iTunes - page 16

As Mac fans, we all know that Apple habitually throws an iPod event in September, where the obsolete iPods allowed to grow dusty in our love are whisked off behind the killing sheds, while the shiniest new models are simultaneously heralded. These events usually see an updated iPod Touch and a new version of iTunes, and this year, everyone’s expecting word on the new streaming iTunes features and perhaps a relaunched, iOS-driven AppleTV called the iTV.

Needless to say, excitement is high… but Apple still hasn’t tipped their hat on when we can expect the conference. Well, you might want to pencil September 7th in for following our iPod Event liveblog, because Bloomberg’s sources are now saying that date’s a lock.

Of course, since Apple traditionally doesn’t alert the press to an iPod Event until a week ahead of time, we won’t know if Bloomberg’s sources are right until the end of this month… but Apple certainly can’t put it off much later. If you’re hungry for a new iPod Touch or even an updated AppleTV, earmark some credit for that date.

A dozen individuals have been arrested in the United Kingdom for laundering money through iTunes.

The twelve individuals’ plan was pretty simple, all things considered. Using stolen credit card numbers, they purchased tracks that they themselves had uploaded to Apple’s digital music delivery service. All things considered, they laundered over $300,000 worth of purchases in just four months.

For the record, this isn’t a security vulnerability with iTunes. Transacting digital goods is actually a common way to get money off of a stolen credit card number: I myself had $1500 stolen from me a few years back when someone got a hold of my credit card number and simply lost game after game of online poker against another account that he controlled.

The same thing pretty much went on here, and Apple wasn’t the only company to get hit: Amazon’s MP3 service was also used by the criminals in question.

Should this worry you? Probably not: in most cases of credit card fraud, credit card companies are quick to side with the card holder. In my case, all I had to do was assure Mastercard that neither I nor my girlfriend were secret gambling addicts. If you ever do see a suspicious iTunes charge come through on your credit card statement, give your bank — not Apple — a call, and they will very quickly set things right.

A few times a year, some dusty old Beatle pops up out of his crypt, coughs out a centipede and tells us that they really want to bring their catalogue to iTunes and it’s coming soon, honest.

It can be confusing: three years ago, Paul McCartney said that an iTunes deal was “virtually settled”, but just three months ago, he said a deal was just a far away as ever, claiming those boneheads at EMI were the ones gumming up the works.

Now John Lennon’s infamous wife has emerged from her Black Pyramid and recited the incantation that transforms her into Yoko-Ono The Ever-Living. She doesn’t blame EMI: she basically just says Steve Jobs is messing things up by not paying them enough money.

“Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy. There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out,” Yoko said.

“Don’t hold your breath… for anything,” she then ominously added, punctuating the implied threat with a maniacal cackle before returning to her mausoleum to plot the attainment of the fabled Sword of Omens.

Ever since Apple bought the web-streaming music service Lala, our teeth have been aching in anticipation of our iTunes libraries vaporized from our hard disks and existing in the Wonkavision like ionosphere of the cloud.

According to CNET, though, we may very well have a while to wait before Apple truly capitalizes upon its Lala purchase… and when it does come, it might be a far more modest proposal at first than even Cupertino would like.

In talks with the four major labels, Apple is apparently downplaying expectations, saying that if they launch their cloud-streaming iTunes functionality in the next few months, it will be “modest in scope” when it comes to streaming music.

If you accidentally updated your jailbroken iPhone 3GS, you cannot simply downgrade it by restoring to an older version of the firmware (even in DFU mode) because of an added layer of security by Apple.

However, if you have a previously jailbroken iPhone 3GS, there’s a possibility that Cydia saved some files called SHSHs to help you bypass this added security. Cult of Mac’s how-to guide will help you do it.

Over the course of the last few years, the music industry has been struggling to cope with the way iTunes single-handedly changed the way music was consumed, from albums to $0.99 singles.

But is this earth change in the music industry simply due to iTunes’ ability to allow users to purchase just the songs they want, or could pricing fix the problem?

According to Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, speaking at the New Music Seminar this week, the real thing killing the album is that $9.99 for an album doesn’t offer a significant discount over the per unit price of a $0.99 song, while historically, consumers have gotten a better deal on albums versus singles.

