Monday, April 26, 2004
ExtremeTech: "iTunes Bad, WMA Good"
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 07:00 AM
"AAC is a perfectly fine audio format. It sounds good. I don't really want the music I pay money for to be encoded at 128k, but none of iTunes' competitors are offering a higher bitrate, so I don't have much choice there. The problem with AAC is that it doesn't really have digital rights management, so songs you buy through the iTunes Music Store have an Apple-specific proprietary digital rights management scheme called FairPlay attached to them. AAC may be a format that many desktop applications (like Winamp) can understand, and it's certainly possible for non-iPod portable players to build in support for it, but iTunes and iPods understand FairPlay.
If I buy music through the iTunes store, it will only play on iTunes or an iPod. That's it, until the end of time. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it for me. How do I know what music player I'm going to want to buy in four years? How do I know my next car won't have a built-in digital music player? I certainly don't expect Apple to make a CarPod. All those iTunes songs I pay for today are going to be useless tomorrow. I generally don't want to play back my music through iTunes -- I want to use a smaller, faster, less obtrusive playback client like Winamp. With music purchased through iTunes, that's not an option."
Oh my - I can see why this article has 170 comments posted to it already! It's quite the bold statement. I'd like to know what DMT readers think - give the whole thing a read and come back and comment. I think there's a lot of truth in what he's saying, but I can understand why it would upset happy iPod owners. :wink:
If I buy music through the iTunes store, it will only play on iTunes or an iPod. That's it, until the end of time. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it for me. How do I know what music player I'm going to want to buy in four years? How do I know my next car won't have a built-in digital music player? I certainly don't expect Apple to make a CarPod. All those iTunes songs I pay for today are going to be useless tomorrow. I generally don't want to play back my music through iTunes -- I want to use a smaller, faster, less obtrusive playback client like Winamp. With music purchased through iTunes, that's not an option."
Oh my - I can see why this article has 170 comments posted to it already! It's quite the bold statement. I'd like to know what DMT readers think - give the whole thing a read and come back and comment. I think there's a lot of truth in what he's saying, but I can understand why it would upset happy iPod owners. :wink:
