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iTunes 4.5 Released

This was posted by Paul Thurrott on his web site http://www.internet-nexus.com/ about the iTunes update.

All he does is talk about the conversion from WMA to AAC, which is valid enough I suppose, but just can't say something good about it!!!!


Notice that he does NOT mention that:

  • 700,000 tracks
  • 70,000,000 tracks sold
  • Estimated 70% market share
  • GREAT new features




Is it just me, or does this guy never really have much good to say about Apple... :mad:


Wednesday, April 28, 2004


As promised, Apple [sort of] embraces WMA in iTunes
Thanks Claudio: Apple today released iTunes 4.5, which allows you to convert WMA songs to AAC format so they'll play on the iPod. In typical Apple fashion, this is the hard way to do things, as the iPod would support WMA naturally if they just let it (Apple turns off this feature in the iPod bios). But give Apple credit: A file transcoded from WMA to AAC will sound like crap, so the company can point to the sound quality difference as a reason to stick with its proprietary format.

More info on the iTunes import page: "If you’re excited about using iTunes, but have already have a music collection built up in other programs, you’re in luck. iTunes can import music from Windows Media Player, MusicMatch and any other app that uses MP3, AAC or WMA (unprotected). iTunes 4.5 will now convert files digitized by Windows Media Player in unprotected format to AAC, so you can use them in iTunes or on iPod. When you import your MusicMatch library or other MP3 collection, you can choose to let iTunes make a copy of the library, or point to the old files. If you want to gather up all your music later, iTunes lets you consolidate your library anytime."
posted 4/28/2004 08:57:00 AM
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iChan said:
It would be quite hard it actuality as apple has made, give or take a few thousand, $69,300,000 in revenue from music at the iTMS.
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i doubt apple has pulled a profit yet. they may have made some money, but they are still operating at a loss.

remember, most of the 99¢ goes to the music companies. then, apple has to pay for all the equipment for the iTMS, upkeep it, and pay people to work there and code iTunes. I highly doubt these costs are less than income, yet.
 
Nemesis said:
You live in a bat cave and testing your radar-like ear sight by dropping needles onto ground? :D
Of course you can hear the difference, and not just that, there are some people which can distinguish solely by their ears which codec have you used for compresson (MP3, AAc or WMA) and also tell the exact bitrate used (192, 256, etc) ...
Ha, ha, I love this forum :D
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Me too- it helps me realise that, while those of us in the pro-audio business kill ourselves chasing the highest quality we can possibly produce, our efforts are often wasted on the stone-deaf portions of our prospective audience - and this is for you too, Damek:D

But seriously, children, listening is a skill that can be learned. The more time and energy you devote to it, the better your ability becomes. Like anything, you can learn to do it better with practice: but do you care?

Disclaimer: Of course, at the age of 43 and therefore being almost a part of the fossil record, I come from a generation that used to sit and listen/read/write a great deal. Do people still sit to listen to music? And how prepared are you to devote time to just listening to music, to the exclusion of everything else? If people won't do this anymore, then the higher bit-rate and lossless codecs are indeed irrelevant.... there's probably even a codec so lossy you couldn't tell Britney from Shostakovich.

Music - "that irritating stuff in the background" ?
 
Yes, it is. I now have 6.5.1 without having downloaded it from the QT homepage. :)
 

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not much to be confused about

Stewie said:
I am confused about the losses feature. I tried converting a random mp3 and the size went from 4mb to almost 30mb?!?!?
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Converting from an AAC or MP3 to loss-less is pointless, you should only do this if you are importing from a CD or other loss-less format like AIFF or WAV (perhaps you imported some analog stuff from tape or vinyl).

Loss-less will be about 50% smaller than the equivalent AIFF or WAV file, not a lossy format like AAC or MP3.

Ex: a 4 minute track on CD becomes:
AIFF: ~35MB
Loss-less: ~ 18MB
MP3 (160Kb): ~4.7MB
AAC (128Kb) ~3.7MB

The thing about loss-less is it compresses the file more like a .zip or .sit file, it doesn't allow any information to be lost, it's all stored in a more compact form. 50% compression is fairly good for loss-less, 70% is pushing or breaking the limits.
AAC and MP3 allow bits to be tossed away and thus get very small file sizes, and allow up to like 97% compression if you really want.
 
Sharing incompatibility between versions ridiculous!

stoid said:
Probably due to issues caused by the Apple Lossless Audio for one. I know that you have to update QuickTime to 6.5.1 or it thinks that those files are corrupt.
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Even if this is true, this is a copout solution. There is *no* reason for example, why iTunes 4.5 shouldn't be able use itunes 4.1/4.2 Shares. That is just ridicules. The only conceivable reason for Apple doing this is to encourage people to upgrade. This seems like a very Microsoft thing to do. ...

It is a little less ridiculous that iTunes 4.2 can't read 4.5..but even so, Apple could have made it so it would have skipped over the songs it could not read.

As someone who lives on a college campus and love to explore new music by listen to other students shares, this is very annoying...and now has me considering trying to go back to the old version of iTunes...if that is even possible.
 
idkew said:
i doubt apple has pulled a profit yet. they may have made some money, but they are still operating at a loss.

remember, most of the 99¢ goes to the music companies. then, apple has to pay for all the equipment for the iTMS, upkeep it, and pay people to work there and code iTunes. I highly doubt these costs are less than income, yet.
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Congratulations to Apple iTMS on its 1st anniversary. I think that it's awesome that they 70% of the market for legal downloads. This at some point should lead to those who enjoy the service to take a look at Apple computers. They a attracting a new generation not yet able to purchase computer.

