iTunes Authorization

[Fat Tony]

Originally posted by arn
you would not be able to have a full copy of them work on all four computer simultaneously... but you would be able to have them on any three.

What's key is that with apple's iTunes Rendezvous streaming - you only need a _full copy_ on one computer and can stream to as many as you want. (this is not restricted by DRM as I understand it)

arn

Sorry for my ignorance on this, but does that mean you can stream to any computer with iTunes "anywhere" or just within your LAN. Would I be able to stream from my home computer to my work computer? If it's just within a local network, could you possibly be able to stream via VPN as I have setup from my home machine to my office network? Thanks.

 

[trrosen]

DRM

Sorry folks sharing of purchased music requires activation of the system playing the file. (i tried it) works great with non-purchased files though.

Also I burned a cd (WITH TOAST) and re-ripped into ACC thus stripping DRM. I cant tell the difference between the files.

Also the burned disc mounted up and iTunes found all the track info like it was a store bought cd.

 

[nickgold]

DRM DOES limit the number of Macs you can stream your PURCHASED music to, via rendezvous. However, this limitation does not affect songs, even AAC files, that you rip yourself -- only the ones in the AAC protected format that are purchased through the online store.. Seems ironic, but that's clearly how it works, and this is well documented.

 

[DeusOmnis]

For all you people worried about being able to play on only 3 computers, it's not like the Mac Underground wont deal with that issue quickly enough.

 

[nickgold]

You CAN stream to any achine on the internet, using an IP address. They DO NOT have to be on your subnet (although they do for rendezvous sharing to work, obviously).

Advanced -> Open Stream

 

[AVALONdesign]

Yeah. The only thing I don't like about this service is not being able to stream the music you purchase, as if you have less rights to the files you purchase online rather than the ones you purchase in a store.

 

[Joep]

International Users

I guess the Record Companies want us 'international' people to start rippin', stealin' and burnin' music, until they lost enough income in the rest of the world too. Then they will allow Apple to sell their music in the rest of the world. I guess this is more than an invitation. It's a challenge.

Alt.binaries.sounds.mp.complete_cd here we come. Let the 'free' music be ours, while you americans pay the musicians. Thanks guys.

 

[AVALONdesign]

Yeah, I definately wouldn't blame the U.S.-only store on Apple. I'm sure the record companies are just trying to keep this to a very small crowd, incase it's something that turns out to be detrimental to their business, then they only have to worry about the 3% or whatever of Mac users that are using it.

 

[trrosen]

previews

It seems steve was a little off as far as the present quality of the service. Many of the previews for older somgs are of very low quality. Id say less then 56k mp3 streams...definatly not ACC 128.

maybe this is due to time constrants or somebody screwed up but the are very low quality

 

[j763]

Re: Problems

DRM is very easy to workaround -- I don't know why so many people are fussed about it. It is an annoyance, but nothing more.

It's incredibly simple to avoid -- just burn the music you buy onto CD from iTunes. Then, rip the music from the CD at 128kbps AAC. If you're good with Toast, you don't actually need to waste a physical CD anyways.

Simple, non?!

 

[j763]

Re: previews

Originally posted by trrosen
It seems steve was a little off as far as the present quality of the service. Many of the previews for older somgs are of very low quality. Id say less then 56k mp3 streams...definatly not ACC 128.

maybe this is due to time constrants or somebody screwed up but the are very low quality

What songs have you sampled that sound this bad? Give us some names!

 

[jettredmont]

Originally posted by alia
What happens if you buy say 1,000 songs (hypothetical here!) and then move them to another computer? Can you authorize them en masse, or is it one at at time? I think that would be the biggest pain when it comes to this system.

RT(F)A

You authorize/deauthorize a computer, not individual files. Your .Mac/AppleID account is branded on the files, and authorize specific computers (ie, instances of iTunes?) to play music branded to that ID.

Presumably, when you authorize a new computer to do this you will require internet access at the time of authorization (not necessarily a big deal, as this is an internet-based service ... the only scenario this knocks out is downloading the files at work (CPU1), then putting them on an AAC CD or DVD to transport to your hypothetical, completely disconnected home PC ... this would require that you take your home PC to some location where you can get internet access of some sort just to authorize it on your AppleID account ...)

Since all songs are branded with your AppleID, you will also not be able to transfer ownership of the songs to anyone else (at least, not individually; just the entire group en masse along with your AppleID account itself ... )

 

[Qball]

Originally posted by j_maddison
Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced.

Maybe, but I think this whole setup is the music industry admitting that most albums have some good songs and some real crap filler too. Albums at $17.99 with one or two hits are basically a bait-and-switch tactic and the industry knows it. It will not be so easy for artists to pull this off now -- albums will have to be of a higher quality. The quality of music could improve because of the Music Store.

