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Posts tagged with "itunes"

Flight Control Lands Nearly 4 Million Sales

Firemint, which recently acquired Infinite Interactive has posted on it’s blog some sales statistics of it’s popular Flight Control game that is currently featured in Apple’s Top Paid Apps of all time. As of the post it had sold 3,881,634 copies and has raked in $3.8 million dollars and that’s after Apple 30% take.

As demonstrated by the graph it released that is shown above (click for larger size) it’s pretty clear that Christmas and big feature updates really helped increase sales of the game. In particular the addition of Game Center support led to a peak of 120,000 sales, the largest peak since the release of the app. The new maps update and Retina display support were the other notable peaks.

Also notable is the sales by country, as the graph below the break shows, the US has the lion’s share followed by Great Britain, Australia and Germany.

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Lyrica 2: Redesigned, And Still The Best App To Tag Songs

A few days ahead of the opening of the Mac App Store, we previewed a nifty little app for the Mac called “Lyrica” which helped you display lyrics from songs playing in iTunes through a translucent black, HUD interface. The Mac App Store launched, the app was priced at .99 cents, it was one of the few useful apps in the Music category – it snowballed. It quickly jumped the charts to get in the first spots of Top Paid, and two weeks after the grand opening it’s still firmly positioned in the top 30 apps.

It turns out, though, that many users didn’t like the HUD style of the app, which may or may not make it difficult to read lyrics on a translucent background. So developer Florian Zand redesigned the entire application and added some new features during the process. Lyrica now comes with a white, cleaner look with a stacked style that kind of reminds me of a newspaper. I also like the fact that I can choose between different fonts – personally, I sticked with Georgia.

Graphics changes aside, the app now searches through seven lyrics databases, including AZLyrics and MetroLyrics. Several preferences have been added (Lyrica can still automatically tag any song playing in iTunes, even if it already has lyrics on its own) and the developer also implemented a new functionality to replace and remove broken lyrics. Useful for those (like me) who tried to tag their music library in the past with some shady Mac app that didn’t work at all.

Lyrica is available at $0.99 in the Mac App Store. It’s getting better on every release, and even though it’s not perfect yet (and design-obsessed folks will still have something to say about it) it just works, better than many other apps sold at a higher price by well-known developers. Give it a try.

iTunes To Become Part Of Safari? We Don’t Believe It

According to website Three Guys and a Podcast, Apple has been working on a major redesign of its iTunes software that will see the music manager / app organizer / media hub become part of Safari. The new system is rumored to be announced at Apple’s music event that should take place (as every year) in September and will be the evolution of Apple’s original plans during the lala acquisition.

Apple may be preparing a massive move that will propel Safari from niche browser to market leader. The move to merge Safari and iTunes into one software solution appears long in the works, which may arrive this fall at Apple’s usual iPod special event.

It is believed that Safari will be the only browser able to access iTunes, as iTunes is built into the browser itself. “Moving iTunes organizational side-bar into Safari isn’t a monumental task” claimed a source, adding “Safari would skyrocket in use as a result of integrating the software titles together.

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The Beatles On iTunes: 5 Million Songs Sold In 2 Months

On November 16, 2010 The Beatles came to iTunes. The ever-popular Liverpool band was one of the big holes in Apple’s digital music offering, and an option long pursued by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who also happens to be a huge fan of the Fab Four. In two months, 5 million songs and 1 million albums of The Beatles have been sold through iTunes, Apple told The Loop.

Two weeks after the initial release, Apple announced 2 million songs had been sold. Clearly sales have slowed down a bit, but it’s an impressive figure nonetheless. And just like when 2 million songs were already out of iTunes, the most popular album is “Abbey Road”. Most popular song in the U.S. is “Here Comes The Sun”.

November 16 might not be a day we’ll never forget, but it sure marked the beginning of a lucrative relationship between Apple and The Beatles.

The Daily Won’t Be Announced Next Week

Looks like we called it: citing “sources familiar with the companies’ plans” All Things Digital reports that The Daily, the joint venture between Apple and News Corp. for an iPad-exclusive newspaper, won’t be announced next week:

Apple and News Corp. have made a joint decision to push back next week’s planned launch, according to sources familiar with the companies’ plans. The delay is supposed to give Apple time to tweak its new subscription service for publications sold through its iTunes platform.

Plans to hold debut the iPad newspaper at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next Wednesday have been tabled “for weeks, not months,” I’m told.

