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Microsoft Opens MSN Music Store
pbranes writes "Microsoft has opened their online music store today with 1 million songs and it will be officially opened tomorrow when Windows Media Player 10 is released. Music costs $0.99 and $9.90 for albums ($0.09 less than iTunes). Also, music is at a higher quality - 160kbps VBR. You can browse the site with Mozilla, however, ActiveX is required for full functionality so IE is required to use the store. Also, Microsoft takes a hit at Apple for not licensing iPod functionality to third parties (kind of ironic when ActiveX is required to use the site).... If you are an iPod owner already and unhappy about this policy, you are welcome to send feedback to Apple requesting that they change their interoperability policy."
These are the minimum requirements to play radio or purchase music from MSN.
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000, or Windows XP
Internet Explorer5.01 (or later), which supports 128-bit encryption
Windows Media Player7.1 (or later), we recommend the latest version
A 233 megahertz (MHz) processor (such as an Intel Pentium II or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processor) or faster
64 megabytes (MB) of RAM or more
Speakers and sound capability
Payment with a valid credit card with a U.S. billing address
To enjoy high-quality audio as a Radio Plus subscriber, you will need Windows Media Player 9 Series (or later)
The BBC also has some info
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Er, the iPod plays normal mp3's as well as AACs.
If you can legally download an mp3 song then you can play it on your ipod.
If iTunes / iPods accounted for 90% of the music player market and if Apple were trying to leverage this market share to take over other markets, I might agree with you.
Disclaimer: I don't really fit your "Apple fan" description since the last time I owned Apple hardware was in the 1980s.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
Not to further fuel the flames, but it's not quite that straightforward.
I think part of the problem is that folks are looking at AAC as 'Apple's format.' It's not. AAC -- Advanced Audio Coding -- is an open standard; there's an ISO number for it, and it was come up with by the MPEG standards group. AAC is to MPEG4 what MP3 (MPEG1 Audio Layer 3) was to the original MPEG. AAC itself is quite widely played by software players -- more than just iTunes -- and is more or less the intended successor to MP3. (NOTE: Intended. I make no predictions about whether or not it will actually happen.)
Where you can point the finger at Apple is on their DRM implementation on top of AAC; that's not part of the AAC specification, and so means that while an un-protected AAC file can play on iTunes, WinAmp, etc., a protected iTunes Music Store one cannot. THIS is a little unfortunate; I'd love to be able to load protected AAC onto my NetMD minidisc player without having to burn it to CD first.
WMA makes me more nervous as a format, because as far as I know it's controlled by a single entity (Microsoft) instead of an open group (MPEG standards group). However, it can't be discounted that WMA's integration of DRM has made it the more attractive commercial option for folks, since it's possible to make differing players handle the same DRM-protected files.
Whether or not AAC with some form of DRM will catch on remains to be seen, I guess.
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From the about page:
From radio to your library: If a particular song on MSN Radio gets your attention, you can click to download it and instantly make it a part of your music library. And if you prefer plastic, we'll connect you to several online CD sellers, including Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
Amazon and B&N - those are some heavy lifters. A new Axis of Evil? =)
Interesting though, this is an area that Apple has avoided: making the connection to the hard-copy world. This could provide Microsoft with even more backing and support from some of the entrenched, big players in the music industry. Scary.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
First, I'm a technologyt agnostic kinda guy. I like Apple's stuff, like some of MS's stuff, like Linux, etc.
Second, the "monopolies commission" can come down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft because they are using their monopoly position to further themselves in the marketplace. Other companies can hardly be established, let alone successful, in certain arenas. The classic example here was MS leveraging their Windows desktop monopoly to crush Netscape.
Apple, on the other hand, enjoys no such monopoly. Sure, they don't license their DRM technology, but this is for competitive reasons in a market in which their is ample room for competition. Apple has no "lock" on the market like MS has on theirs. A monopoly is not created by a company selling a device and trying to lock you into that device. This would be a monopolistic situation if Apple had 98% market share and bundled iTunes with the operating system and would let it only work on iPods at the same time they were actively trying to crush other music services.
I'm not sure how clear this explanation was, but I hope it makes sense.
2 pass VBR, the average bitrate is 160.
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Monopolies are defined by an artificially created barrier of entry to a market. In other words, apple can use whatever technology that interacts or doesn't with other types of music or hardware, that's fine. If, on the other hand, apple were to sell their iPod for $5 and make it so that after your computer is set up for the iPod no other music player would work, then that would be getting into monopoly territory. The iPod is by no means a monopoly, you have a choice. If you don't like the fact that it means you have to use the iTunes music store (which of course you don't, it's just the easiest way) then you can buy another player, of which there are plenty on the market.