Now the thinking goes that you can spend less to get exactly what you want. The six good songs will cost you $5.94. Not bad.

It's just weird to think about a super-rich artist like Eminem making his money 99 cents at a time! It's kinda humbling.

 

[dscottbuch]

Originally posted by AVALONdesign
Yeah. The only thing I don't like about this service is not being able to stream the music you purchase, as if you have less rights to the files you purchase online rather than the ones you purchase in a store.

This seems to be a common misconception. You DO NOT have the RIGHT to stream the music you bought on a CD to anywhere even thought you may be able to do it. You have the RIGHT for personal use of the music.

I don't like the draconion measuring being taken to prevent this particular abuse because its trying to put a genie back in the bottle, rather than adapt to a new paradigm under which money can also be made. That aside, those who want to stream music to all, just because they own it, are confusing RIGHTS with ABILITIES. Just because I can hit you in the nose doesn't imply I have that right.

 

[j763]

Originally posted by dscottbuch
This seems to be a common misconception. You DO NOT have the RIGHT to stream the music you bought on a CD to anywhere even thought you may be able to do it. You have the RIGHT for personal use of the music.

I don't like the draconion measuring being taken to prevent this particular abuse because its trying to put a genie back in the bottle, rather than adapt to a new paradigm under which money can also be made. That aside, those who want to stream music to all, just because they own it, are confusing RIGHTS with ABILITIES. Just because I can hit you in the nose doesn't imply I have that right.

True. But I think the point that avalon was trying to make was that music you import from CD has 0 restricions on it, where music you purchase from the iTunes Music Store is accompanied by many restrictions.

Again, I'd recommend grabbing some blank CDs and start burning!

 

[jettredmont]

Originally posted by jwthomp
This is not true. The album price is at a reduced rate. It appears that almost all albums are $9.99. Far far cheaper than the cost of most albums in the store.

Not quite true. you need to take this on a case-by-case basis. For instance, Norah Jone's excellent album is just as expensive online as at Best Buy ($13.86). It has 14 tracks, so album price here is == track-by-track price. I don't know why, but Pink's album is marked as "By Song Only" ... you can buy every track, but there is no album price.

I haven't found a "majority" of disks at a discounted rate. It seems more are grouped around $.99*#tracks, and then a select group discounted below that.

Seems to me we're hitting the vagueries of each label's contract with Apple. Perhaps some allowed discounting of some of their artists' full albums while others licensed only per-song or album-same-as-sum-of-tracks pricing.

The .99 price becomes an excellent deal when you only wish to purchase one or two songs from an album.

Exactly. That's where Apple gets my money: when I can preview all the tracks of an album and fairly confidently say "not for me" on all but a handful. For full albums, I can get the same tracks along with a physical CD and jewel case and liner notes (sorry, I'm shocked that "cover art" is all Apple's providing here!) for nothing more than a periodic stop in to the Best Buy on my ride home from work.

The album strategy, IMHO, needs work before this goes full-access (Windows+International). Either you compete on price (which Apple has never done very well) or you compete on features (give us access to music videos and extra content that wouldn't fit on a CD along with 70 minutes of music for our money!) Fewer features for equivalent cost leaves only convenience, and frankly the convenience just isn't all that significant when every street corner has a music store!

One problem that can arise is if you purchase one or two songs from and album and later decide to purchase the whole thing, you don't get credit towards your purchase. So in effect you own "two" copies of some songs. I also imagine that the digital rights mechanisms do not handle this (say putting it on 6 macs).

Correct. Your "2" copies of the songs are still only available to three Macs, as each is branded with your AppleID and only three Macs can be authorized on a single AppleID at once.

One thing that puzzles me is the Rendezvous support. If anyone wants to listen to my music via iTunes Rendezvous support, they must have my user name and password for my .Mac account to authorize them, and this counts as one share.

Really? Are you sure? My impression was that iTunes streaming allows your computer to "authorize" any number of clients. As Mr Jobs said in the demo, you have access to your friends' shared playlists while they are in the area, and when they leave, they take their sons with them (he said it better though )

I think we need someone to experiment with this...

I am in a work environment where we are all on Mac's and this basically negates using Rendezvous for sharing music. I can't even pick one or two people to let use my music as I own two other Macs (an iMac and an iBook) that I use regularly and want to be able to listen to the music on those systems. For me this is the biggest drawback so far.

Well, the Rendezvous support using MP3 or non-branded AAC (ie, self-ripped in iTunes) works great in a work setting. We had a handful of shared playlists floating around here about ten minutes after Job's announcement.

