iTunes - page 20

Apple is designing an entirely new entertainment experience designed specifically for its upcoming tablet, the Financial Times claims today in an interesting but rather vague story.

Apple’s fabled touchscreen tablet will have a 10-inch screen and will be more like an oversized iPod Touch than a full-fledged tablet computer (a key question is what OS it will run).

Contrary to previous rumors, the tablet hit stores in time for the holidays, the FT says, citing record label sources out of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

To accompany it, Apple is working on a new entertainment package to rival the album experience in days of yore, when the release of a new album was a cultural and social event.

“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” one executive told the FT.

Codenamed “Cocktail,” the entertainment bundle would resemble an “interactive book,” but be more than a bunch of hotlinked PDFs, the FT says.

Apple is reportedly working on Cocktail with the big four record labels, who describe the project as “revolutionary” and are hoping it will offset declining album sales. When consumers buy music online, they biuy low-margin singles, not profitable albums.

Unfortunately the FT doesn’t have many details of this intriguing idea. Reminds me of the hype surrounding “multi-media CDs” in the late ’90s when CDs with music and video were supposed to provide a similar revolution in entertainment and education.  There was talk about amazing immersive encyclopedias, but instead we got unreadable digital books with tiny embedded QuickTime movies.

Its also hard to imagine friends sitting around an Apple tablet reading band biographies while listening to music.

Much easier to imagine a couple of kids on the couch sharing the device to watch episodes of Spongebob.

Indeed, one record exec told the FT: “It’s going to be fabulous for watching movies.”

The FT says Apple is also in talks with book publishers who are “optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer.”

If you’ve told the kids 100 times not to interrupt while you work in the home office, maybe it’s time to download a new app that emits a high-frequency pitch that anyone under the age of 25 finds seriously annoying.

Called Kids Be Gone, it works like a teen deterrent device first used by British police to disperse unruly underage crowds by emitting a shrill tone only they can hear, 18.000 hz. (Kids and the under-30 crowd still have sensitive hair cells in their inner ears plus full aural capabilities people gradually lose as they age — try the demo for a similar service after the jump).

If your memory is a little hazy on where to find a medicinal pot supplier, there are a couple of apps for that.

The Cannabis app, available on iTunes for $2.99, helps users locate the nearest medical marijuana collectives, co-ops, doctors, clinics, attorneys, organizations and other patient services in the thirteen states where pot is legal for medicinal purposes.

Cannabis is the work of a Devin Calloway — web engineer and medical cannabis patient and self-described “digital activist” — and software engineer Julian Cain. The pair will donate $0.50 of every app sold to found a cannabis non-profit reform fund.

Cannabis isn’t the only app on iTunes for pot-seeking people. The other cannabis finder is called California Herbal Caregivers and, for $0.99, offers a list of the state’s 700 dispensaries on-the-go.

Despite Apple’s ongoing policing for “inappropriate” apps, both pot apps are rated 12+, or suitable for anyone over the age of 12, for “infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco or drug use references.”

High anxiety, anyone?

After our story on peek-a-boo apps, sexy content OK’d by Apple despite the smut ban, a reader wrote in to say we missed a whole genre: sex game apps.

(You can read a Q&A about how sex games get approved with James Miller of Trichotomy Media about their Naughty Loaded Dice app here).

Sexy dice are full-contact party games that — much like the real-world equivalent — are intended to boost lagging passion or tease friendships beyond platonic lines.

While the premise is as old as spin-the-bottle, the apps are feather caress away from violating Apple’s policy about “no inappropriate content” apps for sale on iTunes.

Surprisingly, of the half-dozen sexy dice apps available, some are deemed suitable for ages 9 and above for “infrequent/mild/mature/suggestive themes,” others are rated 17+ for “frequent/intense/mature suggestive themes.”

More details and screen shots after the jump.

