Quote:
Originally Posted by Bassey
I don't think lack of WMA support is the only reason to hate iTunes.
And if you're going to crticise a company for tying down their products and locking in their customers then surely you must be talking about Apple, not Microsoft.
Apple are the company trying to force their customers to use Apple software to connect to Apple products. I can use any piece of software to connect my MP3 player to my PC, or none at all (it just shows up as a USB drive).
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I was criticising them both - especially for the evils of DRM - although at the moment Jobs is turning out to be a far worse control freak than Gates (e.g. the iPhone lockdowns). If I buy music I expect to be able to play it on whatever I like when I like - which you can't do with a proprietary format and DRM.
WMA is the worst format of all to pick for archiving a music collection, because it's supported only be a small number of platforms, isn't the best quality, and by the fact that if you want to transcode it to another format, you'll lose even more quality (like MP3, you can't put back what it threw away on the first conversion). Whereas FLAC will give you pretty much the quility you had from CD, no matter what format you transcode it too. I can also play it natively through my Squeezbox - and the difference in quality between that and MP3 on my home system is astounding. The only downside is that it takes up more hard disk space, but that's not an issue now storage is so cheap.
I had no idea 5 years ago (let alone 10) what I would be using in 2007 to play music (especially on the move), so there's no way I can know in the future. Ripping and storing my collection to a lossless open format gives me some insurance that whatever I end up using, it'll still be accessable, and will sound as good as it does today.