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HP Dumped Napster for Apple
Pieter Townshend writes "Found on GMSV: 'In the days leading up to Napster's re-launch last October, a deal that would have put Napster links on millions of Hewlett-Packard computers went bad. HP withdrew from the agreement at the last minute, its reasons for doing so becoming clear three months later when it announced a surprise partnership with Apple to feature the iTunes Music store on HP computers and sell Hewlett-Packard branded iPod music players.'"
HP decided they wanted to sell rebranded iPod's, so they went with iTunes.
>>Also it does cost $.99 do download the song
>>form Napster, so you have to pay for access
>>then to download. From Napsters
>>(www.napster.com) front page "Choose your own
>>tracks for $0.99 each, or get the whole
>>enchilada for just $9.95 per album."
You're confusing two different things.
Napster allows the following:
1) Subscribe for $10 a month and have unlimited download access to songs, you can not burn these but can download so as long as you are a subscriber. The vast majority of the library can be accessed by download but there are a select songs that are 'buy only'
2) Purchase a single track for $0.99. No subscription required.
3) Purchase a single album for $9.99. No subscription required. It's a one time purchase and not tied to anything else.
Well, yes and no. Tracks you download from iTunes have DRM, but AAC in and of itself is an industry support subset of the MPEG-4 standard. Think .MP4...which is what some people have been calling it (in fact that was the default extension from my non-Apple AAC transcoder until iTunes came out, now it's .m4a).
WMV, on the other hand, is exclusively owned by Microsoft. It's also available in non-DRM flavors, but is only licensed for use on platforms that have been granted MS' okay. Which are few, basically just Windows and OSX, maybe X-box.
You need licenses for either format, but AAC licenses are available to anybody with available reference implementations. And I think -- think, mind you -- that AAC doesn't require a license for free-as-in-price encoders/decoders written by hobbiests. At the very least, you can get free decoders at www.audiocoding.com, open source of course.
So yeah, AAC's not open like Vorbis. But unlike Vorbis, the industry invested a lot of research into it and actually wants to use it. As such, AAC is heading for the same popularity as MP3, whereas WMV is looking more like, well, ASX. Vorbis will eternally be a hacker's tool because it doesn't have the visibility nor the clout of AAC in the industry...but as it's going to be eternally tweaked, it will no doubt continue to sound better at comparative bitrates.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Napster is compatible only with Win---s XP and 2K. Not even with 98 or NT will you have access to it. Meanwhile HP -- iPod by HP; Linux by HP? Maybe HP wants to diversify their products and is aware that relying too much on one technology will limit their business. IMHO HP has better business sense than Roxio, who targeted Napster only to part of 94% desktop users.
I know it was half-joke, but it's not that Apple DRM is good, it's that Apple's DRM policies are recognize fair use rights. The only serious complaint I have heard about the format you get from iTunes is that you have to burn to CD and then rip that to get MP3, which results in potential loss of quality. But the ausio CD you burn from the protected AAC file is a redbook compliant audio CD with no restrictions on it.
apple makes about 27% profit margin on all hardware, ipods included. Their PR for investors explains this.
Sleep is for the weak.
burn them onto MP3 disks
Just a small correction: You can burn them to audio disks, you cannot transcode them to MP3 but have to encode from an audio disk to MP3.
(of course solutions exist to get around this but their use is not allowed for by the iTMS usage terms).
It was advertised that music obtained through the unlimited subscription model was only playable (without cracking the protection, violating the DMCA) while you were still a paid subscriber. This would have to imply you can't legally burn it to redbook audio CD.
Actually, the newest versions of WMA DRM don't work on OSX.
- The Amazina Llama
As others have mentioned iTunes relys on an API that is not available under GNUStep. Additionally, even if iTunes was Cocoa, and could thus be compiled using GNUStep, it would have to be recompiled to do so, AND for each architecture it ran on. iTunes is NOT open source, only Apple could recompile it. Many people misunderstand GNUStep, believing it is some form of Cocoa emulator and can run binaries built on a mac with cocoa, it cant. GNUStep is a reimplimentation (and an imcomplete one) of Cocoa and apps have to be built with GNUStep in mind.