Well, it seems strange insofar as I was dragging art to the album art space in the bottom right corner while viewing an album, then realizing I used the wrong picture and was thinking that dragging another there would overwrite the old one. It didn't.
Also, iTunes does cover art by adding a copy of the image to the ID3 tags of the image. This is fine.. a bit space wasteful, but at least it complies with standards. However, ID3v2 specifies a way to label each piece of art as "cover", "back cover", "inside art" and so on, and from my experiments, iTunes only uses the "cover" tag to put art in the file. Thus you have a MP3 file with several cover art pieces. While this is okay and sorta complies with the standard, it's annoying that it doesn't have the capability to let you label which piece of art is which in the editor, as far as I can see.
I sent Apple a comment about this flaw in the iTunes browser.
On reflection, WMP9 does exactly what I said iTunes should do with a "temporary" playlist. Whenever you're in the library and tell it to start playing something, the playlist on the main screen fills up with what you're currently seeing in the library before it starts playing.
iTunes could do this easily enough, and I even suggested extending the iPod's "Now Playing" metaphor in order to do it. Have a built in "Now Playing" playlist that gets erased and populated with whatever you happen to be looking at when you tell it to play a song. Then play from that list. This would let me change my view and not worry about iTunes stopping playback.
True, but that entails a re-encoding of the waveform and a theoretical quality loss. It's not good enough for some people. Besides, it's a silly workaround. The data is there. It's already encoded. Evidence suggests it's not even encrypted, just in a thin DRM wrapper. I really don't expect it to take long before someone works it out.
In short, Apple's using the same interface they've ever used.
I know. That's the problem. I thought I made that clear. They're using a layer between windows and iTunes to change their interface to some degree, and it is slow and buggy. That's a technical problem. The fact that they're using the Mac interface on Windows at all is another problem, but in this case it's a fundamental design and usability problem. By changing the UI that every windows user expects to see, they've actually succeeded in making their interface HARDER to use.
Mac users and Apple fans like to harp on "eas-of-use". Sorry guys, but ease-of-use does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot look at two interfaces and say "this one is easier to use" because that leaves out the consideration of who is, in fact, using it. Someone used to working with Windows will have a harder time using a Mac than someone used to using a Mac. That's just self evident.
In Windows, I expect a maximize button to maximize (especially when it looks like a maximize icon and is in the right location for it, ie, the top right corner of the window). In Windows, when I see a columned list, I expect to be able to double click on the line between two column headers to auto resize the column to show all the data in that column (see Excel and any other program using the standard Windows functions for columned lists).
I grant you that a lot of programs using skins and such have moved away from these conventions on the Windows platform. Music Match is one of them. Winamp is too, to a lesser degree. However, Music Match sucks too, and Winamp is pretty normal in most things if you use the default skins (it's just colorized a lot). But it not possible to ignore these conventions entirely and still claim to be better at ease-of-use, much less to be "the best windows app ever", as Jobs did.
I'd like to decrypt the files without recompression too, but WHY would I want to put in the time?
Simple, I can do anything I want with my 3 computers! The DRM is non-existant for me, so its simple not WORTH MY TIME TO HACK IT! Well, one very good reason would be if you don't have an iPod, but have something else that can't play M4P's, perhaps? Then you'd have a valid reason to be able to transcode your legally purchased music into another format, and you'd ideally want to do it without having to burn a CD for it.
It may not be worth your time, but it will be worth somebody's time. How many Mac users with portable MP3 player's don't have iPod's? There's been little or no incentive for them to do this sort of thing, because the iPod can play the protected file just fine. Now that Windows users, with a large variety of portable devices, have access to the protected format, they'll definitely want to be able to take it with them.
I complain when Real does it too. I complain when anybody does it. Just because other shitty software does the same thing doesn't mean your software should do it too.
Oh please. Oh great windows hackers, show us your technical skillz.
I didn't say there wasn't a lot of morons using Windows too. But there's quite a lot more hackers, crackers, and generally more technical people using Windows than there are using mac's, on a simple percentage basis. When you have 90% of the market, that's a hell of a lot of people.
Oh, I found that Shift-clicking on the maximize button makes the window switch between two sizes, neither of which is maximized. You can resize either one of them and it will remember that size, and then shift clicking the max button will toggle between those two sizes you've set. Wacky stuff, that is.
