Rogue Amoeba - Under The Microscope

Fission Loves iTunes Plus

Wed, 30 May 2007

Earlier today, Apple released iTunes 7.2, with a new "iTunes Plus" feature. iTunes Plus is the marketing name for newly-available 256 kbps (read "higher quality") and DRM-free AAC files. As discussed in April, these files are standard AAC files, playable with any software and hardware that supports the AAC audio format.

AAC isn't as ubiquitous as MP3 (yet, anyhow), but all iPods support it, as do Zunes and many other players. Unless other stores quickly adopt DRM-free audio¹, AAC is likely to gain more ground in the near future, as consumers clamor for other players to support these iTunes files. If AAC takes off, users of our lossless audio editor Fission will be in luck. Because, you see, Fission loves iTunes Plus.

A bit of background/self-promotion: When using any other editor to edit AAC, your file must be converted out of AAC (to AIFF/WAV) for editing. When done, it's then re-encoded back to AAC, causing undesirable quality loss. Fission avoids that by editing the AAC file directly, causing no loss in quality. Fission is the only lossless AAC editor in the world.

Before today, all music purchased from iTunes came as "protected AAC" files, a proprietary AAC format that Fission couldn't access. With iTunes Plus tracks, Fission can access the audio just fine. You can use this audio however you like - create sound bytes, mash it up with other audio, or use it for a ringtone. Fission will open iTunes Plus files and provide full access to the audio, just as with audio from any other standard file.

Creating a ringtone

Above is a screenshot of Fission editing the first song I purchased this morning (Clint Eastwood by The Gorillaz). I've cut it down to just the opening seconds of the beat, for use as a looped ring tone on a Sony Ericsson k790 (which supports AAC ringtones). Neat!

Once you've grabbed iTunes 7.2 and had a look at iTunes Plus, download Fission and use it for editing all your iTunes Plus audio.

Footnotes:
1. Amazon previously announced that they'll have EMI's tracks for sale as MP3s without DRM "later this year". That's not very specific, but it's something. For now, however, iTunes is the biggest (partially) DRM-free online music store. ↩

Posted by Paul | Permalink | View/Post Comments (16)

Comments

Ian
Wed May 30 19:02:35 2007

I'm pretty sure I noticed in the license agreement for iTunes it says you can't use the tracks for ring tones. Not that anyone reads those things anyway. :)

Ian
Wed May 30 19:06:15 2007

Yah, here it is. It's the one for the iTunes Store.
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/service.html

(viii) You may not use Products as a musical “ringer” in connection with phone calls.

BiscuitDave
Wed May 30 19:42:28 2007

Hmm - I just got here from Slashdot, where someone mentioned that Fission strips these tags: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=236737&cid=19329919

I tried it out, and sure enough, it does. Neat!

I just hope the people who want to hide their name and info find that and the people who want to pirate music don't.

ryan
Wed May 30 19:56:12 2007

I think Apple would find it near impossible to enforce that term. It's obviously a precursor to selling ring tones though.

Paul (Rogue Amoeba Staff)
Wed May 30 21:10:36 2007

Ian: That's very interesting. I pulled up the Google cache of this, and it appears this was just added (and indeed, the current page says 'Last updated May 30, 2007').

Honestly, what's the point? There's no way to enforce it, no one reads the EULA anyhow (you only skimmed it, and even that's odd 8), and what's the penalty going to be? Cutting off your iTunes account, at best? The whole thing is ridiculous.

BiscuitDave: Fission currently ignores tags it doesn't understand, so yes, it appears this is currently stripped. These aren't part of the metadata standard for AAC. We'll see what we do in the future. We don't have any desire to aid piracy, but helping user anonymize their files isn't by definition a bad thing.

ryan: Near impossible, no question. But Apple selling ringtones? I doubt it. Maybe one day, after the iPhone can buy music directly, but not anytime soon.

I find it much more likely that either AT&T/Cingular wanted to protect their ringtone business, or the labels want to protect their ability to sell 30 second cuts of songs for three times as much as a track. Or both. What boggles my mind is that someone apparently believed this would be effective.

