Apple, as usual, has chosen to put their "business needs" above the good of their customers...
Personally, it bugs me that Apple won't support FLAC - even though they could do so for free (since it
ISN'T proprietary).
And it bugs me that Apple, who claims to "care about music - and about their customers", still refuses to sell lossless music on the iTunes store.
And we won't even discuss how it always seems to require a $39 "special Apple cable" to connect the digital audio output of your Apple device to anything else (when everyone else seems satisfied with a $5 USB cable).
I'm not an Apple fan, and never have been... because their products were always proprietary, overpriced, and limited in flexibility...
BUT.... I
REALLY wanted to like iTunes; the idea of being able to buy any music I wanted with the push of a button was a very compelling "sell"....
Until I found out that I
COULDN'T actually buy the full CD quality version of the music I liked from them - at any price.
In fact, the original 128k AAC format was pretty awful (I guess Apple figured that the majority of their "valued customers" didn't have very good hearing).
Then, after years of whining, and customer unrest, they finally relented.... and started offering everything at better (but
STILL LOSSY) quality....
(Now, whenever I hear about a group I like releasing an album on iTunes, my first nervous thought is: "I hope I can still buy a
real copy of it somewhere".)
Anyone who wants to talk about "piracy" should consider the possibility that maybe some pirates are just desperate to find the full quality version of their favorite song - which they
CAN'T buy from iTunes.
The whole idea of "convenience trumps piracy" is that it's easier to spend a buck for your favorite song than to pirate it; and that concept fails miserably if you can't actually
BUY what you want
LEGITIMATELY.)
(In other words, I have no sympathy for Apple about piracy until they can say "you could have had a legal copy of that song for a buck" without having to add "but it wouldn't sound as good as the real one".)
Incidentally, I even owned an iPod Classic for a while; and I must admit that it was a very nice piece of hardware.....
BUT, it wouldn't play the FLAC files that every other player that I own plays (hardware and software)...
AND, even worse, I couldn't even copy music to and from it without either installing iTunes on my computer, or buying some other third party program.
AND, of course, it wouldn't give me a digital output I could connect to my separate system DAC.
So, yeah, the Apple ecosystem is great, as long as you drink the Kool Aid, and you really like Kool Aid... and then you don't mind never being able to drink anything after that
EXCEPT Kool Aid... and you don't mind the
PRICE of Kool Aid.
(And I do apologize to the fine folks who make
real Kool Aid... which I don't especially like, but at least it's cheap, and you don't need to buy a "special licensed $39 pitcher" to drink it.
)
It makes sense that the world's biggest vendor of music (Apple) doesn't support the format preferred by pirates...
It makes sense to use ALAC (Apple Lossless) if you devices are iPhone, iPAd, iTunes, etc Especially when ALAC is supported by JRiver.
Sincerely
/b,
Wow. Pirates?
Spoken like a real Apple user.
What are MP3s then?