EDIT: iTunes 4.1 is now available for download for Mac OS X and Windows NT & XP. Among the noteworthy features in the Macintosh version is "error correction" when ripping CDs. I just tested it on an old burned CD, and it seemed to work quite well. For Windows, the most noteworthy new feature is it's existence

Apple just had a press event where they announced a new version of iTunes, probably iTunes 5, for both Mac and Windows PCs running XP or NT. It will probably be on the iTunes page later today. The full story from MacMinute:

It's out for Windows now.

I can't get the darned program to run (on Windows). It starts, tries to access the Internet in the background (so says ZoneAlarm) but all I see is an error message:

"The folder iTunes cannot be found or created, and is required. The default location for this folder is inside the Music folder"

Bloatware alert #1: Conveniently installs QuickTime 6.4 for you.

(Sorry, I was skeptical in another thread about iTunes being bloatful just like QuickTime.)

Quite an arrogant statement, considering the 100's of thousands of programs written for Windows, also considering iTunes was rushed into service, I am doubting that statement will hold true.

New option in iTunes 4.1 on the Mac:

Preferences -> Importing -> Use error correction when reading Audio CDs

The blurb next to the checkbox says:

"Use this option if you experience problems with the audio quality from Audio CDs. This may reduce the speed of importing."

Neato!

Well I just downloaded and installed iTunes on my laptop running Windows XP.

First time I have ever used iTunes. It looks almost identical to the screenshots of the Mac version that I have seen. Same type of interface.

Sounds really good from what I have heard so far. I justed ripped an album and encoded with AAC 128kbit and was very very impressed with the quality for such a low bitrate. Since I have always used Musepack --standard, this is a huge surprise. I can definitely hear problems with the highs (such as high-hats on drums), but overall I have never been more impressed with a 128kbit lossy file before. Very surprised with the stereo separation, I was worried about that.

What are the DRM restrictions (if any) for ripped AAC files (not the ones downloaded from the iTunes Music Store). Speaking of which, I haven't tried but I probably will soon.

I really like the interface, especially for managing playlists and burning CD's.

Also I noticed a feature to keep the volume level for songs the same. Curious how that works.

What is everyone's experience with higher bitrates? With AAC is there a huge gain going to 160kbit or 192 kbit?

iTunes for Windows cannot read tag from mp4 file created with Nero and tagged with tg.exe. (foobar and dbPowerAmp can read tags fine)

I just installed it, and it's pretty sexy looking. It speaks to my creative side for some reason. I hadn't been this excited about installing any piece of software ever. It hasn't been a disappointment, really, as it's about what I expected: pretty-looking, and as functional as iTunes for Mac. It's not as powerful as Foobar or Winamp, which means that I will probably not use it for most of my music usage. I'm a sucker for a sexy interface, so I like it almost for that reason alone. I do miss my hotkeys and Replaygain, though.

No DRM at all on tracks you rip yourself.

...


I think it's similar to replay gain, if you drag in a bunch of files it 'analyzes' them, which takes a while. Don't know if it's better/worse quality.

Just installed, I can totally seeing myself spending any and all available extra money (which to say, isn't too much) on buying songs. Good deal and I can find the artists I want. I'm tempted to just buy this live CD from Less Than Jake that I never knew existed (well, it is titled "live from the apple store", so thats understandable).

Problems I've seen though on my computer (which is slower, but faster than recommended or minimum) are pretty much scrolling the iTMS is kind of slow. The response when clicking on "file" or something also seems slower than I might expect. Though, not terrible. Just gotta get used to how the program works.

I'm also scared that if I load up my /Music directory that iTunes will mess up everything up for me automatically.

Then, lets not forget the lack of Musepack, Vorbis, FLAC, Monkey's Audio, APEv2 tag support either. Though, there appears to be this "sound check" feature that is advertised as being like replaygain ("automatically adjusts song playback volume to same volume"). That makes me happy, and there is some "error correction" checkbox for ripping CD's. Maybe later I'll test to see if the rips are identical to the ones EAC creates (on a fairly new CD).

