doubleTwist

In 1983 Steve Jobs in a characteristically brilliant speech introduced the Mac as the solution to IBM’s dominance in the PC industry. “IBM wants it all.” He says a few times. A clip of the speech is available on YouTube (embedded below):

This speech was also the unveiling of the legendary 1984 Mac ad. Shot by Ridely Scott for the agency Chiat/Day. It won numerous awards despite only being officially shown on TV once during the superbowl. Here it is (YouTube):

Fast forward a quarter of a century and replace the PC industry with the music industry and IBM with Apple. Which brings us to doubleTwist, a company aiming to set music collections free from the Apple monopoly/tyranny. They’ve produced the parody ad below (YouTube) which shows familiar drones and an anime girl hero complete with sledge-like-hammer.

The doubleTwist app presents a familiar iTunes like interface (screenshot below).

In my (brief) tests it works well, finds all the media (music and movies) from iTunes and in the usual on disk folders. Playback is noticably louder than iTunes and it did pause a few times (presumably due to CPU load) but it seems to work fine. Unfortunately because I am in China I can not try the Amazon music store function, just like I can not try the iTunes music store. I can get my hands on lots of pirated music and movies though.

BTW: The albums in the screenshot by Talvin Singh are excellent and well worth a purchase.