iTunes for Windows is out

[Asher]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Exactly. AAC is an open standard, unlike WMA.

No.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Oh, I almost forgot. I've got to work on polishing my lines for the church play tomorrow morning.

Goodnight everyone.

[Q Classic]

Q Cubed - he just admitted that in a previous post. All that work for nothing.

x-post, but also to argue against his claim that aac is an open format. he only admitted that aac was a development of mpeg2-acc, not mp3.

so, ag, it's not 'wasted effort'.

[Q Classic]

and as far as effort goes... if googling the formats, clicking on the first link, and then going to the faqs is too much effort...

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Q Cubed

Q Cubed - he just admitted that in a previous post. All that work for nothing.

x-post, but also to argue against his claim that aac is an open format. he only admitted that aac was a development of mpeg2-acc, not mp3.

so, ag, it's not 'wasted effort'.

Some people use "open format" to mean an open standard like CD Audio. Others use it to mean open source as in GPL.

Confusing, yes...

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
and as far as effort goes... if googling the formats, clicking on the first link, and then going to the faqs is too much effort...

Calm down....

[Q Classic]

dude, i'm not angry or not calm. i'm just pointing out that it wasn't much effort. google makes everything easy.

[Q Classic]

(sigh) you know what i hate about dialup? it's sloww...

in any case, an open standard, as i'm defining it, is one where you can study the standard and not pay to use it. one where you can develop your own implementations.

a proprietary/non-open format is a format where you must license it to use it in an ecoder or decoder legally. it doesn't matter if you can read about the standard if you can't actually use it. therefore, it's proprietary, and not open.

what makes apple's aac even more proprietary is that they've modified the aac format they use to have drm; so not only does anyone who wants to use their accs format have to license it from them, they also have to obtain the licenses to the basic aac format. therefore, it's not an open standard.

if we went by the definition you seem to be using, in that open standard means anybody can read it, then you cuold consider word .doc open--but they're not. that's why openoffice can't always open up a .doc file flawlessly--they made an implementation of something that can almost decode it, but they don't have the last few bits that microsoft owns and keeps to itself. thus, though anyone can see the encoding of a .doc file, it's still proprietary.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
what makes apple's aac even more proprietary is that they've modified the aac format they use to have drm; so not only does anyone who wants to use their accs format have to license it from them, they also have to obtain the licenses to the basic aac format. therefore, it's not an open standard.

No. All a company would have to do is license the AAC and use their own DRM.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

By the way, everyone here keeps talking like AAC belongs to Apple, but in reality the company that invented and patented AAC Audio is not a part of Apple at all, but an independent subisidary of Dolby Technologies.

http://www.vialicensing.com/who/

So the good thing here is that right now Apple happens to be the only company that is a licensee of the AAC format. Other companies have yet to license their use of the new format.

[Drake Tungsten]

No.

What an in-depth response.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
What an in-depth response.

I only had 30 seconds, and Q Cubed already addressed it.

Mr Nice Guy: I've told you months ago AAC was Dolby's, it's actually a slightly modified Dolby Digital 2.0. All of this talk about AAC being really advanced is weird, it's older than MP3 by a few years. Just requires more computational resources to encode and decode, and wasn't available on the PC until recently.

The problem is thus:
AAC is proprietary to Dolby, who charges a significant licensing fee.
Apple's DRM is proprietary to Apple, who has yet to license it to anyone whatsoever (since some people here are being naive enough to think that unless a press release is issued saying they'll be *******s, Apple will of course license it out).

So I have to say that the people who call AAC an "open" standard are mindless Macheads who once again fall far short of being remotely correct in the world of technology.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Mr. Nice Guy
No. All a company would have to do is license the AAC and use their own DRM.

What good would that do, seeing as any songs from iTunes would not play, and the only people who use AAC are Apple and iTunes.

There is a demand for codecs far more powerful than MP3. AAC and WMA are the alternatives: AAC is expensive and not as advanced (and not being developed anymore), while WMA supports much more features and still gets developed, while being significantly cheaper and having much wider industry support.

WMA is the logical choice, Apple chose AAC because no one else did and their entire business model is based around using iTunes to lock in potential buyers for the iPod. So using AAC makes perfect sense for them. Doesn't mean it's a smart move from a consumers' point of view, but Apple and Apple's customers don't seem to care about that.

[Drake Tungsten]

So I have to say that the people who call AAC an "open" standard are mindless Macheads who once again fall far short of being remotely correct in the world of technology.

This sures makes me wonder why all the tech articles I've been reading on the subject refer to AAC as an "open" standard. Of course, even people who write about this stuff for a living can't be right if Asher says they aren't...

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

So I have to say that the people who call AAC an "open" standard are mindless Macheads who once again fall far short of being remotely correct in the world of technology.

This sures makes me wonder why all the tech articles I've been reading on the subject refer to AAC as an "open" standard. Of course, even people who write about this stuff for a living can't be right if Asher says they aren't...

Sad and pathetic isn't he.

Here's more ammunition. Evil psychopathic Apple did not develop Fairplay; it was developed by a company called Veridisc http://64.244.235.240/ and licensed by Apple.

(don't go to veridisc.com - it's a site devoted to pornographic torture - ugh).

Although I may be mistaken, what little info there is at this site suggests that Fairplay is available for licensing to other third parties.