BlogCadre users see no ads!  Popular topics: humor, video, links, cool, wtf.  Go create an account!




An Innovative Idea for iTunes and iPod

Okay, so iTunes might be the most successful music downloading service, but they probably aren't making as many sales as they could be. Right now, there's isn't any real reason, for most people, to buy music instead of just downloading it from a P2P network. What Apple needs to do is offer something that say, Limewire, cannot. For instance, they could incorporate a way for the all songs downloaded from iTunes to have the lyrical text embedded within the file. Then once it was loaded on the iPod, it could have the ability to scroll the lyrics across, along with the music, karaoke style.

Now you might just be thinking, "Well those files would just get on the P2P networks anyway, and people wouldn't buy them," but you'd be wrong. The lyrics would be digitally embedded into the file, similarly to the way DRM is. Then, if the file were to be ripped to an MP3, along with losing the DRM, the lyrics would be lost also, since it wouldn't be audible data.

If Apple were simply to implement these into iTunes and the iPod, it would give a reason for people to actually buy their music, other than the whole legal thing.

interesting thought

Jason Striegel's picture

Though I don't know if you want to release my karaoke talents to the world...

I wonder what other things could be bundled with an audio download to make it a better product. You can only go so far with album art and that sort of thing.

Really, I just think once things settle on a reasonable price, people will be happy to pay for the convenience and consistent quality of the legal product. The whole DRM issue is crippling them right now.. it makes the legal product less useful and more of a pain in the keister to listen to. The customer has spoken over and over regarding this: Don't lock me into using a specific program or operating system to listen to music I paid for. Don't keep me from storing music on both my laptop and my work desktop. Don't make my songs expire when I've chosen to discontinue a subscription.

An Innovative Idea...Its available NOW!

Hello,

My name is Ben Dunton, and I am the developer of a program that does exactly what you are talking about....for the Mac. It is called iStar Composer, and allows for the searching and and easy synchronization of lyrics to songs. It works with Apple's DRM, and plays beautifully on the new video iPods (works on any color ipod). I am currently working on v1.5 and v2.0, both of which will bring a lot of really cool capability. Shoot on over to iStar Composer's webpage, and give it a try.

Thanks,

Ben

Sweet!

Hey, that's very cool. Have you talked about licensing your software to Apple? I'm sure they would be interested, if they even incorporated it right into iTunes.

_jon_granada_

Apple tried to shut them

Apple tried to shut them down, If I remember correctly...

--Chris