Friday, September 11, 2009

iTunes convert

Although I like music I've never been a big buyer of it. One of the problems is the standard complaint that I'm either paying an arm and a leg for every single by one band I like, or I'm paying for an entire album half of which I won't like.

Digital downloads seem made for me, except despite they came with a high price - DRM. Now I'm not going to get into a pro and con slinging match over DRM, but for what I want to do - convert music to MP3 so to play in the car it sucked.

Apple recognised this and were slowly changing all their offerings to become DRMless. Now I find that dream has been realised and I can use a single organising programme with built-in wide-ranging store to buy individual songs - yay!

So hassles? Well I pulled my existing music and went to pick up the Album covers for the minority Apple seemed to know about and found I couldn't as I didn't have an account. So I went to create one and it required payment details. Okay if you use the store you need to pay - duh; but I'm thinking of people, kids in particular, who might just want to use iTunes to organise and convert existing tracks. Tying registration to payment cuts them out completely of this simple visual option.

My only other minor niggle is that iTunes knows I'm in the UK, and even asked UK specific questions so why is my default language English (United States)?

Actually one other niggle on the Store - you can't resize the columns so you see something like "Carmina Burina (C..." by "Tbilisi Symphony Or..." from "The Most Essential..." however if you hover over each entry it'll expand in a pop-up... sometimes, because sometimes it doesn't. Hovering through a list it went pop, pop, no-pop, pop despite each title over-spilling. Can't seem to locate a pattern as to why it works only occasionally.

Anyway I'm been having fun with downloading tracks I'll list them in my next entry.

2 comments:

Orphi said...

iTunes?

Isn't that that piece of spyware that QuickTime insists on installing even though you don't want it?

I don't know man… I'm not sure I'd ever trust iTunes. Seems too risky.

FlipC said...

Heh no Quicktime is the piece of spyware that iTunes installs, along with Safari and Bonjour if you're not careful.

Despite not installing them they still manage to tick themselves whenever an update comes along.

As for risk; the only think I've learned to do is treat the Wish List as a shopping basket so I buy in batches rather than have Apple divvy up my purchases for me - that is buy one song, buy another, browse, browse buy a third and you get two receipts and two credit card transactions; total it at the end of the day and send me one bill and one statement rather than these microtransactions.

Besides at around 99p a pop it's hardly painful except for the first go around as you snaffle up big chucks you want :-)

Good selection too though I'm a little miffed that I can't find the original version of 3am Eternal and that the 'proper' Justified and Ancient can only be bought as part of Tammy's album - boo! Oh and no Beatles, but that's not that surprising given history.