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Apple In Serious Talks To Stream Music
Apple is in serious talks about a music subscription service and once again the major label heads appear ready to do whatever Cupertino asks them to do. iTunes head Eddy Cue has recently been in touch with label execs to “figure out how the partners can move forward,” according to the NY Post. The new music service would reportedly be priced in the $10 – $15 range depending access and portability. Subscriptions could be tied to an iTunes in the cloud service, but at least one report suggests that Apple’s desire to add subscription music has more to do with stopping a Spotify entry into the U.S.
Major Labels Fall Under Apple’s Spell Again:
Music subscriptions are not new. Rhapsody, Napster and others have been offering them for years with only moderate success. But an iTune’s music subscription service appears to sound new and sexy to the struggling labels.
So when Apple also recently told label heads that they were having serious doubts about whether Spotify could ever deliver serious revenue; the profits Apple was really worried about were their own. According to CNet, Apple reminded the labels that it’s hard to to sell something that someone else – like ad supported Spotify – is giving away. An industry insider told CNet’s Greg Sandoval that it’s “only logical that if Spotify were allowed to launch a free-music service here, at a time when Nielsen recently reported that the growth of digital sales has flattened out, it could eat into the businesses of proven revenue-producers like Apple and Amazon.”
There are at least two major problems with Apple’s hypothesis that the labels are choosing to ignore. While single tracks sales are flat, Nielson and many others project continued album download growth. As for Spotify hurting music sales – the old “why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free?” argument – most surveys show that Spotify increases download sales while also fighting piracy.
Apple has always been a very aggressive competitor and with Google, Spotify and others preparing to chip away at it’s supremacy in the music space, Jobs & Co. appears anxious to crush or at least stall any competition that in can.
Importing Your Firefox Settings Into Safari
I’m probably going backwards compared to most people, but I have been using Firefox and am tired of it crashing all the time, so I want to go back to Safari on my MacBook. Problem is, I don’t know how to copy across my bookmarks bar and it’s pretty tweaked for the way I browse.
Dave’s Answer:
There are a lot of Web browsers available nowadays for us Web surfers, whether you’re on a Windows system or a Mac OS X-based computer, but each seems to have its pros and cons, which is still pretty frustrating. Google Chrome? Not compatible with a bunch of sites. Firefox? Crashes left and right. Safari? Breaks some sites too (like Google Image Search, surprisingly enough).
Still, I appreciate your desire to move from one browser world to another and see if that works better for you. I keep switching back and forth, though I haven’t found The Perfect Browser yet.
The best solution to your question is really to sign up and use one of the different free and commercial bookmark synchronization services. A quick Google search of “bookmark sync firefox safari” produces a quarter-million results. I’m sure there’s one or two that’ll work for you.
Rather just do it manually? No worries, here’s how I exported my bookmark bar from Firefox and brought it into Safari with just a few mouse clicks…
I think the hardest part of this entire task is figuring out how to export your Firefox bookmarks. Why? Because the feature is hidden in the “organize bookmarks” area. Launch Firefox the choose “Organize Bookmarks…”
The bookmarks organizer window pops up and if you don’t look closely, you won’t see the button you need to click: “Import and Backup” (apparently “export” is something they’d rather avoid saying):
That brings up a small pop-up menu, and you’ll want to pick “Export HTML…”
Now just give the file a memorable name:
Saved? Good. You can quit Firefox and launch Safari now.
In Safari you want to choose “Import Bookmarks…” from the “File” menu:
Find the .html file you just saved from within Firefox and select it.
Click “Import” and the HTML file will be parsed and all the bookmarks will be brought into Safari:
We’re over half way, no worries! As you can see, though, the problem now is that the Firefox bookmarks are indeed imported into Safari, but they’re in a new sub-menu, which doesn’t help you replace the bookmarks bar in the browser.
Luckily it’s not too difficult once you realize that you can drag and drop sets of bookmarks from one area to another in Safari as a way of organizing them. What you need to do is delete everything that’s currently on your bookmarks bar in Safari, then we’ll just drag the bookmarks bar bookmarks there to update them.
Start by choosing “Show All Bookmarks” from the Bookmarks menu (or clicking on the little open book button on the very left of the bookmarks bar). You’ll see this:
As you can see, I have selected the “Bookmarks Bar” on the left and it’s showing me all the bookmarks I have in the current Safari bar. I don’t want those, though, so I’m going to click on the first bookmark in this folder that I want to delete (it’s on the right side), Shift-click on the last in the list (which selects them all), then Cmd-click to get the pop-up menu. I’ll select “Delete” and *poof* they’re all gone.
On the left side you now want to click on the newly imported bookmarks folder.
Open up the “Bookmarks Bar” folder, and use the same click + Shift-click to select every single bookmark from there that you want to move. Now, just click and drag the entire set to the “Bookmarks Bar” on the left side:
Here you can see that I am moving 17 bookmarks with a single mouse click. Handy!
The end result:
Hopefully that’ll help you quickly and easily move your bookmarks from Firefox to Safari!
How To Subscribe To Podcasts For Your iPhone
I read your earlier article on How to subscribe to a podcast in iTunes but am not entirely clear how to get those podcast episodes onto my iPhone automatically. How do I subscribe to a podcast on my iPhone?
How To Use Spaces On Your Mac
I’ve been working with windowing systems on computers, graphical user interfaces, for over twenty-five years. My first taste was the MIT X Window System back when Apple was selling the Lisa and Microsoft was trying to get people interested in something called Windows 3.1.
How To Make A Google Voice Call With iCal
I have a conference call every morning – same number, same access code. I’d like to set up iCal so that as one of the “reminders” Google Voice calls my phone and connects me to the conference call automatically. This should be possible… Can you figure it out?
How To Send Files From Your Phone To Your Mac
Okay, so I now know how to pair a cellphone with my Mac via Bluetooth – thank you! – but I am still unclear about how to actually transfer a file to the device. Can you shed light on this additional step, Dave? Continue reading
How To Pair A Bluetooth Device To Your Mac
I saw your earlier article about how to pair a bluetooth speaker with a Mac OS X system, but am wondering about how to do the same with my son’s older LG phone? I know that the iPhone has a good connection with the Mac OS X system, but what about other cellphones that support bluetooth? How do you pair ‘em?
How To Renew Your MobileMe Account On Your Mac
I’m enamored of MobileMe, the data sharing and sync service from Apple, but $99/year seems pretty steep. Is there a cheaper way that I can renew my MobileMe membership and save a few dollars?
Setting Your External Mac HDD For Reading And Writing
This is so weird: I just bought a new 500GB external hard drive but when I hook it up to my iMac, I get a little “not allowed” symbol every time I try to copy anything onto the device! Digging around, it appears to be connected “read only”. HELP!