Over at SiliconBeat, the San Jose Mercury News tech business weblog, Matt Marshall writes:
Apple’s technology makes it really difficult to play music on its iPod if it comes from sources other than its iTunes online store.
This is lazy and bad reporting. I have thousands of tracks in my iTunes library, of which perhaps 10 came from the Apple music store. The rest are MP3s that I ripped from CDs, or obtained elsewhere (mostly legitimately — I won’t apologize for that bootleg of Coldplay doing the Hank Williams classic “Lost Highway” at a concert).
So Apple in fact does support the formats that nearly everybody prefers — open formats. They don’t support other proprietary, “protected” formats. It’s an important difference. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that the dominant music player doesn’t support a myriad of crappy DRM formats is wonderful. Now we just need to get them to get rid of their own crappy DRM.
May 24, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Heh, speaking of “open” formats, I still know people who are holding out on buying an iPod because it doesn’t support ogg yet…
May 24, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Ah, thanks Pat, now I remember why I bought a Samsung Yepp instead of an iPod 🙂
May 24, 2006 at 1:54 pm
I’ve never used Ogg myself. MP3 is good enough for me.
May 24, 2006 at 9:50 pm
I too have never messed with Ogg Vorbis; no point in re-ripping all that music.
BTW, I’ve recently signed up for eMusic, which has a lot of great music, a decent price ($10 a month for 40 songs), decent bitrates (160 MBps VBR or better) and — the best thing — no DRM.
June 2, 2006 at 1:18 am
Ogg sounds better. And it’s open. Unlike mp3.