Apples and lemons

A French court ordered Apple to liberate its iTunes store for people owning other players than iTunes and iPods today.

Now, normally I’d say this is a healthy thing, because it makes the online music market more competitive and accessible to more people. This time, however, I do not necessarily see this as a good thing, which might seem odd to you, especially as I’m not a Macintosh-supporter.

Some ‘specialist’ on BBC World argued when he buys a CD he wants to be able to play this in every CD-player he comes across. Well, I think it’s a bit like making a greengrocer sell steaks, in order to serve carnivores and vegetarians. Or perhaps more, saying Vinyl-stores have to sell CDs too (or the other way round, which would apply to more stores nowadays).

Let me explain this to you. Apple sells files in the AAC-format, whereas most MP3-players, well, play MP3s. So they aren’t compatible with Apple’s AAC-format, and Apple will have to convert its entire database into MP3s just to please the French market.

Obviously such a decision can never be the right one to make, a company will have to do a huge investment in order to make this possible, though there’s only a minor chance of selling these files to its own costumers.

CDs however are sold with copy-protection which stops you being able to play them on e.g. your car stereo and computer. They even do this while bearing a logo of a standard which more or less dictates the medium has to be able to be played on every player bearing the same logo.

I guess you see the problem now and probably you’ll find – as I do – they can hardly make iTunes sell MP3s, they would better make sure CDs are actually CDs.

Oh, and for proper audio file encoding – lossless – use FLAC!