iTunes? Sure.
Oct. 16th, 2003 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikI've got no problems admitting it: the Apple folks make solid products. I downloaded, installed and purchased music with iTunes in only a few minutes. It's easy and very functional. Good one, Apple. To my parents and friends who might be reading this: give it a shot. It's worth the trouble, and free to start. http://www.itunes.com
Now if only they'd put in a proper electronica/trance bend to their catalog. At least they redeemed themselves by having a handful of Yello tunes. :)
Now if only they'd put in a proper electronica/trance bend to their catalog. At least they redeemed themselves by having a handful of Yello tunes. :)
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Date: 2003-10-16 02:49 pm (UTC)"At least they redeemed themselves by having a handful of Yello tunes. :)"
What's this? The mighty Apple deity deign acknowledge Electronic Music, albeit in a minimal way?
Forsooth and gildenfrock!
(Goes over to iTunes to see if they have anything he likes...)
Hey, they won't let me browse the catalog!
How the heck am I supposed to see if it's worth it for me to sign up?
eMusic let me browse their entire catalog, I just couldn't download anything.
Oh wait, there's NO membership fee.Hmmmmmmmm...
What's this? The iTunes program only works for WIN XP and 2000? Double-bogus!!
Guess I'll wait and see if they extend support to 98SE...
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Date: 2003-10-16 04:46 pm (UTC)I don't know why you can't browse their site to find the tunes, but if you COULD get iTunes to work (which you need to buy it anyways) it is quick to browse and quite integrated.
I like it, and I know it doesn't help, but if you REALLY wanted to see if they had something, that you couldn't find anywhere else, I would look for you. I just have to figure out if I can get it to MP3 format.
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Date: 2003-10-16 03:37 pm (UTC)Can I purchase music and get it in any format besides AAC? I've got a number of devices that only speak mp3, and honestly never really play music on a normal computer anyhow...
According to the help files, yes.
Date: 2003-10-16 04:50 pm (UTC)Anyways, you pick what you want in preferences, then close.
Click on the song(s) you want to convert, and click convert to MP3. Before it would have said AAC, but now it says MP3.
HOWEVER it says when going from one compressed format to another you may lose sound quality. If you go to WAV or AIFF it says there is not. I wonder if you go from AAC to WAV to MP3 if that would be ok?
Re: According to the help files, yes.
Date: 2003-10-16 05:20 pm (UTC)The reason you lose quality isn't because audio compression (or, at least, psychoacoustic audio compression like AAC or MP3) works by removing certain sounds from the music that you wouldn't be able to hear anyways. Problem is, all the different compression methods remove different parts of the signal, so when you compress with one, and then recompress with another, you lose everything the first threw out plus everything the second threw out. Basically, anyhow. So it doesn't really matter what form your audio goes through in the middle, because once a given bit of signal is gone, it's gone forever.
Still, though, compression with some quality loss is still probably better than the silence I would get otherwise... :)
Re: According to the help files, yes.
Date: 2003-10-16 05:24 pm (UTC)Re: According to the help files, yes.
Date: 2003-10-16 05:43 pm (UTC)If you go AAC->WAV->MP3, you're still recompressing something that's already had stuff thrown out of it. You can't get it back unless you re-rip it from a CD or whatever.
To make an analogy... each file format is a Xerox machine. When you make a photocopy of something, you lose some clarity, subtelty of greys get lost, maybe you get some spurious greys introduced because the book isn't flat on the glass. Put that copy on a different copier and hit the button, and what comes out looks even worse. If you had a "perfect" copier that could make an exact duplicate, and went from "original page" to "normal copier 1", then put that into the "perfect" copier, and put that into "normal copier 2", you're still making a copy of a copy; you're just wasting paper and time on that intermediate "perfect" copy of a munged-up duplicate.
AAC is generally a lot better than MP3 anyway; it's a newer format that thinks a lot harder about what it's throwing out. You probably won't be able to hear too much quality loss if you do re-encode the AACs into MP3... but the file might be bigger than an MP3 made straight from the original data (raw CD track), because it's trying to preserve little artifacts that AAC introduced that MP3 thinks is important.
I'd have slowly re-encoded all my music as AAC a while back, but I really hate the way iTunes wants to organize my music for me; I also have some investment in the mp3 player I use (Audion) because I've made a couple skins for it, and I like to see my own art on my desktop instead of ugly brushed metal!
(sorry for the double-post - I left an italics tag improperly closed halfway through. :P )
Re: According to the help files, yes.
Date: 2003-10-16 05:52 pm (UTC)And I've seen on http://www.resexcellence.com/user_iTunes.shtml some iTunes skins. I think somewhere on the site you can find instructions on making them, too. It was all over my head so I didn't really look.
Yes, I know you like what you have, but I thought it would be something interesting to look at. :)
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Date: 2003-10-16 06:14 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, when "skinning" iTunes, you're still stuck with the basic layout Apple dsigned; the mp3 player I use lets me make skins that look like this or this. I think my reluctance to switch to iTunes is pretty much summed up by those two screengrabs! The future of Audion is pretty debatable, given that iTunes is totally free.
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Date: 2003-10-16 06:26 pm (UTC)I guess I appreciate that stuff -- I used to change my desktop weekly, and icons, and then let people see my desktop in real time using snapperhead.
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Date: 2003-10-16 06:29 pm (UTC)I would've linked to the skins on Panic's skin archive, but it's not working quite right at the moment for some reason.
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Date: 2003-10-16 06:39 pm (UTC)Also a VERY trusted friend helped me set up some Apache stuff on my mac by remotely logging in, and checking it from my screen using snapperhead. Forgot what he did though, we wound up resetting it. (Oh yeah I think we were trying to set up PHPSlash on my machine to see if it would work.)
I've seen good skins for -- shoot what did I have? I had the one everyone had before iTunes came out, that came with my tiny iJam MP3 player. It had nice skins. Nothing like what I saw in your DA, though.
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Date: 2003-10-16 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-16 07:16 pm (UTC)The music you _purchase_ is in protected 96kHz stereo AAC format and it only plays on machines authorized to you. You can have up to 3 devices authorized to you at one time.
iTunes will _import_ music (i.e. from a CD) in whatever format you like, as the other poster described, including mp3, AIFF, and unprotected AAC.
There are apps you can obtain that will rip whatever is playing to mp3, straight from the audio out pipe. But if you do that, you're 'transcoding,' and will suffer the loss of audio quality that comes with twice-compressed.
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Date: 2003-10-16 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-17 10:24 am (UTC)