I'm surprised there's not a huge thread about this already. Perhaps because it's not available to windows users (yet) that it's not getting more discussion. Or perhaps people just haven't heard how cool it is.

Here are highlights
- AAC sound - far better quality than mp3 files
- 200k+ songs available at launch and growing
- very fast searching/browsing
- every single song has a 30 second streaming demo at full bitrates
- every song is downloadable for $0.99 with a single click. Listen to the sample, decide you like it, and within 1 or 2 seconds, you own the song on your computer.
- most albums are downloadable for $9.99
- the songs can be played in iTunes, burned to CD (as many times as you want) or downloaded to iPods

advantages over traditional CDs include
- no more out of print
- lower cost
- pick the songs you like instead of buying a whole CD for 1 or 2 good songs (this is especially important when a record company puts out a greatest hits CD that adds one song never released before - before this, you had to buy the whole CD to get that one song legally).
- the music doesn't go out of print or out of stock

not going out of print is huge. Providing currently out of print music is even bigger. Providing currently unreleasable music is I think the home run. Why have outtakes anymore, why not make all music available? Why have massive amounts of music lost to fans in a vault?

Wouldn't it be awesome if Prince worked a deal with Apple to allow him to upload music as he records it? He'll reach a lot more fans that way than through the NPGMC. A lot of people aren't big enough fans to join a music club, but would still be willing to browse 30 second samples of Prince music to find tracks they like.

I think Apple has once again changed the world.

I spent last night starting to rerip my CDs as AC3 - better quality, less disc space - and bought a few songs from Apple to fill in some holes. Also, in browsing their site, I realized I had some songs I want to listen to that aren't in my iTunes, so I had to hunt around for the CD.

I think this will be especially a big hit with kids. Our kids have been paying $3/song for something called Hip Clips, which aren't even very good quality compression from what I've heard. I've been telling them that's crazy.

As IceNine Corrected me earlier in This thread, u can only burn it 10 times on2 a cd

you can burn the songs as many times as you want - what you can't do is create one track list and burn it repeatedly - after 10 CDs, you just have to change the track list to burn the songs again.

It doesn't say, but my guess is this is probably a property of iTunes 4 and not specific to the Apple music store.

Does anyone need more than 10 copies of the same track listing for personal use?

The other cool thing on iTunes 4 is that when you download the song to one computer, you can listen to it on any other computer on your local network. We have a half dozen macs in our house, I can now listen to my iTunes music on any of them.

alandail said:

No, no huge threads ... just all of these in the last 24 hours:

http://www.prince.org/msg...&tid=46813

http://www.prince.org/msg...&tid=46727

http://www.prince.org/msg...&tid=46783

http://www.prince.org/msg...&tid=46782

http://www.prince.org/msg...&tid=46781

http://www.prince.org/msg...&tid=46778

well, I was trying to consolodate the discussion. Not sure where the best place on this site is to discuss it, though as it's relevant to all of the forums it has been discussed on.

I have an iBook and an iPod and I just D/Led iTunes 4 last night. I'm having fun dragging album artwork/pictures into my iTunes library and having the pictures show with the songs, that's cool. I haven't gotten fully immersed in iTunes 4 but I'm slowly discovering all the new things.

JANFAN4L said:

Where do you find large artwork? The songs I've bought from Apple have CD cover sized artwork, while I've only been able to find tiny images on the net for my own CDs. The Rainbow Children artwork I found was about the size of a stamp.

Make it available for PC and elsewhere besides the States, and maybe the music biz might have a solution that works.

alandail said:

I get most of my album artwork from images.google.com -- just type in the name of the artist and/or album and it's almost always in there. If not, I'd try amazon.com or an online record store. Just run a Google search and look for the names of the albums, you'll luck up sometimes and find huge images. It varies widely, but if you're seriously looking for larger-than-gif/jpg-type images I'd recommend scanning your record or CD covers.