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This article first appeared in the February 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
It's really hard to stay ahead of the game when writing about software. This month's ramblings were to have been about how to assemble a powerful collection of free tools to create, play and manage your MP3 collection. In fact, it was done and all but delivered when Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in San Francisco and changed everything.
Jobs more or less admitted that Apple blew it last year. While CD-R and MP3 were taking the PC world by storm, Apple didn't have much to offer. It's true there are many programs for handling MP3s on the Mac, and dozens of companies selling CD-Rs, but Apple's only offering for MP3s was QuickTime Player--an adequate MP3 player with nonexistent organizational features--and you couldn't buy a Mac with a built-in CD-R from Apple for any amount of money. For a company using AV as a selling point of its machines, this was a pretty embarrassing situation.
On the CD-R front, there is a complete reversal from Apple. Pretty much all the desktop Macs will ship with CD-RW drives inside. The high-end machines will ship with a new drive Apple modestly calls the SuperDrive. It can read and write normal CDs, but its chief selling point is that it can also very quickly write MPEG4 video to DVDs so ordinary DVD players can play it back. Apple's been shipping DVD-RW drives in most of its G4s as more or less standard equipment for quite a while now, but the disks can only be read by another similar DVD-RW drive. The new disks can be read by any DVD player, but the big catch is that the SuperDrives will only appear on the very high-end machines--$3300 and up.
The most interesting announcement for most people was that Apple is giving away a new MP3 player called iTunes.
iTunes is more than an MP3 player. It's an all-in-one toolbox that lets you listen to your CDs and MP3s, rip your CDs into MP3s, burn your MP3s to CDs, export them to your portable player, listen to Internet radio streams and manage your ever growing music library. In other words, it's all the tools most people will ever need for handling their music in one good-looking package. And it's free!
Free is the key word. Nearly 300,000 people downloaded iTunes within a week after Apple hung it out on the Internet. You can grab it yourself from the Apple Web site (www.apple.com). Apple is pushing it at the G4 machines, but many people are having good luck running it on much older machines under Mac OS 9.
What Apple has actually done here is license several best-of-breed tools and combine them into one killer package.
On the MP3 creation front, they licensed the guts of Cassady and Green's SoundJam MP, the best MP3 ripper for the Mac. In fact, with both iTunes and SoundJam installed, double-clicking some of the iTunes files will run SoundJam instead. Since the ripper is the same as that in SoundJam, it uses the high quality Fraunhofer IIS algorithms, that are widely believed to be the best available, and aren't available for free from anyone else. And it's pretty fast, converting CDs to MP3s at somewhere between four and seven times the play rate on a G4 Mac, depending on the model.
Not all the features of SoundJam are built into iTunes, however. There's no equalizer, and the program isn't scriptable. Mercifully, they also left out the 'skins' feature that seems ubiquitous, but more frivolous than useful on other MP3 players.
The CD burning end of things is handled by code from Radialogic's CDMaster. According to the documentation, it's only supposed to work with Apple's own upcoming drives, but many workarounds have already been found to support other drives. A search on the Web will quickly show whether your favorite burner is unofficially supported. The next version of iTunes, due soon, will support some third-party drives.
Finally, the playback is done with Apple's own QuickTime, which many people with ears better than mine criticize as having a 'brittle' sound, especially with files ripped at low bit rates.
All this is held together by a single-window, logical, drag and drop interface sporting the new graphite look. The window usually works as a simple, but quite powerful, database view of your MP3 collection. My collection of well over a thousand songs was sucked in and catalogued with startling speed.
To top things off, they also threw in the G-Force SoundJam plugin screen saver that makes your monitor think it's a psychedelic lava lamp that can boogie to the music.
After two weeks of pretty heavy use, iTunes still remains an impressive program. But, as with any new program, there are a few rough edges that need sanding.
An annoyance is the way it handles ID3 tags embedded in MP3 files.
ID3 tags are a standard way to store information such as the performer, album, cut number and title of a song. Given the Mac OS 9 Finder's limitation of 32 character file names, these ID3 tags are far more important on the Mac than on Windows or Unix/Linux, where very long file names are possible. On Windows, it's not unusual for MP3 collections to be completely organized by file names like 'Loreena McKennitt-Parallel Dreams-05-Standing Stones.mp3.' When transferred to the Mac, it might look like 'Loreena McKennitt-Parallel Dr.mp3.' That's why Macs need the ID3 tags.
iTunes makes wonderful use of the ID3 information to slice, dice and sort your MP3 library in a dozen or so ways. In fact, unlike most other MP3 players, it pretty much ignores file names in favor of the ID3 information. When you rip a CD, it creates ID3 version 2.2 information for each cut by grabbing the information off the Internet.
The problem is there are several different versions of ID3 tags, the oldest called ID3 1.0 and the newest ID3 2.3. Different versions of the tags can be present on a song at the same time. The newest has more capability and allows longer titles than the older. iTunes can read all the versions, but if it only finds a 1.0 version, it absolutely refuses to write a newer ID3 version, even though it will read and edit the newer versions, when they are already present. This is really annoying. It lets you type in a long version 2.3 title, but it will be clipped to the version 1.0 length when iTunes updates the information.
There are workarounds.
ID3X is freeware for editing ID3 tags from the German company three-2-one interaktive Medien GmbH. One of its most useful features is the ability to write tags onto a whole folder full of MP3 files at the same time. You can use ID3X to create ID3 2.2 tags and then iTunes will be happy to work with them. It will even copy the version 1.0 information into the version 2.2 tags. Check out www.versiontracker.com for the latest and greatest ID3X. The newest, as of this writing is version 1.1. You can find it at Version Tracker.
Several acquaintances with portable MP3 players pointed out a really annoying consequence of the single-window interface. It either shows your music library, or the contents of your player, but not both. This makes the task of transferring files to the player a memory test.
All-in-all, iTunes isn't perfect, but it's certainly the best MP3 program for its price on any platform. With just a little more work, it could become one of the best at any price.
Scrupulously avoided by all involved during the introduction of iTunes was the specter that's really driving this whole MP3 makeover--Napster. Somewhere between eight and twenty million people--depending on who's estimate you believe--are out there trading MP3 files on the Internet with Napster. For the computer industry, Napster is kind of like having a very generous uncle who sells drugs to buy you presents. You may like what he's doing for you, but you can't feel right about how he's doing it. The computer industry pretends not to know Napster sells machines for them.
Late last month, the first official Napster Mac client was introduced, and then upgraded a few weeks later. The first official Mac client wasn't any big deal because the same program has been available for about a year under the name Macster. The Napster people just gave it their stamp of approval and changed its name. You can pick it up for free off the Napster Web site (www.napster.com).
The speaker at the February 27 LCS meeting will be local FileMaker Pro developer, Brad Bishop. He will speak on the new capabilities in the latest version of FileMaker Pro.
The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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