yesterday marked the first year of apple’s itunes music store and besides the usual number games, itunes was also updated to version 4.5.
h6. first the number games
in 12 months, itms sold more than 70 million songs – that’s 2.7 million songs a week. however, this is 30% short of steve job’s estimate when itms was launched. but its still sufficient to be at the top of the list of other legal music download services.
there is also 700,000 songs from 5 major music companies and more than 450 independent music labels with still more songs being added weekly.
but after a year’s waiting, there is still no sign of itms expanding outside the borders of the usa.
h6. itunes 4.5 & itms updates
this birthday also saw the launch of itunes 4.5 and also upgrades to the itms.
itunes 4.5 has a number of new features which may or may not be useful.
bq(rightblk).. songs i’ve gotten free
* Crea U Lied
* Nelly Furtado’s Try ( no longer free )
* Renée Fleming’s La Wally, Drama Lirica in Quattro Atti: Ebben? Ne Andrò Lontana ( no longer free )
* Counting Crows’ Accidentally In Love ( no longer free )
* Jane’s Addiction’s Price I Pay ( no longer free )
* Annie Lennox’s Pavement Cracks ( no longer free )
* Courtney Love’s Hold On To Me ( no longer free )
* Avril Lavigne’s Take Me Away ( no longer free )
* Foo Fighter’s My Hero ( no longer free )
p. imix allows you to publish your favourite playlists onto itms or sending it to your friends. to me, that’s a rather subtle marketing tool to get your friends to buy songs that you have bought. recommended customers tend to make the purchase.
party shuffle automatically generates a playlists chosen from your whole library or selected playlist. it dynamically updates a list of songs, allowing you to shift the order and also adds a new song if another was deleted from the list. however, what criteria used for selecting the song is a mystery. might as well use smart playlist to have more control?
print cd inserts makes it easy to print the playlist with album covers forming a montage – ie. if you have them embedded in your mp3s. if you buy from itms then the album cover will be already in there. but if you ripped your own tunes, adding the cover will be a hassle and also adds to your file size. there is also limited control over how the insert should be printed. itunes will be even more kick-ass if a build-in editor is provided allowing drag/drop album covers and freedom in layout. but well, good start anyway.
itunes also now allow importing of wma format to be converted to AAC format, although only the unprotected wma files are accepted. there is also a new apple lossless encoder which achieve sound quality indistinguishable from the original, at about half the original file size – in this case aiff format. so the filesize will still be around 20plus mb per average length song.
the rest of the new features can be found in the music store. you can now check out radio charts of major stations in the usa, which is much useless as i don’t know any usa station to know which chart is good to follow.
a good feature is the ability to watch music videos and also movie trailers straight from your itunes via the music store.
the itunes, with quicktime, is slowly becoming an all-round entertainment unit. now we can watch music videos and movie trailers, what’s stopping us from watching live tv via quicktime streaming? lots of possibility if i dare say!
last but not least, since a birthday won’t come without birthday gifts. but the gifts for us users…or at least those that can get stuff from itms. apple is giving free tunes for the next week, with the first being foo fighter’s my hero and today its avril lavigne’s single take me away to come. so catch them while they are there!
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