Admit it: given how much like an honest-to-goodness Stevenote yesterday's music press event turned out to be, you regret not blowing off work and heading down to your local Apple retail store to catch the show live via satellite. You figured it was just going to be a low-key affair, introducing iTunes for Windows and maybe a voice-recording accessory for the iPod. Heck, you thought, Steve might not even show up for something so relatively "basic," and then you'd wind up standing in a store gawking at Schiller for an hour or something. So instead of bathing in the healing glow of a geosynchronously-transmitted Jobsian Reality Distortion Field amid the rapturous swoon of your fellow Macfolk, you ended up tallying sales figures all afternoon, or making bagels, or whacking federal witnesses or whatever. Bummer.

Welp, fear not, because now you can capture a good 60% of the Steve Jobs Experience after the fact. Just as we predicted, a QuickTime version of yesterday's gala music event has now surfaced at Apple's web site, and we feel a lot better now that the gaping pit in our souls has been filled with a little extra Steveness. (Yes, "gaping pit." For the record, Apple is dead wrong when it asserts that "Hell froze over." Seeing as both the Cubs and the Red Sox flubbed their shots at the World Series, Hell is consequently just as mosty-toasty as ever. On the plus side, at least the apocalypse has been averted for another year.)

Yes, thrill to nearly ninety minutes of classic Steve, strutting his stuff just as if he had been working an Expo crowd. It was all there: the mock turtleneck. The hands-on demo, complete with technical glitch. (Was that big band music that started playing when he clicked the "60s Music" Smart Playlist?) The "one more thing." A parade of announcements so long and extravagant, the execs at Macy's are considering cancelling next month's Thanksgiving Day gig because yesterday's act was "too tough to follow."

Truth be told, though, we still haven't watched yesterday's entire presentation-- we had to take a break when Steve began his iTunes demo on a Wintel because we witnessed a sight that sent us screaming into the night. Yes, we know that we were watching it in the daytime; that's how freakin' scary it was. Faithful viewer toby provided a link to a still of the most frightening image known to man, but please note that if you dare to gaze upon its infinite horrors, AtAT cannot be held responsible for any physical, mental, or emotional distress you may suffer as a result. Keep the heart pills handy. (A nearby change of underwear might be useful, too.)

So yes, iTunes is now available for Windows, and Apple claims that it's the "best Windows app ever"-- to which we can only say, hyperbolize much, guys? After all, judging by several reports floating around the 'net, iTunes has "issues" on the Windows platform. For example, faithful viewer David McConnell notes that p2pnet.net dug up a post by a USA Today writer who was "looking to talk to people who've used iTunes for Windows today and are experiencing the same kinds of bugs." Apparently the poor lil' fella can't do anything with his purchased music without constantly being asked to authorize his computer. (Obvious question: uh, did he authorize his computer? More on that in a minute.) Furthermore, he reports that he's installed iTunes on two computers, and "both have crashed several times from the software."

Okay, granted, the proprietors of p2pnet aren't exactly likely to be unbiased on this topic, seeing as they'd rather remove their own livers with nothing but a Silk Effects+ and an ice cream scoop than ever say anything even remotely positive about a music download service that isn't free. But the problems reported are being experienced by a USA Today reporter, so p2pnet's obvious prejudices are largely irrelevant in this context. That said, faithful viewer mrmgraphics pointed out that said USA Today reporter (one Jefferson Graham) has now publicly trashed Apple's new software with a bunch of incorrect information.

"Is iTunes worth it? Not in comparison to its competitors," says Jeff. First off, he claims that AAC is a "closed Apple format," which is technically untrue; AAC is the audio codec for MP4 and is as open as they come, although it is true that the digital rights management Apple is using is not. Still, it's a little unfair of Jeff to lambast AAC as closed and proprietary as opposed to MP3, given that none of Apple's competitors sell music in the MP3 format; they all use Microsoft's WMA, which is a closed and proprietary beast. Just because more players support the WMA format doesn't make it "open," Jeffster; it just means that Apple's the only digital music player manufacturer who hasn't had to buckle to Microsoft's monopoly and pay its licensing fees just to stay in business.

Next, Jeff insists that since he doesn't have a FireWire connection on his IBM laptop, he "couldn't transfer a song from the IBM to the iPod" even if he wanted to-- and this is somehow a problem with iTunes. Never mind that if the ThinkPad has USB 2.0 and his iPod is a 3G model he most certainly can transfer his music. Never mind that if his ThinkPad doesn't have USB 2.0 or FireWire either built-in or added in, it doesn't meet the system requirements of the iPod in the first place and he might as well be complaining that his 8-track tapes don't play in his microwave oven. No, since his ThinkPad doesn't have FireWire and he thinks he can't transfer his music, that's all iTunes's fault. Mmm-hm.