Naughty LOADED Dice is a sex dice game, one of the “foreplay” apps that nudged past Apple censors (see our round-up here). There are half a dozen similar sex games available on iTunes, but Naughty LOADED Dice may be the only one to exploit iPhone technology for sexual content — allowing users to secretly control the roll of the dice.

The game (whose title excludes the word “loaded” after download) has a secret menu that allows him or her to select their preferred combination. When playtime comes, the user can play normally with his partner, or press a secret hidden “button” to activate a fixed roll of the dice. The ruse makes use of the iPhone touchscreen, which allows developers to create buttons on screen that are invisible.
Despite rumors that Apple censors would nix the app — in part for its menu trickery — it was approved for sale in the iTunes store July 3.

Cult of Mac spoke to James Miller, Director of Marketing for Trichotomy Media, about the murky process of getting the app approved, Apple’s ambiguous stance on promo codes for +17 apps and why his company’s next apps won’t be for adult audiences.

CoM: What was your experience in getting your app approved?
JM: Getting Naughty LOADED Dice approved wasn’t the trial by fire that it seems other apps with “racy” material had, but it sure seemed to have something fishy to it. I read that other developers who submit apps with very simple functionality get their apps approved in a few business days, a week at most.

Ours has very simple, self-contained functionality and it took more than a month (to get approval). I had already talked to my PR contacts about how we submitted our application, expecting it either to have taken only a week or just get rejected outright for the content.

Full interview and pic of the app’s secret screen  after the jump.

UPDATE: the original headline and a reference to “wireless” syncing in this article have been changed to correct a misunderstanding on the author’s part.

Apple has confirmed that Palm Pre will no longer be able to sync with iTunes versions beginning with the latest update, killing a sales feature that Palm had long relied upon in billing its phone as a major competitor to the iPhone.

“iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris, in a BusinessWeek report Wednesday. “It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” she continued, adding, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

For a device roundly touted as iPhone’s most worthy competition in the smartphone market, Palm’s Pre has not made many waves since being released on June 6 by Sprint, and remains hampered by an online app store with very little product.

There is some disagreement among analysts about how well the Pre has been received so far by the market, with some crowing that expectations have been more than met, while others say not so fast.

While the news of iTunes’ Pre lockout is no surprise, and Palm could still easily craft workaround allowing Pre users to sync with newer versions of iTunes, including using third party solutions to do the job, the lockout news is further evidence that Apple is not about to let up the pressure on a company now run by some of its former employees.

What it is: iPlay Music, a Mountain View, CA company, produces music learning software and operates a web-based store in the iTunes mold that just launched an innovative Chords for iTunes app that gives musicians an easy way to synchronize music in an iTunes library with a Quicktime video showing the chords to play along with a particular song.

Why it’s cool: The Chords for iTunes app is a promising tool for learning to play popular songs, whether you are a guitarist or keyboard player, and offers easy to read visual cues to the chords of songs such as Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, Proud Mary, Refugee, When I Come Around, and more.

At present there are but 26 songs available to download for free, but the iPlayMusic Store offers a host of additional paid downloads that teach everything from 12 Bar Blues to Reggae strumming to Swing and Rock chord formations. The catalog of downloadable lessons is a bit thin in the early going, but many of the basics that underly a strong foundation in musicianship are covered and for those just beginning to learn an instrument, iPlay Music products and services are well worth checking out.

A couple of cool features of the software allow you to slow down a song while remaining in pitch so you can play along at the speed you need to learn the song, and an Export to iPod feature, that allows you to put the lessons on your iPod or iPhone so you can take them with you on the go.

Where to Get It: All the info you need is available on the web at the iPlay Music site. The Chords for iTunes (Beta) app is a free download, and many of the lessons available on the iPlay Music Store are available for free as well.

Most paid content sells for 99¢ and multi-lesson packages and Family Packs can go for up to $29.95.

Michael Jackson is likely make more money in death than he ever did in life — the Elvis effect. And it’s already started.

Jackson sold a record 2.6 million digital downloads in just one week, according to preliminary sales numbers from Nielsen SoundScan.

