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Apple Releases Major iTunes Update
shunnicutt writes "Apple has released iTunes 4.5 (and iPod software 2.2 and QuickTime 6.5.1) and relaxed some iTunes Music Store restrictions: now tracks you purchased can be authorized to play on up to five other computers, instead of three. However, they reduced the number of times you can burn a playlist to an audio CD from ten to seven. Another new feature is iMix, which allows you to publish playlists on iTMS, including comments on each track. The iTMS also offers a weekly free single for download."
crazney adds "This release also changes their network sharing protocol in a way that breaks the open source iTunes sharing applications that have been released (based on my work on iTunes 4.2's DRM)."
kefoo writes "Among the new features is Apple Lossless Encoding, which claims to compress losslessly to half the size of uncompressed CD quality audio." Hm, and I was about to re-rip all my CDs at 320 kbps MP3 ...
Update: 04/28 14:56 GMT by P : I just tested, and I can listen to previously de-DRM'd AAC files from playfair, but I cannot use either playfair or FairTunes any longer. The former "Couldn't get DRM key for user," and the latter produces a blank file.
My work PC is behind an authenticating firewall, so I was never able to log into iTMS and consequently was not able to authorize my work PC to play my purchased music. When I launched 4.5, it brought up the IE dialog box for entering my firewall password, and voila... I could enter the iTMS and log into my account!
I love the addition of two more authorized computers as well. I'm getting a new PB this spring to give my four Macs/PCs that I would have iTunes on and now I can keep them all authorized!
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
It will be as soon as Apple announces it later today. You can still download it off the web.
I hate sigs.
According to comments in ipodlounge, this new version won't allow playback of Playfair DRM stripped AAC files.
Nice to release on the anniversary, and draw some attention.
My one complaint with the service is that you can't download the source file multiple times. So, I may have a license to listen to it, but I have to get the file from somewhere, if I lose it. They let you listen to your music on 5 machines, but you have to transport the file itself to those machines, by yourself. A real pain in the butt.
Beyond that, it's fantastic, and I recommend it to anyone shopping for a service.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
More important than this update is Apple's new push to provide music to college campuses. Their information is available here http://www.apple.com/education/itunesoncampus/. As a Penn State studnet whos money is being wasted by a garbage contract with Napster, I hope that iTunes begins to displace Napster all over the country. Napster is a shoddy, two bit service that offers a marginal utility at best. I'm rooting for iTunes and AAC in the battle for university contracts.
iTunes on Campus, which lets academic institutions site license iTunes Music Store content for their users delivered by Akamai's distributed network, which now not only includes over 700,000 songs from all 5 major labels and 450 independent labels, but also thousands of audiobooks, periodicals, and journals.
Also new is the ability to import unprotected WMA into iTunes, and an iPod update to support Apple Lossless Encoder.
And last, iMovie 4.0.1 has been released.
http://www.apple.com/education/itunesoncampus/
Additionally, the app now also features a cool track melding feature not mentioned in the heading. This makes it a lot easy to make seamless listening possible for tracks that are supposed to proceed without pausing, So now I can finally listen to classical tracks the way they are supposed to sound. Seamless and lossless. Cool.
If you're talking about the "Join Tracks" feature, this is not new to iTunes 4.5, it has been around for quite some time. If you're talking about a new feature for gapless output, then I'll be a very, very happy user.
Actually, that's my only real gripe with iTunes & my iPod: lack of gapless playback. iTunes has a crossfader, which, if you set it to 0 seconds, does a pretty good job of playing tracks as they should sound on a CD, but it's not perfect, and no such solution exists for the iPod. I know it's an often-requested feature for the iPod, I just hope we see it sometime this year.
re: screen real estate.
:)
check out space.sourceforge.net. Space.app is multiple desktops for the mac. been using it since like 10.1
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
The Party Shuffle feature gets rave reviews from me.
In the past, I have used a playlist I call "now playing" to move music in and out of during a party. This can be a real pain when you really just want to play a few playlists back to back.
Party Shuffle changes all that. It allows you to easily DJ a party. You select how many "just played" songs and how many "upcoming songs to show. You then select a source, be it your music library or a playlist or a smart playlist (think Rock or Pop where 1979 year 1990). You then can easily manage what is coming up in the list and view what just got played. You can click the "refresh" (where Burn and Import are) and the list will be regenerated at random. You can also give preference to the higher ranked songs in your library.
