UPDATE: a petition asking Apple to make its online services available to non-US users has started, I encourage you to sign it [1].

As I had predicted on my posting of March the 14th [1], Apple released iTunes 4 which allows you to share your music via Rendezvous, adds support for AAC encoding and integration with Apple's new Music Store.

Apple's Music service sounds good, it's really easy to use it and I really appreciate the fact that we don't have to pay a subscription and that we can burn the songs as many times as we want for personal use. This way, Apple is fair with artists, music majors and consumers. Althought there are some server access issues for the moment, Apple's new Music Store is now definitely the best way to acquire music legally, in my opinion. I hope that users that live outside the USA will soon be able to buy songs too.

QuickTime 6.2 update has also been released with improved AAC encoding and support for iTunes 4. I also tested the DivX codec to see if the .avi files bug has gone. Let's say it has partially gone. Actually I can play DivX movies with very low quality audio playback and lousy synchronization. It's like if the sound was played from a VBR MP3 that has been partially downloaded ;). That's not necessary Apple's fault this time. Maybe it comes from the codec itself as its developers couldn't perform any tests for audio playback on earlier versions of QuickTime, so there is some hope that it will be fixed soon. Unfortunately, the full screen feature is still disabled for unregistered users.

The new iPods, as expected by some rumour sites, get cool new features. I find them competitive but I thought they would be cheaper, especially in Europe where we can get the 10Gb model for as much 399e.