You are here: Home / Archives for itunes

Apple iTunes to raise prices on movies

December 5, 2007 By Leave a Comment

According to MacNN, Apple is set to raise the prices on downloadable movies in iTunes to $15, just a couple of dollars below the retail price of a physical DVD. This means that for $3 more, you can order the same movie, without DRM, with extra content, in a nice box, and probably in better quality.

It is suggested in the article that the studios are under pressure from retailers such as Wal-Mart. Which basically means that old-style retail is trying to hold on to their distribution model, and forces the new-style retail to mimic their inefficiencies… I hope Apple will come up with something else, especially now that there are serious indications on the music side that the old model is failing (EMI scaling back funding of the RIAA, more and more DRM-free music).

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , , ,

iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

September 26, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Somewhere along the upgrade trail from 7.3 to 7.4.2, I started getting the annoying message “iTunes was not properly installed. If you wish to import or burn CDs, you need to reinstall iTunes” whenever I start iTunes. After following this advice, and restarting iTunes, I got the message “iTunes was not properly installed. If…” – OK, you got the idea…

Apparently a lot of other people seem to be having this problem. And it happens under Vista 32 and 64 bit. Despite the message, people are reporting that importing works fine (I haven’t seen any messages confirming that burning a CD still works).

A discussion thread on the Apple Support forum helped me out: simply installing the GEAR Software drivers seemed to resolve at least the message. In some cases, a new error message pops up saying it can’t find the folder with the CD settings. In that case you have to uninstall iTunes 7.4.x, install 7.3.2, copy the CD folder to a safe location, uninstall iTunes 7.3.2, reinstall iTunes 7.4.x, install the GEAR driver, and copy the CD folder back.

I haven’t tried importing or burning a CD yet, but at least iTunes starts without pausing for me to click OK!

Filed Under: Music, Windows Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Vista network performance while playing music

September 18, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Yeah, I just got bit by that Vista “feature”… the one where your network slows down when you play music. That one, yeah.

I just added an index to our database, unfortunately from the client side. While I was chastising myself for doing it client-server instead of host-based, I was watching the number of records being updated per second. Hmm, about 400… maybe if I shutdown some programs. First, Sidebar – it displays some RSS feeds and weather information. OK, up to 420-440 records/sec. Not bad…

Then I remembered reading something about the Vista network stack and playing music files. I closed iTunes, and lo and behold: I now was updating about 1800 records/sec! Over 4 times as much??? Me thinks Vista has a problem there. This is on a dual-core 2.4GHz Intel with 2GB RAM.

ZDNet has an article with Microsoft’s response to the Vista network performance issue, and while some of the arguments may be true (only local network operations, two high priority drivers contending for the same resource, etc.), I still think it’s funny that a dual processor system would have its network performance so drastically reduced.

Anyone thinks it’s the DRM…? Anyone…?

Filed Under: Music, Network, Windows Tagged With: , , , , ,
Newer Posts »