Some Notes On iTunes LP | Hacker News Reader

Some Notes On iTunes LP

jayrobinson.org

20 pointsHagelin13 comments

I wish there were more LPs available out the door: I don't like the current selection, but I'd kill for a Tubular Bells LP done in this vein.

I can't wait till this catches on and there are thousands of LPs to pick from. This is the sort of extra functionality that makes buying music rather than stealing it worth the consumer's money.

Great[edit: !!!] Would be even cooler if it fully worked in Safari and other browsers.

I guess they didn’t include fonts because of licensing woes. I wonder what that does to accessibility.

The “Great.” is entirely non-sarcastic. Funny how “Great.” has come to denote sarcasm. I would guess that is why I was downvoted. If you mistake my “Great.” for sarcasm the comment is indeed vile. My mistake.

An exclamation mark helps - "Great!"

See my edit :)

One thought I've had:

Do this for education and textbooks. Has anyone tried to create a simple iTunes LP themselves and open it in iTunes.

I wish I could find info for artists on creating these. So much potential for creativity here, and I hope that's opened up to indies sooner than later and not just the majors.

Interesting for two reasons: gives an incentive to buy the album not pirate, and gives an incentive to buy from iTunes - not from Amazon or another service.

I see no point to this at all, but seems some people like it. When I listen to music I'm appreciating the creative output of the artist; there's no need for it to be dolled up by animated web pages and visualisers and what not. In fact I find that kind of thing distracting and usually annoying, like those DVDs which have some half-ass custom menu effect meant to "put you in the mood" or something; I wish I could just skip it.

Still, glad (and somewhat surprised) to see it's not an encrypted, proprietary black box. Kudos to Apple for that and a great advertisement for the excellent Webkit.

I can see if this is poorly done it will become annoying like a repeating DVD intro for sure. But as an artist, this also gives an opportunity to be not just musical but visual and even interactive. If it's based on webkit, sky's the limit for what you can embed. A listener chatter box? Why not? These could totally hook up to a server for interactive elements and ongoing content updates. You could tell a whole story in one of these.

I love vinyl LPs because the larger visual format is more immersive and I take the time out to enjoy the experience. On the computer, I find all music becomes background music, which is a shame. So I'm really looking forward to what artists (myself included, hopefully :) will do with this. I hope it lives up to that experience and becomes the new standard "LP" that other players adopt too.

I miss liner notes. I still rarely buy individual tracks, being much more partial to the album and musicians/bands who can record albums. I've heard enough people think this is backward. Me, I might actually buy some music on iTunes finally (currently either rip CDs or use Amazon MP3)

... but if you want to do that, why not just have a website so everyone can look at it? You don't need to tie it to people who bought the album on iTunes.

I understand your point about music moving into the background when you're at a computer, and agree to some extent, but I think that's more to do with the fact you are sitting in front of an entertaining multi-function device rather than on a couch in front of a dedicated stereo system. It is possible to set up the latter even with a computer, and you'll still be distracted by all the possible activities with your computer even if you have a bundled web site to look at.

I agree that it's good to have something album-related to look at, to allow you to concentrate on the music more. Personally I think computers are the worst possible device to fulfil this role but don't have any other solutions.

Very true about computers. I find even with CDs I don't get the same thing as with vinyl though. It's just not as compelling an artistic medium.

As to putting it on a website, that could work and some people have done exactly that, but this is cool because it turns that novelty into a product you can sell (access to a restricted area of a band's website on the promise it'll be there in a year's time is a hard sell by comparison) and this is where people know to go to buy music now so the expectation that it will cost something is already in their minds. So this just works better as a saleable product.

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