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iTunes One Year Anniversary Sparks Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "CNet News is running a story about the upcoming one year anniversary of Apple's iTunes service. It gives a pretty good summary of the year in online music, with a nice chart comparing each service's user base now and then. The most interesting quote in the article is from a record executive stressing that the industry is quietly hoping that the online music stores will start selling songs in compatible formats. As a sidenote, the headline story at the beginning is based off this page."
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
- WMA9 - 192k
- WMA9 - 160k
- WMA9 - 128k
- WMA9 - 96k
- WMA9 - 32k
- WMA9 - 20k mono
- AAC - 128k
- AAC - 256k
- MP3 - hifi VBR (lame -preset standard)
- MP3 - 128k
- Ogg Vorbis - q6
- FLAC
In-house we use FLAC to store everything, then have shell scripts to de-code those FLACs to WAV files to convert to the various other formats.Looking at the comparison table, it isn't fair to list Rhapsody in there, with Rhapsody being a streaming service and almost every other player in there is a download service. Interesting to note that , RealPlayer music store is listed in there too and has a pretty good download number for something that opened just one-two months back.
Rhapsody with a user base of 489,000 is doing pretty good I beleive with each user paying $10 / month . Thats like 4.89 million. Apple is way ahead in the competition with almost double the users compared to its successor.
My current favorite download service is Bleep
http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/
Great electronic stuff from guys like Squarepusher and Plaid in un-DRM'd 192k LAME-encoded mp3 goodness.
I wish iTunes had a higher quality option. It's not that 160k AAC sounds bad, but if the download is all I get, I'd like a higher quality format to get at the same time.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I call bullshit.
PlayFair/iTunes allows burning of the same playlist to a CD up to 10 times without modification, and rearranging tracks or tacking on a 1-second silent track counts as modifying and entitles you to another 10 burns. There is no reasonable way you should ever run up against that limit in anything resembling normal use, it seems to me.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
Apple's PlayFair files only allow burning under limited circumstances, particularly that the same mix of songs can only be burned three times.
That's simply not true. What are these "limited circumstances" you speak of? And where do you get three times? Even Apple says ten is the limit for a given playlist, and IIRC, once you reach that limit you can just make a new, identical playlist. There is no per-track limit.
Microsoft's WMA format allows the DRM applier to set whether they want to allow 1 burn, 5 burns, any other number of burns, or infinite burning. Again, Microsoft's just the software provider, it's up to the store to make the deals for these things....
What this means in reality is that any two tracks even from the same store might have different limitations. If you make a mix with tracks A and B, with burn limits of 1 and 5, respectively, you won't be allowed to make two copies of that mix.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Why don't more people seem to mention or know about the legal alternatives to these services.
www.allofmp3.com
www.3mp3.ru
club.mp3search.ru
It's legal even in the US due to international copyright law.
(www.museekster.com/allofmp3info.htm)
Nice post, but a little out of date, as I see no mention of Poisoned which is a front end to giFT. giFT supports FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella, and OpenFT (a hot little network). Personally I'd rather run Poisoned than Kazaa any day.
Furthermore, the BitTorrent community is alive and well on OS X. Azureus works really well, and there's a hot little native client that is better than the standard one.
I've been using the Overnet command line client, which sucks but gets the job done better than the various front-ends floating around.
And then there's Hotline, Carracho, and the new open-source client-server model "Wired".
Enjoy.
In practice, this is complete BS. Aside from Playfair, there are innumerable programs out there that provide "virtual sound cards", so you can rip the output of any sound player straight to your hard drive.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Microsoft is only entering the game as a software provider? No Microsoft music store? Did you think Microsoft could really resist leaving any pie untouched?
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5176411.html
I wouldn't actually use it, though.
I don't want to be offensive, but you should read and understand the posts before you reply to them (specially if you are going to quote them).
The 10-copy limit applies only to burning a playlist to CD. And, as the other posted said, once you reach that limit, it is trivial to restart the counter (by rearranging or recreating the playlist).
So, in practice, the 10-copy limit is irrelevant to the regular end user. It's only intended to slow down the pirates who want to burn dozens of copies of the same list.
Once it's on an ISO CD format, it's fair game. Just make a binary copy of that CD as many times as you want.
Sure, you can do the same thing with CDs made from iTunes, except you don't need to.
I consider it a point against WMA-based services that you need additional 3rd-party software to do something that iTunes has no problem with in the first place.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.