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April 30, 2004
iTunes and QuickTime Updates
Apple has released updates to iTunes and QuickTime. The new iTunes is certainly a great move from Apple to integrate more seamlessly their iTunes Music Store into the iTunes "personal music library" model. In many ways this new iTunes update demonstrates Apple's philosophy of information architecture (and marketing); as Bono from U2 said in a promo for the iTunes music store, you don't need a PhD in button-pushing to use it. Anyway, some features of iTunes worth noting:
Tighter integration of your personal music library and the music store
Well, this certainly makes sense to Apple. Now you'll notice a little right-pointing arrow next to your music categories. Selecting this area will take you to related music in the iTunes music store. Now this is certainly a commercial plug, but from another perspective, it can work as a great discovery tool.
WMA conversion
Now you can convert (unprotected) WMA files to iTunes' MPEG 4 Audio (AAC)
Previews in playlists
This is a great feature. Before this I used to store unpurchased music in the iTunes shopping cart, using it as a "wishlist" of songs. Unfortunately, you weren't able to tell iTunes that you only wanted to purchase only one song in your cart. Now, if you find a song you think you might want to buy, drag it to a playlist. This playlist could then work like Amazon's wishlist, which brings us to iMix
Sharable playlists via iMix
This feature introduces a "community-building" feature into iTunes. Once you've constructed a playlist from your iTunes library, you can publish it to the iTunes music store for the world to see.
Apple Losless Encoding (AL)
In addittion to MP3, WAV, AIFF, AAC, you can now use the Apple Losless Encoder for music encoding. AL allows you to import uncompressed audio at half the size of say its WAV or AIFF equivalent.
Print from iTunes
Now you can print from iTunes. Now you can get rid of the sharpie, and actually print a jewel case for a CD based on your playlist. If the album you purchased off of iTunes music store came with a digitized version of the orginal CD cover, you can print it out.
There are some other changes worth noting, particularly some changes to the Digital Rights Management infrastructure. You can read more here.
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Posted by admin at April 30, 2004 06:49 AM