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[jay-ell]

Dude.  Totally.  

[CortJstr]

Eh, I'll stick with EMusic for now.

I'm too lazy to look, are the iTunes mp3's VBR with and average bitrate of 192? Because if not that's just sad for 99 cents.

Now if they went to Ogg Vorbis I would be all about that shit. I'm surprised they haven't, what with it being free and all.

[jough]

Wow, $1 per song.  That's more than a cd costs.  

I'll stick with gnutella, thanks.

[jay-ell]

I don't know all the techie stuff about it.  I've used it on Pedro's laptop (an Apple) and loved it.  I don't buy a hell of a lot of music and prefer to buy by the song rather than a whole album.  And it's super-easy to burn mix CDs.  I know it reads mp3s and can export/burn in .cda or in .mp3.  

Maybe Pedro can fill in the gaps?

[Choop]

SO DOWNLOADING RIGHT NOW


okay, not right now, but in a few minutes, like.

[jough]

I can't believe how GOD DAMNED STUPID you kids are ALL THE fuck*ng TIME!

Let's see, pros and cons, let's take a look at two competing markets:

Gnutella/Kazaa/File Sharing, etc.

Pros:

Free
MP3s can be played, copied, or burned anywhere as many times as you want.
No limit to the number of songs, from any studio.

Cons:

Highly illegal - possibly immoral.
Quality can differ greatly from track to track.
Often have to hunt around for things - could take days/weeks to get an entire album if something's obscure.

iTunes

Pros:

Can download decent (but not great) quality music 24/7.
Reliable catalog - everything they offer is available at any given time.
Legal.

Cons:

Can only play songs in a special player.
iTunes controls how many times you can play, copy, burn a song.
Quality isn't so great - but it's consistently not so great, at least.
Ridiculously overpriced for an intangible.
Privacy Issues - iTunes can keep track of what you listen to.
Limited availability of songs/shallow library of obscure or "indie" music, which means they tend to push the mainstream.

Gee.  Let's not all start sucking each others' dicks quite yet.  Is iTunes really that exciting?

[V-Adore]

I actually had a long, frustrating conversation with a housemate who was... how do I put this delicately... verbally pleasuring himself about the iTunes Windows release and about how we could buy a whole CD's worth of songs for 10 bucks. Two of us at the table, poor little Luddites that we are, pointed out that that isn't that much cheaper than an off-the-rack CD, and CDs give you things like liner notes, lyrics, and other pleasant tangibles. It was about the time that he claimed that the lack of portability of the MP3 was counterbalanced "because you can load it in your iPod!" or get a special car stereo that can play them that I realized his original "it's so much cheaper" point was more or less dead.

So... honestly, I'm not all that sure I groove on iTunes ATM. Winamp works fine for my admittedly-modest playing needs, and a buck a song is just too damn much, IMHO.

[AugustWest]

I can't believe how GOD DAMNED STUPID you kids are ALL THE fuck*ng TIME!

Let's see, pros and cons, let's take a look at two competing markets:

Gnutella/Kazaa/File Sharing, etc.

Pros:

Free
MP3s can be played, copied, or burned anywhere as many times as you want.
No limit to the number of songs, from any studio.

Cons:

Highly illegal - possibly immoral.
Quality can differ greatly from track to track.
Often have to hunt around for things - could take days/weeks to get an entire album if something's obscure.

iTunes

Pros:

Can download decent (but not great) quality music 24/7.
Reliable catalog - everything they offer is available at any given time.
Legal.

Cons:

Can only play songs in a special player.
iTunes controls how many times you can play, copy, burn a song.
Quality isn't so great - but it's consistently not so great, at least.
Ridiculously overpriced for an intangible.
Privacy Issues - iTunes can keep track of what you listen to.
Limited availability of songs/shallow library of obscure or "indie" music, which means they tend to push the mainstream.

Gee.  Let's not all start sucking each others' dicks quite yet.  Is iTunes really that exciting?

Hmmm, let me compare my music medium of choice:

8-tracks:

PROS:
Makes nifty "CLUNK" when you shove it into the player.