FWIW, I don't use Macs much, but we do have a few at work and I have to use them there occasionally. I'm not used to the Mac's unusual and weird interface designs, but I can get by on them if needed.
My guess... You are not playing a playlist. You are using the browse pane to select a sub-set of your library and then moving to another part of your library to edit things. If the tracks in the playlist that is playing are no longer selected either via browse or search then iTunes doesn't know how what track to go on to.
Then iTunes is fundamentally flawed in that respect. They should fix it. I select an album in the browser, start playing that album, go to a different album and edit it's tags or what have you.. iTunes should continue to play the list that it had when I told it to start playing.
Dragging the songs to the playlist bar to create a playlist just so I can go edit other songs while it's playing is, at best, a kludgy hack for a problem iTunes has. A built in "playlist" that's not necessarily displayed should be created whenever I tell it to play any set of things that's on the screen. If I start WMP9 playing in the library, then go mess with other songs in the library, it does exactly what I want it to do. Continue playing as if I had done nothing to my view. Not that I much like WMP9 either, but it got that part dead on.
Wow. With a ridiculous statement like that I can't tell whether you're a Windows user or a Linux user. Let me spell it out for you though: there are interfaces that are naturally easier to use than others. This does not mean that there are not strong components that must be learned anyway, but once you get over that, the software has to match up well with our own internal cognitive models of what we're doing, or else it will not be easy at all.
I use Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'm a three-in-one sort of guy. And here's the deal.. When I'm using a Mac, I expect applications to work like they do on the Mac. When I'm using Windows, I expect applications to work like they do in Windows. When I'm using Linux, I expect applications to work they way I spent half an hour setting up the config files to tell them to work.;)
It's one thing to make your interface easy to use. It's another to redefine such extremely standardized things as the freakin' MAXIMIZE BUTTON. iTunes uses the maximize button to, oddly enough, go into "compact mode" where the damn window is smaller instead of larger. How much more unintuitive do you get considering it's on a windows platform?
The bits in the interface, for the most part, are fine. It's the standard every day things that are not, because they decided to use a Mac emulation mode instead of the normal Windows method of doing things.
That's what the "repeat playlist" button is for (bottom, third button from the left). I don't know about iTunes for Windows, but I've never had iTunes on the Mac spontaneously stop playing songs while I'm dorking around with the iTMS or other playlists, as long as that button is turned on.
Huh? I mean like I have an album in the list on the screen.. I start playing that album. If I walk away, the album continues to play. If I go to another album while it's playing and edit some tags or something, then when the current song stops, the album doesn't continue to play. That's wacked out, IMO.
Most likely it's because you stole your music off the internet. If you had ripped it yourself, or bought it, it would have those tags already. I did rip most of it myself. But ripping CD's doesn't give you cover art.:P
True, but the original point is valid. If it's going to install QT, make sure it: a) Mentions that it's going to do so, loud and clear b) Doesn't add the Taskbar icon c) Doesn't add the QuickLaunch icon d) Doesn't add a Desktop icon e) Doesn't add anything in the start menu (this one is debatable, the rest are not debatable)
Just don't try to take over my shit and I have no complaints. Ideally, it would check to see if QT was there already and upgrade it's components only (I think it does this, in fact), and if it's not there, it would put only what it absolutely needed to function there and not change anything else. When I'm installing one program, if it installs another then it's doing something that I don't want it to do, regardless of the need for the other program to function.
The answer is that you can copy it to an iPod using iTunes and perhaps nothing else.
Apple's DRM works, basically, as follows: 1) Every iTMS user has an account. This account gets a key. 2) When you "authorize" a copy of iTunes, basically you're downloading a copy of that key somewhere onto that computer. Apple will let you authorize 3 copies of iTunes per account. You can "deauthorize" a computer too, telling apple that the key has been removed from that computer. 3) Every file you download from iTMS has some DRM in it. The M4P file (MPEG4 Protected) has a note in it saying which account downloaded it. In other words, it has your ".MAC" username inside. 4) When you play the file with iTunes, it sees the username and checks it's big list of keys to see if there's a key for that user on the computer. If so then it plays the file. If not, it doesn't.
The key can work a few different ways. Which way it really does work, I haven't fully worked out yet.
Method a) The M4P also contains a signature that decrypts with your key. iTunes then simply checks the signature using your key and plays if it's good. Method b) The M4P's actual audio data is encrypted using your key. This is possible, since they're already modifying every downloaded M4P file to stick in a.MAC username, might as well encrypt the data too. Method c) A combinaton of both a and b. This seems most likely, but again, I haven't totally worked it out yet.
