Microsoft announced that tommorow users can get their hands on sleek new Zune players, redesigned Zune software, and new online services including the Zune Marketplace and Zune Social, an online music community. Users will have the option to customize their Zune player with laser-engraved designs and personal text through a new Web store called Zune Originals.
The new redesigned Zune software with Zune Marketplace and the new now playing screen looks cool.
Apple’s DRM policies are not all that restrictive. If you want to buy an MP3 through iTunes, you most certainly can - so long as the artist or label allow you to do so. That’s not Apple’s fault, is it? #.
But the last time I checked Apple offers over 2 million DRM-free tracks with AAC encoding. AmazonMP3 too offers over 2 million DRM-free tracks but in MP3 format. Its Apple who chose AAC for DRM-free music not labels or artists. Now tell me whose fault is it Chris.
∞Lots of iPod and music related news from Apple yesterday which doesn’t make me buy another iPod, but I did order an iPhone.
∞Watch Steve Jobs introducing the very first iPod at a low key event in 2001. The rest is history.
Microsoft plans to jazz up its music player in Windows Vista, the company’s next operating system. But at least some of the new features will debut much sooner. The software, which will be built into Vista, is designed to offer better synching with portable devices, make it easier to scroll through long libraries of music, and be tightly integrated with Urge, a new subscription and download music service co-developed by Microsoft and MTV Networks. Microsoft is on track to release a Windows XP version of Windows Media Player 11 before the end of June, the company confirmed last week. Microsoft has said the XP version won’t have all the features of its Vista sibling, but the company won’t say which features will be excluded. The company also has yet to offer a public test version of the software. Check more details.
The RIAA has been going around trying to villify P2P end users as “pirates” and “downloaders”,but on November 15, 2004, in testimony before the Federal Trade Commission, the RIAA admitted that most P2P end users whose files are in a “shared files folder” don’t even know that their files are in a shared files folder. According to “Recording Industry vs The People”,
As an initial matter, P2P software may, upon installation, automatically search a user’s entire hard drive for content. Files that users have no intention of sharing may end up being offered to the entire P2P network. Continued sharing of personal information is hard to avoid and is facilitated by confusing and complicated instructions for designating shared items. A study by Nathaniel S. Good and Aaron Krekelberg at HP Laboratories showed that “the majority of the users…were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive. #.