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Hi, sorry for the vanity. I am very Windows XP literate but not Mac literate and am posting this for a family member. She has a BlackBerry and uses a Mac. She wants to transfer songs directly from compact discs to her Blackberry (if possible), but I'm thinking she has to first extract the songs from the CDs to iTunes and from there (iTunes) transfer the songs to her BlackBerry. Couldn't she also just go to the iTunes store on her Blackberry and download the music directly to her BlackBerry that way? The only downside is that she would be...

ONE IN FOUR SONGS IN U.S. BOUGHT ON ITUNES By Caleb Johnson Aug 19th 2009 at 1:30 PM Although digital music sales continue to rise, CDs still account for the market majority in the U.S. When it comes to the burgeoning online world, though, iTunes stands alone. Macworld writes that a recent report released by NPD Musicwatch showed that 25-percent of the songs purchased in the United States during the first months of 2009 came from the iTunes store. That makes iTunes the most popular music retailer in the country, beating out former champ Wal-Mart, which boasts 14-percent. (That figure,...

Oh dear. We can't say this was a complete surprise, but it looks like Apple made good on its earlier warning and put an end to the Palm Pre-iTunes synchronization with the release of iTunes 8.2.1. In the release notes, Apple states that "iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices." Not wanting to believe the news, we bit the bullet and downloaded the latest version of Apple's music software to our PC and sure enough, the romance is dead. Just as before, we connected the smartphone to our laptop...

Apple may be known for its advertising prowess, but this little marketing coup is going to go down as one of the most hilarious ad placements in recent history. doubleTwist, the company co-founded by renowned software reverse engineer DVD Jon, has managed to place a banner for its product directly next to the main entrance to Apple’s flagship San Francisco store. The ad invites passersby to try “The Cure for iPhone Envy”, which they can use to access their “iTunes Library on any device. In Seconds”. It’s clearly a message that Apple doesn’t want anything to do with. We’re hearing...

Barry O'Bomber of the Barry Bomber Four joins us today to debut his new single, covering the classic "I Fought the Law," but with his own special twist, chronicling his rise to the presidency and actions since his inauguration. Enjoy folks!

On September 9, 2009, after a nearly 22-year wait, digitally remastered versions of all of the Beatles studio albums will be released, a press release has confirmed. Each album will feature the track listings and artwork as it was originally released in the U.K. and come with expanded booklets including original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited time, each of the Fab Four’s 12 proper albums will be “embedded” with a brief documentary about its making. The rereleases will include the Beatles’ 12 studio albums and Magical Mystery Tour as well as Past Masters Vol....

A nine-year-old computer programmer in Singapore has hit the top ten selling list on the iTunes store with an application called Doodle Kids.

I am soon to pull the trigger on getting a laptop. Which one, I do not know. But one thing that is slowing me down and is of great concern to me is transfering the bazillions of songs I have in my iTunes software to the new computer so I can use my iPod with that instead of the old desktop. What is a quick, simple, and easy method of doing this for someone that knows jack squat about computers?

Apple Inc. unveiled significant pricing and copyright changes to its iTunes Store, moves by the dominant online music seller that could spur similar action across the industry. The changes, announced at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco Tuesday, include a new three-tiered pricing plan for songs, instead of the 99-cents fixed price Apple has used almost exclusively. Apple also said it will drop copy protection from all of the songs in its digital store.

Apple Inc. is dropping the digital copyright locks from most of the songs it sells through iTunes, a move that could prove to be a death blow for the music industry's attempts to control how consumers buy and listen to music. With the revolutionary iPod and the iTunes music store, Apple rewrote the rulebook for the music industry as labels struggled to adjust to the new digital reality of file-sharing and copyright violations brought about by the Internet. Today, Apple is the largest retailer of music in the U.S. with more than five billion songs sold and many will see...

Apple fans are under attack on multiple fronts.Security researchers have discovered an unpatched vulnerability in Apple's iTunes and QuickTime software that creates an opportunity to crash browser applications. The flaw might also open up a route to inject hostile code onto vulnerable systems, though this remains unproven. Exploitation of the flaw in either case involves tricking surfers into opening a maliciously constructed QuickTime tag contained on a web page or embedded in an MP3 and video clip file. Security clearing house US CERT rates the buffer overflow-based flaw - which affects Apple QuickTime 7.5.5 and iTunes 8.0 - as a...

