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Google To Take On iTunes?
An anonymous reader writes 'Multiple sources say Google is preparing to launch Google Audio. According to people familiar with the matter, Google has been securing content from record companies. Is Google about to go head-to-head with Apple's iTunes?'
Well can they?!!?
I think the name should be iGoons
... It's called songbird http://www.getsongbird.com/ = (mozilla+google)
I'd be thrilled if Google could do a music player analogue of Picasa. I've always hated iPhoto, and Picasa is great. A similar product to displace iTunes would be incredibly welcome (and yes, I've tried Songbird; maybe someday, but it's not there yet).
To reign is to serve.
lame
another half-assed google knockoff! fill my ass with goo, sergey and larry!
She got a pussy in her panties
She wore a pussy thong.
This, if true, will only hasten the divide between the two tech darlings Google and Apple.
Apple has a vested interest in maintaining their defacto monopoly on online music sales though their vertical product pipeline. The Zune is no real threat, as Microsoft does not have the mindshare. Google, with Android, have significant clout, and potentially enough mass to unseat Apple from the head of the online music sales table.
Apple has done very well with the iPhone, but if history is our guide, they did very well with the original Macintosh. Fast-forward a few years to now, and the story is being repeated. Apple is dominant with their iPhone platform, but Steve Jobs is too obsessed with removing buttons from mice to loosen his grip on the brand. This has help Apple survive, but it ultimatly leads to Apple's cyclical demise.
Anyway, Google launching a music app will cause Apple to remove Google maps, and Youtube integration from their products. In the end, Google (openness) will win over the closed Apple system. Yes, the Apple devices will be pretty, but the Google stuff will work well enough, be less expensive, and have 95%+ of market share. (Its like we've seen that before somewhere....)
--sig fault--
The Wall Street Journal's story says that the plan will allow people to buy FROM iTunes and Amazon. According to this version, Google is just providing a link to the music providers when it comes to the purchase. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704597704574487423504899680.html If you're not a WSJ subscriber, copy the first sentence of the article and Google it. The link from there will allow you to read the whole thing.
If this means a Google version of a crappy, bloated, needlessly complex music player, then good.
If this means a Google version of an overpriced digital music store that sells digital copies of songs that are only good enough to listen to on poor quality mp3 players, then good.
Why Apple decided to use the same name for both a software application and an e-commerce site is beyond me. Regardless, I'd love to see something better than both.
I don't respond to AC's.
As a dominant content company Google must not be allowed to use it's search results to promote it's product offerings. They better have ironclad separation between the divisions.
According to TechCrunch, it's a music search with the option to do limited streaming. So you can search for music, preview them, then either use those services to buy or use iTunes/Amazon to buy it.
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
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FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
> "According to people familiar with the matter"
Which in today's terms means 'we made this whole thing up' just to fill a gap in the so-called news...
I hope it's not a crappy knock-off, like when they launched Google Video.
Even the goodwill of their name couldn't save that horrible site.
No wonder a couple months later they bought YouTube.
This time maybe they'll buy Lala.com.
If you want a good browser-based iTunes store, that's it.
Is Google about to go head to head with iTunes? No, but they are about to go head-to-head with Amazon.
Are you suggesting sanzenpuss got the headline wrong? Where do you think you are?
Google audio (BETA)
Lyric Search: Carry a laser down the road that I must travel
Did you mean: Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
10 cents a song and I'm there.
Anything more than that, I'm not there, as it makes no sense to charge more than that for a song in an inferior format (compared to CD) such as .mp3.
Ah well, until the online music vendors come to their senses, there's always "free" P2P sites like Skull&Crossbones Harbor, and the like.
Why doesn't Google stop delving into all these other markets and just stick to what it knows?: SEARCH. I can just see the day in the near future that Google is disliked as much as Microsoft because it was being a monopoly. Good things never last unfortunately...
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All this hype about omgz Google is so innovative. Let's take a step back and see what they have actually created shall we?