Hopefully with time Apple will turn a profit.
 
nsb3000 said:
Even if this is try, this is a cop out solution. There is *no* reason for example, why iTunes 4.5 shouldn't be able use itunes 4.1/4.2 Shares.
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Actually, there is. New, improved library structure. Noticed the updating bar at the first launch of 4.5?
 
slughead said:
A loss-less conversion from one lossy file to another means you're not trimming the data with each new conversion. That's why Playfair was so awesome, you could go from m4p -> m4a with ZERO loss, as opposed to m4p -> CD -> m4a which IS lossy.
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Just a little experiment...it appears after buying a few new songs today that iTunes 4.5 and/or the new iPod update breaks PlayFair. But now that they've upped the authorized computers to 5, I don't really have a need for PlayFair anymore.

Hopefully this loosening of DRM for computers while tightening the CD restrictions will continue...allowing unlimited portables (iPods) and devices on a shared subnet (computers, SliMP3s, TiVos, other yet to be invented components) share/stream music makes sense and eventually (if not already) will not even be noticeable for most. While burning CDs is becoming so "90s" and still allows for potential unauthorized sharing.

Go Apple!
 
velkr0 said:
"Movie trailers. Music Videos"

Where's this?
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in the music store on the left hand side.


can anyone tell me how to group two tracks together - well remove the gap between them when they play. also how do you make it so that the artists of compitation cd's are not mentioned in the artists list?
 
Chopper said:
I have no idea (and yes, I know that I'm being zero help). Has anyone tried this yet, to see what the size is, in comparison to other formats (AAC @ 192, etc)?
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if you imported your CD collection at this bit rate, you'd be using close to 325 MB per CD you re-encoded...I believe using AAC at 256 it's closer to 70-80 MB per CD. An uncompressed CD is typically 650 MB (give or take). The difference is this is lossLESS compression, meaning it will be an indistinguishable copy of the CD, but take up half the space. This is great for Audiophile's who imported all their audio uncompressed (AIFF) now they have a smaller file size alternative. You'll only see a benefit when encoding from the source material however, and you'll need plenty of dedicated free space. Without having used the lossless encoder, i'd guesstimate it's about a 3:1 file size difference (lossless:AAC).
 
brooklyn said:
With the movie preview feature added to iTunes, I bet it won’t be long until Apple implements Pay-To-View Movies on iTunes.
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Don't bet on it. Codec's have gotten better but to get DVD quality you are still dealing with triple digit file sizes and by the time a movie is downloaded I could have gone to Blockbuster come home, found that the wrong movie is in the case, gone back, exchanged the movie, and I’d probably still have a half an hour left. :p We won’t even get into how much it would cost Apple for that kind of bandwidth.
Its wishful thinking guys. Apple has its hands full with iTunes right now. What I think people aren’t picking up on, or maybe they are since I didn’t read all 7 pages, is that I think Apple is going to take a tip from Microsoft in the not too distant future and smash the QuickTime player and iTunes into one cohesive media player. In this regards Microsoft is well ahead of Apple.
 
Nemesis said:
There's NO WAY you can distinguish AAC@192 from the orginal CD, on a hi-fi equipment costing less than $50,000. You're not a music conductor like Herbert von Karajan, and you're not Mozart too, and of course you're not a bat :D
So, please stop worrying about it!

:rolleyes:
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Well, it is an issue in case you want to convert to some other format in the future. If you start with something less then lossless, it will only get worse with future conversions.

I'd like to start with an open lossless - AAC Lossless, then let everything else sort itself out. Apple lossless is just as proprietary as WMA lossless. I don't want to be locked to either Apple or MS.
 
Lancetx said:
WMA conversion only works with the Windows version of iTunes 4.5.
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This is a concerning development... Apple releasing a Windows-only feature? :eek:

I understand that WMP is not as popular on the Mac, but I would still like to be able to download radio programs (legally, from sites such as www.kfuo.org) and play them on my iPod. Apparently I will need a Wintel PC to do this. :(
 
Ok, well, I've been waiting for the "little arrow" next to each title, artist and track, but wow, I'm not sure I get what the point of is to having it link to the music store. Why would I buy a song from the store, and then have a link always there that I can press to, what, go back to the store and remember the day I bought it?

You think there'll be a hack to get the default action of that arrow to be to link to the same artist (or album, etc..) in your own library? After all, that's what I'd use it for... some song comes up and I'd think "Perfect, I'll listen to this band for a while..."

The iMix thing is rather groovy.
 
Geetar said:
Me too- it helps me realise that, while those of us in the pro-audio business kill ourselves chasing the highest quality we can possibly produce, our efforts are often wasted on the stone-deaf portions of our prospective audience - and this is for you too, Damek:D
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Excuse me, but you are wrong, wrong, wrong.

At the age of 43, the biological basis of your hearing has deterioriated enough that you will have troubles hearing anything _at all_ above 15Khz. This is nothing that can be salvaged or trained, it just goes away.

People who believe they can identify the codec music was compressed at 128Kbit or more are just fooling themselves. At a compression rate like this, few people will have a chance to hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed music in a double-blind trial. This experiment has been done.

I know, audiophiles will not believe this. They go to great lenght to fool themselves into believing they can hear differences between burned CDs and bought CDs, different kinds of audio cables and stuff like that. None of this holds up in controlled double-blind trials - however if it makes you happy to believe you still got the pristine hearing capabilities of a 9-year old, go ahead and buy that 15K audio setup - it certainly makes the company selling it happy :)
 
Yeah that's what i was wishing for when i fist saw it. The radio stream would be a cool feature.
SiliconAddict said:
Guys. How dang cool would it be if Apple had all those local radio stations available to stream to your computer. :eek:
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Kirtus said:
Does anyone know the keyboard shortcut to add a song to the Party shuffle?
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Hey! We're talking Apple software here, not Windows. Just drag the song over to your Party Shuffle playlist.
 
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