| Thursday, October 16, 2003 |
13:22 - Kid in a candy store
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
|
(top)  |
Wow... I've really been out of the loop. Today's announcement really snuck up on me.
I had no idea, for instance, that there was a Stevenote this morning, in which iTunes for Windows was unveiled, along with a ton of other stuff. iPod accessories, for instance; like Damien Del Russo, who wrote to tell me about the Stevenote and its details, I'm going to have to get me a new dockable iPod now-- the accessories won't work with the old iPods, but they're too cool not to have.
Belkin Voice Recorder. Sweet. This is something they've been needing for some time. Fifty bucks, and third-party-- but all the iPod itself needs is a software flash, and blammo: instant voice-recording feature.
inMotion Portable iPod Speakers. Now this I want. A set of small but powerful speakers that you can use to turn your iPod into a portable boom box, or even just a bookshelf stereo. Very stylish, actually-- hell, I think it looks a damn sight better than those godawful Aiwa and Panasonic monstrosities they sell in electronics stores nowadays. Begone, Tokyo At Night displays! $150? I can get behind that.
Belkin Media Reader. OoooOOooo. To quote: "Save a bundle on memory cards the next time you take your digital camera on vacation. When your card is full, transfer the images to your iPod via the handy Belkin Media Reader." Niiiice. Damn cool.
The new Windows iTunes is evidently 100% feature-identical to the Mac version. Wow. It's got Aqua widgets, and Apple calls it an "application" rather than a "program"-- sure to grate again Windows-heads with the "Mac accent" of the terminology-- but, hey. Looks to me like they even managed to make it fairly attractive.
MusicMatch is gone. When you install the Windows iTunes, it supplants MusicMatch for transferring music to the iPod. I guess MusicMatch must have known this was coming; they can't have made a whole helluva lot of money on their iPod bundle deal in any case.
So the DRM is being done entirely within iTunes, then-- so I wonder just what it's keying off of. On the Mac, you get a combination of the machine's serial number and the primary Ethernet address; what do they do for PCs? I'd love to know.
iTunes for Windows does disc burning. I guess this means some poor R&D unit within Apple had to undergo the torment of testing hundreds of Windows drivers for various ATAPI optical drives... kudos to them if the list of compatible drives is of any significant length.
iTunes 4.1 is the new current version, which means there's a new one for Mac users to download too. Evidently you can do voice notes and on-the-go playlists and sync them to your iTunes, you can burn long playlists that are longer than a single disc (it allows you to span discs), it lets you access the iTunes Music Store as a web page and drag it into an e-mail and stuff-- interesting. And of course there's Windows compatibility-- including the ability to share files between a Mac and PC. I wonder if this means you get any more than the three DRM slots? You know, like, "three for your Macs in their halls of stone, and two for the Windows-lords under the sky" or something?
As for the iTunes website-- it's been majorly revamped and reopened. It's clear now what's been going on, or at least so I surmise: the current multicolored iPod ad campaign, with the silhouettes dancing around with their iPods, was originally intended to accompany the iTunes for Windows release. But then BuyMusic.com came out with their own campaign trashing the iTunes store (quite literally); so Apple had to launch the new ads early, centered only on the iPod (which, they remind us, is "Mac or PC"). And now they can roll out the full campaign: iTunes for all! (booo!) Very well, iTunes for none! (booo!) Very well... iTunes for some; miniature American flags for others! (yaaaay!)
It should be noted that just about everybody and his brother is starting up a music store. First BuyMusic.com, now PureTrack.com, and now we hear that Dell is coming out with one, and probably Microsoft and all the labels and so on. But you know... it's notable that only Apple has released numbers for how many songs its store has sold. The other stores haven't. Presumably because the numbers would be too embarrassing.
(Oh! WinTunes' installer wants you to reboot after it finishes. Isn't that precious?)
Oh, and I'll have to look up the details of this, but evidently Steve also announced a giveaway of 100,000,000 songs. A hundred million. How does that work now?
Damien says:
The best was Bono, after he complimented Steve..."That's why I'm kissing the corporate ass" - claaaaasic.
Sweet. Let the good times roll! And now for the betting pools on download numbers (WinTunes-vs-Mac iTunes) to kick into high gear...
Oh... and on the iTunes Overview page, which is full of much-updated info, it says that iTunes is "Coming soon for more than 25 million U.S. members of America Online". Wow... they're really blasting off the chocks, aren't they? All that first-out-of-the-gate stuff really did pay off in the corporate wheeling-and-dealing world, huh?
UPDATE: It appears the iTunes Music Store itself has been nicely spruced up, too-- and not just cosmetically. True, all the song and album listings are now in attractive boxes whose color patterns match the artist pages (Elvis's page is in a deep greenish-brownish-gold that looks like coffee mixed with molasses and a light shined through it); but more importantly, there's a bunch more content-- both static and dynamic.
Each artist now has a Biography page-- very long and detailed in many cases-- and also an "Influencers and Contemporaries" page, which I think is extremely cool. You get to see all the artists and all the albums that your favorite artists listed as inspiration; you can track musical styles back through the ages this way. As database-driven content goes, this is some of the best stuff I've seen. This is what it's all about, man.
Oh, and the Store now has "allowances" (so you can give your kids access to your purchased music without giving them your credit card) and gift certificates. This thing's got some serious potential...
UPDATE: The Audiobooks section appears to be an evil, evil trap for the unwary spendthrift. There are dozens and dozens of books in there now, all the Audible content now integrated into the iTunes Music Store. Books range from $10 to $35 or so, and there are authors from Isaac Asimov to Tolkien to Hillary Clinton to Ayn Rand all represented in rich digital form. They even seem to have a special Star Trek section, with all the random novellas narrated by the actors-- Frakes, Shatner, Nimoy, Mulgrew, Ryan, Shimerman, everybody. (Well, everybody except Patrick Stewart, for some reason.) Tons of classics as well, plus clean recordings of all those public-radio shows that I only hear on a crackling radio on those weekend trips out to Sacramento. They have archives of Car Talk, for crying-out-loud.
I guess all this content was there before, but the whole Audible thing never really showed up on my radar. Now, though... it's all unified.
Apple's got a powderkeg on their hands; the next few days will be interesting indeed...
|
|
