shahine.com/omar/

Still, even with the no DRM nonsense, iTunes is still placing restrictions on what I can buy and charging me more for the privilege.

Here is the new Daft Punk Alive 2007 Album in iTunes:

And on Amazon.

Amazon lets me purchase each track individually, iTunes does not.

Album is:

• $11.99 on iTunes
• $8.99 on Amazon

Harder Better Faster Stronger indeed.

Love the Amazon MP3 service. Bubba has a detailed review.

I have fallen in love with Amazon.com's new MP3 download service. Here are the facts:

• DRM free music from EMI and Universal
• $.89 a track
• $8.99 for most albums
• 256 kbps Variable Bitrate MP3
• Application that downloads tracks and transfers to iTunes or Windows Media Player with Album Art

Before this service I was still firmly a "CD only" purchaser. DRM was too restrictive. For example, how would my wife and I share music on our iPods? Our current solution was to use my iTunes accounts on my machine, her machine etc. But this got to be a pain in the butt.

Another thing that rocks? Amazon customer service. I had a problem with a credit card on file due to some one-click thing. So I clicked on the help link, and then clicked "call me", entered my phone number and within 3 seconds I was talking to a live human being who already had all my account info. It was actually kinda funny because I was buying my wife the new Fergie Album she asked for and the customer service lady was like "So you're trying to get your fergie"?... awkward!

Anyway, lets see how this stacks up to iTunes:

1. Cheaper
2. More DRM free music selection
3. No DRM on all tracks sold
4. MP3 format, so it works on all music devices.

Sold!

My biggest complaint with iTunes was always it's mediocre metadata support when compared to Windows Media Player. However, sometime in the past year Apple quietly updated iTunes to support the last remaining critical meta data field, Album Artist.

Why do I care about Album Artist? Well lets take a look at the latest George Michael Twenty Five CD (yes, I do in fact like George Michael, it reminds me of being a child of the 80s).

Anyway, take a look at the normal "Artist" Field".

The problem with this is now when I look at my music in Cover Flow modeI see separate entries for:

• George Michael
• Wham!
• George Michael & Paul McCartney
• George Michael & Elton John

However, this is not what I want. I purchased a CD, and I want to lookup and browse using the Album Artist: George Michael.

Well in prior versions of iTunes you were stuck with this lame behavior. However, in Windows Media Player, it does the right thing(tm).

Well the latest iTunes has an Album Artist field. Just go to View -> View Options and select Album Artist.

When you do that you can get this:

Now Cover Flow will work as expected and you won't see more entries than the number of CDs.

Unfortunately, the iPod does not support Album Artist yet, and as such iPod Cover Flow is broken in this respect. To bad. I hope that gets fixed.

She is very cute. Since this was a gift for my wife, unboxing will have to wait for tonight.

Wow, and what a long way to travel. I'm glad I paid for the free shipping since it appears Apple if footing the FedEx bill from China.

BTW, Mike Torres has some thoughts on the iPod vs the Zune.

Here is the thing... folks like me, who might have purchased a Zune this year (v2) won't... why? Cause I just spent $650 bucks to refresh my iPod(s). That covers me for a year. I'm not sure there is any feature that would encourage me to spend money on a Zune v2 (assuming it's something I want).

To bad, missed opportunity. Chris Lanier even thinks that the Zune is dead:

"Sorry for anyone looking for a pro-Microsoft post today, but Apple just announced those new iPods I was talking about last night when criticizing the Zune and I’m personally declaring that the Zune is dead."