The Brunch Table

So, Apple did indeed dump a new iTunes, iPod, and digital music store today, and now that their server load has died down a bit, I’ve taken the software and service for a spin.

At first blush, iTunes 4 doesn’t seem shockingly different from its predecessors. The note in the iTunes icon is now XBox green instead of Aqua blue. Apple’s resident design wankers have changed the buttons yet again, to the flat metal look first seen in Safari. There’s also a new button in the lower-left corner, which shows and hides a new panel for displaying album covers. These images are provided with purchased songs, but there doesn’t seem to be any handy automatic way to get them for normal MP3s or CDs. However, it’s straightforward enough to open a browser and drag in the appropriate image from the Amazon or CD Baby site. These images are stored in the actual song files (in the ID3 tags?)–they don’t show up when streaming songs via Rendezvous, but if you copy the file to another machine (remember, boys and girls, for personal use only!), the album cover image is carried along. Speaking of the Rendezvous streaming, this is the most compelling feature of the new iTunes by far. Once you’ve turned on sharing in the iTunes preferences (and after clicking through a nag telling you not to share promiscuously), anyone else running iTunes 4 on the same network will see your collection in the playlist area. They can then effortlessly browse and play your music over the network pretty much the same as the files on their machine.

The music store manifests itself as a playlist called “Music Store”, with a couple sub-items called “Shopping Cart” and “Purchased Music”. When you click on “Music Store”, you get an HTML-looking interface. However, it’s not just a web panel–the store is well-integrated with the existing parts of the the interface. The progress information is displayed in the pseudo-LCD section at the top, and the existing search form searches the store nicely (though not in real time, as in the rest of the music library).

Before you buy music (or listen to “protected” tracks streamed from another machine), you need to “authorize” your machine with an Apple Music Store account. You can authorize up to three machines at once with one particular ID. If you’re out of slots and you want to authorize another machine, you can “de-authorize” one of the previous ones. In any case, the interface walks you through the process of associating your existing Apple ID with the store or creating a new one, including entering credit card information. Apple loses big points here with validation problems on its credit card forms. I had to go back a couple times because the form wanted the credit card number without spaces, and it wanted my zip code instead of my zip+4 (which had been filled in automatically). I hope that some day, programming languages will make it easy for computers to understand information the way that humans write it down, because the programmers certainly aren’t making the effort to do it now.

Once your account is all set up, you’re ready to consume! You can browse through the selection and buy sundry tracks for 99 cents apiece, or you can buy entire albums for set prices (usually about $10). Some albums are partial, missing a few tracks, and some tracks can only be had as part of the entire album. The record company apparently gets 65 cents per track; I assume they probably pass on, say, 1 or 2 cents to the artist. Once you’ve found some tracks that you like, checkout is a breeze, and the songs start downloading straight into your library, freshly imprinted to you like hatchling chicks.

iTunes offers a menu item to convert a file to MP3, but trying to do that to a download file (which are in DRM-burdened AAC format) nets you an error. Presumably, you could burn it to a music CD, then re-rip it as an MP3, though I haven’t tried it yet. Thankfully, iTunes doesn’t foolishly limit the burning of downloaded tracks, other than preventing you from burning a particular playlist more than 10 times.

Other companies (Amazon, for example), have sold tracks for a buck before, but none have made it so painless. By integrating the store into a piece of software that most Mac users (and many Windows users) want to have on their machines anyway, and by keeping iTunes simple and streamlined rather than turning it into rococo RealAudio-style schlockware, Apple makes paying for downloaded music more compelling than ever before. The question is, will a good user experience and quality metadata triumph over the near-infinite selection of free, unfettered files available on the file-sharing nets of the world?