Anyone going to try it?
I’m all over it. I love my iPod.
What’s the DRM on these? If I spend .99 cents is the song mine mine mine?
I installed it, and I like it a lot. Nice interface, decent library in the music store, and a buck a song (seems reasonable enough to me).
Here’s a question for the Tivo folks on the board: can you play the protected AAC files that you buy through the iTunes store on a networked series 2 Tivo?
Midnight Son: the iTunes store sells its music in a protected MPEG4 format. The license is very reasonable, though. The songs are yours, permanently, but you can only play them on up to three computers at one time (you “authorize” your machine to play music purchased on your account, sort of like Windows activation; you can also de-authorize machines if you need to switch computers). You can burn the music to a CD as standard audio, though you are limited to ten burns of any playlist that contains protected AAC files. There is no limit on burning the AAC files to CD in their native format. You need the iTunes player (or an iPod) to play them, but it’s free (the iTunes player, not the iPod), so no big deal. My advice: check it out. There’s no subscription fee, the software is a free download, and the music is $.99 a song, so you basically have nothing to lose.
I can totally see this sort of thing replacing the retail music industry… and sooner rather than later.
Unless you don’t live in the US or Canada, in which case it’s just another button to be ignored - the online 60’s Music, if you will. iTunes is a great little program though. Got it installed just for cataloguing music.
$0.99 a song seems steep to me. Anyone remember that weird jukebox they test marketed in the early nineties? It would make you a mix tape. $0.50 a song was the price back then. Sure this is more flexible, but if they want to stop piracy, free still wins.
I know, $0.99 cents a song is roughly what a CD costs. Right. But with a CD I don’t have to worry about MP4s, online activation, which computer I’m allowing the songs to be played on, hard drive failures that wipe out my entire music collection permanently… etc., Plus I get liner notes, cover art etc., Maybe this will pan out, but I doubt it’ll replace retail any time soon. All this does is gives MP3 fans with a conscience an alternative.
Oh, also, if this does catch on… doesn’t this mark the death of the “album”? The death of quirky little songs that won’t ever be bought singly at $0.99 a pop? That seems sad to me. Lots of great songs aren’t singles, after all.
Maybe. I will say that it’s a lot easier to find stuff I want, and faster to download it, in many cases, via iTunes as opposed to Kazaa. And free is probably a bit less appealing to people with the record industry suing people right and left.
I know, $0.99 cents a song is roughly what a CD costs. Right. But with a CD I don’t have to worry about MP4s, online activation, which computer I’m allowing the songs to be played on, hard drive failures that wipe out my entire music collection permanently… etc.,
The “online activation” is automatic. Unless you want to transfer your activation status to a different computer, you don’t have to do anything at all. The software automatically activates your machine the first time you buy a song. You can burn the songs to CD, either in their native AAC format (as an archive), or in standard audio format (to play in your CD player). If I want my entire music collection on stardard audio CDs, I can have it. So it’s hardly as fragile as you make it out to be. I mean, why is a CD collection any better? CDs get scratched, or lost. I end up transfering most of my CDs to my computer anyway; this just takes a step out of the process.
Oh, also, if this does catch on… doesn’t this mark the death of the “album”? The death of quirky little songs that won’t ever be bought singly at $0.99 a pop? That seems sad to me. Lots of great songs aren’t singles, after all.
You can buy entire albums, and they have an “album notes” page that is viewable in the iTunes software. I’d like to see the actual liner notes presented in this format (and they could do it pretty easily), but they have cover art, at least.
Overall it’s a fairly nice player. It sounds crisp and clean, the playlist management features are head and shoulders above Winamp and Windows Media Player, and the sharing feature to stream music over the network is pretty damn cool.
I haven’t played much with the store, since I have no desire to buy music through iTunes, but by all accounts it’s pretty slick and bug-free.
That said, I have a number of complaints.
First, it has a 35-40 MB memory footprint. By comparison, Windows Media Player generally stays under 15 MB and Winamp (2.x) uses around 3 MB. This is all while an mp3 (the same one in each case) is playing, and does not include the other processes it starts (read on).