Search engine? There were plenty of search engines before Google came along
Android? Oh look, Apple are doing really well with phones, let's be on the cutting edge and... create a phone
Online music? Apple are doing really well with iTunes, time to be way out there, live life on the edge, and... get into online music
Google maps? Easy to use but hardly a new concept
Gmail? wow!! how imaginative - a decade after online email they blow everyones minds with, you guessed it... online email
So all you fanbois - with all the fanfare and hype - what exactly has Google really invented or developed that is so way out there? I'm not suggesting Apple invented any of those other things either, the difference is Apple + co don't go around telling everyone how they have legions of super smart uber-nerds who come up with ideas us mere mortals cannot even comprehend. So tell us - besides developing good search algorithms what exactly have these uber-nerds given us that requires such massive pools brain power?
I put forward that on an innovation per IQ point Google is perhaps the most inefficient use of intelligence ever.
A story is posted about Google apparently engaging in some healthy (and frankly long needed) competition against Apple/Amazon, and the tags we get are 'donoevil,' 'queuethefanbois,' and 'fuckgoogle.' At least someone came along and put a ! in front of the last one but the tag being there at all is an artifact of seriously unconstructive vitriol. This is a story about Google expanding into new markets, not about Google doing anything wrong. These tags must be here accidentally at best and as flamebait at the worst.
I welcome any alternative to the iTunes Store interface. Considering that Apple prides itself on its intelligent and intuitive user interfaces, the iTunes Store boggles my mind. I gave my father a gift certificate to buy some songs for his iPod, but he got frustrated quickly and handed the controls over to me. After a few minutes of navigating the slow, labyrinthine interface myself, I threw in the towel and got the songs he wanted through other channels. If not for the luxury of being so tightly integrated with the hardware and iTunes itself, I doubt Apple could get away with pushing something so clunky. Hopefully, Google can remedy that.
I doubt I'd buy music from them any more than I would from the iTunes store... but if they are going to come out with some music and media management software to compete with the iTune software, I'd be very interested. Every one I've tried, ESPECIALLY iTunes, has been crap... so I'm still organizing all my music in standard file directories and text editing playlists in notepad.
My second thought is... surely Google would be more receptive to indie and non-professional artists?
Google's been doing this in China for a couple of years already www.google.cn/music. It's ad-supported and provides completely free mp3 downloads and streaming, without DRM and with scrolling lyrics sync'ed to fast-forward and rewind and fully licensed content from all the big four record companies (including both Chinese and Western artists). It's pretty much exactly what you'd want in an online music service. It's also IP-blocked unless you're in China.
The trouble with iTunes as a front end is that it is designed to be half the ui of an ipod. A lot of non-ipod iTunes users, use it to sort, catalog and play their libraries and it does an excellent job at that. Try and export to a non-Apple media player and you get problems as it stuffs up the filenames.
The problem with iPods, is that you need iTunes to sync/delete/add stuff.
So if Google or whomever would come up with an iTunes like front-end with decent performance and could make it equally good at consolidating media, you'll have a VLC like multimedia player that can sort, convert, catalog, backup, share, stream, import and export with installable codecs and plugins then count me in.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Here in Sweden 1 in 5 of the population has a Spotify account. I think Google would do themselves a service by coughing up a huge sum of money and buying Spotify which already has pretty much all music you would want, android, ipod, apple, pc applications, high quality ogg vorbis streams and a very loyal user base.
Spotify is the next big thing, the US just hasn't seen it yet, their business model is great, and their software works really well.
Spotify may not be for sale, but Google has deep pockets and a link up would knock out MS and Apple easily I think.
Google going to resell music. Woohoo. Another intermediary to burn money. Another link in the "Songwriter > Musician > Label > Wholesale > Itunes > A dozen resellers > Customer" chain that inflates prices.
Except Apple has always been fashion darling, not a tech darling. Indeed, Apple's technology is always fairly far behind, but Jobs' 1-button obsession does create fashion conscious products. Apple will always find users who'll pay more for fewer features when existing features are presented more fashionably.
