I love the commercials – Apple’s Mac and PC guy – and new new Windows 7 ones that feature the little girl. The competition between the two companies is making the products from both companies (and oddly those from Google) better. I doubt Windows 7 would be nearly as good without Apple to steal from.
However, like all wars there are casualties. Namely, us consumers.
Mrs M and I both have iPods so we need to have music files that play, you know, on the iPod. However, last spring I bought a pretty powerful PC to use for Media. Apple doesn’t really provide a serious option here thanks to it largely avoiding the HD format so I went with Windows Vista. And, after figuring out what a dog Vista was I quickly went to Windows 7 RC as soon as it was available.
Windows 7 has its issues, which largely come from large lazy companies like HP and Logitech (yeah, I’m looking at you and your sorry ass developers who haven’t rolled out a decent beta for keyboards, cameras and your damn printers) but on average it’s pretty good.
So back to the music wars. 99.99% of all my music is in MP3 thanks to the an old relationship with Napster and no real desire to go the extra effort with lossless formats like WAV, FLAC or the other proprietary formats for Microsoft or Apple. At least this was the case until Mrs. M got me the new re-mastered Beatles box set for my birthday.
Since the entire point of the box set was that the sound was supposed to be superior I did some research on formats and found lossless was the way to go. My first test run was ripping a disk to Apple’s loss format. The size was much larger than MP3 but the sound would be pure. This wasn’t a problem since I only list to about 5% of my iPod music. I’d just kick some random music off the island and move on.
Once the M4A file was created, I decided to test it in Media Player since that’s what would be playing at our house. No luck. Me thinks this isn’t a real problem since codecs are available. But, oh no, apparently since Apple’s lossless is proprietary they haven’t licensed the rights to Microsoft, yet have purchased the license for WAV and Microsoft’s lossless format.
Last weekend and the first part of this morning was spent search for a decent plug-in, which turned up nothing. I give up. I’m ripping the disks to WAV and then having iTunes convert the WAV files to Apple lossless, if of course, iTunes can stay stable enough to perform the function.
They want me to go one way or another – Apple or Microsoft but if this stuff doesn’t find a way to get resolved pretty quickly I may look to a third option – Linux anyone?
