iTunes Authorization

assuming DRM is a necessary 'evil' for online music purchases.... it seems reasonable.

The major caveats are:

1) You can't migrate to a PC yet. Not until Apple releases a PC client... because you can't play them on the PC yet.

2) You are locked into iTunes/iPod. Again - no other players will play these. At the moment, it's 'ok' - in that this is what I would use anyhow... but you limit being able to change later. Hopefully, AAC will become more popular.

3) Your songs are tied to Apple. Hopefully, Apple will do well ... :)

arn

The main thing that annoys me is you cant use the music store in the UK (or any where else outside US), so it looks like I will have to stick to kazaa for the time being.

Originally posted by hvfsl
The main thing that annoys me is you cant use the music store in the UK (or any where else outside US), so it looks like I will have to stick to kazaa for the time being.

I can't really understand why this annoys you, keep using kazaa or limewire and get your music for free. Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced. If you download an entire album you start to get into the same cost as bying a CD. Baring inmind that the net is inherintly a cheaper route to market, why does the music industry just see it as another way to overprice its products. Surely they should be cheaper on the net? There are minimul distribution costs incured, no packaging or logistic cots, and the only sores costs is incured by hosting and bandwidth costs. Just seems pricey to me, no wonder people on the net still support peer to peer file sharing and illegal music distribution in the way they do.

if the music industry demonstrated any sence the price of a download would be low. Economies of scale would take over ensuring maximum profitability, and then in a few years once the consumer has become comfortable with the distribution medium then they could increase the price. Just seems ill thought out on all fronts, both for the consumer (another nescient marketing cock up) and for the business (probably marketings fault again, sorry have a pet hate for marketing at the moment. Being made to suffer several module on my msc long live economics!!)

enough ranting.

jay
p.s. arent the new ipods quite sexy looking, makes my old ipod look a bit dated.

What happens if you buy say 1,000 songs (hypothetical here!) and then move them to another computer? Can you authorize them en masse, or is it one at at time? I think that would be the biggest pain when it comes to this system.

Of course, I'm still not in a financial position to switch yet, so I guess it doesn't matter yet. :D

Alia

Well, at least someone is using drm with the consumer in mind. Thank you apple. The drm management seems a little complicated to me - i don't know what they've done with the "rights" of individual users on the same computer, i haven't found much mention of it yet.

I tried to rip one of my CD's to aac, and got a message about access privileges. I think it is because I had the iTunes music folder in "Shared" so that everyone could put an alias to it in their home/music folder. Experimentally, I deleted the alias, and let iTunes create a new folder - it kept all the music from "shared" and then also let me rip the CD that I previously couldn't. This is what I don't like about drm and OS X users - the privileges are complicated, and there are many bugs that still need working out (i must admit, OS X privileges give me far less hassle now than in the first versions).

j_maddison: these songs aren't overpriced - they're on apple's website. (sarcasm) seriously though, now apple as well as the music industry takes a cut, plus, all the work behind the scenes to make a program like this fly probably cost a little money. In the technology world, we're paying not so much for the product as for all the research and development that went into creating and providing it.

"I can't really understand why this annoys you, keep using kazaa or limewire and get your music for free. Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced. If you download an entire album you start to get into the same cost as bying a CD."

This is not true. The album price is at a reduced rate. It appears that almost all albums are $9.99. Far far cheaper than the cost of most albums in the store.

The .99 price becomes an excellent deal when you only wish to purchase one or two songs from an album.

One problem that can arise is if you purchase one or two songs from and album and later decide to purchase the whole thing, you don't get credit towards your purchase. So in effect you own "two" copies of some songs. I also imagine that the digital rights mechanisms do not handle this (say putting it on 6 macs).

One thing that puzzles me is the Rendezvous support. If anyone wants to listen to my music via iTunes Rendezvous support, they must have my user name and password for my .Mac account to authorize them, and this counts as one share. I am in a work environment where we are all on Mac's and this basically negates using Rendezvous for sharing music. I can't even pick one or two people to let use my music as I own two other Macs (an iMac and an iBook) that I use regularly and want to be able to listen to the music on those systems. For me this is the biggest drawback so far.

I can see it happening...your computer crashes, or some prefereces file gets corrupted, and your computer deauthorizes itself.

You've legally bought and downloaded all this music, and you're not allowed to play it on this computer. Let's say you've already got two other computers authorized, and the artificial restriction of 3 means you can't re-authorize your computer. Now you've got headaches trying to convice Apple that you're a decent, law-abiding, citizen before you can re-authorize your computer.

The biggest problem I have with all of this is that you're treated as a criminal first.

Originally posted by j_maddison
Seriously though, I think that .99c for each song is overpriced. If you download an entire album you start to get into the same cost as bying a CD.

If you want an album, buy an album at tower records.com. You get the art and a permanent CD w/o DRM. But if you don't want an album, because you want only 2-3 songs (or 1), $1 each is pretty good. You come out way ahead, because you're not throwing money away on songs you don't want. Other than napster-style stealing, where else can you buy a single song that you want for $1? All the EP/CD-singles are $5, and that's only for some songs--the rest aren't available anywhere.

What's the rule on burning songs you've bought onto compact disc? Wouldn't it change format, or is there still some protection somewhere? Would I be able to burn an album I just bought to play it in the car? Does it count against authorizing/deauthorizing?

Originally posted by mproud
What's the rule on burning songs you've bought onto compact disc? Wouldn't it change format, or is there still some protection somewhere? Would I be able to burn an album I just bought to play it in the car? Does it count against authorizing/deauthorizing?

you can burn a song as many times as you want. DRM is stripped when you do so.

*though you can burn a specific playlist/mix 10 times before you have to rearrage them. most people won't run into this

arn