I dislike the closed source culture surrounding Apple's computers and strongly dislike the iPhone's restrictions, but Apple's fashion awareness has helped many people. Just look how Apple made incremental back up fashionable. Can you imagine how much time and how many irreplaceable family photo albums that move has saved?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Lets face it - the Android Market mechanism itself sucks. If they were gonna do a desktop buy-n-sync system, the iTunes model is the one to follow. Looks like they are just following Apples pattern.
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Huh? Granted, iTunes Store can be slow at times, but I think it's easy enough to use.
What specific usability problems did you run into?
are they now also going to insert ads into the songs i listen to?
Many of the buyers in the primary demographic will hear, "Google Audio," and not realize Google is selling music. -Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Another example of "Sensational headlines sells", before this ./ post even went live more details became available that in fact this is about adding music to the search results and that the songs found can be played through iLike, last.fm, lala, etc.. and offer 'Click to buy' links to iTunes and Amazon.
So no, Google is not taking on iTunes or Amazon, in fact it will help sell their music.
That doesn't mean however this isn't a very nifty feature :)
Screenshots and more info are available at:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/google-to-partner-with-ilike-and-lala-for-new-music-service/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/google-music-service-the-screenshots/
Soon it'll be "If you don't want to buy it from iTunes or Amazon, just copy the first line of the song and Google it. The link from there will allow you to hear the whole thing."
it is iTunes you iNsensitive Clod!
Let's see, we all know about Google's Don't be evil mantra...
What is it they say?
Gotta shake hands with the devil to do the lord's work...
If you dance with the devil you're bound to get burnt, or something like that...
So now they're going to get in bed with the devil (RIAA)... What are the results of that? Volcanic herpes or the business equivalent?
I had a sucky sig.
Yes!!! Google getting involved can only mean one thing: free music with less privacy! YAHOOOOOO!!!!!
Yes, and no. I think this style of leadership has great strengths, but it opens Apple up to huge weaknesses. My iPhone is the only Apple device I have owned, and having had every other platform other than Android, I can say it is the best phone I have had.
However, it does have many faults. It does seem like it was created by one man. If that one person decided the iPhone should do something (play music, manage calls), it does it VERY well. If they either decided it shouldn't do something or didn't consider it (multitasking, syncing to multiple computers), then it can't be made to do it. With Windows Mobile, it never did anything well, but I could force it to do about anything half-assed. The iPhone is wonderful and worthless, depending on what you ask it to do.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
The problem he ran into was his own limited intelligence. A blind monkey could figure out how to activate an iTunes gift card.
How did this get down to an iPod thread?
...pulls out popcorn.....
The recession didn't start in 2007, it started in late 2008.
The recession before that was in 2001 (.com crash + World Trade Center demolition). The recoveries in the past two decades have been more jobless than before. Recovery largely comes in the form of increased productivity per employee and the development of foreign economies rather than increased domestic employment. This makes perception of a recession last longer than the official economic figures.
Or at least pretend to take over the world from a story box.
I agree. And I'll add another reason: it's fast. I love that.
iTunes has nice features, but that sucker crawls on my (relatively new) Windows XP machine. If Google can trounce iTunes in the speed department, I'd take a serious look at their offering.
On that topic: how fast is Songbird, or other full-featured "library" players? (I do use Winamp when I just want quick access to specific songs, and it's fast, but it's a less full-featured program.)
Here's a neat trick that I use to make mpd work better for me:
Use xbindkeys, set ctrl-alt-shift-f to run mpc next and ctrl-alt-shift-d to run mpc pause. Then you can control your music player without switching away from emacs/firefox/pornview/.... (add bindings of 'a' to prev and 's' to stop if you feel like it; I do.). I'm quite amazed that no music player I know of does something like this by default (or makes it easy to do)---and the "Multimedia Keys" are no substitute, as they're a long distance away from your hands when you're typing (even worse when running pornvi... uh, emacs!)
I can also recommend binding a key to xterm -geometry 80x3-32-64 -e 'watch -tn1 mpc'. That'll give you nice "mpd status window" in the lower right of your screen.
(strictly speaking, I'm binding ctrl-alt-shift-[aoeu] because I'm using the dvorak layout, but that's [asdf] on qwerty, so it all makes sense... yes?)