Now, when you stick the M4P onto the iPod, a few different things can happen: a) iTunes can remove the DRM, decode the file into a normal unprotected one, and stick it on the iPod. Unlikely, as the iPod has basically zero protection for taking music back off of it. Just a bit of obfuscation, nothing seriously hard to overcome. b) iTunes transfers the key to the iPod, which can then decrypt the file and play it as needed. This means that you must use iTunes to transfer the M4P to the iPod, and therefore this seems to be the most likely method.
The reason I call this whole mess DRM-lite is that everything you need to play the song is on one computer. This is easily proven, in fact, as you can authorize a computer, unplug the ethernet cable, and it still plays just fine. Reboot it, it still plays great. Whatever, the key is on the computer somewhere.
The crack that will eventually come up is that someone will find the key on the hard drive, figure out how it decodes the M4P, and write a quick and easy program that converts the M4P to an M4A (unprotected MPEG4 Audio). That'll be the way the conversion is done without decoding and encoding again.
Now that the other (and let's face it, a bit more technical and hackerish) 90% of the world has real solid access to the format, it'll be cracked in a couple weeks or so.
First, let me state that I own an iPod, which is why I like iTunes to some degree. It works incredibly well with the iPod.
However, it's not without it's faults, both major and minor. Most of them are because they shoved it out the door too early, I grant you. The next release may fix most of the problems.
Minor ones:
- Speed. It's slow. Not excessively so, but Apple made a massively huge mistake in porting large chunks of the iTunes interface to Windows using some kind of emulation trick. Resizing a column width isn't fluid and smooth like it should be. Even moving the window around is clunky because of all the custom interface code. Memorywise I have no complaints, unlike many others, but it's slow because it's trying to use nonstandard interfaces. Quicktime suffers the same problems. Hey guys, this is Windows. Use the freakin' Windows standard interfaces already. You're only pissing off Windows users. Ease of use? Ease of use always boils down to what you're used to, and that's it. I'm not used to using a Mac. If I actually had a mac, then maybe I'd be used to it. This is piss poor design and sloppy coding. If you're really determined to stick with the mac like interface, then actually rewrite the damn thing instead of slapping a slow emulation layer underneath it and shoving it out the door.
- Interface is totally wacky. There's no way to maximize the thing to get the most out of the screen real estate. NONE WHATSOEVER. You can drag the thing larger, but you absolutely, positively, cannot fill the screen. This is damn annoying. The maximize button even makes the damn thing go into compact mode. Talk about unintuitive. Again, USE THE STANDARD INTERFACES.
-It has a real problem playing one playlist while I do things to other songs. I start playing something in a list, then go elsewhere in the interface to edit tags or something, and when that song stops, the damn thing stops playing because I'm no longer on the playlist that I was on when I started playing. WTF? Why can't I have it continue to play songs in the background while I'm doing other shit in the foreground? This is clumsy and stupid. When I start the thing playing a list of songs, it should play until I tell it to stop, no matter what the heck I do. Unless I go in and remove songs from that list, don't freakin' stop. I hate having to go back to the list to start the next song every 4 minutes. It's so annoying that I've started using Winamp in the background to actually play songs while I'm modifying tags and adding album art and such.
- Oh, when I manually add album art to a file, if I do it more than once, it adds multiple pictures to that file (in the ID3 tag). This shouldn't happen, it should remove the old one first or overwrite it or something.
-Quicktime installation without asking. Make the initial install more clear that quicktime is going to be installed, and then install it in such a way that it doesn't: a) leave an icon in the taskbar by default, b) leave an icon in the Quick Launch bar by default, c) leave an icon on the desktop by default. In fact, why not detect if QT is installed, and if so, upgrade and then use it, but if it's not installed, just install the minimum crap needed to use iTunes, like DLL's and code and such. Maybe I don't want the damn QT player, but I still want to use iTunes... Forcing customers to have to clean up the shit you're spewing everywhere is not a way to make friends.
Major things:
- I cannot believe that an advanced media player program has no capability to retrieve tags and cover art and such for random files using available information. This is totally unacceptable in a modern music organizer program. Hell, even WMP9, as crappy as it does it, can do that. Why am I entering tags and cover art and such shit manually? WTF?