“Historically, the price of an album was five times greater than a single,” said Silverman, who believes setting the price at a tenth of an album’s cost was a mistake and that even $1.29 is too low. “It should’ve been a $1.99, and then we would’ve seen higher digital album sales because it would’ve been a bigger discount for buying an album.

The good news for album fans like me is that the $9.99 price of albums is slowly but surely making some headway: 14% of all Universal Music’s digital sales these days are for complete albums. iTunes hasn’t necessarily killed the album… it’s just put it in semi-hibernation.

Apple’s massive data center in North Carolina will come online early next year, Apple execs said during an analyst conference call on Tuesday afternoon.

“It’s on-schedule,” said Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer. “We expect it completed by the end of the calendar year.”

The $1 billion center is as big as the world’s biggest data facilities, and has been the subject of much speculation since construction started in August 2009. Occupying 500,000 square feet, the data center is about five times the size of Apple’s data center in Newark, California.

iTunes 9.2.1 is now available for download and finally fixes the numerous bugs many of us have been experiencing:

• Disables older versions of some incompatible third-party plug-ins
• Addresses minor issues with dragging and dropping items
• Addresses a performance issue when first syncing to some devices with iTunes 9.2
• Addresses an issue upgrading to iOS 4 on an iPhone or iPod touch with encrypted back-ups
• Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance

You can get this update via Software Update on your Mac, or download it directly from the Apple website.

Looking for a new NAS that will play nice with your iTunes collection? Seagate has just announced the BlackArmor NAS 400 that promises to do just that.

The BlackArmor NAS 400 comes without storage bays, so you’ll have to plug your own drives into the four available storage bays, but it supports RAID 0/1/5/10, as well as JBOD configurations. The BlackArmor 400 also comes with a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB ports and ten licenses for Windows backup software.

Other than that, the usual features of a NAS are all here, including encryption support and robust security settings for data protection. The 400 is, as mentioned, also iTunes and DLNA server capable.

Don’t expect the 400 to be cheap though: without drive, the BlackArmor NAS 400 will cost you $399.99.

Ever since Apple purchased Lala late last year, iTunes users have been expecting to see their music collections make a jump to the cloud (often referred to as iTunes Live).

More surprising, though, is how many users are actively looking forward to a new, streaming iTunes: according to NPD’s polling of 3,862 iTunes users, about 25% are interested in a new streaming library function. Extrapolated upon iTunes’ population as a whole, that’s about 13 million users in the United States alone.

Even more interesting, according to NPD, is that roughly half of those users would be willing to pay up to $10 a month for the service, providing it supported multiple devices. That’s about 7 to 8 million iTunes users, adding up to a billion dollar market in the first year.

I was hoping that whatever form a streaming iTunes took, it would be free, but obviously that’s wishful thinking: Apple’s already got a huge number of users chomping at the bit to stream their entire libraries wirelessly to all of their computers and iOS devices. Of course they’ll end up charging.

My big question is what this means for Apple’s iPod-line. If iTunes goes into the cloud this year, does this mean we can expect a 3G-capable iPod Touch at this year’s September iPod event? In the context of a streaming iTunes, the lack of an always-connected iPod in Apple’s device line-up seems like a hole that would need to be filled.

Would you pay $10 a month for streaming iTunes?

Ever since Apple purchased streaming music site LaLa back in 2009 and Cupertino’s acquisition of a massive data center in North Carolina, safe money has been on iTunes moving into the cloud. But why haven’t we seen it yet?

According to an interesting rumor posted by Electronista, it all comes down to licensing.

Currently, Apple has a deal with the music industry that allows customers to stream music from their own computers to other devices, Airtunes. However, this existing licensing agreement doesn’t apply to streaming music directly from Apple’s servers, which would require an entirely new deal to be inked.

If Apple’s going to announce iTunes Live this year, it would be at September’s iPod event… but according to Electronista, many record label executives haven’t even heard of Apple’s service, which may indicate that we won’t see streaming iTunes this year at all.

