Forums | MacLife

unitekequip wrote:

While Apple is a profit company it seems unfair to recharge people for the upgrade. Everyone paying for the upgrades already purchased the original product. It's not like they purchased a piece of software expecting to have to upgrade later. These people bought music--and to pay to upgrade a song is ludicrous. Apple should strip the DRM free of charge and should never have released 128 kbs songs to begin with. Digital music should be of high digital quality. Apple is playing everyone like suckers here.

Isn't there a law which bans certain types free updates, if they add useful features or functionality or some such insane bullsmurf? Seems to me Apple had to charge an insulting little fee for some sort of wireless network driver recently because of this. Maybe removing DRM falls into the same unfortunate mess?

Or it could just be an opportunistic cash-grab. I like Apple's products but the company has always been kind of high-handed and thuggish like that. But didn't non-DRM tracks cost more than DRM tracks, at least for a while? If that is the case then charging people the extra they would have paid anyway had they chosen non-DRM tracks at that time seems sort of reasonable. Though it seems kind of petty now that everything is 99 cents per song and will (hopefully) all be DRM free eventually.

Pariah wrote:

Bat wrote:

Before getting too, mm, 'carefree' with your new DRM-free tunes, be aware there's every chance the RIAA will track you.

Be warned: your account information is stored in every file
Although iTunes Plus files feature no copy protection, files downloaded still contain the email address you have registered with iTunes. So although files can physically be shared with, and played by, friends and family, any of your purchases that end up on file-sharing networks, for example, can be traced back to you.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0, … 555,00.htm

That should be easy enough to get rid of.

It is, they're just MP4 atoms. AtomicParsely should work.

Meh, I might have to roll-back to 8.0.1, The Cable Guy for 99p is awfully tempting.

What?

Former Windork wrote:

Or you could just not be "carefree" with your tracks and use them in legal ways.  Just a thought.

Yeah, I don't see a problem with that. Everything I've bought through iTunes plays and sounds fine now on my iPod, in iTunes (on Mac and Windows) and on CD players. I don't know that I would gain much for the maybe $60-70 it would cost me to upgrade. Maybe slightly better sound quality but I don't know if it would be a big enough difference for me to notice.

Even if (I'm not holding my breath) Apple manages to provide DRM-free versions of all the DRM'd stuff I bought I don't know if I'll bother upgrading. It would be nice to be able to access all my iTunes purchases with Windows Media Player and/or Media Center on the PC but I've got by without for a while now and it isn't like my world suddenly became empty and pointless because of it. If I really cared about getting higher quality, DRM free versions I could just buy CD copies of the 4 or 5 albums (in my collection) Apple hasn't upgraded yet.