We all love the iPod, but sadly, Apple is still not kind enough to provide an iPod manager for those of us who use Linux. However, this is not really a big issue nowadays as there are other means to manage your iPod under Linux. Thanks to these excellent free and open source media players that are certified to handle your iPod the way iTunes can. Banshee Banshee is built upon Mono and Gtk# and uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC. Banshee can play, import, and burn audio...

If you enjoy buying music from iTunes, movies from Amazon.com's Unbox, or computer software from anywhere, be warned: the halcyon days of tax-free digital purchases may be over. With retail e-commerce sales now estimated to exceed $130 billion a year, and iTunes song purchases topping 5 billion, state politicians and tax collectors have begun to levy new fees on digital downloads. Call it the iTax. In 2008 alone, at least nine states have considered digital download taxes, and at least five of those states have enacted them into law. Nebraska's governor signed a digital download tax bill into law in...

MacDailyNews reader Chad reports having received an email from Yahoo! that the Yahoo! Music Store will be closing. Here it is verbatim: The Yahoo! Music Store Will Be Closing; Important Information About Backing Up Your Music Files Greetings, The Yahoo! Music Store, along with the ability to purchase and download single songs and albums, will no longer be available as of September 30, 2008. Songs and albums that were purchased through the Yahoo! Music Unlimited Store are protected by a digital rights management system that requires a valid license key before they can be played on your computer. After the...

Buzzword chimera the size of a paperback Start-up CherryPal is taking pre-orders today for its partly cloudy "desktop" that mashes web-hosted computing, going green, open source, and social networking into a 10 ounce box. The (self-titled) CherryPal systems are $249, and surprisingly won't require a monthly subscription despite the fact that most of its storage capacity and several of its features hosted in the cloud.Note: we still haven't seen a working unit with our own eyes. According to CherryPal, as of Friday the boxes were still being given the fine tooth courtesy of US Customs and Border Protection's best and...

Excerpt - Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US in December. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to an NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month January contained in an internal Apple e-mail which was leaked to Ars Technica but has not been officially published. The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees,...

A report by the Financial Times (registration required) cites unnamed executives who say that Apple is in talks with record labels to offer access to the entire iTunes music library for a lump sum price. The fee would be added as a premium option on an iPod or iPhone, or it could come as a monthly charge. It would allow downloading of any song at any time so long as the purchaser still owns the device, and the songs would be yours to keep.This latest concept is similar to Nokia's "Comes With Music" program set to launch later this year....

Music industry blog Coolfer has an interesting post this week about online tools for do-it-yourself musicians in which he points to a relatively new service called Speakerheart. I checked out the service, and while I agree with his assessment of the interface--it's based on Adobe's Flex (an offshoot of Flash) and is very slick and easy to use--I think that Speakerheart, like most other digital distribution start-ups, is going to have a very hard time. The process is pretty straightforward: Artists sign up with Speakerheart to sell their songs through a digital storefront on the site. Artists have complete pricing...

Apple has officially announced movie rentals for iTunes. Studios involved include Touchstone, MGM, Miramax, Lions Gate, Fox, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony, just to name a few. The new feature will launch today with 1,000 available films by the end of February -- prices will come in at $2.99 for a regular rental, and $3.99 for new releases. You'll be able to begin watching your movie in 30 seconds, and will have the rental for up to 24 hours, during which time you can transfer the file to an iPod or iPhone and take it on...

NEW YORK (AP) — Apple Inc. escalated a dispute with NBC Universal over the pricing of television shows by announcing Friday it would not sell any of NBC's programs for this fall season on iTunes. Earlier, NBC had told Apple that it would no longer allow its programs to be sold via iTunes at the end of the year. NBC Universal-controlled television programming accounts for an estimated 40 percent of the video downloads on iTunes. "We are disappointed to see NBC leave iTunes because we would not agree to their dramatic price increase," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of...