Also, it chugs. I’m running a 1.53 GHz processor and have 512 MB of RAM. Games are one thing, but I’m not used to a media player getting choppy when I resize the window or change songs, to list a couple of examples.
Additionally, it has created a startup process (iTunesHelper.exe) and a couple of automatic services (iPodService and Gearsec) on my machine. There are no options to just tell iTunes that I do not have an iPod and do not wish to use it to burn CDs (this is presumably what Gearsec is for). In fact, there is a general dearth of preference options. I assume this is because that is the standard for Mac software.
Finally, brushed aluminum and blueberry really doesn’t work on a Windows desktop. I could argue that it doesn’t look good at all, but I’m not a Mac user, and to each his own.
I assume that a CD burned with iTunes could then be re-ripped and then encoded into MP3, right?
Presumably, yeah. I mean, it’s not like you are going to be able to stop people dead-set on pirating music with any protection scheme, and most of those people probably aren’t buying music from the iTunes store, anyway. If Tivo will play the AAC files, I don’t really care about converting them to MP3s, anyway.
The Tivo site says that Tivo Desktop is compatible with iTunes, but only under the Mac section. I’m assuming they just haven’t updated the site yet.
I wasn’t thinking in terms of piracy. More along the line of loosing the restrictions on the intellectual property I was legitimately purchasing. (IE: Copying the song to a non-iPod MP3 player or – ooh – burning an 11th mix CD three years down the road…
They need some kind of tiered pricing structure. I don’t want to pay a buck a song for old stuff. New stuff, sure, but not some hoary old Rolling Stones song from 1965.
Do they offer any kind of volume discount, like get 25 songs for the price of 20?
Neither my car CD player nor my Rio SP250 CD player support AAC.
So unless I can somehow legally rip the AAC files to MP3 (and NOT through an intermediary; I am not going to burn to redbook then rip the redbook, that is simply ridiculous), I won’t be touching this with a 10 foot pole.
I won’t be touching any online music programs, regardless of how great their license ends up being, because I want the RIAA to die.
My boycott continues unabated. I have a nice new tool that helps.
Unless you don’t live in the US or Canada, in which case it’s just another button to be ignored
US only, I’m afraid…us canucks are out of luck too.
It’s interesting how he says, “Convert to MP3,” and you jump to, “people dead set on pirating.”
It was probably a Freudian slip on your part, but I really love the fact that there are plenty of people who automatically assume when I say something like, “I just got done ripping my CDs” really means, “I’m doing something illegal music-related.”
Something else that’s been nagging at the back of my head is how the RIAA is suing the people who SHARE the files, not the people who download them.
Allow me to paint a picture. You buy a buttload of CDs. You then take those CDs and put them on your porch, with a sign that says “borrow at your leisure.” It is not illegal to lend CDs to other people (although with the copy protection schemes and iPods DRM, it’s beginning to move towards that direction), it is illegal to actually copy the CDs. You shouldn’t be able to be held responsible for what someone does after borrowing one of your CDs.
Otherwise, the public libraries would be a hotbed of lawsuits, because they lend CDs, DVDs, VHS, and even BOOKS to people!
The fact is, they should be suing the music downloaders, not the sharers, because for all they know, every single song shared on Jane Doe’s PC could have been tracks of CDs she owned, and ripped herself.
But THEN there’s the possibility that Jane was downloading the file to save the hassle of ripping it, which makes it difficult to be able to sue the downloaders. Short of sending an officer to their home to verify their ownership of the album…
Yadda yadda yadda. It’s utterly ridiculous.
Down with RIAA, down with iTunes. The lot of you who are supporting them deserve to be sodomized by a hooker with a penis.
I would consider a buck a song to be reasonable if the DRM didn’t restrict my usage of the songs I purchased.
But when I can’t copy them to my Pocket PC, my Palm, the solid-state MP3 player I use at the gym (I do have an iPod as well), or play them on the cool LinkSys wireless MP3/stereo system adapter, it’s unreasonable.
Rhapsody is a bit cheaper. 79 cents a song and $9.95 a month. Still more expensive than I would like. I’m thinking 35-40 cents a song.
