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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.
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
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
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
(tig)
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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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.