[via Boy Genius Report

It’s easy to extrapolate from the fact that Macs don’t have Blu-Ray drives already (even as an option) that, internally, Apple is banking on digital delivery as the future of high-definition content. Now, for the first time, Steve Jobs has confirmed it in one of his characteristic email exchanges with an Apple fan.

Writing a disappointed Blu-Ray fan about the form’s absence in Apple’s line up, Jobs wrote: “Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD – like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.”

When his correspondent respond that high-end video formats had a higher uptake, citing the lack of DRM as a main driver behind Blu-Ray growth, Jobs shot down the idea.

No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.

I think you may be wrong – we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over.

I think Jobs is write that Blu-Ray is clearly an interim format, although I’m skeptical, right now, of iTunes’ dominant place in the high-definition video digital delivery ecosystem: iTunes isn’t really making the most impressive show when it comes to video compared to the likes of Netflix, and I don’t really think that’s likely to change until Apple starts taking the Apple TV more seriously than “just a hobby.” Apple needs a competitively priced and featured set-top box to really get their video strategy into play.

MobileMe went down for some ‘scheduled maintenance’ last night, and when it came back up it included a whole host of new features. As well as the Mail web application now out of beta, Apple’s list of improvements includes:

• Widescreen and compact views.
• Rules to keep your email organized everywhere.
• Single-click archiving.
• Formatting toolbar.
• Faster performance.
• Increased security with SSL.
• Support for external email addresses.
• Improved junk mail filtering.

In addition to the new features, Apple has updated the login page (above) and introduced a fancy new application switcher (below) that provides a nice new way to navigate between the MobileMe web applications.

Apple have also released a Find My iPhone app that now provides you with quick and easy access to the Find My iPhone service from each one of your iOS devices. All of the web application features are included like sending a message to your device or playing a sound, locking the device and even wiping your data remotely.

Apple has been busy releasing a few of their own iOS applications this week, and as well as Find My iPhone, we’ve also seen iTunes Connect Mobile which gives application developers the ability to monitor their app’s success in the App Store from their iPhone, and the Apple Store application allowing customers to make purchases from their iPhones and schedule reservations at an Apple Retail Store.

If you intend on upgrading to iOS 4 on Monday, the first piece of the puzzle has landed on Software Update: iTunes 9.2 is now available for download.

It’s a pretty tiny update, with the only non-iOS 4 specific feature being some new album artwork improvements, including a new transition effect. Apple’s clearly saving all the big new features for iTunes 10, which we can probably expect to land in September with some sort of cloud-storage and streaming functionality.

Here’s the change log:

• Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go

• Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1

• Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4

• Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes

• Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4

• Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library

Get it now through Software Update, or download it directly from Apple.

It’s not the streaming iTunes we were all hoping for — that announcement makes more sense to come at Apple’s iPod-centric September event than WWDC anyway — but iTunes 9.2 is on its way, and while you won’t see anything revolutionary in this iterative point update, there is a bunch of cool new functionality allowing iPhone owners to more easily cope with the new features in iOS 4.

I’m fairly well-known for being a detractor of the convoluted mess that iTunes has become in the video and apps iPhone era. I might have even labeled it Apple’s own IE 6 at some point. That’s actually not true — it’s more Lotus Notes, trying to fit every possible feature into a single application rather than writing a bunch of specialized programs that excel at their task. From a desktop experience perspective, at least, I know I would be way happier with discrete applications for a slimmed-down music player, video player, and store/file manager.

Well, I might have found the first of that set. It’s called Instinctiv, and it’s a gorgeous, free, Mac OS X exclusive music player that actually makes listening to music on a computer intuitive again. It has some shortcomings, which I’ll address, but on most levels, it’s a superior music solution to iTunes.

Apple’s been under the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice in two anti-trust investigations over the last couple of months: the first in response to complaints by Adobe that Apple wouldn’t allow Flash on iPhone OS, the second in relation to the forthcoming iAd network.

Steve Jobs can’t be happy about either of these investigations, so the prospect of a third must have him massaging his temple as if someone just fired an invisible BB into it: the New York Times claims that the DoJ is launching yet another anti-trust investigation against Apple, focusing on the iTunes hegemony over the digital music market.

