The iPhone is the next logical step in Apple's move to dominate the music download market. The company kicked off this venture in 2001 when it launched the very first iPod, which had a mere 5GB of hard drive space and room for just 1,000 tracks, and followed up in 2003 with the launch of the iTunes Music Store, since renamed simply the iTunes Store.
On launch, the Store was open to US users only, and its catalogue ran to a fairly conservative 200,000 tracks. Yet it was pretty much guaranteed to succeed. Not only was it tied in to what had by then become the world's most successful and iconic music player, but it was also cheap and ridiculously simple to use, because every track cost $9.99 and every album topped out at $9.99, so whatever you wanted, you knew what it would cost before you even entered the Store.
The Store was built into iTunes, Apple's PC- and Mac-based jukebox software, from version 4 onwards. By version 6, released October 2005, the iTunes Store had started to sell television programmes and music videos to complement the fifth-generation iPod, which had been announced simultaneously and sported video playback features. By then, Apple all but owned the market for music downloads, and it has since become one of the top three music outlets in the US.
So Apple could not afford to throw away all of this hard work by launching an iPhone that had less than perfect integration with its online music store — especially not when the hardware allowed for such an impressive user experience.
For this reason, Apple initially refused to allow users to buy tracks from the iTunes Store over the mobile networks, instead insisting that they buy and download them through its own iTunes software before transferring them to the iPhone. In fact, so key is iTunes to the whole iPhone experience that you will come to know it very well indeed over your years of happy ownership.
Into the iTunes Store
The iTuncs Store is nothing more than a web page that can only be accessed through iTunes. It originally sold all tracks at 79p with copy protection measures, and later introduced higher quality, protection-free tracks at 99p. Now all tracks arc protection-free and more variably priced.
DRM added small pieces of extra code to each track that inextricably linked it to your copy of iTunes and restricted the ways in which you could use the music, only allowing you to load it onto five different computers and an unlimited number of iPods and iPhones.
This may sound stingy on Apple's part, but in fact it was a measure insisted upon by the music companies before they would allow Apple to sell their catalogues because they were afraid that if the tracks were sold entirely unprotected they would be swapped between users, and the publishers would see a massive drop in record sales.
The iPhone's iTunes application lets you rent or download movies direct from the store, and preview them before making your buying decision.
The iTunes Store is the first place to turn to when you want to download new music to play on your iPhone. Whether you buy it directly over the phone, or via your Mac or PC, most tracks cost 79p, and single-disc albums are £7.99. It goes without saying that you don't get any physical media, but it does give you an instant fix and saves you having to rip your albums yourself.
This angered many users and in early 2007, after Steve Jobs wrote an essay outlining Apple's desire to sell tracks without protection, UK-based EMI announced it would be releasing higher-quality tracks free from DRM through the iTunes Store. iTunes Plus was born, and other companies, including Warner and Universal, were soon experimenting with DRM-free downloads through alternative online stores.
iTunes Plus tracks arc altogether more portable and offer you a degree of protection, as they can be more easily moved from one machine to another without having to reside in an authorised copy of iTunes .
However that does not mean you have the right to email them to friends — indeed, you would be extremely unwise to do so, considering each one is tagged to the email address that you used to register with at the Store, allowing publicly available tracks to be traced to whoever bought them in the first place.
Of course, not every track you might want is available through the Store because it depends whether the artist is signed to a music publisher that has a deal with Apple. Even then, you are not guaranteed to find them — AC/DC, for example, arc famed for refusing to sell their music through the iTunes Store because they don't want customers buying their songs one track at a time, insisting they should be bought only as complete albums, which Apple docs not facilitate.
However, there are benefits to buying in this way. Apple frequently sources iTunes exclusives, with tracks available on the Store a week or so before anywhere else. Moreover, each week it gives away a different track for free, which is always promoted on the front page. The best reason of all to buy from iTunes, though, must be the price. At 79p for a single track and £7.99 for an album, it undercuts most high-street shops by some margin and, with no physical media to ship, it is more environmentally friendly, too.
Buying from iTunes
There are two ways to buy tracks from the iTunes Store: either through your Mac or PC, or directly to the iPhone over a wireless network.
