How Apple's iTunes Music Store rates.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Mike Langberg

I've just yanked myself out of the infamous Steve Jobs reality distortion field, so I can try to give a rational evaluation of Apple Computer's new iTunes Music Store service for downloading songs: It offers modest improvements over competitors in some features, while falling short in others.

I temporarily fell under Jobs' spell April 28 at the cavernous Moscone Center West in San Francisco, where Apple's co-founder and undisputed leader held one of his mesmerizing new-product demonstrations _ complete with the usual cheering throngs of Apple employees who packed the hall to give the event an aura of immense public excitement.

Jobs spent an hour on stage solo, touting Apple's music-related hardware and software. The centerpiece was his unveiling of the Music Store (www.applemusic.com), which offers users of Apple's Macintosh computers a selection of 200,000 songs over the Internet for 99 cents each; a Windows version is due before the end of this year.

That's great news for Mac users, who've been shut out of existing online music services such as MusicNet (www.musicnet.com), Pressplay (www.pressplay.com) and Rhapsody (www.listen.com), which use copy-protection software created by Microsoft that's only available for Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Jobs dismissed these competitors as misguided and said only the Music Store is customer-friendly; an accompanying Apple news release declared the service "lets users explore music in an entirely new way."

Many Mac users, a long-suffering group known for occasional bouts of self-delusion, will undoubtedly believe Jobs, since they've never been able to try the other services and therefore won't realize how little is actually new in Music Store.

None of which means Music Store is unworthy, or won't succeed. Here's how it works:

The Music Store is a feature within Apple's new iTunes 4 software, a free download that Apple made available April 28. While iTunes 4 will run on almost any recent Mac, users may need to upgrade their operating system _ iTunes 4 requires nothing older than Mac OS X 10.1.5.

When you install and launch iTunes 4, there's a new "Music Store" link in the list of music sources on the left side of the screen. If you're online, clicking the link takes you to the Music Store's home page, promoting the albums and songs available for purchase. You can search through the collection by entering the name of an artist, album or song, or by using a browse feature to explore by musical genre.

These searches produce lists of songs, each of which can be purchased for 99 cents _ billed to an Apple Store account, which requires a major credit card. Apple puts a charge on your credit card no more than once every 24 hours, so if you buy three songs at separate times during one day you get a single charge of $2.97.

You then download the purchased songs onto the Mac's hard drive, where you can listen as many times as you want. You can also transfer the songs to one of Apple's portable iPod music players or "burn" the songs to CD as often as you want.

The method of searching through the music and the ability to purchase single tracks isn't new.

What's different about the Music Store is that customers don't have to pay a monthly subscription fee. The other online music services charge $5 to $18 a month for a bundle of features that might include commercial-free Internet radio, unlimited on-demand streaming of music tracks and unlimited "tethered downloads" _ tracks stored on your computer that can be played repeatedly, but only as long as you maintain your subscription. Also, purchased tracks can only be burned once.

The Music Store is out front with unlimited burning and per-track purchasing without a monthly fee, and both are positive steps, although rivals are likely to catch up about the time Apple begins offering the Music Store to Windows users.

On the other hand, I missed the streaming and tethered downloads. These are great ways to learn about new music, much superior to the free 30-second preview clips the Music Store provides.

Where Apple is stuck in a dead heat with competitors is the library of available music. Apple, like its major rivals, has licenses from all five major recording companies _ BMG, EMI, Sony Music, Universal and Warner Music. Whatever the rivals offer will, with a few small exceptions, be what Apple's Music Store offers.

While 200,000 songs sounds like a huge number, there are still significant gaps. Don't look for the Beatles, the Grateful Dead or the Rolling Stones on any of the music services _ the artists or their managers haven't given permission for online distribution. In other instances, tracks are missing from albums because rights for particular songs aren't available.

I did a quick Top 10 test of the Music Store just a few hours after the service launched. From the Web site of Billboard (www.billboard.com), I got the 10 top-selling singles and 10 top-selling albums listed in the magazine's Saturday issue.

Apple offered six of the Top 10 singles, including No.1 "In Da Club" from 50 Cent and No.2 "Get Busy" from Sean Paul. But No.3 "Ignition" from R. Kelly was missing, along with three others.

The complete No.1 album, "Thankful" by Kelly Clarkson, was available, along with all the tracks from two others. But the Music Store offered only five of the 21 tracks on the No.10 "The Very Best of Cher."

This isn't Apple's fault, of course. The big music companies need to move faster to license more of their huge catalogues if they want to get serious about stopping rampant piracy through file-swapping services such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

The technically minded will want to know that downloads from the Music Store are recorded at 128 kilobits (k) a second in the copy-protected AAC format, enough to produce almost perfect CD quality when burned. The burned tracks can easily be "ripped," or converted, into the popular MP3 format and legally shared with a few friends.

As with MP3 files at 128k, the Music Store's AAC tracks run about 1 megabyte a minute of playing time. That makes downloading slow when using a dial-up connection; I waited 15 minutes for the 2.6-megabyte file of John Lee Hooker's classic "Boom Boom" when connecting to the Music Store through America Online; similar downloads took less than a minute when I used my cable modem.

One odd wrinkle that emerged during my testing is Apple's inconsistent approach to album pricing. Most albums in the Music Store cost $9.99, making them a bargain when there are 12 or 14 or 16 tracks priced at 99 cents individually. But some albums with fewer than 10 tracks set aside one or two tracks that are available only if you buy the entire album for $9.99 _ raising the per-song cost well above 99 cents.

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In my previous column on the new Home Media Option offered by TiVo for its Series 2 digital video recorders, I incorrectly called the service "the first example" of its type. In fact, rival ReplayTV (www.replaytv.com) introduced several similar home-networking features a year ago.

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(Contact Mike Langberg at mike@langberg.com or (408) 920-5084. Past columns may be read at http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/tech_test_drive/.)

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