- Support other devices. Not massive support, you don't need to do smart playlists on them and such, but if you want to use iTunes as an interface to the store, then you need to be able to support devices other t
One of the settings for every song is whether it's part of a "compilation" or not. Turn this on and that song goes into the "Compilations" folder instead, under a subdirectory with the album name. So any of those soundtracks you have, or various artists, or anything with different artist names for the same album, select them all, right click and go to Song Info, and then flip the Compilations flag to YES. It'll flip it for all those songs and they move to the Compilations folder as appropriate. A little unintuitive, I feel. Could be better. iTunes could be smart about it and flip that bit for any album with more than one artist associated with it. But hey, it's not hard to select all those albums and then flip the bit en masse.
But I still haven't allowed iTunes to organize my files as they live on drives that aren't always powered up, at the moment.
I get Discovery Science on my digital cable. Okay, TLC is soap opera crap nowadays, and Discovery ain't much better, but DCSci ain't too bad. It's mostly hour long documentary type shows, with different focuses.
A few shows in my guide on Discovery Science: Connections Discover Magazine (which is like a fast 30 minutes of semi interesing pop-sci stuff) Extreme Earth (natural disasters and other geographic type stuff) Science of the Deep (semi-science based documentary show all about various underwater explorations) Pulse (fairly good show which is about anything medical related) The Gene Hunters (DNA, evolution, etc) Curious World (random hour of whatever they come up with) About 5 different shows about dinosaurs in some way. Ancient Expeditions (anything archeology related) Mission Control (space stuff)
And so forth. Generally they pick a wide topic, like space stuff or dinos or medicine or whatever, and show stuff mainly relating to that topic for a couple days. A lot of repeating episodes and such, but still it's not cluttered with crap like "A Baby Story" on TLC.
There are science channels out there, they're just not widely available without digital cable and extended packages, sort of thing. The reason being that these aren't popular shows. It's mostly documentary type stuff.
I guess I'm just failing to see why a new channel is needed when there's several good ones, which simply aren't in very wide circulation. What makes the people making this new channel think that they'll get any better area coverage than these existing marginal coverage channels?
The FCC has a great history of putting the broadcast companies back in their place when they get out of line. They also have a very good history of making the right decisions on this sort of thing. I'd be really amazed if they sat by and took this kind of attitude from CBS, and downright shocked if the ruling mandated any form of protection that allowed the broadcaster to control something like the length of time a show can stay on your PVR.
They could mandate that a form of copy protection be active on a recording type device to prevent second generation copies from being made, but there's no way that they'd permit nonsense like allowing the broadcaster to state "this can only be on the drive for 3 days then it's auto removed".
My college computer labs had the same sort of thing hooked into the print spool. When you printed a document, it went into the spool. When it was finished printing, a "net send" type of message got sent to your workstation saying that your document was now in the printer tray.
It has it's uses, but it should never have been bound to the IP connection by default, without some kind of safeties.
What functionality do you lose when disabling the service? Is it one of those that never need to run, ever?
I thought the service description wasn't very clear, at least not after being translated to swedish.:-P
Originally it was conceived to provide an easy way for programs to send out messages over networks to users and/or admins about conditions that they need to know about. It allows one to send a simple pop up dialog box to anyone on the local network. You can use the "net send" command on any NT/2000/XP box to send messages using it.
As Windows got more into the internet, it got turned into a partially TCP/IP service sort of thing as well. This turned it, eventually, into another form of method used to send spam. Nowadays, that's really all it's used for mostly. Some network admins use it for it's original purpose, but simply have those ports firewalled off from the real internet to prevent the spam characteristics.
However, if you're not a network admin and don't use it for such, then there's really no reason it should be on. The fact that it's on by default is really the problem. It should be off by default, as should all network services, IMO. You turn on what you want, and the rest stays firmly closed.
What do you lose? The ability to receive those pop up messages, which are mostly spam nowadays.
This approach will crash and burn if attempting to traverse a stateful firewall, of course, since such a beast needs the info in the control conection in order to allow the data connection back through. Not if you use FTP in PASV mode though, right? Using PASV lets the client do the connection to the server for both the control and data connections.
Slashdot Mirror
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:)
Amazing.
Well, it seems strange insofar as I was dragging art to the album art space in the bottom right corner while viewing an album, then realizing I used the wrong picture and was thinking that dragging another there would overwrite the old one. It didn't.
