iTunes for Windows Reviews 628
The iTunes stores provides one of the most liberal usage policies of any of the Internet music download services, matched by some of the best prices. Most individual tracks are 99 cents, most albums under $10. There is no subscription fee, so once you've downloaded it, you can listen to it forever. You can also burn CDs with the music you've purchases, provided you don't burn the same playlist more than 10 times.
These terms are a testament to the weight Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, pulls in the media industry. The fact that he was able to single-handedly negotiate such liberal licensing terms is simply amazing given the comparatively restrictive policies we've seen from other online music download services. Jobs clearly gets it, and he's dragging the music industry, kicking and screaming, into an entirely new way of thinking about online music distribution.
And now it's all available on the lowly Windows PC. We'll talk about the implications of Apple writing Windows software later, but for now, on to the review.
Installation
You start at apple.com and click the download link for the Windows version of iTunes. I thought perhaps I'd experience some sort of clunky installation experience - after all, Apple has never written any Windows software, let alone had to deal with the vagries of the Windows installation process. But the installation went off without a hitch, requiring one reboot.
Atfer the reboot, you launch iTunes, it asks you a few questions, and you are ready to go.
The iTunes Music Store
To download music, you must first create a user account. This is a fairly simple process. You provide an email address, credit card number and verification information. It's quick and painless, and when complete you are immediately logged onto the iTunes Music Store (iTMS from now on).
First, a little bit about the interface layout in iTunes. iTMS is presented as a browser pane within the iTunes software. A hierarchical "Source" sidebar on the left hand side of the screen allows you to switch between the Music Store, your own music libraries, shared libaries, CDs, Internet radio, and the iPod (though I don't have one, so I can't test this).
All of the various content choices are displayed in some way in the main browser pane. Along the top of the iTunes window you'll find a search box that works as well for the iTMS as it does for your own music libraries.
The iTMS is attractively laid out with quicklinks on the home page to top songs, top albums, featured artists, and celebrity play lists (what does Shaq listen to?). A drop down allows you to browse a particular genre (what, no separate genre for Heavy Metal?)
Click on an album you like and you are taken to an album details page. Here Apple takes advantage of the fact that iTunes is more than a simple web browser. The top of the browser pane shows cover artwork, top downloads from the album, and a "People who liked this, also bought" list (didn't Amazon patent that?).
The bottom of the browser pane shows a sortable list of all the tracks in a grid format. You can add and remove columns, chosing from Album, Artist, Comment, Composer, Disk Number, Genre, Time, Track Number, and Year. Double clicking on the track plays a short, 20 second sample of the music. The Artist and Genre columns provide little arrow icons that serve as links to display more music from that artist or genre.
At the top of the page you click "Add Album" to purchase all of the tracks, or click "Add Song" in the grid to purchase a single track. Some album's don't allow you to purchase the entire album, you have to buy all the tracks individually. Some tracks are available only when purchasing the entire album (these are marked "Album Only" and are usually longer tracks).
Buying and downloading music
Apple provides two options for purchasing music, a "1-click" option, and the traditional Shopping cart/checkout. I prefer the shopping cart. It helps keep down the impulse buys and the cart itself is pretty slick. When you select the shopping cart, the main browser pane shows a list of all the tracks you've selected for purchase. Tracks from a whole album purchase are nested under their album title. Almost all of the same functions (preview, links to other works/genres) are available in the shopping cart. At the top of the pane a list of "Recommendations based on the items in your cart" is shown. Ah, blessed be the up-sell...
After you click "Buy Now" you will be asked to provide your iTunes password. You can optionally tell iTunes to remember you password for music downloads, and you will not be prompted. After a final confirmation, the download begins. You can continue to browse the music store, listen to other music in your library, or rip CDs while the download continues. The status window at the top of the screen continues to show the download progress. You can also check up on the status of a download by looking on your "Purchased Music" folder, a sub folder of the Music Store folder.
iTMS Music Selection
I found plenty of variety in just about every genre I like. Apple claims 400,000 tracks from 5 major labels are available. If you like audio books, they've got 5,000 online. And no, Metallica, that fun loving band of music sharing nay-sayers, isn't available.
