TOPIC: ITUNES STORE
It isn’t all iTunes in the UK
8th December 2007The iTunes store was a breath of fresh air following an experience of several OD2 offerings; broken downloads were a regular nuisance, but that may have been down to my not having a broadband connection at the time. Its seamless mix of purchasing, downloading and playing impressed me so much that I used no other media player for my music in the days when I almost exclusively used Windows.
Now that I have jumped ship to Linux, having to fire up a Windows VM to hear my music is starting to feel a little over the top. The result is that I am keen to use DRM-free digital music when I can. Because I like to stay legal, it means that I would like to buy DRM-free files on the web. Here, iTunes leaves me down a little, since most of what they offer is locked down, and I have to burn a CD and extract from it to release music from its iTunes-only shackles.
So when I saw on an article on Tech.co.uk that made mention of 7Digital and that they purveyed unlocked music, my interest perked up. The file formats on offer are WMA, MP3 and AAC and there are high quality 320K variants of the latter two of these about too. Only the WMA files have any DRM associated with them. Previewing whole albums is a simple matter of clicking on a single button, a trick that iTunes would do well to learn. Payment using PayPal augments the usual credit card options and any purchases seem to be available for download more than once; pottering over to the My Locker part of your account provides you with access to your purchases, another of its trump cards over iTunes. Downloading is on a file by file basis, though, and it is here that I notice an area usually addressed by a player like iTunes: the ability to download whole albums at once and background directory creation. Not having to have player has one advantage, though: platform independence. Anyway, a spot of shell scripting would resolve any file management gaps. Overall, there's a lot to commend 7Digital, and I wouldn't be surprised if I were to return some time again. It might even usurp iTunes as my digital music store of choice...
US, not us?
5th December 2007As of the time of writing, Amazon MP3 is only available to customers in the U.S. of A., so any enthusiasm for its provision of DRM-free digital music offerings has to be tempered by that limitation on its availability. Apple's iTunes store offers some, but locked down tracks are its mainstay. Amazon's restrictions aren't the first in the digital audio world, and they are unlikely to be the last, too. Pandora have done it in the world of internet radio, and I seem to remember that iTunes might have done it too in their time.
There may be other reasons, but licensing and royalties might need to be negotiated country by country, slowing the rolling out of new products across the world. The iPhone faced an equivalent situation, though that involved mobile telephony providers. Commercial considerations pervade too, and I suppose that a worldwide launch of the iPhone might have been too complex a feat for Apple to manage; they probably wanted to nurture a sense of anticipation among customers in any case.
It appears that things are still following the pattern that at least used to be endemic in the motion picture industry: the U.S. gets to see a film first, and then everywhere else thereafter. Being able to reuse the movie film reels used in American cinemas has been the studios' advantage from the staggered releases. Because cinema releases have been staggered, video and DVD releases were staggered too, so it's both intriguing and frustrating to see American companies using a similar launching strategy in wholly different market sectors. It's astonishing how old habits die hard...
Is Apple ditching Windows 2000?
11th October 2007Having had a brainwave of using my Windows 2000 VM to play music without impacting the rest of my PC's working, I made the discovery that a bit of digging was required to find a version of iTunes and QuickTime that work with Win2K. Google delivered the goods, so here are the links:
It all reminds me of a post that I wrote a few months back, but iTunes is now working and, thanks to VMware's Shared Folders functionality, using the host PC's digital music collection. I'll be seeing how the ring-fencing goes...