Also, iTunes does cover art by adding a copy of the image to the ID3 tags of the image. This is fine.. a bit space wasteful, but at least it complies with standards. However, ID3v2 specifies a way to label each piece of art as "cover", "back cover", "inside art" and so on, and from my experiments, iTunes only uses the "cover" tag to put art in the file. Thus you have a MP3 file with several cover art pieces. While this is okay and sorta complies with the standard, it's annoying that it doesn't have the capability to let you label which piece of art is which in the editor, as far as I can see.
I sent Apple a comment about this flaw in the iTunes browser.
On reflection, WMP9 does exactly what I said iTunes should do with a "temporary" playlist. Whenever you're in the library and tell it to start playing something, the playlist on the main screen fills up with what you're currently seeing in the library before it starts playing.
iTunes could do this easily enough, and I even suggested extending the iPod's "Now Playing" metaphor in order to do it. Have a built in "Now Playing" playlist that gets erased and populated with whatever you happen to be looking at when you tell it to play a song. Then play from that list. This would let me change my view and not worry about iTunes stopping playback.
True, but that entails a re-encoding of the waveform and a theoretical quality loss. It's not good enough for some people. Besides, it's a silly workaround. The data is there. It's already encoded. Evidence suggests it's not even encrypted, just in a thin DRM wrapper. I really don't expect it to take long before someone works it out.
In short, Apple's using the same interface they've ever used.
I know. That's the problem. I thought I made that clear. They're using a layer between windows and iTunes to change their interface to some degree, and it is slow and buggy. That's a technical problem. The fact that they're using the Mac interface on Windows at all is another problem, but in this case it's a fundamental design and usability problem. By changing the UI that every windows user expects to see, they've actually succeeded in making their interface HARDER to use.
Mac users and Apple fans like to harp on "eas-of-use". Sorry guys, but ease-of-use does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot look at two interfaces and say "this one is easier to use" because that leaves out the consideration of who is, in fact, using it. Someone used to working with Windows will have a harder time using a Mac than someone used to using a Mac. That's just self evident.
In Windows, I expect a maximize button to maximize (especially when it looks like a maximize icon and is in the right location for it, ie, the top right corner of the window). In Windows, when I see a columned list, I expect to be able to double click on the line between two column headers to auto resize the column to show all the data in that column (see Excel and any other program using the standard Windows functions for columned lists).
I grant you that a lot of programs using skins and such have moved away from these conventions on the Windows platform. Music Match is one of them. Winamp is too, to a lesser degree. However, Music Match sucks too, and Winamp is pretty normal in most things if you use the default skins (it's just colorized a lot). But it not possible to ignore these conventions entirely and still claim to be better at ease-of-use, much less to be "the best windows app ever", as Jobs did.
I'd like to decrypt the files without recompression too, but WHY would I want to put in the time?
Simple, I can do anything I want with my 3 computers! The DRM is non-existant for me, so its simple not WORTH MY TIME TO HACK IT!
Well, one very good reason would be if you don't have an iPod, but have something else that can't play M4P's, perhaps? Then you'd have a valid reason to be able to transcode your legally purchased music into another format, and you'd ideally want to do it without having to burn a CD for it.
It may not be worth your time, but it will be worth somebody's time. How many Mac users with portable MP3 player's don't have iPod's? There's been little or no incentive for them to do this sort of thing, because the iPod can play the protected file just fine. Now that Windows users, with a large variety of portable devices, have access to the protected format, they'll definitely want to be able to take it with them.
I complain when Real does it too. I complain when anybody does it. Just because other shitty software does the same thing doesn't mean your software should do it too.
Oh please. Oh great windows hackers, show us your technical skillz.
I didn't say there wasn't a lot of morons using Windows too. But there's quite a lot more hackers, crackers, and generally more technical people using Windows than there are using mac's, on a simple percentage basis. When you have 90% of the market, that's a hell of a lot of people.
Oh, I found that Shift-clicking on the maximize button makes the window switch between two sizes, neither of which is maximized. You can resize either one of them and it will remember that size, and then shift clicking the max button will toggle between those two sizes you've set. Wacky stuff, that is.
REALLY?!
:-D
That means they must be using "Method a)" as I described in my above post. Wow. Just... wow.
Okay, I revise my estimate from "a couple weeks" to 1 week then.
FWIW, I don't use Macs much, but we do have a few at work and I have to use them there occasionally. I'm not used to the Mac's unusual and weird interface designs, but I can get by on them if needed.
