MacWorld 20th keynote
Published January 06, 2004
Today's MacWorld keynote by The Steve wasn't earthshaking, but moved Apple more into music with a new iPod (4GB Flash player, about the size of a biz card) and an addition to the iLife, Garageband, a midi/audio editor with pre-fab loops and a guitar simulator.
The new iPod is cute and colourful, but only $50 cheaper than the baseline, now 15 GB model. For those using their iPods as firewire drives, the HD models offer better value. Of course if you really want to show off your music status nothing beats a huge honking 70/80s era ghetto blaster - now there's an after market, a wifi router which looks like a ghetto blaster and has a firewire cradle for an iPod.
I wonder how Garageband is going to further confound the mess which is music copyright (essentially based on concepts of sheet music and piano rolls) since it combines samples and original compositions and performances, mixes it all together and sends it to iTunes.
And this is either the 20th or Centenary of the Macintosh (the default start date of a Mac is Jan. 1, 1904)
- MacWorld 20th keynote
- Published: January 06, 2004
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- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Video: Music, Music: News, Books: Computers and Internet
- Writer: Jim Carruthers
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I'll stick with the hard drive, but the newbie iPod is cute and I like the ad -- small (10,000 songs) and mini (1,000 songs). It keeps the focus on the fact all iPods are little. Considering the colors, these might go over well with the youth market.
I wonder how Garageband is going to go over with musicians and composers. In this month's MacWorld and on the forums, some of them are not happy about Soundtrack. They say programs like these deprive professionals of work.
I just see this inter-vertsigal scene where we are smuggling grandmas across data-borders.
Okay grandma, if I can type real phuqing fast I can make your @ss 0k. Hang on old lady.
Musicians are rarely happy about technological advances that actually change things.
When sound started being used in movies, the musicians union tried to stop it. Recorded sync sound put them out of work, because they played in live orchestras that accompanied the silent movies. The musicians would have preferred that, to this day, we still have silent movies, exclusively, so that their jobs would have remained secure.
It wasn't merely a preference they indicated, either. They went balls-out to try to stop the film industry from adopting sound.
It's true that many of those musicians no longer had those particular live-performance gigs when theaters converted to talkies (over a transition period of many years).
But, somehow, music survived.
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I couldn't believe how the air just went out of Jobs' presentation at the end.
After building up the 4 GB iPod mini as something to compete with the $199 (list price) competition, he reveals the price...$249.
For fifty bucks more you can get a 15 GB iPod.
Who's gonna buy these things?
The Garage Band presentation was great, though. As far as copyright concerns, I don't think there are any with the loops Apple provides. Loops are generally royalty-free. The original composers and performers on them have given up their exclusive copyright. Any song you make with Garage Band loops and instruments would be legally yours. The only thing you can't do with loops is re-sell them as loop CDs, I believe. (Odd license.)
But when people start bringing in songs from iTunes, yeah, that gets interesting. If you burn a home movie with a Beatles underscore on a DVD and give it to Grandma, have you violated the law? I think most people would assume that's within their rights. Technically, it probably isn't.
Maybe when Grandma gets sued for possession of pirated property consumers will come around more to the pro-freedom side of the copyright issue.