{"id":1153,"date":"2003-04-28T18:28:35","date_gmt":"2003-04-29T08:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/04\/29\/ituneswwwapplemusiccom\/"},"modified":"2019-12-04T16:43:12","modified_gmt":"2019-12-05T00:43:12","slug":"ituneswwwapplemusiccom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/04\/28\/ituneswwwapplemusiccom\/","title":{"rendered":"iTunes\/www.applemusic.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just some initial thoughts after playing around with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/itunes\/\" title=\"Apple - iLife - iTunes\">iTunes 4.0<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.applemusic.com\/\" title=\"Apple - Music\">iTunes Music Store<\/a> for a bit.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>AAC<\/strong>: I&#8217;m sold. Through some very non-scientific, non-mathematical experimenting, I seem to be getting about a 40% reduction in file size with 128kbps AAC .m4a&#8217;s as opposed to 160kbps VBR .mp3&#8217;s. With a \\~14,000 song, 75GB music collection, a 40% reduction in size is <em>beautiful<\/em>. Plus, they do sound at least the same, if not better.<\/li>\n<li><strong>iTunes 4.0<\/strong>: Basic functionality is still the same as previous versions of iTunes, which I was already quite happy with. They&#8217;ve obviously done some under-the-hood work, though &#8212; where I used to get &#8220;spinning beach balls&#8221; almost anytime I clicked around in iTunes, now the only time I get a wait cursor is when I&#8217;m getting info on multiple tracks at once. Much snappier performance &#8212; and on an aging 350Mhz blue-and-white G3, that&#8217;s pretty impressive.<\/li>\n<li><strong>iTunes Music Store<\/strong>: Again, I&#8217;m sold. Very nicely and simply integrated directly into iTunes, finding stuff in the store is a breeze. I&#8217;ve already purchased one track to replace a corrupted .mp3 file created from a scratched CD, and once the iTMS is tied to my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mac.com\/\" title=\"dot Mac\">.mac<\/a> account, single-click purchasing works flawlessly. Could be dangerous, though &#8212; talk about instant gratification! The selection of music available could use a little work, though I suffer a bit in having more esoteric music tastes &#8212; the majority of the &#8220;big artists&#8221; seem to be pretty well represented, and Apple says that they&#8217;re constantly working on expanding their library. Can&#8217;t complain too much, though &#8212; I&#8217;ve even found some pleasant surprises that I&#8217;m thinking about picking up (lots of Bill Cosby, and even a fair chunk of Spike Jones albums!).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Excellent work, all around. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, all of the whiners at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/mefi\/25416\" title=\"Apple Music Service goes Live\">MeFi<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/apple.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=03\/04\/28\/1723226&amp;mode=thread&amp;tid=188&amp;tid=141&amp;tid=176\" title=\"\/.: Apple Introduces iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4, new iPod\">\/.<\/a> can jump off a cliff &#8212; Apple&#8217;s got a good thing going here. The only downside I can see is that to take advantage of AAC&#8217;s smaller file sizes, I&#8217;ve got about 1500 CD&#8217;s to rip all over again&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Excellent work, all around. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, all of the whiners at MeFi and \/. can jump off a cliff &mdash; Apple&#8217;s got a good thing going here. The only downside I can see is that to take advantage of AAC&#8217;s smaller file sizes, I&#8217;ve got about 1500 CD&#8217;s to rip all over again&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2039,2035],"tags":[65],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}