Agreed. It won’t be the entire product line at once—these transitions are always multi-year affairs—but it will start happening in some form.

I wouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that there are a few ARM-based MacBook Air notebooks inside of Apple right now…

Just to make you aware in the nicest way possible, my employment is as a scientist working in psychoacoustics, so you don't need to explain audio encoding to me. Nothing I was saying was really related to that.

Cool. I was responding to your comment that implied that everything on Bandcamp is better quality than what's on iTunes, which you and I both know isn't the case, but somebody might get that impression from your post. As I mentioned before, FLAC sounds better, but only a tiny percentage of the music buying public can actually play it—or even understands why they should care about it.

It's important for everyone trying to make decisions about who to buy from (iTunes vs. Bandcamp vs. Amazon) and what formats to buy (AAC vs. MP3 vs. FLAAC, etc.) to understand that it's about tradeoffs. iTunes isn't all bad and Bandcamp isn't all good is all I'm trying to clarify here.

FLAC is great for certain things, but it fails at being useful for mobile use, like on an iPod. Having choices looks great, but most people don't want lots of choices; they just want something that works and sounds good. It would be great to if the general public cared enough to take the time to understand the tradeoffs between formats, file size, sound quality, etc.

At the end of the day, indie bands IMHO need to be more concerned about how to build their audiences using the tools that are now available to them and less about the distribution model. If we're going to take anyone to task, it should be the record labels and the RIAA, who've created the system that we now are living with.

iTunes is only where it is because the record company executives were clueless about how to respond to music distribution on the internet. And if Apple didn't exist, I can't imagine what kind of far more draconian distribution system we'd have. And people would have far less access to music than they do now. Lets be glad it was Apple and not Microsoft or the record labels themselves who have the leading media store on the internet.

I think that the simple fact that iTunes pays 54 cents on the dollar as opposed to Bandcamp's 80 cents, for what is undoubtedly an inferior product, is enough reason to reject this entire scheme wholesale.

It's a little disengenuous to say what iTunes sells is inferior. iTunes sells unprotected, 256K AAC files which sound great and for most people would be considered CD quality. And as an added bonus, these files actually play on the devices most people own, like iPods and iPhones.

Bandcamp is a great site, but it doesn't have 160 million customers with credit cards that have already purchased billions of tracks. You certainly could make a lot more money on iTunes if you became popular than you could on Bandcamp. And now that social commerce is part of iTunes via Ping, it should be easier for indie bands and their fans to get the word out.

I am going to err to the side of the tracks that says Apple will never make this, or any music applications truly friendly towards indie artists, as they are in the buisness of making money, and indie bands/musicians are far from giant producers of revenue.

Apple runs iTunes as a slightly over breakeven business. Remember, they only get about 5 cents from a 99-cent track. Apple makes its money from selling devices—iPods, iPhones, iPads and Macs, not music. But they know to sell iPods, you need stuff to listen to and watch, hence iTunes. The only reason bands can make any money at all online is because Apple made it cool to actually buy music online instead of stealing it via Napster (this was back in 2001) and other sharing sites.

Any band or musician can become popular, regardless of level of talent, as long as slick and swarthy marketing techniques are used. Myself being a musician, would much rather be recognized for my musical ability, my drive, and devotion to the love of my art. Leave iTunes, and other high profile music distribution methods for, the sheeple. Actively promote live performance, sell your merch out of your car, trade some CD's with the bands you play out with, Do It Yourself.

Yes, indie performers should certainly have a grassroots, DIY ethic. Most of the ones I've seen perform do—they have the signup list for their email list, they have a MySpace page, they have CDs for sale, etc. More of them are getting on other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to engage with fans and build an audience; Apple's Ping should only help with that.

As far as leaving distribution concerns to the "sheeple" of iTunes, I figure that doesn't work for performers who'd like to make a living from their music instead of working in coffeeshops and boring, dead-end office jobs. It's cool to have ability, drive and devotion and all; however, that doesn't pay the bills.

