Like the fact that 90% of all music sold is infact without DRM. It’s called CDs.

And that there are three options for Apple when it comes to DRM: Continue as today (with DRM in iTunes), license FairPlay (not an option, says Jobs) or third: Get rid of the whole DRM thing:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

Impressive. It will be very interesting to see if any music industry leaders react to this. Do they even put their thoughts online like this? Also interesting to see Steve Jobs doing it. It has been a rather strict Apple policy to not “blog”.

Note to Eirik: Steve is on your side.

Update: Gruber

And as always, John Gruber has an excellent analysis:

In other words, the music industry wants a magical DRM format that gives them — not Apple, not Microsoft — complete control over all digital music. And a unicorn and a rainbow.

Now, mr. boss of huge movie company: Let me buy the movies! I have my credit card ready. I’m willing to let my computer download all night to get the movies in HD. I would even tolerate DRM (but would prefer not). I find it absolutely amazing that here we have an industry that doesn’t want to make money.

And when (if ever) you start putting whole movies in HD in iTunes… check your atlas. Or wikipedia. There are 6.5 billion people on earth. 300 million in the US. You do the math.

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.

But an independent review is to recommend the terms are not extended, a well-placed government source has said.

Gee, let me think. So “Love me do” will be out of copyright in 2012? Out of copyright as in f-r-e-e? Hmmm. Better start selling…

So when I heard about Tangerine, an application that scans my iTunes library and figures out the BPM – Beats Per Minute – on all my tracks, I downloaded it immediately.

Perfect for running

I would use it like this:

• Scan all my tunes, and get BPM for all of them
• Make a test run, and figure out which pace that fits the running I’m doing
• Make playlists that starts at a certain pace, and speed things up at the end
• Or make playlists that mix paces, slow at the start, then faster, slower again etc.

Tangerine does all this. Tags my tunes with the right BPM. Make playlists. Very cool!

Except that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t find my iTunes music library. It may be because I have an Norwegian version of OS X, so the music folder is called “Musikk”. But other apps using the iTunes music library finds it, so it’s just a guess.

Tangerine is still in Beta, and others reports having the same problems as I do. Others tell that it works flawlessly. I’m really looking forward to the next version and hope that it will find my music library and start tagging it.

Do it manually (or maybe not…)

In the meantime, I’m using the bpmWidget. It works like this: Download and install (as a widget). Start a song in iTunes, and tap the widget with the beat for some seconds. Then hit the small note icon to copy that BPM value to the current song playing in iTunes. Repeat 8 000 times for all your songs. Sigh… Tangerine! Where’s that next version?!

I don’t know if this is old news, if anyone has suggested something like this before blah blah blah. But this is a very nice icon representing a podcast:

I think it’s brilliant. I found it at the Dumb Little Man blog, that showed up on a search I did on del.icio.us today. It’s made by Spoiltchild, but I couldn’t find any mention of it on their site.

I especially liked Nathan Ziarek’s ideas on how to share music between members of a family. Infact, Apple should take this even further, and make an Xserve for families.

It could work like this: A special Xserve with special Apple software is installed somewhere safe in your house, a place cold and where no one can hear it. It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

The family Xserve should also have a tv-tuner and an EPG, making it possible for all users in the house to plan recordings even if they where “off-site” with their Macbooks.

…if people look at it and their initial reaction is “Oh, it’s an iPod rip-off,” that’s a pretty crummy first impression. Does anyone at Microsoft realize that rip-offs aren’t considered cool?

A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Then again, Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” By that standard the people on the Zune team must be a bunch of Michelangelos, eh?

A: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

Excellent analysis as always from John Gruber.

Put this link into iTunes or your podcasting app of choice. Or use the button in the left sidebar.

I set it up today, and I can’t figure out why not all the latest posts are there. I’ll check back in a few days and see if it is fixed.

What do you think? The computer generated voice was much better than I expected, and it is a great feature for people who can’t read webpages for different reasons.