Lastly, Jefferson states that every time he tried to play a purchased song, burn it, or transfer it to an iPod, he got an error message indicating that he needed to authorize the computer. "One problem," he says: "no information anywhere on how to 'authorize' your machine." Gee, no information anywhere, Jeff? How about in the built-in iTunes and Music Store Help, where our search for "authorization" turned up everything you'd ever want to know in about four seconds? Or if the Windows version has no Help (which we sincerely doubt), what about on the Internet, like right here on Apple's support pages? Okay, fine, a link to that information in the error message you received would have been very helpful (something for 1.0.1, Apple), but jeez, buddy, aren't you supposed to be a reporter? What, if the information isn't in the form of a brightly-colored USA Today pie chart, it doesn't get absorbed? How is it we can find this stuff in two places with no trouble at all, but you can't seem to find your own hinder with a map and a flashlight?

That's not to say, folks, that what Jefferson experienced wasn't a bug; it may well have been. Of course, it may also be that he tried playing his songs on a system with no 'net connection and therefore no means to get authorized and didn't know what was wrong because he didn't read the Help page. (Another note to Apple: you should probably add that info to the support article.) But to say that there's "no information anywhere" on how to authorize and deauthorize a machine is just plain false.

Now, Jefferson does have one very valid complaint, which is that iTunes keeps crashing his Wintel systems-- but frankly, given the heady brew of ignorance, incompetence, and total inability to find and read any sort of documentation whatsoever that is evidently sloshing around inside the man's cranium, we have to say, we wouldn't be at all surprised if the crashes are caused by something else. Probably not, but hey, this is the sort of doubt that a complete and utter lack of credibility can engender. Did we mention that all of Jefferson's trash talk occurred in a USA Today chat that started at 4 PM Eastern yesterday, roughly 90 minutes after iTunes for Windows became available? Now that's what we call serious research.

Okay, that's enough of that-- let's move on to bug reports from people who actually could solve a connect-the-dots puzzle on a placemat at Chuck E. Cheese without peeking at the answer. One AtAT viewer reports that he installed iTunes on a Windows 2000 system and thereby rendered the machine completely unbootable. He can no longer use Windows on that system at all. Say... apparently iTunes is the best Windows app ever!

Meanwhile, lots of the anti-iTunes Music Store grousing we're noticing from the Windows side of the fence centers on price-- i.e. 99 cents is just waaaaaay too much money to pay for one piddly little song. This is not entirely unexpected, since most Wintel users wouldn't be Wintel users if it weren't for the fact that, instead of paying a fair price for quality goods and services, they prefer to pay as little money as possible in exchange for... well, utter crap, basically. Not that we're judging, of course; to each his own, it takes all kinds, most people are suckers, etc. etc. etc.

Therein lies Scott Blum's fundamental folly with BuyMusic.com, by the way: yes, 79 cents per song is cheaper than 99 cents (of course, he only offers about three songs that are 79 cents-- whatever), but free via Kazaa is even cheaper, bad karma notwithstanding. (C'mon, if these people had good karma, they wouldn't be stuck using Windows in the first place.) That's presumably why last week the iTMS sold more than twice as many songs as all of its competitors combined, even though BuyMusic.com and MusicMatch Downloads had a potential market twenty times the size of Apple's.

So how, you ask, does Apple expect to make any money selling music to the notoriously cheapskate Wintel market? Answer: they don't. CNET reports that Phil "Gilligan, Drop Those Coconuts" Schiller freely admits that, while the iTMS is "close to profitability," it's "still losing money" overall-- and even when it does squeeze into the black, Apple "doesn't have any illusions that it can make great profits from selling songs over the Internet." In short, says Phil, "the iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't." Wow. The last time we encountered anything that blunt, someone was swinging it at our heads.

So, let's think about this for a minute: if Apple (who had a massive infrastructure already in place for the delivery of scads of data over the 'net) can't make a profit on 99-cent songs even when selling in the volume of millions, what hope is there that legal services offering cheaper tunes will stay in business long enough to compete? In other words, unless the record labels decide to lower their wholesale prices to song resellers like Apple, 99 cents is probably the rock-bottom sustainable price we'll see for a while-- and Apple isn't even expecting to make money on the songs at that price. As company execs have stated before, the whole point of the iTMS is to sell iPods.

Incidentally, this ties in directly to another iTMS complaint we keep seeing from Wintel folk: if you buy iTMS songs and you want to take them with you, you "have to buy an iPod." And yes, that's 100% true, at least for now. But guess what? If you're not the sort of Wintel user who'd buy an iPod, Apple doesn't want you as an iTMS customer anyway; unless you also buy that iPod (and maybe eventually a Mac), any songs you purchase from Apple are probably just costing the company money. Let's be clear about this: Apple isn't going after the whole Wintel market with iTunes. It's going after the subset of Windows users who happen to have a little taste, and (more importantly) a little money to spend on iPods and other nifty (and profitable) stuff.

So, bottom line, 99 cents per song is it for a while, and Apple's only real competition price-wise is therefore Kazaa and its ilk; none of the legit services can compete on price and actually make money. If Apple weren't making money on iPod sales, it wouldn't be running the iTMS in the first place; "just trying to have a business around downloadable music would be tough," says Phil.

Once again, Scott Blum gulps audibly and starts to sweat through his suit.