The sales make Jackson the first artist to sell more than one million digital songs in one week. The week before his death, Jackson sold 48,000 songs, illustrating how big a jump this week’s numbers are.

Jackson’s records are dominating the charts. Six of his albums are in the top 10 Top Digital Albums chart, a record, and 25 of his singles are in the top 75 Hot Digital Songs.

Like Elvis, Jackson is likely to bigger earner in death than he was in life. Elvis earned a whopping $52 million in 2007 — $8 million more than living pop stars like Justin Timberlake ($44 million) and Madonna ($40 million), according to Forbes.com.

What it is: Lala is a newish (about a year old) web-based music marketplace, but to brand it as simply that does an extreme disservice to an interesting, innovative Internet destination that, given enough publicity, strong management and bit of good fortune could become the first online music store to give iTunes a real run for its money as a music distributor.

Why it’s cool: When I was a kid growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I spent uncounted hours in the music listening rooms at the back of Pop Tunes on Summer Avenue, where I discovered the heritage of the city they call the Home of the Blues, and learned about the ground-breaking artists who gave birth to the Blues’ baby, Rock & Roll.

Pop Tunes was a great spot to get in out of the hot summer sun or the cold winter rain, where I could browse the racks, amassing a stack of LPs and 45s, both old and new, and head for one of the four or five sound-proof listening rooms at the back of the store, where I’d listen to my heart’s content before deciding which of the albums or singles my meager allowance or paper route money would buy me any given week.

By the time I left home for college in another of the great music cities in the US – New Orleans – I had a music collection numbering over 1000 lp records and another few hundred 45rpm singles.

What does my ancient music-buying experience have to do with Lala and this review?

iTunes is hosting a free month-long concert series — 31 nights, 62 bands — at  London’s  Roundhouse in July.
With that many acts, there’s bound to be something to tickle your eardrums, the line-up so far includes Oasis, Madeleine Peyroux, Kasabian, The Hoosiers and Franz Ferdinand.

Tickets for the third iTunes Live concert series are give-aways, only, drawn from a pool of friends of the free music fest on Facebook.  (And just like your real friends,  the organizers have will access to your profile information, photos and your friends’ info).

If you can’t make it to London, you can check out live broadcasts and video highlights, before the concert recordings are sold at 22 iTunes stores worldwide — again, if you become an Tunes EU fan on Facebook .

Via MacWorld

UPDATE: As predicted, seven of the Top 10 albums on iTunes are Michael Jackson’s. Checked at 8AM Friday morning.

Just hours after his untimely death, Michael Jackson’s albums are storming the charts on iTunes.

Jackson’s seminal album Thriller is currently the number one album on iTunes, while The Essential Michael Jackson is number two.

Several of his other albums are climbing the charts fast. At the time of writing (about 6.45 PST) Jackson has nine albums in the iTunes top 40:

Thriller (25th Anniversary, Zombie Cover) is #7; Off the Wall is #9; The Ultimate Collection is #12; Number Ones is #13; Bad is #22; Greatest Hits is #27; Dangerous is #29; and Thriller (25th Anniversary, Deluxe Edition) is #28.

Jackson is the best-selling solo artist of all time. He sold more than 750 million albums worldwide, and Thriller, produced by the genius Quincy Jones, sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide.

I expect Apple to post a homepage tribute, and Jackson’s albums to dominate the chart by the morning.

What goes around comes around: a ring of disk jockeys have been charged with running a six-figure iTunes scam.
Nine British djs allegedly used 1,500 stolen or cloned credit cards to buy their own tracks to the tune of £500,000 (USD $815,000). They were paid £185,000 (USD $300,000) in royalties before getting caught.

The fake buys also boosted them up higher in the iTunes sales rankings, generating further buzz and more royalties. It all started in September, when the DJs used American music distributor TuneCore to get their music on iTunes.

