iLounge

1

Are those Tic Tacs 100 Per Box available in the US?  I like my Altoids case for the Shuffle because I can carry my headphones around with it, but the Tic Tacs case could be great for when I was actually listening to the Shuffle.

I’ve never seen the bigger box of Tic Tacs before.

Posted by Third on June 10, 2005 at 12:21 PM (PDT)

2

Couldn’t Apple counter that with a threat to drop any label that allows that trade to Microsoft?  It might be an empty threat, but given how little market share .wma music stores and .wma players have, it could be enough for the labels to drop the idea.

Posted by Gatsby003 in New York on June 10, 2005 at 12:45 PM (PDT)

3

Interesting iTunes video stuff…

Posted by ipodman715 on June 10, 2005 at 1:04 PM (PDT)

4

Anyone who falls for this must be pretty dumb. Don’t they know that they can just burn a cd from iTunes purchased songs and RE-rip them into ANY FORMAT THEY WANT??

Posted by ahMEmon in Canada on June 10, 2005 at 1:19 PM (PDT)

5

“Don’t they know that they can just burn a cd from iTunes purchased songs and RE-rip them into ANY FORMAT THEY WANT??”

Anyone who gives a crap about quality already knows how stupid that is to do.

You’re trying to upconvert heavily compressed audio that reconvert it down to a smaller file.  End result: Crap sound.

Posted by stark23x on June 10, 2005 at 8:50 PM (PDT)

6

““Don’t they know that they can just burn a cd from iTunes purchased songs and RE-rip them into ANY FORMAT THEY WANT??â€?

Anyone who gives a crap about quality already knows how stupid that is to do.

You’re trying to upconvert heavily compressed audio that reconvert it down to a smaller file.  End result: Crap sound.”
—————————————————————
Not true. Assuming the original file is of top quality doing this conversion ONE time will not result in any noticable loss of quality. I did about 200 songs like this and maybe 5 suffered noticably but most made the transition just fine. Now,if you do this and then say do it again (ex:aac->cd->mp3->cd->wma) sure,then you’d start to ruin the file to the point it wouldn’t be worthwhile. But once? Not really.

Posted by CanofAir on June 11, 2005 at 1:30 AM (PDT)

7

Unfortunately, iTunes Music Store doesn’t encode in top quality, they encode 128 kbps.

Posted by coreywhompus on June 11, 2005 at 9:32 AM (PDT)

8

Any music service that is going to take share away from iTunes is going to have to:

a) At least match if not exceed iTMS features, usability, price, and especially the uniform and liberal usage rights.

b) Provide music that will play on the huge and ever-growing installed base of iPods.

I just don’t see Microsoft’s service meeting point a), and Apple will very likely never make part b) a reality.

I’ll never say never, but I really think Microsoft missed the boat on digital music.

Posted by ct77 on June 11, 2005 at 12:58 PM (PDT)

9

^I kind of agree with you. But I think that at this point, it’s still too early to tell.

Posted by dino in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada on June 12, 2005 at 3:24 PM (PDT)

10

As for converting songs thing,

It seems more like they’re saying that Microsoft will provide NEW versions of the songs people have purchased.  Sounds more like they’ll give you all the songs you’ve bought as wma files, rather then stripping and converting what you have.

At any rate, jHymn is your friend.  Much faster to simply strip the DRM and convert the song at the same time rather then burning it to a CD and importing it back into iTunes.

Posted by LilAlienD in Maryland on June 13, 2005 at 5:57 AM (PDT)