I just spent 2 hours watching Jack White play at the iTunes Festival (recorded earlier this month in London). What a show. If you have a copy of iTunes, fire it up. Better yet, if you have a fancy AppleTV thingamabox, check out the dedicated app/channel for the Festival and watch it on the big screen.
I tried playing along for a couple of songs. But, there’s just no fracking way. The dude is absolutely insane. Wow. He reminds me of someone, though…
Jack White: iTunes Festival 2012 from iTunes on Vimeo.
A computer-generated story, using tracks in my iTunes library as source material [as per request](http://nogoodadvice.somethingkindaooooh.com/2011/02/04/visual-assignment/)
A tale of mortality. Of acceptance. And of transcendence.
From the iTunes terms of service:
TERMS OF SALE
CANADIAN SALES ONLY
Purchases or rentals (as applicable) from the iTunes Store are available to you only in Canada. If you are not in Canada you may not use or attempt to use the service. iTunes may use technologies to verify such compliance.
Do I get to use the US store if I’m south of the border?
I just upgraded a bunch of tracks to iTunes+ DRM-free files. At the bottom of my “Purchased” album, I noticed the stats:
So that’s why she complains about the stream of iTunes charges on the Visa… Oops.
Best $50 I’ve spent in a long, long time. My music library is not pretty much DRM-free. What was that about the evil Apple lockin again?
Update: doh. looks like the process has a glitch or two. I’m sure that’ll get worked out really quickly though. This is what I get when I click the “Buy” button shown above:
Update 2: GAH! I tried to post a question on the Apple Support site to see wtf, but can’t seem to find the button to do that. No email link. No support available. My only option is to wait a day or so and try again. Fail.
Update 3: thanks to a friend who kindly pointed out that I had missed the Contact Us link on the iTunes support page, I’ve submitted a support message with Apple. Hopefully I can spend that $50 in the next day or so… 🙂
This was my shuffle-ized playlist for the morning ride and cooldown. There isn’t a radio station on the planet (satellite or terrestrial) that would have put a playlist like this together.
It looks pretty eclectic, but the tracks all worked amazingly well against each other.
I hadn’t visited an iTunes U site for awhile, so this may not be new. I just checked out the Berkeley iTunes U to see what they’re doing with it, and notice the shiny “Subscribe” button when viewing a topic. I don’t remember that being there before, when I was poking around in the Stanford iTunes U. Berkeley’s using it to let folks subscribe to audio on topics like Global Affairs, as well as individual courses. Hey! That’s podcasting! If only I knew of anyone that could use something like this…
I hadn’t visited an iTunes U site for awhile, so this may not be new. I just checked out the Berkeley iTunes U to see what they’re doing with it, and notice the shiny “Subscribe” button when viewing a topic. I don’t remember that being there before, when I was poking around in the Stanford iTunes U. Berkeley’s using it to let folks subscribe to audio on topics like Global Affairs, as well as individual courses. Hey! That’s podcasting! If only I knew of anyone that could use something like this…
There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept – forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”
This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.
- Don’t publish the content (status quo). This somehow feels like a tighter lock-down than publishing into iTMS.
- Publish on your own. People are doing this. It’s hard to scale, though. Apple’s offering infrastructure and systems that would be hard to replicate. It is possible, of course, as shown by MIT OpenCourseWare.
- Create a new iTunes + iTMS clone, perhaps open source, that could be used. Technically possible. Is it worth the effort and resources to do this, though? I’m not sure.
And, I haven’t seen anything requiring exclusive distribution “rights” being granted to Apple. The content remains property of the university, who is of course free to repackage and republish to their heart’s content. Don’t like iTunes? Write your own client. Don’t like AAC? Convert a copy to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or Real or WMA or whatever. Don’t want the only online copy of the file to be served from Cupertino? Stick a copy on your own server, and provide some kind of service to let people access it.
From what I see, and I have no insider info (so I could of course be wrong), all the iTunes U. service offers is an option for publishing media easily, into the most popular (legal) online content distribution system on the planet.
I’m stepping out on a limb here, but if Apple provided a website front-end, and the option to use MP3 as the file format, would the objections remain? It’s not as simple as “Commercial/proprietary systems suck!” – the option, for many, is to not be able to effectively share content at all. Apple isn’t intending to restrict, they’re attempting to enable.
Update: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know – and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok – you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).
There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept – forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”
This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.
