All Articles Tagged iTunes

I love the fact that Apple gives us their events on iTunes! Believe it or not, I still watch the MacWorld 2007 video. I enjoying watching the part where Steve says:

An iPod, Phone and an Internet communicator. iPod, Phone, and an Internet communicator. Are you getting it? These aren’t three separate devices…

hmmm, perhaps I have watched that one too many times.

I do wonder why it is a Podcast though and not a “movie”. I say this because the Podcasts do not refresh… we just get a new one every time.

You can find the link here to the Apple store for download, enjoy.

iLounge brings word that, according to their sources (all familiar with the situation and plans, of course), the upcoming SDK will sport the following “features”:

• Locked down via iTunes. All apps will be distributed exclusively via Apple’s iTunes store in a manner similar to today’s iPod games.
• Approved by Apple. Apple (no doubt via a single Steve Jobs thumbs up or down) will elevate any given app to the heavens of iTunes, or drop them to the lions of perpetual delay or refusal. No unapproved apps will be released or releasable.
• No docks for you. 3rd party apps will not be able to call on the connector, removing hardware keyboards and other dock-dependent offerings from the table.
• Radio/camera open. BT is unknown, but 3rd party devs should be able to access most if not all core features of OS X mobile, including Wi-Fi, phone, etc.

Also, the same sources agree with previous ‘net chatter that the March Event will only see a beta release of the SDK, not the full fledged version, along with increased enterprise support.

Your iPhone does a better job displaying album and and sorting through all your music than any other device on the planet, past and present. However all that sweet, sweet music on that sweet, sweet interface doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know what exactly it is you’re looking for. We’ve all had it happen: a friend makes us a mix CD and iTunes can’t figure out what’s what. Which “Track 2″ was that again? Hassle.

iTunes can auto-grab album art, but it can’t do it unless it knows which album to grab. Enter in some automated solutions for tagging your music with the proper song, artist, and album names. These little add-ons “listen” to tiny bits of each song and compare them to the MusicBrainz database, then are able to identify the song. Instead of manually punching in everything yourself, you can just have these little programs do all that tiresome work for you.

On the Mac, you’ll want to check out iEatBrainz [via TUAW], which was just re-released today in a Universal form. On the PC side of the world, my favorite app is still Picard.

Get iTunes Cleaning!

Jobs notes how everybody has tried and failed to get movies off the internet onto a widescreen TV. He admits that Apple TV was a miss as well, that people really want Movies, not an accessory for your computer.

“Apple TV Take 2: No Computer Required.”

• You can rent movies directly on Apple TV.
• Movies will be available in DVD and HD quality!
• Audio and Video podcasts
• Grab photos from Flickr and .Mac
• An entirely new user interface

The HD movies are a dollar more to rent.

The new interface on Apple TV is really slick – the shopping experience of looking for movies, music, and TV shows on your television seems very intuitive and fun. You can also browse and download any podcast in the iTunes podcast directory. Browsing photos is easy too – despite the fact that Flickr refused to serve up photos for Steve.

It’s a free software upgrade! …..AND they’re droped the price to $229. It will all be available in 2 weeks.

Jm Gianopulos, Chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, has announced that going forward, their DVDs will come with a “digital copy” that you can use in iTunes or on your iPhone.

They’ve sold 4 Billion songs, 125 million TV shows, and 7 million movies. However, that 7 million mark is lower than they’d prefer. So today, Jobs has announced iTunes Movies Rentals.

On board – every major movie studio! Steve presented them with a “and by the way.” They will launch with 1000 films by the end of February. They will be on iTunes 30 days after their DVD release. You can watch on iPhone.

You can also start watching within 30 seconds of downloading. You have 30 days to begin watching, then once it starts you have 24 hours to watch it. You can also transfer even as you’re watching.

Older titles will be $2.99, new releases are 3.99. It launches today and free software updates are available for all compatible devices (iTunes, iPods, and iPhones)!

Movie rentals will also be available in HD quality for $1.00 more (That’s $3.99 for DVD quality and $4.99 for HD quality). You can also shop for these movies directly from your television with Apple TV 2.

A savvy forum user over at MacRumors found some interesting new dialog box messages inside the new version of iTunes. These are probably the highlights:

"4320.082" = "The iPhone “^1” contains new voice memos. Would you like to move these voice memos to your iTunes library?";

"4320.073" = "Enabling the iPhone for disk use requires manually ejecting the iPhone before each disconnect, even when automatically syncing music.";

We’ve reported on the kinds of things that one finds inside of “localizable.strings” inside of new versions of iTunes before. To date, they haven’t predicted any new functionality. And yet, rumors of new features coming to the iPhone based on these strings persist. I want to believe too.

We mentioned the release of iTunes and Quicktime in our podcast yesterday, but haven’t provided any release notes. There’s not a lot in terms of content for anyone deciding to update or not. Ambrosia reports that iToner still works — though the initial update will wipe out iToner ringtones, you can easily sync them over. The iTunes doesn’t touch a user’s library file, so there shouldn’t be any risk of anything. The QuickTime update includes improvements for converting video for the iPhone. Are you excited about this? Yah, me neither.

The fourth annual iLounge 2008 Buyers Guide works for the iPhone and iPod, and is viewable online for smaller screens like the iPhone, iPod Touch, or laptops. If you prefer, for desktop viewing.

Verizon is lowering their data rates for feature phones in preparation for competition with the iPhone. Expect a snarky comment from Dieter on this one. Unfortunately, their smartphone data rates are still sky-high. And, you can add a Canadian roaming plan for just $20. The Phone they’re thinking about using to “compete” with the iPhone is the Samsung F700, though they might re-brand it as the U940. That’s some “brilliant marketing.” I don’t usually report on “iPhone killers,” but I’m glad to see the iPhone forcing prices down for everybody.

Rumors from AppleInsider indicate that iTunes 7.5 will be coming out in the next couple of weeks. This probably means that any iPhone updates with post-Leopard goodness require an iTunes update. This iTunes update will also bring support for the UK, German, and likely French iPhones. Oh, and it will include better duplicate song management. w00t!

Mark/Space, makers of many popular “Missing Sync” smartphone sync softwares, have announced their intent to release “Missing Sync for the iPhone” later this year. Their software will include Notes.app syncing, SMS backups, better call log management, and a migration tool to copy data from a BlackBerry, Palm OS, or Windows Mobile smartphone.

While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

Most, but not yet all, iTunes Plus songs are now 99¢. Steve Jobs confirmed at the Wall Street Journal that the price drop was now in effect. I don’t know yet if you can upgrade normal iTunes purchases to iTunes plus for free or whether you have to pay a slight fee to upgrade or if you have to re-purchase for the higher fidelity; free would be the bee’s knees. I’m pleased to report that iTunes appears to be heading in a DRM-free direction. I think the arrival of Amazon’s MP3 service is pushing the labels progressively forward. They can’t give Amazon something and not give it to Apple; that would be a lot like the illegal collusion they’ve been accused of in the past.