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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."
Being able to buy an entire playlist, instead of one tune at a time, is though. Just to clarify.
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.
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
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
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.
Ummm, no. What Apple stops is non-iPod devices showing themselves as iPods to iTunes. They do not stop iPods from syncing with 3rd party apps. There are a metric shit-ton of Linux apps that can sync individual MP3s or playlists to iTunes and Apple cannot give a shit.
Remember, iTunes and its music store exist to sell iPods. If you've already bought that iPod, then great. Just don't make your device pretend to be an iPod, like Palm did with the Pre.
:q!