Choosing your music format is like being back in high school — either you’re in, or you’re out. If Apple has its way, you’ll be in, inexorably. Once you’ve committed to the iPod way of life, you’re in for life. Might as well drink the Kool-Aid… you’re not going anywhere. However, as more and more DRM-free options become available, now could be the chance for other players to become contenders since Apple's system depends on it. As other systems get easier to use, iPods suddenly seem cumbersome and restrictive.
The latest release from Coldplay is exclusively on iTunes. Fan of American Idol (Come on, admit it!)? Those songs and performances are exclusively on iTunes and playable only on iPods, digging you deeper and deeper into the ground. What happens to the poor fool who doesn’t have an iPod? Or, God forbid, you have an iPod and another MP3 player? What happens to those folks?
Well, it gets complicated. But it can work. More on how after the Continue jump.
iPod Only
One of the big factors in the iPod's success is also the thing that makes it so limiting: All music management must be done through iTunes. No big deal — iTunes is wonderfully easy to use. Managing music couldn’t be easier, and buying new songs requires just a few clicks. What’s not to like?
Well, a lot, if you like choice. Transferring music to a new iPod is difficult, and if your computer crashes, you could lose the songs you bought forever. Apple's DRM (digital rights management) copy protection is quite robust, and quite a pain in the tush. If you want to replace your iPod with another brand, you're completely out of luck if significant chunks of your library are downloaded (DRM-protected AAC). You can’t easily convert protected AACs to MP3s or WMAs to play on non-iPod players. Even your own copies of your own CDs would have to be converted, at a significant loss of sound quality. Of course, Apple has a (relatively) small number of songs without copy protection — about two million.
Napster’s News
You remember Napster, right? You know, the turn-of-the-century company that encouraged music files to fly through cyberspace with zero regard for copyright? It eventually was forced to drop that approach in favor of being tied into DRM heavily, offering Microsoft PlaysForSure WMA music files. These songs don't play on iPods, however, and only had limited amounts of music available. But
Napster just announced that they’re abandoning the WMA PlaysForSure format and will be providing DRM-free MP3s. In fact, with over six million songs available, they’re headed towards the Number 1 spot.
Amazon's music store has about five million songs without copy protection.
Napster’s Nightmare?
So, what if you avoided the iPod trap and bought into Napster a while ago? Is your music now going to be obsolete? Absolutely not. Napster ensures that its music will be playable now and into the future — at least the near future. However, they won't upgrade the songs you’ve already purchased to MP3 files. And remember, WMA files aren't MP3s. DRM or not, some MP3 players won't play them. Ever. So, you can’t upgrade to non-DRM’ed MP3s, but they will still play… as long as players support these kinds of files. Good news, bad news.
All Eggs, No Baskets
What happens to good, honest people who’ve done the right thing? They’ve bought their music legally. Played by the rules. And now, they’re stuck with music that won’t play everywhere, or that’s so bogged down with DRM that they can’t even enjoy what they’ve purchased legitimately. The way the world is going, it seems that iPod is the way to go. It plays iTunes music, and it plays MP3s.
Going the other way, finding an MP3 player that plays AAC files (the default codec when you rip music in iTunes) is hard , and finding a non-iPod that plays protected AAC files is impossible. What a wonderful world this could be if other players started offering AAC playback. If the choke hold of DRM was removed from AAC files and other players were compatible, Apple should really start to worry. There would be no need for their music store to be the only source of good-quality downloads.
iPod for All
In the world of digital music, there's one thing for sure: America has embraced the iPod like no other product. From speaker docks to accessories to even cars, everything is iPod-ready. No matter what other companies offer, will it be enough? Why should people bother switching? Why fight the iPod future? Tell us what you think — is it even worth it?
By nathangimpel at 7:19 PM ON 05/29/08
I bought an iPod largely based on the fact that the choice of accessories makes every other player dwindle in comparison. Heck, even my car stereo has a connection made exclusively made for the iPod (try finding a Sansa-ready car stereo). The ugliness of DRM didn't hit me until I took the time to figure out how much money I've spent on music downloads. Since that moment, I've bought CD's or downloaded MP3's from Amazon, which is becoming quite the tour de force. If I ever lost my iTunes music, I would download the missing music guilt-free from bit torrent. I already used my money to support the artists, no sense letting them double dip.
