Universal Music, the world's largest record company, today announced that its European unit has by the end of summer, as noted this earlier morning.
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They're probly just counting 2 years of total processing time. I would hope they didn't hire some guy to sit in his cube swapping CDs in and out for 2 years straight.
Apple is just RIPE to sqander away 10-15% of the European Marketshare unless they get European iTunes out ASAP
Assuming that it takes 5 minutes to encode a song and upload it into the database it would take the 1000 Mac cluster just over a day (25 hours) to do this job... 2 years on a PC / a sunday on a bunch of Macs
It would probably take at least a month and a bunch of employees to scan the covers, etc....
Don't forget, Apple makes their AACs from the master tape, remember? So that means encoding the AAC plus typing in tags for 300,000 songs. Definitely not a Sunday task.
Apple does not do the encoding.
Apple provides the label with the tools to encode their music for the iTunes Music Store and then the label is responsible for actually encoding the music.
that was what was meant by "It would probably take at least a month and a bunch of employees to scan the covers, etc.... "
that should include typing in 300,000 songs, descriptions of albums + cover art.
Now lets double and tripple the effort and we still just have 3 months...
Universal would be totally stupid, if the encode their catalog in 128bit WMA c***. Even 128bit AAC would be stupid. Then they have to reencode everything once the bandwidth is getting lager and iTMS and others offer higher encoding rates.
Lets make the math 20 Tracks = 1GB raw CD quality (16Bit 1024 bit/s).
So they need 15 000 GB = 15 TerraByte.= 5 XServeRaids.
So just 5 Raids for the whole catalog in pure CD quality. In addition they could have a database for covers / ID tags and then generate every codec on the fly.
So these files will be available "through Apple, Napster, and others as those companies role out European versions of their stores"?
I wonder which company will take the lead role in the European market?
"It appears that Universal's digital catalog is encoded in Windows Audio format..."
Where exactly did you get this information? It certainly doesn't say so in the story you link to. Whether they did or not, it would be silly for them to choose a final format like AAC or WMA.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2001
Can anyone say AplScript?
Take a room full of G4's or G5's and start a batch file with Apple Script and they will finish what they did in 2 years with probably a few people and some Windoze systems in a few months on a Mac... and whola! Done. Ready to go! Euro Doe for iTMS UK.