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Spotify Challenges iTunes With iPod Support, Playlist Synching
Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from thinq.co.uk: "Spotify has made a surprise announcement, and while it's still not the long-awaited US launch, it will be making a splash over the pond: the streaming music service is morphing into an iTunes competitor. In what is a clear attempt at rattling Apple's cage, Spotify has unveiled a pair of major new features: the ability to synchronise Spotify playlists with iPods, and the option to buy MP3 files to own — both key features of the iTunes platform. Any playlist created via the Spotify player can be downloaded in a single step, making 'digital mix-tape' creation significantly simpler."
in 3...2...1...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Being able to buy an entire playlist, instead of one tune at a time, is though. Just to clarify.
Apple is not for people who want free, customized, private or self-made software, media or data.
iOS has shown the path to profit, and I fear Apple may start "securing" OS-X soon.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Deliberate somewhat off-topic de-rail:
Not all competition is beneficial. In fact, in the general case, competition generally means that the stronger or more cunning party succeeds, not the better party. For instance: I do not want to have to compete with other people for my food.
A better phrase is probably "Coexisting Diversity = Good." Take Coke and Pepsi (or a car analogy: GM and Toyota): it is better for society to have both of these than to have just one, because people who prefer the taste of either product are satisfied. If one company "wins the competition" and puts the other out of business, then the people who preferred the "loser" suffer real loss. Also, resources spent competing are probably always better spent cooperating instead.
So for all the people wanting [platform X] to win: be careful for what you wish.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I am a Spotify premium customer, because it gives me access to lots of streaming music on my iPod. However, they are not an iTunes competitor. Their catalog is no where near iTunes in comprehensiveness. For many somewhat popular songs (try, for instance, finding the original "MacArthur park" the only results you get are a zillion bad karaoke albums, or covers. They have lots of random crap though. They are not really a competitor to iTunes, but rather a complement to it.
iPods (and apparently all Apple devices) munge filenames on the devices so that you are forced to install a music management application like iTunes. Apple chose not to follow the standard that every other device manufacturer was using and went their own proprietary route.
Aren't those features of, well, pretty much any online music store at all, such as Amazon?
With Amazon I can buy mp3s, and syncing mp3s to my player is not a function of the damn store I bought it from! Drag and drop through USB mass storage has been around forever - I was doing that on my old IRiver player back ages ago.
I don't understand stories like this. Mp3s can be bought in a million and four ways, and syncing them to my own devices (although I don't own an iPod) has been possible for as long as there have been mp3s at all. What's the big deal here? If something today couldn't do that, it means it was behind basic functionality of the early 1990s.
Note to most Slashdotters - almost every time you stamp your feet declaring something unnewsworthy, you're usually missing something.
The key point here is that it syncs with iPods. Not "MP3 Players", not to a USB Mass Storage Device, but to an actual honest to goodness iPod. Amazon doesn't do that, specifically because iPods use a proprietary sync routine and can't be synced like most other players.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Sued for what? When did Apple sue AOL for Winamp's iPod sync support?
Don't worry, they were able to sue Samsung over a rectangle with rounded corners, I'm sure they'll devise something to get rid of the pesky competitor.
Yeah they won't sue. They'll just make the next generation of devices harder to interface with. This is what they've done in the past to block 3rd-party iTunes alternatives.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This. If you care about software freedom you shouldn't buy from Apple. You're destroying your hobby and your job prospects. It's like a gearhead buying a Maybach.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I can't believe people simplify the issue to this extent (but reveals their bias). Even respectable sources for news have done it (FOTO8) and yet Nilay Patel has explained it in great detail: http://www.macgasm.net/2011/04/19/recommended-read-nilay-patel-apple-samsung-lawsuit/.
Jonathanjk.com
Itunes' (and other softwares') "organising media crap" amounts to the software creating and managing a bunch of directories on disk for you. I'd respectfully submit that anybody who's managing their music collection by manually creating and shuffling folders around, and manually updating filenames should turn in their self-congratulatory geek card.
I'm pretty sure being someone "with brains" amounts to more than "right click -> new folder..." or "cd ~/music; mkdir 'The Beatles'", and doing that a thousand times doesn't make you any more of a geek than doing it once. In fact, insisting on doing something manually which is adequately, consistently, and automatically performed by software would tend to make you a luddite.
WRT to your follow-up to your own post: perhaps some perspective would be helpful when you find yourself getting "angry" over the opinions other people share about a piece of media playback software? The submit button will still be there after you've proofed your comments, and spewing bile doesn't generally make people more likely to want to spend time reading your opinions.
...even worse support for those of us who use free software.
I didn't realize iTunes wasn't free.
There are some of us who believe in a resource-based economy, rather than the current money-based system which is broken beyond repair. Within that context, resources expended to compete, are resources wasted outright. Competition is a destructive process.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Apple only blocks their software from working with other people's hardware (Palm syncing with iTunes) or if the software turns their hardware into a commodity (Flash on iOS.) Once you buy their hardware, they couldn't care less if you use non-apple software.
Yes you can, at least in iTunes.
Preferences > Advanced > uncheck "keep iTunes Media folder organised"
Then it behaves exactly like Winamp if you want to do all the folder and music management yourself.