Apple today released QuickTime 7.2 for Mac and Windows which addresses critical security issues and delivers: • Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player • Updates to the H.264 codec • Numerous bug fixes This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users. QuickTime 7.2 is available via Software Update (on Macs under the Blue Apple Menu) and also as standalone installers. More info and download links: • QuickTime 7.2 for Mac (51.4MB) • QuickTime 7.2 for Windows (19.3MB)

June 22, 2007 9:35 AM PDTApple's iTunes overtakes Amazon in overall music sales Posted by Greg Sandoval Strong holiday sales helped Apple's iTunes push past Amazon and take third place in overall music sales during the first quarter, according to a new report. A spike in iPod sales over Christmas drove new device owners to iTunes, and helped Apple grab 9.8 percent of the overall music market, according to the report, issued Friday by the NPD Group. Amazon came in fourth with a 6.7 share, according to NPD's figures. Wal-Mart was tops in the quarter with 15.8 percent and runner-up...

Excerpt - Apple Inc. is in talks with the Hollywood studios to make new movies available for rental for its iTunes service, according to two studio executives familiar with the matter. The rental service is being pitched aggressively by Apple, with titles to rent for $2.99 for a set number of days before expiring, these people said. ~ snip ~

Names, e-mails and other sensitive information embedded in files Fresh privacy fears have been sparked after it emerged that Apple has embedded personal information into music files bought from its iTunes online music store. Technology websites examining iTunes products discovered that personal data, including the name and e-mail addresses of purchasers, are embedded into the AAC files that Apple uses to distribute music tracks. The information is also included in tracks sold under Apple’s iTunes Plus system, launched this week, where users pay a premium for music that is free from the controversial digital rights (DRM) software that is designed...

Apple announced iTunes Plus today, where anyone can buy DRM-free tunes with "amazing" 256 kpbs sound quality for $1.29 versus the typical $.99 per song. This is great news--and not only because it takes advantage of EMI's decision to free music lovers from the shackles of digital rights management. In the long-run, I think the question of audio quality is also going to become far more important. Yes, I know--fidelity is far down the list of most consumer's priorities. Conventional wisdom is that it only matters to audiofiles who have convinced themselves they can hear a difference. That may be...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Major record companies are forcing Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) to curtail access to iTunes online stores across borders, leading to higher prices and less choice, the European Commission said on Tuesday. The EU executive sent formal charges to Apple and the major record companies last week because consumers can only buy iTunes in their own countries and cannot shop around for cheaper prices and a broader catalogue in other states. "Our current view is that this is an arrangement which is imposed on Apple by the major record companies and we do not see a justification for...

EMI Group PLC on Monday announced a deal that will allow computer company Apple Inc. to sell the record company's songs online without copy protection software. The agreement means that customers of Apple's iTunes store will soon be able to play downloaded songs by the Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Coldplay and other top-selling artists without the copying restrictions once imposed by their label. EMI said almost all of its catalog, excluding music by The Beatles, is included in the deal. Singles and albums free from copy-protection software and with a higher sound quality will be offered as a premium product,...

Today, Apple officially kicked off its Apple TV publicity campaign, providing review hardware to friendly members of the press and enabling selected journalists to publish early reviews. The goal: to try and build enough positive buzz to sustain the newest member of the Apple family despite some mainstream skepticism about its prospects for success. To provide a bit of balance for all the hype you’re likely to hear over the next several days, we bring you this: a list of the top ten reasons you might not need Apple TV, at least yet. Some are obvious, others aren’t, and all...

Apple today released iTunes 7.1, an update to its multimedia jukebox software as well as QuickTime 7.1.5, an update to the multimedia software that address eight different security flaws. iTunes 7.1 brings support for Apple TV, allowing users to "enjoy your favorite iTunes movies, TV shows, music, and more from the comfort of your living room with Apple TV." Apple said that iTunes 7.1 also supports a new full screen Cover Flow and improved sorting options to let users decide how iTunes should sort your favorite artists, albums, and songs. Apple TV is expected to be available from Apple in...

Digital rights management (DRM) is an out-and-out disaster both as a concept and as an always changing technology. Most technologists have always believed this and apparently now Steve Jobs is saying it publicly. See related story. He is begging the music industry to give up on all the DRM initiatives while subtly predicting they may spell its doom. He is dead right. The negative attitude over DRM is best expressed in the Wikipedia entry for DRM, "Technologies to give content providers control over redistribution and access to material. Critics of these technologies use an alternate expansion, 'Digital Restrictions Management'."