User ratings on iTunes alone can be misleading when you’re trying to decide which movie to buy or rent. A perfectly execrable movie might have a four or five star rating thanks to the efforts of a small pool of fans to bump its rating up.

The latest addition to iTunes seems particularly useful, then, in avoiding buying or renting a dud film: as of now, the iTunes movie store features the reviews of Top Critics and the Tomatometer rating score from the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site to let you see, at a glance, what critics thought of the movie you’re about to buy.

I hope this is just the first step towards Apple bringing more outside review data into iTunes as a whole. Being able to see at a glance if a movie is worth my time is great, but it would be fantastic to see the same sort of aggregation happen when I want to buy a new album, or even an App Store game.

[via TUAW]

Ever since the master strategists in Cupertino bought and (predictably) killed off the only genuine competitor to ever rise against iTunes, the question has hung like a pall over the online digital music marketplace: what will replace Lala?

Perhaps Jobsian worker bees are buzzing about as we speak, crafting an iTunes portal to allow users access to their digital music libraries from anywhere on the Internet, one which will sell them web-only versions of their favorite music for as little as one thin dime per cut.

Until that happy day dawns, or until some other independent outfit comes along to offer something as interesting and valuable as Lala was, one might consider checking out a newish Facebook mashup called Friends and Music.

Put this firmly in the rumor file for right now, but Macsimum News is reporting that a live streaming version of iTunes will debut at this year’s WWDC, building upon Apple’s December purchase of online streaming service Lala.

With the hatchet between Apple Computers and Apple Records long buried and the digitally restored catalogue sounding better than ever, the continued absence of The Beatles from iTunes is a bigger mystery than ever. Don’t blame Apple, though… either Apple. According to former Beatle Paul McCartney, it’s EMI gumming up the works.

“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul told Newsbeat. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”

“It’s been business hassles”, he said. “Not with us, or iTunes. It’s the people in the middle, the record label [EMI]. There have been all sorts of reasons why they don’t want to do it.”

On their part, EMI say that discussions are ongoing, and claim that they would love to see The Beatles’ music available on iTunes. Translation: they want a much bigger cut of the iTunes pie, and you’ll have to rip your Beatles’ tracks yourself until Apple caves… which I seriously doubt Cupertino has any intention of doing.

The impasse continues.

Fruit Ninja is a super fun game from Australian developers Halfbrick Studios that is impossible to put down!

Fruit Ninja incorporates the speed and simplicity of games like Doodle Jump with an innovative control method that makes the game addictive. I love this game. The graphics look like crap but the game proves the old adage — gameplay is king!

I wish I could tell you that LaLa.com is coming back or that Apple is bringing music subscriptions and unlimited downloads to our iPhones/Pads. I can’t.

What is apparent is that Apple has recently filed to trademark “iTunes Live” and  plans to use it for two things:

– Online retail store services in the field of entertainment featuring prerecorded musical, audio and audiovisual content

– Entertainment services, namely, arranging and conducting of concerts and live musical performances

Apple could not only have their hands in the way we purchase and listen to music, but also live music performances and  the ability to make them readily available as product. Let’s just hope this signals one of many features to be made available this summer with the iPhone OS 4 release and impending iTunes upgrade.

[via TechCrunch]

An exciting new feature in the latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta might finally address a long standing complaint of both users and app developers: the inability to easily move non-media files between the iPhone and a computer. According to Boy Genius Report, iPhone OS 4.0’s new File Sharing feature will allow you to transfer and sync files directly between your iPhone and your computer.

All you do is plug your iPhone into iTunes, go to the Apps tab and scroll down. On the left side of the screen, you choose an app from a list of supported programs, while the right side of the screen allows you to copy files into that app’s sandbox or save them from your iPhone onto your computer.

The File Sharing feature doesn’t work yet, but it’s an exciting hint at things to come. It looks like a lot of the office and productivity suites on the iPhone OS are about to get a lot easier to use across multiple platforms.

These days many people do some or most of their music listening on the computer, and much of that is managed with iTunes.  It’s very nice to have such quick and easy access to your music library, podcasts and internet radio in one place, but by default these only play in the room where the computer is located.

Wouldn’t it be nice to listen throughout your whole house or office, and without breaking the bank?