Lazycoder

Stupid people shouldn’t buy music from iTunes

rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s Weblog:

“Another person in
my office lost all of her Apple iTunes store purchases when her
PowerBook’s hard drive crashed (another rant for another day).
Despite the obvioius fact that Apple knows she has purchased these tunes and that her problem was caused by an Apple hardware problem, their response is: You should have backed it up. Huh? To what? ”

Some guy named Rex knows some stupid people. “To what?”. Well, maybe to the built in CD burner that Powerbooks come with. Unless she has a really, really old Powerbook. There’s another gem buried in his rant against DRM.

But because of the encyrption (or, DRM – “digital rights management”) of the iTunes store-purchased files, you are forced to go through an easy, but time-wasting and illogical few clicks to rip out the encryption. Again, Apple gives you the tools to convert the file into a non-encrypted file (they call it “Burn Disk,” but it might as well say “Get rid of our Ridiculous Encryption”).

Yes, because it was the DRM that caused the hard drive to fail, and it’s the DRM that prevented her from burning the DRM protected files to a CD-rom, where she could copy them back to her hard drive, add them to her library, and re-authorize her computer to play the songs. Ah, but he addresses this.

Don’t just back up the encrypted (DRM) version of the tune. By burning a CD, you will get your tunes out of the iTunes store format and into a format you can use without it having to be “authorized” by the Apple store. I (and my testing panel) have learned this the hard way. For some unique reasons, I have had three different computers during the past year. Having children who share some musical tastes also means a couple of other devices use the tunes. I’ve had to de-authorize and re-authorize my Apple store account more than the allowable times.

So there are two issues really, the first is disaster recovery. Which burning the DRMed files to CD takes care of. The second is hassle. I’ve read about some people who have had to contact Apple to allow a new computer authorization, usually it’s gone pretty smoothly. If you think you’re going to go through a lot of computers and you just don’t want to have to contact Apple, either burn the music to CD or just skip ALL digital music stores and rip them to your computer. Would it still be Apples fault if she had lost all of her Word documents? Back your stuff up if you care about it people.

Me? WHen I download a song, or an entire CD, from iTunes. I burn the DRMed file to CD, then if I have enough songs, I burn them to an audio CD.