Burning CDs
The easiest way to burn a CD is to create a playlist with the tracks you want to burn. If the playlist contains any music you've purchased from the iTMS, you will only be able to burn that particular playlist 10 times. Not much of a restriction in my book.
Burning is as simple as selecting the play list, selecting the songs in the playlist you want to burn, then clicking the "burn disk" icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This confused me at first, because the icon is grayish before activation, it looks disabled to this long-time Windows user. But once clicked, it comes to life, turning into a little radioactivity icon that throbs and spins as the burn progresses.
The progress of the burn is displayed in the same place that the download status is displayed, the oval status window at the top of the screen. A little icon in the status window allows you to switch between "Now playing", download status, an equalizer, ripping status, and burning status. Another little 'X' icon in the status window allows you to cancel a download, rip, or burn.
I have to say that this layout is a marvelously efficient use of screen real-estate, and avoids the dialog box hell many similar programs suffer, but at first I found it a bit confusing, especially since it's not immediately obvious how to get the status window to display the status of the various tasks iTunes has initiated.
I burned several CDs and had no problem playing them on other PCs. There are only a few options to set for burning. You can explicitly specify the burn speed, and the format, picking between Audio CD, MP3 CD, and Data CD (I am assuming this is just a direct burn of the music files, in whatever format).
Music burning just works, and works well. In fact I burned a disc at the same time I was ripping another, and playing some downloaded music. Everything worked without a hitch, though CPU utilization was high enough that it slowed down other things on my machine.
iTunes also supports burning to DVDs but I believe this is still available on the Mac only. As I don't have a DVD burner handy, I can't test this.
Organizing your music
Even without the iTMS, Windows users should want iTunes for it music library management/jukebox features alone. iTunes blows away the competition in so many ways it's hard to catalogue them all.
Playlists
Let's start with the play lists. Playlists are added to the Source pane, along the left hand side of the screen. You can create a play list and add songs manually. You also have the ability to check and uncheck songs within a playlist, to disable and enable their playing after you've created the list.
The "Smart Playlist" feature allows you to build dynamic song selection criteria based on the meta tags (song attributes - artist, album, rating, genre etc...) For example I created an "Ella" play list for Ella Fitzgerald. This included three rules: "Album contains 'Ella'", "Artist contains 'Ella'", and "Song Name contains 'Ella'". These playlists can optionally update dynamically as new music is added.
You can tell the Smart Playlist to match 'Any' or 'All' of your criteria. Criteria include "contains", "does not contain", "is", "is not", "starts with" and "ends with". Criteria can be applied to any of the meta tags. The number of songs in the playlist can be limited to a specific number of songs, minutes, hours, or total file size.
The Library
Selecting the "Library" icon from the Source pane displays your entire music library in all of its glory. The bottom of the screen shows the total number of songs, number of days of music, and total size in Gigabytes. The default view is a sortable grid displaying all of the meta tags as columns. You can sort on each column. The columns can also be rearranged. Every column but the "Song Name" can be enabled and disabled.
All of the usual meta tags are present, along with some new ones (at least to me) "My Rating", "Play count" and "Last Played", and "Equalizer". That last one lets you specify an equalizer preset for that track only. You can also specify a volume preset when you view the track's Info page (this is not available in the grid view).
Most of the fields are editable in the grid display, just click on the text and wait a second, an edit box will appear, allowing you to type over the information. You can also perform bulk updates by selecting multiple songs then viewing the "Info" page for those songs. A "Multiple Song Information" dialog appears that allows you to update selected tag fields for all of those songs.
I found this to be very handy for my ratty old MP3 library. It was poorly catagorized, with many fields missing. The bulk update feature made for quick cleanup.
As in the music store, double clicking the track in the grid plays it. By default, when finished with a track, the player plays the next track in the list, based on the current sort order. You can select a "Shuffle" mode that plays random tracks. Repeat options include "Repeat Playlist", and "Repeat song". I'd like to have seen a "Repeat album" feature.
