Rush my money to the record shops

[venta]

I'm at work, I've fortified myself with my morning dose of tea and toast-and-evil, and I still don't quite feel like taking on the kernel locking primitives which are waiting for me.

So instead, I think I'll wax gently wrathful about iTunes.

Those of you who follow the minutae of my life (a) should get out more, and (b) will be aware that I recently downloaded iTunes just to get hold of their exclusive Pixies' single. (Incidentally, apologies to those I to whom I offered an mp3, the continued delay is because bastard Evesham still haven't given my laptop back.)

Although iTunes does offer itself as an all-in-one music solution, I decided I'd prefer to continue using Winamp as my main music player. iTunes' format is proprietory, so I can only listen to Bam Thwok with iTunes, but that was pretty much the only thing I intended to use it for. I played around briefly with it, failed to be able to work out how to generate a playlist, and shut it down.

I'd unset all the "make this my default player" options, but it still started up every time I put a CD in the drive. I closed it every time. One time I failed to close it swiftly, and as I watched, my open directory of mp3s all changed icons. Away went the little orange zigzags of Winamp, and in came the blobby green notes of iTunes.

A quick glance through file associations confirmed it - all my audio format did indeed belong to iTunes. I've got them all back now to where I want them, but it took a while. iTunes was very much in disgrace.

But I thought its online music-purchasing aspects deserved a fair chance. Unfortunately it didn't do what I'd hoped - the music it offers for sale is mostly the mainstream things you could find in any record shop anyway, not the obscure stuff which I'd have thought it would make sense to offer. After all, deleted albums which are now unavailable should be cheap to offer, and people would want them. Fair enough, I suppose, but it was disappointing. As it was to discover that with a popular album, the "known" single is often only available as part of the album, not as an individual download.

Now, every Tuesday iTunes mails me to tell me about their newly available stuff, and to let me know what the free-to-download single of the week is. Two weeks ago, the free-to-download single didn't actually exist when I searched iTunes for it. Last week, clicking on the link from the mail displayed me a crashed page of XML. When I tried later, I got a popup saying the store was unavailable.

This week's mail listed a Barenaked Ladies album among their new releases. Now, a new Barenaked Ladies album is the sort of thing that one could get quite excited about on a Tuesday morning, so I followed the link - only to be told the album wasn't available in the UK store, and they had no details.

So. I am in all ways officially unimpressed. I dunno where the online music revolution is, kids, but it's not hanging around at iTunes.

And now - I realise as I come to fill in the 'current music' field that I'm not listening to anything. So I hunt out a suitable morning album, and discover that once again all my .m3u playlist files are displaying the iTunes icon. Bastards. Fortunately, the Winamp context menus seem stronger, and I'm still offered the 'play in Winamp' option. So I am doing.

And by the way, don't put St Ivel Gold low-fat edition on your toast. Work usually provides us with some form of butter-substitute-for-the-gullible, but this week we have St Ivel. It's an odd texture, and it doesn't melt properly, and it sits on your toast and mixes up with whatever else you're trying to spread on it in quite an unpleasant way. Bah.

Comments

[diffrentcolours]

iTunes' format is proprietory

And that's why I won't use it. I can just about tolerate MP3, though I find Ogg Vorbis to be technically and legally preferable, but iTunes means I have to jump through hoops to do perfectly reasonable things with music, like play it on a Linux box or a non-iPod portable player, or burn it to CD. I've heard many tales of woe from Mac-otaku about how the DRM has caused them to lose access to hundreds of dollars worth of music, and I don't think that's a risk I want to take.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'd agree - I was only suckered in by a song which was unavailable elswhere, and because I thought something like iTunes had a potential to be a good thing.

Once I get my laptop back, I think I'll be burning Bam Thwok to a CD (alledgedly simple from iTunes), and uninstalling the whole lot.

[diffrentcolours]

I might have to obtain a copy of Bam Thwok from a convenient p2p network. It might be illegal, but it seems to be my only recourse.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, assuming you don't mind the slightly poorer audio quality of something that's been burnt and re-ripped to mp3, I'll happily pass you a copy once I have one. Or lend you the CD.