- Don’t publish the content (status quo). This somehow feels like a tighter lock-down than publishing into iTMS.
- Publish on your own. People are doing this. It’s hard to scale, though. Apple’s offering infrastructure and systems that would be hard to replicate. It is possible, of course, as shown by MIT OpenCourseWare.
- Create a new iTunes + iTMS clone, perhaps open source, that could be used. Technically possible. Is it worth the effort and resources to do this, though? I’m not sure.
And, I haven’t seen anything requiring exclusive distribution “rights” being granted to Apple. The content remains property of the university, who is of course free to repackage and republish to their heart’s content. Don’t like iTunes? Write your own client. Don’t like AAC? Convert a copy to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or Real or WMA or whatever. Don’t want the only online copy of the file to be served from Cupertino? Stick a copy on your own server, and provide some kind of service to let people access it.
From what I see, and I have no insider info (so I could of course be wrong), all the iTunes U. service offers is an option for publishing media easily, into the most popular (legal) online content distribution system on the planet.
I’m stepping out on a limb here, but if Apple provided a website front-end, and the option to use MP3 as the file format, would the objections remain? It’s not as simple as “Commercial/proprietary systems suck!” – the option, for many, is to not be able to effectively share content at all. Apple isn’t intending to restrict, they’re attempting to enable.
Update: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know – and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok – you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).
I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ – regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…
I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
There are some issues, like the perceived lock-in to the iPod, and the need to have iTunes on the desktop. Both aspects have some very strong arguments both for and against, which I’m not going to rehash now (but am giving them a lot of thought, and Brian’s given it a go already).
One thing I’d like to know is how to integrate the iTMS as a part of a larger ecosystem – it can’t be an exclusive engagement, so there would be nothing preventing a campus from also producing .mp3 versions of appropriate files and hosting them in a non-iTMS solution for the non-iTunes-using, non-iPod-toting, or Linux-using crowds.
I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ – regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…
I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
There are some issues, like the perceived lock-in to the iPod, and the need to have iTunes on the desktop. Both aspects have some very strong arguments both for and against, which I’m not going to rehash now (but am giving them a lot of thought, and Brian’s given it a go already).
One thing I’d like to know is how to integrate the iTMS as a part of a larger ecosystem – it can’t be an exclusive engagement, so there would be nothing preventing a campus from also producing .mp3 versions of appropriate files and hosting them in a non-iTMS solution for the non-iTunes-using, non-iPod-toting, or Linux-using crowds.
via Josie Fraser at EdTechUK – This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while. Stanford University is putting a bunch of audio content online, free, via the iTMS.
Stanford on iTunes will provide alumni—as well as the general public—with a new and versatile way of staying connected to the university through downloads of faculty lectures, campus events, performances, book readings, music recorded by Stanford students and even podcasts of Stanford football games. At launch, the service will contain close to 400 distinct audio programs, and the university will continue to add new content as it becomes available.
They’ve put up a page describing the effort, with a direct link to the Stanford section of the iTMS. I’m downloading a few things now (a session on Stress and Coping – ironically enough – and some live recordings of some concerts).
Very cool. Great to see a Big School “get it” that by sharing resources freely they are not shooting themselves in the foot. Every university should be doing this as part of their contribution back to the community.
ps. Yes, I know it’s not really podcasting, but close enough. The spirit is the same, and they provide some handy hooks to download all content at once. So it’s not fed to you via RSS. Whatever…
via Josie Fraser at EdTechUK – This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while. Stanford University is putting a bunch of audio content online, free, via the iTMS.
Stanford on iTunes will provide alumni—as well as the general public—with a new and versatile way of staying connected to the university through downloads of faculty lectures, campus events, performances, book readings, music recorded by Stanford students and even podcasts of Stanford football games. At launch, the service will contain close to 400 distinct audio programs, and the university will continue to add new content as it becomes available.
They’ve put up a page describing the effort, with a direct link to the Stanford section of the iTMS. I’m downloading a few things now (a session on Stress and Coping – ironically enough – and some live recordings of some concerts).
Very cool. Great to see a Big School “get it” that by sharing resources freely they are not shooting themselves in the foot. Every university should be doing this as part of their contribution back to the community.
ps. Yes, I know it’s not really podcasting, but close enough. The spirit is the same, and they provide some handy hooks to download all content at once. So it’s not fed to you via RSS. Whatever…