 

[frinky23]

Re: DRM

Originally posted by trrosen
Sorry folks sharing of purchased music requires activation of the system playing the file. (i tried it) works great with non-purchased files though.

Also I burned a cd (WITH TOAST) and re-ripped into ACC thus stripping DRM. I cant tell the difference between the files.

Also the burned disc mounted up and iTunes found all the track info like it was a store bought cd.

Are you saying that with Toast you can burn a CD using the AAC files downloaded from the service? I don't care about re-ripping to strip the DRM, I just want to burn music CDs and iTunes does not support my CD burner (an internal Plextor 40x burner). I've sent a message asking Apple to add support for my burner, but I doubt that will happen.

 

[jettredmont]

Originally posted by kdickey
Well then, for those of us with older SCSI CD-Rs that do not work with iTunes we are screwed and cannot burn to CD I assume.

[...]

Is there a way to burn the AACs with Toast? If so then that would work for me.

The AAC files are just files (look in your iTunes Music folder). Drag them to your Toast project and burn them.

The computer is authorized/deauthorized for your AppleID account, not the songs. This keeps things quite simple and seamless in 99% of all cases.

 

[Maclicious]

I've downloaded my first legal digital songs from the internet, as easily and seamlessly as if they were already in my music library. I'm stunned. This service is going to do great, great things for apple and the music industry, too.

 

[jettredmont]

3-Mac Limit and the lost Mac problem

So this appears to answer my question about what happens if your Mac dies completely, or is lost or stolen (this is on my mind as my Windows laptop completely died a few weeks back ... sometimes won't boot up at all and other times will start booting and run for about 2 minutes before crackling and dying ... a sad thing!)

Unfortunately, the answer's not good (you can't "deauthorize" a computer for your account without physical access to that computer). But, hopefully, Apple techs will be able to handle this special case by fiddling with the authorization on their database if such a thing ever happens. I hope so, anyway!

 

[steve-not-jobs]

AAC, MP3 and CD

Sorry for the list of questions, but it's all a bit vague for me;
If I download a song from the store and burn it to CD do I need to decompress it before I can play the CD in a standard CD player (eg in my car)?
Also my Home Theatre plays MP3's burned on a CD - I guess AAC is completly different, so again I would need to decompress the file before burning.
How much quality (if any) do you lose when decompressing?
Do you only get a problem if you try and recompress to say MP3?
Thanks

 

[alia]

Originally posted by jettredmont
RT(F)A

You authorize/deauthorize a computer, not individual files. Your .Mac/AppleID account is branded on the files, and authorize specific computers (ie, instances of iTunes?) to play music branded to that ID.

Presumably, when you authorize a new computer to do this you will require internet access at the time of authorization (not necessarily a big deal, as this is an internet-based service ... the only scenario this knocks out is downloading the files at work (CPU1), then putting them on an AAC CD or DVD to transport to your hypothetical, completely disconnected home PC ... this would require that you take your home PC to some location where you can get internet access of some sort just to authorize it on your AppleID account ...)

Since all songs are branded with your AppleID, you will also not be able to transfer ownership of the songs to anyone else (at least, not individually; just the entire group en masse along with your AppleID account itself ... )

Thanks for clearing that up! As I don't have my own Mac yet, I can't test it out for myself. Too bad my mom isn't big with iTunes! I could have her test it out for me on her mac.

Thanks again!

Alia

 

[soosy]

Originally posted by j763
True. But I think the point that avalon was trying to make was that music you import from CD has 0 restricions on it, where music you purchase from the iTunes Music Store is accompanied by many restrictions.

Again, I'd recommend grabbing some blank CDs and start burning!

Yes, I too find it quite strange that potentially pirated music already in your library you can stream, but songs you buy through Apple you cannot stream. I guess that's just how any sort of DRM works -- legal songs are going to have DRM which means some restrictions.

This would be an incentive to buy the actual CDs (unlimited use plus booklet, case versus instant downloading at slightly cheaper price). I suspect the Record Labels are hoping that with copy protected cd's you eventually won't have any more flexibility with a store bought CD than you will with a DRM AAC download.

In the meantime, it's irksome.

(not that I ever plan to support a copy-protected cd by buying one)

 

[frinky23]

Originally posted by jettredmont
The AAC files are just files (look in your iTunes Music folder). Drag them to your Toast project and burn them.

Of course, but will Toast burn them to a music CD (as in will play in an audio CD player), or are you limited to a data backup CD?

 

[nickgold]

You can burn the protected AAC files directly from iTunes, as a standard, non-DRM music CD. Toast not necessary at all.