Read the fine print

So Apple launches an online music store. It looks very nice when put side by side with the com­pe­ti­tion. For starters, there doesn’t seem to be any monthly fee and all tracks are the same price. This seems like a good idea until you start read­ing the fine print… accord­ing to Apple, the tracks you down­load are high-quality AAC music files. AAC files? what are those?

A quick search on the Apple site reveals that AAC stands for Advanced Audio Cod­ing and that’s a for­mat that works on well, it works on the mac and on the iPod. If you want to carry that any­where else, you can’t.

OK, well, I’m a pro­gram­mer and that’s a new sound for­mat, maybe I can write a decoder. So where’s the for­mat. Oh, here it is. What, I have to pay to read the stan­dard? What if I wanted to develop a free decoder? Oh, right, I would have to pay for that too!

Oh well, back to my reg­u­lar MP3 col­lec­tion then. At least I can use it either on my PC, mac, and exist­ing MP3 player. I don’t have to be locked into a par­tic­u­lar OS, use a par­tic­u­lar player or a par­tic­u­lar com­puter. Until some­one offers that, there won’t be a viable music ser­vice out there and I’ll be forced to keep buy­ing CDs, burn them to MP3 for easy travel and stor­age (a sin­gle disk filled with MP3s can con­tain sev­eral albums!)

Hello, music indus­try, here I am! I want to pay for tracks but I want them to be MP3 because I already have an invest­ment in hard­ware and soft­ware around that. I a will­ing to pay (*wav­ing credit card*) but please give me what I want. Apple has the right idea (99 cents a track, noth­ing else required) but the wrong for­mat (I do NOT want to be locked in!)

Don’t tell me the new for­mat is bet­ter. I don’t really care. I didn’t care when Microsoft made the same argu­ment with Win­dows Media Player so why should I lis­ten to the same argu­ment when Apple makes it. What I want, plain and sim­ple, is a ser­vice that will allow me to down­load, for 99 cents per track (hey, cheaper if pos­si­ble), a real MP3 that can work on my mac, on my PC, on my MP3 player, on my DVD player… well, you get the idea. Once a for­mat is ubiq­ui­tous, why try to change it?