I really wish Apple made some way for developers to add other formats and features. I'm sure I would be more willing to make it my "constant use" application if it had the format support of Fb2k. Though, its main goal is to get iTMS to Windows users and make them want it, and I'd say that goal has finished beautifully (seeing as how my credit card is having a hard time staying in my pocket)

Oh lord, Apple is going to make so much money with this. Full Album's for 10$ (okay, not all are 10$, and those "partial albums" that still have all the songs on it but you have to buy song by song suck). Sure you're supporting the RIAA a little (not quite as much as before I think). Having it all already tagged and a high quality rip in a pretty good quality format, being able to preview. So hard to resist, it's such a good deal (if it were lossless and at the same price, I wouldn't be eating next week).

Has anyone done any listening tests on AAC files produced by iTunes? Also noticed there is a new Quicktime version (6.4) that you have to install with iTunes, I assume iTunes uses that to encode. Curious if there has been any improvements with the quality over previous versions of iTunes and quicktime.

Hmm... I'm beginning to think that iTunes is merely a very powerful front-end for QuickTime. Can anyone else confirm or deny this?

Since iTune seems to require QuickTime, I'm going to assume that it uses QT to do all the encoding and decoding.

That said, Ogg Vorbis support is available for QuickTime from here. This may enable support in iTunes.

Once I get home, I'm going to install all the stuff and check into this more closely. I'll post back with my findings.

Edit: Oh yeah, for the Mac users, it seems there's a newer Ogg Vorbis QT component available here.

Finaly!
The day i've been waiting for!

Only dissapointing thing is the lack of Ogg Vorbis support.
Stupid thing to ignore, there's support for the format in the Mac OSX version.

Anyone with information about this support?

[edit: thanks to the poster above me ]

160kbit AAC files sound SOOOOO good with a very limited and definitely not double-blind listening test I tried out...yeah I know, I plan to do an ABX test later on when I get more free time.

Haven't got a chance to compare an iTunes with error checking rip to an EAC rip, but so far listening to the 2 albums I ripped I haven't noticed any audible ripping errors.

More than likely. If I understand the MacOS multimedia system correctly, QT pretty much backs the whole thing. All apps encode and decode through it. I'd guess that they would do the same with the Windows version, rather than rewrite significant portions of iTunes just for Win32.

Of course, if I'm completely off my rocker, someone please smack me.

WRONG!

I rip in EAC encode with QuickTime and tag with TG.EXE.

Import with tags works fine with me.

BUT!

Wrong move from Apple here. You'll need to rename your MP4 files to M4A for it to work.

Sad but true.

But at least my MP4 with accented chars works fine tagged with the UTF version of TG.EXE since iTunes got them right.

Have you or anyone else gotten this component to work? I have no idea how to get it to work with QuickTime 6.4 and subsequently, can't get iTunes to play my Oggs.

Err... They're following the MPEG-4 spec. AFAIK, MP4 files are supposed to contain video and audio. M4A files are just audio files.

I'm very very impressed. It's not as a crappy as QuickTime, it's completely an OS X equal. I just hope that people will be willing to make plug-ins for QT for Windows to allow the playback of the other great formats out there. If this happens I can see iTunes becoming the killer music player on Windows as well.

Download oggvorbis.qtx and put it inn your C:\WINDOWS\system32\QuickTime folder.

Direct link: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/qtcompo...is.zip?download

ogg vorbis works, but is *very* slow. i'll stay with foobar for sure

Doh!!! I put it in the QuickTime Plugins directory. Quicktime can now play back my Oggs, but iTunes still can't. I doubt Musepack will be supported either. It's a nice interface alright, but I don't think it'll substitute for Fb2k for me. I'd probably fall in love with it if I actually owned an iPod, rather than a Neuros..... Oh well.

EDIT: @ilikedirtthe2nd, how'd you manage to get it to work?

EDIT2: how'd you manage to get it to work in iTunes?

make sure you have "write" rights on your "My Music" folder and that it is not read only. did the trick for me.

too bad the store is available for US customers only . again Europe is left behind

edit: been testing it for 15 mins now and I must say, this is the type of program that will keep me away from p2p networks. If the record companies want us to not share music illegally anymore, they just have to support iTunes or similar initiatives. I'm already loving it and I can't even buy songs :'( !!!

sthayashi: Tried to put it in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\QuickTime folder stupid?