The scam played out with the police in London in New York about three months later after Apple got hit with ‘stop payment’ orders from credit card companies, saying accounts were fraudulent.

The DJs, ages 19 to 41, were arrested in London and the Midlands on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.

Via Metro UK

Jon Lech Johansen, the world-famous reverse engineer who earned the nickname DVDJon for cracking the CSS DVD-copy protection scheme years ago, again made headlines awhile back for his software program DoubleTwist, which removes old school iTunes Store DRM. That was a bigger deal in the years before every song on iTunes went DRM-free, but many users (myself included) have never paid the 30 cents a song needed to upgrade their older libraries — so DoubleTwist still has a purpose, if you for some reason want non-Apple hardware.

Anyway, all of that is a long pre-amble to highlight the above hilarious picture, which is DVDJon’s physical display ad for DoubleTwist, which was posted on the south-facing wall of the flagship San Francisco Apple Store. As it turns out, the ad wall is actually owned by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and the ad doesn’t misuse any Apple trademarks, so it’s perfectly legal — even if it appears to show Apple endorsing a product that helps people to stop using iPods and iPhones.

The ad was taken down over the weekend, but DVDJon says it will return soon. Genius.

Via TechCrunch

Image via Engadget

The biggest announcement at today’s fairly lackluster All Things D7 conference is that the very intriguing Palm Pre will sync easily with iTunes — it even pops up an iPod icon in the process. It won’t be able to play any old iTunes DRM’d films, but anything else is fine.

Now, assuming that Apple lets this stand, this is a very bold move by Palm. Apple’s ecosystem of iTunes, the App Store and its various hardware devices is the real strength of the iPhone. With Palm offering its own App Catalog and iTunes integration, it really will come down to which OS is nicer, and which hardware is more appealing.

Honestly? If the Pre weren’t limited to 8 GB, it would be hard for me to say with any certainty that I’ll be picking up a next-gen iPhone. Credible competition is grand, ain’t it?

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

What it is: An iTunes add-on for cleaning mislabeled tracks, downloading art and finding music videos, concert info and artist bios.

Why it’s good: After years of downloading weird crap off the internet, my iTunes library is a swamp of mislabeled and unidentified tracks, and I’m sick of it. So I downloaded TuneUp — and I’m in love. TuneUp handily cleaned up a bunch of mislabeled tracks using the Gracenote database (which uses the track’s “audio fingerprint” to identify it). Cleaning takes a few seconds per track and was about 70-80 percent effective on my odd library (British punk, post-punk and lots of electronica). Previous track cleaners I’ve tried have been useless. But it’s the extra artist info via the Net that I’m really digging. TuneUp sits to the side of the iTunes window and displays all kinds of artist info: Wikipedia bios, Google News stories, music recommendations, upcoming concerts and YouTube videos, which I’ve wasted hours watching. The information is truly useful, fascinating, appropriate and timely. Apple thinks so too. TuneUp was added to the shelves of Apple’s retail stores this week — a rare honor granted only to tip top software.

Where to get it: TuneUp is available as a free download with 100 cleans and 50 album covers. Full version costs $29.95 (or $19.95 for an annual subscription),

NOTE: Use CULTOFMAC activation code to get a 15% discount.

One million potential iPhone developers downloaded Stanford’s dev course since it started in April. The 10-week course from the Palo Alto university’s school of engineering is offered gratis on iTunes.

Steve Demeter, the founder of Demiforce and maker of the popular Trism iPhone game, spoke to the class Monday, the SF Chronicle reported, and touched on the opportunities and growing challenges of developing for the iPhone.

Demeter earned $250,000 in the first two months of Trism but acknowledged his good luck in breaking through early and having the support of Apple, two things that most developers now can’t count on.
You can still catch the video lectures of about an hour long each are available here.

Screenshot from Steve Marmon’s May 8 lecture, courtesy Stanford, iTunes.

