More on iPod Shuffle

EDN Technical Editor Brian Dipert emailed me some thoughts prompted by my recent post on the iPod Shuffle.

I use both Windows and Macintosh machines, so I've got no built-in bias either way. However, I do not use an iPod. As some of you may already know from my past writeups (see this one for example).

My wife and I own a collection of Creative Labs portable digital audio players, and we also have two Voyetra Turtle Beach Audiotrons. Our music library, consisting mostly of ripped CDs but also some online-purchased tracks, currently resides on a LAN-connected Toshiba Magnia SG10 server appliance in 96-kbps CBR WMA format, non-DRM'd. Also, I was at MacWorld and saw the keynote firsthand.

The Shuffle is a sly attempt to turn a weakness (no display) into a strength ("We gave 'random play' a much cooler name!"). More generally, it's interesting to watch the Apple fanatics attempt to spin the iPod family's comparative feature dearth into a "simplicity" strength. Unless, of course, they're talking about a feature that Apple had "first," such as photo display. Then it's a sign of Apple's "visionary leadership." Having one's cake and eating it too?

With that said, the more people get hooked into Apple's preferred audio format and DRM wrapper with their music libraries, the more locked they'll be into the iPod architecture and that of (eventual, potentially) licensees. How many times do you want to buy your music? How many times do you want to re-rip your CD library? I did my own CD ripping…once. It was incredibly time-consuming, both in the actual ripping and in the post-rip tag editing/fixing. Would I, if I had initially standardized on an Apple audio player, want to go through that process again on my entire CD library just to move away from the iPod platform? No way. And I'm a geek. Most consumers won't realize they've been locked in to the iPod way until it's too late. And re-ripping falls (as we used to call it at Intel, my previous employer) below the ZBB (zero-based budget); work, sleep, eating, exercising, interacting with and caring for family and friends, and vegging out (in its myriad forms) take priority.

Transcoding from AAC to another format is another approach to breaking the iPod stranglehold (don't forget, by the way, that for folks thinking of migrating to iPod, iTunes provides a built-in and straightforward method of transcoding a WMA library to AAC). Admittedly, the average consumer won't understand or care about the issue of incremental quality degradation when migrating content from one lossy codec to another. But anything that transcodes from FairPlay (Apple's DRM) to something else has to either be an illegal crack of FairPlay (PlayFair, Hymn, etc.) or be developed after obtaining an Apple license. How motivated do you think Apple will be to grant a license to someone who wants to enable freedom from FairPlay? There's a third option, of course (which is what I did with the Beastie Boys albums I bought from iTunes as an experiment): burn the tracks to a CD, then rip the CD to your desired format. But then you have the transcoding quality issue—not to mention the time issue.

iPod naysayers may claim that most iPod users' libraries are CD-ripped and MP3-encoded, therefore portable to other platforms. To the extent I acknowledge that's the case today, I think this situation is quickly changing. Steve Jobs claimed at MacWorld that Apple had sold more than 230 million songs through iTunes to date, and that the current sales rate of 1.25 million songs per day extrapolated to roughly half a billion songs per year. And don't forget, the iTunes rip default is FairPlay-locked AAC. (In fairness, the Windows Media Player rip default is DRM-encoded WMA, too.)

Microsoft and its partners such as Creative Labs and iRiver had better get moving, and soon. As I see it, the best chance for success for the WMA camp is to change the rules of the game: figure out how to move folks to a subscription model. Because it's hard for me to see iPod competitors winning the game under the existing rules. And I don't think an audio "presentation" conversion (such as to high-resolution audio, or to lossy compressed multichannel MP3 surround recently announced by Fraunhofer and Thomson) would motivate folks to re-purchase their music any time soon. This may turn out to be the "long-term defendable market" that Jobs hoped for but didn't get with the PC (because inevitably, in the computer world, folks sooner or later upgrade their hardware and software, and therefore saw the opportunity for a switch).