Before you can buy songs, you must first set up an account. This is free, but your details will be used to mark the music you buy, which means if you subsequently pass it on to friends, it can be tracked back to yourself, and you may be held liable for piracy and copyright infringement. You will also need to supply credit card details before you make your first purchase.
Buying music is frighteningly easy. On a Mac or PC, fire up iTunes and click on iTuncs Store in the left-hand margin. Search for your favourite artist, album or song name in the box at the top of the application window, and, when you have found what you are after, you can preview the free 30-second clip to make sure it is the version you want.
It is? Great. Click on Buy Now and confirm you would like to add it to your collection by entering your password, and then watch it download.
One word of warning, however: there is a maximum file size that can be downloaded over the mobile network, and anything over 12MB in size will have to be downloaded either using wifi, or by a regular computer running iTunes. Fortunately you'll know if this applies as an error will pop up warning you, so you shouldn't lose your download.
Because you bought the music from the iTunes Store rather than encoding it yourself, it will be accompanied by high-quality album artwork. This will be transferred to the phone when you upload your tracks, and be used when you next flick backwards and forwards through your album covers when choosing what to play.
What is less obvious is all the supplementary data transferred alongside the track relating to the artist, album, genre and year of recording, which will help you later on with searching for specific songs. This is known as metadata, and it is drawn from a large user-contributed database found online at mnv.cddb.com. This is supplied in a standard format compatible with a wide range of music players, meaning that any tracks you buy for your iPhone can also be indexed by an iPod and — if they arc iTuncs Plus tracks - on some regular portable media players.
In general, tracks are supplied in a format known as AAC, or Advanced Audio Codec, although two notable exceptions arc the proprietary Audible format used for most audio books and MP3, a widely used audio format popular with podcasts.
Encoding your own music
Of course, you probably already have an extensive CD collection gathering dust on your shelves, and you will not want to buy all of those albums again through the iTunes Store, so the first thing you will want to do is copy them into iTunes. Then you can transfer them to your iPhone for listening on the move.
If you don't have an iPod already, and have not used iTunes before, then you are starting with a clean slate, which gives you the luxury of choice. You can either copy them at the highest possible quality and accept the fact that you are going to have to make some compromises when it comes to filling the iPhone's internal memory, or you can reduce the quality and take more music with you. Most users would be advised to compromise, as few mid-price headphones will be able to do sufficient justice to very high-quality copies and justify the space they consume. This is doubly true of the white earbuds that come bundled with the phone.
Apple's preferred format for copying music is AAC, which is iTunes' default format and the model used for all commercial tracks downloaded from the iTunes Store. However, iTunes, iPods and the iPhone can also handle AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3 and Wav file formats at a variety of quality levels. For simplicity, and to get started right now, you could just leave iTunes set to the default format, but if you want to get the best from your music and determine for yourself how it is used away from home. This chapter will walk you through the various options, what they all mean and how they can be put to best use.
Of course, you probably already have an extensive CD collection gathering dust on your shelves, and you will not want to buy all of those albums again through the iTunes Store, so the first thing you will want to do is copy them into iTunes. Then you can transfer them to your iPhone for listening on the move.
If you don't have an iPod already, and have not used iTunes before, then you are starting with a clean slate, which gives you the luxury of choice. You can either copy them at the highest possible quality and accept the fact that you are going to have to make some compromises when it comes to filling the iPhone's internal memory, or you can reduce the quality and take more music with you. Most users would be advised to compromise, as few mid-price headphones will be able to do sufficient justice to very high-quality copies and justify the space they consume. This is doubly true of the white earbuds that come bundled with the phone.
Apple's preferred format for copying music is AAC, which is iTunes' default format and the model used for all commercial tracks downloaded from the iTunes Store. However, iTunes, iPods and the iPhone can also handle AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3 and Wav file formats at a variety of quality levels. For simplicity, and to get started right now, you could just leave iTunes set to the default format, but if you want to get the best from your music and determine for yourself how it is used away from home. This chapter will walk you through the various options, what they all mean and how they can be put to best use.
How compression works
All of the music we listen to, unless it is played live right there in front of us, is compressed. As it is recorded, the device used to capture it makes some intelligent decisions about which parts of the sound wave to strip out and throw away. This is usually made on the basis of what the human ear can and can't hear, with anything that would be out of our range of hearing immediately stripped out. The resulting sound wave is then chopped up into discrete chunks, a portion of which is also disposed of, with the amount of axed material depending on the bitrate selected. The higher the bitrate, the more of the chunks are kept, the smoother the sound wave, and the higher quality we perceive it to be. The lower the bitrate, the more of the chunks are thrown away, the more stepped is the sound wave, and the lower we perceive the quality to be. It is as simple as that.
