Syber News

While Amazon MP3 has offered a good alternative to iTunes for some time, but as yet it has not made a significant dent in the market share owned by Apple's music store. Although Amazon MP3 has the music, iTunes (the software) is a major advantage for Apple, making it easy for iPod users to buy, manage and play their music. Thus, Amazon MP3 has teamed with doubleTwist, which has had it in for Apple for quite some time.

<Co-founded by noted hacker DVD Jon, who has cracked both CSS copy protection on DVDs and Apple's FairPlay DRM, doubleTwist says its aim is to help you liberate your music. It does so by removing DRM, and allowing you to sync with various devices. The software is still in beta, however, and a look at the forums indicates there are quite a few bugs.

The software also doesn't recognize network drives, at least at the time of this writing. In this time when more people are creating home networks and placing their home media on network drives, it's a pretty bad omission.

On a positive note, the current release of doubleTwist integrates with Amazon MP3 in a way that pretty much replicates the iTunes experience. You can buy Amazon MP3 music directly from doubleTwist's software. The question is, will that make a difference?

Industry estimates place Apple's iTunes in the dominant position. In fact, estimates say that has at least 90% of the music download market. It's difficult to imagine this move could make much of a difference.