My guess... You are not playing a playlist. You are using the browse pane to select a sub-set of your library and then moving to another part of your library to edit things. If the tracks in the playlist that is playing are no longer selected either via browse or search then iTunes doesn't know how what track to go on to.
Then iTunes is fundamentally flawed in that respect. They should fix it. I select an album in the browser, start playing that album, go to a different album and edit it's tags or what have you.. iTunes should continue to play the list that it had when I told it to start playing.
Dragging the songs to the playlist bar to create a playlist just so I can go edit other songs while it's playing is, at best, a kludgy hack for a problem iTunes has. A built in "playlist" that's not necessarily displayed should be created whenever I tell it to play any set of things that's on the screen. If I start WMP9 playing in the library, then go mess with other songs in the library, it does exactly what I want it to do. Continue playing as if I had done nothing to my view. Not that I much like WMP9 either, but it got that part dead on.
Pictures: Get info for multiple tracks, drag the new picture in the "Artwork" box.
I do that, but I have 300 ripped albums, and dragging the "folder.jpg" in to every one of them is damned inconvienent.
Wow. With a ridiculous statement like that I can't tell whether you're a Windows user or a Linux user. Let me spell it out for you though: there are interfaces that are naturally easier to use than others. This does not mean that there are not strong components that must be learned anyway, but once you get over that, the software has to match up well with our own internal cognitive models of what we're doing, or else it will not be easy at all.
;)
I use Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'm a three-in-one sort of guy. And here's the deal.. When I'm using a Mac, I expect applications to work like they do on the Mac. When I'm using Windows, I expect applications to work like they do in Windows. When I'm using Linux, I expect applications to work they way I spent half an hour setting up the config files to tell them to work.
It's one thing to make your interface easy to use. It's another to redefine such extremely standardized things as the freakin' MAXIMIZE BUTTON. iTunes uses the maximize button to, oddly enough, go into "compact mode" where the damn window is smaller instead of larger. How much more unintuitive do you get considering it's on a windows platform?
The bits in the interface, for the most part, are fine. It's the standard every day things that are not, because they decided to use a Mac emulation mode instead of the normal Windows method of doing things.
That's what the "repeat playlist" button is for (bottom, third button from the left). I don't know about iTunes for Windows, but I've never had iTunes on the Mac spontaneously stop playing songs while I'm dorking around with the iTMS or other playlists, as long as that button is turned on.
Huh? I mean like I have an album in the list on the screen.. I start playing that album. If I walk away, the album continues to play. If I go to another album while it's playing and edit some tags or something, then when the current song stops, the album doesn't continue to play. That's wacked out, IMO.
Most likely it's because you stole your music off the internet. If you had ripped it yourself, or bought it, it would have those tags already. :P
I did rip most of it myself. But ripping CD's doesn't give you cover art.
True, but the original point is valid. If it's going to install QT, make sure it:
a) Mentions that it's going to do so, loud and clear
b) Doesn't add the Taskbar icon
c) Doesn't add the QuickLaunch icon
d) Doesn't add a Desktop icon
e) Doesn't add anything in the start menu (this one is debatable, the rest are not debatable)
Just don't try to take over my shit and I have no complaints. Ideally, it would check to see if QT was there already and upgrade it's components only (I think it does this, in fact), and if it's not there, it would put only what it absolutely needed to function there and not change anything else. When I'm installing one program, if it installs another then it's doing something that I don't want it to do, regardless of the need for the other program to function.
The answer is that you can copy it to an iPod using iTunes and perhaps nothing else.
.MAC username, might as well encrypt the data too.
Apple's DRM works, basically, as follows:
1) Every iTMS user has an account. This account gets a key.
2) When you "authorize" a copy of iTunes, basically you're downloading a copy of that key somewhere onto that computer. Apple will let you authorize 3 copies of iTunes per account. You can "deauthorize" a computer too, telling apple that the key has been removed from that computer.
3) Every file you download from iTMS has some DRM in it. The M4P file (MPEG4 Protected) has a note in it saying which account downloaded it. In other words, it has your ".MAC" username inside.
4) When you play the file with iTunes, it sees the username and checks it's big list of keys to see if there's a key for that user on the computer. If so then it plays the file. If not, it doesn't.
The key can work a few different ways. Which way it really does work, I haven't fully worked out yet.
