Apple ready to roll with iTunes serivce in Japan
Apple is reportedly ready to launch a localized version of its iTunes online download service in Japan.
According to a Mainichi Daily News report ,Yoshiaki Sakito, president of Apple Japan, made the announcement on Tuesday in Tokyo.
Japan is the largest music market Apple's iTunes service has yet to undertake.
Unfortunately, the report offers no timeframe or details; but it does provide a some background on the Japanese music industry.
"In Japan, rigid controls by CD companies on the copyright of music have blocked companies from launching full-scale digital music operations," the report notes.
"In the face of the rapid growth of the digital music market, however, Avex, a major CD production company, announced it will launch a digital music business, and other CD firms are leaning toward accepting such a move."
Still, Label Gate Co., a joint venture founded by major CD firms, and Microsoft Corp. were able to form small-scale digital music operations in Japan last year. However, neither service is compatible with the iPod.
Industry sources told Mainichi Daily News the arrival of an iTunes download service would likely speed up growth of the digital music market in Japan, where digital music players have recently become very popular.
For the most part, negotiations between Apple and the CD firms have been a waiting game. Apple began meeting with Japan's major CD firms over a year and a half ago, but witnessed negotiations progress at only a minimal pace -- eventually falling flat. In addition to price discrepancy disputes, the CD firms also deemed Apple's copy protection measures to be inadequate.
But as Sakito said in an August 2004 interview, "The record companies won't be able to swim against the tide forever.''
According to a Mainichi Daily News report ,Yoshiaki Sakito, president of Apple Japan, made the announcement on Tuesday in Tokyo.
Japan is the largest music market Apple's iTunes service has yet to undertake.
Unfortunately, the report offers no timeframe or details; but it does provide a some background on the Japanese music industry.
"In Japan, rigid controls by CD companies on the copyright of music have blocked companies from launching full-scale digital music operations," the report notes.
"In the face of the rapid growth of the digital music market, however, Avex, a major CD production company, announced it will launch a digital music business, and other CD firms are leaning toward accepting such a move."
Still, Label Gate Co., a joint venture founded by major CD firms, and Microsoft Corp. were able to form small-scale digital music operations in Japan last year. However, neither service is compatible with the iPod.
Industry sources told Mainichi Daily News the arrival of an iTunes download service would likely speed up growth of the digital music market in Japan, where digital music players have recently become very popular.
For the most part, negotiations between Apple and the CD firms have been a waiting game. Apple began meeting with Japan's major CD firms over a year and a half ago, but witnessed negotiations progress at only a minimal pace -- eventually falling flat. In addition to price discrepancy disputes, the CD firms also deemed Apple's copy protection measures to be inadequate.
But as Sakito said in an August 2004 interview, "The record companies won't be able to swim against the tide forever.''
Comments
Originally posted by AppleInsider
Unfortunately, the report offers no timeframe or details
It seems that Apple is launching a new round of stores 28 April.
Topic: Apple ready to roll with iTunes serivce in Japan
No doubt "serivce" is Japanese for "service".
Originally posted by JLL
It seems that Apple is launching a new round of stores 28 April.
I reckon an update to iTunes will be released at that time as well. Hopefully one that's rewritten in cocoa and hooks right up to CoreAudio & the new AAC VBR encoder.
Originally posted by Sopphode
I reckon an update to iTunes will be released at that time as well. Hopefully one that's rewritten in cocoa and hooks right up to CoreAudio & the new AAC VBR encoder.
People have this anti-Carbon bias that I don't understand. Writing iTunes in Carbon makes it easier to maintain parity with the Windows version, since many of Carbon's APIs are available to Windows programmers via QuickTime. VC++ (the standard compiler for Windows) doesn't even compile Objective C, which is the language used for Objective-C's interface components (unless they use Java....shudder). So apple would need to have two completely different codebases for the Windows iTunes.
iTunes uses QuickTime to perform some of its audio decoding and playing (which again makes it easier to port), and on OS X QT uses CoreAudio. And it does use CoreAudtio for audio mixing and sampling (e.g. the equilizer). So even if they rewrote the interface in Cocoa, the underpinnings that played sound would most likely not change drastically. In fact, QuickTime is the framework that implements FairPlay, which is how any application can use music from the iTMS (eg iLife), so they would need to use QuickTime (which strictly speaking *IS* Carbon).
There's no performance improvements to be had by rewriting it in Cocoa. In fact the Cocoa framework uses more resources then Carbon because some of Cocoa is implemented on top of Carbon, such as the Menu Manager. And Cocoa's message dispath mechanism, while faster then before, is still not as fast as Carbon simply because it is not a simple function call, but rather name lookup. One need only to look at the sloth like nature of iMovie and iPhoto to see why Cocoa != faster.
I *do* wish they'd overhaul the networking (OpenTransport? Are you kidding me?) but some of the APIs they choose were dictacted by QuickTime's APIs (e.g. until recently most of QuickTime was not thread-safe and did not accept newer data structures). But iTunes is not that bad compared to some of the iLife applications (*cough* iMovie *cough*) that seem to have a responsiveness of a Mac Plus.
Originally posted by rmcgann220
People have this anti-Carbon bias that I don't understand. Writing iTunes in Carbon makes it easier to maintain parity with the Windows version, since many of Carbon's APIs are available to Windows programmers via QuickTime.
QT 7 is rewritten in cocoa, as is *all* other Apple apps during the past few years (excluding Finder). There is a reason they do that
Originally posted by Sopphode
QT 7 is rewritten in cocoa, as is *all* other Apple apps during the past few years (excluding Finder).
And iTunes,
Originally posted by JLL
And iTunes,
Yeah, my point is that iTunes is likely to be next on the list
Originally posted by Sopphode
Yeah, my point is that iTunes is likely to be next on the list
Not unless they dump the Windows version.
Originally posted by JLL
Not unless they dump the Windows version.
They are making a Windows version of QT 7 as well..
Originally posted by Sopphode
They are making a Windows version of QT 7 as well..
There are more to QuickTime than the player.
Originally posted by JLL
There are more to QuickTime than the player.
In addition to rewriting the player, they also migrated QT to CoreAudio.
QT (and iTunes, hopefully) are probably important enough to warrant a cocoa version on the Mac even though it means more work in maintaining feature parity with the Windows side.
Originally posted by WhiteRabbit
Quicktime and iTunes are not complex applications. It's not that difficult for them to maintain two different versions, one for Mac and another for Windows. They only need to have a few different functions which they need to have the windows way, and the mac way. In fact I bet they already have two different versions of each. They just do the same thing, so they don't look like two different versions.
Originally posted by Sopphode
QT 7 is rewritten in cocoa, as is *all* other Apple apps during the past few years (excluding Finder). There is a reason they do that
People here are confusing QuickTime with QuickTime Player. QuickTime Player is Cocoa, yes. But QuickTime has NOT been rewritten using Cocoa.
QuickTime Player uses the QuickTime framework, which is basically "Carbon" (it's a set of procedural APIs exported as C, using mainly Carbon data structures, if that's what people mean by Carbon). The QTKit framework in Tiger is written on top of the QuickTime framework.
QuickTime will most likely never be written soley using Cocoa, because that would take away the ability to use QuickTime on Windows, and from within Carbon applications on Mac OS X.