And a “Put on site”:

• Baum, L. Frank. The Road to Oz
• Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
• Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground
• The Founding Fathers. The Constitution of the United States
• Irving, Washington. Old Christmas
• James, Henry. An International Episode
• London, Jack. Call of the Wild
• Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus
• Wodehouse, PG. Psmith in the City

You can help them, by reading books yourself, and upload them to their server.

And that it’s just a hype that will end pretty soon. Yeah, right. Now people will FILL their iPods with all the videos from Usenet. Lots of skin I would guess. Which of course is a sign of a mature technology that’s here to stay.

Update: Another reason. PodDater lets you download videos of profiles for dating. Mating on your iPod.

This is what is going on with downloadable television at the moment. Although PVR ownership is growing there is still far too much money on the table for television executives to offer us anything compelling. Why innovate when there is still tons of dough to make in commercials and DVD sales? To offer us a truly compelling service would mean disrupting their current rich, but declining, revenue streams and they are still too lucrative at this point for them to do this. Unfortunately.

So what do they do instead? They offer us a bunch of very limited crap alternatives that people won’t end up using to pay lip service to the idea of video on demand. And whether it’s the crappy “start over” service from Time Warner (hey, it’s great, people can’t skip the ads) or a download service from Apple (but with expensive sucky low res versions of shows) or these two latest offerings from NBC (NBC’s service will only work with DirecTV DVRs, uh hello McFly) and CBS (their service will contain commercials), these are all stupid offerings that have no or limited appeal at best.

Picture yourself driving in a rickety old Lincoln four-door convertible, one that looks suspiciously like the one in which JFK was assassinated, but to avoid criticism, you lie and say that it was made several years after his death. The air is cold on your face and you wonder why you’re even driving a convertible on such a cold night. The car is an orchestra of noises; there’s a rhythmic ping noise coming from behind the dash, a repetitive clicking in the passenger side paneling and thick fuzz spewing from the speakers.

You’re driving down a long highway and you see a dirt road to the right that leads to an old refinery, lit up like a tiny city. You’re compelled by the thousands of dotted lights and the smell of oil, so you veer off the road and the Lincoln bumps its way to the factory. Then it starts raining. By now you’re driving through the factory, and just after the rain starts, there’s a huge explosion on the other side of the factory and a loud alarm goes off right around you.

Throughout all of this, your little brother is, for some reason, sitting in the backseat playing the original Mario Brothers on Nintendo and beating Bowser.

Read it here. The concert in Oslo is February 28, 2006.

“Only” $1,015…

If you’re new to Last.fm, it works like this: You download a plugin for your music player software. There are a number of plugins found here. Install the proper plugin for your OS and player. Some of the plugins also works with mp3-players like the iPod. So when you sync your iPod, it sends the tracks played to the plugin.

Register with Last.fm and create a free account.

Next time you play a song, the plugin will send the artist and track name to Last.fm. Now the whole world can see what you’re playing. Scary for some, cool for some! My Last.fm status page is here.

When you have registered (or if you already are a Last.fm user), head over to the brilliantdays.com group, and join. When 15 people have joined, you can see the collective music taste of the members at the group page.

This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Chris Pirillo thinks.

1) It’s too small. People are now buying 32″ and 42″ and even 50″ flatscreen TVs. 20″ isn’t enough. I would like Apple to stick together the 30″ display with the iMac. If you just took an iMac without the screen, you could glue it on the back of the 30″!

2) The harddisk is too small. With the OS and a full Final Cut Studio install, almost 60 GB is used. When I first digitized all the CDs, I used AAC. But if I should use the Mac as the station for playing music at stereo at home, I would redigitize most CDs as pure 44100 KHz AIFF. That would take lots of space. Add videos, audiobooks, podcast (many with video), and 250 GB would be gone in days.

What Apple really should consider is making a home edition of the Xserve with an Xserve Raid. Install it in a closet somewhere you can’t hear it, put cables around the house. And let all music and video stay on the Xserve instead of the individual computers. Make a version of iTunes that just hooks up to the Xserve Home, and puts all media there.

