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More on iPod and WMA

HP is about the only PC company out there that is worth its salt.

Hopefully they will drop microsoft when there is a moment of opportunity.
 
I think this is that one bloggers wet dream and he's trying to convince people that he's right. I've read through some of his entries and I think he's a whole lot of 'i'm better than you' problem and somehow got thrust into the limelight for his 'insight' that I think is mere conjecture.

Apple and WMA are even harder than iTunes for Windows. I just don't see it happening. That'd be like Quicktime being dumped for WMP

Plus I don't bet HP is in a big hurry to pay Microsoft for every new hPod they sell either. Apple sure isn't into the Microsoft tax either.
 
Re: Re: More on iPod and WMA

Originally posted by Le Big Mac
Isn't this claim a bit much? Sure, AAC is open, but the DRM (Fairplay) is not. So, I can burn my CDs to AAC, and I could play those songs on any player with AAC, so it's open that far. But if I buy a song with FAirplay DRM from iTMS, it's gotta be on an apple product. hardly open.

not saying it's bad, just kind of a misleading claim by Jobs.

As for the strategy, I commend to anyone the WSJ article. It makes it pretty clear that digital music could be a winner take all race to get adopted first, and currently apple is winning. And the race could be over by the end of the year. It's pretty obvious why Apple and pepsi are giving away 100 million songs: the more songs out there in AAC/Fairplay, the more quickly people get locked into the format. I'm surprised Apple hasn't sought to get the promotion started sooner.
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Actually, indications are that Apple may have put hooks into QuickTime that will allow other players to play iTMS-purchased files, as is evidenced with the upcoming RealPlayer 10 being able to play iTMS files without circumventing the DRM.

While you're right that the DRM itself is not open, you hardly need to play the music on an Apple product. iTunes runs on Windows, and if you're really inclined, just burn your music to a CD and rerip it -- and then you can play it on any platform that supports unprotected AAC or MP3.
 
Apple wants to sell more Ipods and also sell songs with itunes (AAC), but
the PC world is sort of forced to use the inferior WMA.
Click to expand...

Well, there is iTMS.

It may, at some point, make sense for Apple to add WMA to the iPod. However, since the huge majority of online sales are in AAC, that point is not now. iTMS is successful enough to make an AAC-only strategy viable, and that strategy can push iTMS to grab even a larger slice of the digital music sales pie, which would strengthen Apple's position even further. However, if this best-case scenario doesn't come to pass, and other WMA-based stores become popular, then Apple can always fall back on Plan B, and enable WMA on the iPod. But for now, there is simply no benefit for Apple to do so.
 
Re: Re: Hello

Originally posted by sw1tcher
I totally agree with what you said.

The iTunes Music Store is merely a loss leader to selling the very profitable iPods. Apple probably knows that they'll never, in the end, dominate the paid music download services, despite the fact that they're doing so now.

Apple's main goal is probably to dominate the MP3 market. And by supporting the WMA format, they can expand out to those who have chosen not to use the iTMS and AAC -- Yes, there are many people who don't use the them.

By reaching out to those people and offering an MP3 player that supports WMA, Apple will be able to get their iPods into that many more homes/hands, resulting in more profits. Many people who use/prefer(?) WMA probably would love to have an iPod, but since it doesn't support WMA they're forced to buy something else. And Apple knows this. But if the iPod does support WMA, then they'll most likely buy the iPod.

This is a strategy. It's a way for Apple to dominate the MP3 player market in a way that they were never able to do so with the computer market.

Trying to get people to adopt the AAC format will be very difficult. Most music services use WMA, and with Microsoft's eventual entry into the music download business, it'll be even more difficult.
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If that was the plan all along (to add DRMed WMA to iPod) then opening the ITMS was a foolish waste of money. Apple simply could have made the iPod the best player to use for any windows music store and been done with it.

No, the plan is to make Apple (not Mac, but Apple) the platform for music.
 
Originally posted by agentmouthwash
It's a Catch-22

Apple wants to sell more Ipods and also sell songs with itunes (AAC), but
the PC world is sort of forced to use the inferior WMA.
Click to expand...

