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.

Comments

iTunes 4.5 is a screen hog

[Spatula Sam]

When expanded to properly display the album art and the new large-format videos, iTunes balloons to a size that is far, far to large for any jukebox. It's almost to large to gracefully use on a PB12's display (thank god for exposé). I wonder if this application inflation is part of some nefarious Jobsian plot to make us buy those gigantic cinema displays...

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.

Re:iTunes 4.5 is a screen hog

[grahams]

I have always been a Pager/Workspace fan, but a few months ago, after the release of Panther, I decided that I would give Expose a real fair shot as a replacement for the Pager. I uninstalled Codetek VirtualDesktop and forced myself to use Expose for two weeks, and at the end of that time I was going to "declare a victor".

After about a week of Expose, however, I decided that it was terribly better than the Pager solution and decided to never go back... Now I just wish I had some Expose equivalent on the other platforms I use...

Update shows iTMS needs more selection

[radicalskeptic]

One cool feature mentioned in 4.5 is "iMix", which publishes your playlists to the iTMS for all to see. So out of curiosity, I tried to publish my "top 25 most played" playlist. Out of the 25 songs on the list, only seven were available at iTMS.

Sure, one could argue that I have eclectic taste in music, but on the other hand, they are missing some pretty big names: Radiohead, Frank Zappa, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea...

On an unrelated note, I wonder if iTMS is going to start offering lossless files. That would be cool.

Re:Update shows iTMS needs more selection

[ncmusic]

You also have to remember maybe some bands don't want to be on iTunes. In the case of Radiohead I believe that they only wanted their albums sold as a whole and not individual tracks, because that's how they see their albums.

Re:Update shows iTMS needs more selection

[amichalo]

According to Apple's press release today, Their library is the largest in the world - 700,000 songs.

One must remember that artists can choose not to distribute their music this way. Notables are easy to recall - Dave Matthews Band, Metallica, Radiohead, The Beatles, etc.

This is temporary. In a few years, no artist will keep their music from this medium, though they may not distribute through the big 5 either. The same press release shows Apple has 450 indy labels represented with iTMS!

This whole limit of computers...

[cflorio]

This whole limit of computers is kind of redundant if they let you burn audio cd's. Aren't most people burning an audio cd, and then ripping to MP3 from there?

Re:This whole limit of computers...

[squiggleslash]

I've done iTMS AAC ->CD PCM -> 128kbps unemcumbered AAC conversions in the past and there was no noticable sound degradation. Now, iTMS AAC ->CD PCM -> 128-192kbps unemcumbered MP3 conversions did show obvious artifacts, so obviously a lot of this depends on the format you want to convert to, but it does make sense. MP3 will throw away a different part of the content than AAC would, so in an AAC to AAC conversion, the second AAC is throwing very little away (because it's already gotten rid of in the original pass.)

Re:This whole limit of computers...

[prockcore]

This whole limit of computers is kind of redundant if they let you burn audio cd's. Aren't most people burning an audio cd, and then ripping to MP3 from there?

Why would you do that? Take your protected AAC, open up iMovie, import the AAC, the save it again as an AIFF.

Missing: Basic Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, instead of using this update opportunity to add in basic functionality that would increase iTunes' value to avid music listeners, Apple went the route of throwing in some glitzy features for kids to rave over: "OMG the shufflez is teh party!! THE DJ IS ME!!1" They missed out on a lot of items that get requested on their forums.

• Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.). Foobar and Winamp with a little tweaking open almost instantaenously, while iTunes lags behind on starting up. Even when minimized, iTunes is taking up far more CPU than a media player should (even more than WMP!).
• MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
• Queueing. Once again, something included with XMMS, Winamp, and even MMJB. If your listening to a huge random playlist of songs in Winamp, but want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then shuffling the rest. Or you can hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.
• Downloading Songs Off iPod Through The Media Player. Instead of assuming your user is doing something criminal and (flimsily) preventing them from easy access to the songs on their iPod, why not give them the freedom to move songs back and forth onto their hard drives. ml_ipod, a plug-in that lets you manage your iPod through Winamp's media library, not only allows you to transfer songs from your iPod, but lets you even "reverse-sync" them.
• Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
• Gapless playback on iPod. This is a big deal to audiophiles, and I'm really surprised by the iPod's lack of support on this. The Rio Karma does this. Why not iPod?

Though I'll admit that the join-tracks feature was much-welcomed, what else did iTunes users get? Instead of downloading songs with propietary DRM, now we can encode our songs with a new proprietary DRM--songs that won't play on anything else? I think I'll stick with FLAC. The ability to publish my important music playlists for the whole world to see? I think I'll stick with Audioscrobbler. A free song from another bland RIAA-sponsored band? Epitonic has always provided a good sampling of independent artists and their music for you to try out. A wishlist to download those Top 40 songs later? Well, why don't I just download the songs now off allofmp3 now with their ridiculously low prices, in whatever format I want, without DRM? Import unprotected WMA files? Winamp

wine?

[TMB]

Has anyone gotten it to work under wine? I'd love to be able to use it under Linux, but since they don't seem to be forthcoming on a native client, at least it would be a way to let me give them money! ;-)

[TMB]

Apple Lossless encoding

[amichalo]

Some initial, unofficial reports are coming in that a 4mb AAC translates to about 30mb Apple Lossless.

