iTunes 5?

[ogravdal]

Why not

I don't see the point in not supporting WMA in iTunes. If iTunes could play all kinds of audio files it could easily become the only player that you would use. Even in the windows world.

And then, in case you want to buy some music, why would you use any effort to buy the music from any other stores than the one that is accessible from within the program?

In my opinion WMA support is both necessary and important. I even think it can increase the usage of both AAC and iTunes Music Store. WMA support the implementation of AAC.

I don't think the rumoured bluetooth headset will offer wireless connection between the headphones and the iPod. Instead I think (and hope) it will make the iPod an addition to a mobile phone. Imagine listening to your favourite music when you get an incoming call. The music stops playing and you press a button on the iPod to enter the conversation instead. Thanks to a built-in microphone it will be possible to turn the whole iPod into a headset. Thanks to the scroll-wheel it would also be possible to dial using the iPod and the address book is already there

Another possibility would be to store the pictures taken by a camera-phone on the iPod, via Bluetooth of course.

A while ago I had a MP3 player for my Ericsson t68 phone and I used it a lot until I got my iPod. It would be great if the iPod offered more functionality when used together with a phone! I don't want to carry my iPod in one hand and my phone in the other anymore.

 

[Phil Of Mac]

Re: Why not

Originally posted by ogravdal
I don't want to carry my iPod in one hand and my phone in the other anymore.

That's why I clip one to my belt and put the other in my pocket.

 

[ogravdal]

Re: Re: Why not

Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
That's why I clip one to my belt and put the other in my pocket.

True, I do the same. But it would be nice if I didn't have to fiddle around whenever I get a phone-call.

I wouldn't have to pause the music, I wouldn't have to take out the ear-phones and I wouldn't have to take the phone out of my pocket.

 

[ClimbingTheLog]

Originally posted by frozenstar
The theoretical peak data rate of Bluetooth v1.1 is 1 mbps. The real-world sustained data rate is about 150-200 kbps. Clearly, that's more than enough to stream a 128 kbps AAC file. If necessary, iTunes can even re-encode higher bandwidth files on the fly.

You forget the point of saying a music file is 128 kbps. It's the compression rate. You take a 1500 kbps raw audio stream (16-bit 44.1KHz stereo) and crunch it with maths so it becomes 128 kpbs on disk. When you play it the decoder converts it back to 1500 kbps output and you can't hear that much difference.

The problem for Bluetooth is that you have to send the 1500 kpbs stream from the iPod to the headphones. Otherwise you have to build a costly decoder/CPU into the headphones and that will suck battery.

Cell phones are fine since the audio coming out of a cell phone is about 64 kbps uncompressed (8KHz 8bit mono), and nobody cares about CD-quality-sounding cell phones.

Now, maybe you could do a simple joint-stereo/RLE or LZ lossless encoding and get a 2:1 compression ratio to make a low-powered iPod bluetooth headphone work, but then you're stuck with a non-standard Apple-only headphone.

 

[zync]

Originally posted by SilentPanda
It might be possible that iTunes would support playing WMA files... I haven't used a PC at home for quite a while but doesn't MusicMatch and Windows Media Player by default encode CD's into WMA format? If so then your typical home user would have all of their music in WMA format. Thus supporting the playing of WMA files would be greatly needed to allow the seamless integration. Or at least they would reencode your WMA files on import to iTunes and maybe not let you play WMA files or make new WMA files... I suppose I really don't care either way... but it is a consideration for the reasoning that might be behind that.

Windows Media Player might but MusicMatch does not....at least by default....MM might if you tell it to though I don't think it can....