iTunes Music Store (Apple)

Available from: Apple.com
Format: Apple Mac, Windows, Linux (soon)

The Pros: fast downloads (over broadband) excellent (IMHO) sound quality easy to use GUI generous rights management

The Cons: some missing soundtracks despite featuring in listings FairPlay AAC format prevents writing to non-iPod MP3 players European stores contain less tracks than the US Windows version not 98 or ME compatible

After what seemed like almost an eternity had passed Apple have released the iTunes Music Store in the UK, Germany and France.

I have now been using the store for a few weeks, along with the associated iTunes application on my iMac and can say that it is very easy to use.

To access the store one needs an AppleID, which is an account with Apple that contains a valid debit or credit card number registered in the country for which purchases are to be made.

Accessing the store with the associated AppleID is straightforward, with the user simply selecting the country that purchases are to be made in (taking into account billing address as mentioned above), and then proceeding to the store proper. The initial presentation is for my liking a little cluttered, resembling the Netscape or MSN portal sites. However perhaps I am being too harsh, as after only a few minutes of use it becomes apparent that there is a lot of power behind the scenes.

For example, as well as selecting a featured song, album or artist from the main page, I can click on the Browse Music or Power Search links (currently in the left-most column) from which I can search the entire catalogue. However it is odd that a large number of soundtrack albums are actually missing even though their titles appear in the list. I can only guess that Apple are busily recording the tracks into their proprietary Fair Play (AAC) format as fast as they can. Despite this oddity there are currently several hundred tracks to choose from, with more being added every day.

I should perhaps at this point mention that the European iTunes stores differ slightly from their US counterpart in content. The latter now features over a million tracks (if the blurb is correct) where-as the European stores fall a few hundred thousand short of this figure. This is mainly due to the (apparently) tricky licensing rules in Europe. I wouldn't have minded this so much except that I am particularly after two albums by the Utah Saints, which are advertised in all of their play-before-you-buy (see below) glory on the US store, but are noticeably missing from the UK. For a web developer and designer like myself I could do without the dangled carrot - their are far too many interesting web technologies that I want put my energies towards!

Now would be a good time to go through some of the technical side of the store. Once a track has been found in the database a 30 second sample can be played. Generally these are excellent, although once or twice I have purchased a track after listening to the sample only to find out that the rest was lacking in substance. This has only happened twice so far with over a hundred tracks purchased, which I guess isn't bad. The tracks themselves can either be bought individually for £0.79 each or as part of an album from £7.90 upwards. I should mention that it is worth checking out play.com as occasionally they have special offers that take the price to below that offered by iTunes. Mostly though iTunes is excellent value for money.

There has been a fair amount of talk online about the quality of AAC versus this and that, but to my ears the tracks sound fine. I'm an "average" netizen when it comes to music, without a particular ability to tell a 128kbps track from a 160kbps one. I would suggest buying a few tracks that are to your liking and then deciding for yourself, as after all hearing is a personal thing.

The purchasing process allows you to disable the "are you sure you want to buy?" popup, but for myself I have left this in place as an incentive not to purchase too much music on my card. When you have purchased a track it is immediately downloaded to your harddrive. With each track ranging from approximately 3mb to 5mb in size the download can take between about 20 seconds and 2 minutes for each song depending on your bandwidth. This isn't a bad thing as it is still cheaper than walking to the shops.

When you have downloaded tracks you can then burn them to CD or synchronise them to your iPod. At the time of writing Apple have not licensed the FairPlay AAC format for other MP3 devices and strictly speaking you cannot convert from AAC to MP3. However as I do not yet own an iPod I burn playlists (think of these as albums of music, the individual track listing of each being decided by you) to CD and listen in my car whilst travelling. To be fair to Apple the proprietary format and FairPlay rights management system have not yet got in the way of me enjoying music, which is what it is all about. I won't go into the details of FairPlay in this article as every time I look it seems to have been tweaked. However do take a look at the Apple site if you are at all concerned by this.

And what do I think of the iTunes Music Store overall? On the whole it has been a very positive experience. A few small niggles about the interface and missing tracks aside I have been happy with what I have purchased and will personally stick with iTunes over its competitors.

The views presented above are of the author and not necessarily that of Ethical WebSites, and should not be taken as an endorsement of any product or service whatsoever. This article is provide "as is" without any warranty of any kind. Read and enjoy.

Author: Colin Deady, 16/08/2004