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Comment by jdc | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything that iTunes could learn from Steam?

Yes, by selling full CD quality or higher tracks, and with infamous "Steam Sales". There is no incentive for me to buy a lossy track, when I can just go buy the entire disc cheap online. I know most people don't care about audio quality, but this is a major contention for me.

Did you do a double blind test between an uncompressed CD track and same track in 320 kbps (same master — not vinyl, not "mastered for iTunes)? Did you really hear the difference in statistically significant number of trials?

That's not the point at all. I'm not paying the same or more, for a locked in ecosystem, and lesser quality tracks, regardless if I can perceive the difference.

You can now transfer iTunes purchase into mp3s, right in the iTunes software. As such, I'm not sure if I'd call it a locked ecosystem anymore.

What happens when you want to reencode that 320 to 196 or V0 or want to forego MP3 altogether and go with .ogg? You end up needing to transcode to a lossy source from a lossy source - and quality does suffer from doing that.

There is no reason for a test of perception like this to be blind.

You are not trying to isolate a scientific truth, but engaging a lifetime of biased neural pathways with the goal of maximum enjoyment. When listening to music in the real world, your biases will affect your perception so trying to remove specific ones in the name of science is only muddying your measurement of actual preference.

They should support Web playback like Google Music. I feel this is a huge issue for me when switching between computers.

Support Linux.

I want an iPhone, but I can't even sync music libraries with my Linux desktop.

So I'm stuck with Android.

I haven't synced my iPhone with iTunes in around 3 years. The only cost is iTunes Match (£25 per year) which puts all of my music in the cloud and available to my device.

Probably not worth it. By Valve's measure [0], 0.84% of Steam users are on Linux. They have made the investment into Linux support toward the promotion of their own Linux based hardware. Apple has no such incentive.

Does iTunes not run well enough in Wine [1]?

I say this all as a frequent user of Steam on Linux and a nonuser of iTunes.

[0] - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

[1] - https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

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