An analyst predicted Wednesday that Apple Computer Inc.'s shares will trade higher by the end of next year, with revenue boosted by new products such as the iPhone and iTV. Morgan Stanley analyst Rebecca F. Runkle raised her target price to $110 from $90, and said in a note to investors the computer and iPod maker's expanding portfolio, growing distribution force and opportunities at increasing market share all lead to an "Overweight" rating for the stock. The analyst said she has "high conviction" that the iPhone will launch in the first half of 2007.

Research Firm Clarifies: iTunes Sales Are Not Collapsing Reporters misunderstood data released in a recent market report, Forrester Research says. Media reports of plummeting sales on Apple Computer's iTunes music store are untrue and based on a misinterpretation of data released in a recent market report, the research firm that published the study says. Forrester Research on Wednesday tried to set the record straight after some media companies reported that its study on iTunes showed that song sales fell 65% during the first six months of the year. "For the record, iTunes sales are not collapsing," Josh Bernoff, analyst and...

Digital flatline looks ominous for music labels The leading DRM digital download service, Apple's iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research. Secretive Apple doesn't break out revenues from iTunes, but Forrester conducted an analysis of credit card transactions over a 27-month period. And this year's numbers aren't good. While the iTunes service saw healthy growth for much of the period, since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65 per cent, with the average transaction size falling 17 per cent. The previous spring's rebound wasn't repeated this year. And it isn't...

Sales from Apple's iTunes digital download service have not kept pace with strong sales of iPod players, according to analyst company Forrester Research. Apple doesn't reveal revenue from iTunes, but Forrester conducted an analysis of debit and credit transactions over a 27-month period. The results released Monday show that since January, monthly revenue from iTunes sales fell by 65 per cent. The average transaction size declined by 17 per cent. Apple's iTunes holds more than a 70 per cent share of the digital download market, but the Forrester study suggests this has more to do with nearly 60 million iPods...

Just wanted to see if anyone has had problems installing the latest version of iTunes (7.0.2). The software seemed to install fine; however, when the program is launched for the first time, I receive this error:"iTunes has encountered a problem and needs to close...." Anything short of reinstalling Windows to solve the problem? I have consulted many tech. boards to no avail. I have downloaded and redownloaded the exe four times, from four different locations, and receive the same error each time, subsequent to installation.I'm running XP SP2. Thank you sincerely for any suggestions.

Excerpt - A recent out-of-court settlement between Apple Computer and a Vermont-based inventor has landed Apple the rights to a prestigious software design patent that may allow the company to seek royalties on a broad spectrum of digital downloads. Michael Starkweather, a lawyer and author of the 10-year old patent, issued a statement on Thursday calling it a "billion dollar patent" that will have affects on the future of the "cell phone, iPod and PDA" industries. "I believe that, with this patent in hand, Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to...

Apple today released iTunes 7.0.2 which adds support for the Second Generation iPod shuffle and addresses a variety of stability and performance issues found in iTunes 7 and 7.0.1. System Requirements: • Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later • Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4 or later) • Windows XP (latest Service Pack recommended) More info and download link (25.5MB for the Mac version, 35.1MB for the Windows version) here.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 24 (Reuters) - A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from download music stores other than Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iTunes, his company said on Tuesday. Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple's FairPlay copy-protection technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist, the company that plans to license the code to businesses. "What he did was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay," she said. "This allows other companies to offer...

With the 5th anniversary of the iPod, Newsweek spoke with Steve Jobs about the iPod, iTunes Store and Zune as a potential threat. According to Jobs, one major reason for the iPod's success was its relative simplicity: Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they're really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple.Meanwhile, courting the music studios to distribute music through iTunes was an 18 month process, with them gradually coming over. During the negotiations, the initial limited distribution to the Mac platform only was seen as a positive feature. "If we're completely wrong...

PARIS, Oct. 8 — It took more than 10 minutes to persuade the Paris police station’s highest-ranking officer that a crime might have taken place, but that did not deter Jérôme Martinez and his two companions. After all, the three had marched halfway across the Latin Quarter one evening in late September, accompanied by about 40 fellow advocates, waving banners and handing out parking-ticket-style leaflets that claimed they had committed a number of offenses. Among their crimes was listening to a song purchased from iTunes on a device not made by Apple Computer. The group, StopDRM, largely made up of...