You still owe me a Goon Show CD :)

[diffrentcolours]

Yes, I also said I was going to lend you the Earth Loop Recall album, didn't I?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er, yes, I think you did.
Though was more of a forcible education program because I said I hadn't liked them live.

Of course, in order to effect this lending, I'd have to, like, see you or something :)

[diffrentcolours]

Yeah, you should come down the pub more :p

Or I could just whap the relevant files up on my Soulseek share and you could download them from me ;p

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yeuch, pubs, don't like pubs. Nasty beer and stuff you find in them.

I'll endeavour to make it down this side of the heat death of the universe. And give you advance warning.

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Theres a shoutcast over here:

http://goons.fabcat.org/

[zandev.livejournal.com]

I should clarify that the iTunes format for the music isn't particularly proprietory in that AAC is an mpeg standard. iTunes will also quite happily rip to various other formats including MP3.

However, the DRM system wrapping this (used by the iTunes Music Store, not by tracks ripped with iTunes directly) is indeed proprietory. It's also extremely restrictive.

I'm generally very happy with iTunes as a music player. However, I've not bought anything from the Music Store, and I'm unlikely to in the future. It just isn't competitive with just buying the CD, particularly as HMV and Virgin keep having sales.

[diffrentcolours]

True, I should have specified the iTunes Music Store format, rather than the iTunes Media Player format. Out of interest, will iTunes rip to Ogg?

I'm told that mplayer on Linux will play non-DRM'd AAC files, at least. Doubt we'll see iTunes for Linux any time soon...

[zandev.livejournal.com]

No, it won't rip to Ogg. Supported formats are AAC, MP3, 'Apple Lossless Encoder', AIFF, WAV. The windows version will also transcode from WMA.

I've just tried it and the MacOS port of mplayer does indeed seem to play the AAC files correctly (though without positioning controls).

[diffrentcolours]

Fair enough. AAC is as bad as MP3 from a patent-encumbering POV, though I haven't played with it so I couldn't compare on a technical level. I'll stick to xmms and abcde then :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that if you can produce WAVs then you can produce OGGs very easily indeed. I suspect (but can't prove) that it should be no more lossy than if iTunes exported OGG directly.

[diffrentcolours]

Well, yes, but the point of iTunes is that it's an all-in-one application to do everything you want with music (ripping CDs, buying stuff from iTMS, playing the damn things). I already have a choice of several applications for ripping CDs to Ogg, so using iTunes for CD -> WAV and then a seperate application for WAV -> Ogg (and possibly a third for metadata tagging) seems a little pointless.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I didn't realise that's what iTunes was supposed to be. In view of this there will now be a short pause while I point and laugh at iTunes.

<points and laughs at iTunes>

Thankyou.

[venta.livejournal.com]

as bad as MP3 from a patent-encumbering POV

Can you explain what you mean there, please ?

Having done nothing more complicated that rip mp3s to play to myself on a Windows machine, I've no idea what you're talking about.

[diffrentcolours]

The MP3 compression algorithm (the bit of maths that makes it work) is patented by a company called Frauhofer, owned by Thompson. While it's public knowledge how to make an MP3 encoder and decoder, anybody who does so has to license the patent to distribute their work, or to trade in MP3 files. Ultimately, even if I write my own MP3 software, Frauhofer get to say what I can and can't do with it, despite the fact that MP3 is an ISO standard from the MPEG group.

The About Xiph page explains why this is a bad thing for the world in general, and why Xiph produce open formats such as Vorbis, FLAC and Speex (for audio) and Theora (for video) which are free from patent encumbrance. As far as I understand it, Xiph patent their work, then "donate" the patents to the public domain so everybody can use them (but nobody else can patent it).

As for why some of us think this is important, it's worth reading this editorial from BoingBoing, even though it concentrates more on DRM lock-in technologies such as that used by the iTunes Music Store rather than patents which are used to achieve the same lock-in effects through legal rather than technical methods (and the legal methods are possibly even more effective) but the basic upshot is the same - lockin, however it's achieved, is bad for the artist and bad for the consumer and should be opposed. It's why geeks like me get up in arms about things like the European software patent legislation and bad legislation like the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which came over to Europe in ther form of the European Copyright Law Directive) and the proposed and utterly insane INFRINGE act (why does all American legislation have to have funky names now?).