It's very slow and there's no support for vorbiscomments.

i did nothing special; downloaded the file, extracted it, opened itunes and dropped the files. not more...

but: itunes needs about 2 seconds for every single song to open! completely unusable

I've just noticed one thing.

QuickTime 6.4 now opens and reads .m4a files (w00t) v6.3 didn't.

But the filename limit of 64 chars is still there.

Alright. We know that Media Player Classic can use the QuickTime DLLs to play QT files. Well Media Player Classic wouldn't play the M4P files out of the box. But using QT 6.4 Pro, I saved it as a protected MOV. Media Player Classic was able to play the MOV. This shows that it is possible to use the DLLs via wrapper code to play iTMS downloaded music in other players. Hopefully Gabest is quick to route M4P files through his QT system. =)

Auto-sync with my 15GB iPod is great. Other than that, I hate just about everything on this application (mp3 playback, library management, performance, and ITMS)

EDIT: "iTunes for Windows is the best windows app ever written" ...you're right on that one, that is pure arrogance. we all know firebird is the best windows app ever written (w00t)

Grrr.... iTunes won't open my Oggs, even when I explicitly ask it to do so, EVEN THOUGH QUICKTIME HAS THE PLUGIN NOW!

You do realize this not Apple's fault but the QT plug-in's?

I was wrong earlier, there is vorbiscomment support.
But it's not perfect
-no support for chars like øæå etc.
-no tracknumber support?
-no year support?

Even if the plug-in works when I use Quicktime? Nah. Chances are, this is just another case of an I D ten T user error

At any rate, I don't think I'll install this on my home computer just yet, and seeing as I'm about to take off for home, I won't be able to determine where my problem is.

iTunes won't play oggs. Well, sort of...

Even if you got a Quicktime plugin that worked (see below) then you wouldn't get any support for tag editing, Sound Check (like Replaygain) or a thousand other things, you just get the same support as you get for .au and other crazy formats supported by Quicktime i.e. it plays and that's about it.

About the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime plug-in: the plug-in is far from flawless and the developers have laid the blame on Quicktime itself, as it is apparently unable to handle something that Vorbis needs (VBR-related possibly? I can't remember)

For those in Europe wanting to try the iTunes Music Store, all you need is an American credit card as that's how it determines where you live.

Now it become more complicate.

I've tried encode same PCM wave file with Nero 6 (latest release), QT 6.4 and zPlane AAC Encoder RC2 and tagged all the file manually with dMC then import it to iTunesWin 4.1.

iTunes can't read any tag in any file. And the very strange thing with Nero file with .m4a extension. iTunes does not even play it! (it shows "Not Available" in track length field) but when I renamed this file to .mp4, iTunes can play it.

This strange behaviour does not occur with QT and zPlain file. iTunes can play them just fine (with both m4a and mp4 extension)


I will test this on my home pc again.

Come on spoon! Where did your sense of humor go? The whole iTunes for Windows launch has been tounge-in-cheek. Even Apple's home page declares that "Hell froze over."

Hmm, yeah. iTunes doesn't seem to like our method for gapless playback. Strangely enough the mp4 plays back just fine.

Already reported to Apple.

Menno

Temporary fix: get latest foobar2000 mp4 plugin, then first extract mp4 to aac, then convert it back to mp4. Those files renamed to m4a should work in iTunes.

But when Jobs said this, he really meant it!

Anyone see this in the importing preferences... Wonder what it means...

OK, what really rocks is Rendevous/ZeroConfig support...

Unfortunately, DirectCombo Tivos don't have HomeMedia Option or I would try to see if my playlists could work on my TiVo....

As an alternative to plugins for iTunes, wouldn't it be possible to create a foobar plugin that establishes a ZeroConfig service, including automatically converting a lossless (such as FLAC or APE) or highly low-loss (such as MPC) format to either AAC or MP3? With regard to AAC, there's already a Nero MP4 encoder so all that's really needed is to direct the output to an outgoing stream instead of a file.