The Browse feature
When viewing the Library, or any playlist, you can click the "Browse" button in the upper right hand of the screen (minor nit, the "Browse" button looks like a large, poorly rendered eye). This toggles the browse pane, taking some real-estate away from the song list grid at the top of the screen.
The browse pane itself is broken into three panes, Genre, Artist, Album. Selecting a genre limits the artist pane to only those artists in that genre. Selecting an artist limits the album pane to only that artist's albums. As you are doing this selecting, the grid below dynamically updates to show only those tracks that meet the catagories selected above. It's a very quick way to see what you have at a glance, and to find a particular track, album or performer in a large library. Very cool.
Overall iTunes does an excellent job of allowing you to flexibly organize and find your music. The interface is clean and simple, but powerful.
Ripping
Simple. Stick a CD in, select it from the "Source" sidebar on the left hand side of the screen, and the click the "Import" icon. I was not impressed with the ripping speed, which seemed to vary between 2x and 4x. There doesn't appear to be anywhere to set or tune the ripping speed.
There are only a few configuration options for importing. You can set the import format, choosing between AAC (MPEG-4), AIFF (mac uncompressed), MP3, and WAV. For each of the formats you can pick the sample rate and stereo/mono. For AAC and MP3 you can select the bit rate (VBR is an option for MP3s).
iTunes uses CDDB to look-up album and track information. In my usage this performed flawlessly, recognizing all the albums I threw at it.
More on the AAC format
AAC is the default music encoding format (codec) for the iTunes player. Apple claims that 128kbps AAC encoding provides quality almost indistiguishable from the original, much better than a 128kbps MP3. To my ears it all sounds great. The AAC files I downloaded at 128kbps sound great. I rarely encode MP3s at that low a bit rate, so I really can't do a comparison.
The full name for the AAC standard is actually MPEG-4 AAC. Music purchased from the iTMS is downloaded in an encrypted version of this format (.m4p) which is presumedly proprietary to Apple. However, you can rip music into an unencrypted AAC format (.m4a).
AAC is not an open standard, but was developed by the MPEG group, which includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia. As a result any software or hardware that uses AAC has to pay a license fee. As AAC is realtively new, support may be sporadic for the format in other players.
As a test I ripped some CD tracks to AAC format and then tried them out in other players. The Real One player didn't recognize the .m4a file extension. After renaming the files with .mp4 file extension, Real One downloaded a decoder, but then failed to import the ripped tracks. Note that these should not be encrypted tracks, as I ripped them, they weren't purchased from iTMS.
Windows Media Player didn't know what to do with either file extension (and I have the fully up to date version 9). There supposedly exists a winamp plugin for MP4/AAC, but I did not test it. There also appears to be a burgeoning gray market in unlicensed MP4/ACC de/encoders.
Even if your other audio players can read the audio format, they may not be able to read the meta tags you've created in the iTunes software, as Apple apparently uses its own tag format. So, if you rip to AAC, expect that iTunes will be the only platform that is going to provide full access to your music, until other players fully support the format. Also, don't expect to play the purchased music in native AAC format anywhere but in the iTunes player because of the built in encryption/DRM (though you can certainly burn a disc, then rip to MP3 format, you will lose some of the native quality).
If any of this is a problem for you, just rip directly to MP3 format and be done with it.
Importing your existing library
When you install iTunes, it will ask you if you want to search for existing music. I passed on this option, preferring to tell it exactly where to look. Importing older libraries of MP3s is simple. Just use the "Add Folder to Library" feature in the "File" menu.
I pointed iTunes to the root folder of my entire MP3 collection, and it figured everything out, flawlessly importing all of the albums, along with all of the meta tags. By default it leaves the tracks in their current location (which is what I wanted). You can choose to consolidate your music library at a later point. This copies everything into you iTunes music directory.
The iTunes music library directory is configurable. By default in Windows it's under My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music. If you want to change it (as will many with large secondary drives used for music storage), make sure you do so before you start downloading, otherwise you might end up with music files in multiple locations.
Sharing your music
No, iTunes won't let you get in trouble with the Recording Industry by sharing your music with everyone else on the Internet. What it will do is allow you to export your full music library, or various playlists, to up to five other people on your local network. I didn't test this feature extensively, but it worked flawlessly between my desktop machine and my laptop over a Wi-Fi network. Apple calls this feature "Rendezvous", and it's been available on the Mac for a while now.
