| Monday, April 28, 2003 |
12:35 - Help! I'm behind again!
http://www.apple.com/music/
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Well, well, well. It seems all the rumors were true, even the really off-the-wall ones.
Apple has released its new music service-- the iTunes Music Store-- along with a new version of iTunes; and there is a new iPod, pretty much exactly as Think Secret described it, with 10/15/30GB sizes, a docking station, reorganized buttons, a smaller profile, and USB 2.0 support. (Yes, USB 2.0.)
And what's more, it seems my current iPod is now officially obsolete. I've installed the new iPod firmware (v1.3), which supports AAC playback and the iTunes Music Store, but so far the only big change I can see is that now the "Backlight" option appears right on the main menu. Everything else is the same.
Presumably you have to buy a new iPod to get all the new PDA features-- I guess there's more RAM capacity in the new ones or something. But yes, PDA capabilites. The iPod is now officially a PDA, so it would seem. There's now a note viewer, an alarm-clock function, three different games (including Solitaire! Solitaire finally comes to the Mac!), and a number of music-playing functions that previously were iTunes-side-only have now been enabled on the iPod. Now you can rate songs on the fly (the 1-5 stars scale), and create "On-The-Go Playlists" which seemingly sync up with iTunes once you're done. None of this stuff is on my lowly, year-and-a-half-old 5GB scroll-wheel iPod. Daawww.
(Seriously-- I don't know what I'll do with it if I get a new one. I can't bear to throw it away.)
The USB 2.0 support is interesting; it's clearly a bone thrown to the Windows side, but it means the new solution to connectivity can be fairly tidy: a single docking-station port on the bottom of the iPod, with both FireWire and USB 2.0 built-in. (Presumably, this means they can release FireWire 800 support in the future, with just an iPod firmware update, and all you'll have to replace is the docking station. Nice.) But it's also Apple's first tacit acknowledgement of USB 2.0, and it's on the iPod first, before any actual Macs. My guess is they still want to wait until FireWire 800 is present across the board before they add USB 2.0. It'll be a good checkbox item to have once they do.
Anyway, iTunes 4 has those new, flat iMovie3-like buttons, and seems to work the same as it always did; but now it's got a number of extra little nifty enhancements and rough edges sanded off. It now displays album art, for instance, and it has full AAC support (if you have QuickTime 6.2). There's a whole slew of new controls to deal with in the Music Store data source. But one thing I'm pleasantly surprised to see is "Shared Playlists"-- remember back when Jaguar was on the way, and they showed a demo on stage of two TiBooks sharing iTunes playlists with each other via Rendezvous? Jobs and Schiller walked to within AirPort distance of each other, and their Macs immediately discovered one another and started streaming music upon request? Then Jaguar was released, but that feature wasn't to be found in iTunes 3-- all Rendezvous appeared to be useful for was iChat, and creating personal web server pages. Whenever I talked to anybody in an Apple Store or on an expo floor, all they could tell me was that maybe the RIAA had shaken a few fingers at Apple and told them not to implement that feature. Music-sharing and all that-- evil, y'know.
But now it's in iTunes 4, just as previously advertised; and when you enable Music Sharing in the Preferences, you get a dialog box that says "Remember: Sharing music is for personal use only." So perhaps they're still treading that ragged edge of official legal sanction.
As they must be with the iTunes Music Store itself. Man... what an ambitious venture this is going to turn out to be. There's a ton of stuff available, as one might expect; it's all for a dollar a track, with full-quality 30-second previews available for all songs (selected judiciously from within the song, not just the first 30 seconds), "Hot Picks", featured lists, and all the rest. There's a column-view-esque browser view, as well as basic and advanced search functions. It all looks very large and a bit intimidating; they've made it look very pretty, but it's going to take some getting used to. Anybody from the Napster Generation is going to have to adjust to the idea of selecting music tracks of guaranteed quality, using an easy and yet sophisticated search scheme, to download exactly the music they want at very affordable cost from the actual vendor. Wow. What a concept.
Out of the gate, it looks like the service has a few bugs to work out. The installer process needs a little soak time; the Music Store requires iTunes 4, and iTunes 4 requires QuickTime 6.2, and downloading each of those manually from the website gives you an admonishment to "Nex time use Software Update"; but Software Update, as of today, makes no mention of either update being available. (Besides which iTunes 4 seemed to run fine without QT6.2.) And the Music Store service itself seems to be rather swamped. I keep getting timeout errors (or something-- Error 504?) on database queries, and I can't seem to log in using my Apple ID. I think either they massively underestimated the load they'd be sustaining (wouldn't be the first time), or the system is woefully untested (again, wouldn't be the first time). But infrastructurally and logistically speaking, this is a huge undertaking, and I would have been far more surprised if it had worked flawlessly right out of the box. I'm sure it will smooth out over the next few days.
Those few days are going to see me racking my brains for the names of songs I remember hearing way back when and losing track of, so I can seek them out and download crispy fresh new copies; and it's also going to see me scrabbling in amongst the sofa cushions for loose change to convert into a new iPod.
Or perhaps not; I wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of my current one. It's not its fault we're both behind the curve now.
Poor thing.
UPDATE: Here's the nitty-gritty of the DRM terms:
The iTunes Music Store is fast and convenient for you, and fair to the artists and record companies. In a nutshell, you can play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.
Okay-- that answers a number of questions, and raises quite a few more...
UPDATE: As of 4:00 PM PST, the kinks in the service seem to be worked out; I can now sign in, search, browse, and move around the system with very little delay. Guess they got some more servers online.
Also, Chris points out to me that the purpose of moving the iPod's playback/navigation buttons to a row above the scroll wheel, instead of their previous ring around the wheel, is to allow them to go the the touch-sensitive track-pad sensor buttons for all of them, not just the wheel. (Early iPod owners complained a lot about taking their iPods to the beach and getting sand in the scroll-wheel, hence the move to the track-pad wheel.) If they'd stayed with the old button layout, but made the ring buttons touch-sensitive, there would be no tactile separation between them and the scroll-wheel; moving them to the row above lets the user navigate by feel as well as keeping the sand out.
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