[djjava]

From the Drudge Report, I found this: http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe...=1066565414574

Microsoft on Monday announced plans for a new generation of portable music and video players that will compete directly with Apple Computer's iPod.

The initiative once again pitches the world's largest software company against Apple, which it fought in the 1980s for dominance in desktop computing.

Microsoft said that its new Portable Media Center software will play digital music files encoded in the popular MP3 format as well as the company's own Windows Media music and video formats.

Manufacturers including Samsung, Sanyo, Creative Technology and iRiver have agreed to produce players based on the new software.

The companies expect Microsoft-powered devices to go on sale in the second half of next year.

Since its launch in October 2001, Apple's iPod has emerged as the best-selling portable digital music player.

Apple has sought to capitalise on this success by launching iTunes, an online store that allows users to download music for 99 cents per song.

Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, said earlier this month that iTunes was capturing 70 per cent of worldwide revenues from music downloads.

Microsoft's move underscores the increased interest of big technology companies in portable music and video players that, like desktop computers, use software to organise files stored on hard-disk drives.

Dell Computer will on Tuesday start selling its own Dell DJ portable music player, which runs software from MusicMatch, a privately owned company.

Dell has also launched the online Dell Music Store in an attempt to replicate the success of Apple's iTunes.

sitll stuck on mp3 are they..when will they ever learn.

[slider]

For M$ it's not about providing a service or selling music players. It's about beating down anyone who has the potential to be a threat. I think Apple would be wise to allow other MP3 Players to work with iTunes. I think the iPod can stand on it's own against anything else out there. By letting other music players work with iTunes, even the cheapos with will continue to use iTunes in place of WMP. This is an opportunity to prevent M$ from hammering a "standard" on the rest of us and allow for a mutually agreed upon standard.

[xylon]

Originally posted by slider:
For M$ it's not about providing a service or selling music players. It's about beating down anyone who has the potential to be a threat. I think Apple would be wise to allow other MP3 Players to work with iTunes. I think the iPod can stand on it's own against anything else out there. By letting other music players work with iTunes, even the cheapos with will continue to use iTunes in place of WMP. This is an opportunity to prevent M$ from hammering a "standard" on the rest of us and allow for a mutually agreed upon standard.

Perfectly stated, I couldn't agree more.

[pwgphoto]

If you buy mp3 music from I tunes is it only playable in iTunes or on the iPod. Can they be played on any mp3 player be it stand alone or in a computer like the windows media player? I ask because I am interested in buying legal mp3 downloads from iTunes but have both a mac and pc. I know that apple now has iTunes for both systems but I want to know if these mp3's have any kind of encryption to prevent them from being copied and played on other machines.

[SupahCoolX]

Songs on the iTunes Music Store aren't MP3's. They're actually AAC audio files (MPEG-4). Basically, they are higher quality per megabyte than MP3's. Currently, only iTunes and iPods can use AAC files (I'm not sure about other Windows software that might) because the rest of the world hasn't caught on yet.
With songs downloaded from the iTMS: You can have up to 3 computers at a time authorized to play the music you bought. You can have it on an unlimited number of iPods. You can burn unlimited copies to CD, but you can not burn the exact same playlist more than 10 times in a row (this prevents people from mass-duplicating CDs and selling them on the street. Just add/remove/move a song in the playlist and continue burning).

[slugslugslug]

Originally posted by SupahCoolX:
Songs on the iTunes Music Store aren't MP3's. They're actually AAC audio files (MPEG-4). Basically, they are higher quality per megabyte than MP3's. Currently, only iTunes and iPods can use AAC files (I'm not sure about other Windows software that might) because the rest of the world hasn't caught on yet.
With songs downloaded from the iTMS: You can have up to 3 computers at a time authorized to play the music you bought. You can have it on an unlimited number of iPods. You can burn unlimited copies to CD, but you can not burn the exact same playlist more than 10 times in a row (this prevents people from mass-duplicating CDs and selling them on the street. Just add/remove/move a song in the playlist and continue burning).

I think I remember reading that RCA was coming out w/a portable that played AAC files, but I can't remember where I saw it. Maybe I can dig it up later.

The iTunes app actually works with lots of portable audio players. It'd be interesting if their plugins could report to iTunes what kind of files they could play, so if you tried to copy an AAC file to an incompatible player, iTunes would either warn you or just not bother w/the file transfer..