It just works. I fired up iTunes on the laptop, and the shared library, with all its playlist was immediately available in the Source pane. I'd suggest Microsoft take a page from this playbook. Anyone who has ever messed around with Microsoft's supposedly 'plug and play' home networking knows what I am talking about.
You can't do much with a remote music library, other than play it, and it's play lists. You cannot edit the meta tags, or create/edit play lists. Not a biggie, I am not sure I'd want that much flexibility anyway.
Sharing between users on the same machine
iTunes makes sharing music with other PCs on the network a snap, but it's a bit harder to share music between users of the same PC. At home I've set up my computer with an account for myself, and one for my fiancee. I installed iTunes in my account, and downloaded some music.
We wanted to see if my fiancee could use this music as well. The iTunes icon was on her desktop, but when we launched it, there was no music available in her Library. We changed her music libary to point to the music library iTunes had created for my user account, but still, nothing showed up in the play list.
We did mange to get it to work by exporting my Library using the "Export Library" option on the "File" menu. This allows you to save all of your playlists and track information to a massive XML file. We then imported this into iTunes when logged into her user account. It worked. This is a bit clunky though, and I doubt any meta tag updates she does will be reflected in my Library, and vice versa.
I imagine we could have manually added the music to her iTunes Library using the import functionality. The larger problem is that as we buy or rip more music we will constantly have to worry about keeping both account's Libraries and playlists in sync.
One cool way to work around this would be to use Windows XP's fast user switching. I haven't tried this (I run Windows 2000), but in theory with fast user switching you should be able to use Rendezvous between two users on the same machine.
Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has become a dirty word in some technology circles. Many other music download services use DRM to lock you into their music player, force you to pay a subscription to keep listening to your music, and to tightly control what you can do with the music once you've downloaded it.
With iTunes, what's most noticable is how unobtrusive Apple has made the DRM. In fact, it's almost not present. Here are a list of things you can't do:
- Burn a play list with purchased music more than ten times
- Share music with more than 5 other computers on your local network
- Share music over the Internet
- Access your purchased music at full quality outside of iTunes
- Re-download music once you've successfully downloaded it once (remember to make backups!)
Internet Radio
iTunes provides a comprehensive list of Internet radio stations. I don't believe that Apple provides the content for any of these stations, but it does dynamically update the lists for each genre when you access them to ensure that the list remains fresh and defunct stations are removed.
I didn't exercise this feature too extensively, as I quickly found one of my favorite di.fm trance stations and spent the entire day at work listening to it - so I can't vouch for the quality or availability of the other stations. But there appears to be a wide selection, within a good variety of genres.
User Interface
If there is one thing I don't like about iTunes is the way it plays fast and loose with the various user interface metaphors. The iTunes player is a strange mixture between a "Brushed Metal" look, the native Mac OS X "Aqua" interface, and the boring old Windows native interface. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what's used where.
The menus and most drop down lists are windows native, even if the controls that access them are the Aqua look alikes. For example, in the iTMS there is a drop down list labeled "Select Genre". It's rendered with the translucent Aqua look and feel, but clicking it displays a drab Windows native drop down list. Just weird.
Also, what's up with this brushed metal obsession of Apple's? Why should computer software look and feel like a 1970's stereo component? I don't know. Do you?
The interface overall is sluggish. Presumably because of whatever software Apple used to port the Aqua eye candy to Windows. I'd prefer to give up some of the eye candy for a bit more speed.
All things considered, the interface potpourri doesn't get in the way too much, and though sluggish it's still usable. So these are all minor quibbles. Apple did such an outstanding job in making iTunes a simple yet powerful way to organize your music, that a few minor interface issues can easily be overlooked. At least until the next release.
Stability
One might think that as a first attempt at Windows software that iTunes might be buggy or prone to crashes. It didn't crash once in my usage, and handled some heavy workloads without incident. In fact I had it burning, ripping, and playing all at once. I'll bet you could add downloading to that list without a hiccough. There have been some reports of iTunes locking up after install - Apple is currently investigating. I did not experienced that particular issue.