Method a) The M4P also contains a signature that decrypts with your key. iTunes then simply checks the signature using your key and plays if it's good.
Method b) The M4P's actual audio data is encrypted using your key. This is possible, since they're already modifying every downloaded M4P file to stick in a
Method c) A combinaton of both a and b. This seems most likely, but again, I haven't totally worked it out yet.
Now, when you stick the M4P onto the iPod, a few different things can happen:
a) iTunes can remove the DRM, decode the file into a normal unprotected one, and stick it on the iPod. Unlikely, as the iPod has basically zero protection for taking music back off of it. Just a bit of obfuscation, nothing seriously hard to overcome.
b) iTunes transfers the key to the iPod, which can then decrypt the file and play it as needed. This means that you must use iTunes to transfer the M4P to the iPod, and therefore this seems to be the most likely method.
The reason I call this whole mess DRM-lite is that everything you need to play the song is on one computer. This is easily proven, in fact, as you can authorize a computer, unplug the ethernet cable, and it still plays just fine. Reboot it, it still plays great. Whatever, the key is on the computer somewhere.
The crack that will eventually come up is that someone will find the key on the hard drive, figure out how it decodes the M4P, and write a quick and easy program that converts the M4P to an M4A (unprotected MPEG4 Audio). That'll be the way the conversion is done without decoding and encoding again.
Now that the other (and let's face it, a bit more technical and hackerish) 90% of the world has real solid access to the format, it'll be cracked in a couple weeks or so.
First, let me state that I own an iPod, which is why I like iTunes to some degree. It works incredibly well with the iPod.
However, it's not without it's faults, both major and minor. Most of them are because they shoved it out the door too early, I grant you. The next release may fix most of the problems.
Minor ones:
- Speed. It's slow. Not excessively so, but Apple made a massively huge mistake in porting large chunks of the iTunes interface to Windows using some kind of emulation trick. Resizing a column width isn't fluid and smooth like it should be. Even moving the window around is clunky because of all the custom interface code. Memorywise I have no complaints, unlike many others, but it's slow because it's trying to use nonstandard interfaces. Quicktime suffers the same problems. Hey guys, this is Windows. Use the freakin' Windows standard interfaces already. You're only pissing off Windows users. Ease of use? Ease of use always boils down to what you're used to, and that's it. I'm not used to using a Mac. If I actually had a mac, then maybe I'd be used to it. This is piss poor design and sloppy coding. If you're really determined to stick with the mac like interface, then actually rewrite the damn thing instead of slapping a slow emulation layer underneath it and shoving it out the door.
- Interface is totally wacky. There's no way to maximize the thing to get the most out of the screen real estate. NONE WHATSOEVER. You can drag the thing larger, but you absolutely, positively, cannot fill the screen. This is damn annoying. The maximize button even makes the damn thing go into compact mode. Talk about unintuitive. Again, USE THE STANDARD INTERFACES.
-It has a real problem playing one playlist while I do things to other songs. I start playing something in a list, then go elsewhere in the interface to edit tags or something, and when that song stops, the damn thing stops playing because I'm no longer on the playlist that I was on when I started playing. WTF? Why can't I have it continue to play songs in the background while I'm doing other shit in the foreground? This is clumsy and stupid. When I start the thing playing a list of songs, it should play until I tell it to stop, no matter what the heck I do. Unless I go in and remove songs from that list, don't freakin' stop. I hate having to go back to the list to start the next song every 4 minutes. It's so annoying that I've started using Winamp in the background to actually play songs while I'm modifying tags and adding album art and such.
- Oh, when I manually add album art to a file, if I do it more than once, it adds multiple pictures to that file (in the ID3 tag). This shouldn't happen, it should remove the old one first or overwrite it or something.
-Quicktime installation without asking. Make the initial install more clear that quicktime is going to be installed, and then install it in such a way that it doesn't: a) leave an icon in the taskbar by default, b) leave an icon in the Quick Launch bar by default, c) leave an icon on the desktop by default. In fact, why not detect if QT is installed, and if so, upgrade and then use it, but if it's not installed, just install the minimum crap needed to use iTunes, like DLL's and code and such. Maybe I don't want the damn QT player, but I still want to use iTunes... Forcing customers to have to clean up the shit you're spewing everywhere is not a way to make friends.
Major things:
- I cannot believe that an advanced media player program has no capability to retrieve tags and cover art and such for random files using available information. This is totally unacceptable in a modern music organizer program. Hell, even WMP9, as crappy as it does it, can do that. Why am I entering tags and cover art and such shit manually? WTF?