Beginning this week, New Jersey residents purchasing music and videos from services like Apple's iTunes and rival digital downloads e-tailers encountered something they'd previously only found at bricks-and-mortar counterparts: a sales tax. Democratic Governor Jon Corzine proposed the sales tax expansion earlier this spring to help the state to recover from a $4.5 billion budget deficit, an ABC News affiliate in New York reported recently on its Web site. The changes, along with a sales tax rate hike from 6 to 7 percent, took effect on Oct. 1. According to a CNET News.com special report completed in April, 15 states...

Just to give heads up to my fellow freepers who are following the best show on TV and anyone who might be interested in seeing what it is all about, itunes has a 42 minute episode called The story so far up for free. If you have not seen BSG, I would highly recommend it. In some ways, this is an incredibly political show that presents a conservative viewpoint in a positive light and treats religion with a lot of respect it is also very entertaining. this is the download link Battlestar galactica the story so far

After all the complaints surrounding iTunes 7.0, Apple quitely releases an updateWhen Apple announced its new range of iPod music players two weeks ago, it also launched a new version of iTunes. iTunes 7.0 boasted a slightly redesigned interface, the ability to sync an iPod to more than one computer, a new "Cover Flow" view for album management, the ability to download album art from the Internet and support for full-length feature film downloads.Shortly after the release of iTunes 7.0, however, the complaints started to poor out from users. There were problems with high memory usage, unexpected program crashes and...

Apple's new release of iTunes 7 brings along a bunch of new problemsJust days after the release of iTunes version 7, Apple is facing a barrage of user complaints and reports about iTunes being well, not much of an upgrade. Steve Jobs demonstrated the new release at the special conference to an amazed audience on Tuesday, showing off features such as free downloadable album art, new view and sort methods, and gapless playback. Unfortunately, some core features of iTunes have now become broken. Going through the Apple iTunes forum, some of the problems most frequently reported are: Being unable to...

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Has Apple Computer's chief executive, Steve Jobs, found a way to connect the PC to the TV? With an enticing invitation proclaiming "It's Showtime," Jobs last week touched off speculation about how far Apple will go as it takes its next big step into digital video. On Tuesday, Apple will hold another of Jobs' marketing events in San Francisco to introduce what trade publications and analysts indicate will be his next campaign: an effort to transform the distribution of Hollywood movies as thoroughly as he has revolutionized the recording industry with the iTunes Music Store. A distribution deal with Disney...

A new free music website has won the backing of Universal Music, creating a new model that could challenge market leader Apple's iTunes Music Store. New York-based SpiralFrog, which plans to launch its service later this year, said Universal Music, a unit of France-based Vivendi, has agreed to make its library available for the service to United States and Canadian customers. The site is apparently the first to offer legal music downloads for free to customers willing to watch online advertisements. The inclusion of the biggest of the big four music labels is expected to give SpiralFrog an edge...

Apple's iTunes music store now has added episodes and season pass for Season 10 of Stargate SG-1 and Season 3 of Stargate Atlantis.

YouTube's planned effort to offer "every" music video for free could dethrone Apple's iTunes as the leader in the digital music/media industry and eliminate the paid-for online content business model. Users watch 100 million clips each day via YouTube, and the video sharing site is in talks with EMI as well as Warner Music to offer music videos for free via download, according to Guardian Unlimited. The move threatens Apple's closed iPod/iTunes ecosystem which uses proprietary technology restricting tracks purchased from iTunes to play only on Apple's iPod and iTunes software. YouTube's popularity could mean free video-based music competition for...

The DVD Copy Control Association is soon expected to finalize changes that could allow iTunes customers to burn video downloads onto DVDs. The forthcoming technical and policy changes involve the association's proprietary technology called the "Content Scramble System," or CSS. The group licenses the encryption technology to makers of DVD players and other electronics firms, applying it to movies on DVDs to restrict illegal copying, according to a report from the Associated Press. The association said it will expand that licensing to digitally distributed movies on demand or a la carte in the near future, and is cooperating with disc...