I did find some minor display issues where sometimes the screen didn't update properly. Particularly when ripping, the little check mark sometimes didn't appear next to the track after it was ripped. This didn't seem to affect functionality in any way, and the songs played fine after the entire CD was ripped.
Wider implications for Apple
For years, Apple has been writing superior software, but only for the Mac. This has been a way for Apple to draw users to the Mac platform. Apple's tight control of the both the software and hardware environment allowed them to provide a superior user experience. For Apple to produce Windows software represents a sea-change in this philosophy.
First of all it represents a huge risk to the Apple brand. If it doesn't work well, or crashes due to the weird hardware/OS combinations that are all too prevalent in the Windows world, they will tarnish that hard won reputation for quaility and ease of use.
Secondly, they are giving up one of the drivers that pushes people to purchase that high margin Mac hardware - the superior software, that used to be available only on the Mac. There are people who bought Macs simply because of the media software that came bundled. Now, there is one less reason to get a Mac. Will Apple port more of these goodies to the PC? Is Steve Jobs crazy?
Like a fox. Note that Jobs has no plans to port OS X to commodity PC hardware, nor has he made any moves to port any of the other software in his suite of media productivity tools to the PC. The reason he ported iTunes is because it's the best way to access the iTunes Music Store. Apple makes money selling music on the iTunes music store. Probably not much money yet, but certainly they will make considerably more money if they don't restrict users to the Mac platform. With the advent of iTunes for Windows, the iTunes Music Store became the largest distributor of online music overnight.
Remember also that Steve jobs is in the process of re-conceptualizing the Mac as a media hub, de-emphasizing the computer itself, for media accessories. The iPod is an outgrowth of this process. With iTunes on my PC, guess what's now on my Christmas list? An iPod. I've played with other MP3 players and they software they use to manage MP3 libraries. They sucked - hard. iTunes shows me that it can be easy - it should be easy. In a single stroke Jobs has vastly increased the market for the iPod.
So what Jobs has done is managed to increase the market for two of his newest alternative revenue streams (iPod and iTMS) without singificantly compromising the revenue stream that's funding everything (Mac sales). Brilliant, and very pragmatic, so unlike Jobs.
Summary
Steve Jobs claims that iTunes is the best software ever written for Windows. It's certainly the best music player/Jukebox ever written for Windows. I don't know that any of the others can match it, feature for feature.
With iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, I honestly can't see myself returning to buying CDs. It's just so much more convenient, and significantly cheaper to download and burn - and I don't care about the minor quality differences or the lack of cover art. This is what I've been waiting for. YMMV of course, but it's definitely worth a try.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
My review. (Score:0, Informative)
In conclusion, Slow, Ugly, Dosen't support my music. If you have a Mac and Live in the USA, then its probably right for you, but for everyone else its Windows Media Player or Rhythmbox [rhythmbox.org] for Linux/BSD users
A few quick comments (from a Mac user) (Score:5, Informative)
Apple claim that the DVD burning works on Windows. As a Mac user I can say that iPod synching is effortless - I would assume that the Windows software operates the same (the iPod supports Firewire and USB 2). Apple have admitted that the iTMS makes no money at the moment and mainly exists to sell iPods.
The 5 computers thing is a restriction on the number of machines you can authorize to play DRMed music. You can share your own rips with as many on the local network as you like. You can also authorize a machine at work and copy your music there to play, but that's one less machine at home obviously. Rendezvous is very cool - it's basically plug-n-play IP (using wacky multicast DNS).
Various people have found ways to share a library between different users on Mac OS X, I would assume that similar hacks can be used with the Windows version - Google may turn up something helpful.
Re:Rendezvous is a false sense of plug & play (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, and driving to work "just works" because of all the effort the road builders put in, not because of some fad called "a car".
Perhaps you don't understand. Rendezvous is a service discovery technology. It automatically finds machines on a network offering a service. Without Rendezvous, you'd have to find out the IP address yourself.
It really IS plug and play, in that as soon as I plug my iBook into a network, I show up on everyone's iChat Rendezvous list. Pretty smart, and much more than a 'fad' in my view.