I hope someone does a full listening test with a blind panel
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Also, music is at a higher quality - 160kbps VBR
;))
no, bitrate in not equal to quality. iTMS has the far superior AAC, while Microsoft uses WMA wich comes last (or close) in most tests (except the ones Microsoft pays for
two tests here:
1
2
Although Apple computers and Apple iPods do not support the PC standard WindowsMedia format for music,....unfortunately Apple refuses to allow other companies to integrate with the iPod's proprietary music format.
Crap, now I'll have go re-rip all those OGGs
Or Not.
From Mossberg's review at the WSJ:
-only about 500K songs
-no audio books, gift certificates, spending limits for kids
-Microsoft runs ads on its search pages
-click the "Buy" button, it changes to read "Purchased," but that doesn't mean you have the song
- several thousand of Microsoft's songs will cost more -- some nearly $4 each
-WMP choked when tried to synchronize songs purchased in Microsoft's own format from the Musicmatch, Wal-Mart and Napster online stores, saying it was "unable to obtain license
-Overall, MSN Music is no match for iTunes -- yet.
Mossberg thinks eventually MS will catch up.
http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20040902.html
The next pasture is always greener
Yes but WHICH WMA are we talking about, the reason you have to have Media Player 7 is because older versions didn't support the DRM. For the streams you need Media Player 9 because 7 doesn't have the newer DRM.
Your WMA portable player probably won't play WMA music from these stores because the DRM version keeps changing.
So sure Microsoft has its WMA formats, all of them.
In my own testing using a SBLive 1024 sound card and a pair of god quality Philips HP890 headphones I can say that WMA9 is one of the better sounding codecs available. At least in the medium-range bitrate (I used ~192Kbit VBR for testing).
They Might Be Giants sells unprotected 256 kbit MP3s of their catalog for 99 cents per song or $9.99 per album.
Epitonic sells a much more diverse catalog and offers songs in MP3 format.
For more information, click here.
Is ist only me, or they really have only american production ? (I searched for 4 well known artists, non-american, and no one was found on this music shop).
Um, where did all this "only way to legally download music for the iPod" come from anyway? I can get legal music from Real to play on my iPod. Two choices does not a monopoly make. Secondly, WMA formatted music can easily be converted to other formats with a little help from third party freeware, EasyWMA is one example. What's to bother? The iPod is far more flexible than most non-pods realize.
Xerox invented the first major GUI, not Apple.
Stop revising history.
Allofmp3 offers you the choice in what format you would like to have your music. You can get mp3, ogg, wma and flac. So yes, they do offer lossless music. I'd rather support the russion mob than the RIAA mob.
Those're covers, either from the "True Love Waits" CD or "Anybody can Play Radiohead."
It should be noted that while AAC is "open", it is patent encumbered. If you want to write a software AAC encoder or player, you need to pay Dolby. Although there are open source decoders, their legal status is unclear. Of course, you also need to pay Microsoft for WMA, bit it is a little cheaper.
The same applies to Fraunhofer for MP3 if I believe, although I can't find pricing information right now. Unfortunately, the most free and open format lacks market penetration.
the only way you can legally download music for the iPod is through iTunes?
There are a large number of sources from which you may legally download music for the iPod, for example here.
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Radiohead, the band, not Apple, MS, Capitol, etc decided they dont want to be part of the a la carte online music sale business. They (and other artists) prefer you buy their whole albums.
iTMS AAC is a type of VBR known as ABR (Average Bit Rate). Instead of the frames being a variable number of bytes they are instead grouped into blocks of a constant size. This means that you can have variable-sized frames that have a constant, dependable size over the long-run. ABR is pretty much as good as regular VBR but it is a better format for streaming because of the regularity of the average bit rate.
There is an explanation of the formats here.
Sapere aude!
> 128kbps AAC is at least as good as 192 kbps mp3's. That's not just what I think.
A 134kbps (VBR) Lame-encoded MP3 sounds almost as good as a 128kbps iTunes AAC. (In the final analysis, they're statistically indistinguishable.) I highly doubt a 192kbps MP3 can't beat a 128kbps AAC. But neither is as good as a well tuned Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV) encoding.
The only blatant rip off is you repeating ideas that have no factual basis. If you're going to spout bullshit, please come up with original bullshit.
It's not even funny how much MacOS resembles the desktop interface at Xerox PARC, right down to the colors, look, and feel. There's even a mouse!
It's not a blatant rip off when you pay to use a technology.
