I posted last month an article (Amazon's MP3 store is better than Apple's) about how 3 of the 4 major record labels now distribute DRM-free music via Amazon's MP3 store. Well, Amazon just announced that they have reached an agreement with Sony BMG to distribute its catalog via there store, which now makes 4 of the 4 major record labels to reach such an agreement.

In July of 2007 iTunes surpassed Amazon to become the 3rd largest distributor of music in terms of sales, but that statistic includes physical CD sales. It will be interesting to see how this changes over the next year now that Amazon offers a bigger catalog for DRM-free music in downloadable MP3 format.

Labels: iPod

So I read the article 3 down, 1 to go: Warner Music Group drops DRM last night and decided to check it out. I have been really happy with the ease of ordering music from Apple's iTunes in the past, they really pioneered selling music on the web, and have made purchasing music and transferring it to my iPod dead simple.

What compelled me to check out Amazon's MP3 service?

The main reason I was interested in it is that music purchased from Amazon is DRM-Free. For those that don't know, DRM means Digital Rights Management, which "is an umbrella term that refers to access control technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices." - wikipedia. Since the music I purchase is DRM free it means I can easily copy it to any device I own, including my laptop, my iPod, my new iPhone, or my desktop without any limitations, which is nice because I have so many devices.

The real significance of the announcement mentioned in the article is that "EMI, Universal, and Warner now offer their catalogues in DRM-free digital formats," on Amazon.com, which constitutes 3 of the major music labels to come to such an agreement.

The thing that bothers me so much about the DRM that Apple/iTunes uses is that it is way to restrictive, and way to difficult to backup. So far I have purchased 3 movies, and 1 season pass for a TV show, and of all those videos that I have purchased I can't get them on all the devices that I want and own because I downloaded them to different computers. If I purchased them, shouldn't I have the freedom to put them on any device that I choose? This also pisses me off about my DVDs...I have about 100 DVDs, but I can't easily transfer them to my computer, iPod, or iPhone without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Well, enough on the DRM-Free aspect of Amazon's service, there are some other benefits too, such as price. So far I have purchased two albums from Amazon, and both were only $8.99, which is cheaper than iTunes standard $9.99 per album for music.

There is also an added benefit of increased quality of the music purchased form Amazon over iTunes. The majority of music purchased through iTunes has a bit rate of 128kbps, where as Amazon's music is all 320kbps (Correction, it is 256kbps or higher). For those that don't know...higher bit rate means higher quality. From what I am told the human ear can't notice any sound quality difference at a bit rate over 192kbps, but it can distinguish the difference for anything less than that. So Amazon's music should have a noticeable quality upgrade over Apple's.

So to sum everything up, Amazon's mp3 store is better than iTunes because:

• It is DRM free
• It is cheaper than iTunes
• It is better quality

The only time I can see going back to purchase any music from iTunes is if Amazon doesn't sell it. Try it out if you are the type that buys music online. I don't think you will be disappointed.

Labels: iPod

Check out this list of Free Education Courses online.

It is a list of free videos from Berkley courses.

Topics from Berkley include:

• Computers
• Biology
• Health
• Engineering
• Math
• Other various courses

The page also has several great resources on the left hand side of the page including links to other educational videos, links to learn foreign languages and so on.

This is a great resource.

Labels: iPod

One of the things I am most interested in when it comes to eLearning is eLearning content that is developed for portable devices such as the iPod. I was pretty excited when I saw that iTunes launched iTunes University.

Well, a new game has been developed by Apple called iQuiz, which is a trivia game for the iPod. It allows you to play downloaded "trivia packs" on the iPod.

So you can create these "trivia packs" for your learners so that they can take your quizzes on their iPods. Cool, huh?

What I like about it:

• The UI - The games look and feel is cool. Really feels like you are playing a game. The animations are really slick as well.
  
• Ability to create timed quizzes
  
• 3 strikes your out - Some of the quizzes have a "loose" value. A loose value is the number of wrong answers that result in losing the game
  

Unfortunately there are a couple of things that prevent this from becoming a really effective tool for deploying eLearning material:

• No way to capture results - This makes it an ineffective tool at it as tool for assessing student retention of information. It would be nice if users could take the quiz, and then have the results uploaded to a database or LMS when the user synchronized their iPod.
  
• No way to provide custom feedback - Only default feedback is displayed (correct/incorrect). So it is difficult to use quizzes as an effective tool.
  
• End user must have iQuiz installed - Which means any user who wants to take your quizzes will have to have iQuiz installed.
• Installing the quizzes is not intuitive - Quizzes need to be copied to the \My Music\iTunes\iPod Games\iQuiz folder, and there is no ability to manage your quizzes in iTunes.
  

So basically the game is more about trivia than it is quizzing. But anyways, I think the program is interesting, and in a follow-up blog post I will post instructions for how you can create quizzes (trivia packs) for iQuiz, and instructions on how you can copy the quizzes to your iPod.

Learn more about the iPod in Education.

iQuiz for the iPod.

Labels: eLearning Technology, iPod