Re:Off topic (Score:1, Informative)
There's something wrong with the box that assigns moderation points.
Personally, I suspect that they are starting to push MySQL farther that anyone has before, and it is starting to fall apart.
Cover Art is Available with Purchased Tracks (Score:5, Informative)
Errrr. Two steps:
1 - Toggle 'iTunes > Edit > Show Artwork' on.
2 - Select a purchased track.
Alternatively,
1 - Select a purchased track.
2 - Visit 'File > Get Info > Artwork'.
If you need Ogg, just add it (Score:5, Informative)
Just go to the QuickTime Components Project. [sourceforge.net]
It's not as elegant as having Ogg support out of the box, and the open-source component is beta right now, but it works. I just tested it.
And hell, Windows Media Player? Clearly, you're either a troll or you haven't begun to look at the tag editing functionality of iTunes. I'd delete this post if the information about Ogg weren't useful.
Re:A few quick comments (from a Mac user) (Score:2, Informative)
When you want to move from your work PC, to another PC at home, or another at work, you de-authorize one computer and authorize the other.
Been using this since April 24th and it all works very well.
BZ
Re:A few quick comments (from a Mac user) (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a little wooly on the mechanics of it myself to be honest. But as I understand it, all the music you buy is encrypted with something unique to your account. When you authorize a computer you download a key that will decrypt your music (and only your music) on that machine. The keys must be locked to the computer somehow (a la activation) and Apple will only issue you 5. If you want to move your music from one machine to a new one and don't have a spare key, then you need to de-authorize one computer freeing the key so that you can authorize the new one.
The downside of this is that catastrophic system failure (or theft) will lose one of your keys. Or if you authorize a computer and then re-format the drive to do a clean re-install without having de-authorized first, then again you lose the key.
Also, is it true that no other players will play AAC? I am worried about this lock-in Ars Technica is talking about. Maybe I should wait til standards get set...
I've successfully played Apple AAC music on other players before. Apple's
I guess whether Apple ever license their DRM tech to competing players depends on whether Apple can ever make iTMS turn a profit.
Re:Anyone care to explain this one to me? (Score:5, Informative)
Forget the easy to use interface, its tiny footprint, the effortlessness in syncing it, its notes, calendars, games, contacts, etc. Lets focus on the big things.
Apple have designed it from the ground up based on the user rather than the techonology. Take the front panel buttons, they do not have moving parts. This is because a normal use will use it in environments that have dirt and other irritants.
The scroll wheel makes moving through menus so eas y it is not funny. It makes second nature in minutes and no other device, not a PC, nor a Mac nor even a microwave oven has anything like it in terms of perfect interfacing.
The sound outlet is put on the top...not the side. Most players I know have it wherever they feel like. The iPod is placed where you need it when it sits in your pocket (again, unlike most mp3 players).
This is a big deal to me...the scroll wheel when playing songs functions to skip through it, change the volume and change the rating. Everything so nicely placed and so perfectly executed.
Anyways, I am going to go to bed listening to these 5 new songs I downloaded and synced without a button click. Go grab your Wal-Mart mp3 player, but enjoy setting it up, and using it day to day. As for me, I will continue to buy and recommend the iPod to everyone I know. 7 other friends agree with me.
Winamp 2.78 forever! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Oversight (Score:5, Informative)
And? Last I checked, WinAMP has a tiny fraction of the capability of iTunes. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
Resizing the iTunes window is insanely slow - 100% CPU usage, and it takes a quarter to half second just for the screen to update while resizing the window.
You must be lying, or else you have something seriously wrong with your box. There is simply no way an Athlon XP with 768MB RAM can't resize iTunes better than this. I have an Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM and iTunes resizes just fine. 100% CPU usage? Please.
the ~6 second load times for iTunes that I experienced on my system
Wha? I see load times of around 1.5 seconds. Again, you're either lying or there's something seriously wrong with your machine.
One peculiar thing is that the titlebar looks very strange and is neither the titlebar that you see in OS X, or the standard Windows one
Care to point out to me where the standard Windows title bar is in WinAMP?
