strollin wrote: Another drawback to using a USB drive besides the relatively small size (although I've seen them as large as 32G now) is that they are slow performance wise. They're also easily lost or misplaced. You would be better off with an external hard drive to store your music.
Between my 4 kids and I we have had quite a few (more than a dozen) different mp3 players. By far the least reliable/most fragile are the iPods. The best players we've used are from Creative. We consider iTunes to be one of the negatives for having an iPod.
The only area where iPods clearly are the winner is in the available accessories.
I have not experienced any problems with iTunes or any of the iPods that I, my 15 year old son, 12 year old daughter or wife have had. Starting with the first generation that I owned to the iTouch I currently have all have performed flawlessly and some were down right abused. When I have upgraded, I sold the old models on eBay. iTunes also is very user friendly. FOr me, hands down the iPods are the way to go.
Some folks don't like iPod because it requires iTunes to manage it, some because it's Apple and they're old fogie PC heads. Bottom line is that the iPod is the world standard of MP3 players, and that's a fact. They and iTunes are reliable, stable, reasonably rugged (better than most), available everywhere, and understood by anyone computer savvy at all. Love em’ or not, Apple has changed the music world from one end to the other.
I keep my iTunes library on a 250G external drive backed up by another external drive that automatically grabs at least the last month worth of iTunes backup files as well as it's play list (directory). Treat your iTunes as you would the family pictures, because some day you'll wish you had.
What does DRM actually do?
Sounds like you download from Itunes to your PC, but then can only copy it off to a IPOD or CD a certain # of times?
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What does DRM actually do?
Sounds like you download from Itunes to your PC, but then can only copy it off to a IPOD or CD a certain # of times?
DRM is essentially copy protection. Microsoft uses one with Media Center, RealPlayer uses something else, and Apple uses FairPlay with iTunes (being phased out!). It is designed so that if you buy a song you can't copy it on a thumb drive and give it to your friend.
iTunes tracks the # of physical devices (in theory) you load songs to and tries to limit you to 5. My wife and I share an iTunes account on 2 computers and both have iPhones AND iPods (= 6 devices) and I've never had trouble with the DRM. As best I can tell iTunes effectively limits you to 5 computers but doesn't track the # of iPods you use.
iTunes does not count burning to a CD, you can do that as many times as you like. This is actually the easiest method to remove DRM - download a song, burn to CD, delete the original song (or backup and delete), then copy off the CD.
Apple is actively phasing out FairPlay DRM with iTunes Plus content. Plus content (denoted by a "+" next to the name in iTunes store) is encoded at a higher bit rate and does not have DRM. The issue with DRM is not the stores but rather the Record Companies and the RIAA. They would have everything DRM'ed and you should have to pay every time you play a song! Apple has publicly supported the removal of DRM as it is ineffective at what it does. I think the most effective (and proven) model thus far is the iTunes Store model where it is so easy to buy the music people don't bother hunting around the P2P networks to find it.
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Sounds like you download from Itunes to your PC, but then can only copy it off to a IPOD or CD a certain # of times?
For most people it doesn't do anything for them. Never had an issue with DRM. DRM is to keep people from passing the song around or putting it on the internet to file share. It allows you to play the music on 5 computers , unlimited ipods and burn the same playlist 10 times(then you just change the order of the music and burn more).
It was demanded by the record companies and Apple campaigned to have it removed as it was ineffectual. Any time you burn a CD of DRM music the DRM is removed.
EMI was the first one to agree with Apple and offered to put their music on itunes DRM free. Then the other companies saw this as a way to reduce the power of Apple and itunes and gave everyone else DRM free music BUT Apple. They figure if the can reduce the market power of Apple then they will raise the price of songs. Apple still refused to raise the price of songs over .99 . The record companies want to do varing prices and new songs can be as high as $2. Apple believes people will pay .99 for a song and not bother to go online and steal it, but if it's $2 then the will just file share the song for free. So far they have been right.
Just remember when you buy MP3 music from other places you are buying music at lesser quality and you are contributing to the advancement of higher prices.
I won't buy any songs other then itunes. As long as they fight the record companies to keep the prices low.
Thanks for all the info guys!
Played with Itunes, ripping a couple CD's, and loading to my Daughter's IPOD.
Itunes does seem pretty slick & easy!
Now maybe look into an external harddrive for backing-up our music and pictures.
Thanks again.
I can't remember how I did it, but whenever I put an audio cd in, it is automatically ripped to the harddrive. Somewhere in the settings. I use Windows Media Player, but others are probably better.
By choosing IPod, you lock yourself into ITunes for managing your music library. That's the Apple way of doing things.
You can use ITunes to convert MP3s to the Apple format used by IPod.
My experience is with daughter's single IPod. One IPod, one ITunes library on one computer. I'm not sure what complications come from using two IPods, I presume the girls want different libraries?
For the granddaughters, we went to simpler MP3 players, just maintain a directory of music and copy it over to the player; son-in-law feels he has more control, Apple has none.
I have a Zune. Love it! No ties to Apple or the DRM bad compression! The music I want (Old Blues and Jazz) is not avaible on ITunes. I get it from my CDs or from Yahoo or Amazon for $1.99. The I Pod restricted me on what I could download and where I could put it. Itunes erased all of my music because I tryed to move something from my friends MP3 player that was not on my Ipod list. Never an Ipod for me again! I will control what music I can get and where from!
Q: If I use iPod as my digital-media player, I can only download music from the iTunes Store.
A: Not true. You can download music from other sites (as long as the site doesn't use Windows Media DRM -- iPod isn't compatible with that encoding).
Q: If I use iPod as my digital-media player, I can only use the iTunes software as my jukebox.
A: Not true. While iPod is made to work with the iTunes software, there are other jukeboxes out there that you can use with your iPod.
Q: If I download MP3 or WAV files to my iPod, they'll be converted into a proprietary audio format.
A: Not true. Downloading files to an iPod doesn't change the format. iPod can play MP3, WAV, AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless and Audible audio files.
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