I would disagree. PC users have the opportunity just like mac users to enjoy AAC/Fairplay. iTunes exists for Mac or PC. Works with or without an iPod.

If they want portability, buy a pod. This is what Apple wants.
 
If anything I think Apple should include changing WMA to AAC. That way people who have their music collections in WMA just have to click a button and they will be converted to AAC so they can work with the ipod.
 
Re: Odd considering I found this.

Originally posted by tanlis
I found this article on Slashdot about WMA being added to the iPod.

http://www.connectedhomemag.com/Audio/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=41429
Click to expand...

Reprint - possibly through syndication - of Delusionist-In-Chief Thurrott's CES piece and credited as such.

I have a great idea for dealing with Thurrott: instead of everyone visting his Microsoft hagiography page, thus increasing page impressions and the advertising revenue accruing as a result, why don't we just all send him an e-mail with a PDF of a webpage that contradicts his ludicrous assertions - I think thurrott@winntmag.com is the address. That way we make his life more interesting AND we'll be performing an educational service.
 
Originally posted by MacForbes
If anything I think Apple should include changing WMA to AAC. That way people who have their music collections in WMA just have to click a button and they will be converted to AAC so they can work with the ipod.
Click to expand...

That's an interesting idea. But wouldn't Apple then have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee for WMA since iTunes would have to be able to read/decode a WMA file?

I don't know for sure, that's why I'm asking. Maybe someone here knows.
 
so i think we can safely add this guy, paul t, to the blacklist of people to ignore.

wma ipods is like osX on intel, ibox, iwalk, newton2...
 
WMA = Better Audio Quality

Sorry to say this, but WMA and several other formats do have an edge over AAC - they provide for lossless compression. Yes, I'm a Mac owner and I have a fairly nice stereo. I've done blind tests with WMA losless vs WAV and various AACs and MP3s. On my syetem, the difference between the best lossy compression and a WAV or lossless MP3 is striking. Actually, listening to a lossy format on my system is... well... depressing. Lossy formats are great for iPods, multimedia speakers, and that Kenwood receiver. Play a lossy format on a pair of B&W Nautilus with Krell amp and you're in for a real letdown.

Lossy compression on a "good" soundsystem works something like this... parts of the music are accurate and musical, but there are some instraments and passages that are unrecognizeable. You get wierd thumps instead of drum petals... shrieks instead of symbols. The revealing nature of these systems points out the artifacts that the compression left behind. Lossy formats actually sound worse on better soundsystems than they do on poor soundsystems - a lot worse. We're not talking sipping scotch and basking in subtle differences here... we're talking your friend's teeneage kids coming over and saying your system sounds horrible... it is that bad.

Again, this is a high-resolution audio system... think blowing that 2MP JPEG up to a poster sized image... it looks fine in 4x6, but crappy as a poster.

This creates a real dilemma as, though I love the iTunes interface, I'm forced to archive in huge WAV format files. At least WM9 supports lossless compression. Now I'm stuck with .APE archives, WMA9 Archives and WAV Archives. I have to use utilities to copy and convert batches of my files into MP3 format so they're portable. I also have to maintain seperate archives - not to mention backups of teh primary archives. This process is a complete organizational and disk-devouring nightmare... Steve J, please fix this and support lossless compression!
 
Re: Odd considering I found this.

Originally posted by tanlis
I found this article on Slashdot about WMA being added to the iPod.

http://www.connectedhomemag.com/Audio/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=41429
Click to expand...
It seems he's getting so much heat for it he wrote a second article where he tried to defend himself from the mob that resulted from the first piece:

http://www.connectedhomemag.com/Audio/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=41450

It really is a toss up - there seems to be arguments both ways (as witnessed by the discussion in this thread so far). But my gut tells me that HP would want their hPod to have seemless support not only with Apple's standards but with MS's standard of choice. Don't forget, HP still sells Win boxes.
 