Or is it? We will come back to that in a minute.
Naming your tracks and CDs
When you insert a CD into iTunes, it will examine the length of each track and where it sits among the other tracks on the CD. It will then use this information to look up the likely name of the album, artist, year of recording and a range of other information. If you have an account with the iTunes Store, it will also try to find the relevant album cover for use in iTuncs and the iPod application.
While it usually gets this right first time, it can sometimes either find two albums that are so similar it needs to ask you to pick the right one, or be unable to find a match at all. If the latter is true, you can enter the necessary details yourself. This can be time consuming and laborious if you do each track individually, but you can dramatically cut the workload by changing common details in a batch.
Select all of the tracks on the album (Command-A on a Mac, Ctrl-A on a PC), right-click and choose Get Info from the contextual menu that pops up. iTuncs will ask if you arc sure you want to edit the details for several tracks (below). We do, so confirm this and use the resulting form to fill in as much common information as you can. By common information, we mean those details that apply to every track, such as album name, year of publication, genre, artist and so on. However, this is not the place to enter individual track names unless ever}' track on the CD docs indeed have the same name.
Once you have entered these details (left), click on OK to apply them to the selected tracks, then right-click on each one and select Get Info from the contextual menu again. You will see that you now have far more options at your disposal, including equaliser presets, sorting options, and the ability to add missing artwork and even tweak the volume for tracks on which it is higher or lower than average. We are interested in the Info tab for the moment, because clicking on it will open up a form identical to the one you had been filling in for the album as a whole. It will be populated with the fields you have entered already, and now that you have only one track selected, you can finally add the track name.
The question of compression
Now that all of the tracks are correctly named, you can start copying them to your computer in readiness for downloading them to the iPhone, which brings us back to the question of compression.
Opening up iTunes Preferences and clicking on Advanced > Importing will let you choose the codec used to encode the tracks and the quality at which they are sampled. The defaults for each of these arc AAC and 128 kilobits per second. This will not mean much to most people, but if you have ever bought a 79p track from the iTunes Store, then you will have a pretty good idea of what kind of quality this equates to, as that is the codec and sample rate used on the Store. The two other options - apart from the custom setting where you can tweak things more precisely — are for 'spoken podcast', which is 64 kilobits per second, and 'higher quality', which is 256 kilobits per second. This is the same as the better-quality, DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks from EMI available through the Store.
Which one you choose is a matter of personal preference, but we would recommend sticking with 128 kilobits per second because most casual listeners on the move will not be able to tell the difference, they will take up less space on the iPhone, and the encoding process will be completed much quicker, so you can tear through your CD collection in half the time.
If you are only ever likely to use your music in iTunes or on an iPhone or iPod, there is no point switching from AAC. However, for the best possible compatibility, and to ensure that you can play your tracks on other devices should you decide to leave Apple's platform, you should consider MP3, which is by far the most widely accepted format for digital music.
But is it legal?
There is a lot of debate over the legality of copying your music in this way and who you believe depends on which side of the fence you sit on. Some lawyers still insist that ripping your music in this way infringes copyright.
When Sony BMG took alleged file sharer Jammie Thomas to court for copyright infringement of 1,702 tracks in October 2007, the company's head of litigation told the court: 'When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.'
If the court agreed, this would mean that - in the US at least - copying CDs in this way would be illegal, even for personal use. It would also be illegal to transfer the tracks to your iPhone, since you would then be making a further copy. Things become more complicated if you have bought a track from the iTunes Store, as then you would only be able to listen to it using the copy of iTunes through which it was downloaded, since synchronising iTunes with your iPhone would create an illegal copy.
At the conclusion of the case, Thomas was found guilty of sharing files and fined $222,000. Should the argument about personal copying also one day be accepted by the courts, it would signal a sea change in the way digital music is handled around the world, which would likely do as much harm to the music companies as it would to manufacturers such as Apple. The record companies, then, can't really afford for this kind of encoding and mobile usage to be outlawed.
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