...and Ping can't be used to promote indie artists yet, that's just my point!

It's a little early right? Ping has been available for less than a week. I suspect 6 months or a year from now, Ping will be an important piece of the puzzle for promoting indie bands.

All my songs for sale on iTunes have DRM on them and I could beg Apple night and day to sell my songs without it and they won't. If you know otherwise, please let me know how I can change that. My understanding is that it is not an option for indie artists.

I'll ask people that are more connected to iTunes than I am about indie artists and what their options are.

Tunes files absolutely are lower quality than the FLAC files or the 320 kbps MP3s that you can buy for less money on Bandcamp.

It's easy to Google and see the results of sound tests that compare the various codecs and how the sound. And while everyone's hearing is subjective, test equipment is not. It's generally known and understood that AAC files sound better at the same bit rate than MP3 files do.

I did some testing for a friend's iPhone app that streams AAC; it's so much better than the MP3s that get streamed by services like Pandora.

FLAC is a lossless format; unlike AAC and MP3, it doesn't discard anything the designers believe most people wouldn't be able to hear anyway. But because FLAC is lossless, it's going to sound better than either AAC or MP3, the files are much larger. However, FLAC is a great archival format, which is why recordings of live shows are often saved in this format.

Even if the size issue—FLAC files seem to be 2-3x larger than MP3 or ACC files—didn't exist, the other major issue: the iPod, with has over 70% of the MP3 player market, doesn't play FLAC files. Neither does the iPhone or iPad. Since being able to listen music on the go is extremely popular, having lots of FLAC files isn't very useful for that. Yes, a knowledgeable person could convert FLAC to other formats, but non-geeks or nerds aren't going to do that.

For audiophiles, Apple has a format called Apple Lossless which has the same type of sound quality as FLAC, but produces smaller files and plays on Apple's devices. And you can rip CDs to Apple Lossless right in iTunes.

Amen Sooz! I totally agree. This is the position we as lovers of indie music in general and Boston indie bands in particular should be advocating.

Just wanted to add some balance here…

Apple dropped DRM on most of it's music a couple of years ago; any remaining DRM is because that particular record company requires Apple to use DRM for their content. Apple would love it if all music was DRM-free. How do I know? Because Apple CEO wrote an essay about it over three years ago. The last album I bought from iTunes—The Roots’ How I Got Over—had no DRM and was 256K AAC to boot.

Also, iTunes files aren’t lower quality; on the contrary, they’re much better. Lots of other online stores use the MP3 file format; Apple uses AAC, which is higher quality at the same bitrate. That is, a 128K AAC file is going to sound better than a 128K MP3 file. This Wikipedia article describes how AAC is better than MP3.

Yes, some tracks are most expensive on iTunes, but that's because the record labels wanted variable pricing while Apple wanted to keep the price at 99 cents a track. Apple basically gets a nickel out of a 99-cent track; the labels get the rest.

The bottom line is that there are 160 million credit card-using customers on iTunes and if an indie artist is going to make any money at all, they need to be on iTunes. Ping can be used to promote these artists; I'm glad that Exploit Boston is doing its part by promoting Boston bands on Ping.

Certainly it would have been better to launch Ping with more than 7 or 8 mainstream artists. I suspect before long, the full range of artists will be available there. So far, there's nobody for me to follow.

Also, I don’t believe Taylor Swift is a recommended artist because someone paid-off Apple—that’s not how they roll, plus Apple made over $15 billion in revenue last quarter, so it’s not like they need the money. ;-)

I was at the Middle East for Kristen's show. She was so so good. Count me as an official Kristen Ford fanboy. ;-)

"Chrome, Safari and Opera do not integrate GPU acceleration."

Seriously? Of course Safari has GPU acceleration; it has since version 4.x on the Mac; version 5.x supports it on Windows as well.