3) Look at the picture of the iMac with the new Front Row software again. Four “buttons”: Music, Videos, DVD and Photos. What’s missing? TV. Why on earth isn’t there a TV tuner inside?? Unbelievable. If Apple want people to put their Macs in the living room they have to make the screen bigger and put a TV-tuner inside. I want to record my own TV-shows. I want to pause live TV. I want to use an EPG to program which programs I want to record.

Also: Make an easy way to make plugins for Front Row. I want to be able to see my RSS feeds in there as well. The weather. The webcam for the roads on the way to work. The babycall from the kids room. Just add two more buttons, TV and Yours. And make an easy way for people to hook all kinds of things up to the software under Yours. Many of the widgets people have made for Tiger would be very nice to use (in a different form) on a big TV-screen with a remote. I would even consider reading mail in there, if the interface was good enough.

Update: And if you didn’t know – Battlestar Galactica is now available for download in the iTunes Music Store! Watch on the bus, at work, in class, in the pool (oh wait…)

The most important thing missing in iTunes 5 is a history menu. Or log menu.

I have blogged about it before, I have reported it to Apple before, and I’m repeating it: Why isn’t there a history menu in iTunes? It doesn’t make sense at all.

Try this: Browse the podcast directory, choose a category (like television):

Find a podcast that you would like to subscribe to, click the arrow to see the info page for that podcast:

When the infopage is up, hit subscribe. Now iTunes switches to the podcast view in where I see all my podcast.

OK, now I want to go back to the podcast directory and check out some more podcasts. Where is that back button?

To get back where I were 10 seconds ago, I have to click on the “podcast” button on the bottom of the screen to see the iTunes music store podcast view, then click on one of the categories on the right. Then find the sub-category if I were browsing those.

No good. Let us have an iTunes history menu.

It’s still in beta, and is free. It will also be free when it’s final. LinoType does this beacuse the program has access to the LinoType font store, just as iTunes has the iTunes music store.

One cool feature is that FontExplorer X can activate fonts missing from documents for Quark and Adobe apps. You can find them in your collection or buy them online.

It syncs with iTunes and iPhoto, and has an option to reduce the size of the files to get more of them on your phone. And – it can convert videos from your Mac onto the W800 with one click. Nice!

And most amazing: Dot-Pod. Which lets people connect to your iPod from the internet, controlling which songs to play. Ok, that must be the number one fastest way to mess up your iPod hard drive since some crazy engineers at Blackmagic Design used an iPod as scratch disk for HD material in Final Cut Pro.

(via eirikso)

With all this going on: How come there is no History-list in iTunes?

I need one! When I browse music at Amazon.com or any other webbased musicstore, I can use Safari’s history-list to see which pages I have visited.

Not so in iTunes. No list at all.

What I want, is something similar to the History tab in Photoshop. Not only does it show everything you have done, but it also have different icons for different actions.

iTunes need some kind of list like this, not to be able to go back and undo things. But to be able to see my footprints later – to be able to go back and see which songs I played and pages I viewed on the net with iTunes.

Here are some of the categories I would like to have:

• (Recent) Songs played
• (Recent) Songs added/imported to iTunes library
• (Recent) Songs transfered to iPod
• Songs deleted
• Pages viewed at iTunes Musicstore (one for each of the contries you use)
• (Recent) searches in iTunes Musicstore
• Imixes submitted
• Quicktime movies watched
• Podcasts downloaded
• Podcasts subscribed

When choosing one of these categories in the new History menu in iTunes, a list with the 100 recent items (or more if you set that number up in preferences) shows up, with a title, and a date. Choosing some of the will make that song play or page open. Choosing “Songs deleted” will just show a dialog box saying something like this:

“Songblahblah by bandblahblah was deleted from your iTunes library on monday, at 23:12. It has also been deleted from the harddisk. Do you want to do a Spotlight search for it?” and a “Yes” and “No” button.

Or: “Songblahblah by bandblahblah was deleted from your iTunes library on monday, at 23:12. It is still in that Trash. Do you want to put it back in the iTunes library?” and a “Yes” and “No” button.

