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iTunes One Year Anniversary Sparks Comparison

Posted by simoniker on from the who's-the-bestest? dept.

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."

4 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. Re:CD Baby - the word from the backend by linuxbaby · · Score: 5, Informative
    P.S. As of now, these are the different formats for which we have to convert every song - in delivering to the various download music services:
    • 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.
  2. Not a proper tabulation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Mac + Windows = Success by useosx · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nice post, but a little out of date, as I see no mention of Poisoned which is a front end to giFT.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.

  4. Re:Microsoft offering a competitive environment? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.