[dvlug] iTunes music silos

[Grant Bowman]

On Friday some of us briefly discussed iTunes and how we use our
music.  With Apple's new iPod and Apple TV lineup I thought I would
share my experience with iTunes. Choices for alternatives now include
the Ubuntu One music store if you run Ubuntu and some other online mp3
vendors.

I don't like DRM encumbered .aac files.  A good friend of mine was
using iTunes and she enjoyed the convenience of purchasing the music
and having it "just work" on her iPod nano.  Whenever she did I used
an open source program called Audacity.  I played each song in iTunes
and told Audacity to record what was played on the computer.  I then
saved the audio as .mp3 using the downloaded encoder I installed.
This allowed her to play the music on her own non-Apple music players,
clearly a fair use.

A number of years ago I took all my CDs and converted them to .ogg
files.  I now wish I had used .mp3 because many players don't support
the ogg vorbis format.  So my choice in future hardware is somewhat
limited at the moment. When last I checked, I could buy an iPod but I
would need to install an open source firmware to make it play .ogg I
think. This works well on the old iPod v.2 that I use at home though
the interface of www.rockbox.org is far inferior to Apple's native
software. My cheap little Centon Craze mp3 player I picked up at Fry's
Electronics awhile ago works great but seems to have been
discontinued. Oh, amazon has a few left but the centon.com website
doesn't mention mp3 players.

I am curious about this as I am getting ready to release a small
software app for the Android platform and will be working on some iOS
(iPod compatible) version.  Drilling down into
http://www.amazon.com/MP3-Players-Audio-Video/ shows you can get quite
a bit for your money in music hardware these days, both in Apple
brands and other brands.

In what formats are your music collections in?

Regards,

Grant