Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio

It has been a solid tick since we’ve seen a good FairPlay hack, so it’s with great pleasure that we pass along El Tunes for Ubuntu 8.04 users everywhere. Tested to work on Hardy Heron using RhythmBox (but assumed to work on any modern Linux Distro with GStreamer and a media player that utilizes GStreamer), said plug-in enables open-source aficionados to play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. As for limitations, the current version has no Pause / Seek support and cannot de-authorize a machine for playback, but a future version should hopefully cure those two quirks and add support for purchased video content and audio streaming to an AirTunes device. Give it a shot and let us know how it treats ya.

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Color us completely unsurprised, but it’s being reported that a number of state politicians are looking at the possibility of imposing new laws to levy taxes on digital downloads as a method of taping up shattered budgets. Yep, anything from music to videos to books are at risk, as a growing number of lawmakers are looking to start collecting taxes from each iTunes track and Kindle eBook you purchase. Of course, this idea is far from new, and a number of US states already impose such taxes, but it seems that the ever-growing amount of content purchased online has caught the eye of those looking for new streams of tax revenue. Needless to say, the issue as a whole is about as far from black and white as you can get, but we’re not asking you to take our word for it — tap the read link to get a good feel of just how sticky the situation really is.

[Image courtesy of Izzy]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Based on today’s earlier leak of some weekly NPD marketshare data, we had our doubts that Apple had actually overtaken Wal-Mart as the number one music retailer in the US, but it looks like that January surge of iTunes gift cards and new iPod owners pushed it over the top for good — and now we’ve got the PR to prove it. Apple’s giving out the same “4 billion songs to 50 million customers” numbers as it has for a while now, but it says iTunes was the biggest game in town in January and February. Of course, there’s a lot of 2008 left to go, so Wally might make a comeback — it was the overall champ last year — but Apple’s achievement is still a major milestone for digitally distributed content, and we hope to see a lot more iTunes-like services on that list soon.

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Although we aren’t inclined to believe that this is the first time such a suit has been brought upon Apple, a new one claiming that the Cupertino powerhouse has unlawfully tied the iPod to its iTunes Store has made its way to the US District Court for the Southern District of California. The complaint was filed by a Florida resident on behalf of all Florida-based iPod owners and iTunes Store customers, and it basically alleges that certain limitations — such as the inability to play content purchased through iTunes on anything not labeled an iPod — is “unreasonable and illegal under Florida’s antitrust and unfair trade laws.” Furthermore, the plaintiff claims that Apple willfully disabled embedded support for rival formats, and stated that it was “in possession of monopoly power in the portable digital media player market, the online music market and the online video market.” ‘Course, it’s not like those lawyers at 1 Infinite Loop aren’t used to this stuff by now, and we really can’t see this being the beginning of the end (nor a catalyst for rule changes) for the oh-so-mighty iTunes Store.

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