It's actually more like DRM-Lite.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:My biggest beef with iTunes is iTMS (Score:4, Informative)
If you're wondering why this process might take awhile, the following tidbit might interest you. I have a poster hanging on my wall promoting Skinlab's CD "Disembody: The New Flesh." [amazon.com] This album was released on a label called Century Media. At the bottom of the poster is the following, in fine print:
"Distribution: SPV in Germany; Caroline Distribution in the U.S.; Suburban in Benelux; House of Kicks in Sweden; Plastic Head in UK; Media 7 in France; NSM Records in Austria; Phonag Records in Switzerland; Self Distribution in Italy; Mastertrax in Spain; MVM in Portugal; MMP in Poland; Globus in Czech Republic; Music Dome in Hungary; Megatherion in Greece; Voices of Wonder in Norway; Spinefarm in Finland; NordicMetal in Denmark; NEMS Enterprises in Argentina; St. Clair in Canada; M.D.M.A. in Israel; Shock in Australia; Rock Brigade in Brazil."
The distributors above most likely have exclusive agreements for their respective markets. Meaning that if Apple wanted to sell tracks from this CD to Canadians, for example, it would first have to get permission from the label (Century Media), and it would then have to contact St. Clair, the Canadian distributor. Even if both of them agreed to let Apple in on the game, the contract between Century and St. Clair would need to be renegotiated, and new contracts drawn up between Apple and both companies.
And all this work only covers the 10 tracks from this album, as it's quite possible that Skinlab's other efforts are distributed through entirely different companies. Not to mention thousands of albums from hundreds of other artists. After all, it's doubtful that Apple would launch a Canadian version of ITMS without having a substantial number of songs available.
My condolences, but I don't think ITMS will be available in (m)any other countries for quite awhile. I agree, sucks... But don't blame Apple.
Minimize to SysTray (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, it would also be nice to be able to remove cover art once you've added it. The way it is now, if you make a mistake, you're stuck with the wrong cover art.
Re:Unlimited copying to iPods (Score:5, Informative)
There is absolutely no DRM whatsoever within the iTMS downloaded file.
There IS, however, your iTMS UserID & name embedded in the files.
My proof is this -
I took an iTMS purchased track and was able to play it on my Windows laptop LAST MONTH by doing the following:
1. Rename the file to
2. Use QuickTime 6.1 for Windows. This version of QuickTime had no DRM support in it, and supported AAC audio.
FUDs over. Move along.
Check again (Score:5, Informative)
But guy, I just did. I'm using the windows version. I downloaded an ogg file, added it to my library, clicked on burn disc, and got a fine audio disc with the correct recording on it.
I'm not about to create an entire Ogg library and waste CDs testing out every one of your assertions. Most of them sound like reasonable limitations on software that is certainly being expanded to be the most ambitious music player yet, what with the iTMS and Rendesvous and all.
As for petitions, come on... when does a petition work? People sign those things all the time. I know they recalled the Governor, sure, but mostly petitions don't tell the company anything they don't know. Market research already tells them that there may be, say, a hundred thousand people using Ogg. Why would they change their minds just because those people clicked on "Submit" somewhere?
Ok review, but a few mistakes (Score:4, Informative)
iTunes for windows *can* burn DVDs
You can "Access your purchased music at full quality outside of iTunes". Any app that supports quicktime files can play them, there aren't as many such apps on windows as there ought to be (and as there are on mac), but that will change if there's any real demand for this feature.
Plus you can burn your music to CD with no quality loss.
"Apple uses it's own tag format" is technically true, but misleading because Apple's metadata fromat from quicktime was adopted as an open standard for MPEG-4. Any app that properly supports the MPEG-4 file format should be able to read those tags.
Also, AAC *is* an open standard, it's just pattented, the same as MP3. All the documentation is available, any you can make a MPEG-4 AAC codec and legally sell it up to 50,000 times without paying any liscencing fees.
My WineX experience (Score:3, Informative)
My review of the reviews... (Score:5, Informative)
Bottom line, as of a few days ago, Windows users have another choice. It's far more than Mac users have. So why the bitching? Mac users seem perfectly happy. If you don't want any of this, don't use Apple's products. Use the others.
