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Apple's iTunes Rotten!
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By johnaec, Section Live Gripes
Posted on Tue Jan 04, 2005 at 09:58:37 AM PDT
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Apple's iTunes seemed to be the perfect solution for my needs - downloading older individual tunes my band wanted to learn. I have no problem paying 99 cents per tune, and purchased a few. Their info said I could then burn the protected .m4p files to CD, either as .mp3 files or an audio CD - this was necessary as I need to play them back in a stereo at rehearsals.
Well, I've got a fairly current Windows 2000 computer and very standard HP CDRW, with all the latest patches and software, which has never given me any problems burning CD's from any program I tried. Even iTunes sees it and say's it's supported, but after iTunes "prepares" the songs for burning an audio CD, it goes into "initialization", then cancels out, with an "unrecognized error" message. I tried numerous brand new blank audio and data CD's, all to no avail. And when I tried writing via .mp3 format, it tells me these particular songs cannot be saved as .mp3 due to agreements with the authors! WTF? And their "conversion" routines will not convert iTunes' protected format. This alone is patently ridiculous, since once someone burns them to an audio CD it's common to just copy them back to a computer from the CD - Apple is just obviously throwing up whatever roadblocks they can to people playing this music on anything other than a computer or iPod.
Apple support was virtually useless - all they did was keep referring me to the same support docs, none of which made any difference.
I *finally* succeeded in finding a free downloadable program that removes the DRM from iTunes' .m4p format and then saves them to .mp4, which I can easily convert to .mp3 or .wav and successfully burn to CD that plays fine in the stereo.
In principle,I don't object to the concept of DRM, but when I can't even use the stuff I've paid for, there was no other choice but to find software that breaks the DRM...
I guess I'll have to try Walmart's downloadable music, to see if it's any more usable, (much as I dislike Walmart...)
John
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