If you haven’t thought about this before: With Spotlight you can search anything on your drives, even inside documents. With Safari, you can see all pages you have visited for ages back. But with iTunes: Nothing.

What do you think? Have you ever missed a History-list in iTunes? Use the comments!

Make sure the files are bookmarkable on your iPod; AAC files can be made bookmarkable, while MP3 files cannot.

Update

Michael has updated the article for iTunes 6:

Importing CDs for audio books can be kind of painful, because there are usually a lot of them. To make matters worse, each CD usually has dozens of tracks on it, which makes it a nightmare to manage on the small screen of an iPod. Worst of all, the track names are rarely recognized by the automatic lookup service, so you need to enter them by hand. This import process attempts to reduce the amount of manual input, while also making sure that the track information is highly usable on an iPod.

A way to backup all the extra attributes for songs in iTunes into each file’s metadata and restore it as a cheap protection against the DB going south. Hopefully a later version of iTunes will have this.

…writes Codepoetry.net. Ah, yes. That would help. I must have lost all my ratings at least 10 times.

I will eat this post if Final Cut Pro is the “latest version announced” the day after NAB, 22nd of April.

Here’s what I would like to see in FCP 5.0:

Move before import
I would like to see a checkbox somewhere when I’m importing something. When this is checked, files are moved to the current Capture scratch folder before importing. I’ve blogged about this before.

One click CD import
In the File menu I would like to see: Import drom audio CD. Then a iTunes-ish window pops up, where I check which tunes to import. Or listen to them. When clicking import, all files go to your projects folder in Capture scratch, inside a folder marked by CD name, artist etc (just like iTunes does).

One click Backup project
Put “Backup project” in a menu somewhere. Pick a sequence or several, and choose “Backup project”. It saves all files that can’t be batched. That is imported soundfiles from CDs, graphic files etc. But not things that came from tapes, those can be batched (batch digitize). FCP then collects all the files, reports if any are missing, and asks for a destination. And tell you to insert an empty DVD if you want to backup to DVD. The folder (or DVD) it then creates is called “(name of project) backup 040205″ by default but yoy can change it. It also puts a PDF-file with the names of the tapes needed to batch the sequence. That way, you can give the DVD to an assistant without FCP on his Mac, and he/she still will be able to find the tapes and put them at your desk.

iTunes and iPhoto tabs in Browser
I would like an iTunes tab in the Final Cut Pro browser. Just like we have “Effects”. When clicking this tab I see all my iTunes tracks, and also my playlists. This would be a HUGE timesaver, as we have all our audio effects in iTunes. With a iTunes Tab I could get to all the sound effects without using other software.

Same goes with iPhoto, even though it’s much more seldom I need photos in FCP.

Multiuser iTunes enviroment
This is not a Final Cut Pro wish, but adresses an important issue for FCP users working at bigger post houses or schhols where several stattions are connected through a fast network or a SAN. Let’s say you have 200 sound effects CDs that you want 10 FCP Macs to share. You insert every single one into iTunes on one Mac and import every track (in 48 KHz of course). Thanks to CDDB you don’t have to type all the names!

When all the sound effects are imported, and stored in a single folder on the SAN or network, go to every FCP Mac and import the whole folder again. Remember to check off that option that moves songs you import. The whole point is that the sounds should stay at the server/SAN.

OK, so now we have 10 FCP Macs with access to all our sound effects. The licence for this is of course ok. No stealing here.

Then, next week, you get 15 more CDs. You import them on the first Mac, then what? Then you have to do the same import again for all 10 Macs. No good.

iTunes is a great program for music and sound effects. Apple should make a version that lets an administrator update the library on several Macs from one central location. Not to steal or copy music illegally, but to make things easier for the companies that uses their other software, like Logic and Final Cut Pro.

It could be connected in some way to Apple Remote Desktop 2, or maybe XSAN. And only work on the same subnet. This would prevent it from being misused by people who just want to copy music between Macs.

What are your top wishes?