By dwennon at 8:01 PM ON 05/29/08
well i have tried ipods and found the navigation and use annoying and useless especially compared to my zen nano which i actually had tried using and ipod before and couldn't even figure the damn thing out, so yes other players are better and stuff like the zen and samsung players are good since they can store extra data if you haven't filled it up yet, so that way the people your around can see that you got a music player for work and outside of work
By BuzJones at 8:10 PM ON 05/29/08
I'm stuck with iPod because of its accessories, but I hate iTunes. I've had trouble with it hosing my Vista computer in an earlier incarnation that still gives me nightmares. I use my iPod mostly for audio books on my daily commute. I rarely use it for music. I use it, but if there were a viable convenient alternative I would ditch iTunes and iPod for anything else that works as well. I also hate the iPod's tweaky controls and would prefer something more straightforward even if its less 'cool'.
By datajanus at 9:05 PM ON 05/29/08
What a whiner. Go to legalsounds.com and fill up your iPod for next to nothing.
By kShadhavar at 10:45 PM ON 05/29/08
I have no problem with my music. I ONLY use DRM free mp3 files or rip from cds I purchased. I refuse to buy DRM music files for my mp3 player and have ONLY ever used non-drm. I don't have an ipod, I'm one of the 5 people in the world that own a zune (1st gen) haha. I really love it, almost perfect. but hate micro$oft's software and store. It doesn't play well with my audibles but there are workarounds.
By InStim at 6:58 AM ON 05/30/08
Dwennon, just wanted to mention that you have been able to 'enable disk use' on iPods for quite a while. I have done this for years to have important files and utilities with me pretty much all the time since I almost always carry my iPod around with me.
By imotionsrt4 at 9:44 AM ON 05/30/08
Right on kShad. I love my huge zune and wouldn't change it for anything. Yeah the software and store definately need some work. But I don't buy enough music for it to really bother me. Apple has proven that catchy marketing can turn people into trend whores. It just seems like too much sugar for a nickle with an Ipod. I picked up my Zune around Christmas time, BRAND NEW (no refurb), 32gig, first gen, for $80. Ok so it's brown and as big as a brick, but I didn't have to pay out the A$$ for it (like an ipod), and I can put whatever I want on there. Grant it, there are TONS of products out their for ipod, and it makes me kind of jealous because of the lack of products for the Zune, but there are ways around a lot of that stuff. So my car doesn't come with a plug for an mp3 player....WAHHH!! Picked up $120 detachable face CD player with an AUX input on the front. Still less than an ipod. No DRM Drama, works fine with my computer, and it didn't cost me $400.
By imotionsrt4 at 9:54 AM ON 05/30/08
Sorry about the triple post guys. I kept getting a "page could not be displayed" error. Had no idea it was going through.
Sorry once again
By Firequake17 at 9:58 AM ON 05/30/08
I like my iPod. Its interface is usable, and I've got more storage than I know what to do with (I have a out-of-date 60gb iPod). But it worries me. I just bought a new RAZR(V3xx) from ATT, and it plays music. I converted my music from AAC to MP3, but it has iTunes coding on it and won't play properly. I'm content right now, but I'm worried that if Apple ever abandons iPods, or if the go out of business or something, I'll be stuck with tons of useless music.
By John Lockwood at 12:46 PM ON 05/30/08
DRM is stupid no argument here, but this article promotes the same anti-iTunes falsehoods as many other sites.
1. You can import CDs in to iTunes losslessly in not just one but a choice of three different formats (AIFF, WAV, and Apple Lossless - Apple Lossless can be played in Windows Media Player if you know how).
2. Just as you cannot easily move Apple FairPlay DRM protected tracks to a non-iPod player, you also cannot move Napster WMA protected tracks to a Zune or an iPod. Therefore iTunes/iPod is no better or worse than its competitors (in reality as you can burn all FairPlay protected tracks to a CD it is actually better).
3. Apple has offered an upgrade path from FairPlay protected tracks to DRM free tracks (when allowed), this differs from Napster which is not offering any upgrade path at all. How can this therefore be 'superior' to iTunes?
4. You are not forced to use AAC in iTunes for your own imported tracks an increasing number of other players including the Zune supports AAC as do most music playing mobile phones. AAC is an official independent standard unlike WMA which is a proprietary Microsoft standard. Which do you trust more?
By mjmfilms at 1:37 PM ON 05/30/08
When I first started using iTunes a few years ago, I was very disappointed to find that I didn't truly own the music I had paid for. Back then, iTunes was infuriating to me. You could not convert the AAC protected songs to any other format, and you could only burn something like 6 CD's! My solution was to just burn the songs to a CD, and burn them back onto the computer. Waste of a CD, but at least I gained ownership of my music.