Real history of the GUI
A walk in the Parc
Please try to gain a bit more knowledge instead of repeating nonsense that you've heard. There's this thing called the internet that you can use to check facts. Look into it.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Bad as it is, ActiveX is *not* the biggest security issue in Internet Explorer.
The whole "security zones" model is the biggest security issue in Internet Explorer. There should not be a mechanism in a web browser to run code outside a sandbox. Not just "for the Internet zone", but anywhere. Having a program (and by this I mean the whole MS HTML control, IE is just a wrapper around it) intended for safely viewing untrusted documents able to grant local user rights to that document is just asking for people to try and figure out ways to "flip that switch".
IE is like the trusting sidekick in horror movies who is stupid enough to invite the vampire into the house just before the climax. Unfortunately IE doesn't die horribly as a result... this is one of those black-humor serials where the same people get to make the same mistake over and over again.
The reason that other browsers don't have the same problem is because they don't have this "enter freely and of your own free will" escape clause. If a hole is found, the hole itself can be fixed, because there's no non-malicious software that depends on the hole.
Microsoft has exactly duplicated the iTunes pricing structure, from what I can see so far.
Sure... AllOfMP3.com. It's in Russia, but it's legit (there are legit businesses in Russia). They accept credit cards and paypal.
They have a huge library of music, albiet not as large as Real's, Apple's, or probably Microsofts.
Most songs can be downloaded in one of several formats (unprotected AAC, MP3, lossless, etc). You can even specify the encoding level (160 VBR, etc).
And the best part - most songs are $.01 (1 cent) per megabyte. The site isn't breaking the laws of its parent country (using Russian Federation Copywrite law).
Commence critiquing the benchmark, but at least try to find an equally or more credible benchmark that has different findings. From everything I've seen the believe that WMA just must suck is wishful thinking.
As for the MHz "myth," MHz is perfectly fine for comparing within a single architecture (or codec), and about as fair as any other benchmark for comparing between architectures if you knock down the P4 by about 25%. The Pentium-M, AMD 64, and PowerPC are all fairly close in IPC. Most of the bencharks that sharply contradict MHz are on some narrow benchmark, carefully chosen to "prove" a point.
128kbps AAC is at least as good as 192 kbps mp3's. That's not just what I think.
Apparently, it is. You can see that LAME MP3 actually does better than iTunes AAC on about half the tests - and at approximately the same bit rate. The overall results are extremely close.
I actually took part in that listening test. This was a double-blind test (like all of Roberto's listening tests) so I had no idea what codec I was listening to, and I could barely tell any difference between any of them. It was only a little better than random chance that I could pick out any compressed format vs. the original. I almost gave up. And I consider myself a pretty picky listener.
The fact that so many of these results are up near 5 - including for MP3 - shows that all codecs sound very good at ~128k. You could argue that MP3 had a 6k advantage (the MP3 files were VBR and averaged out to 134kbps), but that's not going to make much difference. And anyway, your statement about 128kbps AAC vs. 192kbps MP3 is clearly moot. 128k AAC and ~128k MP3 both sound very good, and so close are their overall results that any difference is probably not statistically significant. I doubt you'd hear much improvement in a 192kbps VBR MP3, but you'd probably hear some, so I doubt your statement is true even in an absolute sense.
Apple likes to perpetuate this myth that the codec they use sounds better than MP3. The fact is you'd almost never be able to tell the difference even at the same bit rate. The difference between AAC and WMA is a little greater, but I still doubt you'd be able to notice it with most types of music. If you'd taken this test too you'd probably agree.
Not that it matters to me; I rip all of my own music to 256 or 320kbps VBR MP3's using LAME. That way I'm ensured of compatibility with any music player and I have great sound.
Meanwhile, illicit data sources for music continue to flourish. All the convenience of click-at-home without any of the restrictions that make you wonder when you'll run in to the glass ceiling that stops you from playing your favorite tune on your new audio gadget.
Sure. You can burn your own. For now - the RIAA has never shown approval to such practices. However, this involves either travel time or shipping time as well as the effort to RIP the media once you have it in-hand. Not to mention the issue of buying a collection of music of increasingly questionable quality for that one gem. But hey - at least you get to RIP it to your taste.... assuming you know how to do that.
The recording industry could have wiped out Napster, et al early if they had just thought ahead. They could still do it. High quality, professionally RIPed, fully functional files from a single source without any hassles over bandwidth or incomplete downloads. Sell them at a reasonable price.