Via SF Chronicle

Image credit: MobileGuerilla

It must be a measure of how divorced from reality the US financial establishment has become when one of its most venerable voices discounts $20 – $45 million as ‘not a lot of revenue.’

That’s the figure range Jeremy Liew, an analyst at Lightspeed Venture Partners, estimates would be Apple’s take from sales on the first 1 billion iPhone and iPod Touch applications downloaded through the iTunes App Store.

Leaving aside for a moment the 15:1 – 40:1 ratio range of free to paid apps Liew pulled out of thin air to arrive at his estimates, it should be noted that the Barron’s writer reporting on Liew’s analysis allowed that the App Store “is significantly changing the way way people think about mobile devices, and has triggered a response from Research In Motion (RIMM), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK) and Palm (PALM).

If true, Liew’s figures would mean Apple is seeing a revenue boost of roughly 0.1% from the App Store, but the mere numbers do not account for the intangible benefits to Apple’s public awareness or the number of hardware sales being driven by the venture. The company, and Steve Jobs in particular, always said the App Store was never intended to be a big profit generator, that it was rather a vehicle for helping the iPhone change the way people think about mobile computing.

By that measure, Apple’s take from the App Store is incalculable.

Who knows when the happy moment will come, but when it does, Apple is ready to trumpet the news that a billion apps have been downloaded from the iTunes AppStore.

So says the Brazilian website Mac Magazine, anyway.

A reader, identified only as JOSZé claims to have discovered a counter embedded in Apple’s website that, when advanced to the number 1,000,000,000 will return the page you see above.

As the editors at Mac Magazine said, “sorry to spoil the surprise.”

Thanks to Rafael for the tip!

UPDATE: Rafael, from Mac Magazine, tells Cult of Mac the secret to revealing the waiting “Thanks a Billion” page lies in changing the time and date on your Mac to something in advance of the date you might expect the magic number to be reached. A recent check of the App Store’s counter says more than 990,000,000 apps have been downloaded as of this writing.

Apple has released new lists of the “all time” Top 20 paid and free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as the iTunes AppStore plows on toward 1 billion total downloads.

The “all-time” designation is kind of interesting, given the AppStore has only been open less than a year, but some of the numbers coming out make an impressive case for yet another ding in the universe attributable to Steve Jobs and his little niche computer company.

The number two paid app, the lovely, meditative Koi Pond has been downloaded 900,000 times at 99¢ apiece, according to one report, certainly a nice year’s work for its developers, The Blimp Pilots.

But how about the number one paid app, the game Crash Bandicoot? Its total downloads are unreported, but one could assume a figure somewhat north of Koi Pond’s 900K — at $5.99 per copy, Crash Bandicoot must have Vivendi Games Mobile wondering how much richer they might have become had the world economy not suffered a total melt-down in the past year.

On the free side of the ledger Facebook and Google Earth run one-two, which is no surprise at all, given the worldwide popularity of those two web properties.

Apple has a giveaway contest going in conjunction with the countdown to one billion downloads, with winners slated to get a fully loaded MacBook Pro, a 32GB iPod Touch, a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card and a Time Capsule wireless hard drive.

Proctor & Gamble is now behind (pardon pun) global public bathroom finder app “Sit or Squat.”  Below the list of facilities in the area, a Charmin logo appears with the phrase “Gotta Go?  Relax. We got your back.”

The app, offered gratis on iTunes, has info on where to find bathrooms, changing tables, handicap access and other amenities. Users can add new content to the service and rate featured toilets.

“Our goal is to connect Charmin with innovative conversations and solutions as a brand that understands the importance of bringing the best bathroom experience to consumers, even when they’re away from home,” explained Jacques Hagopian, Brand Manager for Charmin in the press release. “Helping people find a bathroom that is clean and comfortable is exactly what the SitOrSquat project is all about.”

So far, SitOrSquat has compiled information on more than 52,000 toilets in 10 countries worldwide. Some  1,600 users have downloaded the app, although complaints about the user interface and slow loading times are frequent.

