Apple Releases iTunes for Windows 1691
Billy_D_Goat writes "Today at a special media event, Apple Computer released their acclaimed iTunes Music Store and stand alone player for Windows XP and 2000. They also announced a partnership to sell music on AOL and give away songs with special bottles of Pepsi. You can learn more and download it from here. "
one of the best parts : allowances (Score:5, Interesting)
Allowance accounts and gift certificates Now you can give your kids a legal way to download their favorite songs with music allowance accounts, which give them access to the store without requiring a credit card and set a limit on how much they can spend. It's easy to set up recurring allowances which refresh every month, and you can establish different allowance accounts for each of your children. You can also buy music gift certificates -- just the thing for your favorite college student or birthday friend. A counter in the iTunes Music Store shows how much credit is left in allowances and gift certificates.
apps & services (Score:2, Interesting)
Amazing that no one has noted the REAL STORY... (Score:1, Interesting)
Consider:
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a term Apple has used before; IIRC, in the Copeland days, Apple was offering developers it's "Yellow Box" APIs (an early version of Cocoa, I would guess--NextStep wasn't in the picture, though), which would allow them to write to new APIs but with the current Mac OS (Classic) underneath. It was basically a hosting environment, so that once the real OS was released, programs written to the Yellow Box specification would "just work."
I can't confirm that this comment was actually made by Steve Jobs. If he did say this, and he was being serious, then I wonder if Apple now has a framework to let it deliver software on Windows? I don't know about you, I've always wondered why Microsoft never ported COM & a few other things to Mac, Linux, etc., 'cause that would let them leverage their existing codebase on new platforms. Has Apple put itself in a position to pull that trick on Microsoft? Could we see Safari for Windows soon? Or more "insanely great" software on Windows--and not from Microsoft?
Trojan horse might be apt after all; and delivered so innocently, so out in the open at such a cozy event as a music service launch.
Re:It's also an MP3 player. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're running OS X, eventually most of your RAM will be getting used for something. It doesn't necessarily need that much RAM, but its not going purge anything from RAM until somebody else needs it -just in case it is needed again. Basically works like a cache.
You need to open up a terminal window and run top to see what's reeeally in use.
Re:iTunes rules (Score:3, Interesting)
Only if you don't want to go to the trouble of copying it yourself. You can put your purchases on up to three machines you authorize to play them, and from the info today it seems that includes whatever mix of Macs and PCs you want; you can move files from one comp to another with impunity. Just copy the music you bought at home to your portable storage thingie of choice and take them with you to the office and copy them to your work PC.
As Steve said back in March when introducing the iTMS, "We'll download it to one machine; you have to move it to the other two." If Apple let people download their purchases more than once, lots of people would opt to do it simply out of convenience, and Apple would inevitably spend tons of bandwidth serving up the same track 50 times to the same person for just one payment. Their attitude is that it's the same as any other purchase; once somebody buys a track and gets it from them, it's that customer's responsibility to keep it, put it where he/she wants, prevent it from getting damaged, etc., in sort of the same way Sam Goody won't replace your CD once you get it home and drop a bowling ball on it.
Apple doesn't mind you copying the tracks from one comp to another (as long as you don't put them on a total of more than three, and that's why they have the DRM); they just don't want to do it for you.
Re:Can PC users tets it and report? (Score:2, Interesting)
Was the iPod originally formatted on a mac, or on windows? There may be some compaitibility issues there... Peace!
Re:Can PC users tets it and report? (Score:2, Interesting)
There is where success ended though. When playing music, the sound is choppy. Much like when the heads and rollers are very dirt on a cassette or 8 track tape (or the tape is creased.)
However, the same songs play fine in Music Match and WinAMP on the same computer. (AMD Athlon 1900+, Windows XP Pro, 512MB ram.)
I like iTunes on my Powerbook. I'd like it on my XP machine here at work. However, it looks like for at least the time being, I'll be sticking with Music Match Plus (I registered it years ago and even bought the lifetime updates.)
More than just the store and ripping. (Score:3, Interesting)
Being able to easily share music over a LAN. How easy? My roommate (who runs Windows) starts iTunes and voila, he's sees my shared music. He even sees my playlists. He clicks a single button to share his music and instantly he appears as source in my list on iTunes. No mounting of disks, no mucking around with servers, it's just there and it works. Instant gratification.
Oh yea, the interface is so much better than anything else out there (except those that are attempting to clone the iTunes interface).
Re:First Impressions (Score:2, Interesting)
Yup, works both ways, flawlessly. I'm sharing my playlist with two other Windows boxes which are intern sharing their playlist with the others computers. I have been playing files off my Power Mac on both Windows computers while I play music from either Windows box on my Power Mac, just to test it out. And it works without any problems at all. Zero configuration, instant play back just like local files, completely seamless, all over 802.11b. Great job Apple.
Re:ARRGH! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure, but there may well be support for functionality in 2000 and XP that doesn' exist in the 4+ year old OS versions.
Re:More than just the store and ripping. (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh, and it's free.
Holy crap! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can PC users test it and report? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's great because it 1) uses wavelet compression and 2) has two modes, lossy and lossless and 3) the lossy compression is an order of magnitude better than regular JPEG.