At a press conference today in London, England, EMI and Apple announced that they will sell unDRMd music starting in May, 2007. Sorry for the scattered look of all of this, but I wanted to get it posted as fast as possible:

Quick notes:

Jobs: Need to take online music distribution to the next level:

* need to address interoperability

* audio quality: new versions of songs, higher quality 256kbps AAC $1.29 / track. easily upgrade entire library for $0.30/song; album = same price.

EMI: DRM music is going to be available to all retailers.

Jobs: Apple reaching out to other labels–hopes 1/2 of songs will be DRM free by the end of the year. The right thing for the customer in the future is to tare down the walls of interoperability.

Q: Is this more complicated for consumers?
Jobs: People are going to have a choice and set iTunes to pick one. We don’t want to take away anything–want to give consumers the choice. We think consumers are going to choose the higher quality.

Q: How will this impact the iPod/iTunes relationship?
Jobs:Always been able to play the mp3s. We compete on best music store.

Consumer groups:
Jobs: not offering anything here today that consumers can’t get already on a CD.

Are you giving green light to file sharers?
EMI: “need to trust consumers” this doesn’t diminish fight against piracy, key is to give consumers a compelling experience, trust them, educate them, grow sales rather than diminish them.

EMI: hopes that this will grow sales–the main point of doing it.

Jobs: EMI is pioneering something that I Think is going to be very popular.

Jobs: We’re not offering something different. All CDs are provided unprotected and in high quality. Protecting CDs–Sony tried that, it didn’t work out so well.

Q: Are other majors standing in the way of this?
Jobs: There are always leaders ad there are always followers. opportunity for everyone to win: customers win; music companies get more money by providing more value.

Video DRM free?
Jobs: Video is different. They don’t offer video DRM free today, so I wouldn’t hold them parallel right now.

Do you expect fall in iPod sales:
Jobs: No link broken. Always been able to rip and copy to iTunes and put on the player they want to. No real link. Success based on whether people think we have the best and easiest to use music store and music players. Not going to do anything different. Want to be the best music store and the music player.

What’s the point of DRM on cheaper tracks, why not remove it completely?
Jobs: For customers that are price sensitive, we don’t want to tell them that we’re taking something away from them.
EMI: not everyone cares about sound quality.

Will consumers feel cheated?
Jobs: music lovers have a choice, they can go whatever way they want to go. More choice. Life is a balance between total freedom and simplicity. Try to strike the maxims–we think we’ve done a good job of that.

How will it work with other music services?
EMI: we only set wholesale prices. We hope this will help to generate growth.

File size on iPods because of larger file size?
Storage sizes go up prices go down.

How can you justify 20% increase in price?
Jobs: exactly same price as yesterday. New product offers more features, higher sound quality; more flexibility, so higher price. Consumer gets to choose.

Official press announcement here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html

by James Alguire

You spent hours fiddling, adjusting and tweaking the parameter settings for a particular effect (filter, transition, or motion) until it looks great. Now twenty-five additional copies of the same effect are needed. But rather than spending several more hours replicating the effect each time, Final Cut Pro provides several ways to easily save effects to reuse in the current project or future projects.
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Have you heard the old joke?

When a person speaks two languages we call them bilingual, when they only speak one language what do you call them? American.

Now that joke may not apply to you but odds are that you don’t speak as many languages as your Macintosh. And if you don’t happen to speak Azerbaijani, Breton, Croatian, Esperanto and/or Tongan then those languages are taking up space on your hard drive. Even if you remember Spanish, French, or German from high school you may not ever plan to look at an application with the user interface set to that language. If you could delete those language files then you would save disk space. How much disk space you will save will depend on how many applications you have installed and how many of those applications come with a multilingual interface. On my computer I saved 2Gb of storage space. A friend saved 4Gb by deleting those files.

One tool that makes it easy to delete the unneeded bulk of both language files (as well as binaries compiled for a processor chip that you computer does not have) is the free application Monolingual. Select what you want to keep and what you want to delete and then press a button and what. Of course, before you do something like this a backup is always recommended.

Editors note: I will second Chris’ recommendation for having a good full backup prior to running Monolingual. You may remember a time when I recommended Monolingual on the Maccast prior to them adding Universal support. Needless to say some Intel Mac owners were not too happy. The application is Universal now, but still caution is always smart when modifying your system at this low a level. I personally avoid the need to use a tool like Monolingual by doing a custom install and only loading the desired dialect when I re-install OS X (which I will do when Leopard is released).

We’ve reviewed iTunes Store alternatives on MacCast before, so I thought I’d take a look at a new and innovative music service that incentivizes indy music discovery while compensating artists—all without DRM.