Makes nifty "CLUNK" when it switches between tracks.

Some songs split in two between tracks, allowing one time to savor the "CLUNK" and provide a useful bit of silent time for contemplating the musical significance of the song.

Lack of "Fast Forward" or "Rewind" control teaches one patience, exposes one to entire album.

Obsolence means available music choices not muddled by bands later than "Grand Funk Railroad".

Fit nicely into milk crates.

CONS:

None.



There.  I think the choice is clear.  Can we start sucking each others dicks now?

[slink]

CONS:

None.

Other cons: Terrible quality - all the time!

But anyway...

V has a point. ITunes isn't much cheaper than CDs. And especially with certain record companies having recently made the decision to drop all their CDs to realistic prices.
Companies like Interscope have said they plan to get all their releases down to about $10 at most, usually ranging from $8-10. And the record shops won't make less money out of it. So who's losing out? The record companies who have been shafting us for however long.
Who's winning? Us for cheaper CDs, and them since we will probably all buy more!

ITunes does have the odd benefit over free, illegal downloads. One, it appears that you can burn CDs of the downloads. This may mean you don't need an Ipod, but I'm not sure. Just what it looks like.
The other is that there are a lot of things available there that I can never find on Kazaa/BitTorrent/Emule.
So, I may download it and see what it's like. See if I can buy the couple of things I want but can't be bothered getting on CD for more, (mainly not music I might add, i.e. one track on a whole cd, thus more expensive) or simply cannot find.
Until I get broadband however I am resigned to simply copying things, getting my mate to download them, or buying them.
When I sort sat.broadband - the free mp3 days will begin again!

[jay-ell]

I don't have an iPod.  I burn my own CDs and play them in the car, or listen to the music straight from my machine.  You can burn individual songs as many times as you like, but you can only burn the same playlist 10 times without changing it.  (So basically you can't make copies of the same CD for everybody you know.)  

Also, I don't spend much money on their online music store.  I'm currently ripping my hard CD collection into .mp4s.  For me, the point of iTunes is to have a really beautifully simple program that I can use to back up my existing CD collection and make my own mix CDs.  I've spent all of $17 on iTunes and in exchange gotten 17 very cool pieces of music and absolutely no "filler."  That's a rare find in the offline world.  And it's very, very easy to find exactly what I want, and I don't ever have to worry about inadvertently downloading spyware or a virus or a corrupt file.  To me, that's worth it.  

Also, I've found the sound quality of my purchased music to be as good or better than the tracks ripped from the physical CDs I've bought.  When I burn it onto a CD, I can't tell by the sound which tunes I purchased electronically and which ones I ripped from hard CDs.  And ripping the CDs is fast.  I've ripped four full-length CDs in the time it's taken me to type this message, and I don't have to type in song titles or artists, either.  iTunes does all that automatically.  

So basically my point here is that Jough is full of shit.  Don't knock something you haven't tried.  You don't have to like iTunes, or even try it, but don't make yourself look like a dickhead by railing against it when you obviously don't know the first thing about it.

[V-Adore]

Okay, let's make an agreement.

1) iTunes is great for some people. Those who really enjoy it have the right to enjoy it. But at the same time...
2) Those who don't feel like using iTunes have the right not to.

There, friends?

[jough]

Hey, if you want to disagree with my points, that's fine.  I think I was pretty fair with my pros and cons, and your 8-track list of "pros" would be... I'll be nice and call it "unrealistic" for most consumer's needs.

I would probably be more on-board with iTunes and their competitors (BuyMusic, etc.) if it weren't for two MAJOR problems with their service:

1. Content Management (i.e. they control how many times and WHERE you can listen to your music).

2. Quality.  Their 128Kb VBR is 1/11th the quality of a CD.

And just a note on price, since others mentioned it - most CDs have more than 10 tracks.  Used CDs cost $6.99 at my local shop.  New releases are $11.99, and catalog titles are around $10.  So CDs are CHEAPER than iTunes, 11 times greater quality of sound, and you have a tangible CD that you can play anywhere.