Lastly, and this is a feature of the entire music library, not just playlists or Party Shuffle, the same "arrow" icons that show up in the iTMS when you search for a song are present in iTunes. This means you can click an arrow for a song name, album, or artist and it will launch a search on iTMS. But say you don't like that feature? Well you can of course turn it off in preferences, but you may also hodl down "option" and click it. The result? it searches only YOUR library, not the iTMS.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
No. If you try to compress a wav file with zip, rar, etc., you will get very little compression. There is very little repeated data in a wav file. Looking at a wav file with the knowledge that it is audio, however, allows for decent lossless audio compression.
Yeah but the itunes files are at 128k, so a burn then rip is going to result in noticeable sound degradation at this point.
what I find a bigger issue is that iTunes can STILL not create playlists over the network. I have my G5 upstairs with all my music, but I would like to have the party shuffle (or an ordinary playlist) hold some tracks on my tiBook in the living room. Especially since the kids now also store their music on the G5 (since that machine is always turned on), but want to create lists locally without having to disturb me when I'm working.
:-(
I've submitted this feature request to apple each time they release a new iTunes version, but still nothing
Hey slashdotters : help me convince apple of this feature ! click here and ask apple to provide networkable playlists (so NOT copying the tracks over the network, only their URL) Let's see if this can work !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
They don't warn you that once you upgrade, you can't access shared music on older versions of iTunes. Now I have to go upgrade all my systems.
Don't install it if you don't have time to upgrade all your computers, if that sort of thing matters to you.
Yea, they should definitely sacrifice hardware sales to support this free program! Why didn't they think of that?
Hello? Apple makes money off iPods, not iTunes or the iTMS.
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You can play uncompressed AIFF files on your iPod, and it's a pretty easy, lossless conversion between WAV and AIFF.
Actually, Zipping a wav file will do absolutely nothing. There's way too much entropy in a regular song to find similar patterns which it can compress. Also, FLAC only get's about a 60% compression ratio, meaning 100 MB of wav turns into 60 MB of flac
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well, they call your Queueing "Party Shuffle": http://www.apple.com/itunes/playlists.html
>
> Now with Selective Listening
>
> Of course your party deserves a great soundtrack, and iTunes
> helps you jump-start your set list. The new Party Shuffle feature
> creates a dynamic playlist, similar to shuffle play, from either your
> entire library or a designated playlist. You can review upcoming songs
> to reorder or delete on the fly, taking charge like the DJ you always
> wanted to be. You or a guest can add songs to the mix at any time. If
> you like the random picks, you can always save them in a personal playlist.
> And of course, you can use Party Shuffle when listening to music alone,
> too. So your playlist is always full, and always full of good tunes.
>
And I think your "gapless playback" could have been helped with the preference for the gap between songs (though that nay only apply to burning CDs). In any case, I agree that it's a very important feature for stuff live albums and arty, no-break albums (of which I have a couple).
Actually, iTunes does support several competing players, and has since well before the iPod's appearance. It's not something they advertise much, but it is there.
I don't know about WINE, but I do know how to Install iPod Update v1.4/v2.2 in GNU/Linux.
OLPC Australia
You could just have the music stored on a network share on the machine, then drag the files into iTunes, and if you don't have it manage the library, they will stay on the network drive.
Someone's unofficial report on that forum also indicates that it converts from WMA to AAC.
Umm...it's not unoffical. Apple touts it on their website.
The folks at FLAC have a handy comparison page. ALE obviously hasn't been tested yet.
gzip and bzip2 are meant for text. Only with rare audio files will they achieve much of any compression whatsoever. FLAC achieves about 50% compression on average, depending on the source material. All other lossless audio schemes achieve similar compression, within about 5%. The big advantage FLAC has is that it uses only integer ops for decoding (making it very fast and non CPU intensive). That also means FLAC has a number of hardware decoders already on the market.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
"Jitter" is one of the more annoying audiophile myths floating around.
If you are recording from one digital device to another; as long as the data stays in the digital domain, jitter is not recorded. The only thing actually captured is a sequence of amplitude values; digital media simply have no provisions for storing information about individual sample timing. The timing is based implicitly on the sampling rate and is freshly re-created by the digital-to-analog converter's clock every time the audio is played back.
