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Apple Releases iTunes Windows and More

Gleeful rant, Audiobooks bitrate?

OH MY...

My little ibook is gonna be sooooo jealous of my XP dektop now... Seriously, though. I have ALWAYS stolen my wife's ibook for burning mix cd's, encoding, etc. The fact that it TECHNICALLY isn't as fast as my pc is ridiculous. The flow that itunes lets you have saves you more time than the XP box's processor edge. Most of you apple-y people here already know that, but as a recent convert speaking to some who are contemplating a switch, believe me - the operating system is a DREAM.

/gleeful rant

One question, though... I love books on tape, and was wondering what's the bitrate on those audiobooks?
 
Good feature

The new iTunes 4.1 allows optional error correction when importing (maybe s.th. like oversampling). I hoped for that!
 
The accessories are so so, not exactly what I was thinking of. I agree with the other posts that would want Apple to do some of the accessory design. At the same time, I can understand Apple wanting to leave that to other manufacturers.

iTunes for windows sounds great. I like the allowance feature, gift certs, 400k+ songs and I love the fact I can use a mix of pc and macs as authorized machines! Very good deal here! I think the AOL and Pepsi (would have preferred Coke but that is Coke's loss) are great marketing ploys and will dramatically increase the market share. It seems like here Apple finally realizes the economy of scale through sheer numbers. Say what you may about AOL but it is a perfect fit for windows iTunes. Simple internet with simple music downloads. I will be curious to see how many windows downloads they will get in the first few weeks. I would imagine with the iPod market share we will see many.

Hopefully we just won't have too many people with software problems after loading it up. Of course, that is one advantage of using OS X.
 
Just downloaded 3 songs from my windows 2000 box. worked perfect. Using rendevous with my imac now, again perfect. This is going to be a big hit!
 
Why can't I access the iTunes Library on my Mac from Windows? It does not seem to want to download the list. Additionally, I can't search iTMS from the search box...

But it's a good start.
 
Re: Just left the Michigan Avenue Apple Store

Originally posted by deepkid
Was peculiar watching Steve demonstrate iTMS on a Dell. Was wondering if he'd demo on some other wintel, like an HP.
Click to expand...
Actually, Apple's doing exactly the right thing. If you have to feature a competitor's product, pick the one with the best-known brand and biggest market share. In other words, give free advertising to the one who will benefit from it the least.
 
Problems w/iTunes on my Win2000 laptop:

1. iTMS preview not loading in music store (most likely due to massive traffic)

2. Radio option doesn't work

3. Sharing doesn't seem to work

4. Oddly enough, some menu options are "grayed out" and cannot be selected (i.e. visualizer, convert selection to AAC, etc).

Strange. iTMS is like molasses too (which is good!)
 
Originally posted by sebisworld
Why can't I access the iTunes Library on my Mac from Windows? It does not seem to want to download the list. Additionally, I can't search iTMS from the search box...

But it's a good start.
Click to expand...

Stupid question: Do you have sharing turned on?
 
couple more shots:

itunes03.jpg


itunes04.jpg
 
Originally posted by alset
So, who's installed iTunes on a PC? Let's have some reports on how well it works!

Dan
Click to expand...

Looks great, performs great. Haven't burned a CD or DVD yet. Much faster on an 800MHz PIII than it was on my 17" iMac. To be fair, it handles my large music library faster than WindowsXP explorer also.

I'm using Windows 2000 without SP4 which it recommends so I'm going to credit that with the two hangs.

All-in-all I'd give it a 9/10. Lack of WMA support is going to hurt though. iRiver's iHP-120 with optical out looks killer. OGG but no AAC. Something's going to have to give. Either someone other than Apple is going to have to give major support to AAC or Apple is going to have to think seriously about supporting WMA and other players.

