Correction

[mmcirvin]

Contrary to what I said in an earlier comment, iTunes still supports non-iPod MP3 players-- or at least its help files claim so, though I have not yet found any mention of this on current versions of pages on Apple's Web site. I thought I'd read that the support for other players went away at some time in the past, but this seems to be incorrect.

Nothing but the iPod currently supports the (nominally open) AAC format and (proprietary) DRM scheme used by the iTunes Music Store, but that's not an issue unless you want to buy stuff from the Music Store.

Update: It's an interesting question what would be needed to give another player support for Music Store downloads. It might be that all that is needed is AAC support; I remember reading somewhere that the DRM is all inside of iTunes. In that case, third parties could conceivably give a player support for the store. I wonder what Apple would do, given that the store is mostly an enticement to buy iPods. They might actually encourage it, given that in the long run it's beneficial for them if the standard format for paid music downloads becomes something other than Microsoft's.

Oh, yeah, and: There's at least one well-known hack for getting around the restrictions on purchased AACs: burn them to audio CDs and re-rip them as MP3s. That would, of course, also allow playing them on any player you like, as your fair-use rights ought to allow. Apple claims that this will ruin the sound quality, but users report that the damage is no worse than you'd expect, which is to say not much unless you are a hothouse flower audiophile. Whether this paragraph is illegal under the DMCA is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yet another thing I did not know: Multiple sources also report that iTunes' ability to burn MP3 CDs includes the ability to burn them from AAC files, including purchased ones! That is very good, and not something I expected at all. In general, Apple seems to be doing an extremely good job of not letting their digital rights management piss off users. The one exception I remember was the undocumented introduction and rapid revocation of IP-based user streaming over the Internet. A community of iTunes-based streamers sprung up almost immediately. Somebody wrote an app to capture the streamed songs, making the whole thing into a jury-rigged file-sharing system (if not a terribly convenient or logical one), and it quickly became too hot to allow to live. Apple restricted it to streaming within a subnet, and Cory Doctorow wrote a volcanic essay about how Apple was screwing its users over for the Man yet again. But they had never advertised this as a supported feature in the first place.

Comments

[astrange.livejournal.com]

At least one other player will play AAC, but I forgot the name. Nothing else will play the special stuff from the iTunes store until someone figures out how the DRM works.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

This is just full of venom. Grrrr.

Oops

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Now others are saying you actually can't burn DRMed songs to MP3 CDs (which is what I would have expected). You can burn them to audio CDs though (I've done this several times myself).

I should shut up about experiments I haven't tried myself.

Some people have been pestering Jobs about the possibility of cheap iPods-- maybe 128MB flash-based ones with no hard drive, just all the other features and some variant of the iPod interface. That would be technically feasible and it would be cool if they existed, but to be competitive I doubt Apple could charge the kind of margin on them that they can on iPods, so they probably wouldn't do it.

Still, given that their download store seems to be doing brisk business already and some of the new features and promotions are clearly gunning for kids, there's an open niche for some downmarket player a teenager can afford that can play songs with Apple's DRM. They might be able to make some money by licensing it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Typical Microsoft FUD, and he completely neglects the existence of services that legally sell or give away unrestricted MP3s, which of course will play in Apple's world just fine. But it is true that Apple wants to suck people into a vertically integrated walled garden to some extent. They've opened it up to some degree because the moneymaking strategy has shifted to iPods, but that means that whatever they do is going to be iPod-centric to some extent.

If the record companies ever have the courage to reduce their cut (or get outcompeted by somebody who will), then it's possible that Apple could actually make a nonnegligible profit on distribution, in which case the iTMS itself could become the profit center, and the strategy would change again to include more players. As it is, I suppose they could open things up a little by licensing their DRM scheme, as I said elsewhere.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

In windows machines, post '98 at least (that I've used), you can presumably rerecord AAC tracks as WAV internally using hardware recording (that is, by getting any recording app to record from your soundcard) and just possibly through software recording (such as with a program like Total Recorder, which has a sounddriver that permits it to record directly from software players). Macs can do the former, as far as I can tell, but not with any of the free software that'll come with a Mac-- the feature just isn't offered. (Whereas the basic Windows Sound Recorder can indeed manage hardware recording.)

YMMV in Windows with your soundcard and its drivers; some card/driver combinations make this easy, others make it more complex (with some compensations, usually). But once you get that worked out, turning AAC files into MP3 files should be relatively easy, and possibly could be automated.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

BTW, thank goodness they support non-iPod players. I agree with Brian Tiemann that iTunes's migration to Windows is probably more to sell iPods than music, but at least there's hope. (We'll see if it lasts-- if Apple really does want to sell iTunes, it could cut that support.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't think they're working very hard on supporting other players, mind you. And Phil Schiller has as much as said publicly that it's a loss leader for iPods. The danger here is losing respect if that becomes too obvious and intrusive a fact.