The music industry has been complaining for years that CD sales are falling, and blaming it on piracy, especially people uploading files to the internet. But could there be a far simpler explanation? Business Week has a very plausible suggestion – we simply don’t have enough time to listen to more music.
(Seen at doom9.net)
Note to self:
From some time in May, iTunes should be offering DRM-free tracks from EMI. Here’s a list of artists who are signed up with EMI.
EMI and Apple have announced that iTunes will sell EMI’s albums at a higher quality (twice the encoding frequency) without any copy protection (DRM), for the same price as the other label’s albums with copy protection. Single tracks will be more expensive, but in my case I almost never buy individual tracks, so that won’t affect me.
Thanks to Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) and Eric Nicoli (EMI Group CEO)!
There’s no mention in the press release as to whether this means that EMI’s CDs will also be sold without copy protection, but Boing Boing reported that EMI had decided to stop selling DRM’d CDs in January this year (I never saw an announcement from EMI at the time).
I do not like buying music with DRM (digital rights management, also known as copy protection). It is a real pain removing it from, for example, anything I buy from iTunes. There used to be a utility called JHymn, but it broke when Apple brought out iTunes version 6. Since then, on the Mac, there hasn’t been any way to remove DRM from iTunes songs without manually burning a CD and re-importing the tracks.
Until recently… Read the rest of this entry »
If you are looking for an excellent utility to backup or copy your iPod’s music into your iTunes library, one of the best is Red Chair Software’s CopyGear for Mac.
They come originally from the Windows corner and also offer a tool-set for Windows called Anapod Explorer which includes CopyGear and additional utilities for managing photos on your iPod as well as integrating with Windows Explorer to provide drag-and-drop file management to and from the iPod. Until now I’ve used Senuti to transfer from my iPod, which is donationware. CopyGear is more powerful and well worth the $15 registration fee (you can try it before you buy – by transferring up to 25 tracks before the demo version stops working).
If you want the Mac version, just make sure you don’t do what I did, which was to inadvertently jump to the Windows product page in their store and buy that version before I realised I hadn’t bought the Mac version as intended! You can only get to the Mac store page from the Mac product page.
Grab it while you can; I suspect it won’t please Apple!
(via vowe dot net – thanks, vowe!)
Update: At the moment it throws an Apple Script error just before it finishes the conversion – the current version is 1.0, keep an eye on the site and see if they bring out an update.
Five years ago today Apple introduced the iPod. The video above shows Steve Jobs explaining why Apple decided to develop the iPod and what he thought differentiated the iPod from the competition.
It’s hard to believe now (Apple shipped 8.7 million iPods in the last quarter), but at the time the analysts didn’t think it would be a success. It was expensive ($399) and could only be used with a computer which had less than 5% of the market share for personal computers (the Mac).
PC World has interesting article looking at why the iPod did become the market leader.
The first time, most of the tracks were full of pops and clicks and Apple gave me a refund and asked me to retry in 3 weeks, by which time they would either have fixed the problem or withdrawn the CD if they couldn’t. Four weeks later the download contained identical errors and Apple refunded the price a second time and told me they would inform me when the problem was fixed. That was on June 28th, since then I’ve heard no more.
Now, I have ordered the CD on eBay through Ihr-Klassiker, which will cost me 15 Euro instead of €9.99 at iTunes, or €19.99 at Amazon, but I am hopeful that the CD won’t be as badly scratched as Apple’s copy – and of course I won’t have to burn it to a CD to remove Apple’s Digital Rights Management 
If you’re thinking of buying a Roku Soundbridge and want to use it with iTunes, you need to be very careful what you buy. Roku is selling the Soundbridge under the Roku brand name and licensed to Pinnacle (“powered by Roku”). Only the oringinal Roku Soundbridge supports iTunes and DAAP servers, for example mt_daapd. Although the Pinnacle web site and their product packaging specifically state that iTunes is supported, it is not.
What has inspired Roku to license a crippled Soundbridge under the Pinnacle brand name isn’t clear, but as the Pinnacle marketing push seems to be coming from the UK, European buyers need to beware of buying the crippled version. Pinnacle, like Roku, is based in California, but has a strong presence in Europe.
The reason for the lack of iTunes support is, according to Mike Kobb in Roku’s Engineering Team on May 13th, “licensing issues” and they don’t expect that Apple will grant licenses to cover the Pinnacle version:
If you read the comments to my previous post, you’ll have seen that Volker invited us round to look at the Sonos set-up which he’s testing at the moment. A demo really is the best way to appreciate the kit, the hand controller is a little larger than an iPod and makes it easy to link the units in several rooms to play the same music, or if you prefer and the rooms are not all open plan, you can listen to completely different playlists in each room. Like an iPod, the nice thing is that you can display the album covers on hand unit’s display, which makes the selection process more like browsing your physical albums.
I’m not going to rush out right now to invest around 1000 – 2000 Euro, but if I can arrange to get the kit at US prices or the prices here drop a little, you will almost certainly find that we using a Sonos system here too within 12 months.
You can read much more about Volker’s experience with his installation on his blog. A good place to start is with his last post on Sonos, which links to the earlier ones.