But, I can play all of my iTMS purchases again, so I'm happy. I'm not sure what I'm going to do regarding future purchases. I'm definitely going to get an HP120 this Christmas.
 
iTunes windows runs perfectly on my XP box (PIII 450, 384ram). The only thing i've noticed is that when trying to view iTunes on the Mac I get an error saying "The shared music library "<my name>'s music" is not compatible with this version of iTunes. I'm still running the orginal 4.0 on the mac, so i guess i'll have to update it.

Physicsnerd
 
Is anyone else getting bogus characters in the menus? See my screenshot. What's happening is the ellipse characters "..." are being turned into rectangles because of an encoding problem, or something. I may have changed my menu font, but it's only set to MS San Serif (meaning I figured it was a complete font with all appropriate characters).
 
Originally posted by pb1212580
Just ordered my Recording accessory. I can't wait to see what the quality is like on the mic. I was hoping that we could plug our own mics in...

anyone has any idea on how to do that?!
Click to expand...

we should be able to use our own with the new software (it doesn't plug in to the bottom pins)
 
Thank You

Everyone said they took to long and that they better hurry up with this software. But now all I can say is Thank You Apple.
 
Originally posted by ebow
Is anyone else getting bogus characters in the menus? See my screenshot. What's happening is the ellipse characters "..." are being turned into rectangles because of an encoding problem, or something. I may have changed my menu font, but it's only set to MS San Serif (meaning I figured it was a complete font with all appropriate characters).
Click to expand...

I think thatis a font problem on your machine. we have the same problem when taking files from unix. try changing your fonts.
 
Originally posted by ebow
Is anyone else getting bogus characters in the menus? See my screenshot. What's happening is the ellipse characters "..." are being turned into rectangles because of an encoding problem, or something. I may have changed my menu font, but it's only set to MS San Serif (meaning I figured it was a complete font with all appropriate characters).
Click to expand...

odd - mine looks fine. note how much bolder your font is too..wierd...

itunes05.jpg
 
Originally posted by i_am_a_cow
we should be able to use our own with the new software (it doesn't plug in to the bottom pins)
Click to expand...

But the Belkin model also has a nub that goes into the headphone jack. That's probably how it saves the recorded sound to discrete files. I wouldn't think that's possible with just a microphone.
 
Installed iTunes on my WinXp machine.

It takes up almost 40MB or RAM while running, which I think is quite a lot. Also it is using a good 80% of my CPU (Athlon 1400+ OC to 1.75Ghz) while playing music. Idle the numbers eventually go down to about 10MB and 5-10% CPU usage.

The install causes two other programs to run on startup iTunesHelper.exe and qttask.exe (which is the quicktime startup)

iTunesHelper.exe takes about 3.7MB and iPodService.exe (started by the iTunesHelper, I assume) takes another 3.2MB.

I am going to see if iTunes will still work without running these extra services. I just hate stuff starting on boot up.

Also, the "maximize" button puts iTunes into "mini" mode (I am not sure what it is called) but when you double click on the title bar, it resizes the window horizontally.. (this makes no sense to me) When resizing, it is kinda sluggish.

The interface is very clean and start up time is good. Startup time with the '/prefetch:1" option is less than a second.

No real major problems, but just wanted to point onut the minor ones for everyones info!

Time to go buy some music :)

screenshot.JPG
 
Benchmarking

OK, so there are lies, damned lies and benchmarks. But it occurs to me that we have an interesting way to benchmark Pentiums against G4/5s now.

I am ripping MC Solaar's disc "MC Solaar", and my 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 running XP is toasting my PowerBook G4/867 12".

I know, I know...that's not really a fair fight, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Incidentally, the PC is ripping almost twice as fast as the PowerBook did, which would mean my G4/867 would be equivalent of a 1.2 GHz Pentium 4 -- at this task at least.

Anyway, totally unscientific and off the cuff...but just interesting...

UPDATE Looks like my little 867 MHz PowerBook achieves about 60% of the speed of my P4 2.2GHz desktop. So, that'd make it closer to a 1.3 GHz P4, ignoring everything else like bus speed, and so forth. Not too shabby since this little laptop's bus speed, memory and hard disk are all much slower than my Windows desktop.
 
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