Coming Out

Last Monday, all the world was aflutter about AMIE Street. It’s an online music service that does not wrap its music in DRM and employes a unique monetization model that encourages its users to find discover and recommend otherwise unknown music. The big deal on Monday was that AMIE Street signed a deal with “Canada’s leading privately owned record label and artist management company,” Nettwerk Music Group. One of the big name acts under Nettwerk’s label is (are?) the Barenaked Ladies. The big-name group instantly added credibility to the new site and traffic swarms ensued; AMIE Street quickly buckled under the server load, but recovered by the end of the day.
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by James Alguire

iMovie users have it easy. Because of the integration within the iLife applications, iMovie users can quickly and easily tap images from iPhoto, within iMovie, to create still image sequences. Final Cut Pro users have to export the photos from iPhoto or Aperture, then import them. Now Final Cut Pro users can quickly and easily create still image sequences, complete with transitions, right from Aperture with Connected Flow’s Aperture to Final Cut, Aperture plug-in.

Here’s how it works.

Download the free Aperture to Final Cut Pro plug-in from Connected Flow’s web site, http://connectedflow.com/aperturetofinalcut, and install. Aperture to Final Cut Pro requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Aperture 1.5.1 or later and Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 or later.

In Aperture create an album with the images to be used in FCP, and adjust and arrange them in the order they are to play back (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Arrange and tweak images in Aperture.
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Looking at the application dock just now it occurred to me that that was an interesting collection of apps. Maybe not. But for better or worse, here they are (show us yours too if you like):

Grab — We start right out with an oddball. This is the standard screen grab utility that comes with the Mac, and I basically NEVER use it. But it’s open now cause I couldn’t get any of my usual tools to grab the application dock. But Capture->”Timed Screen” did the trick. I quit it the moment after I took the shot, and probably won’t see it again for a long time.

Finder — Ah the Finder. At Merlin Mann’s suggestion, I tried Path Finder for awhile, but Finder is good enough for me. I’ve even gotten used to the left-hand-icon-sidebar of Tiger. Although I really wish we could get consistent about what a single- vs double-click does on an icon.
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Final Cut Pro’s real-time playback features save a tremendous amount of time while working on projects. Add a transition here, a video layer there, or tweak a filter, and you need not worry about rendering the results just to confirm everything works as expected. But even on the most powerful Mac hardware real-time playback has it’s limits, as it is truly a real-time previewing system. Situations requiring rendering to view, no matter how good the Mac is, include: complex or rich video projects containing many video and audio tracks (especially if the project is HD), clips with multiple filters applied, or projects that incorporate native Motion or LiveType project files. When content in a Timeline sequence requires rendering, red bars appear above the Timeline’s ruler bar (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Clip with Multiple filters applied showing render bars.

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Downsize by Stunt Software, now… what can I tell you about this clever little application? Well, so that I could give you a really good insight into what it offers, I have been using it for the past month. You may well have noticed that all of the images on the Geekanoids site changed. They now all have borders, with rounded edges and a nice subtle shadow, a nice uniform look… all courtesy of Downsize.

The application window is just so easy to get to grips with. On the left hand side you select the source of your images, this can be from iPhoto, a particular folder for batch processing, or you can just drag a single image into Downsize. You can also set a destination folder for your finished images. The right hand panel consists of three tabs, resize, watermark and frame, each determining how your image will look.

In the ‘Resize’ tab you set the maximum width and/or height that you want your finished image to be. You can also choose a sharp or smooth quality and a compression quality. Just using these settings alone give you a useful way of resizing your images quickly and easily, but there’s more…
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This episode is inspired by a question from a reader regarding problems they experienced applying transitions to clips in a sequence. As it turns out, the problem wasn’t with the transitions themselves, but with the lack of handle material in the clips. So let’s talk about handle material.

Handle Material consists of the frames of video that sit outside the In and Out points set to define the portion of a video clip to be edited into a sequence. Handle material is created in Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express whenever In and Out points are set in a video clip loaded into the Viewer. Handle material can also be created during a batch capture from a video tape in Final Cut Pro. Figure 1 shows a video clip without handles and Figure 2 shows a clip with handles.

Figure 1

Figure 2

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The Apple Store Bentall Centre, Kingston-upon-Thames opened today, Saturday 17th February at 9.00am. I am happy to say I was there to soak up the atmosphere, with exclusive shots from inside the Apple Store before they opened. In the photo gallery that follows you will see photographs of the whole store, including the astounding applause for the first customer, who had been in the queue since 4am.

Here are some photos that I took whilst there, to view the full gallery click here, or visit the Geekanoids home page.

The staff at the store clapped and welcomed the first 1,000 customers, with the queue still going strong at 10am. The staff and visitors enthusiasm was superb and things soon sprang into action with advice and sales meeting with so many smiles. The sales were ultra smooth too, using the scanner technology that Apple introduced late last year, customers do not have to get into line to pay. If they have something in their hand, they can have it scanned where they are standing, pay by card and they’re good to go. You can see a picture of the Fujitsu scanner in the full gallery too.

Also prominent in the store was the “We are better than Vista Campaign”, with the new slogan “Go Beyond Vista… It’s time to get a Mac” on coloured banner displays and some staff t-shirts (see the full gallery for more on this too).

I was also pleased to see how happy everyone was, and from all walks of life too. There were many silver haired heads to be seen, right down to enthusiastic youngsters using the display machines with big grins all round.

So enjoy the photos, I hope they help you soak up some of the atmosphere that was happening today, and if you are in the Kingston-upon-Thames area be sure to visit the Apple Store… full gallery of photos by clicking here>>