Apple and EMI ditching DRM is good, but it’s not good enough:

Last night the lot of us Engadget editors went to bed with sweet dreams of a DRM-free world dancing through our little heads. Lo and behold, this morning we woke up and to our pleasant surprise, EMI announced that in conjunction with Apple, it would make its entire digital catalogue available on iTunes completely DRM-free. The watershed moment we’ve all been waiting for — the first of the Big Four music businesses makes one of the most pro-consumer moves we’ve seen in years. Or did they? Was today’s announcement a real commitment dedicated to consumers’ digital rights? Or was it a play for disenfranchised music lovers’ hearts? We have a feeling the answer lies somewhere in the middle — although we can’t help but feel the whole thing is gestural at best, and subterfuge at worst. Here’s why.

Read the rest.

Three things I’d like to note in reply:

Engadget’s criticism for Apple for still selling AAC tracks instead of generic MP3′s seems kind of frivolous to me. It’s like winning a computer and complaining that you didn’t also win a monthly stipend to cover increased power bill you get because of the computer. My point is that if the tracks are DRM-free then you are free to cross-convert them to any format you wish, including generic MP3s, very easily (iTunes will even do this for you). Sure many devices don’t support AAC now but that can be easily fixed with a firmware update. I even suspect that AAC support will become more common now that iTunes sells DRM-free tracks too. Also, Engadget’s mentions several MP3-player manufacturers that don’t support AAC, but one class of device that they don’t mention is cell phones where AAC support is fairly common (most MP3 playing Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia phones support the format).

Second is an issue that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere today. Two background facts about the new DRM-free system: 1) You’ll be able to ‘upgrade’ your past purchases to high-quality DRM-free tracks for 30¢/each, and 2) DRM-free full album purchases will not cost any extra once this system goes live. So my question is, what about full albums that I’ve purchased in the past but now want to upgrade to be DRM-free? Will it still be 30¢/track? What if it’s a 30-track album? That’s a $9 upgrade if I have to buy every track, which is probably close to the original purchase price. It would be nice to see a flat album upgrade fee (I would say $3 or less would be a fair price).

Finally, what about the free iTunes singles? Will they be available as high-quality DRM-free files (provided the record label is one that allows this)? Can I upgrade past free ‘purchases’?

In any case, this is interesting news and I’m excited to see how it all develops.

Update: One of the responses that the Engadget mentions is from Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso. It’s particularly idiotic and laced with PR-Speak, so the ever poignant Daring Fireball provides this translation. Here’s an excerpt of the translation relating to interoperable DRM:

Magic interoperable DRM would give people all the features and capabilities they get with DRM-free media.

The crux of the piece is that Apple would sell DRM free music if the big 4 music labels allowed this on the iTunes store, indeed Apple would prefer this to selling DRMed music.

It’s a fascinating read for several reasons. It’s an interesting new perspective on the business. But even more interesting is that Steve deemed this topic worthy enough to release this kind of statement. It’s not often you see this kind of open communication from a company like Apple, especially Steve himself.

I’m assuming there are similar ones for music/movies/podcasts? (I’ll have to try those out…)

I love Apple, they give me such good shit.

Ho ho ho, iTunes 7 for all!

The playlist features a lot of stuff I’ve never heard of before, but of the stuff I do know includes Grandaddy, Mates of State, Phoenix & Goldfrapp (though I kind of think of the last two as more Electronic than Alternative, so I’m curious to see what classifies as Electronic later on).

To get the free tunes, log into Facebook and visit the Apple Students group. Clicking the banner at the top of that page will result in a message being sent to your Facebook message box with a code to redeem on the iTMS for the songs.

Enjoy the free tunes!

(Via iLounge)

First up is the music video for ‘Steady, As She Goes’ (?iTMS). This is the first single from the Jacks’s new project with Brendan Benson (?iTMS) called The Raconteurs (warning: link may resize your browser window). The first album Broken Boy Soldiers comes out in just a few weeks on May 16th. It sounds like really good stuff.

White also wrote a new little song called ‘Love is the Truth’ that is featured in a new Coke Commercial titled ‘What Goes Around’ that’s available (“for a limited time” apparently) on this Coke UK site. One news outlet (probably quoting a press release) describes it this way: “The commercial is intended to convey White’s premise that one act of kindness begets another.” It’s really wonderful, but it’s also very grainy (I wish they had a higher quality version available). The commercial will be airing just once in the UK after showing up during Australia’s MTV VMAs, so Coke apparently doesn’t think it’s very good at hawking their product. Kind of a shame.

Since the site tries to prevent you from saving the file (even with QuickTime Pro) and it’s supposedly “limited” (whatever that really means), I’ve put up an iPod-ready version of the file here.

Update (5/2/06): The acoustic version of ‘Steady, As She Goes’ (?iTMS) is the iTunes free single of the week. Huzzah!

TAL & Ira Glass are simply amazing. I was worried it might mess with the formula of radio (I once ‘saw’ Ira talk in a pitch-black theater for 10 minutes and it was awesome) but I have confidence that they can make it work.

But if the shows are on Showtime, they won’t be free on the internet like the radio program, I guess? Damn. Well there’s always BitTorrent or iTunes.

(Via Kottke.)

Apple’s been going a bit patch-happy lately with 10.4.5 landing yesterday so run Software Update or check the links above to get all the patching goodness.

