Apple, the US computer maker, is expected to launch its popular internet music store in Europe tomorrow, in an attempt to build on the company's considerable success in the US online music market.

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iTunes is launched. http://www.apple.com/uk/

For the french like me who have an iTunes that always starts on the U.S store simply do this :

Close the active session, ask t create a new account, then cancel, the french pages comes.

In the pop-up menu at the bottom chose France (shown as set but doesn't work)

And now open a session and the store will be in french.

I don't know if the germans and british have the same problem of getting the localised start page. But that trick might work for them too.

And the songs only cost 0.99€ (Germany/France) instead of 1.64071€ ( =1.09£ in the UK by Napster). But still $0.99 = 0.818415€. Conversions from xe.com

what bitrate does napster use? 128 or 192kbps?

128 kbps WMA std AFAIK

hm, if you pay 0.99$ for a song in the us, is the tax included? or will you all in all have to pay more than 0.99$?

Yes, there is tax here, so for example, 4 songs here in Indiana costs $4.20.

So the european version is cheaper than the US one...

I tried it yesterday and found some old stuff I didn't have (like US versions of singles). But for the most part it's very empty for the kind of music I'm listeing to (electronic of all kinds). So IMO it's good for mainstream (and even for lots of artists you only half of the albums and a 5th of the singles) but for rare of underground music it's shit (and most likely will always will).

Apparently there are reasons for why there are so few independant music on iTMS : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/apple_itunes_indies/

Unfortunately, us Danes will have to wait until October

The independent music selection (as well as more mainstream stuff) will no doubt increase as time goes on. The US store has about 3 times the tracks of the European ones but started out nearly the same.

The UK indie music association is really trying to pressure Apple with their press releases about the negotiations and laying it on thick with the melodrama (including my pet peeve: incorrect usage of 'monopoly').

It's interesting for example to say that "The White Stripes are refusing to license their music to iTunes" when if you go to the US store you'll find exclusive tracks available to download along with the rest of their back catalogue. It sounds much more like a label problem rather than an artist one.

But regardless, it's just a negotiation tactic, so we'll see them soon enough once a deal is struck.

Technical observation.
A french guy had uploaded a short sample of a file bought in french online store.
http://rapha83.free.fr/bazar/extrait_pauljohnson_itunes.wav

Graphical representation is really surprising. First, there's a lowpass at 16 khz. But beyond this value, and up to 20 Khz, informations are available, without any 'hole', but at low energy. This behaviour is totally different from all AAC encoders available. Very different at least from QT 6.0->6.5 (lowpass at 16 Khz) and from QT 6.5.1 (visible 'ringing' beyond 16Khz).

We can't conclude anything about quality, but we are sure that the encoder used by the store (at least for this file) is really different from encoders we tested in the recent past.

I wonder if they are using QuickTime AAC at "Best" instead of "Better".

QT “best” looks similar to “better”. It's probably a different encoder.

It's a shame they didn't post the m4a file which may contain info about the encoder used.