[Brad]

MP3, MP3PRO, Ogg Vorbis, AAC overview:

http://www.ipodlounge.com/articles_m...id=271_0_8_0_M

It's worth noting that the article was written before iTMS existed.

[Jim S.]

One thing that iTunes 5.0 desperately needs is two "year" codes. The current year code is the year the CD was released. Users of smart playlists would also like the year the music was originally released. I've purchased a lot of oldies from iTMS and many of the songs show recent years since they are from "Best of..." or "Remastered" CDs that were recently released. If I want to make a smart playlist of 60's music, those songs would be missed unless there's a new field for the year released. I looked at CDDB a long time ago and they do have both fields so it's simply a matter of iTunes adding the field. This seems pretty simple and would be a great feature!

[dfiler]

Perhaps Apple should allocate some serious resources to researching how tags are used.

Currently, it seems that they're almost there... in that the tags they chose enabled the iTunes browsing that revolutionized the industry. However, there is work to be done. I suspect that a handful of tags could integrated into the iTunes GUI without bogging things down. The fine line of course would be picking which tags to use. Feature creap quickly leads to bloat. Yet, I think just a few more would be reasonable. <fingers crossed>

[Kickaha]

Almost sounds like you want metadata...

[Paul]

well in terms of liner notes the new U2 album and "Box Set" both come with a pdf dubbed a "digital booklet" see info here
adding more "id3 tag entries" (metadata) would be a very good idea, but Apple needs to start thinking about publishing their own ccdb type of setup through the iTMS where users could download and sync information for free... lyrics and other "digital booklets" could be set up as well....

re: 4.8, 4.9, 4.10... did apple skip a few numbers? I remember 4.0, 4.0.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 were there any others? Why did they skip .3 and .4? 5 will probably come before they even reach 4.9 anyway so the debate is pretty frivolous...

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Brad iTunes .ogg stuff

Doesn't work with Streaming though.

[dglow]

One request: iTunes solves the gapless playback problem in a manner more satisfactory than "join tracks".

For instance, allow me to define a property for any given song: 'fades out', 'sudden stop', or 'flows into following song'. Now use this information to modulate playback. If contiguous songs on an album are supposed to play without pause then please don't crossfade regardless of my preference settings. Likewise, I would like to denote that certain tracks should always be followed by x seconds of silence. Some songs simply demand a brief pause before playback continues to the next track, IMHO.

Ideally playlists would further support this level of control via setting a 'transition' between tracks. Bonus points: do the same for iPod playback.

I've read others speculate that gapless playback and related features are impossible to support for compressed formats. I find this difficult to believe. WinAMP provided gapless MP3 playback, what, 5 years ago? C'mon, Apple - stop making excuses and fix this. Please.

[onlyafterdark]

Pretty please.

[dfiler]

This post is the gripe of a windows/iPod using friend of mine. Despite severe mocking, he's sticking to winAmp. Reason? ...

iTunes stops playing from your library if you browse to elsewhere in the library. Please fix so that users can browse without halting playback!

[futuretheory]

Allow me to listen to streaming Ogg Vorbis PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.

Oh screw it, I'm sick of asking. Just make it happen.

[Kickaha]

Depends on the streaming server they use. :} I have a buddy at a local college radio station that was struggling with this. Turned out that it was their server - one popular one (icecast?) makes a non-standard stream. They were using it. They stopped, switched to another, and iTunes worked.

[onlyafterdark]

I would really like to see some speed increases and less of a hindrence on the CPU. It seems like with every new release of iTunes it gets slower and takes up more resources. And now with the incorperation of the iPod photo, I dont think things are going to get any better.

[DMBand0026]

People are under the common misconception that a music player should take up no CPU power. In actuality, it should hover around 15-20% of CPU usage. iTunes is not a CPU hog, it's right at or even above par in that regard. As far as resources go, get more RAM, your computer will run better and you'll thank yourself later.

[dglow]

Furthermore, consider the scenario where a user plays an Apple Lossless file to remote speakers:

In this case iTunes is 1) decompressing the lossless encoding, 2) applying any equalization or other audio settings, then 3) re-compressing into lossless before streaming out to the Aiport Expresss. This is a non-trivial amount of calculation by any measure - no wonder the CPU gets hit!

[onlyafterdark]

Good points by all, but I still dont understand why it needs to take up ~15-20% if the iTunes window is not open, and all you are doing is playing songs straight from a playlist without random being on.

[futuretheory]

Originally Posted by chucker Doesn't work with Streaming though.

Exactly, there are A LOT of streams out there in Ogg Vorbis that I can't listen too.

Also, I'm a switcher, well sort of. I have always had a mac but I also have a PC, on which I burned a ton of CD's in high-quality Ogg Vorbis before I considered AAC and iPod as an option (a while ago). At the time I wanted support for 5.1 sound and other high-end stuff and AAC wasn't reviewed yet--Ogg isn't DRM'ed either. I really don't want to have to re-import that much music, in fact I doubt all the CD's are still around and/or unscathed. There is support out there with some helper plugs, but I can pull music off my server with it yet. All my new stuff is AAC, but damn it would be nice to have Ogg streams in iTunes and on iPod.

Please??

