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Singles cost 99 cents and albums usually cost $9.99.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T h e   R o a d   L e s s   T r a v e l e d
Buy your favorite albums and tunes online using Apple's no-hassle, no-guilt music store


May 7, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   I feel like an honest man at last. I can download music without even thinking of grabbing pirated songs off a file-sharing network.
   The force that brought me back to the straight and narrow is Steve Jobs, cofounder and chief executive officer of Apple Computer. Jobs got all the major recording companies (Sony Music, BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner) to go along with one of the brightest ideas in the history of music -- the notion of selling music online with virtually no strings attached.
   That's what Jobs announced last week. It's called the Apple Music Store. Within a few days, Apple had sold a million songs from the Apple Music Store. It's a smashing success.
   For now, you need a Mac -- and a modern one at that, running the OS X operating system -- to shop at it, but before long you will be able to do all this honest downloading using Windows, too. (Last week's job postings in technical publications showed that Apple was advertising for a Windows software engineer willing to join the company for the Windows iTune project.)
   There are no subscription fees, no sign-up costs and no hassle. The Apple Music Store was up and running last Monday, and by Wednesday evening I had filled out the gaps in my collection of Steely Dan albums. I even picked up some Pablo Casals cello pieces I thought I'd never get around to locating.
   All with a couple of clicks.
   You have a choice of thousands of albums and singles. Apple has more than 200,000 items in the store so far, and it should double or triple that number in the next few months. Singles cost 99 cents and albums usually cost $9.99. (I've seen double album sets for $15 or so.)
   Here are the basics:
   You need a Macintosh computer that runs OS X, the current operating system. If you have a Mac that was purchased in the last year or so, it will have the new operating system. If you're in doubt, call the store that sold the Mac.
   You also need the latest iTunes software, version 4. iTunes is the world's best jukebox-type music organizer and audio player, and could well be the single best reason to buy a new Mac.
   iTunes is free. Go to the Apple Web site at www.apple.com to download it. The first time you run the new iTunes and go to the store, Apple will ask you to create an account. There's no cost to do this.
   You'll also need a newer version of QuickTime, the multimedia software for Macs and Windows PCs. It's also free and can be downloaded from a clearly marked link at Apple's site.
   The new QuickTime software supplies the required conversion files so that iTunes can play the music you buy. Every one of the downloads is encoded in the superior Dolby AAC format, not in the nearly universal MP3 format. AAC ("Advanced Audio Coding") also can create smaller files than MP3 without losing quality. Apple uses a 128k sampling rate, the equivalent of a 192k MP3 recording.
   When you run iTunes 4, you'll see navigation buttons for the music store. Getting around the online store is very easy. The iTunes 4 interface works a lot like a Web browser, and you even have a reassuring "Back" button if you start to get lost.
   iTunes 4 also has a search form that looks like it came from Apple's outstanding Safari Web browser. You can search the store for anything -- part of the name of a song, a performer's last name or an album title, for example.
   You'll see album covers for every album in the store. They're not large enough to frame, and, unfortunately, don't come with liner notes, but they're a nice touch anyway. (I'd forgotten what Steely Dan's "Aja" cover looked like, and seeing the cover art let loose a flood of memories from the days when I did a lot of my own semi-pro audio engineering.) You can save album covers as JPEG files by dragging them into your desktop.
   Apple's store is ideal for browsing. A 30-second excerpt from any track is only a click away, and it fades in gracefully instead of blasting your ears each time you want to audition a song.
   To buy an album or a track, you simply click a button labeled "Buy Now." All downloading is done in the background, so you don't have to worry about other activities getting in the way. (I burned DVDs while buying songs and downloading them.)
   You can even shut down the computer during a download without causing a problem. I did an intentional shutdown while iTunes was downloading a dozen Loggins and Messina songs I had purchased. The next day, after I booted up, iTunes showed me a message telling me I had paid for music that had not been downloaded and asked me to click a button to finish the downloads.
   Steve Jobs was able to work a miracle in convincing record companies to go along with his no-guilt approach to selling music online.You can do basically whatever you want with the music you buy except make mass-produced copies on CD.
   Each track you download has Apple's own DRM (digital rights management) system built in. But it's very forgiving.
   You are allowed to listen to your downloaded music on your Mac and all the other Macs in a typical home. You can burn CDs of the music you buy and even do almost anything you want with them -- as long as you don't try to make more than 10 consecutive copies of one playlist. (Those over the age of 30 might not know what a playlist is. It's a list of which songs iTunes should play consecutively.) After the 10th copy, you have to change the order of the playlist to get the built-in DRM to approve another 10 CD recordings.
   This is designed to block commercial CD pirates from downloading songs and then making hundreds of thousands of CDs of their downloads. It's not likely to inhibut law-abiding users in any way.
   You can't make MP3 copies of the downloaded AAC files directly, but enterprising geeks probably know of a few ways to get around this limitation. A bonus, to me, at least, is the way iTunes incorporates Dolby AAC into its recording abilities, too. I converted a half-dozen CDs to AAC format with excellent results.
   As for sound quality, AAC seemed to do a good job. In direct comparison tests, 128k AAC files from the Apple Music Store sounded slightly better than 128k MP3 files I made of the same CD. When I raised the rate to 320k, both methods sounded the same.