Yes folks, given the release of iTunes 9 today, our sibling site PreCentral.net rushed out to check and surehawtdang, Palm Pre sync is deader than dead dead… again!
Will Palm, also again, pick up this latest, brick filled gauntlet from Apple and re-enable Pre Sync, maybe on the molecular level this time?
Sigh. We hope they don’t. Their resources are better spent, you know, making the Pre and Pixi even more spectacular. But given the odd father/son issues between Jobso and Ruby — and for the sake of fun internet soap opera everywhere — they probably will.
The visual experience of the record album returns with iTunes LP. Get a gorgeous, immersive version of select albums — right in your iTunes library. So while you listen to your favorite songs by your favorite artists, you can also five into beautiful animated lyrics and notes, performance videos, artists and band photos and more.
Techcrunch thinks the move of iTunes to the clouds is inevitable. Back in February there were rumors of something called iTunes Replay, that would allow users to store their media purchases — which can easily grow to 10s if not 100s of GBs fairly quickly — on Apple’s servers and then stream them down to iTunes, Apple TV, or their iPhone or iPod touch on-demand.
Nothing came of it at the time. Since then, however, Apple has begun building a world-class data center in North Carolina, and baked a new HTTP streaming media feature into both the iPhone/iPod and the Mac.
With cost of hard drive storage still falling, and 2TB soon being realistic capacities for standard home media centers, do we — or Apple — really need to think about the “cloud” so much?
We do if we use iPhones, iPod touches, laptops… or upcoming iTablet and like-devices dependent on smaller, still more-expensive solid state storage. Sure local copies for backup are nigh impossible for old curmudgeons like myself to even consider giving up, but syncing, deleting, and otherwise managing content can be a pain in our old curmudgeonly nethers as well.
There’s one key area, however, it doesn’t address — bandwidth caps. Sure, they’re not an issue for most people in the US, but they are in countries where internet service is both more expensive, slower, and far more tightly capped. (Like where I am, in the distant realm of Canada.)
And even in the US, if cable and DSL companies start losing TV subscribers to iTunes, those prices and lack of caps might just change as well.
Of course, letting us sync and manage our content over WiFi could and should be an alternative. iTunes and Apple TV can already sync over WiFi, and the iPhone can download movies from the iTunes Store over WiFi. Why can’t the iPhone browse our PC’s iTunes library and transfer media over via WiFi?
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. That’s the future. Maybe. This is now. Do you want your iTunes in the cloud?
Every year Apple has a special music event, and every year Beatles rumors follow along with it. This time, the event date of 9/9/9, the release of Beatles Remastered on CD and Beatles Rock Band has the rumors running faster than ever. Will iTunes join the fray, or will Big Music try to make their money on physical media and games before allowing digital downloads?
Current is adding fuel to the fire, however, with a purported screenshot of the Beatles being featured on iTunes — a slip of the old server, so to speak.
But is it real, or just really fake? iTunes ads are easier to whip up on photoshop than lolcats, after all.
As the typical timeframe for Apple’s annual Music Event — focused on iTunes and the iPod — draws close, rumors have once again turned to… the Beatles. Perhaps because no other band seems both as close to Apple founder Steve Jobs’ persona, and yet is still utterly missing from the digital download space.
This year, however, the Beatles do show up on Rock Band, and are releasing newly, digitally, remastered CDs, so will we finally get a Beatles on iTunes announcement this year to cap things off?
Ugh. Who knows? Why even bother to speculate any more, to track possible yellow iPod colors, to monitor McCartney’s California travel plans, to play last year’s Let’s Rock keynote backwards for clues. It’ll happen when it happens.
UPDATE: MacRumors is saying they have good reason to believe these images are, indeed, fake…
Boy Genius received some more screen shots of what’s alleged to be iTunes 9, showing a Samsung YH-J70JL Black — of all things — purportedly syncing with the front end of Apple’s media management empire. PreCentral.net jumped on this to ponder out-loud if Apple was having a change of heart regarding locking out Palm’s previous attempts to spoof an iPod ID and sync with iTunes on the down-low, and will now allow non-Apple devices access. TiPb, however, can see this playing out in only 3 ways:
The screen shots, or that specific feature at least, isn’t real
The ‘verse gets rebooted, Star Trek-style, and Steve Jobs ain’t in it.
Jobs is going nu-cu-lar and will allow every device except the Palm Pre to sync with iTunes.
According to NPD, Apple’s iTunes now sells 25% of all music in the US. That’s up from 21% last year, and 14% the year before. Zoom. Zoom. Walmart, by contrast, is at 14% combining their real-world stores and online distribution.
In the strictly digital domain — which continues to gain share — iTunes accounts for 69% of downloadable music, with Amazon trailing at 8%.
Those numbers, in case they don’t smack anyone immediately in the face, are HUGE. Despite the jump to $1.29 for – quote unquote – premium music, the shift to DRM-free, combined with on-device downloads for the iPhone and iPod touch, might just be enough to keep the juggernaut rolling. Next up, we’ll see how Digital-45s and “cocktail” do for them…
Looks like Wednesday, September 9 might just be this year’s date for Apple’s annual iPod and iTunes event, where it’s widely expected we’ll see the third generation iPod touch (with video camera?), iTunes 9 (with Blu-Ray and “social” integration?), as well as other refreshes to Apple’s music-themed lineup.
Now, TiPb thought it would be September 8, because Apple almost always drops product on Tuesdays, like last year’s Let’s Rock event (and it still might this year, the above is only a rumor from a source), but we’re not going to read anything into it if it is a Wednesday this time around either.
All Things Digital also says, however, there’s one big ticked item we won’t be seeing:
The event will be held in San Francisco–most likely at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where it has occurred in years past–and is expected to showcase upgrades to the iPod line and an update to iTunes that may involve some sort of social element. Our sources insist it will not involve any discussion whatsoever of the tablet Apple is reportedly developing.
Still remaining, however, is the other great unknown — will Steve Jobs take the stage once again, or leave things to the Tim Cook/Phil Schiller/Greg Jozwiak team that filled in during his leave of absence earlier in the year?
BGR reports a source saying Apple is readying iTunes 9, which will include support for visually organizing apps on the iPhone, and for playing back Blu-Ray media.
iPhone 1.1.3 introduced the ability to add icons (limited to WebClips at the time, expanded to native apps with iPhone 2.0), and to move them around by tapping and holding until they began to jiggle. While this works well enough for a few icons once and a while, it makes totally re-arranging the 11 home screens made available in iPhone 3.0 a tad laborious. Suggestions for, even concept videos of, adding a more robust solution via iTunes have been floating around the web for a while now and would be a welcome addition indeed.
Steve Jobs had famously called Blu-Ray a “bag of hurt” due to licensing, but changes in those licenses and perhaps Apple’s priorities — which previously seemed to want to promote their own download service over physical media — could make it happen. Unless there’s more expansive and integrated support for the “digital copy” feature as well — where an iPhone/iPod version of the movie is included on the disk — it’s not really an iPhone friendly addition.
Also rumored were some kind of Twitter/Facebook/Last.fm social features.
