Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
The 2nd largest music e-tailer in the US (11% vs the iTMS’ 88%) is making its debut in the European continent. eMusic, which sells independent label music in the plain ol’ DRM-free MP3 format, is selling three types of monthly subscriptions:
eMusic Basic: 40 song downloads per month / €12.99 per month / £8.99 per month
eMusic [...]
iTunes 7: Fetching artwork for fun and profit: a script “that basically allows you fetch a URL containing a neat 600×600 JPEG”. Available in Perl and in PHP. Try the online demo. [via]
FixTunes is an app whose main goal to fill those missing tags in your MP3s and add album art. If you want to, it can also organize your music in folders (artists, albums, year, etc.—you define the pattern). Finally, it can be used as a means to browse your music collection (e.g. the “Show All [...]
Lower prices for the Zen V: in a move that raises the value-for-money bar considerably, the Zen V now sells for 30 bucks less—this means you can get the 1/2/4GB versions for $90/$120/$160 respectively. For comparison’s sake, the 1GB Nano sells for $150 while the same-size Shuffle sells for $100.
Cog is an open-source audio player for the Mac (OS X 10.4 and above) with support for all major lossless formats—in active development. Worth a look; its interface is that of your typical neat Mac app (is there an app for that platform that doesn’t look good?). [via]
→ MySpace to launch a music store too: based on Snocap, all unsigned artists (currently estimated to be around the ~3M mark) will have the option to set up online storefronts on their profile pages and sell their music in DRM-free format, at a price of their liking (MySpace and Snocap will be taking a [...]
Whoever made this, “mad propz” as they say. FairUse4WM is a tool that strips WindowsMedia DRM 10 and 11 (not DRM 9)—it surfaced first on Engadget. This is the kind of protection that the tracks you listen through subscription services (Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Napster, etc.) come with. The app looks easy to use and [...]
Dell exits the MP3 player business for good: all references to the flash-based DJ Ditty, the company’s sole offering in this department since it dropped its HD-based players in February, were pulled from the Dell website. [via]
First, a short introduction and a necessary reference to Hymn—Hymn is an app that strips the DRM (Apple calls it FairPlay) of the tracks you bought from the iTMS—only drawback? You need iTunes 5 for it work.
iTunes 6 users can now have a look at Igor Skochinsky’s QTFairUse6 [via]—a tool that’s supposed to do the [...]
Q4 financial results and conference call notes
$230.9M in sales ($305.4M a year ago)
$12.7M net loss ($31.9M a year ago)
Verdict? Betten than last year, but stil… Michael from epiZENter also jotted some notes from the conference call—interesting to see they’re pushing the X-Fi technology, talking about a future product that is connected to the Zen Vision:M [...]