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.