My personal iTunes wish list

[Dark Paladin]

And maybe this is available in other MP3 players - but this is my list after setting up some new Smart Lists this morning:

1. Nested lists: so I could have one list that says "if genre = rock", then a sublist that just has "if My Rating is > 3" or "if year published is 2" and the other "if My Rating is > 3" (which I use to differentiate between "Background work music" and "Driving kick ass music".

2. Copy playlists: Another major issue with the above is that if I have 2 playlists that are 90% the same, I'd like to set the first one up, then just copy the list logic into a new one and only edit the 1 or 2 differences.

3. iSync iTunes I have a laptop, and so does my wife. Right now, all of our music sits on a Master hard drive on a Powermac, then synced to my iPod, which when I'm at work I plug into my laptop and place on "manual" (so it doesn't copy the laptop music files). This works out, but it's not what I'd like.

What I'd like is to go home, sit with my laptop and have it say "Oh, I see Playlists X, Y, and Z on your main computer have updated, and I've updated these MP3 tracks ratings/tags/etc. Let me sync up."

Then I could select the lists I want on my laptop from the main machine and only those files would be copied to my box. Since, if I buy music from the iTunes Music Store I can play it on 5 separate machines, it would be nice to have an "auto-sync" kind of system.

I think that's about it for now. I like the option of a new lossless recording (if I ever get my computer tied into a good sound system I can use it - I think there's some new devices that can stream from your Mac to from about $200 that might be worth a look).

It makes sense to go up to 5 auth. systems

[Rude Turnip]

A couple weeks ago there was a discussion on /. about iTMS. One of the points I made is that I haven't used iTunes in a while because I have 4 computers at home and it was a hassle to keep authorizing/deauthorizing them because you were limited to three authorized systems. Another point was made that Apple should expand the number of authorized computers to 5 because their OS X "family plan" lets you install OS X on up to 5 computers...therefore they should be consistent.

As for reducing the playlist burn amount from 10 to 7, I don't think anyone will notice. Although CDRs are dirt cheap, they are pretty wasteful for the small amount of music they hold. Flash and HD music players are the way to go.

Good work, Apple! Next step: Get the songs I buy on iTMS to work with TiVo's Home Media Option.

Goodbye DRM, Hello Lossless

[pgrst]

what will be real interesting is if APPLE start selling lossless from the iTMS.

Previously the DRM limitations forced people to burn to cd then re-rip with out drm. the problem with this is

drm'ed mp3 > cd > mp3

the problem was that drm'ed mp3 !=mp3
because when the mp3 is ripped from the burned cd, it will not be indentical to the original mp3.

with lossless encoding this problem is fixed because

drm'ed lossless > cd > lossless

drm'ed lossless = lossless.

Obvioulsy APPLE is aware of this, they have effectively removed the DRM issue (at least for files that start as lossless)

Lossless Encoding at Half the Size?

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't know about you, but to me half the size of uncompressed audio sounds like a lot. How do gzip, bzip2 and FLAC stack up?

Yay for WMA conversion

[CdBee]

At the time iTunes for Windows was launched, I went to the suggestions page at apple.com and suggested a WMA importer for iTunes, and suggested on /. that others do the same, as a malrge number of users have ripped all their music to WMA and therefore couldn't play it in iTunes.

I am glad Apple were listening - it's really pleasing to see a major company release a tool which will reduce the number of Windows Media files in existence in the world.

Apple lossless

[Josh Coalson]

If someone will host a clip in apple lossless format, preferably a one second sine wave, un-DRMed, along with the original input (WAV or AIFF) and the stream parameters (bps, sample rate, #channels, exact length in time or #samples) I can take a look to see if it's FLAC or FLAC-like inside (I developed FLAC).

Josh

Ironic how 4.5 opens up WMA

[32bitwonder]

It's interesting how Apple has chosen to enable two lossless codecs into 4.5. On the one hand, you can use iTunes to import your CD's into it's own Apple (potentially proprietary) lossless format, or you can now import losslessly encoded (or not) WMA files which iTunes converts to AAC.

(Thinking aloud) Prior to reading about 4.5 this morning, I was encoding my CD collection into a FLAC archive. Using foobar2000 I could then encode my FLAC collection to just about any other format, including AAC. Up until iTunes 4.5 however, there was no direct method of importing losslessly encoded formats (other than wav files). Importing WMA vs FLAC now makes this process at least one step easier - Windows Media Player's WMA tagging is also extremely easy. Using foobar2000, one can also transcode WMA files into virtually any other format as well. WMA arguably has more overall support than FLAC - at least as far as portables are concerned. I'm not saying I'll switch away from FLAC, but it may be worth investigating.

I find it very odd how a new version of iTunes has me reconsidering WMA as an option for archiving my CD collection, especially as their own lossless codec was released on the same day.

Re:I hear the cheers of Apple Fanboys now!

[cbiffle]

Don't be silly! If you wanted FLAC and Vorbis playback, 16 hours of battery life, and gapless or crossfaded playback, you'd just buy a Rio Karma.

(Seriously.)

CD-Text?

[nvrrobx]

Does iTunes 4.5 support CD Text? I have yet to understand why iTunes hasn't had this support! Just about every burner on the planet supports it. Even factory car stereos support it now.