==================

Back to my earlier reported issue with starting iTunes... it only works in a different user profile. And copying the files from the second to my primary profile doesn't work. Nor does reverting the location of my main profiles documents (which are located on a data partition).

Any help would be appreciated...

Hi people,

Why does iTunes install two filter drivers? Wouldn't it be easier just to have an ASPI DLL in the iTunes folder?

The two drivers are GEARAspiWDM.SYS and GEARSEC.EXE. Also, the iPodservice eats up another chunk of RAM.

I have removed them and now iTunes gives me an error message when launching it.

I don't like it. I was hoping I could finally ditch EphPod, but it seems that iTunes is not what I'm looking for.

Well don't remove them...

They correspond to the burning part for CD/DVD of iTunes.

Since you can read in the "About iTunes" - "CD and DVD burning engine from Gear Software" that explains all.

It means precisely that - that errors on the CD will be corrected. I just edited the news item to mention this. A comparison between this and other rippers - EAC, CDex & cdparanoia - would be very interesting. I would be highly surprised if it turned out to be better than EAC, but you never know...

if anyones really surprised that apple is going to support ogg over aac, then you dont understand apple.

as for qt, it is the backend, and thats why it needs to be there. components (as theyre called in the mac-world) can be implemented to encode/decode any sort of file. eg, i have a ogg, 3ivx, ffusion(for xvid/divx) component in my qt library, and it allows qt to play all these files.

so all it takes is some enterprising people to write qt components for the filetypes.

Hrm, I'm not getting the Ogg Vorbis component to work in either QT or iTunes. I might need to reboot, but I can't do that tonight.

It's one hell of a memory hog, and I don't like having to leave the services running ALL THE TIME. (Hello, why not start the CD-Burning service WHEN I GO TO BURN A FSCKING CD?! THIS IS NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK! NOR DO I OWN AN IPOD?!)

Edit: The Radio is pretty cool though.

Love the interface but definitely needs work on the backend. 40+ MB RAM used for iTunes itself. And that doesn't include all the services and extra junk it loads. If it wern't for the massive RAM requirements, I'd almost consider using it. I say almost because it needs support for Vorbis, FLAC, APE, etc... aswell.

Could you or maybe someone else could write small utility that do the job (and preserve all tags to new m4a file)?

I have about 2,000 songs encoded with nero, just don't want to fix it manually.

Got iTunes installed one of our win2k boxes here. After the reboot and login, windows froze. Rebooted, logged in....froze again And again....

So just before it froze, I managed to get into the Services control panel and turn off the iPod service....it stopped doing it. So I finally got to test iTunes. It really impressed me, esp. how I can listen to previews of songs and can buy songs (well, I cant since I live outside the US) that I like rather than a whole album.

Been using iTunes and such for about 8 hours. Few things I've noticed:

- It's fully functional with the iPod, obviously. But I mean fully, as in smart playlists really work. I made a "5 star" smart playlist, starred a few things, transfered it over to the iPod. Then I used the iPod stars adjuster to change stars and voila, they updated on the smart playlist in real time, without redocking. So that all works better than any other Windows iPod interface thus far. Not even Media Center 9 can do the auto-updating smart playlists yet (soon, perhaps).

- The CD burner functions work okay, but it's almost too simple. I'll stick with Nero, as I like to customize my CDs a bit more than iTunes will let me do.

- The ripper to AAC works well. It definitely uses Quicktime as the encoder and as the playback functionality for AAC files. Didn't try MP3's but I'm assuming it uses the Quicktime stuff for that too. Remove QT 6.4 and basically everything breaks. Remove just the authoring component and the ripper breaks.

- There are OGG plugins for iTunes for Mac, but obviously no plugins for Windows yet. You should just need to plug something into QT, in theory, but I haven't tried to get anything to work yet.

- Apple also released the iTunes for Windows Visualization Plug-in SDK, here: http://developer.apple.com/sdk/ if people want to start developing vis plug-ins for iTunes for Windows. Looks interesting.

Better yet, wait until Apple releases a better version of iTunes.

Menno, who's bad is this? Did you guys at Nero go against the standard, or is Apple failing to proporly implement said standard?