We Called It!: iTunes Archives

I have been an iTunes user for quite some time, way before my iPod. The bottom line for me with iTunes is it's a product you hate to love (or love to hate, depending who you are ;). As an iTunes/iPod combo user, nothing could be more simple to use. You sign up with an account which is saved within the software. To purchase music, simply click a button and type in your password. The song even downloads itself without even a confirmation pop-up. The playlists are a somewhat rudimentary concept but being able to add the same song to many of them without duplication on your hard drive is nice. Having more than just music available within iTunes is nice too--one place for videos, TV shows, movies and podcasts. Downloading it to my iPod was extremly simple too. It pops up as a Device within iTunes, you set your preferences--I can do music, podcasts and/or photos and then almost any subset of those--and then you just wait until it says Complete and click Eject to remove it from the USB port. Writing CDs are a snap, done within 1 or 2 clicks. Even importing CDs is easy.

The drawbacks to iTunes do exist though:

I bought of a couple albums awhile back under a different account. Since then, I have switched computers and accounts and can no longer remember my password and have had no luck retrieving it through any of their "Lost your password?" help screens. The result: I'm out of those all those songs. Thank goodness I had burned CDs of them and can rip them. But still.

I really don't like that you have to authorize each computer to play the songs you bought and then have a limit of 5 computers. If you bought it, you should be able to play it.

It only downloads the song once. If I buy a song on my husband's laptop, I then have to copy it to CD and load it on my computer. Why can't we at least have a 2-3 download limit per song?

If you dare to go outside of the Apple world of iTunes/iPod combo, you're kind of screwed. The song ype is proprietary in its m4p file type and it's not as simple as buying an MP3 and playing it on any MP3 player you have.

Their songlist is not complete. I have songs that I like outside of mainstream music that's just not on iTunes.

Final complaint is that you have to install the software on your computer and also make sure you are up to date on the latest version. I can understand the need since it is interacting so much with your hard drive, but it's just a pain when you are start switching computers..just one more thing to download and install. I know that's a lot of complaints but really, for an iTunes/iPod user the ease of use outways many of the cons and I definitely recommend iTunes for any iPod owner.

So like I said, you hate such a proprietary, single-minded product but you love it anyway!

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Jaynee:

I have a Creative Zen and I still use iTunes to download songs. For $20 I bought Tunebite, a program which will convert MP4 files into MP3 files. It works like a charm and has more than paid for itself.

Jaynee | February 28, 2007 4:51 PM

February 28, 2007 16:51

Dalton:

http://hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/

or just google "JHymm"

That can remove the .M4P file extension and take all the Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption with it.

Dalton | March 19, 2007 5:55 AM

March 19, 2007 05:55

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