Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

itunes for windows

AppleInsider.com reports that Apple will announce iTunes (and the iTunes Music Service) for Windows next Thursday, Oct. 16, in San Francisco. (“Apple to Host Music Media Event Next Week” - 10/09/03)

Over the past couple of months, Apple has quietly been working behind the scenes to expand the iTunes Music Store offerings. According to sources, plans to more than double the store’s content offerings were in place back in August.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports suggest that the company may soon begin to provide incentives to consumers who merely register to tryout the online service. Offerings could potentially include a selection of freely downloadable music, reports state.

The current success of the iTunes Music Store — which serves up over 80,000 tracks to paying customers each day — can largely be accredited to Apple’s industry leading iPod digital music player. Windows compatible versions of the player have been shipping with MUSICMATCH Jukebox since last July, but will soon arrive with Apple-branded iTunes for Windows software instead.

Additionally, the company has recently nailed down a pair of hardware peripherals to be made available for the most recent generation of iPod players. Information related to the add-ons has been extremely hush-hush, with those in-the-know seemingly unwilling to provide details.

The iTunes Music Store has, up until now, been open to a fairly small, elite audience. It’ll be interesting to see how (if at all) the landscape of downloadable music changes once the service is available to the PC-dominated larger computing community.

(Link found via Slashdot.)

Speaking of music services, Wired reports that files downloaded from the new, “legal” incarnation of Napster will not play on the iPod, which could definitely hurt the service’s chances at success. (“New Napster, IPod Don’t Play Nice” - 10/09/03)

Mike McGuire, research director with GartnerG2, said that fiddling around with different file formats could be discouraging to consumers.

“If online music is going to require me to look at an option plan that is going to be as complex as your average cell-phone plan, none of this is going to work,” said McGuire. “Online music, then, is still a niche.

“Until the majority of consumers decide which format they like the best, we’re going to see the same struggle,” he said.

Napster 2.0 is joining an ever-growing field of paid music services like Musicmatch and BuyMusic.com. These download services offer songs in Windows Media Audio, or WMA, format, the same format used by Napster.

Apple’s iPod, on the other hand, plays songs that use the Advanced Audio Coding, or AAC, specification. Napster’s files, then, are incompatible with the iPod.

Of course, the iPod plays a variety of other formats, including MP3 files and uncompressed audio file formats such as AIFF and WAV.

Channelling my CCTP 505 lessons, the world of downloadable music will continue to be a minefield until someone — the “market,” or some governing body, or a few powerful companies — decides on a single standard to follow.