Now, iTunes seems to have seen the error of their ways, and they are selling songs in a DRM-free unprotected AAC format at 256kbps. This new service is called "iTunes Plus"; any song with a plus sign next to the price has the new quality and DRM-free standards. The songs don't cost extra. This is what iTunes should have been from the beginning, and they are smart to do this, because they are losing people who would rather spend a few more dollars to own their music. By the way, AAC (.m4a) files from iTunes, while they may not be compatible with many devices apart from iPods, can easily be converted to an .mp3 in iTunes.
Companies are realizing that DRM protected music is not the way to go. All the companies are going this route. The end result? There will be almost no difference from buying a song from iTunes versus Amazon, or Napster. The only difference will be the format you buy it in (which can be changed), and the quality of the music. This is where the companies will be competing, (as well as ease of use).
iTunes is no longer putting people in a straight-jacket! Sure there may be only 2 million songs which are DRM-free, but it's a start. It's up to the other companies to convince the consumer why buying music from them is better than buying from iTunes. Apple is making their argument more difficult.
By Quiglag at 2:04 PM ON 05/30/08
Buy your mp3s from Amazon, They are DRM free, and they have a huge selection. I always go to amazon first, and iTunes second.
By mark at 2:24 PM ON 05/30/08
Why do you have to convert the CDs you ripped? They're not DRM-protected. And iTunes could've ripped them to mp3 in the first place if you set it to do so. By the way, iPod and the iTunes player were one of the first to play mp3s, and the first to support non-DRMed major label music.
And regarding those WMA-protected songs from not only Napster but MSN and the like. Isn't that a disaster? All paid for and reduced to zip, nada, nothing. At least, given iTunes market share, Apple will be supporting it and any of its DRMed-music for a long time.
Did you really do any research before writing this junk about iPod and iTunes? I could think of several real gripes about both, and you could only come up with this!
By Melangell at 8:16 PM ON 05/30/08
I was going to call the author a know-nothing idiot, but others have proven it, so...
By Denzinsprime at 7:38 AM ON 05/31/08
Actually. I would love it if I could buy episodes of Battlestar on i-Tunes again!
By Martin Hill at 10:47 AM ON 05/31/08
You don’t seem to realise it is Sony BMG, Universal and Warner who are to blame for 4 million of the 6 million tracks in the iTunes library having DRM. Steve Jobs has always contended that DRM doesn't work, from the Rolling Stones article published just before they launched the iTunes Music Store to his "Thoughts on Music" post which preceded EMI's entire music catalogue becoming available DRM free on iTunes. However, the Music cartels are in fact shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to let Apple go DRM-free as it does indeed strengthen iTunes’ position in the digital music landscape.
You have quite a beef against the AAC format don’t you, but you don’t seem to realise that AAC is in fact supported by a growing number of players and software including Microsoft Media Player, WinAmp, RealPlayer, the Microsoft Zune, Xbox media Centre, Sony MP3 Players, the latest Creative Zen models, Cowon Media Players, the Sonos system, Roku Soundbridge, the Squeezbox, Sony Playstation 3, Sony PSP, Sony Ericsson Walkman Phones, Nintendo Wii, Nokia N series phones, Blackberry, Samsung, LG and stacks of other mobile phones etc.
In addition the AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format is considerably superior to MP3 (much higher quality for a given bitrate) and is not proprietary - it is an open standard developed by Dolby, Sony, Nokia, Bell Labs and Fraunhofer and ratified by the MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) as the successor to MP3 which was the old standard (originally called MPEG 1 layer 3 Audio). Although hardware manufacturers pay a license fee for AAC support, the MP3 format requires royalty payments on distributed content, while no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
In contrast MP3 is enmeshed in litigation that has already seen Microsoft ordered by a federal jury in San Diego to pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent, for allegedly infringing on their patent technologies related to MP3 compression.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070222-8910.html
Of course in iTunes, you can convert your AAC format files to MP3 with minimal loss of quality if you have an old MP3 CD player or something, but you will lose much more quality in conversions using MP3 as the starting point.
WMA of course is a proprietary format that is solely controlled by Microsoft who has very convincingly demonstrated the dangers of going this route when they knifed their Plays-for-Sure partners in the back in introducing the totally closed and incompatible Zune system. They publicly admitted that trying to license and support a DRM format across multiple 3rd party platforms was far too unreliable and fraught with incompatibilities to be viable. Then they went and shut down MSN Music and suddenly all music purchased from that service will be lost next time their poor customers upgrade or rebuild their PCs with no option to recover it. Unbelievable.
Also, contrary to your article, if you use iTunes and your computer crashes, you won’t lose all of your purchased music as iTunes has the option to upload purchased tracks off your iPod to any other computer you authorise.
It’d be nice if you’d at least try to get a few of your facts correct.