Even digital-audio tape systems don't play audio directly from the tape. Instead, they pass the data through a RAM buffer from which a clock pulls individual samples and sends them to the outputs. As a result, variations in tape speed or data spacing aren't reflected in the output data.
Although jitter causes distortion on playback -- and can certainly generate unalterable distortion during the A/D process when recording from an analog source -- it is not recorded when making a digital dub or when recording between digital devices.
This is the same "Join Tracks" feature that iTunes has had for the past couple versions. It imports multiple tracks from a CD as one track. This results in one long track, in one file. This is not what is traditionally considered "gapless playback", which is taking multiple tracks/files and playing them all back without a gap in between the tracks.
"Join tracks" is an unacceptible solution, IMHO. I still use iTunes, though. I just live with the small gaps.
It's an easy option for artists now to have iTunes only sell their music in an album form. I've seen a number of albums on iTMS that you can't get the songs individually.
Actualy, your right to do with the file hasn't changed, it's the right you burn the playlist that has changed. You can still burn the file an unlimited number of times, just not without changing the playlist every 7 times. There is a slight difference.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
Apple's new lossless codec isn't included, but will have a tough time beating the speed/size ratio of Monkey's Audio.
Another great app is the creatively named Desktop Manager. You can set up as many desktops as you need (I think) and you can do the eye-delicious rotating cube effect to switch between desktops.
The "join" feature still only works during CD ripping, there's not way to join tracks that you've purchased from the store or already imported. This is SO annoying. The systems have more than enough computing power to merge these songs without having to start over.
I'm guessing I will have to cave in and re-rip all my CDs that should not have gaps between the songs.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Well the results are in and between Apple's Press release and the Steve Jobs conference call there are many numbers to consider.
140,000,000 - Annualized song sales at current rate
100,000,000 - Number of songs projected to be sold in 1st year
70,000,000 - Number of songs sold the first 365 days of the service
2,700,000 - Current rate of songs sold per week
1,000,000 - Number of songs available by the end of 2004
700,000 - Number of songs available now (5/04)
450 - Number of indy publishers with music on-line
10 - Previously allowable identical CD burns
7 - Currently allowable identical CD burns
5 - Current number of authorized PCs and/or Macs
3 - Previous number of authorized PCs and/or Macs
70% - Market share of iTMS digital music sales
5% - Market share of Apple desktop/laptop/server sales
0 - Number of more successful on-line music services
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
You CAN sell you music. This was already argued and brought to a head by the eBay auction. Apple's response was "Yes, you can sell your tracks, but why bother?"
Granted, there is no mechanism to do it (yet), but you could indeed sell your entire library at once by simply transferring your account to someone else.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
You can now use other playlists as criteria for a Smart Playlist. Create one playlist that is a combination of several other playlists.
Yes, but then you'd have the file-size of a loss-less codec, and the quality of a lossy codec -- The worst of both worlds.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
Create your playlist, "Rock List" as such:
- if genre == rock
Then create your second list, "Highly Rated Rock" as:- if my rating > 3
- if playlist is "Rock List"
and you're done. Easy.To quickly assess how well the new iTunes 4.5 lossless compression scheme works I picked 10 songs at random from my collection to convert to Apple Lossless Encoder format. The good news is that each song only took a few seconds to convert on my 1.0 GHz PowerBook. Noticeably faster than when I ripped them to WAV files. Unfortunately the compression ratio is not that good. The aggregate compression ratio of the ten songs was 1.5:1. The min, median and max were 1.3:1, 1.5:1 and 1.8:1. This is by no means a thorough evaluation, as my collection is heavily skewed to rock music and far more samples would be required. I would have expected far better however, given that the high correlation between the two stereo channels gives an almost brain dead 2:1 compression to start with, and other lossless projects on the web claim closer to 4:1.
Oh fuck, why did I use my last mod point yesterday?
This is not Informative. Crossfade does not make it gapless. The best it can do is provide the illusion of gapless playback by fading into the next song before the gap starts. If you have tracks with fast beats that run together with no gap, you will notice a glitch when the fade happens. It is NOT a proper solution.
And Steve says the people at Apple are music lovers. I say bullshit. If they were, they'd have fixed the gap problem long ago. The solution's easy.