Dear iTunes haters
Dear iTunes haters,
I understand if you don't like the software. That's fine. But just so you know, as of today there are 8 million DRM-free songs on iTunes, and by the end of the first quarter, they'll all be DRM-free. Straight from apple.com/itunes/whatsnew/:
High-quality, DRM-free music.So. No more complaining. And in case you're wondering about that funny "AAC" encoding, here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:
iTunes Plus is the new standard on iTunes.
Now, you can choose from millions of iTunes Plus songs from all four major music labels and thousands of independents. With iTunes Plus, you get high-quality, 256-Kbps AAC encoding. All free of burn limits and digital rights management (DRM). So iTunes Plus music will play on iPod, Apple TV, all Mac and Windows computers, and many other digital music players. It’s also easy to upgrade your iTunes library to iTunes Plus. You don’t have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 30¢ per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are 60¢ and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates. AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 & MPEG-4 specificationsAnd here's a list from Wikipedia of common portable media players that support AAC:
- Apple iPod/iPhone
- Creative Zen Portable
- Microsoft Zune
- SanDisk Sansa
- Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
- Sony Walkman
- SonyEricsson Walkman Phones-W series, e.g. W890i
- Nintendo DSi (To be released in America mid-2009)
- Slacker G2 Personal Radio Player
So. No more complaining, you hear? I want none of it.
Just so you know, I have no problem with people buying music from other legal sources, such as Amazon.com. There are plenty of reasons to do so. But DRM-free-ness is no longer one of them. I find the iTunes store to be very conveninent, and I'll continue using it myself. You're free to do as you will.
4 comments:
I just have to mention that this never would have happened without the competition from Amazon and other DRM-free sites...
Great! Now they just need to not require the gimongous, bloated interface; become Linux compatible; and start offering lossless versions of songs-- then consumers can actually get what they _want_ and not just what the RIAA is willing to let us have!
(Note: Amazon allows you to use a nice clean web-interface if desired, the client is only needed for the actual downloading, and the client is beautifully slim-lined and will automatically load things into iTunes or Windows Media Player if desired. Also, Amazon works perfectly with Linux in my experience. So it seems Apple still has some ways to go... Now _someone_ just let me buy lossless audio!)
You're wading into fire, dear Yellow. Wading into fire.
I'm glad to hear I can buy DRM-free stuff at a slightly higher price though. w00t.
itunes is the biggest piece of junk i have ever come across, and put me off ever owning anything else from Apple. Jobs must be an idiot to release rubbish like this.
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