Motivation
iPods are dissimilar to most other mp3 players. When you browse the playlists
and songs on your iPod you are not looking at the files on its hard drive,
instead you are browsing the contents of the database file that lives in a
special directory on the iPod.
As to why Apple (the manufacturer of the iPod) have gone to the trouble of
doing this depends on who you talk to. Here are some opinions:
- For technical reasons - its more efficient to read the database then
inspect the id tags within each mp3 file. See http://www.id3.org
for more information on mp3 id tags.
- Because Apple doesn't want to make it easy to copy files off the iPod,
so when an mp3 is added to the database file it is saved in one of many
non-descriptive directories. So by taking steps to make it a little bit
complicated to copy songs off the iPod, it may act as a deterrent.
- Apple has a stake in the selling of music, so this protects that arm
of its business. If copy the files off the ipod was too easy the masses
would be able to just purchase one copy of an album/song and then give
it to their friends.
- Apple may believe they have a responsibility to limit music piracy
by the masses as the iPods are the most popular hard drive based mp3 player.
- Possibly the legal advice given to Apple, considering the changing
landscape of music piracy, file sharing, online music industries, and
legal action (and pressure) by RIAA influenced the strong case for the
iPod to be database driven instead of file driven.
- It means they can store much more information then would be possible in
mp3 id tags. The database lets you alter the sorting of songs in playlists,
allows you to have one song belonging to many playlists without duplicating
the file itself, etc, etc. There are many features that the database
facilitates.
The issue however is not in iPods use of a database (which is a good thing). The
issue is that the database (which is called iTubesDB) is a closed format.
This means extracting the information out of the database once its in there is
difficult to do without using iTunes or another tool.
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