[hillstones]

pauli63 said:

I was looking forward to not having to authorize and de-authorize computers to stay in the 5 computer limit, not to mention upgrading to 256K encoding, which is a big deal with classical music. You can only de-authorize all your computers once a year, if for example, one of your hard drives goes kaput - DRM for me and others with many computers is a big hassle, There's also the possibility that the music we purchased legally will one day be unplayable. Be glad your mileage varies and DRM doesn't present any problems whatsoever for you. :-)

When you upgrade to iTunes Plus, or purchase new iTunes Plus songs, you no longer have to worry about authorizing and deauthorizing your computer. I have never run into any "one year" limitations on authorizing or deauthorizing my computers. Don't know what you are talking about. DRM free music will never be unplayable. It is not a subscription service.

[Stephen123]

It's still day one, and this is an enormously complex contractual and technical situation for Apple to deal with.

I don't see any reason not to assume that they are working on the legacy DRM issue.

One of the problems they are having is albums that were remastered are sometimes not getting correctly associated with the previous versions for purposes of upgrades. I think this is what happened with Pink Floyd.

[HandyMac]

@mathogre:
{quote}There is one little problem. Rather than making all of the music DRM-free, they removed some that apparently couldn't be made DRM free. I know because there was an album I wanted to purchase that wasn't DRM-free. That album was "Hadra" from the group "Lumin." It's a middle-Eastern ambient album. The complete album had been previously available, albeit with encryption. Now it's not there. Brilliant.{quote}
Interesting; I see iTunes has several singles by this group, but not this album. However, Amazon seems to have had no trouble offering the same album DRM free:
http://www.amazon.co...Z/heartsofspace

There seems to be general agreement that 256K MP3 (Amazon) is slightly/somewhat lower quality than 256K AAC (iTunes), though I've never seen an actual percentage figure. At $8.99, Amazon is probably cheaper than iTunes would be?

[aceshelman]

Hurley42 said:

Still not a good enough reason to go back to purchasing from iTunes. I get my content elsewhere.

Where do you get yours? I have found the quality of the MP3s from Amazon to be quite horrible; would like a better source with a good catalog, i.e. not eMusic.

[fletc3her]

I have several albums that are protected, available in the iTunes store unprotected, and aren't listed as upgradeable. I was waiting until now to see if the upgrade became available. I guess I'll just hack them if they don't figure out how to make the upgrade possible in the next month or so.

[walruscp]

Noticing a lot of classics are going $1.29. The Who and Led Zeppelin being two examples. Ridiculous!

[macFanDave]

In normal times, the authorize/deauthorize scheme is pretty unobtrusive, but what happens if your authorized computer dies or gets stolen? The only solution I see is having Apple deauthorize ALL of your computers and then you have to reauthorize the ones that you still have that are alive. Apple SAYS they will do this for you once a year, but I hope that they will do this for you as often as you have mishaps.

Are you really authorizing a COMPUTER or a hard disc (or even a partition)? I now have my iTunes Library on an external drive. Is the Mac mini it is connected to the authorized entity or is it the external drive?

Has anyone seen a 69 cent song? I've looked at Buddy Holly (50's) and Peter Frampton (70's) and U2 (80's really, through today) and haven't found any 69-centers. And don't think the "Internets" are going to help you: you can go to HotLicks69.com, iHeart69.com and GoodVibes69.com and you can't find anything for less than $3.99. . . a minute.

[tony_d]

@pauli63: I could be wrong but I remember the last time we went through this it took a few days for certain songs in my collection to come up on the Upgrade section of the iTS.
@mathogre: I noticed the same thing on certain titles in my collection. I've had a "protected" smart playlist hanging around in iTunes for sometime now. Almost all the tracks are no longer in the store. Mostly small labels though. Has anyone else seen this?

[ibeetle]

If you fire up iTunes right there on the Home page you will find two links to "Great Songs At A Great Price:" Classic R&B for .69 and another link for Rock at .69

[ibeetle]

walruscp said:

Noticing a lot of classics are going $1.29. The Who and Led Zeppelin being two examples. Ridiculous!

Boy you are hard to impress The iTunes catalog of "The Who" currently contains 506 songs. Only four of which are $1.29.
So let me ask you. When did 4 out of 506 become a lot?

[Raymondo17]

Well, I'm glad you pointed out the link to "Great Songs at a Great Price" because I couldn't find them on my own. But come on, a mere 23 songs at the reduced price is laughable. I did a search of artists I'm likely to purchase, from Abba to Zappa, and only found ONE album offering cuts for 69? -- an obscure Lifehouse CD that I had never even heard of. But I did find plenty of songs that had been bumped up to the $1.29 zone. "Schiller did say that more songs would be priced at 69 cents than $1.29." In my perusing of the iTunes store, I find that to be nothing short of a boldface lie.

[someToast]

mathogre said:

There is one little problem. Rather than making all of the music DRM-free, they removed some that apparently couldn't be made DRM free. I know because there was an album I wanted to purchase that wasn't DRM-free. That album was "Hadra" from the group "Lumin." It's a middle-Eastern ambient album. The complete album had been previously available, albeit with encryption. Now it's not there. Brilliant.

I ran across that too. I had a set of albums that I was keeping an eye on as soon as the all-DRM-free announcement was made. Over time, most of them were made available as Plus tracks until there were only three left.

Today I see that of those three, one is available as Plus, one is available as Plus but is now a partial album, and the third is gone from the store entirely (along with most of the artist's other albums -- Unkle Bob).

Not exactly the paradise I was promised.

[Stephen123]

I think it's entirely true that more songs are 69 than 1.29. It's just not as useful as it sounds. For example Mott the Hoople have 5 or 6 albums of 69 cent songs. The tail of popularity is very long. It's back catalog stuff which has NOT been re-released that's most of the 69 cent songs.

But those are NOT the 69 cent songs that are easy to find from the homepage, the ones linked from homepage are current release promotions.

I'm hoping Apple realizes the mistake and doesn't try to replace the bargain bin with promotional sales.