As we expected, the issue seems to be lying in app subscriptions for iTunes, which aren’t ready at the moment. And with such a feature supposedly being scheduled to ship with a software update to iOS, it appears that we’ll have to wait for weeks before actually reading The Daily. iOS 4.3, in fact, was released as “beta 1” only yesterday.

News Corp. PR confirmed the delay, and Apple declined to comment. Apple is reportedly tweaking the iTunes subscription feature that will allow publishers to push new content to users automatically, with recurring billing in iTunes.

Happy Birthday! iTunes Turns 10

On January 9, 2001 Steve Jobs announced the first version of a new music player and organizer called iTunes at the Macworld Expo. Ten years later, iTunes has reached version 10.1.1 and it has evolved into media organizer and aggregator capable of storing music, movies, podcasts, apps, books, radio stations and playlists. Some say iTunes is bloated, and maybe it is. But truth is, it looks nothing like the brushed metal, young and tiny version we first saw 10 years ago.

iTunes has become the center of our “digital lifestyle”, a strategy Apple CEO Steve Jobs started in 2001 with the “Digital Hub” revolution. And looking back at those promises, there’s no doubt a single software running on our Macs has become the most important part of our workflow. We sync iPhones, iPods and iPads to iTunes, we store media in it, we stream content from iTunes to a variety of speakers and devices. Feature-rich or bloated, it’s undoubtedly deeply integrated with the Mac and iOS ecosystem.

So here’s to iTunes, and the digital lifestyle that’s now synced and stored on our computers and mobile devices. It’s been 10 incredible years, and we look forward to what’s next. Happy Birthday, iTunes. Read more

You Can Buy Hacked iTunes Accounts in China

According to a report from AFP, hacked iTunes accounts complete with credit card information are available for sale on Chinese online retailer Taobao. The hacked accounts give you “free” access to music, TV shows, movies, apps – anything you can buy in the iTunes Store. AFP is reporting that hacked accounts are sold starting at 30 yuan ($4) but, as noted by the Global Times, price may go up to 200 yuan, too. Around 50,000 accounts are being sold on Taobao.

“At this time, we have not received any information from Apple or any other principal related to the iTunes accounts indicating that these products either violate our listing rules or infringe on the IP of others,” the company said.

Experts said hackers either hack foreign users’ iTunes accounts, which keep credit card numbers on file, or steal details of overseas credit cards to register several iTunes accounts that are then put on sale.

It is unclear whether or not this sale of hacked accounts has been going around for months. Either way, sometimes the best solution to prevent your account from being hacked is very simple: keep a strong password. [AFP via 9to5]

Ecoute 2.0 - Small, Powerful Alternative to iTunes

Just like any other alternative to iTunes on the Mac, Ecoute has been around for a while. Since Apple shipped its very own music player and digital hub years ago, many developers have tried to come up with original solutions for all those who couldn’t stand iTunes. And as iTunes grew bigger to accommodate apps, books, podcasts and just about anything you can put on an iPhone or iPod, thousands of users and even more developers started feeling the need of a minimal music player, again. What began as a hobby for a limited number of users (“let’s not use iTunes for music”) evolved into a real segment of a market willing to keep iTunes closed to listen to music libraries. And I understand the position of the users and developers that first thought about jumping out of iTunes: why would one need to stare at iTunes and all its features and options all the time, when you just need to listen to some music?

In spite of iTunes becoming many people’s less used music player over time, the apps that have surfaced in the past years that allow us to just play music are, in most cases, nothing but standalone iTunes controllers that strip away the clutter and focus on albums, artists and songs. They fetch a user’s library, take the music out of it and display it into a minimal, sometimes non-existent, user interface. Coversutra, Bowtie: they are two popular iTunes controllers for OS X that have gained support for other features such as last.fm scrobbling and iOS remote streaming. But in the end, they rely on iTunes.

So did Ecoute 1.0, and so does the just-released Ecoute 2.0. Ecoute is a well-known music player for OS X that plays music from iTunes, but doesn’t require you to keep iTunes running in the background. It automatically finds a user’s iTunes library file and takes content from there. It comes with a neat desktop widget for quick play / pause actions, but it’s also got its dedicated interface. Ecoute 2.0 depends on iTunes, but it adds great value while giving you a reason to stay out of Apple’s software at the same time. Read more