Still, as far as corporate-sponsored apps go, it’s much better than Coke’s “spin the bottle” app or Target’s virtual snow ball.

Via textually

Apple must have the sweetest distribution deal in the entire retail universe, if a report published Wednesday at TechCrunch is to be believed.

The AppStore refund policy allows purchasers a full refund up to 90 days from the date of download of any application purchased in the iTunes AppStore. Which seems questionable enough in the light of, say, the Android Market’s 24 hour return policy.

But a clause in the developer’s contract all iPhone developers must sign in order to have their apps sold in the AppStore indicates that in addition to a three month return policy, “Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the end user.”

In effect this means Apple will charge 100% of the sale price to a developer for every refund given, even though the developer only got 70% of the price of the sale in the first place.

Many iPhone app developers are on the record as having no problem with Apple’s 30% sales commission for applications sold through the iTunes AppStore. The thinking goes that independent developers gain access to many more potential customers by having their products in the widely visited venue, save tons of money on marketing and transaction costs and generally benefit from being associated with the legitimacy of the Apple brand.

When consumers get wind of this policy, which may be a new development, according to the TechCrunch report, developers of some widely purchased though basically useless apps could be in for a rude awakening.

UPDATE: No developer is likely to go bankrupt in the real world, according to a level-headed explanation posted Thursday by Erica Sadun, a developer/blogger for ArsTechnica.

The reason, which makes perfect sense when you think about it, is that Apple never gives refunds, except in extreme circumstances and then, only after causing the customer many headaches.

All the Fart app people can rest easy now.

Though it’s not entirely surprising that pop-synth vets Depeche Mode, who recently launched the first “iTunes Pass” are Macs, they way they expressed it in a recent interview was entertaining.

The Guardian asked them to link a song from their latest album to typical PC problems:

Guardian: Being in PC World, hoping to by an external disk drive to back up your important data, considering reliability to be more important than price.

Martin “Miles Away would be the best song on the new album for the situation, because Microsoft Vista is miles away from working. You wouldn’t find us in PC World, we’re all Mac users.”

Guardian: You can buy Macs in PC World now, you know.

Martin: “Well I wouldn’t know about that. Does Windows Vista work yet? (Chuckles) I wouldn’t like to be a beta tester for that!”

Dave: “Hard drives always crash. Make sure you back up!”

Hat tip to CoM reader Peter Philipsen.

Image used with a CC license, thanks to mrmatt

Apple has added HD movies to the US iTunes store, including action flicks “Transporter 3,” “Bangkok Dangerous” and “The Spirit.”   HD versions cost five dollars more to buy ($14.99 regular, $19.99 HD) but rentals cost the same as regular flicks, $3.99. HD purchases also come with an iPod/iPhone compatible standard def version for viewing on smaller screens.

Upcoming titles available for pre-order on iTunes include “Quantum of Solace” and “Twilight.”

Well, it’s more of an unfortunate oversight. But the iCount logo — a numbers game for the iPhone, iPod touch —  looks like it’s all about something else thanks to the dropping of the “o”. Oh, my. Chalk up another one for the iTunes store censors.

Via the Inquirer

The app designed to provide alerts on kidnapped kids in the US is now available, gratis, on iTunes.

As we reported last month, Jonathan Zdziarski, creator of the first iPhone forensics toolkit,  developed the AMBER alert. These alerts are issued when missing child cases are granted Amber status –œ  kidnappings of children under age 17 who police believe to be in danger of  bodily harm or death.
The iPhone Amber app provides a real-time feed of recent alerts including victim photos, suspect photos and descriptions, vehicle photos and descriptions and a reporting mechanism allowing users to report sightings.

The Amber Alert program was created in 1996 after the kidnapping and killing of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman.

The application was approved just two days after Zdziarski emailed Steve Jobs pleading for him to help expedite the app’s approval after waiting over a month, though Apple has not said if his letter had any effect on the approval.

Via ars technica