Some corrections (Score:3, Informative)
- iTunes does not, repeat does not, leave your music where it was when you import it. It re-arranges song locations based on Author - not too big a deal unless you have a lot of compilations. A friend of my found his compliation CDs split into multiple directories based on author, and then album. I don't have many compilations, so this is not an issue for me. There is no obvious way of getting the files back together in the same directories. Strangely, when you rip a compilation CD using iTunes, it puts it into a 'Compilations' directory, storing all of the tracks together. Not sure why the import functionality can't do the same thing.
- Previews on iTMS are 30 seconds, not 20 seconds.
- DVD burning is supposed to work on Windows according to Apple.
- Many people seemed to find the performance of iTunes much less acceptable than I did. My impressions of performance may be a bit skewed, as I have a dual processor box with a lot of memory and a fast harddrive. A friend of mine just installed it on a newer uniprocessor Dell, and it seemed to perform well. YMMV.
Re:Just a note... (Score:4, Informative)
Also, before Apple canned it, they (as Apple and before that, NeXT Software) have written plenty Windows Apps, like WebObjects, Enterprise Objects Framework and all the devs tools that have now become XCode (aka, Project Builder and Interface Builder).
Don't be fooled. Those who wrote iTunes are those same folks that worked at NeXT before that.
Re:Just a note... (Score:1, Informative)
Part of writing an informative article is getting your information straight beforehand...
Re:Problems with iTunes for Windows (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Cover Art is Available with Purchased Tracks (Score:2, Informative)
Oh, so all my machine are broken as well?? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry but of the three machines I've tried it on (PIII900,XP1900,Duron 1GHz all w/512MB) ITunes doesn't come close to launching in 1.5 seconds.
Hey I mostly like ITunes, but you're really in denial about slow it can be. Initial startup takes well over 10 seconds and second launches take just about 4 seconds on my fastest PC. Good for you if it starts up so fast, but rest assured a large percentage of its users don't experience that. And contrary to your accusations were all not a bunch of liars.
Re:An iTunes warning (Score:4, Informative)
iTunes DOES leave your music where it is when you add a folder to the library (i.e. by dragging said folder to the Library icon in iTunes, or choosing Add Folder to Library from the File menu). If you do that, it won't make any changes at all to any other music folders that are added to the library (I just confirmed this by looking through various mp3 folders I added to the library, and they are all still the exact same folder structures and file names as before).
However, if you set a folder of mp3's as your root Music directory in iTunes, as described here, it will treat it as the iTunes Music Folder.
If you do want to do that, but don't want it to do the automatic re-sorting, etc. you described, you will want to go to the Preferences, choose Advanced, and uncheck the option for Keep Music Folder Organized. If you do that, it will leave all your music in tact.
Personally I chose to just add folders to the library without making any of them the actual iTunes Music Folder.
The other option available is to copy any music you add to the library to the iTunes Music Folder (which would leave all of your original music in the same place).
I imagine Apple might want to do something to perhaps make this a bit clearer, as people might more by instinct just make their mp3 folder their iTunes Music Folder, instead of just adding folders to the library.
-Tom
Re:A few quick comments (from a Mac user) (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you can only authorize "3" computers. Many people seem to be confusing the number of machines you can share ANY music with simultaneously with the number of machines you can have authorized to play Purchased Music. 3 machines can be authorized for Purchased Music at any time (de-authorizing one will allow authorizing another). 5 machines can access music shared by another machine, on the local network, at any one time. Not too bad a limitation, since more than that will kind of start to cause bandwidth to crawl anyway.
Just clarifying.
Authorizers Computers Limit: 3
Local Simultaneous Shares: 5
-Alex
Re:Oversight (Score:1, Informative)
Launch Windows on any system WITHOUT iTunes installed.
Open Performance Monitor to show the CPU usage graph.
Click and hold the mouse.
Voila. 100% CPU usage.
Tags (Score:5, Informative)
Apple uses ID3 v2.4 [id3.org] (which added album artwork support).
Your other media players are written by companies that apparently don't care about standards.