With the 6.0.2 update, iTunes has added the ability to display ratings in increments of 10 instead of 20, in other words, a half-star. However it offers no interface for setting such ratings. This information sprung up on Mac OS X Hints a few days ago, but Andrew Escobar makes it even easier with a tutorial that has step-by-step instructions with pictures on How to Set Half-Star Ratings in iTunes. It’s a cinch to set up your own half-star system now.

One warning though, iTunes 6.0.2 has a bug when editing star ratings on Smart Playlists. I posted a comment at the end of the tutorial that explains partially what was happening. If you plan on editing your Smart Playlists based on rating be sure to read it first (and have a copy of iTunes 6.0.1 for backup). Since it’s documented in Apple Support I’m sure it will be fixed with the next iTunes iteration tough.

Update: I found some other scripts to change ratings for the currently playing song by half-star increments and then used the venerable Quicksilver to assign them to global hot-keys so now I can change ratings for the current song even when iTunes is running in the background. For you other QS/LB/Butler jockeys out there it’s the only way to go…

Back to Tristan for a moment though… he actually figured out how to do this extraction back in August. I’ve been using it since around then and I’ve always meant to link to it on this site but never got around to it. Recently however, his website got linked to from a few of the more high profile Mac news sites and, since then, I’ve had my searches fail occasionally. According to the announcement on the site, “the scripts seem to be stressing from the load, if a search fails please try again later.”

This prompted me to do a bit of poking around on the PHP source code that he provides and adapt it for use on my own site. I don’t really know PHP very well but after a bit of tinkering I came up with this: iTunes Art Search. It’s faster and more reliable for me because it’s local and this way Tristan doesn’t have to pay for any bandwidth costs. Feel free to use it at your leisure. Just right/control-click any album link in iTunes music store, copy the URL and submit it. Assuming the URL is valid, you should get a page with the high-resolution artwork that you can then copy back into iTunes to serve as the artwork for your songs.

PS: For you power users out there I rigged it to accept arguments as part of the URL string too. This is handy for QuickSilver-based searches. Just use: http://nvinnyc.no-ip.org/itunes/index.php?*** (where the *** is your query).

Update (5/30/06): Apple’s iTunes team seems to have changed some syntax and added an authorization string to the art URLs in a way that breaks the scripts I had been using… This probably means the game is up but if you want the full technical details check out this digg post.

First off, let me say that though I think Front Row is an awesome product, it’s still very much a 1.0 version: there’s lots of room for both refinement and new features here.

Perhaps it’s easier to define Front Row in terms of what it is not. Front Row is not a program that you’re supposed to use while sitting at your keyboard. Nor is Front Row aimed at offering a “Media Center” like experience (though it might eventually evolve into something like that if some of the commentary & speculation out there proves true).

Let’s get to the “ises” (can I make that a word?). Front Row is an alternative interface for your computer. It has been designed from the ground up to be usable with a remote from across the room. As I stated above it’s not really meant to be used while sitting at the keyboard, in fact, Apple doesn’t provide users with a way to launch it without using the remote (though of course you can get around this limitation). Apple’s played the keep-it-simple attitude here (which should be a surprise to no one) and only put six buttons on the remote. These serve as up/down & forward/back in the Front Row menu system and volume, fast forward/rewind, play/pause, & back while playing songs or videos. For the most part it works very intuitively though I wish the left & right buttons served as forward and back in the menu system instead of being useless when browsing.

Because Front Row is designed to be controlled with a remote, Apple has designed the interface with very large fonts, icons, and interface elements icons throughout the program in order to maximize usability from a distance. This works very well, but again underscores “don’t use it from the keyboard” (unless you have a wireless keyboard across the room I suppose). The other thing worth noting is that not only are the interface elements large, they are all scaleable (and vector based wherever possible) so the user experience is largely resolution independent. This is exciting because it means that Front Row should look and work great when connected to a TV (which usually have significantly lower resolutions than computer screens) while retaining it’s beauty and usability on a 30″ Cinema Display. Resolution independence with vector graphics is destined to be a key feature of next generation user interfaces, so it’s nice to see Apple really embracing it here (though Tiger already supports it to some extent).

I could wax lackadaisically about where I see Front Row evolving (think Apple Media Center) but I’ll save that for another post. For the time being there are a few more concrete improvements that I’d like to see. Mainly they revolve around Front Row is still being kind of slow. My PowerMac is significantly faster than an iMac in every respect but I’ve seen videos of people running it just fine on a Mac mini or worse, so I don’t think this is entirely processor dependent. There is a lot of room for software optimization here to make it seem much snappier. I’m thinking specifically about more OpenGL optimization and tighter integration with QuickTime, iTunes, iPhoto, and DVD Player. Maybe when they release iLife ’06 Apple can finally allow everyone to use Front Row without hacks. In any case, interesting times lie ahead!

Update: There still seems to be some problems with this install in that it makes it impossible to eject DVD’s after playing them in the updated DVD player (you have to restart to get the disc out). As such, consider this a little warning, if you don’t know what you’re doing then don’t do it.

Is it really time for that already? Damn. I think I’m going to go listen to some Nine Inch Nails to make me feel better. Holiday music is such an abomination.

Too bad vingle sounds like some bastard child of jingle and video rather than a video single.

I mean it’s not like they couldn’t have released iTunes 4.9.1 to handle the nano (like they did for 4.7.1 with the shuffle) then dropped the new iTunes 5 with video store along with the new iPod.

Fuck this iTunes 6 shit!