Justin Cox Presents:

The iTunes’ Have It

Today the third round of law suits were sent out by RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) to people who illegally share internet files online. So, on this note I thought that I would review one of the products available to help download music legally.

The program is Apple’s iTunes — an all in one audio center so to speak. The program is freely downloadable from Apples website (http://www.apple.com/itunes/). Ironically, iTunes look is much like that of KaZaA’s and it functions much in the same way. iTunes stores all of the music files on your computer (in all formats) into its Library, a form of play list. You can then play your library as you could with any audio programs — features include random, repeat, etc. The first thing I noticed that I really enjoyed about iTunes is the ease of searching through your library. It’s quick, seamless, and extremely functional. For instance, a quick search for “Jimmy Buffett” in my library shows that I have 148 songs, 10.5 hours, and 732.5 MB’s of music by the one and only Jimmy.

Another cool feature is the ability to create sub play lists. For instance, I can create a play list by singling out all the songs by Buffett and then save it. The cool thing is that if I were to add more of Jimmy’s music to my library in the future, my “Jimmy Buffett” play list would automatically update itself. These sub play lists also can be set so that iTunes picks, say, only 25 songs from a set search criteria, or a maximum of 80 minutes total play time which will come in handy later.

Now, you may be wondering how I got all that Buffett music on my computer and don’t worry, because I didn’t download it. iTunes allows you to import (or rip) music off of CD’s and adds them to your library. Unlike Windows Media Player, iTunes allows you to encode your music in numerous formats including MP3. This is how all that Buffett music ended up on my computer. iTunes’ importation is pretty quick. Importing a 3.5 min song into MP3 format at 160 kbps takes only about a minute (though this was using an external USB 1.0 CD drive so with a faster drive comes faster encoding).

iTunes also has a built in CD burning program that is extremely simple to use. You just select the songs you wish to burn, or, if you have set up a play list with a maximum of 80 minutes like I mentioned above then you select the entire play list, and hit the burn button. When you hit the button, a panel opens up revealing the true “Burn” button as well as opens up your CD-RW drive. Just put in a disc and hit the Burn button and bam, iTunes does the rest.

But what about the main point of downloading iTunes, you know the ability to download music legally? Well, I have tested iTunes and give it my approval, for the most part. You search iTunes’ database of music from inside iTunes itself. Their collection is extremely large spanning all genres of music as well as audio books. You can preview songs by double clicking them; you can read reviews of albums and, in some cases, watch QuickTime music/concert videos. Once you set up an account (which is free) you can purchase music whenever you please. Songs cost $0.99 plus tax (or $1.02 here in Florida) and whole albums start at $7.98. Not a bad price to pay. Once a song/album/audio book is purchased, it automatically downloads into your specified music folder. Download time depends on your internet speed and computer. Here on FSU’s LAN a 3.5 minute song took approx a minute to download.

Here’s the catch, all music downloaded from iTunes is in a format called AAC which stands for Advanced Audio Coding which Apple says is better then MP3. AAC is basically an MP4. Though, AAC files only seem to be able to be played on iTunes. Windows Media Player could not open the file. The AAC file is also protected so that it cannot be re-encoded as an MP3 file. The other catch is that it doesn’t seem that Nero Burning Rom is able to burn an AAC file onto an audio CD so you are forced to use iTunes’ built in burning program.

All in all I would say that iTunes is a pretty good program and a way to get music legally. Other options are available including BuyMusic.com which offers songs at $0.79 cents each, though they are in Windows Audio format and have some pretty weird usage restrictions. Wal-Mart has reported that they will be opening an online music store shortly and Microsoft is throwing their hat in the ring early next year. Though, considering iTunes was the first into the market and has the largest library, I’m going to stick with them. So, here’s to downloading music legally!