Wow, long title! Anyhow, this is the first guide I am making that will be posted on the general blog. And today I’m going to be explaining how to covert your MP3 audiobooks into the format that iTunes will recognise as an Audiobook, and will place in the Audiobooks section on your iPod.
Apple released iTunes 8.1 yesterday, with reported updates for performance and stability. Plus, the new iTunes version supports the latest iPod Shuffle.
According to Apple, new features include a new Genius sidebar that supposedly now does TV and move recommendations, speed improvements when importing large libraries, improves speed and handling of iTunes Plus songs and many accessibility improvements.
So it looks like this may be a worthwile updates and I suggest you go ahead and get it. If you already have iTunes on your computer, you can just get the new version over Software Update. If you don’t have it, head over to apple.com/itunes for the free software.
At last, senior vice president of Apple marketing. Phil Shiller finally announced at Macworld yesterday that iTunes is in the process of going DRM free!
Yesterday, 8 million tracks were converted to non-DRM tracks thanks to a deal with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner music, and it has been said that all 10 million tracks on iTunes will be DRM free by the end of this quarter.
It has not yet been confirmed whether music you have already bought from iTunes will be stripped of its DRM, but we’ll soon find out.
If you use iTunes, which millions of us do, this is a big day. This may well cause the end of DRM forever, eventually.
Good times!
In the past, I’ve used many different music download services.
I used Napster first, which in general was good, but very short lived after I discovered their credit card fraud issues. When I used Napster, I only really used it for buying music to burn to CD but not really for MP3 players because at that time I didn’t own a very decent one.
Then after I closed my account with Napster, I didn’t use any music download service for a while.
When someone bought me an iPod earlier in the year, I started using iTunes. I received a £15 voucher with it so I played around a bit and rented some films as well as downloaded music. I’m not a huge fan of iTunes but the service itself is generally reliable and apart from the fact you have to use an iPod with iTunes, it’s pretty good. Of course there is the problem that iTunes (and Napster) are both DRM sites so you wont get DRM free music.
Then I tried the Orange Music Store (since my phone is with Orange) and that’s slightly more dissapointing but still good enough for most people. The application itself that you have to use to download music is quite buggy and can cause some problems, but I find it useful that if you download the song that you want from your phone, it will automatically send it to your PC (and vice versa). There is still the DRM problem, though.
And finally I recently started using Non-DRM sites. I like 7digital.com because they sell MP3’s that you can buy with SMS payment, although it is £1.50 per song apposed to the average 79p per song in most stores.
What sites do you use for buying music? Do you like them?