JLD's additional pros for the iTunes - being able to make CDs from MP3s and being able to rip CDs into MP3s is the same for both iTunes and File Sharing systems.  I rip CDs all the time, and burn CDs from MP3s about every other day.

But I'm not limited to burning only ten of one CD, and I don't have to ask permission to listen to music I purchased or acquired by other means.

The only major plus iTunes has going for it over File Sharing systems is convenience, since you don't have to hunt around for someone offering a song - it's always available.  And of course there's that pesky legal issue.

But right now iTunes offers ZERO advantages over purchasing a CD if you want to listen to the entire album, other than near-instant (depending on your internet connection) accessibility.

I find your emotional responses to my pros and cons list to be amusing, but if you want to discuss this, try to explain why something that I list as a pro or a con really aren't.  

If you want a really easy and quick programme to rip CDs to mp3 (or any other format - it supports pretty much every encoder on the market) I recommend http://cdngo.com.

It's FREE (not $17.00) and won't limit your playback.  And you can encode in any quality you'd like (i.e. high bitrates).  It will look up the track names on CDDB just like iTunes does (and pretty much every other player/ripper on the market), and has a Burn N Go component that lets you do the inverse - make audio CDs from MP3s.  You can even make 11 copies if you'd like.

So, bottom line, what's there to be excited about?  iTunes offers nothing new except lesser quality, higher prices, and less freedom.

That anyone has fallen for it doesn't surprise me, but that so many think it's a good idea just goes to show that Apple's marketing department should get a raise.

[CortJstr]

Again, this is why I stick to EMusic. It's mainly indie stuff I wouldn't have known to buy on CD anyway and it's regular VBR mp3's with no restrictions at all*

I'm too scared to use file sharing at this point since I have 3,700 mp3's taking up 16GB. The RIAA is shitting their ##### over people sharing half that and it's getting harder and harder to hide your files and just leach.

*okay ONE restriction. They regularly scan file sharing programs for their
own files and cancel the accounts of anybody they can identify

[Choop]

Look, I'm not going to defend everybody here, but what I have to say is this:

I'm not going to spend five bucks on a CD single I catch on the radio, especially if I enjoy the song and have no interest in the album (see: Hole, Dwight Yoakam, and 50 Cent); these are why I File Share. However, I hate the legality issue and am glad someone has come up with a way for me to download files legally- and not throught IE and IE only*- and is a company I respected already. I buy albums. I enjoy good albums. I also enjoy the occasional single, after -gasp!- hearing on the radio, yet have no interest in the full album. If I don't care to hear the rest of the bullshit burned to disc, I also don't care about the liner notes, nor a studio-approved tangible copy. I'll burn it and a whole slew of others as .mp3s, then listen to them all on my oh-so-high-tech .mp3 CD player.

Oh, and once it's converted to .mp3 format? There's no DRM. Yeah. So that business about controlling how much and where you listen to it? Yeah, it's doesn't really actually in fact apply.


didn't you hear? buymusic.com kicks non-IE surfers, and I use Firebird primarily

[AugustWest]

Hey!  Just thought of another PRO for 8-tracks!

In case of physical threat, plastic 8-track case can be shattered into handy shards which may be used as a weapon.  Inch wide tape may be formed into makeshift garotte.  Or, pull several feet of tape from 8-track, swing it repeatedly around head and use a bolo.  Or just swing it around and smack somebody upside the head with it.

Let's see you do that with a bunch of insubstanial 1's and 0's.

Hell, even a 45 is useful in this area.  You could decapitate someone with a thrown 45 much like the butler "Oddjob" in the James Bond film "Goldfinger".

Note:  by 45 I mean "45 rpm record, not 45 caliber firearm.  While a 45 caliber firearm's destructive capabilities are patent, their music reproductions qualities are "teh suk" (of course, 45 caliber firearms are excellent at producing a single loud banging note.  However, this is not of much utility in the music reproduction area unless one is listening to certain pieces by John Cage or Phil Spector)