- Support other devices. Not massive support, you don't need to do smart playlists on them and such, but if you want to use iTunes as an interface to the store, then you need to be able to support devices other t
Took me a while to work that out too.
One of the settings for every song is whether it's part of a "compilation" or not. Turn this on and that song goes into the "Compilations" folder instead, under a subdirectory with the album name. So any of those soundtracks you have, or various artists, or anything with different artist names for the same album, select them all, right click and go to Song Info, and then flip the Compilations flag to YES. It'll flip it for all those songs and they move to the Compilations folder as appropriate. A little unintuitive, I feel. Could be better. iTunes could be smart about it and flip that bit for any album with more than one artist associated with it. But hey, it's not hard to select all those albums and then flip the bit en masse.
But I still haven't allowed iTunes to organize my files as they live on drives that aren't always powered up, at the moment.
I get Discovery Science on my digital cable. Okay, TLC is soap opera crap nowadays, and Discovery ain't much better, but DCSci ain't too bad. It's mostly hour long documentary type shows, with different focuses.
A few shows in my guide on Discovery Science:
Connections
Discover Magazine (which is like a fast 30 minutes of semi interesing pop-sci stuff)
Extreme Earth (natural disasters and other geographic type stuff)
Science of the Deep (semi-science based documentary show all about various underwater explorations)
Pulse (fairly good show which is about anything medical related)
The Gene Hunters (DNA, evolution, etc)
Curious World (random hour of whatever they come up with)
About 5 different shows about dinosaurs in some way.
Ancient Expeditions (anything archeology related)
Mission Control (space stuff)
And so forth. Generally they pick a wide topic, like space stuff or dinos or medicine or whatever, and show stuff mainly relating to that topic for a couple days. A lot of repeating episodes and such, but still it's not cluttered with crap like "A Baby Story" on TLC.
There are science channels out there, they're just not widely available without digital cable and extended packages, sort of thing. The reason being that these aren't popular shows. It's mostly documentary type stuff.
I guess I'm just failing to see why a new channel is needed when there's several good ones, which simply aren't in very wide circulation. What makes the people making this new channel think that they'll get any better area coverage than these existing marginal coverage channels?
Not when the FCC Chairman thinks that Tivo is "God's Machine"...
The FCC has a great history of putting the broadcast companies back in their place when they get out of line. They also have a very good history of making the right decisions on this sort of thing. I'd be really amazed if they sat by and took this kind of attitude from CBS, and downright shocked if the ruling mandated any form of protection that allowed the broadcaster to control something like the length of time a show can stay on your PVR.
They could mandate that a form of copy protection be active on a recording type device to prevent second generation copies from being made, but there's no way that they'd permit nonsense like allowing the broadcaster to state "this can only be on the drive for 3 days then it's auto removed".
My college computer labs had the same sort of thing hooked into the print spool. When you printed a document, it went into the spool. When it was finished printing, a "net send" type of message got sent to your workstation saying that your document was now in the printer tray.
It has it's uses, but it should never have been bound to the IP connection by default, without some kind of safeties.
What functionality do you lose when disabling the service? Is it one of those that never need to run, ever?
:-P
I thought the service description wasn't very clear, at least not after being translated to swedish.
Originally it was conceived to provide an easy way for programs to send out messages over networks to users and/or admins about conditions that they need to know about. It allows one to send a simple pop up dialog box to anyone on the local network. You can use the "net send" command on any NT/2000/XP box to send messages using it.
As Windows got more into the internet, it got turned into a partially TCP/IP service sort of thing as well. This turned it, eventually, into another form of method used to send spam. Nowadays, that's really all it's used for mostly. Some network admins use it for it's original purpose, but simply have those ports firewalled off from the real internet to prevent the spam characteristics.
However, if you're not a network admin and don't use it for such, then there's really no reason it should be on. The fact that it's on by default is really the problem. It should be off by default, as should all network services, IMO. You turn on what you want, and the rest stays firmly closed.
What do you lose? The ability to receive those pop up messages, which are mostly spam nowadays.
This approach will crash and burn if attempting to traverse a stateful firewall, of course, since such a beast needs the info in the control conection in order to allow the data connection back through.
Not if you use FTP in PASV mode though, right? Using PASV lets the client do the connection to the server for both the control and data connections.