Originally posted by Lanbrown
Why would HP get a cut from the sales? Apple makes no money and they have to pay all the costs too? Apple is providing the servers and bandwidth. It is very unlikely that HP would get a cut unless they are paying for servers and bandwidth. It would be like someone taking your car and driving whenever they want and expect you to keep the tank filled.

HP is doing this to compete with Dell. Before Dell sold the iPod so another PeeCee company would probably not want to offer it. Now that Dell has stopped selling it that leaves the door open for one of the others to sell it. Apple makes money on the iPod and not the iTMS. Dell was satisfied with the sale of the iPod only and HP will as well. They will use iTMS to sell more of their iPod and let Apple handle the music store, even though it will say HP. The profit from the iPod will be very good to their bottom line and now they can compete directly with Dell and whatever Gateway comes up with. They obviously see that people want a one-stop shop. That is something that MusicMatch and the rests can't provide, only Apple and Dell can do that right now. HP decided to jump on the winning side and forget about trying it on their own.
Click to expand...

Not "Apple makes no money", but rather, as I said, HP gets a cut. I.e., a small percentage of ITMS sales made by way of their branded/bundled version of the store. And I would say this is more akin to one selling a product in a consignment store, than to one taking unadulterated use of someone else's automobile and fuel.

As you rightly say, HP is in this to meet consumer demand, and by way of that, increase their own bottom line. It is logical to think that they would look to profit in all avenues available by way of this new partnership. Skimming a small percentage of ITMS sales from "their" version of the store would seem an obvious place to do this.

Perhaps it was profit margins, Apple, or the idea of potentially loosing their own customers to Apple at a later date, that has deterred PC OEMs from from selling the iPods alongside their own products, but the simple fact that Dell was doing it certainly did not prevent other PC OEMs from doing the same.
 
Re: WMA = Better Audio Quality

Originally posted by boros
Sorry to say this, but WMA and several other formats do have an edge over AAC - they provide for lossless compression. Yes, I'm a Mac owner and I have a fairly nice stereo. I've done blind tests with WMA losless vs WAV and various AACs and MP3s. On my syetem, the difference between the best lossy compression and a WAV or lossless MP3 is striking. Actually, listening to a lossy format on my ststem is... well... depressing. Lossy formats are great for iPods, multimedia speakers, and that Kenwood receiver. Play a lossy format on a pair of B&W Nautilus with Krell amp and you're in for a real letdown.

Again, this is a high-resolution audio system... think blowing that 2MP JPEG up to a poster sized image... it looks fine in 4x6, but crappy as a poster.

This creates a real dilemma as, though I love the iTunes interface, I'm forced to archive in huge WAV format files. At least WM9 supports lossless compression. Now I'm stuck with .APE archives, WMA9 Archives and WAV Archives. I have to use utilities to copy and convert batches of my files into MP3 format so they're portable. This process is a complete nightmare... Steve J, please fix this and support lossless compression!
Click to expand...


With all due respect, I find this hard to believe. There's been few published reports comparing AAC to WMA, with the most recent studies at least a year old.

As well, we're talking about quality at a given compression level; talking about "lossless" is, to a great extent, irrelevant as the vast majority of people will stay at 128 kbps and a vanishingly small segment will get above 192 kbps.
 
And here is the new Thurrott article - in the name of reducing page impressions.

Opinion: HP's iPod Moves Could Hurt the Industry

Last summer, HP announced a sweeping push into consumer electronics and released more than 100 new consumer-oriented products in one day. The move drew a bit of press attention, but nothing like the front-page news assault that Apple Computer generated last week for its comparably weak announcement of expensive, new, and smaller iPod devices, portable audio players that won't be available for months. Attempting to latch on to Apple's marketing success, last week HP made the incredible decision to license Apple's iPod player and iTunes software, and the move predictably catapulted HP into the spotlight for a day. But as the dust settles, HP's customers are rightly asking some hard questions about the decision because, as Microsoft is pointing out, Apple's technology offerings are an island of incompatibility in an otherwise widely compatible PC world.

