One format, battery problems, high prices, yet they won the market with a simple interface and marketing efforts on steroids.

Which songs, which formats?

By Seán Captain The New York Times

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO There are many pocket-size digital music players available, but they fall into two groups: Apple`s iPod products and everything else. That split, rooted in technology as well as style, poses a challenge for music lovers who want to upgrade their devices.

IPods, the most popular music players, with more than 70 percent of the American market, can play MP3 music files, a popular digital audio-compression format.

But for the most part, Apple steers its customers to songs in another format, Advanced Audio Codec (AAC), which most non-Apple devices cannot play.

Apple`s iTunes software, which runs on PCs and Macs, for example, automatically ``rips,`` or converts, music from CDs into compressed AAC files for loading onto a computer or portable player. So users who want to convert tracks to MP3 files have to change the settings.

And downloads from Apple`s iTunes Music Store come exclusively in a version of AAC that includes FairPlay, Apple`s digital rights-management technology, to prevent illegal copying and sharing of music.

``One of the problems I see a lot is that people who are using iTunes-iPods have ripped their entire CD collection to the AAC format because that is the default setting in iTunes,`` Grahm Skee, who runs the Web site AnythingButiPod.com, said in an e-mail interview.

``Now they are stuck with a format that can only be played on iPods.``

At the same time, most of Apple`s rivals use Microsoft`s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which does not play on iPods. And, most online music stores other than iTunes - like Napster (napster.com), Wal-Mart (musicdownloads.walmart.com) and Yahoo Music (music.yahoo.com) - sell downloads in the copy-protected Secure WMA file format.

With many people`s digital music collections locked into one of two incompatible formats, their choices for new music players are largely determined by what they bought in the past.

Making a choice

So why not avoid all that trouble and just go with Apple? After all, its music players are trendsetters, and the iTunes music store offers a large collection of titles.

But the iPod`s list of missing features is also noteworthy. No iPod offers a built-in FM radio, for example, or an integrated voice recorder. These features are common from companies such as Archos, Cowon Systems, Creative, iRiver and Samsung. And Apple has yet to release a device with video playback capabilities like those on Creative`s Zen Vision handheld device, although it is widely expected to soon.

Nor does iTunes offer a streaming service that lets subscribers listen to any song in its catalog for a monthly fee. Subscription sites like Napster, Rhapsody (rhapsody.com) and Yahoo Music have extended this offering by using a Microsoft technology that lets customers load tracks onto WMA-based players and listen to them as long as subscriptions remain current.

The bottom line: No single music player offers everything, and no one can say what next year`s models will provide.

Format flexibility online

A few online music stores try to bridge the Apple-Microsoft gap, though none offer a perfect solution.

People whose tastes stray beyond the Top 40 may have luck with eMusic (www.emusic.com), which offers a large collection in the universally playable MP3 format.

Many of eMusic`s current top artists - Iron and Wine, Bloc Party and Devendra Banhart - are not household names like Kanye West and Coldplay, but they are popular among indie rock fans, who buy more than 2.5 million songs per month, according to the company.

EMusic is a subscription-based service, and its offerings start at $9.99 for 40 downloads a month.

Music fans can find a more mainstream selection, although less flexibility, with Rhapsody. Long a popular streaming service, Rhapsody began earlier this year to offer music files for purchase and for subscription download.

Songs from Rhapsody use RealAudio 10`s flavor of copy-protected AAC, but Real`s Harmony technology can convert them to either Secure WMA or Apple`s FairPlay version of AAC.

The WMA conversion is done with Microsoft`s blessing. But converting to Apple`s format is shakier. Apple changed the iPod`s program in October 2004 to prevent Rhapsody songs from playing on its newer models, but Rhapsody fixed that in April - although no one knows whether Apple may change again.

Apple declined to comment for this article. The safest strategy, and one popular among audio purists, is to buy music on compact discs and rip it to the MP3 format.

James O`Rourke, a software engineer in San Francisco who owns a 20-gigabyte iPod, said a friend told him that AAC had the best quality. ``But then I thought, well, maybe I`ll have a problem in the future with being able to transfer music between different players. So most of my CD ripping is now done in MP3.``

Buying physical CDs rules out the instant gratification of simply clicking ``Buy Song`` from an online store. And it means paying $10 to $20 for a CD rather than 99 cents or less for a track you want.

But CDs still offer the greatest selection. Some of the most popular music of all time - from bands like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC - still is not available from legitimate online stores.

Ripping CDs can also offer higher quality. ITunes and some other stores sell music encoded at a data rate of 128 kilobits per second. (EMusic, Rhapsody and Yahoo use 192 kbps.) CDs typically are encoded at about 1,400 kbps. AAC and WMA use sophisticated data-compression technologies to maintain audio quality at lower data rates than CDs, or even MP3s, but no one claims that a 128 kbps download is equivalent to a compact disc.

Those who have already ripped a lot of CDs into either the Apple or Microsoft format have the option of converting their music from one format to another.

ITunes software, for example, can find WMA files on a computer and convert them to AAC. Windows Media Player does not have a similar ability to change AAC to WMA, but other programs can handle it.

All about compression

The main drawback is that most formats require a data compression method.

Quality deteriorates when ripping CDs to WMA, for example, then deteriorates further when converting the WMA file to AAC. And converters do not work on copy-protected files from online music stores - at least not without straying into troublesome legal terrain.

Some iPod owners, for example, use a program called JHymn (hymn-project.org/jhymndoc) to remove the copy protection from iTunes music downloads to convert or otherwise modify them without restrictions.

The software also makes possible to share copyrighted files, a use that JHymn`s creators say they do not condone.

A federal law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, prohibits tampering with copy protection technologies. But JHymn`s creators contend that the software, by allowing users to play songs purchased from iTunes on computers or devices that do not support Apple`s system, merely enables a ``fair use`` allowed under traditional copyright law.

A JHymn representative who goes only by the name FutureProof, however, acknowledged that using the software would almost certainly violate Apple`s terms of service for iTunes.