Screw that. I need my music on a disc in a case with liner notes. I like liner notes. And not a JPEG of the notes, they have to be notes I can hold. And I don’t have a printer and I’m not buying one so that’s right out. And really what good is Sticky Fingers if you don’t get the awesome cover? You really think you can download some files and act like you own that shit? No zipper = no Fingers.
Plus I don’t want this compressed crap that you kids think sounds “close enough”. No, no, no, no, no. It had better be at least CD quality. And not MPEGs converted to WAVs that you burn to a disc, the real deal.
I could see myself using something like iTunes to buy a few songs, but it has to exist in conjunction with the retail stuff, which probably isn’t a concern anyway because there are still tons of people who don’t have easy access to it or the bandwidth that makes it take less than 20 minutes per song, so really we’re looking at later rather than sooner.
Also I’m with Denny on the proprietary format crap. I wouldn’t use this if I couldn’t put the files on the Palm.
Edit: I can’t spell. Thanks to machfive for the correction.
I think that this sort of copy protection is going to be a must in any commercial online music venture. It’s one thing to say “the consumer deserves to do whatever they want with their purchase,” but the reality is that what a lot of consumers currently like to do is distribute music files, for free, to everyone else on the Internet. Any business plan that does not include some means of addressing this issue is going to be a non-starter. There’s just no way it would ever get funded.
I’m not saying that Apple’s approach is ideal, but it works well enough for me. Unlike you, Denny, I don’t have 100,000 different pocket gadgets that I need to load my music onto, and since the iPod is such a nice player anyway (and since the 10 GB model is a bit cheaper now), I’d consider getting one specifically to use with iTunes music. If I can use the music on my home network, play it over my Tivo, and burn it to CDs, then I’d say that the DRM is fine for my needs.
Bear in mind that no DRM is ever going to be as generous as pirating–that seems to be the standard that most people here are comparing it to. That just seems unrealistic to me (though it is consistent with the sophistry that generally props up people’s self-justifications for pirating music), at least if we’d like to see retail distribution of music continue to be a viable industry. And maybe it won’t; maybe in the future, people simply won’t be able to make any money off music, and they’ll give it away for free to promote concert tours. In the meantime, it’s nice to have an ethical source of digital music.
Also I’m with Denny on the proprietary format crap. I wouldn’t use this if I couldn’t put the files on the Palm.
It’s not a proprietary format. MPEG-4 is a ISO/IEC standard. The copy protection is the reason you need an iPod to play the files. Conceivably, Apple could license the ability to play iTunes music files to other hardware manufacturers. I don’t know if they are planning to do that, but it would be a smart move on their part.
It had better be at least CD quality.
I’m no hardcore audiophile, though I do appreciate good sound quality. The music that I have downloaded from iTunes seems considerably better in quality than a good 128-kbps MP3. It seems identical to CD quality to me, but this sort of thing is highly subjective, so YMMV.
In the meantime, it’s nice to have an ethical source of digital music.
Go to a good indie record store, buy the CD used for betwee 6 and 8 dollars, go home, and use CDex to rip it to 224 Kbps AVBR MP3’s, which will be playable on practically every DVD player since '01, every computer, every PocketPC handheld, tons of Palms, not to mention the MP3-specific players.
And look at that - Not a dime went to the RIAA, and you’re free to burn 50 mix CDs using those songs. You can do anything you want with them, because you have the CD, and you have the license.
Afraid the artist isn’t receiving their due money? Then send them a fan letter with a check for $1.50. Not even Metallica makes that much off CD royalties. Or maybe you could join their fan club, or buy some of their merchandise. Or see them live.
There’s lots of ways to make up for having bought their CDs used, if you have some sort of guilt about it. I sure don’t. The way I see it, every new CD I don’t buy brings the RIAA one step closer to extinction.
Ben, the way you spin it, you make it sound like music “pirates” are out to screw over the musicians. Most of us actively engaging in the RIAA boycott are doing so because the RIAA is the one screwing over not only the consumers, but the musicians as well.