Here's the problem: Apple's iPod plays back the popular MP3 audio format as well as the standards-based Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. But the Apple iTunes Music Store sells songs only in the more limited Protected AAC format, which is compatible only with iTunes and the iPod, giving Apple the type of corporate lock-in for which Microsoft is often (and, in the case of digital media, unfairly) criticized. Incidentally, RealNetworks' recently announced RealPlayer 10 also works with the AAC and MP3 formats (and with Windows Media Audio--WMA--RealAudio, and other formats), but RealNetworks uses yet another completely incompatible AAC version for its music store, a format that doesn't work with iTunes or the iPod or with any other music software. To its credit, however, RealNetworks is offering higher-quality AAC files than the iTunes Music Store offers because most customers will likely want to convert the RealNetworks' AAC files to the more compatible MP3 format for the short term.

Enter HP, which makes a variety of digital-media products, including Media Center PCs, iPAQs, and media set-top boxes--none of which are compatible with the Protected AAC format that HP will be supporting through the iTunes Music Store or with HP-branded iPods. Microsoft representatives I spoke to politely called HP's decision to go with Apple's technology "interesting," although the loser in this situation isn't Microsoft, it's the millions of people who use HP's products now and will use them in the future. "Windows is about choice," Microsoft General Manager of Windows Digital Media Division Dave Fester said during the recent 2004 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. "You can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services." Indeed, this choice characterizes the PC market. Whether the choice is Musicmatch Downloads, Napster 2.0, the Wal-Mart Music Store, or virtually every other online music store, each service uses the same WMA format for the songs users download, and all the songs are compatible with the same range of software and devices--including, incidentally, all the devices, portables, and Media Centers PCs that HP makes.

During CES, I asked HP representatives how the company would respond to the widespread incompatibilities that its new Apple relationship would cause, and I generally understood that during the ensuing few months, the company would work to iron out some of the details. A contact close to HP told me point blank that HP was requiring Apple to add WMA support to the iPod, a feature that's natively enabled in the iPod's firmware but that Apple disables before the units ship to customers. If it happens, this requirement will solve some of the incompatibility problems. However, with HP getting a portion of the profits from the songs its customers purchase from the iTunes Music Store, a bigger concern centers on how HP will make its many products compatible with the closed and proprietary Protected AAC format Apple uses.

In the HP booth at CES, employees clearly had been briefed about the technological concerns, but I got the impression that none of them actually had a handle on the problems. When I asked an HP representative how the company would solve the incompatibility problems, he told me, incorrectly, that the Protected AAC files users download do, in fact, work on HP's products and that converting them is a simple task if they don't.

Even HP executives are downplaying, if not outrightly misrepresenting, the seriousness of this problem for the company's customers, most of whom won't understand why their music and devices refuse to play nice together. "The next big thing isn't the next gizmo or killer app or hot box," HP CEO Carly Fiorina told "The New York Times." "Customers want all this to work together, and they want a seamless approach. We're very much going to make sure that the Microsoft and Apple worlds work together. That's part of the power we bring to this thing." I hope she's right, but the widespread use of WMA in the Windows world makes the necessity of this daunting task seem almost pointless. In the week that HP announced its blockbuster deal with Apple, Microsoft announced shipping schedules for the Portable Media Centers and set-top boxes that will remotely access Media Center PC content around a home and on the road--both supported, as usual, by a range of hardware companies. Again, choice is what we expect in the PC industry, and HP seems to have given up this choice for a chance to temporarily grab headlines and go with a single, incompatible, portable digital-audio hardware vendor.

