Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

iTunes, Now With Added Freedoms

09June2007 [directLink] [music]
This item was changed on 12June2007

Apple recently released a number of songs under the banner of “iTunes Plus”. Individually, the songs are ~30% more expensive than the non-plussed versions, but they’re better quality (significantly — the bitrate is twice what ordinary iTunes songs are released at), and more importantly, they’re not crippled by DRM. That’s been what put me off ever paying for anything on iTunes. I don’t have an iPod, and not being able to play songs on other devices isn’t a right I want to pay for.

Now with iTunes Plus, I’ve already bought a couple of EPs. Still can’t justify buying albums — I want a physical artefact if I’m going to spend just as much money. Now just hoping the scheme is successful and some other record companies get on board (so far it’s only EMI, of the big guys).

Am now listening to Angus & Julia Stone’s Chocolate & Cigarettes and loving it.

An addendum: simply copying these newly-free-as-in-speech songs to the phone wasn’t enough — it complained that the files were corrupted; but thankfully right-clicking the files in iTunes and hitting ‘Convert to AAC’ did the trick — I copied the resultant files to the phone and they work fine; evidently some of the strange metadata (including my name and email — a price I am willing to pay for freedom) in the files’ headers were confusing the phone’s admittedly basic media player.