-Mart
By Aerfen at 6:39 PM ON 05/31/08
Normally I enjoy articles here as being well written but whoever wrote this one needs to start doing some basic research before posting something like this. This is almost 100% inaccurately. The only correct piece of information in the article is that DRM is bad. Even Apple has been pushing this but it is the music industry that is demanding that the content be provided with DRM. The only reason any stores are selling it without DRM is a few labels are afraid of how well iTunes and the iTunes store works and that Apple refuses to allow them to decide that fans of X artist should pay more than fans of Y artists for work. So to undermine Apple they are allowing their competitors to do something new.
I really hope whoever is in charge of allowing this author to write and post this kind of irresponsible and inaccurate kind of article brings a heavy hand down on poor journalistic flare and really lack luster accuracy. This is so inaccurate that I would be surprised if someone from Apple's legal department does not mention it.
By Existentist at 6:27 PM ON 06/01/08
This article has such an anti-iTunes and anti-iPod slant that the author appears to be little more than a bought-and-paid-for hack.
The music labels are trying to break Apple's hold on online music purchases. Phase 1 is to lock Apple into selling DRM tracks while allowing Amazo(and others) to sell DRM free tracks.
Their hope is that people will stop buying music from iTunes so that they can tell Apple what to charge and how to do business. If that day ever comes, you can be 100% certain that they'll raise prices (and use DRM) at all of these other shops.
Non-Apple mp3 player manufacturers hope to reduce Apple's market share in that area with shrill marketing "articles" like this one.
By USBibble at 3:51 PM ON 06/02/08
ive got an ipod but i left itunes along time ago in favor of te open source firmware replacement rockbox. its free, and easy to use. you can add/remove fles on the ipod via itunes or if preffered just like the ipod was a removable flash drive, drag and drop, yet they can still be played on the player without using itunes' jankey filenameing system that makes it impossible to read the song names without itunes (or winamp/songbird/ephpod/some other specifically ipod oriented software)
its easier to use in my opinion and has several features (like song que-ing) that makes listening to music oh so much easier. on top of that it has a few extra codecs, and a full gameboy advanced emulater.
By cyberlupus at 7:50 AM ON 06/04/08
the ipod is over rated i have a zune and a zenV plus had a ipod and it sucks every body is ipod googoo and there are much better players out there then apple COME ON DVICE open your eyes and LOOK
By ssracer at 8:51 AM ON 06/04/08
I have an iPod and download through iTunes. I have iTunes set to rip CD's as MP3 (easily changeable in the settings) and to burn music CD's with track information. After downloading several songs, I burn them to a music CD, then rip them back as MP3's. It's a bit of work, but I can then use them on any device I want or to make an MP3 CD for the car, and since I checked the include track information, I don't lose any of my tags.
By FatherYang at 10:49 AM ON 06/04/08
It is all corporate driven propaganda as far as I am concerned. DVICE and the Sci-Fi Channel are owned by NBC/Universal. Universal has had a beef with Apple for years over pricing and other issues. If the folks at DVICE are not bashing the Mac, they are complaining about iTunes or over-hyping an iPod competitor as a much "better" music player. Is it surprising that posts like this continually come out of this blog?
By Rhino8989 at 10:57 AM ON 06/04/08
Hey, if you're all so worried about whether or not to continue to use iTunes or any other music downloading program/company, you guys should check out cnet.com. They have a ton of different music file converters for a price or for free. I personally use this one:
http://www.download.com/Free-Mp3-Wma-Converter/3000-2140_4-10442362.html?cdlPid=10814674
This converter comes with a free cd ripper and a 30-day trial of an audio cutter program that'll cost you $25 after the trial. This pack is perfect for me because I can download anyone's music files no matter what the format and be able to make my own ringtones for my cell phone. Try it out.
By lazerer at 5:17 AM ON 06/08/08
I hate the DRM,it puts restrictions on the music that you bought from the internet. Especially with the iTunes and Napster songs. That annoys me the most.
And here is what I'm using to crack the disgusting DRM
http://www.wmatomp3-converter.com/digital-music-converter.html
By 1swtwld at 9:56 AM ON 06/15/08
sink a grand into a Sonos home sound system and you'll quickly see why Apple's DRM sux.
By Gardengirl at 2:57 PM ON 12/30/08
I purchased and Ipod Touch because I liked the interface... love it actually but we also have a Zen and two Zunes in the house. This makes music a huge pain around here. The Zen can use Itunes but not anything we have converted to use on the ipod... The zune uses just the zune software. Uggg. It is such a pain to figure out itunes if you have gotten a new computer and want to transfer your library of 7000 songs over ....