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Apple To Grant All Labels DRM-Free Distribution
SexCaptain writes "MacRumors.com reveals a letter circulated by Apple to all producers of content for the iTunes Store, announcing that from May onward they can sell their music at higher quality and free of DRM. Hopefully this opens the doors for labels like Netwerk. This is a big step in the right direction, although it's unclear exactly what Apple means by 'higher quality,' and there is no mention of price changes. (Apple charges $0.30 more per song for DRM-free content from EMI and encodes it at 256K.) Quoting from the letter: 'Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free," Apple wrote in the communication. "Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers."
This is great. Higher quality AND no DRM, whereas normally you'd think you would have to pay more for non-DRM. I take this as a serious attempt to get rid of DRM and make customers happy.
I can be made happier by getting rid of syncing. I HATE to sync! Hate, hate, hate!
I figure the idea of being able to use only a limited number of computers, and having to sync, is based on Apple's initial wish to make studios happy about their support for drm.
And there is one good thing about syncing I suppose, I used an Internet cafe computer once that had a hundred songs from in an iTunes library left on it. Huh!
The iPod's "sync only specific files" interface sucks and is outdated when you can have so many on your iPod too. And if I drag movies to my ipod in the iTunes app it just silently fails instead of say, starting a size conversion thread or telling me why. Dumb.
And I use my iPod like a hard disk a lot. It would be much better if I can drag music or video onto my iPod to a folder I can play/view from when detached from the computer. How about an expert mode that lets you view all the data in the ipod? And a database at Apple, or some other site like iMDB could be used to update the metadata db in the iPod. Right now everything is nailed down and nearly unhackable (how about a perl app for that Apple?).
If I could I'd like to ask for the iPod to be able to play video in it while connected, convert movies automatically (Red Kawa's iPod converter is so-so but best I've found on windows, though the Mac based handbrake is cool). I'd like to be able to view website archives and pdfs too, and while I'm at it, I'd like to be able to store absolutely huge astro or landscape photos and be able to zoom in on them with the ipod too. Oh and make it possible to use the ipod tactile interface for pageup/pagedown and maybe up/down/left/right too. A tap code would be acceptable to get into that mode.
In conclusion now that Apple is working hard to eliminate drm, I'd like them to make the iPod's software more user-friendly too, and they can start by taking the training wheels off. I'm not going to complain about how the video ipod dies after a couple hours of watching video (okay I just did complain but..) however it feels like Apple just used the function built into MacOS to let you plug in another mac as an external hard disk. That's totally 20th century.
Same about the "corrupted" state my ipod is perpetually in and the "do not unplug" logo. Very fragile I think. They should make use of the iPod screen when plugged in too, and most importantly, dare I repeat myself, GET RID OF THE SYNC! PLEASE! I don't want a sync.
I want to put music, movies, and ebooks (text or html files) in my iPod, I want to be able to put real sized photos in and read real sized text files with a real sized font size, and I want a real backup of my entire iPod on my hard disk. I don't want to have to delete things from my hard disk to delete them from my iPod or some such insanity. Now that Apple's sold enough of these things they can certainly afford to take the time to stop the insanity and STOP THE SYNC! Thank you.