Suddenly those illicit data sources are a lot of hassle for meager savings. They will continue to exist - there are always individuals with more time than money. But then, they weren't customers anyway. And as you pull away the mainstream music loving crowd, there are less sources to feed the illicit data networks... which in turn become less effective. Less popular. Less mainstream.
Of course, this won't happen. The success of the music industry isn't based on sales. It's based on control. And control is what DRM is all about.
Sorry, guys, but allofmp3.com is one of these cases where something is too good to be true. AFAIK, they pay zip to the copyright owners. The odd Russian law basically permits Russian companies to sell music as long as they pay to an odd Russian agence (ROMS), which in turn pays nothing or very little to the rights owners.
If it were even remotely legal, we would see all music download services relocate to mother Russia.
Allofmp3.com say they're legal, but so does the shifty guy who is selling brand new stereos for 10% normal price from his van.
Agreed. This, combined with low bitrate files, proprietary codecs and/or DRM (in Apples' case) are but a few reasons why I don't buy music online. If I wanted the latest drivel, I'd just as soon go down to HMV and pick up the CD. Sure, the music itself is still crap - but at least it'd be uncompressed crap.
I too listen to a lot of 80's music. I've "archived" many of my own collection to lossless FLAC files and stored them on DVD+R's. That way I'm not locked into any particular lossy codec and can re-encode them to whatever suits my fancy relatively easily. That's how my collection of music makes its way into iTunes.
I typically go to used music stores and scour for used LP's & CD's to fill my collection. I often find what I'm looking for and it's typically much cheaper than what it would've cost me for the compressed online version. I rip/record - dump it to FLAC and MP3 files (whatever) and I'm done. Yes, it's more inconvenient but it's also MUCH more gratifying than clicking submit and having $0.99 added to my VISA bill.
www.brownsauce.org
Umm, dude, do you?
AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) is the successor to MP3. It's also known as M4A (unprotected) and M4P (protected, or DRM'd). AAC is not lossless; that would be the Apple Lossless Encoder, which claims to be able to compress to half the size of uncompressed with no loss of sound quality. Mention of it is made on Apple's site here and here.
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Overall the tests tends to show that
So if we trust these studies, we can say
YES, you're right.
160kbps WMA are better than 128kbps WMA, but it's no way better than what you can found on concurrent services at 128kbps.
Therefore : we can conclude that microsoft's service won't that good, because you get the same quality as everywhere else, only the file will be bigger, and in the end you'll be able to squeeze less musique of the same quality on the memory of your player.
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It's really hard to tell if you are trolling or are just really, really stupid. Please click on the links provided by the parent and then tell me how many songs performed by Radiohead that you can see.
After that, try searching for Radiohead and look at the url of the page this takes you to. Then compare this url with the one which was also helpfully provided to you above.
Take a look at www.audiojelly.com if you're into trance & electronica.
It's an awesome online musicstore, you are able to listen to previews of everything (using a flashplayer) and what you're buying is 192 kbit MP3's! Not some lame DRM format which you can't play in the future / on your favorite OS / on your favorite MP3 player..
This is how an online music store should be! Screw Itunes, screw MSN music, support stores like this!
-pug
At Rhaposody (listen.com) I can pay $0.79 per song to be BURNED onto a CD as a "standard" 44Khz, 16-bit, Stereo audio track.
Then, I can rip my new song as a nicer 192kbps file and load that into my ipod/mp3 player/whatever.
Note: When I look at the songs available from iTunes, I find it ironic Rhapsody has the excat same songs available to us. How do I know that (especcially if there are thousands of songs)? I listen to trance, dance, & techno. When they release an album out on iTunes (which is rare), they've also come out on Rhapsody the same day.
Hmmm....My theory is, it's all really the same service.
In case you didn't know, on XP SP2, the "Are you sure?" dialogs are largely replaced (mainly within IE) with a modeless "infobar" at the top of the window that you can easily ignore and that you have to explicitly click on and go through a menu to unblock whatever "unsafe" behavior just got blocked (like a file download or activex). There is no in your face dialog to which you can accidentally say Ok.
After this was first seen (as an IE feature) in the SP2 beta, Mozilla copied it. From mozillazine:
Oops, are we not supposed to talk about that here? I know that acknowledging when Microsoft adds something good or fixes one of their problems violates the party line that Microsoft never "innovates" and that OSS never copies from them, so feel free to go back to bragging about how stable linux is compared to Win95.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Generally, you're allowed much the same as MP3: ABR with small bit reservoir, ABR with regular bit reservoir, ABR with NO bit reservoir (essentially - CBR) and pure VBR.
Hydrogen Audio Link Here