Apple Computer Inc. is making it easier to copy music and video files onto CDs and DVDs, a move that might please fans of renegade file-swapping sites like Napster but will probably rankle Hollywood.
During his keynote address at Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco last week, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs acknowledged the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer-maker had missed the boat by not building audio copying capability into its computers earlier. He promised the company would not only catch up but jump ahead of competitors.
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Apple has been building DVD drives into its consumer and professional computers, rather than drives for writing CDs. As part of Apple’s push into audio, Jobs introduced a new free software product, iTunes, that organizes music files on the Mac and burns them onto CDs more quickly.
At the center of Apple’s focus is the top-end G4 PowerMac that will come with a DVD drive that can write data onto DVDs.
The DVD-R drive, called the Superdrive, will come exclusively in the $3,500 733mHz G4. It will come with iDVD, a piece of software that Jobs said can take big video files and convert them to MPEG 2 format 10 times faster than the common methods today. A DVD holds 4.7GB of data on each side, or seven times more than a CD.
This means that people who swap music files through Internet services like Napster and record songs onto CDs will find it easier to do the same with movies, or with larger volumes of music.