[Brad]

Originally Posted by futuretheory Ogg isn't DRM'ed either.

For the record, I just want to make sure you know that none of the music you import yourself with iTunes is DRM'd. The only AAC files that have DRM are the ones you buy from Apple.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by futuretheory Exactly, there are A LOT of streams out there in Ogg Vorbis that I can't listen too.

Yes, the ones that produce non-standard streams. :P Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the developers of the broken streaming servers will fix it just for iTunes, since everyone else seems to have bowed to their bugs already.

[DMBand0026]

Originally Posted by onlyafterdark Good points by all, but I still dont understand why it needs to take up ~15-20% if the iTunes window is not open, and all you are doing is playing songs straight from a playlist without random being on.

I think that was relatively well explained by all above. The UI won't cause iTunes to take up anymore CPU, so hiding it or closing the window won't help that. iTunes is working really hard under the hood. It's like a duck, above water it seems so calm and cool, but below water it's paddling like crazy.

15% CPU usage isn't a lot, not by a long shot. Years ago there were music players available that took a considerable amount more. Jukebox software has made drastic strides.

[futuretheory]

Originally Posted by Brad For the record, I just want to make sure you know that none of the music you import yourself with iTunes is DRM'd. The only AAC files that have DRM are the ones you buy from Apple.

Of course, didn't I say that I'm using AAC now? Ogg was more viable at the time I ripped those CD's--especially on a PC, even more so if you thought you might move over to Linux. Not to mention, I'd like to see an open source media format do well; we consumers could really use it, though it seems unlikely.

I would personally like to see iTunes on Linux soon, helping Linux helps Apple IMHO.

Originally Posted by Kickaha Yes, the ones that produce non-standard streams. :P

Finally, Kickaha said Ogg Vorbis streams should work in iTunes if they are implemented correctly. I have yet to see one that does, yet in other apps they stream fine (how do you define standard?). Please point me to a working stream and any information on setting up an Ogg stream "correctly", I'm thinking of setting this up at home and would like my itunes to understand it. Thanks!!

[DMBand0026]

Originally Posted by futuretheory I would personally like to see iTunes on Linux soon, helping Linux helps Apple IMHO.

That's next to impossible. Biggest reason being, all Linux UIs look like dick, iTunes does not. They'd have to hire someone with no design sense to take a preverbal crap all over the iTunes UI. Other than that, it's feasible, and very doable.

[Kickaha]

Actually, they'd just have to hire someone to write custom widgets for just about everything to make it look like iTunes.

Oh yeah, that'd be fun.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Kickaha Yes, the ones that produce non-standard streams. :P Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the developers of the broken streaming servers will fix it just for iTunes, since everyone else seems to have bowed to their bugs already.

iTunes' Rendezvous / FUS sharing (DAAP) doesn't appear to accept Ogg Vorbis either, unfortunately.

[Jim S.]

Would Apple need to pay licensing fees to use Ogg Vorbis in iTunes and iPods? If so, would they need to pay licensing fees if they simply created a file converter like they did with Windows Media?

[futuretheory]

Originally Posted by Jim S. Would Apple need to pay licensing fees to use Ogg Vorbis in iTunes and iPods? If so, would they need to pay licensing fees if they simply created a file converter like they did with Windows Media?

No, Ogg is open source and there would be no licensing fee. Conversion is not a great answer, since you are re-encoding audio that has already been compressed.

With the right plugin iTunes/quicktime can play ogg now. The issue is that itunes can't handle ogg streams (apparently lack of standards adherence by streamers is partially to blame, but I can't get any to work). The ipod can't play ogg files at all, some believe 1st gen didn't have the power and by 2nd generation they and AAC were so popular it didn't matter, but who knows?

Simply put, Apple has little to gain by supporting other formats right now other than a lot of street credit. But putting iTunes on Linux and supporting Ogg would sure give that community a boost and more of the right people might start taking Apple seriously in other areas. I doubt they would do it until it was a more popular format, which doesn't seem to happening. Really I just think it would be a nice middle finger to WMA and any other player that uses Ogg as market differentiator.

[Jim S.]

Hmmm... then adding Ogg Vorbis would be a good marketing response to Sony adding MP3 compatability. Apple should stay one step in front of the pack.

[Jim S.]

According to MacRumors (page 2), the next version of iTunes will add support for .ogg, heAAC and FLAC audio. Would someone be so kind as to explain what heACC and FLAC audio is? Thanks.

http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2004/...09142551.shtml

[Barto]

FLAC is a free, lossless format. Basically the open source equivalent to Apple Lossless Encoding.

heAAC is an advanced AAC profile. It takes more "effort" (code and computational power) to encode and decode, but is of higher quality. Apparently.

[hmurchison]

I don't expect to see Apple directly supporting Ogg V or FLAC. It's rather redundant, I believe their efforts should be placed around making AAC and ALAC the best codecs and offer a good plugin API(if one already doesn't exist) to support other codecs.

I think most consumers just want to listen to music without politicizing their lives.

[Barto]

"Consumers" want that? Then support playing Ogg and FLAC. Not supporting something is the only politicisation possible. There's no harm in doing so... Apple doesn't even need to include an encoder, a decent decoder would be better than nothing.