I see now why Itunes is so popular!

[Lagrange]

My wife bought me a 32G Ipod Touch (yea she spoils me ) and I received a $15 and $25 Gift Card with it. I now realize why Itunes is so popular. Its more of a musical experience rather than just a bunch a songs on a site. I feel like its customized just for me and unlike my old portable mp3/media players I feel like I've joined some ellite club. Don't know if anyone else feels this way about it. Apple has done a brilliant job with this product. Enough pluggin Apple now ..

L

[abi]

My wife bought me a 32G Ipod Touch (yea she spoils me ) and I received a $15 and $25 Gift Card with it. I now realize why Itunes is so popular. Its more of a musical experience rather than just a bunch a songs on a site. I feel like its customized just for me and unlike my old portable mp3/media players I feel like I've joined some ellite club. Don't know if anyone else feels this way about it. Apple has done a brilliant job with this product. Enough pluggin Apple now ..

L

i don't know, i simply hate the idea to have to use itunes in order to load or even to delete songs from my mp3 player.

well, it might of course be different, if i had a wife who bought me a 32gb ipod touch though !

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I seriously dislike the DRM and low quality imports. Not to mention that if you have a disk failure and didn't back up the songs you purchased, Apple will force you to purchase them again. I also much prefer owning a physical product, but I know a lot of other people don't care.

That being said, I much prefer eMusic for any downloads. $10 a month gets you 30 songs a month, they do a better job of encoding the tracks to MP3s, and will give you unlimited downloads. They also have a great indie rock selection.

My question is this: instead of iTunes charging me $10 an album or Amazon doing the same, why not offer the album at $15+shipping, give me the MP3s immediately, and mail me a disc? I would go for that every time.

[abi]

My question is this: instead of iTunes charging me $10 an album or Amazon doing the same, why not offer the album at $15+shipping, give me the MP3s immediately, and mail me a disc? I would go for that every time.

cause then you won't have to buy the mp3s again if you lose them!

[waveriderarts]

i don't know, i simply hate the idea to have to use itunes in order to load or even to delete songs from my mp3 player.

yeah using that bloated software sure sucks!

[Reverse Engineer]

I feel like its customized just for me and unlike my old portable mp3/media players I feel like I've joined some ellite club.

You're a smart guy Lagrange, from what i can tell...but reading that just made me feel embarrassed.

[sb.net]

I have a 60gb iPod photo, and I just love it.. iTunes is just amazing.. I bought hundreds of tunes on there!

[Lagrange]

I feel like its customized just for me and unlike my old portable mp3/media players I feel like I've joined some ellite club.

You're a smart guy Lagrange, from what i can tell...but reading that just made me feel embarrassed.

Yea I just got it last yesterday so gimmi a month to come up with some profound intelligent negative statements about it ..

L

[smart]

I've checkout out iTunes a few times and used it a little bit in the past, since my girlfriend has an older iPod Shuffle.

Well, I had a gift I returned a couple weeks ago and had just about enough merchandise credit to buy an 8GB iPod Nano - so I did (the black one )

I gotta say, I see why people love them. This thing is so small and nice to use. They really did a good job on this thing. Now I'm using iTunes of course to get my music on there and I must say I really like it also. My girlfriend had some gift cards from Christmas and she bought an 8GB Nano too after checking out mine a little bit too.

iTunes is really easy to use and shop around and buy stuff from.

Is it true about backing up songs though? I just bought a couple things (not much, I bought the 3 Square Enix Bootlegs which are pretty cool and interesting!) and I'll email them to myself if I have to to preserve the tracks.

I thought I could redownload to another authorized computer (you can auth 5).

[eduardo_b]

Apple has done a brilliant job with this product.

I think that's the secret to their success. They made the experience compelling while selling low bit rate files in a proprietary format at a modest price. Marketing and presentation are as important as the product itself, and for those who want convenience and an enjoyable experience, iTunes has succeeded where others failed.

I have a couple of iPod products, but I don't buy from iTunes and I use other software to load and delete music from the devices. But I've looked at the iTunes store and can see its appeal to many.

[Lagrange]

Dont get me wrong I'm sure there are things that are terrible about it but I just think the whole marriage of hardware player, software/internet store and promotional items is very innovative way to get people to buy music. I wonder if there will ever be competition in this area from any other companies . Meaning, maybe some of these major lables could put some kind of custom player in a package for their releases, dunno just a thought..

L

[blatanville]

As an iPod (30GB iPod Video, old-school, now...) owner of two years, I can say I love the hardware. It's pretty brilliant. And the new nanos are so cute. And the Touch seems nice, from a "no moving parts" point of view, but I still like some physicality to my control interface, you know?

But I've never been interested in the iTunes Music Store (ITMS, the proper name for the on-line content service). I have an annual subscription with emusic, which gets me 90 downloads every 30 days, higher bitrate, unlimited future downloads (as long as they have license to sell the album -- I lost my copy of Ladytron's "Witching Hour" to an iPod crash, and now can't get it back because the license was yanked), a much better selection of non-mainstream music, and NO DRM!
This costs me about about $24/month (I got grandfathered-in under an older offer because I paid yearly in advance).


Tell me 90 tracks (of any length! some ambient albums are 70 minute, single track affairs. Cost: 1 download) for $24 doesn't make iTunes look just a little overpriced...

anyway, combine:

iTunes (the program), for browsing and uploading/deleting from the iPod
+
Xplay2 (or Senuti when I'm on my Mac) to copy songs back OUT of the iPod
+
the iPod itself
=
a great portable music experience.

Downsides: when your music library gets large (I'm at about 245GB), the iTunes database gets slow to load, save, and update.

hth,

[debra1rlo]

My wife bought me a 32G Ipod Touch (yea she spoils me ) and I received a $15 and $25 Gift Card with it. I now realize why Itunes is so popular. Its more of a musical experience rather than just a bunch a songs on a site. I feel like its customized just for me and unlike my old portable mp3/media players I feel like I've joined some ellite club. Don't know if anyone else feels this way about it. Apple has done a brilliant job with this product. Enough pluggin Apple now ..

L

ONE OF US! ONE OF US!

[WilliamK]

I really love iTunes. Specially since you can find something you know, and check what others have bought too. That helps me finding new stuff.

I always burn the songs I buy into a CD, so if I need in MP3 format, I can always import the CD back. And I get a backup disk that way. I put all in those cone-thingy that holds multiple CDs in one box.

Now I'm hocked on TV shows.

Wk

[ATS]

My wife bought me a 32G Ipod Touch (yea she spoils me ) and I received a $15 and $25 Gift Card with it. I now realize why Itunes is so popular. Its more of a musical experience rather than just a bunch a songs on a site. I feel like its customized just for me and unlike my old portable mp3/media players I feel like I've joined some ellite club. Don't know if anyone else feels this way about it. Apple has done a brilliant job with this product. Enough pluggin Apple now ..

L

I used to hate ipods and itunes but now I love it too I have to admit. People should buy more Alex Cooper music on there though