a lot of modern stuff to shame.
Compaq had no fucking clue what they where getting and they where even more clueless in the realm of enterprise customers relying on rock solid, mission critical iron. Uptimes for such customers (for example the Amsterdam coppers) is measured in thousands of days and they tend to take a dim view on the infamous CTRL-ALT-DELETE "error correction" procedure.
I absolutely agree with your statement regarding miss Fiorino, though.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The entire rail industry in the 19th century was essentially privately funded.
Not true. Actually, the rise of the rail industry in the gilded age (1866-1901) is an excellent example of the weird mixture of private monopoly and state intervention, unfortunately typical for American capitalism. If there is a large project - such as "we need railroads to connect our cities" or "we need broadcaster to provide us television" or "we need weapons to combat communism", it is indeed given to private hands. But since it is so important, private enterprises receive substantial state aid (such as advances in government bonds) and become strong enough to influence politics by financing the politicians back. That's how the famous military-industrial complex works (and just because you heard this name in some Oliver Stone movie, it does not mean it doesn't exist).
For example, Tom Scott, a typical railorad tycoon, had a deal with the Republican presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes - "I will help you win the 1876 election, you will subsidize my Texas and Pacific lines when you'll get the office". Scott has helped, Hayes has won, railroad was subsidized. Government also kindly provided troops to break the railroad strikes of 1877.
>QT is MacOS's audio/video API. You can drag the
/System/Library/Frameworks/Quicktime.framework . Also, Mplayer OS X and Microsoft Windows Media Player works just fine on all Mac OS X boxs without using any Quicktime libraries at all.
>QT player to the trash just fine, but deleting QT would
>be a bit like deleting DirectShow.
Sorry, you're free to delete Quicktime.framework if you see fit. It is located at
How the comment is modded as "score: 3, informative" is beyond me.