Only a fraction of google's software offerings beat the competition. And even smaller fraction of that make any money. Most dies a slow death fallingoff the edge to the google toolbar.
OTOH, they could have just encouraged people to use the Finder to
drag their photo library to an attached USB drive.
Infact, current Mac culture seems to be specifically avoiding that
sort of thing. More of the basic system features are being hidden
from the end users never to be seen again. Instead of having the
old school saavy Mac users they are creating a new generation of
co-dependents.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I prefer emusic. They're the first service that was cost effective and more convenient than piracy. They have all my music (I prefer electronica and industrial), so I never bother with iTunes.
If I want to pay iTunes prices and not deal with the BS DRM, I can go to Amazon.
I could really care less about another music store. They're probably just preparing for Android to hit iPhones with music capability.
A decent mp3 player on Linux...that would be interesting. Amarok is glacially slow and incredibly unstable. Rhythmbox is reasonable, but has bugs with ID3 tags that I never deal with in Musicmatch in the old days and Media Monkey today on windows.
I wait for the day, and you know it's coming, when Google rolls out it's ChromeOS, and the EU demands that they give consumers the choice of which browser to use.
and pushed DRM off the table (aided greatly by Amazon)
I don't know the overall metrics on this, but DRM was the very reason I abandoned iTunes and began purchasing my digital music at Amazon. Now, I notice that a downloaded MP3 file from Amazon will have an Amazon "song id#" embedded in the id3 data, and I cannot help but wonder if iTunes makes note of that when it scans my music library.
Reply to That ||
I'm fed up of Apple's restrictive and prescriptive dictating of how I can and can't use my own products. I like my iPod Classic and I like my iPhone, but I can't use iTunes because I run Linux, and Apple of course say that is forbidden.
I've been using gtkpod to transfer music to the iPod Classic, but Apple have gone one extra step to ensure I can't use my iPhone that way under Linux. So if I use an OS Apple haven't rubber stamped I can't transfer music to my own phone. Thanks.
I'm looking forward to the day when Google pull all this together into an open Android device capable of replacing the iPhone/iPod.
Why did you reward Apple with your money, if you don't like their policies and don't want to run their OS? It's not like their hardware is all that exceptional. If I didn't like iTunes I sure as hell wouldn't have an iPod.
Which is too bad, because more competition would have been really helpful, especially for linux users. I currently buy my music on amazon, but their linux support is extremely buggy. To buy an album (as opposed to individual songs), you have to use a special downloader app they provide. To their credit, they do provide a linux version, but their whole setup is just lame and buggy. When I've called with problems, the Indian tech support people always claimed that there's no support for anything but Windows and IE (even though amazon's web site offers specific information and software for linux). Right now, amazon probably has zero incentive to improve the situation. But if there was someone else willing to sell music to linux users, amazon would probably say to themselves, "Hey, linux users may only be 0.5% of our customers, but 0.5% is still millions of dollars, and now that we've got competition we should really get our act together."
Also, although I buy my music in mp3 format, a lot of people prefer less lossy formats. Right now, your only option is iTunes if you don't want mp3. Geographical restrictions are another issue that would probably get fixed if there were more competition.
Find free books.
If there's a DRM ecosystem, could it be related to this...!?#%$!
Did I mention any problem activating the gift card? Reading comprehension a little low, eh? The problem was the computer slowed to a crawl as soon as I entered the store. On top of that, searching worked fine if you were looking for something specific, but the browsing sucks (compared, for instance, to Amazon, which shows alternative products people purchased, top selling items in detailed categories, and more sorting options). The Genius bar is clever and fixed this to a degree, but it could use better integration with the store.
..in China. music.google.cn is one the online music providers in China.
Only in China they have some agreement with the audio companies and they provide all musics for free.
Anonymously posted from the other side of the Great Firewall.
Too many techies engineers forget to do the DRUNK test.
If youre device is UNSUABLE when youre drunk, youre device is toast.
Make any device easy to use so even when youre half blind, cant see, and still can use it , then its good.
ie, large fonts, less words, more icons, logical intuitive layouts.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.