Thijs
Wed May 30 22:56:31 2007

Someone tweeted me this url, as I was having issues with playing the new DRM-free iTunes Plus files on my other devices (which do support AAC, such as the Nokia 6300). It seems the "non-standard" metadata is causing problems with playing back the files on devices normally supporting AAC.

DRM-free yes, portable (out-of-the-box) no!

Kirk
Thu May 31 14:56:55 2007

It could be the non-standard tags, or it could be the bit rate that is too high for the phone.

Kirk

Kirk
Thu May 31 15:59:44 2007

It could be the non-standard tags, or it could be the bit rate that is too high for the phone.

Kirk

Manton Reece
Thu May 31 18:53:57 2007

Even some of Apple's own CoreAudio sample code (the command line utility "afconvert") fails when opening these new AAC files. It is either the extra metadata or the fact that they contain unicode that is tripping it up. I plan to file a bug, but I don't think there is a work-around other than to use other APIs (QuickTime, whatever).

Congrats to Rogue Amoeba for Fission working so beautifully out of the box! I hope you all see a nice spike in sales as a result of this.

Thijs
Thu May 31 19:57:34 2007

@Kirk If I re-encode the file with the same bitrate (256kbps) and same encoding type (AAC) either with or without VBR (tested both), the file will work perfectly on Nokia phones.

If I just open and save the file in Fission, it will strip the tags and make it look like a regular AAC file, but it will still NOT play.

I'll file a bug with both Nokia and Apple. I do wonder, if this is a feature or a problem.

Paul (Rogue Amoeba Staff)
Fri Jun 1 00:18:19 2007

Manton: Thanks for the congrats - hopefully it'll work well for us. It's interesting to see just where these files are breaking.

Thijs: I doubt it's a "feature". I'll certainly be interested to here how these files are adjusted, and if other players (like your phone) require some sort of adjustment.

You said re-encoding worked - I assume that's with iTunes? If you own Audio Hijack Pro, can you re-record on with that, and see how it works? That should work fine as well, but I'm curious.

Lucius Kwok
Fri Jun 1 11:48:03 2007

I'm having problems opening iTunes Plus in Sound Studio because of the problem with the AudioFile API. I've filed a Radar bug report with Apple. This isn't the first time I've had to file a bug report on the AudioFile API. Before, there was a bug with AudioFile not being able to open AAC files with chapter markers, such as iTunes New Music Tuesday files. Apple has fixed that bug in the latest build of Mac OS X 10.5.

I haven't heard back from Apple about this bug, but I wonder if it will be like when protected AAC files first came out: at first you could convert them to PCM data with a system API, then Apple decided to disable that feature in an update of QuickTime. This time they might have just disabled it pre-emptively.

Quentin (Rogue Amoeba Staff)
Fri Jun 1 15:18:29 2007

Yeh, those APIs have always been real spotty. Get you 90% of the way and then completely fail on the last 10%.

For Fission, we use AudioCodec API for decoding, but the rest we roll our own. And even then we have to work around bugs in the AudioCodec API to make it work.

What error is it throwing when you give it an iTunesPlus AAC?

Lucius Kwok
Sat Jun 2 23:22:21 2007

In Mac OS X 10.4.9, AudioFileOpen() gives a -6 error, but on 10.5, AudioFileOpen() succeeds only for a call to set up the converter's output format with ExtAudioFileSetProperty() to fail with a '!dat' error.

I've been able to work around the bug in AudioFile by calling AudioConverter directly. As I wrote in my blog, This the reason why programmers don’t like higher-level APIs. Sure, they’re great if you’re not doing something serious or just beginning to learn an API. But eventually the higher-level API will have some serious bug where the only workaround is to bypass the high-level API and go to a lower level. If that’s going to eventually happen, and the API maintainers aren’t responsive to fixing bugs, then you might as well code to the lower-level API in the first case.

Sam Ask
Wed Jun 13 03:16:26 2007

Speaking about Podcast chapters, will Fission support markers, and exporting them as chapters in AAC (like for example Sound Studio does)?

TjL
Sat Jun 23 13:52:13 2007

Ditto to Sam Ask's question: ChapterToolMe is nice and all, but what I'd really like is the ability to mark chapters in Fission like I'd mark splits.

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