From Apple's point of view, the HP deal is a major milestone. iPods have sold phenomenally well, and with 30 million paid iTunes Music Store downloads, one could even argue that the Protected AAC format is on a roll by default. But the PC market is many times larger than that figure, and potential music sales to all PC users is an order of magnitude larger than anything Apple could handle by itself. With HP at its side, Apple has a chance to change the world (something that Apple has always promised but never really accomplished)--if the companies can find a way to offer users more choice. Contrary to the opinions of some Apple fanatics, I don't care which media coder-decoders (codecs) or platforms win in the market. (And, for what it's worth, I own two iPods and have downloaded more than 200 songs from the iTunes Music Store.) But looking at the Apple and HP agreement from a customer's point of view, I think that HP has made, well, an interesting choice. If this deal only furthers compatibility problems in the digital-media arena, Apple and HP have just set back the convergence of PCs and consumer electronics an untold number of years. I hope HP's choice isn't one that comes back to bite the company's millions of customers--my number-one concern.
Click to expand...
 
Re: Re: WMA = Better Audio Quality

Originally posted by gwangung
With all due respect, I find this hard to believe. There's been few published reports comparing AAC to WMA, with the most recent studies at least a year old.

As well, we're talking about quality at a given compression level; talking about "lossless" is, to a great extent, irrelevant as the vast majority of people will stay at 128 kbps and a vanishingly small segment will get above 192 kbps.
Click to expand...

Again, for many people... MOST... 128 may be fine. Many people find the performacne of a G3 450 to be fine. Therefore, you may have a point in that 128 may be the standard. Also, I do believe that AAC outperforms WMA at a given bitrate - unfortunately, that bit rate caps out at 320 for AAC.

However, some people enjoy high-resolution audio. For those people, playing 128k AAC from their systems will sound worse that it will from your Kenwood receiver. A WAV, WMA Lossless or .APE, however, will sound phenominal! This is really something that people should consider before they take the time to rip their audio collections... It's realy best to rip in some sort of lossless format. With storage prices dropping and a whole range of inexpensive high-resolution digital amplifiers around the corner... Don't waste your time and effort on a process you'll have to repeat in a year or two.

Again, I'm talking about an archive format.. what you play in your iPod may be another thing. For an archive format, however, WMA9 definately has the edge over AAC. So does APE for that matter.
 
Re: Re: WMA = Better Audio Quality

Originally posted by gwangung
With all due respect, I find this hard to believe. There's been few published reports comparing AAC to WMA, with the most recent studies at least a year old.
Click to expand...

There is without a doubt a perceptible difference if you hear an uncompressed format directly beside an compressed one, but I think the degree of perceptibility varies considerably according to the music. When I compress my own solo classical guitar recordings with complex reverb algorithms into either 128 kbps AAC or MP3, the difference is staggering!

I have to confess, I didn't know there was such a thing as lossless compression for audio. What sort of compression ratio does a lossless WMA file have? I'm thinking it wouldn't be that good?

As well, we're talking about quality at a given compression level; talking about "lossless" is, to a great extent, irrelevant as the vast majority of people will stay at 128 kbps and a vanishingly small segment will get above 192 kbps.
Click to expand...

I wonder if that will remain true over the long term, however. As Internet bandwidth increases, and as home systems become more sophisticated I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is an increased demand for audio quality at least as good as CDs. This may take many years, but we really are at the very beginning of this shift.
 
Re: Re: Re: WMA = Better Audio Quality

Originally posted by Rex44


I have to confess, I didn't know there was such a thing as lossless compression for audio. What sort of compression ratio does a lossless WMA file have? I'm thinking it wouldn't be that good?



I wonder if that will remain true over the long term, however. As Internet bandwidth increases, and as home systems become more sophisticated I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is an increased demand for audio quality at least as good as CDs. This may take many years, but we really are at the very beginning of this shift.
Click to expand...

WMA9 and AAC both compress somewhere between 50-70%, depending on the music. Rock, for example, will be more on the 50% side and classical piano more 70%. Lossless means that NON of the audio information is tossed out... think Stuffit or PKZIP... all data is kept. Lossy means that the encoder will decide upon audio information that should be thrown out.

I agree with your assumptions on the future of bandwidth and consumer hifi... Also, look at SACD, DVD-Audio, etc. the difference with these vs. regular CDs is huge. and is likely to spoil consumers to want better audio quality.

Until AAC provides lossless encoding, WMA WINS AS AN ARCHIVE FORMAT - BIG TIME!
 
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